snickered and waved some of the fragrant air toward them. “The high has arrived.”
Hélène grinned in mischief as her nostrils flickered. “Well now, Dad. So this that happy grass they been talking about since those Beatniks. Maybe I should try it before I hit seventy. Never too late, they say.”
Ed slapped his hand down in mock anger. “Better not, lady. You want that high, a good Alberta rye’ll do you just fine.”
The signature song that had put the town on the country music map, Stompin’ Tom Connors’ “Sudbury Saturday Night,” sent an explosion of cheers across the room, inspiring one man to snare a Canadian flag from the wall and parade around, joined by a bearded giant brandishing the Fleur de Lys. Here was one place in Canada that French and English were having a royally good time; separatists, take note. The crowd started clapping, and Belle found herself singing along, sorry that her low profile kept her from serenading the crowd with something by Reba.
Just after “The girls are out to bingo, and the men are getting stinko, we think no more of Inco,” the noise suddenly stopped as if the electrical plug had been yanked. All eyes moved to the door as several officers walked forward, spreading out in an unsmiling phalanx. From the kitchen came a yell and a tinkle of glass, chairs started scraping and a young girl cried out. Steve stood before his men and spoke calmly into a bullhorn. “Please relax, folks. You won’t be delayed long. We have reason to believe that some illegal substances are changing hands here.” A male voice bellowed the most frequently occurring word in Pulp Fiction, but Steve ignored it and motioned toward the wall. “Just line up, please. Men over here. A female officer will search the women in the side room. Once you’re cleared, you can leave. Your tax dollars at work.” When boos erupted from the back, he smiled and made a “That’s the breaks” gesture.
Though Belle passed through the cordon quickly, she became separated from Ed and Hélène. The lodge cleared rapidly to the sound of snowmobile motors roaring into the black silence. At the ramp to the lodge sat a police van which had travelled the ice road, and three men, handcuffed behind their backs, were being guided into seats, their heads ducked for them as they entered. One might have been Brooks, but shadows could be misleading. Belle rubbed her hands by the embers of the campfire until Steve strutted up, unable to conceal his satisfaction.
“Got the bugger,” he said proudly, smacking his fist into his glove. “Two of his dealers will plea bargain their snow pants off when we get them to the station. Five more were carrying small amounts, scared enough to tell us anything. And here’s the cream! In the housing for the electric guts of that fancy septic system, we found his main supply wrapped snug in layers of plastic. Guess he didn’t think anyone would be poking around in there. Five kilos of coke. A small bale of pot. And some of these babies.” He held out what looked like a perfume sample vial, tiny and jewel-like.
“So what’s that, swami?” Belle asked.
“Meet the newest nephew of Sudbury’s drug family. Big city crack cocaine. One teeny rock to a person, please.”
Belle shuddered. “Anyone on that stuff wouldn’t have the sense to come in out of the cold. Any stolen snowmobiles turn up?”
He gave her a comical look as if wondering where she had learned about that. “Just one, but it’s enough. Rumour says he managed to get rid of everything but a Mach Z, saving it for someone who could afford the price and use the machine out where registration wouldn’t be checked. Anyway, we’re tracing it to a theft in Sturgeon Falls. I’ll bet that if we cut him some slack, he’ll admit to the two incidents at your house, Belle. This may be his first charge, but the judges have developed pretty tough skins for dealers lately. He could draw a mandatory fifteen-year sentence without parole.” He left her to return to the final details of the evidence collection. No use going to all this trouble and blowing the fine points.
Belle found the DesRosiers having coffee with one of the cooks in the kitchen. “Damn cold out there, girl. Where the hell have you been? Didn’t want to leave you.”
Not long after, all were home suffering only a popcorn and beer bloat. In a hedonistic papaya bubble bath, Belle warmed up, contemplating her toes, probing the big one into the faucet. When it stuck for a moment, she imagined another humiliating finale worse than choking on vitamins: “Woman starves to death in bathtub. Found by neighbour returning from Florida with Miami Dolphins T-shirt gift. Had been gnawed on by desperate shepherd.” Would Freya do that? Why not? The “doggy dog” way of the world. Dreamily content, relaxing to the sweet perfume, she thought of the gold again, appearing and disappearing in the elusive bubbles. As the surface of the water turned to milky film, a whiter line of surface tension delineating her legs, one half-submerged, the other bent and invisible six inches below the knee, Belle had a vision of her body frozen in the ice.
EIGHTEEN
The gray mailboxes at the junction of her road stood an inconvenient six miles from the house. Half the time Belle thought in kilometres, half the time in miles. Another decade and the logic of metric would be second nature. She took two pieces of mail from the box, cheques for her father, the Canada Pension, which everyone paid into, and the Old Age freebie—$400.00 a month just for wrinkles and myopia!
When she got to Rainbow Country with the shrimp, her father was spruced up in the blue plaid shirt she had bought him for Christmas. Her careful eye noted the clean undershirt, braces and freshly ironed pants. “Good news, Father,” she announced. “Your pension cheques arrived. And, at last count, you’re on the yellow brick road to becoming a millionaire. The stock market is soaring.”
“Take all the money out of the bank and bring it here, right now, right now.” At his stern face, she nearly stepped back. Then his eyes sparkled, a royal blue which belied his years and waning health. No wonder her mother had fallen in love with the man in the picture on the dresser, serious, wearing a tweed suit and metal-rimmed glasses, holding a meershaum pipe. “Just kidding. Gimme ten bucks, though. I owe the haircut lady.”
While she was setting up his meal, she encouraged him to talk about old Toronto. “Hogtown, she used to be called. Rough and ready. Small houses, family stores, horses still pulling wagons down Avenue Road. Big night out to go downtown for a Chinese feed at the St. Charles and see a show at the Odeon. Or maybe Sunnyside Park in the summer. Did you know your old man was a great dancer? Some bad times, though. Those riots at the Christie Pits in 1938, damn Nazis beating up the Jews. My brother Fred and I got Abie Schneider out fast on the trolley. Took him right home with us. And Ma gave us all tomato soup and crackers. I remember Abie was crying.”
“And your years in the film business, all those people you met. Didn’t you tell me that you shook Gene Autry’s hand?”
He held up his knobby fist proudly and offered it to her. “Shake the hand that shook the hand. All the biggest stars came through the office.”
“Right. And all those glossies of Elvis, was that really his signature: ’To my girlfriend, Belle’?”
That got him laughing, an unusual sight which cheered her in this quiet room. There would never be another home, another room for him. “Norman, my name was Norman then,” he corrected her. At the nursing home in Florida, they had mistakenly called him by his unused first name. Then his girlfriend (his consort, he had called her) and he had decided that George was more British, more noble. How many people changed their name after 80?
“Like my haircut?” he asked, and she gave it an appreciative rub.
“A regular crew cut. You don’t look a minute over fifty.” And he didn’t, thanks to his baby-smooth skin.
“No
