Cold Hands (3 page)

‘So?’ Sammy said briskly, in work mode. ‘Herby’s dead.’

A pause. ‘Oh no. Oh shit.
Shit
.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘What happened?’

‘I found him down by the path, near the bus stop –’

‘Fuck, did Walt –’

‘No. I managed to distract him. It’s . . . something must have attacked him. A wolf or something.’

‘A wolf? When did you ever see a wolf near the house?’

‘Well, I don’t know what else could have . . . it, it was pretty bad, Sam.’

Another long pause. ‘What are we going to tell Walt?’

‘Christ knows.’

‘What did you do with him?’

‘I wrapped him up, most of him, in a tarp and put him out in the pool house.’

‘Most of him?’

‘Like I said, it was pretty bad, Sammy.’

‘Oh Jesus, Donnie. Are you OK?’

‘Yeah. Just . . . poor dog. You know?’

‘Look, you’d better call the police.’

‘The police?’

‘Yeah. If there’s a wolf attacking animals on people’s properties they’ll need to know about it. The Franklin boys play down there all the time. You better tell them. And Irene.’

‘Right, I . . . I’ll call them now.’

‘OK,’ she said, and I could hear the catch in her voice. ‘I’m gonna go and have a little cry now.’

‘I’ll see you tonight. I love you.’

We hung up and I stood there looking out of those blue-tinted windows at the white beyond, thinking about what we were going to tell Walt. As I scanned the treeline fringing our property, I felt a growing sense of unease, as though I could feel the cold grey eyes of a predator still lurking out there, moving silently with sloped shoulders and panting tongue between the icy, dripping branches, its breath smoking in the winter air, blood staining its lips, flecks of meat between its teeth.

I reached for the phone. They say that a child can progressively understand the death of a pet, a grandparent and, finally, a parent. ‘Yeah?’ I said aloud to the empty house as I thumbed the button for information, for the number for the police station in Alarbus. ‘Who the fuck are “they” anyway?’

‘
HECKOFA NICE DAY,
huh?’ Officer Robertson said as we walked down the path towards where I found the dog. He’d asked to see that first.

‘Yeah, it sure is.’ Even after so long out here I still register mild surprise when I hear these Americanisms, Canadianisms, seeping into my speech, when I hear myself asking, say, where the ‘washroom’ is, rather than the toilet. I still have the accent though, a thick Ayrshire brogue that can get guttural when I am excited or angry. I tried to lose it, I tried very hard to lose it at one point, but it was impossible. It just refused to go.

Robertson was young, early twenties, nearly half my age, with bushy gingery hair spilling from under his peaked cap, his belt heavy with nightstick, flashlight, cuffs and pistol as he negotiated the snowy path. It took him just twenty minutes to get out here. Slow day at Alarbus PD I figured, picturing the three or four cops who worked at the small station fighting to take the call, to ride out here and break up the day. Alarbus was an affluent suburb of Regina; a pet-slaying probably ranked high in the excitement stakes. I used the twenty minutes it took Robertson to get here to write half
of my DVD review. (
‘This FX-drenched blockbuster that’s a thrill ride for all the family.’
It’s not a very big lie, Walt . . .)

‘OK,’ I said as we came up over the rise. ‘Right here is where I found him.’

There was still the imprint of Herby’s body in the snow, the ring of pink blood.

‘Right,’ Robertson said, pushing his cap back, sweat on his forehead and his hands on hips as he looked around, gauging the distance from here to the treeline that bordered the Franklins’ place. ‘Pretty close to the woods. Could be a wolf, like you say. Mind you –’ he looked back towards the main road, the bus stop – ‘he might have been hit by a vehicle, crawled over here and then, you know, a lot of the injuries would be post-mortem. Birds and rats and what have you.’

‘Really?’ I thought of Herby’s body, about that giant tear up the belly.

‘It’s possible.’

‘Do you get many cases of wolves doing this kind of stuff?’

‘Now and then. More in summer though. This time of year they tend to stay up in the mountains. There was a fella killed by one north of here, about, ooh, three or four years ago? A hunter. Up toward Saskatoon. But it’s . . . you know, it’s pretty rare.’ Robertson bent down, looking at something. He got a pocketknife out and dug in the snow, spearing something. He held up one of the dog’s kidneys.

‘Oh Jeez,’ I said.

‘Shame,’ he said, straightening back up, letting the kidney fall back into the snow. ‘Well, I guess we’d better go take a look at the animal, huh?’

‘Yeah. He’s out back in the workshop. We can go through the house. Would you like some coffee, Officer?’

‘I’d love some coffee.’

We started the trudge back through the snow. ‘I have to say,’ Robertson said, ‘heckofa nice place you got here, Mr Miller. Heckofa nice.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And your wife’s the newspaper editor?’

‘That’s right.’
Here it comes . . .

‘Which would make Sam Myers your father-in-law?’

‘Yep,’ I said.

Robertson gave a low whistle that contained awe, admiration and a definite undercurrent of ‘you poor bastard’.

‘Yep,’ I said again and we both laughed.

Old Sam. About the only man with balls enough to name his
daughter
after him. There weren’t many people in the province who hadn’t heard of Sam Myers.

My father-in-law was the textbook self-made man. A real working-class hero. Born dirt poor he’d made his first few million in construction back in the late 1970s. His seed money had helped build Regina’s first retail mall on the outskirts of town. Then another. A decade or so later, when the city centre was dying on the vine because all the retail business had followed Old Sam’s money out to the suburbs, he started buying up cheap property downtown, which he redeveloped into condominiums like our apartment in the Warehouse District. He got rich at both ends. In the meantime he got into local media, buying up the
Advertiser
in the late eighties, right about the time Sammy graduated with her journalism degree.

She didn’t want to work for the old man at first. Went
off and cut her teeth doing crime reporting on the
Calgary Star
. She was good too. But in the end the old man begged her, offered her crazy money and the chance to become editor by the time she was thirty. Sammy made a real go of the job though, overcoming the prejudices of a lot of hard-nosed subs and section editors in the process. She upped the circulation by 20 per cent over five years and dragged the paper out of the eighties and into the new technology of the nineties, hiring and firing quite a bit in the process.

I met Sammy at the college in Regina, back in 1998, where I was a mature student on the journalism programme. I’d been in Canada maybe five years then, Toronto first, then out here in Saskatchewan. Sammy came to talk to my class. Even though she was only a few years older than me she seemed impossibly sophisticated and assured, a real journalist, someone living the life I was aspiring to. She talked about the realities of writing for a local daily paper, about what makes a good story, about the role of the subs and the editor. She was good too; funny and self-deprecating.

After her talk, during the coffee and biscuits meet and greet, I’d awkwardly, embarrassedly, asked if I could maybe send her a sample of my work. (
She told you months later, in bed, that she’d liked you right away because you were so unpushy, you didn’t seem to think you were the reincarnation of Tom Wolfe like so many other students she’d met.
) She gave me her email address and was patient with my overwritten, adjective-spattered copy. Soon we were both inserting little jokes and did-you-read this? did you see that? things into the emails. Pretty soon we were emailing each other the gags without any copy attached. She started me on the review section; books, DVDs, records.

The first kiss – in the bar across from the office.

Meeting the parents. ‘Christ,’ I said as we came up the drive in Sammy’s car that night. Coming up that drive seemed to take a very long time. Lakeview, the Myers family home, was a fourteen-bedroom Edwardian mansion, hidden behind a grove of elm trees. The only buildings of similar proportions I’d ever visited had been hotels or colleges. ‘Don’t be intimidated,’ Sammy said, pecking my cheek as she rang the doorbell.

It had been hard not to be. The four of us ate in an oak-panelled dining room, sitting around one end of a table that would comfortably have seated ten more people. The maid brought in the courses and I tried to appear worldly and relaxed amid the flickering candles, the leaded crystal and the heavy flatware.

But Old Sam had been charm personified during dinner, even more so later, when we sat by the fire in his study with the decanter of single malt. (‘A Scotsman should appreciate this,’ he’d said, handing me a tumbler that must have weighed two pounds. I could have washed my hands in it.) He’d grilled me lightly about my background, my family back home, what had brought me to Toronto, then to Saskatchewan. He’d even asked my 29-year-old advice about a radio station he was thinking of buying. It felt pleasant and convivial enough, it didn’t feel like what it really was: an interrogation.

Later, much later, I would realise that Old Sam had used the information I’d given him that night to look into my backstory pretty thoroughly. Indeed, he looked into it as thoroughly as you could look into the backstory of Donald R. Miller.

Which is to say, only so far.

Robertson and I took our coffee through the house and down the path towards the pool area, a couple of hundred yards away from the main house. The pool house was a low one-storey stone building, split into two halves: a changing room with showers, toilets and pine benches, and a workshop/storage space for gardening machinery, outdoor stuff and sports equipment. We came into the workshop half; an old barbecue set, the big petrol lawnmower Danny the gardener used in summer, an assortment of footballs and baseball bats, racks on the walls holding tools. There, on top of the chest freezer in the corner, was the green tarp containing what was left of Herby. It was very cold in there, our breath steaming as Robertson set his coffee down and lifted back the tarp. I looked away, fixing on a spot on the cinder-block wall as he gave a low whistle through his teeth.

‘Oh boy. Yeah. Really, uh, did a number on the poor thing, huh?’

‘Yeah. So, you think a wolf? Or wolves?’

‘Well, yeah. Or maybe a vehicle, but, it’s . . . Jeez. Oh boy.’

He dropped the tarp back over Herby and – unable to help myself – I looked down and caught one last terrible glimpse of the dog’s face: those empty black sockets rimmed with red, blood matted into his golden hair. ‘Well, I guess I’d better notify neighbouring properties of the incident. Tell them to be careful of pets and children.’

We shook hands as he got into the prowler. ‘I meant to ask you, which part of Scotland are you from?’

‘Oh, a little place near Glasgow.’

‘I got relatives over there myself. Motherwell. You ever been there?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘I keep meaning to get over and visit, but you know how it is. You get back there much yourself?’

‘No. Not much.’

I watched the car disappear into the trees and then reappear a moment later down on Tamora. The sun was brilliant, high in the sky now, and a bead of light flashed golden along the side of the police car as it turned the bend and vanished. From somewhere far off came the sound of a bandsaw, carrying on the still air. Someone cutting wood. Preparing for winter.

HERE WE COME,
the fucking lads, walking down the main corridor during break time: me, Derek Bannerman – Big Banny – and Tommy McKendrick. Ma best buds. Ma true muckers. Hundreds o’ kids standing about – Ravenscroft was a big school – eating sweets, drinking ginger. Some wee first years walked past us. Targets. Fucking targets, man, scared wee rabbits in a field o’ lions. Tommy flung a leg out and just tripped one of them over, sending his books flying. We pished ourselves. We were only in second year; Tommy and me were thirteen and Banny was fourteen. He’d got held back a year. But he was a big kid, one of those fourteen-year-olds that looked like a man nearly. He’d even got served in the Boot one night. Half the third and fourth years shat it from Banny. He was mental. Every cunt knew this.

‘Ho,’ Banny nudged me. ‘Check it oot.’

There, over in a corner by the noticeboard outside the assembly hall, reading a poster, trying to look invisible, was Craig Docherty.

The fucking Professor himself.

Lord Anthony Parka zipped up all the way. Specs. Even had the fucking uniform on: tie, the lot. His Adidas bag clean,
un-graffitied. No ‘Madness’ or ‘The Jam’ or ‘Skinz’ scrawled all over it. Always the first to answer in class. Top of the class for everything. Lived in a massive house on Kilwinning Road. ‘Bought houses’ we called them. ‘Spam Valley,’ my dad said, meaning that the idiots who bought their own houses, rather than renting them from the council, had to eat Spam to afford the mortgages. They had a car too, the Dochertys. You’d sometimes see his mum dropping him off near the school gates. She was classy. Fit. Big blonde. Into amateur dramatics and shite like that. Acted in plays doon the Harbour, at the arts centre. ‘Ho, Professor,’ we’d shout as she drove off. ‘Ah’d ride your maw daft so ah wid. Ride her till the fucken wean pushed me oot.’

The Professor talked differently to us too. He said ‘seven’, not ‘seevin’. ‘Trousers’, not ‘troosers’. ‘Jacket’, not ‘jaykit’. When he was asked a question in class he wouldn’t not be listening. Or pretend to have misunderstood. He wouldn’t say, ‘Whit, Miss?’ Or shrug his shoulders and make some daft comment to his pals. (He didn’t have any pals.) He’d answer the question. Usually correctly and often with additional, unasked-for information. In break periods he didn’t stand around in a semicircle out by the bins, smoking and spitting. He went to the library and read fucking books. His every other word wasn’t fuck or cunt. He was neither Celtic nor Rangers. He used words in class that we didn’t understand. He didn’t attempt to hide or mask his intelligence. His entire character was just a mad, unidentifiable blur to us.