The Hour of Bad Decisions Read online

  The HOUR of

  BAD DECISIONS

  The HOUR of

  BAD DECISIONS

  Russell WANGERSKY

  © Russell Wangersky, 2006. First us edition, 2007.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Edited by Edna Alford.

  Book and cover design by Duncan Campbell.

  Cover image, “Man Walks Towards Town” by Kamil Vojnar / Getty Images.

  Printed and bound in Canada at Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wangersky, Russell, 1962-

  The hour of bad decisions / Russell Wangersky.

  ISBN 1-55050-337-5

  I. Title.

  PS8645.A5333H52 2006 c813'.6 c2006-901076-5

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  2517 Victoria Ave.

  Regina, Saskatchewan

  Canada S4P OT2

  www.coteaubooks.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Saskatchewan Arts Board, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the City of Regina Arts Commission, for its publishing program.

  CONTENTS

  Burning Foley’s

  In Between

  Hot Tub

  On Call

  Dealing with Determinism

  Bowling Night

  The Latitude of Walls

  Mapping

  Perchance to Dream

  Musical Chairs

  Heartwood

  I want…

  Big Shoes

  No Apologies for Weather

  Borrowed Time

  Better than This

  Housekeeping

  Burning Foley’s

  FOLEY’S HOUSE WAS BURNING.

  You could see it from the top of the hill, from on top of the long green slope that led down into Cuslett.

  There was old meadow on one side of the narrow, crumbling highway, matted spruce on the other. And in the meadow, which ran down in a rush to the river, individual and perfectly conical spruce trees coming up, dark blue-green and full, their skirts right down into the long grass, keeping the wind out. In the town, there were a handful of houses, a blocky red barn, and the long, curving river twisting down to Placentia Bay. It was the kind of small place dwarfed by its surroundings, the swooping spruce hills on both sides of the valley, the huge summer sky rising up over the vast silver bay.

  A slight heat-shimmer in the air, the day just warm enough that the air over the road had a gentle tremble, so that the corners and roof-lines of the houses wavered ever so slightly.

  Other than that, there was no motion at all, no cars on the road, and from the distance of the top of the hill, no sounds either, as if Cuslett were holding its breath, waiting for someone familiar to arrive and wake the place.

  Except for James Foley’s house. Burning.

  Roy Meade could see it, could smell the smoke and the gasoline on the cuffs of his work shirt. And he sat high on the hillside, watching, his brother, Tony, sitting just a few feet away. Roy was singing tunelessly under his breath, his mouth slightly open.

  “I don’t know,” Tony said. He was fiddling with a long piece of meadow grass.

  “Shut up, Tony. Jest shut up.”

  An inverted cone of black and dirty yellow smoke, rising and roiling straight up in the still air. The smoke was pillowing into itself, with the rounded bulges being caught from beneath by the next, faster-rising, still hotter breath from the fire below. Already, there was the distinct and tangled smell of the smoke in the air, that curious, almost dump-fire smell of someone’s possessions burning. Around the burning building, inconsequential figures were running back and forth. Then the roof tar was well alight, with its particular orange flame and the heavy, even-blacker smoke, the roof buckling in the middle, edges shrugging up, the centre falling in with a whoosh of reaching smoke and flame, sparks and flankers showering down on the running figures. And then the too-late fire trucks pounding down the highway, red lights on and sirens screaming, air brakes smoking heavily from the long, winding trip along the shore from Placentia.

  Foley’s house was the green one – or it had been green. It used to have windows, too, but the frames had burned, and the windows were gone, toppling either back into the flames or outwards to lie face-down in the grass. One window had blown out early, when the fire was hottest, scattered the grass with long, sharp knives of soot-blackened glass. The clapboard was smoking and falling off the outside of the house in sheets as the nails lost their grip on the sheathing, the dry wood popping and crackling angrily as the flames roared over it.

  And Foley’s was far from being the first house to burn in Cuslett.

  The welfare house by the beach had burned, too, a few weeks earlier, the family off in Placentia on a grocery trip. It was an old two-storey, three-bedroom, hard to heat, down on the flats where Roy Meade had his wood piled, the rising heaps of sharp-pointed posts and the eight-foot, thin longers. The family had lived there for three weeks. Meade hadn’t even waved hello.

  That time, the fire department arrived in time to soak down the charred main beams; the walls had fallen in before the trucks got there. After the fire, the only things left were the chimney and the Enterprise oil stove, squatting down heavily where the kitchen had been. The stove still intact, its white glazing all crazy-cracked from the heat, the cracks milky from smoke. The trees on what had been the back of the house had their leaves seared black on the side nearest to the fire. The RCMP parked in the driveway overnight, as if something might change in the misting ruin, as if somehow someone might tamper with the steaming beach fire remnants. It smelt like a beach fire, too, the kind of fire that had been doused with salt water and left behind after everyone piled into the car and headed back to town.

  Eventually, the police headed back to town, too, unable to find the cause.

  The fall before, two summer cabins burned on the same weekend that their owners had packed up and gone home, the cabins well up on the river flats behind the town where the Meades had their sheep pasture, fences running for straight-edged miles through the alder scrub and the small rectangles of clearcut. Roy Meade suggested it might have been a chimney fire in the smaller cabin nearest the river, because he had never liked the look of the angled and rusting stovepipe, and he knew they burned green wood anyway. Meade said he had seen the fires while he was well back on the flats where the river first came down from the barrens.

  The post office burned, and the house the police used when the roads drifted in.

  And Mercy Lang’s house burned in the snow while the Langs were snowbound in St. Brides during a storm. And then the abandoned house under the cliff edge, which burned late at night, so bright in the January dark that the red-rock cliff was lit from bottom to top, thirty feet or more, like an overdrawn backdrop to a small and burning one-act play.

  The road in to the abandoned house was long grown over and filled in two feet deep with snow, so the fire trucks didn’t try to get in to put out the fire, and the firefighters stood next to their grumbling trucks instead and
watched the huge fire throw its shadows onto the cliff. And in the morning, when the sun came up bright and winter-hard, the snow was melted and yellow six or eight feet from the foundation, and a great yellow and brown wedge of dirty snow extended away from the foundation in the direction the wind had been blowing, the snow stained by the falling embers and ash. By the time the police arrived, all of Cuslett had been to see the ruins, and hundreds of footprints twined and spun through the snow like wild strawberry runners, and no one could tell which ones might have been the very first footprints in.

  The police didn’t stay for that one, just looked at the twisting footprints, got back into the cars and drove away.

  The police stayed longer at Foley’s: while the foundation was still smoking, they surrounded the property with police tape. They found Foley inside, in a corner of the kitchen. The coroner said later Foley had died from the smoke, although you couldn’t tell from the blackened body they brought out of the charcoal, his arms and legs pulled up tight to his body where the heat had shrunk all his sinews. It looked too small to be Foley, but it was. Plenty of policemen then, most in white overalls sifting through the blackened bits and charcoal and remains with shovels; finding a belt buckle and the batteries from a flashlight, coils of copper wire with the insulation all burned away, the welded workings of an ancient pocket watch. Finding every single bit that couldn’t burn: finding nothing else.

  Roy Meade was stripping and piling spruce fence posts near the beach by that afternoon, the air sharp with the smell of sap. Meade’s hands were black and tacky with the sticky resin, and the axe handle had distinct palm and fingerprints all along the length of its varnished wood. He was standing behind the big berm of beach rocks thrown up by the swells, between the rocks and the long, brown, peaty curl of the river, and he was using the axe to chip long, thick points onto one end of each post. It was wild river meadow there, isolated clumps of blue flag iris, nodding heads of Queen Anne’s lace, and the fresh new grass still supple and not yet beginning to yellow. Damselflies working low over the water’s surface, turning and wheeling and fluttering high, their crystalline wings catching the light as they rose from the water in mating flight.

  The river slow there – it comes in fast, dropping out of the hills and light-brown from draining the great, peat-bound barrens, but it loses all its speed as it swings against the back of the barrier beach, becoming deep and steady, taking its time to reach the near end of the beach where a gap in the stones let the river bleed brown into the sea.

  Meade worked steadily, the thunk of his axe reverberating across the flat of the valley bottom, only occasionally silent when he stopped to stack more finished posts on the pile. All the posts the same length, piled evenly, the rough bark and its long-fingered, fine lichen torn by handling. Meade smelled like sweat and two-stroke engine oil. He wore a dirty black baseball cap, “CAT” written on the front, jammed down on his head, and his movements were spare and mechanical, the shortest possible distance between points. He watched someone walking along the short beach road towards him, skirting the muddy puddles from the heavy rain that had fallen overnight. The sky was blue now, the deep, reaching blue of late June, the heat already shrinking the puddles.

  Tony Meade looked at his brother using the axe to trim the last few straggling branches from the posts, the small feathery branches the chain saw always missed, then turning each post towards the ground to make the points, sharp strokes with the axe, the white, long chips flying. Chips were lying all around, some new, some older and starting to yellow as the wood weathered. The wind full in off the bay, the air briny. A few chips had flown far enough to lie in the steadies at the edge of the river, and they floated, turning gently, surrounded by the small iridescent pools of oil that leached quickly from the sap-bleeding bark.

  “Never the idea,” Tony said. He was a big man, almost six feet tall, but not as big as his brother, and he had his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans, his fingers tapping his legs nervously while he talked. Tony’s face was thin, his lips pursed as if he were tasting something slightly bitter.

  “Wha?” Roy looked up from chopping, his dark face blank, straightening up and pulling his shoulders back, stretching. Roy was big but spare, with the wiriness of constant motion. Except in his face: his usual expression was still and almost expressionless, even his slight smile not without a hint of menace.

  “Never the idea to burn no one,” Tony said. “Never th’ idea at all.”

  “His fault.” Roy shrugged. “Weren’t supposed to be home. That were your job. You said he wunn’t be home.”

  Roy stopped and leaned the axe against the back wheel of his pickup truck. The box on the back of the truck had rusted away, replaced by a flatbed of two-by-six boards, nailed flat, with stakes on the sides to hold the load in. The sides of the truck were spattered with mud, and a case of beer, one flap open, sat in the back. Roy Meade reached in, took a beer, twisted the top off and dropped the cap back into the box. He stared at his brother for a moment before speaking.

  “You said Thursday nights he’s in St. Brides. Not s’posed to come back.”

  “Still…” Tony said.

  “No car in th’ shed. Couldn’t know.” Either way, Roy didn’t look particularly upset. He drank a quick swallow of beer, and scratched the back of his neck. Across the flats, a group of crows were flying loosely, fighting over something one crow was carrying in its mouth. The others put up a raucous cawing, tumbling in the air.

  James Foley’s wake was in St. Bride’s, at his sister’s house. The family held it as soon as the coroner released the body, while the police were still talking homicide and “no suspects” and “investigation continuing.” The family set up the casket in the living room. That day, a Wednesday, the room filled quickly, Foleys up from Barachoix and Placentia, one or two from Branch and a nephew, an oil rigger, all the way from Alberta. Foley’s sister crying quietly in her hands, the noise muffled by her fingers, the other Foleys and some friends talking softly.

  Around two o’clock, there was a sound at the door, and Roy Meade came in, and the room was suddenly silent.

  Meade walked over to the closed casket under the front window. He looked around the room at the silent and watching Foleys.

  “Shame,” Meade said. He examined his hands, turning them over, tore a loose scrap of skin off from next to his thumbnail. There was a ring in his dark hair from the hat, which was pushed into the back pocket of his jeans. No one else spoke.

  It was a small, fussy room, overfilled with photographs, the flat surfaces topped with runners. A ship’s clock on the mantel, and a faint scent of must; a coal grate, unlit, centered in the side wall, and all around, a crowd of soft, faded furniture. Meade looked steadily around the room, a moment for each person, as if he were taking count. Then he turned around and left, a faint hint of pitch lingering in the air behind him.

  The Foleys heard his truck start in the yard and pull away, and still the room was quiet, except for the steady step of the clock.

  There was one pool table in the lounge in St. Bride’s, but it sat crooked on the slanted floor, and only strangers ever tried to actually play on it. Roy sat as far away from the pool table as was possible, on the last seat near the wall where you could look up and watch the bright afternoon light shine in through the dirty glass and the wire grating that covered the outside of the windows.

  When he had come in, his eyes had been dazzled by the bright sunlight outside, and he had thought the bar was empty. But after he ordered a beer and his eyes began to adjust to the light, he saw three men stand up from behind the pool table, pushing their chairs back, the scrape of the legs loud in the empty room.

  The three men, all Langs, walked up to him at the bar; Mercy’s son and two of her nephews. They stood in close to Roy. He watched the condensation form and then quickly pool around the base of his beer glass. The room smelled of old beer and disinfectant. Meade could smell the Langs.

  “Whatcha going ta do? Bu
rn us out, too?” Kevin Lang, the son. All three laughed, and it was an unpleasant sound.

  The three of them had been cut from the same cloth, all three dark, blocky and threatening. Almost shoulder to shoulder with each other, standing over him as he sat at the bar. Roy drank his beer.

  “So I laughed, too,” Meade told Tony later that night, imitating himself gruffly – “haha, haha,” flat and wooden like a crow croaking.

  Even later, the moon came up full and yellow over the too-black hills. By one o’clock, it was falling again, and by three, clouds rolled across and the night was suddenly dark.

  It was cool, the air rich with the complicated smells of summer. The wet of the dew, the fine wick of the juniper rolling down from the barrens. Rhodera, leaves waxy and smooth, its complex resin almost reminiscent of eucalyptus, exhaling softly into the night. Damp moss and blueberry, ground cranberry and mash berry, each one adding a new and particular note.

  In one corner of the meadow, the sheep moved by instinct, pushing up against each other, tight enough for the branch ends on the longers – the long fence slats – to pull tufts from the wool of the sheep pressed against the fence.

  Roy Meade moved across the meadow carrying a stick, the tip of a spruce tree, branches cut away. The stick was about ten feet long, the end wrapped tightly in rags. Meade was carrying a red plastic gas can, too, and he walked up a short hill directly behind the Lang’s house before opening the can and pouring gas over the rags.

  He carefully screwed the cap back on before taking out his lighter. He flicked it and then touched the flame to the rags. For a moment, he stared straight at the torch, watching the soot yellow flames at the edges, the blues in close to the cloth, turning the flaring torch slowly.

  There were a lot of other things Roy might have seen, if he had been looking.

  He might have seen the flames dripping from the end of the torch, yellow drops making fluttering, zip-ping sounds as they fell, and walking towards the back of the house, he might have seen the small burning islands the fallen drops left on the dark sea of the ground, flaring brilliant and burning themselves out. He might have seen how black the yellow gas flames made the rest of the night, how they licked and curled liquid up from the rags, might have seen how the flames stood out like a signal.