He mentioned Margery less and limited himself to one girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old horsewoman named Sue Smedley. And he started the plan. The plan he said would give them something to show for their lives. The plan that meant moving. He applied to more than a hundred companies and pored over MLS catalogues with house listings north and west of Toronto. He would get a good job and set up a life far from his friends. From Kashag. Peck could only watch as Hank grew up.
By the time they moved south, Hank had worked there for four years, at Apco Moulding running a machine that made margarine tubs. He drove the two hours and change each way and took twelve-hour shifts, three nights on, two days off; four nights on, three days off; sometimes seven and seven.
Peck’s chief impression of this period was Hank collapsed stubble-cheeked on the couch, tan boots lolling, sock bottoms black, coveralls faded airplane grey with musky grease stains. Measured snores replaced the ripping songs that used to follow his benders.
When he was upright between shifts after a sixteen-hour sleep and a shave, his smile had a new quality, and he held Peck in his gaze. He acted proud and on the verge of a promise. Peck hated him then, but she had no right. He was throwing their lives through this upheaval to give her a better future, but she worried that one day she might look up from her murder stories and find he, too, had stepped out for good.
Malcolm Salter grew tall and hard-shouldered the summer before Peck left for Westwoods. They took to playing Monopoly in the Salters’ trailer and talking about the Beatles. Peck had fallen in love with Paul McCartney after she’d found out he was fourteen when his mother died of cancer. John Lennon had seen his mother get hit by a streetcar, but he had Aunt Mimi. Whom did Paul have? She didn’t tell Malcolm that she wrote letters to Paul or that she wrote Paul’s replies. In the letters, Paul called her “my love” and told her maybe he was amazed. She would go to Scotland and work as a nanny at the McCartney sheep farm, and Paul would love her and Linda would bow out. She believed in the goodness of Linda.
One day, at the end of a treatise on the backward looping of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Malcolm straightened his money piles. They’d turned on the lamps and closed the curtains against the sun. He picked at the vinyl piping on a cushion.
“Let’s go into the house,” he said. “I’ll show you my Beatlemags.”
She scooped up four houses and placed a hotel on Indiana Avenue and said, “As long as we come back to this game.”
Inside the door, one set of stairs led up to the kitchen and another to a curtained-off area of the basement. Malcolm had taped a collage of Beatles pictures to the unpainted drywall.
Malcolm fetched two cans of beer and put on Abbey Road. He offered her a Beatlemag then disappeared upstairs. Unconcerned, Peck read a column about real-life Beatle encounters. She planned to submit her Paul letters.
Malcolm dropped back on the couch, crossed his legs, jiggled his foot. He reached an arm up, then dropped it to his side. “Come upstairs,” he said. “The rentals are out.” Malcolm’s parents spent their days fishing at Twelve Mile Lake. His father was a retired police officer known as the Sergeant.
“Like Sergeant Pepper,” Peck had said.
“But not as cool.”
Malcolm scorned sports and the outdoors. He said it disgusted the Sergeant that he wouldn’t make a military man, let alone a cop.
Under the bathroom sink, Malcolm displayed a stack of crimped Penthouses and Hustlers. Peck told him about the toilet reading material her mother had left behind and said, “I guess that’s the difference between my house and yours.”
“Not necessarily,” Malcolm said. He took her to his brother Mike’s room and handed her a binder. The plastic sleeves held photographs of murder scenes. There were women strangled by pantyhose, bras, or ties and men shot in the back of the head or the chest, and there was much dismemberment. A brain blown out of a victim’s skull and lying at his feet. A severed head sitting on railroad tracks. A woman with her head on her lap. A woman’s limbless torso. Bodies burned, stabbed, mangled, shot. Malcolm cocked his head as she turned the pages and thumbed the plastic.
“The Sergeant collected these. He gave them to my brother when he got on the force.”
“Imagine what you’ll get if you become a cop.”
“We’ll never know.”
The pattern of their afternoons changed. After passing Go five times each, they sat on Mike’s bed, the carnage album on their laps. Malcolm told the story of each photo, the crime, where and when it happened, what the police figured out. Sometimes they analyzed the bodies in the Hustler spreads, but they preferred the corpses. Malcolm delivered his comments on the nude models and the crime scenes in the same measured, baffled tone he used when detailing the Beatles’ recording techniques or informing her she owed him $90 for landing on St. James Place with one house. She opened her mouth and closed her eyes in a show of shock and disgust, though her library true crimes had plenty of photos, and (something she wouldn’t tell Malcolm) a Hustler lived under the sink at her home, too.
At school, they developed a set of greetings based on Beatles songs. Her favourite was Sergeant Salter’s Lonely Hearts Club Son. He liked Strawberry Peck Forever.
The day before she moved to Westwoods, Peck found Malcolm on the trailer couch reading Mad.
“Polythene Peck.”
“Back in the U.S.S. Malcolm.”
“Peck Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”
“Nowhere Malcolm.”
She sat on the sink and asked, “How’s the Sergeant?”
“They released the boat two weeks ago. Let the game begin.” Malcolm tossed the Mad aside and swung up.
“I don’t have time for Monopoly, Malcolm. We’re going tomorrow. My dad’s moving stuff today.”
“Okay.”
“We could do other things. What we usually do. What about the Beatlemag s?”
His head knocked the skylight handle. His thighs in jeans brushed her bare knees. She stayed put. He propped one hand on the stove and the other on the sink and kissed her without asking. She found his tongue and sucked it.
He recoiled. “Where’d you learn that?”
Saliva dried on her cheeks. She’d never kissed with her mouth open before.
He wiped his lips and cupped her head. “I didn’t mean it,” he said. “It’s an asshole guy thing to say. What a guy who reads Hustler would say.”
“Mean Mr. Malcolm.”
“A Hard Day’s Peck.”
He lifted her onto the couch, where they wrestled and ribtickled then settled into an unbroken kiss. Her tongue met his, and she gave herself over to the sun cradling her neck and the cushions’ dry-vinyl crackle.
“I am moving tomorrow,” she said after a while.
“I know. That’s what makes this okay.”
“It
