Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 11

  Death from above

  Jack was true to his word. Heck, he was better than his word. Hanna Park was only the beginning. We did Keating Woods and Creighton Farms and the back slope of Mount Pelion. We went everywhere and anywhere he had ever found a thing and places he’d never set foot. And we did everywhere and anywhere again. Saturday mornings, we’d catch the matinee at the Odeon and afternoons we’d be on our way.

  Sometimes I’d get the chills, be reminded of a story I’d found during my burglaries. But doubts remained and I stayed silent.

  I’d like to tell you Jack and I found Noah’s Ark. I’d like to tell you we found the Patiala necklace or the Awa Maru treasure. I’d like to tell you I found the lost Zippo lighter I borrowed from the top drawer of my father’s bureau the day after he was buried.

  We found nothing.

  “I’m the cause,” I said. “I’m the reason you’ve been coming up empty. I’ve jinxed you.” We were a few weeks into our Saturday routine when I got around to owning up. The matinee had just let out.

  Jack was hesitant to answer. He started and stopped, then sighed like the guilty do on the downslope to confession.

  “You been holding out on me?” I was no stranger to betrayal.

  “You’re no jinx, okay?”

  I clammed up. I didn’t make it easy for him.

  “Just come with me. Okay? Please.”

  I embraced my latest grudge with open arms, same as I might an old friend were I ever to fluke one off.

  Jack was repentant and persuasive. Still, I gave no ground.

  I dragged my feet, maintained my silence, let the traitor stew. I followed, my curiosity and animosity at loggerheads.

  He scoped out his front yard, then marched ahead to the expanse that sided the driveway. “See that,” he said. Upturned grass. Grey dirt. A shallow hole. “Last Wednesday, after school, I saw this crazy Lab digging up the lawn. I chased him off, but when I went to take a closer look . . . well . . . you’ll see.” We rounded the path to his Fortress of Solitude. My second visit.

  I fired off a fresh round of blasé. I could not care less. Given the chance, I’d grab his Detective Comics 225 and take off, never to see the prick again. Serve him right.

  He removed a Dentyne carton from the shelf. “There are some finds, you need to understand, Gus . . . sometimes I feel . . . I dunno . . . like a grave robber.”

  He’d marked the carton with a big red X. My disinterest faltered, replaced with a twinge of empathy. Perhaps I’d been too quick to react.

  He dangled a gold bracelet from thumb and forefinger—an oval medallion suspended between two chains. “This was where the dog was digging.” He snaked the piece into my palm.

  A blip of colour adorned the centre of the medallion, a severely shrunken heraldic shield, something a leprechaun might carry into battle. At the top, a red and gold crown was fixed upon concentric blue circles. Some Latin words. And in silhouette, a gold eagle, wingspan exceeding the circumference. On the scroll at the base: Royal Canadian Air Force.

  Numbers were engraved above the badge and a name below:

  Lebel, S.E.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Flip it over.”

  On the back, another engraving:

  Love, Iris

  “It’s what they call a sweetheart bracelet. During the war, wives and girlfriends gave them to flyers for good luck.”

  “Neat. When’s it gonna be in the Record?”

  “I’ve been feeling sick inside since I realized what it was.”

  “Because it makes you feel like a grave robber. . . .”

  “Remember the story about the planes colliding over town? Bodies dropping from the sky? The old man who told me . . .”

  “The guy who cried.”

  “Right. Well, his name was Lebel—”

  “Holy cow.”

  “Yeah. And the son who died, the copilot, his name was Simon.”

  “‘Lebel, S.E.’ Jesus.” I fought off the heebie-jeebies, tossed the bracelet back to Jack. “Just like the wedding ring you dug up.”

  “Difference is, this came from the sky.”

  “You gotta give it back to the old man. You got to.”

  “You think I wouldn’t have already if I could? He died months ago. But I’ve done some checking. His son’s wife, Iris, she still lives in town. The only Lebel in the book, anyhow. Across the river, up on Tompkins Street. I’ve been nervous about going over there, afraid of how she might take it.”

  “It’d be like Simon coming back from the dead. Every so often we get a package or something addressed to my dad. Or a phone call for him. It hasn’t happened for a long time. I mean, he’s been dead for years. But when it does, my mom, you’d swear she’s seen a ghost. She’ll go into her bedroom and not come out for hours. Not a word. Not a peep. Not even when I call her. Once, she didn’t come out even for work, and her friend, Dottie, she had to come over.”

  “See. I knew you’d be good at this, Gus. You’ve got experience in this sort of thing. You’re why I’ve been waiting. How about we give it back together?”

  “She’ll thank me, right, like Mrs. Bruce thanked you?”

  “We’re square, then? I’m forgiven for holding out?”

  “It feels good, right, when people thank you?”

  Eight

  Amnesiaville

  Trenton’s wrong-side-of-the-tracks moldered east of the river. Up Dundas. Through the downtown. Over the swing bridge. The side where the creosote plant burned. Where Central Bridge built its boats and Helmut Swartz worked when he wasn’t teaching Dottie Lange the cha-cha. Where Seaway ships docked. Where coal was dumped. Where steel drums went to rust.

  Tompkins wasn’t like the circles and crescents up in The Heights, Annie’s neighbourhood, with its modern prefabs and putting-green grass. Or the venerated Queen, King, and Victoria, with their turn-of-the-century Edwardians—long-ago manors of railroad execs and robber-baron yes-men. Tompkins fell into a third category of street. Hodgepodge.

  There were the older, wartime houses, single story toolsheds inspired by the architectural stylings of the Three Little Pigs. These were dwarfed by newer, larger dwellings, the dreams-come-true of incurable insomniacs. Nothing matched. Nothing jibed. Except the mats out front and the cats curled upon them—a feline DEW line. They raised their eyes in listless la-di-das as Jack and I passed. Iris Lebel lived somewhere up ahead.

  “Henry Comstock was born on this street,” Jack said, off-the-cuff and unsolicited as was his custom. A rougher, tougher, less inquisitive me, and I’d have punched him in the mouth, already. There’s not a landfill on Earth without a substratum of putrefied know-it-alls. But Jack was so damn unselfconscious in his eclecticism, the particulars never jarred. This was the issue with the Double Als, the Mickey Mentals, and the Waynes. Crates, too, I guessed. They were synonym-challenged, Jack’s earnestness taken as conceit.

  A crack on a sidewalk. A brick in a wall. A random remark. That signpost up ahead . . . Triggers were everywhere. Jack soaked up the trivia in his stride, and I assimilated the best of it in mine. He knew stuff; I wanted to know stuff, if only to fulfill Mr. Malbasic’s prophecy—the attainment of my fullest academic and societal potential.

  “The Comstock Lode—that Henry Comstock?” I said. “He’s from here?”

  “Born and bred.”

  “Then why isn’t it Comstock Street?”

  “His mom’s name was Tompkins.”

  “God, it’s like they don’t want us to know anything about anything.”

  Trenton cranked out future NHLers, dime a dozen. Kids who could skate and shoot a puck were gods, which accounted for the large numbers of godless among the rest of us. But Henry Comstock, this was news. And the latest chunk of town history censored by the resident brain trust. It baffled more and more, I tell you.

  “Why’s everything so cool so secret?”

  “Could be there are no secrets,” Jack said. “Could be people just forget.”


  “Like amnesia . . .”

  “An epidemic of it.”

  “And only grown-ups catch it.”

  We weren’t precocious. We watched TV. We went to movies. We absorbed. Any kid who watched Westerns was up to snuff on the Comstock Lode. Nevada with Robert Mitchum. Bonanza did a whole episode. Death Valley Days ran a dozen. It was the first big silver strike in America—Nevada’s rush of ’59. And Trenton’s very own Henry Comstock was its namesake. Sure, Ol’ Pancake was alleged to have been a claim jumper and moralizing dickwad. And, yeah, he died penniless in 1870 from a self-inflicted bullet to the head. But did this make him all that different from Trenton’s other favourite sons? Really? I mean, we’re talking Comstock Lode here. The richest vein of silver the United States of America has ever seen, compliments of yours truly, Trenton, Ontario, Canada, for crying out loud. And nobody knew? Except Jack the Finder, the old coot who must have told him, and me. C’mon. This was certifiable. This was Amnesiaville.

  Nine

  The deliriously grateful widow of Tompkins Street

  If the wartime houses on Tompkins were postage stamps, Iris Lebel’s was postage-due. The bungalow belonged in a hobby shop window. Made in USA by Lionel.

  Iris was at her door, locking up. She was small, thin, and sized right for easy storage, her home made to measure.

  Jack and I held back by the gate, aware of the emotional bombshell we were about to drop on the unwitting widow.

  She high-stepped around her cat with a polka move she’d probably seen on Lawrence Welk and landed hard when she glanced us idling. She rummaged in her purse with haste, juggled Marilyn Monroe sunglasses onto her face.

  “I know her from somewhere, maybe,” I whispered to Jack.

  “You sure?”

  She was elegant in her way. Kewpie cheeks and Revlon lips. Pale green kerchief over an Audrey Hepburn cut and an ankle-length beige trench with broad lapels. She raised her collar to rouged cheeks, cinched her belt.

  “Miss Lebel?” Jack said. He smiled. I smiled.

  She wrangled a shopping buggy from behind a hedge and onto her crumbling walkway. “I know who you are,” she said.

  “You do?” Jack said.

  “I am sorry. I cannot help you.”

  “I don’t think we’re who you think we are,” Jack said

  “I don’t think,” she said, “I know.” She spoke lilt-free, passion run through a wringer. Like authors who give public readings in what they presuppose the voices inside their readers’ heads to be—narcoleptic and hung over.

  I added my two cents. “But we’ve brought you something really neat.”

  We stood aside. She barrelled through.

  “Wait. Please,” Jack called after her, jingling the bracelet. “It’s this. It’s yours. Please, Miss Lebel.”

  “Missus,” she corrected without slowing.

  “But he’s Jack the Finder,” I shouted. “He found your bracelet.”

  “The sweetheart bracelet. Simon’s bracelet.”

  She faltered, turned, her eyes narrowed with uncertainty. None of the blubbering appreciation Jack and I were expecting. Not yet.

  “It was in a hole,” I said. “I helped him find it.”

  She abandoned her cart, inched closer, her purse secured between bosom and crossed arms, our integrity to be determined.

  She examined the bracelet without touching it, appraising, verifying, as Jack dangled it before her.

  Damn right I knew her. And now I knew from where. Her high collar could not hide the scarring—the strip of fried skin beneath her jaw and tapering downwards.

  Oh, man! Could this get any better? Or worse? Iris Lebel was two weirdos in one. If this wasn’t a portent, what was? I wanted to run and I wanted to stay. Hell, I had to stay. Wherever this was going, I couldn’t skip the ending.

  “And his arm?” Iris said. “What have you done with it?”

  “What?” All Jack and I could do was gape. My gaping encompassed both the scars on her neck and a renewed suspicion Jack had held out on me again—Simon Lebel’s arm on a shelf somewhere in his garage. “Ma’am?” Jack said.

  “His left arm. The bracelet would have been attached.”

  Jack shook his head. At a loss.

  “It is, however, twenty-five years. To expect flesh and bone is asking too much. Bone alone will do.”

  “I didn’t see any,” Jack said.

  “Me, neither,” I said. “But we could let you know if an arm turns up, couldn’t we, Jack?” I was helpful, hopeful, debating whether I should let her know I knew who she was. “Or fingers, too? There could be finger bones.”

  My resourcefulness did not go over well. Her eyelids clattered with the rat-a-tat of busted blinds. She reached abruptly for the bracelet, missed, and watched it fall. It lay on the sidewalk, a small, almost perfect triangle of gold, the medallion at the base. “How appropriate,” she said, swooped up the jewellery and flung it into her purse, forgoing the anticipated fanfare, gushing gratitude, and cash reward.

  She reassumed command of her shopping cart and whipped down the block, her trench flapping at the heels of her flats.

  “Blackhurst’s,” I said.

  “The Sewing Machine Witch,” Jack said.

  Ten

  Mothers and other strangers

  After Iris dipped below the horizon, we stayed with her afterimage. We had the look you get after you’ve spotted a UFO, incapable of turning away for fear you’ll miss the second flyby.

  “I didn’t think she could talk,” I said.

  “Or walk. You ever see her out of her chair?”

  Coincidence. Contrivance. Red herrings. Deus ex machina. If you’ve never seen your life as a movie, you’ve never seen your life. The editing is nonexistent, of course, so you’ll need the wherewithal to sit through the excess of boring parts to the end. It can be any genre, too. Western. Monster. Mystery. Adventure. Drama. Except Comedy. (Comedy only works in shorts, fifteen minutes max. Never feature length. Never in real life. In real life, fifteen minutes of comedy is a stretch.) The trick is to see how you figure in the story. Lead, supporting, or extra. Hero, sidekick, or bad guy. Just because it’s your life is no guarantee you’ll survive beyond the opening credits.

  “She seemed younger,” I said. “Not so witchy.”

  “Night and day, man. A different person.”

  “As soon as I saw her neck . . .”

  “No wonder cops love scars.”

  “She got them in the war. Poison gas.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jack said.

  “It’s what my mom says.”

  “Not according to Mr. Blackhurst. That circus fire I told you about—the big top going up in flames?—that came from him. And when he saw I maybe didn’t believe him, he said all the proof I’d ever need could be found at the sewing table in his window.”

  “The scars, then—that’s how she got them. . . .”

  “Yup.”

  “Did he marry her before or after?”

  “What? Blackhurst and Iris? Iris Lebel? The witch? You kidding? You think he could fit in that dollhouse with her? One fart and he’d blow the walls out. He’s got some big old house across the bay. Lives alone, far as I know.”

  “Or maybe the lady I saw is his wife.”

  “Who?”

  “At the cleaners, one time. She was hiding at the back and watching me. But when I asked Mr. Blackhurst about her, he said it was nobody, that I’d imagined her.”

  “Maybe you did. Not everything’s a mystery, Gus.”

  “She was pretty. She wore a fur coat. Movie-star pretty.”

  “Sure it wasn’t the witch in her Iris outfit?”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “Could have been your mom.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She’s movie-star pretty.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “You blind?”

  “Shut up, eh? She isn’t.”

  “Okay, calm down. Your mot
her is not pretty. Okay. I agree. She’s not pretty.”

  “Jesus, Jack, leave her out of this. I’m trying to tell you something.”

  “So you saw this woman . . . and she was looking at you.”

  “It was how she was looking. Like she knew me.”

  “Who’s to say she didn’t? I’m sorry, Gus, but for an unexplained mystery, it’s not exactly Stonehenge. This is a small town. Lots of people know us even if we don’t know them. You’re trying too hard to make something out of nothing.”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “A woman at the back of Sure Press. Big deal. Could be Blackhurst does have a wife. Or a daughter. Or sister. Cousin. A part-time pants presser. Ever consider that?”

  “But why would he say I didn’t see anybody when I know I did?”

  “She could’ve been his girlfriend and he wants to keep her secret. Your mom, for instance.”

  “Cut it out.”

  “You need to ask yourself the right questions. Jumping to conclusions or jumping off a cliff—same thing. Most mysteries can be explained away in nothing flat. The ones that can’t, they’re the ones you bother with.”

  “Like the amnesia epidemic.”

  “Yup.”

  “Still, if you would have seen her . . .”

  “Iris probably knows. You could always ask her,” Jack said, one feeble yuk-yuk ahead of me. “Now that she’s so grateful to us and all . . . loves us so much.”

  Jack had nailed it. Until determined otherwise, a woman who looks at you from the back of a dry cleaning shop is not a mystery; she is a woman looking at you from the back of a dry cleaning shop. Odds are, she’s also pressing pants.

  I wish I could tell you it was a lesson I retained.

  My concern was not that Iris (or her alter ego) wouldn’t tell me about the lady in black, I worried she would.

  What if Old Man Blackhurst did have a girlfriend? And she really did turn out to be my mother?

  Principal Malbasic had put Mom’s looks in my head and I’d hoped the fact would stay between him and me. Now the cat was out of the bag. Jack had seen it, too. And no telling how many others. Mom was movie-star pretty. No denying. I just would have preferred not to know.