It hit me at last. I’d been walking along the old right-of-way. Now the old canal was crossed by the black iron bridge I’d seen, but at some earlier date, the tracks went under the canal.
I moved in, holding to the middle and trying not to think of the creatures of the night that used to haunt my bedroom when I left my clothes in an untidy tangle on the chair when I was a kid. The tunnel curved gently, continuing the arc of the graded trail. The middle was mush. There was no sign of ballast or railway ties anywhere, and the place smelled as dank as a sewer. It seemed to go on forever, but it couldn’t have been more than an eighth of a mile until I saw an arched section of magenta light ahead of me. It got bigger as I slushed on. It must be the glow above the foundry that had located off the St. David’s road. In fact, I could hear the distant thump of drop-hammers through the night.
Once out the other side, I turned north for just long enough to let the embankment over the tunnel reach a reasonable grade. As soon as it looked no steeper than about forty-five degrees, I scrambled to the top. To the north I could see the present line of track with the steel bridge almost shining in the dark. That’s where I’d last seen the boys. There wasn’t any way that I knew of for getting to where I was faster than the way I came. I had the old canal between us now. I was kneeling on one of the oddest pieces of man-made engineering ever made: the spot where an abandoned railway tunnel passes under an abandoned canal. I’ll have to think of that spot again sometime when I think that Grantham is moving into the twenty-first century too quickly.
Half-way down the embankment again, where I’d half slid, half fallen, I heard a distinct rattle among the sounds of slipping feet and stones. I moved my feet quickly before the rattlesnake of my nightmare struck at my unguarded ankle. I must have been hallucinating. I didn’t see anything, and whatever it was it was gone without another sound. Over my shoulder I could see lights from the flight locks and I could hear the faint hum of motors. Beyond the other-worldly twin locks with their regular light standards lifting the buff planes out of the darkness, I could make out the pale glow of Papertown on the other side.
I kept hiking along the ghostly railway track, knowing that it would eventually lead me back to the main line from which it had separated years before I was born. I kept pushing the pace. “Before I was born,” as though that’s a measure of anything. It was like my asking when I was six if the ocean was over my head. The universe was divided into what was over my head and what wasn’t. Not a fair division at all unless you happened to be six. Ahead I could see the present canal’s surge tank. It looked like a gigantic car muffler on end. It must have stood two hundred feet in the air. Right beside it ran the railway right across the new canal. The bridge was down so it was easy over and home free for Papertown.
FOURTEEN
“What do you mean, ‘Can I put you up for a few days?’”
“Just that, Martha. I’m on the run. If I show up at my office or at the hotel, somebody’s going to lean on me pretty hard. It’s just for a few days. I know you’ve got a spare room.”
“Yeah. You fixed it so that it’s been spare ever since …”
“I’ll pay rent, Martha. I don’t mean to take advantage.”
“That’s the story of my life: nobody ever takes advantage.”
“I’ll keep out of the way. I never cook in my room.”
“M’yeah. I know the type. Taco chips in your briefcase, milk cartons on the window sill.”
“No. Honest. I’ll fill up your refrigerator for you. Nothing in the room but me. You’ve got my word on it.”
“Benny, you don’t seem to realize that I’m a maiden lady and maiden ladies don’t invite strangers into their homes without at least three weeks rent up front. And even so, on this street, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Thanks, Martha. You’ll never regret it.”
“M’yeah. I regret it already. How soon will you be moving in?”
“I’ll hail a taxi and be right over. Bye.”
“Tonight? Cooperman-” I pretended I didn’t hear her and hung up.
Martha Tracy has more things to do with her life than keep a rooming-house. She’d lost a paying guest once when I started digging up the past. But in the main she’d been helpful to me in my work six or seven times. Nobody knew this town the way Martha did. She worked for Scarp Enterprises, a big real-estate firm. She knew where all the bodies were buried in Grantham and who buried them. I’ve had more free advice from Martha than I like to remember. She lived in the western part of the city in a house that backed on the tracks that came from Hamilton and were on their way over the Eleven Mile Creek bound for Niagara Falls. I noted the neglected privet hedge as I went up her walk to the green porch.
“Well, you didn’t waste any time, did you?” Martha gave me a heavily leaded smile and pushed open the door farther to let me pass. “I’ve got the kettle on,” she said. Martha doted on instant coffee. Sometimes she got her hot water from the chrome kettle, but often from the hot-water tap. She was blonde, stocky and met the world with a Churchillian jaw.
“Martha, I’m not going to tell you about the trouble I’m in. The less you know about it the better.”
“Library chasing you for fines again?” She dropped into a kitchen chair as she passed a mug to me, and then straightened the hang of her housecoat. She regretted her gag about the library and moved the conversation to the practical matters of towels, the availability of hot water, the broken bottom step and the quirky radio that suddenly increases in volume when you least expect it. I gave her some money which she put into a drawer bursting with coupons.
“Martha,” I asked, after I’d emptied my mug and cleaned the ring on the white enamel table with a dishcloth to show my clean living habits, “what is the biggest engineering project now going on around town?”
“You mean us or the other wheelers and dealers?”
“Not Scarp. I mean a big government contract going to Bolduc or to Bagot Cement.”
She lifted a red-marked palm from the table and leaned her cheek against it, while staring out the back window to the maple tree by the railway fence. “Bolduc is building the new fire hall on the Queenston Road end of St. Andrew Street. As usual they are building condominiums in about six different locations around town. But nothing big, nothing special.” I returned the dishcloth to the sink. “Cooperman, have another cup of coffee and don’t jump up and down like that. You make me nervous. Let me think. You want bigger than that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Something with government money in it. Something with rights-of-way that need buying.”
“Now you’re making it easy. The Feds have called off the work on the canal, so that leaves the province. What they are up to is this: a new major superhighway is going to be built to help the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake. As it is there are so many switchbacks and traffic circles on the last part of the trip from Toronto that half the potential audience for the plays ends up in Lewiston or Niagara Falls, New York, wondering what went wrong.”
“I know that road. You have to double back to the Skyway bridge to make connections with the road to Niagara-on-the Lake.”
“Well, the province,” Martha said, lowering her voice just perceptibly, “in its wisdom, is going to build a four-lane divided highway from the Niagara end of the bridge all the way to the Festival theatre without getting hung up in the traffic of hamlets like Virgil and Homer on the way. It’s big money and Bagot and Bolduc are the only local developers big enough to handle it.”
“That sounds like the one I’m looking for. When it’s finished the festival will be able to run all year round and the sale of fudge along the main drag in Niagara-on-the-Lake will double our sugar imports.”