The Snow Falcon (20 page)

“Is there something I can do for you, Carl?” Michael said. “Because if there isn’t, I’ve got things to do.”

Carl’s tone altered, as if he was losing patience. “Okay, Michael, if that’s how you want it. I need to talk to you about the store.”

“I’m listening.”

“This isn’t something I want to discuss over the phone. I thought you might want to drop into the office next time you’re in town.”

“I don’t get into town very often. I think it works better for everyone that way, don’t you?” Michael could hear Carl on the other end of the line, absorbing his remark.

“I heard you didn’t have much luck finding a job.”

“It seems I’m not qualified for any of the vacancies around here,” Michael said, not attempting to disguise his sarcasm.

“I tried to warn you.”

“You did,” Michael agreed. “So, what is it about the store you wanted to talk to me about?”

“I could still get you a good price for it. I think you should reconsider your position.”

Michael started to say he wasn’t interested, but then he asked himself why he was hanging on to the place. It was just sitting there empty, costing him money in taxes, and he hadn’t even been near it since he’d arrived.

Sensing his hesitation, Carl became friendly, cajoling. “Look, why don’t you just come in and talk about it. What harm could it do?”

Michael thought about the money. “Okay,” he said reluctantly, “but not in your office. Meet me at the store.” The words stuck in his throat.

“Why there? My office would be more comfortable.”

“I just feel like taking a look, if I’m going to think about selling. Call it nostalgia.” Seconds passed in silence.

“About two-thirty?” Carl said at last.

“See you then.” Michael hung up and went outside to the porch. Selling the store made good sense, he told himself. It would give him breathing space. It would also, he realized, loosen his attachment to Little River, which he guessed was at least part of Carl’s motive.

HE WENT OVER to where Cully stood on the perch he’d rigged for her in front of the house, and held out his fist with a piece of meat held between finger and thumb. She turned toward him as he approached, and when she saw the meat, she flicked open her wings and hopped three feet to the glove. After she’d eaten, he produced the hood. When she saw it, she snaked her head left and right to avoid it. He’d discovered this was not unusual: Sometimes she accepted it, other times she acted as if she’d never seen it before. Finally he managed to slip it over her head and tighten the draw thongs at the back; then he untied her leash and took her to the car, where he set her on her perch in the back. Her movements now were accompanied by the distinctive, oddly flat note of the bell that was attached to one of her legs. It was small, about the size of a marble, and made of an alloy that produced a tone he could clearly hear from the far side of the clearing. It was something else Frank had given him, and its purpose was to help locate a lost bird—if the unthinkable should happen.

Michael drove into town and parked outside the store his father had run for forty-five years. There were few people about on the street, and nobody saw him take Cully inside. The only light came from the open door. The store was cold, the air slightly damp. It felt like walking into a tomb. He tried the light switches before realizing the power wasn’t connected; then he put Cully on top of a wooden fixture that would serve as a perch and ripped down the black paper covering the windows. Daylight filtered through the streaked glass, and he stood amid the dust he’d raised, assailed for a moment by a feeling of sadness at the neglect he saw.

Once he’d worked here after school and on Saturdays, when in the afternoons he had the place to himself: Inexplicably, his father would go to Williams Lake to visit suppliers when he could simply have

133

phoned with his order. Michael hadn’t questioned it much back then. It was all part of the mysterious routine of his dad’s life: like the way he’d spend every Thursday evening doing the books at the store and wouldn’t come home until late, smelling of booze, or the way when he was at home he’d stay much of the time shut up in his study, building intricately detailed models of sailing schooners, inspired by plates from the leather-bound books on the shelves of his bookcase. He always had a bottle of bourbon on the table beside him, and he sipped from a never empty glass. The books were still in the house, though oddly, Michael thought, not the models. He wondered what had happened to them.

The store had wooden fixtures that once ran in aisles parallel to the door, and the counter ran along the back wall. Patches of damp showed in the walls near the ceiling, and some of the floorboards were obviously rotten. Here and there, splintered holes showed where the fixtures had been carelessly moved. They lay in a haphazard arrangement, like pieces of a puzzle waiting for somebody to put them back together again. It seemed that long ago somebody had moved through the place without care or respect; Michael supposed that this was when the stock had been taken out by the suppliers, who’d bought it back at bargain prices.

A knock at the window startled him, and he went to the door to let Carl Jeffrey in. His coat buttoned to the neck, Carl stood napping his arms around.

“Jesus, it’s freezing in here. Does that work?” Carl pointed to an old heater.

“No power,” Michael said.

“We could’ve done this at my office,” Carl grumbled, looking around.

Michael thought that if he was going to sell the place, he ought to do it somewhere he could feel the ghost of his father’s presence. He associated the house largely with his mother, but the store had been his dad’s.

“Funny being in here again,” Carl commented. “Your old man spent a lot of time in this place. Something’s missing, though. I remember coming in here when I was a kid. There was a smell I remember. Sort of sharp.”

“Linseed oil,” Michael said, recalling it with sudden vividness. “He

used to buy it in drums and bottle it himself. He kept it out back, but the smell was ingrained.”

For a few moments they were both thinking about the past.

“You spent a lot of time in here, didn’t you?” Carl said. “Didn’t you work here after school?”

“Yes, I did,”

“Did you get on with him? Your dad, I mean?”

There was a genuine curiosity in Carl’s tone. Michael supposed people wondered why he hadn’t come back for his dad’s funeral, why he’d never sold the house or the store, why he’d never returned after his mother’s death. In view of the fact that he’d come back now, he guessed a lot of things didn’t seem to add up.

“Not really,” Michael admitted, unsure why he was telling this to Carl. Partly, he was just talking to himself. “I never wanted to work in here. I hated every minute of it.”

“Yeah? It’s funny, I used to help out my old man around the office after school. He always wanted me to be a lawyer, like him. He was always giving me books to read, law books.”

There was some note of resignation in Carl’s tone. Michael wondered suddenly what secret hopes and ambitions lay buried in Carl that would now never see the light of day. It surprised him for some reason that Carl had ever harbored ideas about becoming anything but the town lawyer, just the way his dad had wanted.

“I guess your old man wanted you to take over the store back then too?” Carl said.

“No, he never mentioned anything like that.” When Michael thought about it, he only ever remembered his dad encouraging him to get an education. He didn’t think he’d ever wanted him to follow in his footsteps.

Carl was hunched in his coat, hands thrust into his pockets. “I thought about going to art college once,” he said, and uttered a quick self-deprecatory laugh. He looked thoughtful. “I probably would have ended up designing labels for canned food or something, though. Things probably worked out for the best.” He looked up as if he expected Michael to be uninterested, but the fact was, Michael found himself surprised. It seemed as if there was more to Carl than what he’d become.

“Were you any good?”

Carl looked as if he thought he was being mocked; deciding he

TH

wasn’t, he shrugged. “I used to be, I think. Who knows? I guess there would have been plenty of kids at college who’d have been a lot better.”

“Maybe not.” Michael wondered about Carl’s dad, what he’d said to give his son such a low opinion of his talent. “It’s never too late,” he offered, though he knew that for most people at this point in life, it was.

“Yeah,” Carl said. “You know, when we were kids, I used to think we had some things in common.”

“What sort of things?”

“I guess that sounds funny, huh?” Carl said with a trace of bitterness. “You didn’t hang out much with the other kids.”

Michael could see where this was going. Carl had been ostracized a little, the way fat kids often are, especially fat smug kids whose father was the town lawyer who nobody much liked. Carl apparently thought that made them similar, but Michael knew it didn’t. His habit of keeping to himself was his own choice.

Carl’s eye flicked to the window as somebody went by, an old man who looked curiously in the long-covered windows. Whatever mood had formed seemed to vanish, as if Carl had abruptly remembered where he was. “So, listen, let’s talk about this place.”

“Let’s have a look upstairs first,” Michael said, all of a sudden wanting to delay the moment.

Cully shifted position, and her bell made its curious flat note. Carl saw her sitting in the gloom and stepped back.

“Jesus, what the hell is that?”

Michael suppressed a smile. Quickly glimpsed, the bird’s pale form was startling, more so given the strange silhouette of the hood. “She’s a falcon.”

Carl peered at her but made no move to get any closer. “What do you do with her?”

“I don’t do anything with her,” Michael said, annoyed for some reason. Carl was jumpy, a soft man wearing glasses and a badly fitting suit whom Michael didn’t really like. Whatever empathy Michael might feel for the wounds Carl nursed inside himself, the man had chosen his path. Michael turned away and went to the door that led to the back stairs. Carl followed him, and they poked around the empty rooms on the floors above. Once, the rooms had been used for storage. Some contained empty boxes and faded newspapers now, but

1)6

u a

that was all. The evidence of the passing years was everywhere. It was in the badly fitting doors that sagged on their hinges, in the wallpaper faded and peeling in one of the rooms, in the floor rotted and dangerous in another.

Carl tagged along, not saying much, and when they got downstairs again, he blew his nose to expel the dust that had got into his sinuses.

“This place is falling apart,” he asserted.

In truth, Michael thought, it wasn’t as bad as that, but he let it go. All it needed was a little money and time spent on it. The walls were sound, and so was the roof. He waited for Carl to go on, giving him no encouragement.

“Are you still planning on staying in town?” Carl asked when he’d finished blowing his nose.

“I told you before, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“But if you had money…”

Michael looked around at the store. “Who is it wants to buy this place, anyway?”

“His name’s Ron Taylor. He’s the same guy that made you an offer before.” Carl put down a folder he’d been carrying around and flicked through some papers. “He’s offering you seventy-eight thousand,” Carl said.

“For the store?”

“That’s right.”

It was about the same as the figure previously offered, with the house taken out of the equation. At some point since he’d walked through the door, however, Michael had decided he wasn’t going to sell. Even while he was standing there, he could see his father’s ghost working behind the counter. He was the way Michael always thought of him, in his middle fifties, gray-haired and thin, quietly unpacking a delivery of hand tools that had just arrived, checking each item against the packing slip with a pencil he usually kept behind his ear.

He’d never got on with his dad. Though they’d worked in this store together for an hour every day, they’d barely exchanged a word beyond his father’s usual questions and Michael’s terse answers. How was his day? (Fine.) What did he do? (Nothing.) His breath always had the lingering sourness of the couple of beers he had every lunchtime. His nose and cheeks were shot through with little red veins like spiderwebs; his eyes had an odd light. Michael never had to work

1)7

very hard; in fact, he hadn’t really had to work at all if he didn’t want to. His dad gave him things to do and thanked him if he did them well, but if he didn’t, he was never reprimanded. Once he’d tried to say he didn’t want to work there anymore after school. It had been his mother’s idea in the first place, another way of trying to “keep the peace,” as she’d put it, though by then he’d started to understand that his mother had always used such persuasions as a way of meeting her own deluded ends. By the time he was in his teens, he was a little embarrassed and repelled by her. He could never forget the time she’d driven into town and pulled up outside the doctor’s office with blood streaming from wounds in her wrists. She’d been disheveled and wild-eyed, her makeup streaked from crying so much. He’d been young then, maybe eight years old, sitting in the passenger seat of the car. His mother told the doctor she’d cut herself in an accident, but Michael knew that wasn’t true, that she’d done it herself in a rage when his dad had called to say he’d be home late. The cuts, it had turned out, were superficial, but they’d waited until his dad arrived to take them home, talking quietly in the corner first with the doctor. Michael thought it was around then that his mother first started spending a lot of time in her nightgown, often not getting out of her bed until noon. She was always having headaches, taking this pill or that for some imagined condition.

His dad had been disappointed that Michael didn’t want to work in the store. “I’d really like it if you did,” he’d said quietly, but that was all. No other pressure. No insisting or shouting. He’d never shouted. And for some reason, Michael had given in.