You go, girl.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Polly and Nathan rolled down I-95…
Polly and Nathan rolled down I-95. It was the start of a whole new life. Halfway through North Carolina, the sun came out. The sky was bright and clear, and suddenly birds were everywhere.
Where the thin patchy snow was fully melted, the bright green of the grass foretold the outrageous explosion that would be spring, just a few weeks around the corner in this corner of the world.
Polly sat on the passenger side, watching Nathan handle the big Cadillac, a marvel of human sense and coordination. He seemed to have done his before, as she saw that the speedometer was registering one-hundred-forty-five kilometres an hour.
This converted to about eighty or eighty-five. She inwardly acknowledged that she was having a hell of a good time. So this is what it felt like to drive to Florida. And she’d always found flying to be an ordeal. In her inexperience, it had been more trouble than it was worth.
Nathan. Something cat-like about the man.
Polly had made a great intuitive leap of the imagination. She had somehow turned everything around, and realized that something inside her had changed in an instant.
Polly could acknowledge that she didn’t even love Nathan—not yet. She also knew that she could, if only she would let it happen. Perhaps it wasn’t even necessary.
She smiled over indulgently at the profile of Nathan Brown, and his hairy arms, with his sun-browned knuckles gripping the wheel in confident relaxation. A younger man, but she didn’t mind.
“We’re going to be living in sin.”
He met her look for a moment, and then put the eyes back on the road again. Polly fondly savored the way his thinning silver mane waved around in the light breeze. His window was always open a crack, a life-long habit. There was so little they knew about each other. They would find out.
Mister Nathan Brown was grinning like a big cat over there.
***
She was losing him. In a moment, he would be lost.
Like an angler vying for a seven-foot sturgeon on three-pound test line, everything was happening under an oblique surface, dimly translucent and only faintly penetrable to her intuitive examination. It was a shocking revelation, when understanding came to her. She could lose Jean Gagnon. Right here, right now. She could lose him.
She thought of her own life over the last four years, then thought of poor Jean’s. Jail, Afghanistan, the kidnapping, everything. The fire, the police, the people in this town.
We deserve better.
Janet: You deserve better, we deserve better.
She felt a burn in her guts, a kind of declaration of intent.
Everything inside of Jean had been taken away, through little fault of his own. Janet and Jean sat in her living room and talked it out. Since he was a free man, they were planning for Jean to sleep on her couch again. The adults had a fire going, and Ashley was in bed for the night. The sounds of Jason’s television in the basement came to them, hammy, tinned laughs echoed up the back hallway and through her cramped kitchen.
“I don’t know.” Jean had a tone of hopelessness, as she brought herself to focus on listening, really listening. “To restore the front entrance using old-fashioned, original materials, in the proper style, it’s really expensive.”
Janet was the last person in the world to offer advice or try to push Jean, but he looked absolutely defeated. His dark eyes were downcast and filmy-looking.
“Maybe you can frame in some doors, cheaper ones.” All it took was a few sticks of lumber and some plywood…a good brush and some stain.
Don often talked about jobs over the dinner table. She knew a fair bit about carpentry work.
“I suppose you’re right. Maybe the soot could be power-washed off the bricks, and two-by-sixes are cheap enough.” He debated this gloomily for a while. “It won’t be so beautiful anymore. I’m not much of a carpenter.”
She suppressed a smile at his seriousness.
“The porches are big jobs.”
“Maybe the insurance company will pay off.” Janet grimaced. “I wouldn’t want Paul Watts after me, not if I was them.”
The company had hung up the phone on Jean rather abruptly, and he’d given up on trying.
“As for the piano, and a few other items, the price just keeps going down, the longer what’s his name keeps thinking about it. The hutch may take a while to sell. I’ve got this crazy idea I saw one at a sale somewhere, and it went for like, maybe thirty-five hundred.”
Jean was just a kid, out with his parents at the time.
“All I can say, Janet, is that I’ve got a few grand in the bank. I got maybe five hundred in my pocket. There seems to be a fair bit of food in the house, thanks to Polly. I should be able to keep going for a couple of months, maybe even longer if I can get welfare or something.”
His eyebrows rose at the thought of a case-worker coming around to what was essentially a small mansion for a home visitation. They would kick up some kind of a fuss. This is no town for honest men, he thought. He had a kind of dread of being unable to cope.
“Is that what’s bothering you? You’ll get over all this stuff that’s happened. People will forget about it, eventually.”
Something let go inside of Jean.
“I’m ashamed to inflict myself on you.”
Look at all the trouble I've caused...
An inner torment twisted his features, his posture one of abject shame.
“Look at all the trouble I’ve caused, look at the problems I’ve caused you and the kids.”
Jean was slumped on the end of the couch, leaning away from Janet. She put her hand up to his cheek. Today and yesterday, Jean hadn’t bothered to shave. Thick stubble rewarded this stretch at intimacy.
“All the things they said about you. They’re not true.” She tried to explain.
Tears sprung into his eyes.
Did Jean believe all the negativity? Oh, God.
“It’s not your fault, Jean.”
Was Jean buying into all the things they said about him?
“It just seems that no matter what I do, something fucks up.” He groaned through a wash of tears. “There are times when I wonder how I’m supposed to get through the next few hours…or minutes…”
Janet gently drew him closer, holding his head against her chest, her heart thumping loudly in her ears. It was so hard to speak sometimes. Maybe he could feel it against his cheek. To think she once feared intimacy with him, but he clearly needed her badly.
“We’ll get through this.” She crooned, as the big, strong man known as Jean Gagnon wept in her arms like a little lost boy, with all the troubles in the world upon him.
Upon hearing that, he just cried harder, body surging with great, wracking shudders, all of his emotions at their most basic physical level. A dam burst, and it was all coming out at once. His body was wracked by spasms of grief, shattering in intensity, as he shook in her arms.
“Jean, Jean, Jean. I woke up this morning with you in my house, and for all I know, this is love.”
It was a relief just to tell him about it, and come what may. This feeling put all trepidation, all the angst regarding mere sex into perspective. She kissed him on the forehead, and nodded into his big, dark, wet eyes. He stopped sniffling, and struggled to get upright. He gazed at her in wonder.
“I’ve known I was in love with you for a month now.” Jean stammered. “I was afraid of what you might think, I’ve been afraid of what you might say. Well, that changes everything.”
Then they were giggling in each other’s arms and smooching like a pair of teenage fools.
***
The coyote tirelessly skulked around the town, sleeping behind dumpsters, eating out of recycle bins behind the local restaurants, and biding his time. He was a grey spirit flitting through the shadows. He had a lot on his mind these days, but his nose and his feet were restless.
He observed the routine of the town and the habits of its residents. He had attuned himself to the rhythm of the town, for timing is everything. If necessary, he could escape across the ice into Quebec at any time. But what if he escaped and then the ice broke up? He might want to come back, as well. That was the essence of timing. Those big hills were always over there, always beckoning, calling.
He laid plans, and then scrapped them, only to make more plans and scrap them too.
This silent wraith of the northland learned. He taught himself every alley, every short-cut, every walking trail and park, every driveway and vacant lot. It wasn’t difficult to evade a few stray dogs, undisciplined and noisy creatures that they were. They haunted the back parking lots, the overgrown by-ways behind the homes, the overflowing waste bins. He familiarized himself with every minute of every person of interest’s daily routine. Argh. He bared his teeth…some of these tomcats these days, you’d think they were on steroids. But the stranger decided discretion was better than valor. The coyote nonchalantly kept going, although he gave the creature a little space out of mutual respect. The big orange tabby cat, face masked and scarred by thousands of encounters, squatted and watched him go by with disdain.
The occasional over-stimulated tomcat who was too dumb to back down usually got himself a good sound thrashing. It was rare to find one willing to take a re-match.
"I'll kick your ass, kitty-cat."
Coyote learned which trees sheltered possums and squirrels, which brush-pile had a rabbit under it, which banked-up heap of yard clippings had a mouse colony under it.
You never went hungry in a city.
The coyote knew what he wanted, and he wasn’t letting go for nothing or no one.
He was a single-minded individual and all his efforts were directed to one purpose, a purpose in which a certain big old house on River Road played a major role.
The Coyote knew the area around Jean Gagnon’s house very well.
He had plans for Mister Gagnon.
He had big plans for Mister Gagnon.
He found himself playing it out, over and over again in his mind, savoring the feelings that he got, knowing that when the moment came, the reality could be sweeter than ever imagined.
“Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions,” an old proverb.
In the meantime, all he had to do was to survive, and stay out of people’s way, and think about things. For someone of his talents, it was surprisingly easy.
The thing for now was to conserve his inner resources, to build up his strength again.
He would need all of his energy, perhaps more than he had, for the task that lay ahead.
Those last changes, from coyote into raccoon and then back again, one or two other creatures as well, had taken everything he had in him, to the extent that he still didn’t feel fully recovered. The coyote would be happy enough if he never saw the owl again. That creature was giving him the creeps lately, what with all his self-professed objectivity. Non-judgmental. Hah. Now that guy was just sick.
The sheer blind genius of it came to him in a vision. If he couldn’t take Jean Gagnon’s half a million dollars, then he could sure as shooting take his life. Maybe even his ever-loving soul. But for that the magic would have to be strong.
END
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