Leon attacked the gearshift and the Trans Am roared onto the dirt road. “Red Bear wants us to convince him to stop blabbing our business to the entire world.”
“So why doesn’t Red Bear talk to him? He’d be a lot more convincing than you or me.”
“It’s called delegating responsibility, Kevin. Red Bear actually wants us to do some work, you know what I mean? And he don’t mean writing.”
“So what are we supposed to do?”
“Just get him to stop, that’s all. How we do it is our business. But if Toof doesn’t stop, that’ll be Red Bear’s business, and you know what? I don’t want Red Bear mad at me, do you?”
A Toyota Echo cut them off as they turned onto the highway, and Leon leaned on the horn. “Asshole. I oughta run him into a rock cut.”
“So who’s Toof supposed to have been talking to?”
“Apparently, the little jerk let slip that we had some business with the Viking Riders, and somehow it got back to Red Bear. Is that bad enough for you, or do you need like a detailed transcript? You wanna go back to camp and cross-examine Red Bear on the subject?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Me either.”
They didn’t speak the rest of the way into town.
Toof was an easy person to find most afternoons, because Algonquin Bay has only two poolrooms: Duane’s Billiard Emporium and the Corner Pocket. He wasn’t at Duane’s but someone said they’d seen him earlier and he was heading over to the Pocket.
They drove up Sumner and made a left onto O’Riley. The Pocket was a couple of blocks up, handily located near Ojibwa High, which was why Toof liked to hang out there. He’d hustle the after-school crowd of boys and make himself a few bucks.
Unlike Duane’s, which was run by a closet thug with a head shaped like an anvil, the Corner Pocket was run by an old couple. They were constantly in a bad mood, and no one knew if that was their normal demeanour or if catering to successive squadrons of teenage boys had soured them.
The old man glared at Kevin and Leon over the cash register as they entered.
They found Toof at the bar, drinking a Cherry Coke and scarfing down a Turkish Delight chocolate bar.
“Hey guys, what’s up?” Bits of chocolate clung to his snaggletooth. He pointed to Leon’s feet. “You’re wearing your fancy hiking boots again. You going mountain climbing?”
“Gotta go for a drive,” Leon said.
“Gimme twenty minutes, eh? I wanna take this guy out.” He pointed with his Coke at a beanpole of a youth who was clearing a table with one decisive thunk after another.
Leon took Toof’s Coke and placed it on the counter. “Now.”
19
THE MEMORIES WERE COMING thick and fast now; she couldn’t stop them. One moment she was yearning to remember more, the next moment she wanted nothing but oblivion. The nurses would give her Tylenol, but no more of the heavy-duty painkillers. She wanted to sleep, but it was the middle of the day and she was wide awake.
The patients’ lounge was noisy. Sophie, one of the suicide wannabes, had three blond witches visiting her and they were all giggling maniacally. Terri huddled in a corner with a Glamour magazine, but she couldn’t concentrate. The memories dropped into her mind in no order, unbidden, with stomach-flipping changes in intensity and obsessive repetition.
For example, the flies. For the hundredth time she was remembering the flies. Not just the ones that bit her, although she certainly remembered the itch and sting of bites on her forehead and ankles. Those flies were small, silent. But she could also hear the buzzing, thick and multi-layered, of other, fatter flies. Great clouds of them in the sunlight. Where had that been?
Then there was the train station. Kevin had come to meet her. He had been nervous, shifting from foot to foot as if they were strangers. Terri had known instantly that he was using again. She hadn’t confronted him about it right away, not there in the station with the crying children, and the drunks wobbling about, and a madwoman yelling incoherently.
Kevin’s place. Nothing but a camp bed and a rickety wooden table in a weird little cabin somewhere in the woods by a lake. Sunlight pouring in through the window, making the sweat glisten on Kevin’s brow.
“I know you’re using again,” Terri said. It just came out. She couldn’t bear to see him looking so furtive and guilty.
“I’m not mainlining. Whole reason I came back to Algonquin Bay was to get clean. I was happy growing up here. It kinda helped me get some clarity.”
“Kevin, I can see it in your face.”
“I’m just skin-popping,” he told her.
“Uh-huh. And where will that go?”
“It’s just something I have to do right now. I’m under a lot of stress.”
He’d had a pout on his face as he’d said it, a child who’s been chastised. A lot of girls found Kevin’s boyishness charming. Terri supposed she could see it. That curly hair—dark, not red like hers. Her brother looked like a guy who was up for a ball game, or for a night of poker, sometimes as if he might pull a frog from his pocket. Unfortunately, along with the boyishness came a lot of immaturity. He’d already done two years in a correctional facility. If he got caught trafficking, or even using, he could get sent away for a long, long time. There was no way she could so much as mention his name to the police, no matter how nice they were to her.
The camp. That’s what Kevin had called the place he shared out by the lake. Apparently, the collection of cabins had at one time been a summer camp for handicapped kids. Once upon a time the cabins might have been white, but now they were discoloured, sagging, sorry old huts that barely kept out the flies. He’d dug up a key for the cabin next to his and told Terri she could stay there, but only for a couple of nights. Red Bear didn’t like outsiders hanging around, even family.
“Isn’t it great?” Kevin said, waving his hand at the view of the lake, the overgrown baseball diamond. “Isn’t it fantastic? Look at that lake, Ter, it’s huge. We took a boat ride across it last week, and it took, like, an hour, even going really fast. You should see the stars from out there. Incredible.”
“You went for a boat ride at night? Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know. It was fun. Come on, Terri, you have to admit it’s pretty cool to have a whole camp for the summer.”
All Terri had discerned in the leaning huts and the rocky beach was the dispirited air of a place long abandoned. It had reminded her of photographs she’d seen of the Great Depression.
And what a collection of people living in it. Kevin and Red Bear and the dim guy with the funny tooth. Supposedly, there was some other character she’d never met. Kevin had never mentioned any of them in his occasional e-mails, a fact that made her suspicious of his new friends right from the start.
“Don’t you think it’s a little much for only four guys to live in?” she had said. “You could house forty people in all these cabins.”
“Naw,” Kevin said. “Most of them are ruined. There’s only maybe six you could live in.”
“Still. Four guys.”
Kevin walked her over to the biggest cabin, Red Bear’s, the only one with more than one room. It stood in a copse of birch trees, a miniature house with cedar siding and a broad window overlooking the lake. Hung from the ceiling were fly strips, where tiny creatures buzzed out their last moments of existence.
Red Bear had been completely charming. Or rather, everything he’d done and said certainly would have been charming, if it hadn’t also seemed a little too … overstated.
“Yes, Kevin has told me a lot about you,” he had said. His smile was like a theatre marquee. Those teeth. “He told me you were the perfect sister, and now I can see why.”