Figures of Fear: An anthology (15 page)

I was still talking to Alma when a tall, stooping man appeared at our table. He wore a long black coat that made him look like a mortician. His hair was white and thick and sat on top of his head as if it could have been a toupee, yet there was an over-combed absurdity about it which made me believe that it was probably real. He wore a striped shirt and a dark blue necktie with the letters NEWS embroidered on it, in yellow.

‘You a reporter?’ I asked him.

‘Why?’

‘Says NEWS on your necktie.’

‘Oh, that. You’re reading it wrong. North East Wood Society, that’s what it means. We’re here to protect forests. Like our fathers did, and our fathers did before us.’

I held out my hand. ‘Pleased to meet you, in that case. My brother was into forestry.’

‘Jack Ballard? Yes, I had more than one discussion with Jack Ballard. You brother was very interested in cutting down tress. In fact, your brother was almost obsessive about cutting down trees.’

‘Of course. That’s what forestry is all about. Growing, cutting, preserving. It’s all part and parcel of the same process.’

‘Not necessarily. Depends which trees you’re cutting down, and why.’

‘Should I know your name?’ I asked him.

‘For sure. John Shooks. You ever been to Shooks, on the Cormorant River, near the Blackduck State Forest? My great-great-grandfather founded that community, with the specific assistance of the Ojibwa.

‘Can’t say I’ve been there, no. I’m a liability lawyer. Fire insurance claims mainly. Some auto-wreck stuff. From Minneapolis. Here’s my card.’

‘Married?’

‘That’s right. Two kids, boy and a girl.’

‘Very different from your brother, then?’

‘In some ways, yes. What are you getting at?’

John Shooks turned his head towards the bar. I beckoned the bar girl in the electric-blue satin blouse with the ruffles at the front and she came over and said, ‘Yah?’

‘Give me another Jack Daniel’s, would you? And a tequila sunset. And whatever the gentleman’s having.’

‘Seven-Up’ll do me. You’re drinking Jack Daniel’s?’

‘My younger brother was torn to bits three days ago. You don’t drink warm milk to get over a thing like that.’

John Shooks stared at me for a while. His eyes were heavily lidded, like a lizard’s, and his irises were pale grey. His nose was awkwardly broken and his chin was prickly with white stubble. He looked like a week-long forecast of seriously bad weather.

‘Your brother was torn to bits because he forgot who these forests belonged to.’

‘I don’t get you. The medical examiner thinks that he was probably attacked by a bear.’

‘In the middle of town? That never happened before.’

‘There’s always a first time,’ I challenged him.

‘I never saw no bear,’ put in Alma. ‘Well, there could have been a bear … but I never saw one.’

‘There was a force-six blizzard blowing at the time,’ I reminded her. ‘Visibility down to fifteen yards.’

John Shooks picked up his 7-Up and sipped a little from the bottle, keeping one eye on me while he did so. ‘You ever seen a bear? Bear’s a hard thing to miss, even in a blizzard,’ he remarked.

‘What are you trying to tell me? You’re not trying to suggest that my brother was killed deliberately?’

‘Well … I wouldn’t use the exact word “deliberately”.’

‘All right, then. What exact word would you use?’

He licked his lips with the blue-grey tip of his tongue. ‘I would use the word “unavoidably”.’

‘You want to explain that?’

John Shooks shrugged. ‘What happened to your brother was an unavoidable consequence of the fact that he was felling over two thousand acres of trees in the Lost River Forest without taking the trouble to ask who those trees belonged to.’

‘Oh, come on,’ I retorted. ‘He was employed to do it, by the Minnesota Forestry Department. Those trees belong to the state. My brother was employed to clear away jack pine and pitch pine, and replant the area with some threatened strains like white pine and Austrian pine, really good timber trees. That’s the way I understand it, anyway. So I don’t see the beef.’

‘Beef? Your brother was considering the commercial value of all of those two thousand acres of trees, and not what they represented in spiritual terms.’

‘Spiritual terms? I’m sorry, Mr Shooks, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

‘The forests belong to those who used to live in them, sir, ever since. Every tree has a human spirit in it, that’s what the Ojibwa used to believe. Every tree is like somebody’s shrine. And what was your brother going to do? Fell them, fell them in hundreds and thousands. What would you do, if somebody came to the cemetery where your grandparents were buried, and tore up their headstone, and dug up their graves?’

‘Mr Shooks—’

He waved me away with a pale, long-fingered hand. ‘Your brother got what was coming to him, don’t try and tell me different.’

‘Mr Shooks, you’re talking about forestry here. Economic rejuvenation. My brother was doing everything he could to save a very profitable species of pine. It was almost wiped out by the white pine blister, as far as I understand it, but he was going to plant a highly resistant strain that was going to turn northern Minnesota into the timber centre of the western world.’

‘Forest conservation isn’t all about money, Mr Ballard,’ said John Shooks. ‘There was human life in Roseau County well before the Ice Age, and Native Americans were living in these forests more than seven thousand years ago.’

‘So what are you trying to tell me?’

‘I’m trying to tell you that the forests don’t belong to the state of Minnesota. They belong to the spirits who live in the trees.’

I looked at him for a long time, and then I beckoned to the bar girl for yet another Jack Daniel’s.

‘Do you know what I think, Mr Shooks?’ I told him. ‘I think there’s a place waiting for you at the Zipple Bay Home for the Seriously Weird.’

After John Shooks had left the North Star Bar, I drank about nine whiskeys too many and when the bar closed at two a.m. Alma had to help me into my sheepskin jacket and my flap-eared tartan cap while I was staggering on one leg and falling repeatedly into the forest of coats in the cloakroom. When the barkeep opened the door to let us out, the cold hit me in the face like somebody throwing a bucketful of crushed ice. Alma kept me steady while I stood on the crunchy rock-salted sidewalk, swaying backward and forward and trying to find my horizon. The town square was deserted. The snowplows had come churning through it in the dark, but since then the snow had been falling softly and steadily, and now everything was white, with only a few random footprints to show that Roseau was inhabited, and even these were quickly filling in.

On the roof of Wally’s Supermarket an illuminated sign told me that it was 2.06 a.m. and that the temperature was minus eleven degrees centigrade.

‘You need to drink about a gallon of water and get some sleep,’ Alma advised me.

‘I need cuddling,’ I told her. ‘I need a warm pillowy bosom.’

‘Come on, one foot in front of the other. You can’t stand here for the rest of the night.’ I looked up. The sky was intensely black, as black as if there was nothing there at all.

‘Did you ever see anything so fucking black?’ I said. ‘Tell me, Alma, did you ever in your whole life ever see anything so—’ I stopped, and frowned at her. ‘What did you say?’

‘I didn’t say anything. Let’s get you back to your hotel.’

‘I heard you say something. I distinctly—’

‘Listen, I didn’t say anything. You’re drunk. Let me get you back to your hotel and tuck you into bed and then you can—’

I turned around, almost keeling over as I did so. I had heard something. I could feel something. Somebody had whispered close behind my back, and when I say close they must have been close enough to touch me. Yet there was nobody there. Nobody at all.

‘How do you do that?’ I demanded.

‘How do I do what?’ Alma was growing impatient now.

‘Is that some kind of – what do you call it – ventriloquism?’

‘Come on, sugar,’ she said, tugging my arm. ‘I’m freezing my buns off out here. If you want a cuddle I’ll give you a cuddle. But for Christ’s sake let’s just get you to bed.’

Another whisper, even closer. I didn’t turn around this time because I knew it had to be Alma. I couldn’t work out what she was whispering: it wasn’t quite distinct enough. But for some reason it sounded deeply unpleasant and perverse.

‘Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?’ I demanded. You know what it’s like when you’re seriously drunk: you can get para-noid about almost anything.

‘What are you talking about? Just move.’

‘I just want to know what kind of stupid stunt you’re trying pull here, you know? All this—’

Whisper – whisper – whisper.

‘Alma, if you have anything you want to say to me …’

We weaved our way across the town square, leaving footprints that looked like one of those dance-instruction diagrams. I stumbled once or twice, but I was so drunk that I was beyond the normal laws of gravity, and I didn’t fall over.

Whisper – whisper – whisper.

‘What?’

‘You said something. You whispered.’

‘I fucking whispered?’ she retorted. ‘Why the hell should I whisper? In this town, everybody’s asleep by seven o’clock. That’s if they’re not in the boneyard.’

We reached a snow-covered bench right in the middle of the square, under a snow-mantled statue of Martin Braaten, the city’s founding father, and sat down. My brain was going around like a carousel, dipping and rising, music playing, lights revolving. I couldn’t remember what I had eaten for supper that evening, but whatever it was, it was going up and down in my stomach like a spotted carousel horse.

Alma said, ‘You’re so different from Jack. It’s hard to believe you were brothers.’

I gave her a little shake of my head. ‘I was always the city brother and he was always the country brother, that’s all. I loved concrete sidewalks and traffic. He loved the woods, and nature. Birds, bugs, mosquitoes and slugs. Even when he was a kid. He was like Daniel Boone and James Audobon and
The Last of the Mohicans
, all put together. I miss him, though, Alma. I feel like I’ve lost an arm.’

‘I miss him, too. He always gave me such respect, you know. Most men wouldn’t know what respect was if it was tattooed on their ass.’

The snow was falling on her hair. She looked almost beautiful, her eyes shining, her shoulders glittering with snow, like a fairy.

‘You deserve it,’ I said solemnly. ‘You deserve respect.’

She looked away and nodded. And as she nodded, I heard that whisper again, although it was more than a whisper this time; it built up from a whisper into a sudden rush, and something flashed past my cheek, so close that I could feel the wind of it, and there was a crackling sound like somebody wrenching the leg-joint off a Thanksgiving turkey, and Alma’s head flew off her shoulders and bounced on to the snow-covered concrete, her face still amazed, rolling past the fire hydrant and into the gutter and lying there, steaming in the sub-zero cold, while her headless body sat next to me on the bench, with blood jetting out of its severed neck, warm still, can you believe it, all over my hands and my sleeves and even spraying into my face.

I can’t remember if I shouted, but I remember ducking off the bench and rolling on to the snow and looking wildly around me to see what had hit her. But there was nobody standing behind the bench. There was nobody anywhere in the square at all.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I kept repeating, lying on my side in the snow, my breath smoking in terror. ‘Jesus Christ Almighty.’

I cautiously climbed to my feet, holding on to the bench to steady myself. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what had happened. There was blood spattered everywhere, all over the bench, all over my face, loops and squiggles of blood all over the snow. Alma’s body remained where she was sitting for almost half a minute, and then she suddenly collapsed like a puppet with its strings broken. I skipped and jumped away from her, and my heart was banging so hard that it hurt.

Again, I looked around, and it was then that I thought I saw something flickering out of the corner of my eye. I tried to focus on it, but it was gone, like those imaginary black cats you can see when you’re really tired.

I ran back to the North Star Bar, or loped, rather, like Groucho Marx. I banged on the door and shouted, ‘Help! For God’s sake! Help me!’ And while I waited for the lights to be switched on, and the alarms to be switched off, and the bolts drawn back, I turned around and there was Alma’s head still lying in the snow, staring at me in bloodied bewilderment, as if she couldn’t understand why I had left her there.

The sheriff’s deputy had a bristling ginger moustache and a lazy left eye and he chewed gum incessantly. He also had the biggest ass that I had ever seen north of the thirty-fifth parallel. His name was Norman Sturgeon. We sat in the cocktail lounge of the Roseau Rose Motel, on textured brown vinyl seats, and he asked me the same questions over and over, not because he was trying to wear me down, but because he obviously couldn’t think of anything else to ask.

‘You were sitting on the bench under Martin Braaten and her head flew off?’

‘That’s right. It just – flew off. Just like that.’

‘And you weren’t having any kind of altercation with her, nothing like that?’

‘Even if I had been, Deputy, how could I have knocked her head off?’

‘I’m not saying you did, sir. I’m simply doing my best to find out what happened here.’

‘I’ve told you. She was sitting on the bench right next to me and I heard this whispering noise and then this rushing noise and the next thing I knew, whack! Her head was rolling across the ground. And her body was still sitting next to me.’

Norman Sturgeon blew out his cheeks in bewilderment. ‘We’ve checked the square, sir, and apart from me and you and a few dozen people who ran out to see what was going on, and the paramedic crew, well, there’s no suspicious footprints.’

‘There was nobody there, Deputy. Nobody. Apart from Alma and me, the square was absolutely empty.’

‘So what do you think happened?’ asked Norman Sturgeon.