Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery (26 page)

Twenty

Sid and Nancy

Known locally as “the 69,” the highway to Sudbury does little to prepare you for the city itself. True, the farther north you go the more barren the terrain becomes as the Canadian Shield rises from the earth like a giantess spreading her apron to shelter a multitude of stunted children, the towns and cities marginalized and tethered on the periphery of the land. Offering boreal forests in the south and tundra to the north, the Shield is better known for its abundant mineral deposits and the mining communities that have exploited them for more than a century.

The landscape had changed greatly since Dan’s time. Much of the change was positive in ecological terms, undoing years of bad. The International Nickel Company’s much-vaunted Superstack, a 1,247-foot, concrete chimney, had been built not long after Dan was born, as if to commemorate his arrival. The poisons and pollutants that once blanketed the town were now sent spinning into the atmosphere at an altitude high enough to cut Sudbury’s pollution by more than ninety percent. His aunt recalled days when she’d had a raw throat all summer long from the sulphur emissions, conjuring images of ash films that blackened the snow outside her basement apartment in winter.

For miles around, forests had strangled on the noxious by-products of mining, the conifers turning rust-red as their needles dropped and the plants slowly died. The region’s pink-grey granite turned black with soot and the vegetation crawled farther and farther into the bush while lakes filled with acid and the fish population shrank and died. With the coming of the Superstack that suddenly stopped, as urban centres to the south began to report mysterious lines of yellow haze scrawling across the sky. Even Inco’s reinvented Tower of Babel couldn’t whitewash the filthy scud away forever. It had to come down somewhere.

To a child, Sudbury had seemed an intricate playground of things gone wonderfully awry: houses jutting from mountainsides, car-sized boulders in basements with washing machines and furnaces tucked around these incongruences. Buildings pitched and tilted to the sway of winding streets, as though the Crooked Man who’d built a Crooked House had returned with a vengeance to construct an entire derelict, lopsided town crowned by the searing gold spill of slag dumps, a magisterial ring of fire poured down nightly on the Earth.

Local legend saw the town nested in the crater of an extinct volcano, just waiting for the return of the fiery forces to extinguish it again. Geologists speculated it was the site of a giant meteor crash that gave the area its vast iron and nickel ore deposits. Years of annual spring floods led some to conjecture that the downtown was in actuality a giant swamp, as water rose over the streets with their smattering of English and French names that mingled New and Old World history: LaSalle, Elgin, Wellington, and the generic but obligatory catch-alls of King and Queen. Who the hell Frood was, no one seemed to know or care. At times the floods were so severe they seemed to be mocking the city planners until they put their heads together in the mid-sixties and devised a drainage system that dealt with the problem once and for all.

Despite its problems, Sudbury affected a sense of homegrown achievement. Schoolchildren recited proudly how prior to the first Apollo moon launch the flight crew trained in the terrain around the city because it resembled the lunar landscape closely enough to launch an astronaut’s career in earnest.

But if Sudbury was the moon by proxy, then the Flourmill District was the dark side of that moon, an industrial, monochromatic soot-on-soot neighbourhood of the type that sprawled throughout England in Victorian times, finally slouching across the ocean to end up reborn as a living museum exiled in northern Ontario ever after. It made the gritty black-and-white misery of other industrial centres seem like a dove’s cry.

Dan pictured the cold-water flat without a bathtub where for years he’d washed in a sink with a tap that never entirely turned off, and whose drips left a turquoise stain on the ceramic basin, just a few streets over from the colossal concrete towers that sat like a giant six-pack of dynamite behind his home. The nearest of the six bore an irregular hole the size of a small child just a few feet above the ground. Lore had it the flourmill had once been set for destruction. The hole, it was said, offered testimony to the fact that even explosives had failed to topple it. Children’s fancy, of course. More likely the dimple had been caused by an errant bulldozer that limped off afterwards with a damaged shovel, having learned to pick on something closer to its own size. As a child, you never admitted you came from the Flourmill District. Not only was it the wrong side of the tracks, it had seemed the worst place to come from in the entire country.

Dan passed a tavern he hadn’t thought of in years, a shallow trough where he’d been sent more than once in search of his father. “Get your father home for supper,” his Aunt Marge instructed in her chirpy voice, though Dan knew supper would be long put away by the time he returned, with or without his father. Dan never had a problem getting into Sudbury’s bars. The bartenders, if they guessed his age, simply turned a blind eye. Or perhaps they knew him for Stuart Sharp’s son. More than one son or daughter had shown up to fetch their parents over the years. Many returned for a longer stay once they came of age. More likely, they assumed Dan was as old as his dark looks proclaimed, which was significantly older than his actual years.

Inside, he knew, was the latest generation of miners, the hard-working men who earned their living pulling precious metal out of the bowels of the Earth, a whole under-class who spent their hours toiling in darkness, not seeing the sun for weeks at a time, who woke one day wondering where their lives had gone and how they’d managed to miss out on them. Meanwhile, their children had grown up without them, their wives had become bored and discontented, and no one could tell them what it had all been for. Until his death, Dan’s father had been one of these men, his personality stuck on edgy, his face so expressionless it had probably not exercised its muscles in years. Permanent immobility was written all over it.

He found the house on the hill at the top of Bloor Street, the same flowered curtains in the windows as when he was a child. Probably they weren’t the same, but no doubt his aunt had replaced the originals with curtains of the same style and colour. He sometimes wondered if growing up surrounded by rock had convinced her that all things were more or less permanent, and that efforts should be taken to preserve them just as they were.

He stepped down the crumbling concrete steps and stopped for a moment where his four-year-old self had heard one of the neighbours say, “She’s gone, poor thing.” The woman had looked at him with such a pitiful gaze that it etched itself onto his heart forever. His mom was gone again, that much he understood. Where she’d gone or when she’d return, no one could say. Except that time she hadn’t come back.

Leyla was waiting at the door with open arms and a ready smile. He wanted to say something like, “You haven’t changed a bit,” but it was such an obvious lie it would only have caused embarrassment. Pretty as a teenager, her looks had been fleeting, like her youth. Her skin sagged, her pallor the colour of oatmeal. She hadn’t gotten stout, but her once impressive breasts were, he gathered, more of a hindrance now than an enticement. She seemed to have wrapped them in an old sweater to keep them from getting in the way. The one thing that hadn’t changed was the glint of joy in her eyes. Dan gave her a peck on the cheek and squeezed her in his arms. She felt tiny.

“Mom’s been so excited knowing you were coming,” she said, in a way that told him his absence the past few years had been more marked than he cared to believe. “How’s Ked?” she asked.

“He’s good. He’s really tall now. Almost as tall as me.”

“They grow so fast you can’t keep up with them. Geez, eh? It’s funny. Mine are nearly grown too. I hardly see them any more.”

She still talked like a high school majorette. Dan recalled her fondness for mohair sweaters, pleated skirts, and hair barrettes.

She put a hand on his shoulder and nodded to the bedroom door. “Go on in, Danny. She’s been waiting for ya.”

Gloom met his eyes, a half-drawn shade simply masking the fact that the light was permanently obscured by the house next door. The wallpaper was Sedona Rose on Pickle Green, some daft artist’s rendering of happiness and cheer. Paper daisies in a snow-white vase sat atop a dresser. The room smelled of disinfectant covered with something homely. If he were to die of a wasting disease, he knew, he could do worse than come back here to be tended to by Leyla. Everything had been tidied up and put away, the room almost too clean to admit to any suffering. He imagined the dull days winding ahead for his aunt, but with a fixed value attached to their number.

On the mantle ranged the usual collection of cards:
Get Well Soon, Heard You Needed Some Cheering,
and
Hope You’re Feeling Better
— his own hadn’t reached them yet. All with the usual compulsory euphemisms that said everything but the truth:
Goodbye For All Time
or
Prepare To Meet Your Maker
. From behind one card peeked the corner of a photograph: himself as a dirty-faced kid of three or four, with a grin to break your heart. What had happened to that boy? Dan wondered.

His eyes adjusted. His aunt lay on the far side of the bed, as if avoiding the light. Flannel rose in soft swells around her sleeping head. A hearing aid curled around one ear like a pink foetus, her hair Marcel-waved into tiny seashells. As a boy he’d watched, fascinated, as she egg-whited the tips of curls and stuck them to her cheeks. Imagining herself glamorous, no doubt. Maybe she’d fancied herself a movie star: Joan Fontaine or Lana Turner. And why not? Life held few enough rewards for someone like her.

At one point she’d briefly turned Jehovah’s Witness, driven for comfort by a husband’s beatings and a brother’s drinking. Eventually the husband vanished, though Leyla said for years afterwards her mother would turn a hopeful ear to the door if there were footsteps outside at night, still praying for his return. It never came. No one knew if he were still alive or, if dead, where he’d been buried. The consensus was that he’d come to a bad end somewhere and that it had been well deserved, whatever it was. Dan recalled her sweaters that always smelled of dampness. She would wait till his dad had gone to work and then start in on him, clutching him to her chest and making him promise he would never drink, smoke, or swear. Devil’s work. His father did all three, Dan knew. He used to wonder if she’d asked him to make the same promise. He hadn’t listened, if she had. But even religion hadn’t lasted forever, like most things in her life.

He remembered her as a woman who spent much of her time planning diets of one sort or another: the grapefruit-only diet, the no-bread diet, the sugar-free diet, and various others with no particular name. All of them defined by a lack. She’d never been a great cook, but she always made sure there was food on the table for Dan and Leyla. Her specialty was peas in gravy on white bread, with greasy ground beef mixed in. Her version of a balanced meal, no doubt. Some days there might be mashed potatoes instead of the sliced bread with its tan leathery borders. Afterwards, orange fat lay congealed at the bottom of the electric frying pan — her one frivolity — until its rounded corners slid under the iridescent soap bubbles in the sink. Most of her days were spent in silence, which was just as well because when she spoke people looked in fright at the sound of her voice, like a whoopee cushion on Prozac. But more than anything, he remembered her as a woman who had taken in another woman’s child to raise as her own.

Someone — probably Leyla — had propped a chair in the corner. He dragged it close and sat next to her. Here she was, his aunt who had always been kind, always accepting. His aunt, who had spent thirty years selling tickets at the movie theatre before retiring on a government pension. Goodbye and thanks for a job well done. When she was younger she’d dreamed of reinventing herself by opening the classifieds to see what fascinating job she could apply for that might just blow her horizons wide open and make all her dreams come true. What’ll it be next: waitress at Kresge’s Red Grill or counter help at Herb’s Bowl-a-Rama? Another time it was a day cashier at Woolworth’s followed by a stint as stock clerk at Zeller’s. The options were stupefying. Maybe she thought they’d go on forever, but one day they ran out and she ended up where she began, dying of emphysema, her life and choices behind her forever.

Dan leaned over the bed, taking care not to bump the fat green cylinder that pumped itself out via the long thin tube attached over her head and feeding into her nostrils. Her skin was wrinkled and translucent, as if, oxygen-starved, her body had subsisted on a diet of light. Her hands were swollen like pudgy starfish.

Here, then, was the salt of the earth. It didn’t get any better or purer.

Eyelids flickered open, eyes cornflower blue. “Hello, Danny,” she said, as though she’d seen him only a short while before.

“Hello, Auntie.”

“My goodness, you look awfully good. Handsome as ever. It’s so nice to see you home again.”

The sentence must have exceeded her lung capacity, because Dan heard the intake of breath, the sharp rasp behind the words.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. “Is Leyla doing a good job of looking after you?”

She spoke a little slower, pacing herself. “Oh, don’t you worry — she’s doing a good job. You know what she’s like.” She took a long pull on her oxygen.

There was a peaceful sound to her voice. Or maybe it was resignation — he’d never known her to be a fighter. She would just as easily go along with whatever Death had in store for her as a request for supper to be made for visitors. Compliance — her greatest virtue — was one and the same with her.

They spoke for ten minutes before Dan felt her tiring. She wouldn’t let him go, hanging onto him as long as she could. “I’ll come back again tomorrow,” he promised.