“What does Cathy say?”
Terry shrugged.
“Jesus,” Wiggy said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. Wiggy was silent for several moments before he continued. “This puts me in a difficult position, man. I like Johnny. He’s got that cool ’57 Chev. We went up to Wasaga Beach last summer and I’m telling you, it’s a real babe magnet. Did I tell you about those chicks from the Saulte?
“You told me,” Terry sighed.
Wiggy turned and faced Terry. “We’re buds, man, but Johnny has the Chev and you’ve got to have wheels to get the chicks.” Wiggy continued on for several minutes until he noticed that Terry was glaring at him.
“What?” Wiggy cried.
“You ever heard of loyalty, Wiggy?”
Wiggy nodded. “But chicks come first, right? We agreed to that.”
“Johnny ain’t a chick.”
“But he’s my supply line. He’s like a warehouse for chicks. No explaining it. Johnny and I were talking about going to California. He says the chicks down there are all tanned, and blonde, and beautiful, and they drop their panties if you wink.”
Terry looked at Wiggy. “Johnny is the enemy. He’s trying to steal my girl.” Terry sighed. “Why do I bother with you?” Terry put his arm around Terry’s shoulder. ’Cause we’re buds.” Dacchau
Sam Kelly rapped on the front door several times. He was about to give up when the door opened. Joe Mackenzie wiped the wisps of gray hair that dangled over his eyes back across his bald head. He rubbed his eyes and let the police officer in. A moment later they were in the kitchen. Joe told the detective to take a seat. As Joe prepared some coffee, Sam glanced at the wall papered with clippings, now yellowed and frayed. One article caught his attention. It was about Dacchau, the former German concentration camp. It had been cleaned up to provide temporary housing for displaced persons. How could anyone have lived there? What had the residents told their children?
“Unbelievable, eh?” Joe said, recognizing the article that Sam was reading. Joe set a cup of hot coffee in front of Sam. “I hope you like your coffee black. Out of milk and sugar. Working the afternoon shift and I just didn’t get around to getting in groceries.” Sam nodded. “Black is fine. People actually lived there voluntarily?” Joe nodded. “After the war there were a lot of refugees-Poles, Russi-ans, Germans. There was no other housing. I guess you put up with a lot of things when you’re desperate. Must have been terrible for the kids.
Even if you don’t believe in ghosts the kids probably overheard stories.
You know how kids talk among themselves.”
The detective sipped his coffee. It was too hot. He put it to one side.
“Must be difficult to forget something like that,” he said.
“You know what was the worse thing the Nazis did,” Joe continued,
“next to exterminating all those people? They tried to erase their existence from history, as if all those people had never truly been. I read somewhere that Hitler got his idea for wiping out the Jews, the Gypsies, and the Slavs from the history of the wild West in America. Open up Eastern Europe as a frontier for the Germanic people by making the people there disappear. Isn’t that what we did to the Indian? Imagine Hitler in a cowboy hat and lasso and all those brown shirts on horses singing country and western songs. Sometimes I think there’s another history written in invisible ink that no one ever reads. But you didn’t come here this morning for a history lesson.”
“I came by yesterday afternoon, but there was no one home.” 56
“I was at work,” Joe replied, then corrected himself. “No, I was here.
Must have been asleep. That’s what getting old is all about. You forget things. Faces, places, but especially names. Parts of your life just disappear on you. I should have taken more pictures.” The detective leaned over the table and sipped his coffee again. It was drinkable this time.
Joe continued. “Imagine all the photographs that have been taken since the camera was invented. Billions of ’em. Where are they? Forgotten in drawers. Buried in dumps. Disappeared. If you had all those photographs, I’ll bet you could wallpaper the planet.” The detective nodded. “Went ahead without you, Joe. I hope that was okay.”
Joe took a swallow of his coffee. The heat didn’t seem to bother him.
“I got a special measuring tape from the Ministry of Natural Re-sources,” the detective continued. “They use it to measure old wells just like yours. Joe, I let it all out. Two thousand feet. And still it hadn’t reached the bottom of your well.”
Joe took another swallow. He shook his head.
“Ask me if I’m surprised.”
The detective leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been thinking that maybe we could lower a video camera down and see what’s there.”
“Won’t it be too dark?”
“Ya, I thought of that. Maybe we could strap a flashlight to it. I’ve been doing a little research. There’s a hole like yours in Sweden. That’s what they did. Lowered a camera.”
“What did they see?”
“Not much. But when they reached what they figured must have been the bottom, they saw a tunnel leading off in another direction. And they saw what they figured was the remains of animals that must have fallen down there. They went down almost twenty-four hundred feet.” Joe was silent for several minutes. He sipped at his coffee, then took a pouch of tobacco and filled a pipe that he retrieved from his back pocket.
The officer waited in silence. He knew that Joe needed a few minutes to mull over the problem. He read another clipping on the wall. The United States had defeated Britain in a World Cup championship match played in Rio de Janeiro. In another article he read about the rise of suicides after World War II. It had been especially noted that the rise was chiefly among young men who had returned from active military service.
“The first problem I see,” Joe began, “is weight.” 57
“The camera is fairly light,” Sam responded. “I figure we can use some of that test line that fishermen use to catch marlin.”
“But once you get that far down,” Joe went on, “most of your weight is the line itself. You think there might be something down there?”
“We know your neighbors have been dumping garbage,” Sam responded. “Who knows what else they dropped. If we can find something suspicious then we can get some authorization to spend more money on investigating the hole.”
“June used to say she could hear the screams of hell coming up from the hole. Of course she was half in the tank most of the time. You think that someone might have fallen down there?”
The detective shrugged his shoulders as he swallowed a mouth of coffee.
“Maybe,” he replied.
Joe relit his pipe that had gone out.
“I have to find out, Joe,” the detective said.
“Like an itch you have to scratch,” Joe responded with a laugh.
The detective nodded.
“Your wife drank a lot?” the detective asked.
“Like a fish. My fault,” Joe said, shaking his head. “She was young and lonely. And I wasn’t much company. Foolish of me to marry her, but I couldn’t keep my hands off her. I’ve never been a man who needed it much but something about June brought it out. In the beginning, I was as randy as a jackrabbit. If only she hadn’t been so stupid. Dumb as a doorknob.”
The detective smiled. “She was in love with you?” Joe shrugged. “She never said she was, never said she wasn’t. Didn’t seem to matter.”
Shot Glass
Jack tilted the glass slightly to one side as he eased the draft beer down its throat. Just before the beer reached the top he released the throttle on the keg he was drawing from, then placed the glass of beer on the table.
The foam rose above the lip and briefly threatened to spill over the top before it finally settled down to a perfect head.
“So you were saying, Sam?” Jack smiled.
The detective picked up his beer and sucked softly on its head, the foam sticking to his thick black moustache.
“Well, I haven’t found out much. I checked with the hospital records at Lakeshore and Etobicoke, and I checked our records. You said the guy talked to a cop, but I asked around. Nothing. No one knows a thing about a man dying out front.”