“You know, you don’t have to take his shit, Maude. It’s a free country. You can walk away anytime you feel like it.”
“Simple as that, Mr. Webster? And what planet do you come from? I want to get away from this shithole more than anything else, but I also want to stay alive. I’m stuck here with a maniac who owns nothing but me. He won’t ever let me go.” She was pulling on her jeans.
“If you want, I can get you off the island. Get you to Montreal.”
“I left once, two years ago.” She put on her bra and stood up. “I got a job waiting tables. Not much, but it was all I needed. God knows how he found me, but he showed up when I finished my shift. He pulled me into his pickup. Literally picked me up and put me in the truck. We drove back here, and he beat me hard for three weeks. Who came to my rescue? Nobody. Not my fucking family, not the social services, not the police. I gave up. It’s easier to be nice than to be beaten.”
She let her words hang in the air, pulled her hair back from her face, and leaned over and kissed me, her tongue snaking deep into my mouth. Then she pulled back and kissed me on my forehead. “I have to get going before that fucker wakes up. Maybe we can do this again sometime.”
She pulled on her T-shirt and left.
I lay there, anger beating in my chest. I thought I had lost that anger long ago.
Once, when I was a teenager, I met my dad on his drunken walk home. Every night he drank at the Bar Saint-Vincent on Ontario Street before staggering home through the alley. He was always angry, drunk or sober, but he was violent when he was drunk. He had stopped hitting me when I grew big enough to fight back, but he never stopped beating Mum.
I remember waiting for him in an alleyway called Sansregret. I always thought that was funny. He didn’t see the baseball bat swing out from behind the dumpster and into his face; he didn’t feel the dozen or so home runs I smashed into his disintegrating skull. Mum didn’t cry when she heard he’d been killed.
Four months after Dad blocked the swings with his face, Mum had another shithead living in our apartment. When her bruises became regular, I realized there was nothing I could do. I gave up on the emotional stuff.
When I whack someone, it’s business. I’m good at it, and you can’t be emotional. If you want to make a career out of it, you have to treat it as a business.
Maude didn’t come back. After a couple of days, I decided to pay a visit to the crap magnet. I knocked on the door. Eleven in the morning, and Ace was already hitting the booze.
“Just passing by,” I said.
He wasn’t so friendly this time. He told me that Maude had left him. She took the dog. He loaded his sob story with details — about his brother coming to help look for her, about the bus schedule he found in the house. Liars love details. They think the more details, the better the story. Honest people tell the facts, and don’t dress their stories up like whores.
Walking back to the cottage, I thought about Maude. Ace didn’t deserve her. She deserved some Henry Constant to take care of her, someone who wouldn’t punch her in the stomach or slap her face with flat fists. She didn’t deserve to leave without a goodbye.
It took me awhile, but I found the fresh earth covered with leaves and branches. I didn’t have a shovel, but just kicking the dirt a few inches down was enough to expose Hoagy’s back. Ace hadn’t even dug a grave deep enough for respect. Kicking up some more dirt, I uncovered her hand, the one with the purple flower ring. I moved her pathetic burial back into place, spread some more leaves and branches on top of it, and went back to the cottage.
It was none of my business. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen people turn up dead for no good reason. No point taking sides. There’s no mileage in supporting the dead.
I should have walked away. But maybe I had too much time on my hands.
I went back to visit Ace first thing the next morning. He came to the door looking like shit, in boxers and a mangy vest, his greasy hair sticking up in odd places. I told him I wanted to go to Montreal for booze and food, and asked to borrow his boat.
“Sure, no problem, man. Long as we share some of the booze.” He went back into his pigsty and returned with the keys.
Five hours later, I brought the boat keys back. I had a bag full of booze and a case of beer. His eyes lit up.
I let him outpace me — he didn’t notice. After two hours he was feeling it. He rigged up a radio outside using an orange extension cord that ran through the kitchen window. He tuned the radio to a country music station that broadcasted from Kahnawake. After three hours he started talking about Maude, the heartbreak and lonesome country songs fueling his imagination.
“I loved her, man, I really did. Sure, we used to fight, but she was the best thing I ever had. And taking my dog too? What kind of woman does that?”
“Hoagy was your dog?”
“Strictly speaking, she came with the dog. But I loved that dog, man.”
“I understand, buddy.”
I walked off into the trees to take a leak. When I came back, I leaned over Ace and said, “Isn’t it always the case? The ones you love are the ones who break your heart.” I had just heard something like that in a song on the radio — it seemed appropriate. Ace looked up at me like I’d said something profound, his mouth open in awe. That’s when I put all my weight into a punch I sent into his slack jaw. His head folded down onto his chest and he dropped the glass. He didn’t even look surprised.
When he woke up he was sitting in the kitchen, strips of duct tape holding him to the chair. I knew he was awake when his breathing changed, but he kept his eyes closed. I waited on the couch while he tried to figure things out. The place stank of stale beer, cigarettes, and dog piss. I had a shovel across my lap, its shiny silver blade still sporting its new label. When Ace finally decided to open his eyes, he looked at me but said nothing.
“I’ll be back in a bit, Ace.” I smiled at him and left.
I came back with Hoagy in my arms, and dropped him at Ace’s feet. Dirt and dried blood made the dog look like he was wearing a bad wig. Ace remained quiet, so I left again. I was back in thirty minutes carrying Maude over my shoulder. I sat her down in an armchair opposite him.
“Look who I found, Ace. Maude came back to see you.”
“Listen, I can explain.”
“Go ahead.”
“It was an accident. I didn’t kill her. She tripped and fell. I didn’t know what to do. Wasn’t any point calling an ambulance, she was dead. I knew they’d blame me.”
“How’d it happen?”
“We’d been drinking. Maude liked to drink. It was one of those freak accidents, you know, like on America’s Funniest Home Videos. But it wasn’t funny. She was walking past Hoagy and he jumped up like she’d stepped on his tail. She tripped and went flying.”
He was talking as though every word was a step toward escape; all he had to do was fill the room with words and he’d be okay.
“She hit her head on the corner of the stove. When she got up, she seemed fine. We went to bed, and she fell asleep right away. She’d had a lot to drink. Later, maybe three in the morning, she woke up and started vomiting. She was vomiting like crazy for about an hour, then she came back to bed and fell asleep. But in the morning she didn’t wake up.”
“Good story,” I said.
“Yeah, a horrible accident.”
I would have done the same thing in his situation: deny everything.
“I don’t believe you, Ace. I saw the bruises on Maude. She was scared of you. You used to beat her pretty good, didn’t you? What was it, recreational?”