Coach House Books, Toronto
copyright © Matthew Heiti, 2013
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Heiti, Matthew, 1980-
The city still breathing / Matthew Heiti.
Issued also in a printed format.
ISBN 978-1-77056-355-1
I. Title.
PS8615.E377C58 2013 C813'.6 C2013-904092-7
The City Still Breathing is available in a print edition: ISBN 978 1 55245 283 7.
About This Book
A dead body is found on the side of Highway 17 outside Sudbury. Naked, throat slashed, no identification. It disappears from the back of a police van and begins a strange odyssey, making its way, over the course of one early winter day, all around the northern Ontario town and through the lives of eleven very different people.
There’s young Francie, who’s determined to start a modelling career and new life in the big city with Slim, her acid-dropping boyfriend, until he steals a pair of cowboy boots – and the body. There’s Martha, Slim’s mother, waiting tables and waiting for her husband to come back to her. There’s Gordon ‘The Python’ Uranium, a failed hockey enforcer and owner of the cowboy boots. And there’s Jyrki Myllarinen, the local drug lord with murder on his mind.
All of them are hoping for something more out of this dying town. All they find, instead is one another, in a strange and apocalyptic moment of violence.
‘Used to be, the invisible man was invincible in school.
But now.
He wanted to be a scientist and discover things.
A cure for cancer. New stars. New planets.
Somebody in Toronto already beat him to the discovery of penicillin.
And now.
Just sex and poetry.
And a taste for leaving.
Every time he walks down the street that leads out of town, his thumb breaks out in a rash.’
– Patrice Desbiens, L’homme invisible / The Invisible Man
‘Here comes
Here comes another hard winter in Babylon
Where have you gone?
Damn you and the horse you rode in on
What star did you fall down from?
Why’d you have to be so cruel?
So cruel.’
– Kevin Quain, ‘Winter in Babylon’
1
He just doesn’t know what to do. Wally Kajganich standing on the side of the road shivering, wishing he hadn’t stopped the van. It’s been a cold day, the kind that punches you in the gut every time you step outside, and the coming night is promising worse. The water’s turned to ice running down the rock, hanging in long fingers over the ditch. There’s no snow on the ground yet, but that’s not what makes the ice stand out – that’s not what made Fisher call out or Wally hit the brakes. It’s pink. Rosy explosions trapped beneath the layer of frost, racing down to the very tips of the icicles where the tint seems darker, more like some fancy lipstick red.
Nothing’s been said for about five minutes, just two men standing on the gravel shoulder over the ditch, staring, and then Fisher opens his mouth once or twice before finally saying ‘Well’ without a question mark. Wally rubs his hands together, looks back at the transport van – police markings faded though he’s put in two requests to have her repainted – and then walks farther down the shoulder, muttering ‘Shit.’ Fisher shuffling behind him like some lost puppy.
They find a point where the embankment is not so steep and the two men climb up the surface of rock and frozen moss, the exertion forcing clouds of vapour around their heads. They make their way back to the top of the ridge and do some more standing and staring.
‘Hey, Kag, maybe it’s this thing.’
Fisher’s pointing at a little stone man perched on the lip of the embankment – the kind of thing you see up and down every highway and back road – making some kind of joke, which Wally knows because he’s got that little twist to his lip he only gets when he makes lewd suggestions about women they drive by or female prisoners.
More sounds come out of Fisher, but Wally’s got him on mute and is turned, looking back into the trees – evergreen and naked maples, thick and dark like a storybook. He’s got that little tingle, that whisper behind his ear that used to make him think he could’ve been a good cop. Leads his eyes, tracing down the scarred trunks to the ground, telling him, Look, look, it’s right in front of you. But all he can see is an ocean of cracked and browning leaves. Look.
A hand on his shoulder. ‘C’mon. Celia’s making me dinner.’
And it’s just as he turns around that he spots it, the shock causing him to grab Fisher’s hand, and the men stand, holding hands and staring down at an opening in the pile of leaves. An eye staring back up at them, frozen over like a marble.
By the time they get the leaves cleared away, Wally’s hands are aching and he’s got them locked over his mouth, blowing into them like a bellows – rhythmic wheezing in and out. Fisher looks at him and then down at the body and then back at him again.
‘The hell you doin that for?’
He pulls his hands away, sliding them inside his jacket and under his armpits. ‘My goddamn Raynaud’s.’
Fisher steps back, wrinkling his nose. ‘Your hand disease?’
‘I’m not an effin leper.’ Wally takes his hands out and blows into them, but Fisher’s looking back down.
A cold wind rolls over the embankment – the brown hair lifts and waves in the wind and for a second the gesture’s so easy you’d almost think he was just resting. But the skin’s gone bone white, the lips frozen, curling back, and those eyes don’t shut, and Wally wonders what kind of a man would lie naked on a rock or what kind of a man would put him there like that.
‘Hell of a thing,’ Fisher says for the fifth time, each time like it’s just occurred to him.
Wally’s only seen a body once before, seven years back now, two for the price of one. A car gone through the guardrails into a ravine out near Spanish. A yellow Beetle. You’d never expect to find such peace in the middle of all that mess, but death has a way of looking easy. Still, it gets stuck in your craw. Like this body, almost unmarked, glazed like some Italian sculpture he saw in a book once. But the throat opens in a smile, coal black along the slash. Blood frozen up the chin, following the jawline and then running along the ridge of the ear onto the rock, spilling down the slope, joining with a stream, finally freezing into a sheet of ice. Long bloody fingers.
‘What d’you mean it’s not working?’
‘I mean it’s not working.’
‘It