LITMIR.BIZ

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the phone, not checking the messages. He didn’t call Penny, breaking another promise. He turned on the TV and found an old movie that he couldn’t follow, black and white, a man and a woman talking wildly at each other. He sat on the bed and watched and listened, without seeing or hearing. He thought about the train hurling by, and the black trees having their conversation, and a strange notion of wanting to join them, learn the language, stand in their midst, and let the elements take him.

      He pushed the thought away. All that really bothered him right now was the twenty-five-minute difference between his wristwatch and the time on the cabbie’s dashboard clock. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, studying the watch up close. His face felt feverish and his airway was tight. He lifted the watch to his ear, and it ticked softly, chk-chk-chk, pretending to do its job. Such a simple job, to stay with him, keep track of the minutes and display them. Not much of a conversation, but a conversation all the same, and it couldn’t even manage that.

      It was a black-faced Smiths military watch. It had been old when he’d got it from Looch seven years ago, a birthday present, and like everything with moving parts, it had a life span. It’ll outlive you, Looch had promised, but apparently Looch was wrong.

      He took the watch off to adjust the time, giving its stem a clockwise winding, carefully, slowly, stopping when he met resistance and giving it a little back-off twist, as he’d been taught. Held it to his ear again, and it sounded fine now, so everything would be okay for a while. He sat on the bed with the watch in his hand and the TV light strobing over him, battening down the fear.

      Four

      Willy and the Watch

      HE WOKE BEFORE THE ALARM went off. Most every morning he woke with resolve that today he’d find his bearings and start walking into the light of normality. But today was different, and he felt defeated before he opened his eyes. When he did look, the sky was pitch black and the clock radio said six thirty. He rolled, fumbled for the light switch, and under its fuzzy blare checked the Smiths. It told him it was 4:02. The TV was still on, now playing a morning talk show just loud enough to not raise complaints from the other guests.

      With two hours before shift, he showered and shaved and dressed with care, and went downstairs to the Super 8 diner, picking up a newspaper from the stand by the door. News in the north was never hot off the press, since delivery took a while, but it kept him current enough with the city. The restaurant was empty except that his favourite place, the sole window booth, was occupied by an old native man smoking what looked like a giant doobie.

      Dion stopped by the table and could smell cheap, harsh tobacco. He gestured with his newspaper at the red pictogram placard on the wall, a crossed-out cigarette in a circle, and said, “Sir. It means no smoking.”

      The old man looked up. He wore a rough-looking scarf around his throat and a canvas coat that sagged open. His hair was white and chaotic, and his eyes looked damaged. He gazed at Dion directly and said something, a full and complex sentence with not a single English syllable thrown in. It sounded like chit-chat, so the man was either partially blind or incompetent, not seeing what stood before him, a white man wearing a hefty gun belt and full patrol uniform. Not someone to chat with, especially if you were native.

      “No smoking,” Dion repeated. “Okay?” He crossed the room, took a table of second choice, and waited for Ken the Korean-Canadian waiter/proprietor to come and take his order. He asked for eggs over easy and dry toast, nothing on the side, and coffee, then added with a gesture toward the smoker as he told Ken, “It’s your restaurant, and you know the rules. Enforce them, would you?”

      Ken dropped an ashtray in front of the old man and said, “Put it out, Willy.” He went off to the kitchen to start cooking, and the old man named Willy crushed out the cigarette, sending up a stink like a dumpster on fire, directing more gibberish at Dion across the space between them. Again there was no hostility there, just babble, like English spoken backward, this time ending in a question mark. Only one word stood out as recognizable to Dion’s ears, the name Johnny.

      “I don’t speak your language,” he said, loud and slow. He flattened his paper and tried to read the stale news.

      The next time he looked over, Willy was turned away, looking out at falling snow. Dion looked down at his wristwatch and compared it to the Dairyland wall clock facing him. He unstrapped it and held it to his ear, shook it and listened again, and what he heard chilled him, a fatal arrhythmia.

      Ken set down a breakfast plate with a clatter. “Watch problems?”

      “The beauty of old stuff like this,” Dion told him, almost viciously, “is it’s fixable.”

      “Good jeweller over at the Copperside.”

      Dion thanked him, but he wasn’t really listening. He already had someone in mind, a guy who could fix anything. Except microwaves.

      * * *

      The fix-all’s address took Dion farther into the wilderness than he had expected, across that spine-tingling chasm that Jayne Spacey had shown him on her tour, and along a road of hard-packed snow with rock wall on one side and forbidding woods on the other, but by the time he’d figured out how impractical the errand was, it was too late, and he had arrived at his destination, a mobile home on a cleared bit of land all fringed by woods.

      A hand-painted sign was posted out front, roadside, attached to the wooden fence. It said, “Northwood Repairs Incorporated,” with an “NRI” logo shaped into a wrench and spewing yellow flames. The yard was full of old shop signs, car parts, the bones of appliances, some grouped in categories and others heaped untidily amidst weeds and snow. Dion parked his car in the open space in front of the trailer, stepped up three aluminum stairs onto an aluminum landing, and rapped on an aluminum door, then stepped back to make room for the door to swing outward. While he waited he looked about, trying to imagine who would buy a piece of land like this, set in shadow, damp year-round. A great breeding ground for mosquitoes come summer. If summer ever reached this bitter land.

      He had given up waiting and was crossing the soggy grounds back to his car when the aluminum door shrieked behind him, and the man with the scar was up on the mini-landing, scowling down. Rourke was wrapped in a striped terrycloth robe in burgundy and blue, and looked like he had a backache the way he stood gripping the door frame, yellow-grey hair sloped messily to one side.

      “Sorry,” Dion called across the yard. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

      “Well, you woke me, so now tell me what you want.”

      “We met yesterday, but actually —”

      Rourke interrupted with a snap of his fingers and pointed at Dion like a warlock casting a curse. “That’s right, the cop with the writer’s cramp. What’s this then? More goddamn pointless questions? What size goddamn shoes I wear, which way I goddamn vote?”

      Dion brought the Smiths from his pocket and held it out. “It’s running slow. I thought you could take a look at it for me. If you have time.”

      “Very smooth,” Rourke blared. “Give it up, Mountie. We all know what’s going on here. I’m way up there on your suspect list, and if you haven’t figured out that I’ve figured it out, you’re stupider than I gave you credit for. That’s the only reason I went down to see you yesterday, to save you the satisfaction of dragging me in yourselves. Cops,” he spat. “You’re all cut from the same cloth, two-faced, underhanded, self-pandering bunch of dipshits. I’ll be writing some letters, you better believe it.”

      Dion listened through it all and then thrust the watch back into his jacket pocket, as it had dawned on him that he’d made a mistake, and a clumsy one: Scott Rourke was in no frame of mind to be fixing things. The missing girl was a close friend, and he’d have no room for anything else at the moment but worry, and all Dion could do now was apologize and back off. “Of course,” he called up. “I’m sorry. You’re not open for business at a time like this. It honestly never crossed my mind. Sorry.”

      He moved again toward his car, but Rourke brought him to a stop with a shout of,

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