Liberty Street (36 page)

He made his move on the board and said, “As I recall, it was a long way down. I obviously didn't think that through.”

We played checkers until we both had queens on the board, but the game seemed like a prelude to something else,
and it was as though we were both waiting for whatever that was to begin. The hail was melting now, and ice-cold water ran into the porch and pooled under our feet. I lifted my injured foot out of the water and rested it on the bench. A sudden gust of wind blew a new sheet of water through the porch screen and across the table. We both jumped up and moved out of its way, and stood pressed up against the trailer's exterior. Dooley retrieved the checkerboard and set it on the little step leading into the trailer. The lamp blew out.

“I should probably go,” I said. “I just came to see if you were all right. And to say thanks for the food gifts, which I should have done sooner. It was all delicious, much appreciated. You're quite the cook.”

Dooley said, “Come inside. You don't want to walk back in this rain.”

I thought of him doing his crazy chicken dance, but I went inside with him anyway. I was not afraid of Dooley Sullivan. I never had been. He offered me a La-Z-Boy recliner that he'd somehow squeezed into the small trailer, and he placed the lamp on his kitchen table and relit it. The small flame cast a surprising amount of light now that we were inside. On a shelf under the little kitchen window, I saw a neat row of well-worn cookbooks, and I could even read some of the titles:
The Spanish Kitchen, Flavours of Italy, French Cuisine.
Dooley put the kettle on the propane stove, and he saw me looking at the cookbooks.

“The rummage sale in the church basement,” he said. “They belonged to my grandfather. I recognized them as soon as I saw them stacked up on a table. Who knows how many hands they went through, how many times they were bought and then given away again. They're the only things of his
that I own. I'm not sure why I brought them home. At first I thought I could smell smoke on them from the fire. Maybe that was it. They're my version of a hair shirt.”

I knew what he meant.

When the kettle boiled, he made tea and handed me a cup, and then he sat down at the banquette and set his own tea on the table in front of him.

“I'm not sure what I was hoping to accomplish,” he said. “The food, I mean. But when you didn't respond, when you left the tray while I was out, I thought the hard feelings must have been passed on from your father. Or maybe you were afraid of me. I never thought of the possibility that you had no idea who I was, which says more about me than it does you.” He paused and took a sip of his tea, and I did the same. In the lamplight, I could see traces of the old Dooley. Not the angry one who had paced around his battered red truck, more the Dooley who had come to me in dreams after the other fiery accident on the bridge. The boy I'd wanted to save.

“When I saw you coming through the rain,” he said, “I knew that no matter what you thought of me, I was going to have a chance to speak to a Moon.” Then he cleared his throat and said, as though he were reciting wedding vows, carefully rehearsed, “I didn't mean to set my grandfather's house on fire. I was drunk. I didn't mean to hurt anyone, especially not his wife; none of my problems were her fault. I'm relieved to finally get the chance to say that to you, the only person I can think of who might appreciate an apology.” Then he laughed, perhaps to defuse the awkwardness, and said, “You're never done with penitence.”

I wasn't sure how to respond. I wished my father could
have heard him, as well as Esme and all those other people who'd never believed Dooley Sullivan would come to anything good. But it was down to me. I said, “Okay, then. Apology accepted.”

Then he said, “Your dad drove a hard bargain. But he was fair.”

I didn't leave. Dooley handed me a dry blanket, which I wrapped around myself, and we sipped our tea and topped it up when it cooled down. And he told me a story, a long one that took all night to tell. It began with him waiting for my rumoured return to Elliot (the source of the rumour was a participant in Mavis's yoga class), and then he slipped into memories that rolled over one another like waves on a beach. He told me things that he had never told anyone, not even in the anonymity of AA meetings. When he got to the part about the red truck and the last time he'd seen its remains in the Texaco parking lot, I wanted to cry for him. When he got to the part about the deer turning into a man—the vision that still haunted him—I knew I had to tell him another version of that night, my version. And for the first time, I told my story—the wedding night, the green cap, my flight from Elliot, and the disasters that followed before I reinvented myself, before Ian.

All night the rain was a soundtrack on the trailer roof, until the man turned back into a deer and both of our stories ended on the same mostly deserted street in Elliot.

It was almost morning when I fell asleep in the chair. Dooley slept too, awkwardly, slumped into a corner of the banquette. Once, I was awakened when I thought I heard him talking. “Now I lay me down to sleep,” he said, but then again, it might have been a dream.

The power was still off when we woke up, but the rain had stopped. The sun was out and mist was rising eerily from the low spots across the street. Before I left, I asked Dooley about Tobias's estate, whether he felt as though he'd been cheated. He said no. He'd taken the money my father had offered and run like a bandit, knowing it was more than he deserved. I was relieved to hear it.

I went up the steps and into my house and sank into the brown couch, my foot aching again. I wished that I had solid proof of my version of the story so that Dooley could truly be relieved of guilt for the worst thing he'd done, or thought he'd done, in his messed-up younger life. He was sixty-eight years old. If he could live his old age without that burden, I thought, he would be a freer man than he'd ever been living on a beach in Mexico. He said that he'd once gone to the RCMP detachment with a plan to make a confession, but then he'd turned around and gone home again, losing his nerve, clinging to the smallest particle of doubt.

The smell of dampness made me get up off the couch and look for its source, although I knew it was going to be the basement. When I opened the door and flicked on the light, I was greeted by the sight of water halfway up the staircase. Debris was everywhere. The bookcase floated on its back, empty of books, the guitar bumping up against it like flotsam. The fur coat resembled a moose with its head under water. The pole lamp poked its own bent head up in an elegant way, a bit like a swan. An old steamer trunk was lodged under the staircase, bulging with wet linens, and soggy cardboard boxes had spilled their contents into the water. It appeared that nothing stored in the basement had escaped.

The house's breaker box was on the wall beside me. I
switched off all breakers and closed the basement door, not believing my good fortune—the need to sort judiciously through possessions now gone—although I did not yet realize the extent of the new problem I'd have to deal with.

That evening, I sat on the porch and watched Dooley Sullivan do his bird dance in the water pooling in front of his trailer. Deeper water lay in the lots between us, and I imagined my house rocking the way it might if it were floating on the ocean. I thought about Joe Fletcher dying in the hospital, an opportunity flickering like a candle burning out, and I saw Dooley's dance in a new way—not just because of the water, but because now I knew about his life since Elliot had lost track of him. Nineteen years he'd been sober. Three times in detox, but the last time it took. Now he went to meetings and took medicinal marijuana for the pains in his body, caused by injuries he'd inflicted on himself, he said, by driving drunk into a bridge. He didn't blame anyone, he said, not his grandfather, not my parents or Esme for packing him off with a cheque and a bus ticket, not the teachers for missing his cries for help.

When he finished his ritual, I went inside and opened the fridge a crack, trying to keep the cold air in, to see what I might have that could be turned into a meal not requiring electricity. I made myself a sandwich, and then I sat on the porch and watched the horses across the road as they grazed their way down the fenceline and out of sight. They belonged to Dooley. They were rescues from an animal cruelty seizure not too far away and had been fending for themselves in a bare pasture without food or water. Dooley knew a bit about caring for horses from his time in Mexico, so he took them because no one else would and they were destined for the
slaughterhouse. He'd been rescued, he said, many times. Everything deserved to be rescued. The town had been happy to lease him the empty lots across the street.

I wondered if Mary, the supposed mother of all rescue, was still on her hill. I scrambled through the barbed-wire fence and made for the shrine. When I got there, I found only the stone grotto and what looked like the remains of an old fire. Someone, it appeared, had burned up the holy mother.

The mosquitoes found me, and then I heard the horses galloping toward me, and it was terrifying, but they stopped before they ran me over and left as quickly as they'd come when they saw I had nothing for them. I hobbled back through the wet grass and crawled through the fence again. I heard a car crossing the tracks and thought it might turn up Liberty Street, but it passed the turn and the sound receded. No one ever came up Liberty Street.

I went into the house and went to bed, thinking I could hear the sound of water lapping. I lay there and contemplated what to do about Joe Fletcher.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I phoned Mavis from a payphone in town and reported that my basement was full of water.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Well, I hear half the basements in Elliot are flooded, so it's not surprising. Main Street is under water, or at least it was. Did you know that?”

I told her yes, there were pumps going everywhere in town. She asked me if the water in my basement was receding. I said I'd closed the basement door and hadn't checked since. There was silence on her end of the line, as though she couldn't believe what she'd heard.

“I have no electricity,” I said. “I'm pretty much camping. I don't really know who to call.”

Mavis said she would try to find someone to pump out the basement and check the electrical.

Later, Dooley knocked on my door. “I was wondering,” he said, “if you might like to go to the hall with me tomorrow night. Apparently, someone is throwing together a benefit to raise money for flood victims, people with house damage and no insurance. There's a good local band. They have a young girl who plays the fiddle, and she's kind of famous around here. She almost won one of those TV talent shows. A lot of people got the Internet just so they could vote for her.” Then he said, “Just to be clear, it's not a date or anything like that. I don't complicate things by having relationships. Sobriety is my mistress. Just thought, two people, not much going on with either of us that I can see. Might as well go together. You think?”

I found myself nodding and saying, “Okay. What do people wear to these things?”

“Anything you want,” he said. “It's Elliot.”

I wore jeans and a T-shirt with a flower-shaped pattern of cheap crystals. I didn't have proper shoes with me and likely couldn't have worn them anyway because of my foot, so I wore flip-flops. When Dooley came to pick me up, he was wearing jeans and boots and a silver belt buckle. There was still a touch of swagger in Dooley Sullivan, I thought, which amused me quite a bit.

The parking lot at the hall was under water and the puddles glistened. Cars and trucks were parked all up and down the street. The hall itself had been spared any damage—the same hall where all those years ago I had hidden underneath
a table and then danced with Dooley Sullivan when his foot was in a cast. I asked him if he remembered that night and he said no. I said, “You crawled under a banquet table where I was hiding and pulled me out to dance with you, much to the annoyance of the ladies who were following you around like you were a rock star.”

“It's been a long time since any ladies followed me around,” he said.

There was a donation box at the door and we both dropped bills inside before we found chairs against the wall at the back of the room. Lots of people said, “
Hola
, Dooley,” to which he answered, “
Hola
yourself.” In a way, the lack of attention paid to me made it seem as though I had lived in Elliot all my life, because that's the way it had been when I did live there.

It was a long night. It was hot and humid in the hall, even with the doors open. I didn't much like the band, and the girl with the fiddle—wearing a light cotton dress and red cowboy boots and looking too young to be on stage in a place where they served alcohol—wasn't doing anything particularly impressive. Dooley kept telling me to wait, assuring me that a solo set was coming. By the time the girl finally stepped up to the mike and the other musicians put their instruments down, I was falling asleep in my chair and dying to go home. I watched her settle her fiddle on her shoulder, pluck the strings, tune, slide her bow back and forth a few times, and then launch into something I recognized. Everyone recognized the song—was it “Orange Blossom Special”?—and before I knew it, I was being pulled up to dance a circle around the hall with Dooley and everyone else, sore foot and all. Then someone was cutting in and I was dancing with a
strange man, and then another, and then Dooley cut in again. Everyone in the hall was dancing, and when the girl stopped playing, the room erupted. Someone took the mike and told the story of how much fun the whole town had had voting for her, and she should have won—she was robbed, wasn't she?—and everyone clapped and stomped again, until the girl began to play another tune and the hall thundered with the sound of dancing feet.