Wildly out of character with the venerable old store, the addition was of radical design, cantilevered over the saltchuck, offering opportunities for the drunk and depressed to contemplate a watery end. In the meantime, it was business as usual in the enclosed porch, which for years had provided liquid relief to islanders. Practically every local had signed the petition in support of the lounge licence, all attesting to the owner’s fault-free history.
The five poker players at the far end of the porch seemed weary and worn, faces stubbled with old growth — all but Emily LeMay’s — and reeking of booze and sweaty effort.
“They been at it for four days and four nights.” Makepeace rang up Arthur’s few purchases, staples for the kitchen. “Some drop out, others join. Herman Schloss hasn’t slept for two nights running, only stops to piss and shit.” Schloss, a music impresario from Los Angeles — either retired or on the run — had recently bought twenty-three acres up by Sunrise Cove. He brushed long tangled hair from his glazed eyes, peeked at a down card, folded.
Makepeace brought out a grab bag of mail, uncollected for several days. “Your Geographic and Lawyer magazines, postcard from your grandson in Australia, he’s looking to graduate from high school with top honours, so you may want to wire him a little reward. This here fancy letter is from Simon Fraser University, they want to give you an honorary degree next year.”
Arthur picked it up. The flap was sealed, didn’t seem tampered with. “Abraham, I’m not making complaint about your reading my mail, that seems part of the local folkways, but please tell me how you know what’s inside this envelope.”
“You hold it up like this.” Toward the fluorescent lamp. “Half the stuff coming in here is junk mail, which, if you recall, you asked me to intercept.” He sounded peeved. “It’s a lot of extra work.”
“Well done. You’re absolutely right.”
“Overdue notice from the phone company. Maybe them two renegades up at your place aren’t taking care of business.” He reached under the counter. “Here’s a roll of posters they ordered. Bundle of mail for your good lady. Mostly friendly, a couple neutral, one hate letter.”
Arthur stuffed everything into his backpack with the groceries, but didn’t shoulder it yet, took a moment in the lounge with the several kibitzing locals. Oddly, they seemed more interested in watching the poker game than yakking about Bhashyistan’s war declaration. Maybe because it was beyond contemplation. How far Garibaldi Island seemed from the wearying world.
Arthur felt privileged to be in on the making of a rumour about Starkers Cove, so-called because of its summer use by local skinny-dippers. “It’s gonna be a nudist colony.” “Where’d you hear that?” “Look how they adopted its historic name. I saw them people at the bylaw meeting, they looked tanned all over.” Other vital news of the day: the Sproules’s ram sneaked into Mabel Grundy’s pen and seduced her heirloom ewes.
He shared a coffee with Al Noggins, Reverend Al, as everyone called him, the local Anglican priest, who was ruefully contemplating the poker players. “I’m here on assignment from Schloss’s wife. If I don’t get him out of that game, she’s going to shoot him. I can’t budge him, so she’s going to have to do that.”
The undercapitalized Hollywood impresario, it turned out, had lost four cords of winter wood to Ernie Priposki, his DVD collection to Emily LeMay, his twenty-foot cabin cruiser to Stoney, and two of his twenty-three acres to Cud Brown.
“Duck. Here she comes.”
Mookie was her name, minor fame as a 1980s B-movie starlet, still attractive but red-faced now with anger. Ignoring Reverend Al, striding directly up to Schloss, pulling him by his pigtail. “Goddamnit, Herm, you’re coming home right now.”
“Last hand, baby.”
“You said that at eleven o’clock last night.”
“Killer hand, babe.”
If it was a bluff, it didn’t work. Local cultural icon Cud Brown, a scrofulous poet who subsisted on grants and readings and part-time jobs, raised him back the two acres of land he’d won. Everyone else threw in their hands, stared solemnly at Schloss, who frantically scribbled something on a slip of paper.
“I thought we agreed, man,” said Cud. “No more IOUs.”
Reverend Al bent to Arthur’s ear. “Cud wants his Land Rover. Herman dotes on that car.”
Mookie jerked his pigtail again. “Let’s fucking get out of here while you’ve got your skin.”
“Two nights with her,” Schloss blurted.
“With who?” Cud asked.
“Mookie. A weekend.”
Arthur couldn’t read anything in her face, not even astonishment. Lost in the State of Catatonia.
“Don’t blame me if she decides to stay for a week.” Cud laid down his hand. “Full house, aces on top.”
Schloss laid down four nines and a joker. “We did it, baby!”
Mookie toppled him backwards over his chair, and he somehow managed to get stuck in the rungs. As he flailed she kicked him in the ribs while howling curses. Reverend Al finally pulled her away, while others scrambled to pick up cards, chips, and IOUs that had spilled to the floor.
After several minutes, peace was restored, and after a long debate about apportioning the spoils the game resumed, the players despondent over losing the mark. Herman Schloss was last seen fleeing by foot from his presumptive life partner.
Arthur’s appetite for local colour satisfied — Margaret would delight in his dramatic retelling — he was about to hoist his backpack when he heard a voice behind him, chillingly recognizable. “I heard there was a game.”
He turned to look upon smiling Ray DiPalma — the crisp new jeans and Stetson defined him as a tenderfoot from the city. Arthur edged away, unsettled, confused. Should this man be in a ward for the emotionally disturbed? Why was he leeching onto Arthur?
But DiPalma paid him no heed. He was answering a come-hither call from the poker players, another city slicker to be skinned.
Two hours later, in the shank of the warm and misty afternoon, still grumbling about DiPalma’s intrusion on his sanctuary, Arthur was tossing bales into his hay wagon, the last of the fall crop from the northeast pasture. Too damp for animal feed after recent rains, but fine for mulching the garden.
A white compact slowed on Potters Road and disappeared behind a dense thicket of blackberries that served as a natural fence. Seconds later, as Arthur was about to mount his tractor, he heard the frantic squeal of spinning tires, and he sighed and clomped off to help. He could make out the white car, glimpses of it, through the thick tangle of leaves and thorny vines.
Even the sorriest fool wouldn’t park among blackberries, but somehow the incident made sense when it was confirmed for him, unsurprisingly, that the driver was Ray DiPalma — who was now struggling through the heavy growth, catching his new country clothes on the barbed vines, gingerly prying them apart, ducking, crawling.
Arthur ducked too, so he could see him, five feet away, his wire-rims hanging from his nose, a bloody scratch on his cheek, a lesser one on his forehead, others on his unprotected hands.
“Arthur, just the man I want to see. You alone?”
“Yes. Stay there, I’ll cut you out.” The preferred alternative being to attach a chain to his leg and pull him out with the tractor. He retrieved long-handled clippers from the toolkit behind the tractor seat, and on returning found DiPalma squatting, lighting a cigarette.
“Saw you pitching hay, needed a place to park where I wouldn’t be seen. What a tinpot car, no traction, I kind of slid in there. You look peeved, Arthur, I don’t blame you, but I had to see you about Zachary Flett — they have him down as some kind of ringleader.”