“Keep your money,” Dion said. “I don’t care.”
“No, hey —”
“I said forget it.”
“Then I’ll buy you a goddamn drink, how’s that?”
“Fine.”
Rourke bought a round and raised a toast. Then he sulked. Then he said, “Totally wrong place to throw something you love, the river.”
“Seemed kind of poetic to me.”
Rourke shook his head with conviction. “People say the river’s beautiful, and it is, like a woman. But it’s also a mean, dark bitch. Just try to step into it, even in midsummer. It’ll freeze your nuts off then rip you to pieces. No, you want a good send-off, go upward. There’s so much paradise around here to inter your loved ones, if you know where to look. You want somewhere open to the skies. The Gates of Heaven, that’s where my ashes are going when my time comes.”
On Dion’s good days, he caught glimpses of paradise here in the north, but mostly he found it cold, badly lit, and monotonous. His own ashes, he had hoped, would sail out from the balcony of his North Vancouver high rise and join the city smog, and maybe a few molecules of him would drift farther out and be taken away by the ocean. But that wasn’t going to happen. Even unemployed, he didn’t have the heart to return to the Lower Mainland. He’d stay in the north, get some shitty job, end up in a no-name urn, buried in a grotty little graveyard in Smithers. “Gates of Heaven,” he said. “What’s that?”
“It’s self-explanatory is what it is,” Rourke said shortly, and Dion didn’t care to pursue it. To take the small talk in a less tedious direction, he asked how come Evangeline hadn’t come out barhopping with him.
Rourke swiped the air dismissively. “Evie’s not the catch you seem to think, bro. She’s a Calgarian whore, and I’ve told her to pack her bags, get the next bus back to Cowtown.”
“That’s a bad idea. Whatever kind of catch she is, she’s probably your last.”
Rourke was pleased, maybe because he too wanted off the topic of failure and death. Or maybe because fielding insults was more up his alley. “Fuck you too.”
“So you picked her up in Calgary?”
“God, no. She was hitching through to Rupert to visit an aunt, so she says, and I gave her a lift, and she asked if I could spare a few bucks while I was at it, and I said ‘Not for nothing, my dear.’ So she came along to my trailer, and lo and behold, has been here ever since. But like I say, she’s leaving. The thrill is gone. Brains of a chickadee, but she eats like a horse. And you’d think she’d pick up a broom once in a while and give the place a dust. No, I can’t afford to sustain a duchess on my wages. Anyway, cheers. Here’s to girls.”
They clinked glasses.
“She’s free then?” Dion said, half joking. “Single, available? Up for grabs?”
“All of the above. But if you hook up with her, take my advice and lock up your valuables.”
It was getting late. Dion had come to the bar by taxi, and Rourke, who said he was temporarily without a proper vehicle for reasons he’d rather not get into, had come on his bicycle, a regular old one-speed of metallic blue. The two men stood outside the front doors around midnight, parting ways. The rain had let up by now, and for once the night was not so bitterly cold. Rourke said he could feel spring in the air. Dion said he couldn’t. Rourke pushed off through the puddles on his two wheels, spraying mud and slush in his wake, and Dion started toward town on foot. He had enough cash for a cab ride back but felt he could use the walk.
Half an hour later he didn’t feel like he could use the walk anymore, and had his phone out to call for the town’s sole cabbie, but realized he didn’t know the number. His was a regular cellphone, not a 3G with a brain that could pull information out of thin air, so he was stuck.
He continued walking until headlights coming from behind fanned a glare over the road ahead. A dog started to bark somewhere in the darkness, racing closer, a territorial warning but not aggressive enough to worry him. He turned to stick out his thumb at the approaching vehicle, the raised headlights of a large truck, the lights on high beam expanding at a speed that said it was going faster than anybody should be travelling on this kind of backroad, especially with a pedestrian here glowing like a jack-o-lantern.
The dog came pelting out of a driveway, and the truck veered away from the dog and straight at Dion, and his instincts already had him heading for the shoulders of the road. Drenched in light, he scrambled up the high snowbank, and the truck’s bumper sheared off a great swath inches from his leg, straightened out sharply and kept going, fast.
Dion watched its tail lights disappearing. He heard a yelping and looked at the road and saw blood.
He stood over the injured dog, a shaggy black animal, middle-sized. The dog was no longer yelping, its eyes rolling at him sadly. The damage was bad. There were guts and crushed limbs, and he had his phone out to call 911. But you don’t call 911 for animals, do you? You bundle them in your car and take them to the vet. Or as a last resort, you shoot them in the head.
He crouched down. An injured person shouldn’t be moved, but did the same go for dogs? Out in the middle of the road like this, it posed a hazard. He scooped his arms carefully under the creature, embraced it, and with difficulty got to his feet, smelling feces and blood, feeling its rear end hanging heavy. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he said, rushing up the driveway from which the dog had appeared. The house at the end of the driveway was a tall A-frame with lots of fancy detailing, its front smothered in oversized, soggy looking bushes. The windows were lit with cold white light. He had no hands free, so he gave the door at the top of the steps a thump with his boot. A medium-strong thump, loud enough to be heard, not so loud as to frighten.
The door opened, and a woman looked out at him. She looked at his face, and then at the dog dying in his arms. “Oh my god, Coal,” she said.
* * *
He knew who she was, Mercy Black-something, who managed the band. Coal lay on a blanket in the living room, beyond help. The woman was of average height, and slim and elegant, even in a thick bathrobe over long johns. Her long hair was light brown, clean and shiny and combed sleek. She knelt over the dog now, murmuring what sounded like a prayer.
The dog was no longer squirming and lay still. Dion looked around at the large, fairly bare living room. There was a two-seater and an armchair of white leather and chrome, which belonged more in a West Vancouver condo than a dilapidated Victorian in a tiny northern village. Three of the rough walls had been partially stripped down to show thin strips of wood nailed up at a diagonal, and the battered wood floor was strewn with old plaster. Sheet plastic lay here and there, and there was the strong smell of some kind of chemical in the air, varnish or paint stripper or glue thinner. A small wood stove crackled, but the room was cold. Or maybe it was just him, chilled by his close call with the truck, his horrific experiences with the dog. He looked from the woodstove to the one unmolested wall. A series of black-and-white photographs were up in frames, hanging over the blocky white-leather-and-chrome seating. The photographs were a series of some kind, some group shots, some showing individuals posed for the camera, and at a glance he knew they weren’t family photos but stills from her professional life. The musicians she had managed in her past, probably.
The setup confused him. She’d been active and prosperous. She’d left the city with her furniture and photos, so she was here for a prolonged stay. It wasn’t a happy stay, judging by her drawn face, yet she was undertaking renovations. By the looks of it, the renos were a DIY project and not gone at with any kind of expertise or organizational skill. Didn’t she have the funds to hire a pro? From his quick scan, it felt to him like a mild form of madness.
“He’s dead,” the woman