‘Wasn’t away.’ Gallen looked through the side window. ‘Just taking my time coming home, is all.’
‘You mind?’ said Winter, reaching for the glove compartment and coming out with a fifth of Jim Beam.
‘What’s the occasion?’ Gallen offered his coffee traveller.
‘We talking about the shit?’
‘No,’ said Gallen. ‘Thought we’d done a good job of not doin’ that.’
Winter swigged at the bottle. ‘Roy told me not to bring it up.’
‘He taught you good.’
Winter showed a busted incisor as he smirked. ‘Said when it came to war, Gerry weren’t much of a talker.’
‘Not much talk from you neither, Kenny.’
‘What’s to say? Got cold, got shot at. Got out still able to fog up a mirror.’
‘What I call a good war.’ Gallen smiled and touched his traveller to the bottle of Beam.
‘Amen,’ said Winter.
‘You Canadians. In the south, right? Fighting out of Kandy?’
‘Yeah. But I worked in the north, with Americans and Aussies.’
‘Special forces?’
‘In the Canadian forces they called us Assaulters.’
‘Kind of sums it up,’ said Gallen, relaxing as the bourbon warmed his stomach. Headlights shone as a truck rounded a bend in the road — Roy, coming to pick them up.
‘You were Marines Recon, right?’ said Winter. ‘Made captain.’
‘You been in Roy’s office.’ Gallen knew that his Marines plaque and his Silver Star were mounted where his father could see them while he drank.
‘Yeah, he’s proud,’ said Winter.
‘I know,’ said Gallen. ‘He rescued that crap out of the trash. I don’t have the heart to take it down.’
Before they reached the house yard, Gallen felt something was wrong. There were no lights on in the house and the big floodlight that hung over the main sliding door of the barn wasn’t working.
‘What’s up, Dad?’ said Gallen. His father’s whisky-fuelled snores rasped from the back seat where he was lying.
‘Lights out,’ said Winter as Gallen stopped the truck. ‘Power?’
Winter walked to the front door and tried the switches. Gallen could see him shrugging by the light of the truck’s headlamps.
‘Power’s off,’ said Winter.
The two of them carried Roy to his bed.
‘You know about this?’ Gallen asked as they stood in the kitchen.
‘No,’ said Winter. ‘You think he was ducking the bills?’
‘Dunno.’
Winter took a kerosene lamp and headed for the bunkhouse, a hundred-year-old wooden shack that had once housed the farm labourers of Sweet Clover, the Gallen family spread.
Watching the mysterious Canadian pad across the house yard, Gallen noticed a sense of containment and caution in his stride. Like many soldiers, when the war was over some habits couldn’t be erased.
Grabbing a lamp, Gallen went to Roy’s study and sat down at the desk. A pile of papers, envelopes, bank files and ledger books rose and spread like a mountain range in front of him. Sorting through them in the dim light, Gallen cursed quietly as he assembled a pile of the bills that seemed to have been paid, judging either by the ‘paid’ scrawled in Roy’s hand or because Gallen could find the clearances in the bank files. Roy’d paid the cattle haulage and the cattle feed and the hay man. And he’d repeatedly paid his bill at the liquor store and a company called La Paree Beautee.
Then Gallen made another pile of the final demands and disconnection warnings. There was a bill from Clearmont Fuels— diesel, propane and gasoline totalling $3817, account in arrears, payment due three months ago, credit no longer being extended on the Sweet Clover account; the co-op had a final demand for the $892 owed for Roundup, electric fencing wire, fence transformers, nails and cattle wormer; Alpine Ford wanted the $1600 it quoted and charged to fix the axle bearings and four-by-four hubs in Roy’s own F-250, a bill rendered in the fall of the year before; and sitting in Gallen’s hand was the power company’s bilclass="underline" three billing cycles in arrears, and a disconnection for 20 March — the official first day of spring.
‘Damn,’ said Gallen, rubbing his face. Roy had ignored a power bill for more than $11,000 and the power company had cut them off.
Lying awake, Gallen listened to the coyotes howl in the still night air. He remembered life in this farmhouse before his mother left, before Roy gave his life to the drink and before his older brother and sister took off for the big cities and their big careers. He remembered being driven home from high-school hockey, his father giving him the run-down on what he did right and what he had to learn; he’d limp into the house and his mom would have a hot bath ready for him, salts and all, mumbling her insults about the game, telling him that he didn’t have to play hockey if he didn’t want to. One morning, his mom had walked out of the bathroom and screamed at Roy when she discovered Gallen’s split eyebrow, an injury Roy saw no reason to bother the doctor with.
Gallen was always going to be Roy’s boy. As close as he was to his mother, he was drawn to hockey, to the code of never backing down, never abandoning a team-mate, never staying down on the ice, no matter who had landed you there. His coach from his midget-league days, Pat Murphy, had once gone crazy after one of the team had stayed on the ice, writhing in agony, after being checked into the boards by the biggest boy on the opposing team. At their next training, Murphy had told the group of ten-year-olds: ‘No one stays down in this team. This ain’t no soccer game and you ain’t no fucking Mexicans.’
And that was about as philosophical as it got in Wyoming hockey. His mom had managed to influence his older siblings and they were both lawyers, Patricia in San Francisco and Tom at a bank in Denver. But Gallen had toed the line, played hockey, taken a few bronc rides at the rodeo and then joined the Marines after high school. Back then it seemed enough: the other kids didn’t want the farm so it fell to the youngest. And the youngest had bought the whole redneck dream.
When Gallen had just turned fifteen, his mother left and Roy started drinking. Roy had a succession of girlfriends and there was a sudden lack of discipline in the life of the youngest Gallen. His mother would call from California and then Hawaii, but she’d never called him to her. Then, in his final year of school, the hay paddock — a hundred-and-forty-acre segment of the Gallen family’s cattle empire — had been sold. Gallen hadn’t seen it coming and hadn’t even thought about it until one day he was sitting in the barber’s chair in Clearmont and a real estate broker called Frank Holst started mouthing off.
‘Seen old Roy sold the hay paddock over on East Fork?’ said Holst, and before the barber could point out that Roy’s son was sitting in the next chair, the broker had offered it up: ‘Old Roy’s drinking the farm away.’
Gallen had spent many summers wet-backing in that hay paddock, making the hay for the winter with Tom and Roy, a third of it sold to other farmers.
Lying awake now, Gallen thought about his mother and her new life and new husband and new friends. He thought about the split, about his mother’s desire for something bigger and Roy’s love of cattle, horses and hockey
He thought about Roy losing it all and he knew what he had to do.
Never stay on the ice.
CHAPTER 5
Gallen put a piece of wood in the stove’s fire box and placed the coffee perc on the hot plate. Through the kitchen window he could see long plumes of steam shooting from the horse yards built off the back of the old ramp barn — a hundred-and-thirty-year-old wooden cathedral on a high foundation of river rocks. Sometime while Gallen was in the Marines, the earthen ramp structure had collapsed through the stone foundation wall and now Roy was loading in hay with a belt through one of the side doors.