There was a noise, and Cardinal whirled around.
Delorme was behind him, staring at the body from behind the corner of granite.
“I don’t know about you,” she said. “But me, I don’t think the blackflies did that.”
8
KEVIN TAIT PICKED UP THE FLY SWATTER and moved with great stealth to the window. The fly that had just taken a piece out of his ankle was trying repeatedly to exit through the glass. Kevin brought the fly swatter down, and the fly went to its reward. Using the swatter like a spatula, Kevin scooped up the tiny corpse and carried it to the cabin door. He opened the door just long enough to fling the dead fly outside without inviting any of its cousins to the Kevin Tait smorgasbord.
He cleaned the little smear from the windowpane with a Kleenex. Across the field, Red Bear was arriving in his black BMW. You had to hand it to Red Bear, the guy knew how to live. Dressed in white from head to toe, all six feet of him, and then he’s got that glossy black hair down to his shoulders and the Wayfarers dark as outer space. He climbed out of the Beamer and two nifty-looking babes got out with him, a blond and a brunette with the kind of bodies that spoke of hours in the gym.
The three of them walked across the former baseball diamond to Red Bear’s cabin, by far the nicest in this crumbling old camp. Kevin watched them from his window, the tall Indian all in white, like Elvis in his final years, an arm around each of the women. Red Bear wore so many beads and bracelets he rattled as he walked. Somehow his good looks and his aura of power overcame the vulgarity.
Kevin Tait was not the kind of young man who believed in personal power or charisma, perhaps because he sensed that he possessed none. Oh, he knew he could be charming. Women have always had a weak spot for penniless poets, and the erotic power of melancholy is well known.
Kevin flopped across the bed and opened his notebook. He pulled out the black pen Terri had given him for his twenty-first birthday. He thought he might start a poem about misery and lust, but the pen remained inert.
He flipped through the notebook, browsing through jottings he’d made over the past months—musings, observations, bits of verse.
Her first love was a captain
For whom she would become
The muse of Navigation
The smoke of opium Just a fragment, and too Leonard Cohenish at that.
A wizard turning wisdom into wine …
God knows where he was going with that one. It seemed ages since he’d finished anything substantial. There had been a poem in March, but he hadn’t bothered to send it out to the small magazines; it needed another polish or two. The last few months he’d been conserving his strength, lying fallow, waiting for just the right idea; he’d know it when it came along. It would go off like a Roman candle, sparks pinwheeling across the jet-black sky of his mind.
“Kevin Tait, good to have you on the show.”
Kevin liked to do this thing in his head where he was being interviewed by David Letterman, even though he knew Letterman never interviewed poets. He figured he would be the first.
“Kevin Tait,” Letterman said again. “Here you are, your last volume of poems sold a gazillion copies. People quote your lines to each other day in and day out. You’re not just a poet any more, you’re a force in the culture. And—I don’t know how to put this gently—you’re hanging out with scumbags. Ne’er-do-wells. Drug dealers. What are you thinking?” Letterman’s fratboy grin took the sting out of the question.
“Drug dealers, Dave, provide a much-needed service to a, let’s face it, underappreciated crowd. People have used drugs down through the centuries, and they always will. Look at Coleridge. Look at Rimbaud. A little disorder in the senses never hurt anybody. And not just artists. It’s a long dark night out there, Dave, and everyone needs a little help getting through.”
Applause. Letterman ignores it.
“But you’re a poet. And you’re hanging out with thugs. Doesn’t that make you nervous?”
“Nervous? Not really.” Kevin gave it a beat. “I’m actually terrified.”
Laughter.
“So give us the big picture, here. How does this—sorry, I gotta say it—oddball behaviour fit into your grand plan?”
“My plan, Dave, is to make a lot of money by selling as much contraband as possible in as short a time as possible. Then I’m heading off to Greece for a few years to write the big one. Maybe Barcelona, Tangiers, I’m not sure.”
Letterman then had him read his latest poem. There was a respectful pause after he read the last line, then a balmy wave of applause.
The plan had a flaw that Letterman didn’t know about: Kevin had a weakness for the product he sold. He liked to think his personal appreciation of his wares was what made him an exceptional salesman. In any case, he was clean these days; just a little skin-popping now and again. Nobody ever came to grief by skin-popping. Besides, he knew he could quit. It was just a matter of getting back to twelve-step.
So that was his plan: keep clean and stow away a ton of cash over the next year. Then he’d hightail it to—who knew?—Greece, Tangiers, Barcelona and spend his time in creative isolation, doing nothing but drinking strong coffee and writing poems. He’d mail them back to Terri one by one, so she’d know he was doing fine. Otherwise, she was likely to chase him around the world, trying to look after him.
Terri had always had a tendency to mother him, and sometimes it just got out of hand. Just a few days ago, he’d had to tell her what was what on that score. That had sent her packing, and he hadn’t heard from her since. Probably she’d gone back to Vancouver, which was perfectly fine with Kevin. He’d call her in a couple of weeks, let her know he didn’t hold a grudge. For now, the important thing was to get a nest egg together, and Red Bear was just the man to help him do it.
When Red Bear had first come along, all dressed in white, talking of his contacts in the spirit world, Kevin had written him off as just another nutcase. That had been almost a year ago. Kevin and Leon had been sitting outside the Lemon Tree on Algonquin Avenue, shooting the breeze, watching the girls go by. It was likely going to be the last perfect day of summer, and all the tables were taken. Red Bear got out of a black car—someone else had been driving—and headed inside the shop. A few minutes later he reappeared with a lemonade and came right over.
“You mind if I sit here?” He said it to Leon, not Kevin.
Leon shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
Red Bear pulled the chair out and spun it around, then sat down facing them with his elbows on its back. The fringes of his white jacket hung nearly to the pavement.
“In exchange for your kindness, I will read your cards.” Red Bear had a curiously formal way of speaking, as if he were translating from another language.
Kevin was expecting a Tarot deck, but Red Bear pulled out an ordinary pack of cards and fanned them out across the table. “Pick a card to represent yourself,” he said to Leon. Leon tapped the king of hearts, nothing subtle about Leon. He sat back and rubbed his forehead with his index finger. He had a small scar there, and sometimes he rubbed at it as if he could erase it.
Red Bear gathered up all the cards except the king, shuffled them, and then began laying them out in squares and crosses. A deep groove of concentration formed between his brows. “You’ve recently had trouble with a relative,” he said. “A difference over money.”
Leon looked at Kevin. His cousin had stayed with him the past winter and had stolen two hundred dollars before hopping on a Greyhound in the middle of the night. Next day, Leon had gotten drunk and beat the hell out of some stranger in the Chinook Tavern, till Kevin had managed to pull him off. Leon had raged about his cousin for weeks afterwards.