Mary Cyr Read online

  Every time Dug Vanderflutin came to the house with his expansive tales (which is how she thought of him) she hid behind a chair, so that only the top of her head was visible.

  Now and then, as he spoke, she would clear her throat, or rustle a MAD magazine.

  Then she met his son, Ernest, and something made her dislike their family forever.

  But—what had happened to her in those intervening years? Those years he had lost sight of her?

  He wasn’t too sure.

  She had gone to Buenos Aires and learned the tango. She had taken a ship to the Falkland Islands and put flowers on the grave of an English soldier. (Her mother’s youngest brother, who was killed in 1982.) She had supposedly had an affair with an Argentine poet.

  “Of the Che Guevara–Fidel Castro stamp,” she wrote him once. “Always devoted to a cause—just like the best of us should be.”

  Then she came back to Canada, and tried to fit in. But with whom, John no longer knew.

  5.

  SHE LEFT JOHN’S PROTECTION SOME YEARS AGO, AND HAD MET many Toronto activists. Could one of them be writing against her? Perhaps all of them. Her gay friends she did not like anymore, her former allies in Greenpeace she refused to give money to. It could be anyone. She was now called among other things “anti-gay.”

  “I’m supposed to like gay men,” Mary wrote. “But I find a lot of them too fruity—and don’t talk to me about being self-righteous; they have that up the ying-yang.”

  That is, in this world there were things one was required to like, or at least to accept. Mary Cyr did not seem able to do that as well as most. Nor did she seem to care. But John now knew she was only turned to anger when someone attacked her or her loved ones first. And her statement about gays came he found out because someone in that community had used her kindness once too often.

  “People mistake activism for morality,” she wrote to him some years before. “And are disgusted by morality that shows activism for what it really is.”

  She once wrote him that she knew many of the male Canadian writers. Two had dedicated books to her. She had even asked John to allow himself to be interviewd by one of them.

  “A Nova Scotia genius, a Percy rock of a man who bagpipes his way along the crags of Cape Breton.”

  Not too long afterwards she had argued with that certain genius. Not too long afterwards she had hidden his bagpipes, and not long afterwards she threw a bottle and cut him on the cheek. She was fined and made to go to anger management classes. She would phone John about the course and how well she was controlling her anger.

  Yes, some writers were great, grand people she wrote, from one end of the country to the other. Her favourite was Jack Hodgins. But some she told him, were unconsciously shallow. That is, she said, there is no one so transparent as certain Canadian writers who want to prove themselves by protecting the rights of women. Those were the writers, unfortunately, who had befriended her for a few years in Toronto.

  You could smell them a mile away. “They are,” she wrote to John, “MPPFs.”

  Then she put in brackets: mincing, preening, pandering fucks.

  Trouble was, she never seemed to recognize them at the time. She had always wanted to be an artist and to be accepted. After her falling-outs, she sounded vindictive—perhaps jealous. But in a certain sense, John realized, she was right. So often these people had used her to benefit from her grandfather’s publishing house, and to get nominated for the literary prize given annually by her family. Many of them guessed she had something to do with both. And many times she never caught on.

  So what she said always had a reason behind it that was more complex and far less self-serving than her outbursts suggested.

  * * *

  —

  Mary’s antics and her statements began to appear in papers here and there. Once she was considered an enemy, women disparaged her and men made up stories about her sex life—or her lack thereof—and the trap of fame began to close about her. A boyfriend was furious he had not won her grandfather’s literary award and told her so:

  “I hung around here for months—months—for what?” he said. Looking at him with a bemused smile she realized he hadn’t caught on to the rapaciousness of his words.

  So she had simply telephoned John one night and left a message on his phone that said:

  “I’ve caught on.”

  Then in final defiance she turned away from professors and established literary men, and women, and what was surely fashion-conscious sycophants more than a few after her for her money, and came to Mexico—but why? What was the reason?

  John dropped the bottle into the trash can at the end of the bed. And took out his puffer and inhaled. He looked over a list of her Canadian and American friends. (That is, some were very influential and he had jotted some names down.) Of course he hated them all—why shouldn’t he? They had more than hated him. Where were they now when she needed them?

  Well, wherever they were, they were not in Mexico campaigning for her freedom. Some were writing about her family being industrial monsters.

  He tried to catch his breath as he looked over his notes. He looked too over the doctor’s prescription.

  It was reported in two papers she was American. Her British mother had lived in Roanoke, Virginia. John was not at all cynical, but if a movie was made, they would need her to be American. Hell, the Americans could do anything. They could revise anything.

  And that was a danger too.

  Anyway, Mary had always considered herself Canadian. Up until two weeks ago, who she was or was not, American, Canadian, British or Australian, would have never mattered. Two hours after a young boy was found dead in her hotel room she was brought to the small police station at the top of the hill, handcuffed and leg-shackled (Why? John had asked the constable seven times already, but both knew why—it was the novelty—or júbilo), surrounded by arid sand and weeds, followed by a dozen curious people, some tiny women, Mexican Maya and a few local officials, very stern and important, one policeman eating his lunch, a bocadillo de lomo, who turned to wait for the photographer to take pictures. This seemed to be the main point—that is, the heat, the dust and the pictures, with her trying to manoeuvre in leg shackles, looking back over her shoulder. It was that picture alone that convinced John she was innocent.

  Then they took her into a room, searched her, kept her without charges, and at some point were about to let her go. But then over the hours things changed. They looked terribly disappointed in her. They had found out she was Mary Cyr, whose family owned Tarsco Mining.

  At night in their beautiful seventeenth-century village, vampire bats, with their flat pig noses, skirted the air, looking for blood.

  Already two or three local women couldn’t help but go to the cell window.

  “Hey, lady—you want to be my amiga?” one laughed. This was Lucretia Margarita Rapone, who was reputed to be scandalous. (At least, the porter told John this with a smile that seemed to suggest Mary Cyr was now in for it.)

  “Could you please stop being idiots?” Mary asked, clutching a cigarette in her bruised hands. “I have done nothing—except, well—you see, if you think about it long and hard, I came here to save you from yourself. Other than that I have done nada de nada—¡no mia melesto!”

  Nothing at all—don’t bother me.

  The most spectacular picture of her was in the back of a black Mexican police car with a yellow stripe along the roof, taken at night by that young woman with the nose ring, showing only one part of Mary’s face illuminated in a tragic glance over her shoulder. That was the picture that made it look as if she was fleeing.

  “Dama Mary Cyr,” it proclaimed. “Trabaca de murte.”

  The picture would be published in the next day or two all across North America.

  The rumour said there were other cases.

  “Trabaca de murte.”

  Dama Mary Cyr worked a murder. The picture had been asked for in Mexico City, Montreal and New York.

/>   “Why New York?” Mary said, trying her best to remain light-hearted. “I’ve done nothing there except shop—”

  It took Mexico to catch her; for they were brave enough to stop this behaviour.

  Tomó México para atraparla.

  That is what people in the town of Oathoa were now so proud about. Especially people like Lucretia Rapone, who lived with her older sister, Principia Gloton, and Principia’s two children, Ángel and Gabriella, both of whom had lost a friend when Victor died—and both of whom went every day to search for the smaller boy, Florin. Ángel was not just angry he was sickened by all of this. He walked about as if he was in a daze—

  The women who looked at her from the cell window—taking turns standing on a garbage can—said:

  “All of us know what it is like to bleed and suffer, and you do not—but you will.”

  6.

  MARY MANAGED TO TELL JOHN THAT IT WAS AN ACCIDENTAL meeting with that boy Victor two short weeks before. She had turned to go to a restaurant and lost an earring among the cobblestones. She bent to look for it just after dark. And there was Victor, a cute little slavishly nice boy who helped her find it.

  “Well, maybe slavish is the wrong word to use,” John cautioned.

  “Yes, perhaps.”

  He was with a group of other boys.

  “What other boys?”

  “Oh, those kids, young boys and girls, who were selling lotto tickets—they come every couple of days. Sometimes he liked to sell tapes of birds.”

  She said Victor came the next day and asked if he could run any errand, or be her guide for two dollars a day. (She gave him twenty dollars and bought him dinner at Restaurante Polo.) Yes, he looked at the twenty dollars as if he had just won some gold.

  He took her to a ruined burial ground, and an old village made out of falling stones. They hacked through the trees and saw howler monkeys. He told her about Jaguars and she told him she drove one. There was a moment when she was overcome by his determination to be the best guide she had—and he was earnest and purposeful, arriving always at nine in the morning in a faded white shirt and grey trousers—and trying his best, she noticed, to hide his desperation—his poverty. His wrists were almost black with dirt. Or no—in a way, he didn’t know he had to hide it. Then she discovered something else: he did not arrive at nine—he arrived as early as seven, and waited outside the foyer of the resort, pacing back and forth. Then, after the mine disaster, something happened. He was more uncertain. He told her he would give her a tape, but he never did. She was, she said, ready to go home, when they found him in her spare bedroom. He was dead.

  John asked her if she noticed anything else.

  “He wanted to hide—he was hiding—from someone—he wanted to give me a tape—but he said he would give it to me only when I was leaving. I thought it was twittering birds, because he had a lot of tapes of them. Twice he went to get it—and then came back and said he didn’t want to give it to me yet.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know—but I should have left sooner.”

  “He had to trust you before he gave it over—and he had to make sure you could get away with taking it—he was probably worried about you as much as anything.”

  “Other boys came searching for him—two or three times.”

  “I see,” he said. “He asked to sleep in your spare room—or did he?”

  “No—I was too stupid to ask him to—I certainly didn’t think he was there that night—I asked him three times what he was nervous about—why he was scared—but he didn’t tell me. I am sure he would have given me that tape if he had a chance. But he was scared of me—it was as if he wanted to be certain he could trust me—because he did not really trust anyone.”

  “So there were two beds—or two bedrooms.”

  “Bedrooms?” she said.

  “Yes—and where did he stay if he was not staying with you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Somewhere near the Calle de Republic—but you see where is his tiny brother, Florin. I am worried about him.”

  “Well, I will find that out.”

  “Okay—find out why it happened—please.”

  7.

  IT WAS ONCE SAID ON CBC RADIO BY A PROFESSOR FROM OTTAWA that she had met the poor, but she had never really known them. But that was not true about her—John believed it was what was said about her by the middle class, who pretended to know everything—in fact she had met the poor everywhere and was more knowledgeable about them than were a host of devoted middle-class activists that he himself had met over the years.

  But once she had met activists and doers, she was encouraged to think of the poor as “something else.” That is, not as poor but as underprivileged. Oh, there was a vast difference in those words. One said what was: the poor were poor. One said they were not like you and me.

  Before, when she was spoiled, she had been far too clever to have causes. “I shouldn’t have come on this trip,” she told him. “But I had to prove something to myself—finally.”

  “Well, that is for another day,” John said. “My main concern is to keep you safe, and to get you the hell home.”

  “No one wants me home,” she said.

  “That is not true at all—Garnet and Perley both do—very much.”

  “Back to a snowstorm,” she said, “blizzard-like conditions—whiteouts on the bay—eating a plate of smelts—that would be fine!”

  John had been her unofficial protector since her father had died when she was twelve, and he slept in a trailer on their back lot for weeks during the summer when she was home. Always taking his vacation to coincide with her arrival. In that way he watched as she grew up. He loved her—but he knew she had opportunity with a hundred other far more important men. (One was almost a goddamn prince.) She knew movie stars and premiers, prime ministers and famous hockey players, could make them fall for her with a glance of those beautiful brown eyes, and he had succumbed too—and he was no different. Well, after she was herself twenty-five.

  “Yes, I am old enough to be her father—so what?” he would say to himself as he drove the highways at night. But to him it would have been a betrayal of the family to act upon it.

  The pill made him tired. He went back to his room. He felt the night coming on, and his room little by little darkened so the cheap frescoes and cheaper furniture could not be seen anymore.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning he woke, sweating and dizzy, and rose without remembering exactly where he was. His face was thin and pale. He was not well now. He knew it—but he kept it, like so much else, to himself. Or in most ways, from himself. That is, he had had a heart attack the year before and was on various medications. He was trying to get off booze but as yet hadn’t. He had not informed the Cyr family about any of this.

  He remembered the sunlight and how it hurt his eyes. He fumbled for his sunglasses, and searched for the pill to help him breathe. He had to do something. He had to go out again, and follow the street past the jail. It was now after two in the afternoon and it got dark early. He supposed Mary wanted to see him too. And he wondered about bail for her—though he was sure her lawyer had already tried.

  John had already solved some of it.

  Victor must have known something or seen something about the mine—he must have come to her with a tape of someone saying something, perhaps—and was worried. Why? Because he hid Florin. Why was it older people or an older person he worried about? Because he did not go to the police, so it had to be someone with some power. And why did he want to tell Mary Cyr?

  Because his father worked at the mine? Because she was an American (he would think) who could help him?

  And why did he not tell her sooner? Simple. Because he had something to give her and was continually being watched, and he did not want to put her in danger. His little life was heroic.

  At first John had speculated that the reason the boy was killed was that he sold lotto tickets and there was a fi
ght over this—that is what the old porter told him Victor did. But now he felt the boy had been beaten and left near the villa, not to have the death blamed on Ms. Cyr but to have it blamed on the boys he was in competition with. (That is, a fight among boys, which John had first suspected himself.)

  But Victor had managed to make it back to her place, and what followed was the result.

  This is what John already knew.

  He went to the restaurant and had cereal and café con leche. He went to the reception desk and asked for a map.

  Mary said that Victor lived somewhere near the Calle de Republic. So that is where he would go. But she got the name wrong—slightly; it was called the Calle Republica.

  Mary had told him that Victor’s mother died and his father was killed in the mine explosion. She said she asked him three times about the tape he wanted to give her, and he said one night, “No más me molestes,” and looked about as if frightened, so she nodded and did not ask him again.

  “Ah,” John said.

  “Ah what?” Mary said. “Ah yes or ah no—I think it is an ah yes.”

  John shrugged and for the moment said nothing else. That is, John did not think he was waiting for Mary Cyr specifically—but she was one of a dozen tourists he might have approached. John was also sure he would have given the tape to her if he had not been worried about his four-year-old brother, Florin.

  So in a way it was accidental that this had happened.

  But John knew already that this would only be if you discounted the input of Mary Cyr herself—the idea that she met the boy accidentally, and did not have some other plan. In his entire life John had never seen her without another plan—a secondary road on which she travelled parallel to the road bystanders believed she was on. So she might very well have sought Victor out by the dropping of an earring onto the cobblestones. She might have badgered him to give her information about the mine disaster, told him who she was (or he found out from others that she was the coal lady), and he just might have worried that he could not trust her. When he realized he could, it was too late.