Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

  Through the doorway to the living room, Robert saw Allan fidgeting nervously with his hands, rocking from one foot to the other, watching him watching. From a distance, the scabs on his flesh seemed to bundle around where his hair would grow. As though he’d actually ripped his own hair out by the roots. Maybe that’s what he’d done.

  After the tenth ring, Robert set the phone back in its cradle.

  “She’s not answering, Allan,” he said, in as reasonable a tone as he could manage. “Where’s Sharon?”

  “I told you. She’s gone.” Allan smiled.

  Robert was trembling again—worse than at Canadian Tire, worse than he was after the worms.

  “I’m going to find her,” he muttered, and pushed past Allan into the living room. “If she’s here. . . .” He turned and glared back at Allan.

  But Allan just shrugged. “Go look,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Robert swore, and hurried down the short hallway to the rest of the cottage. There were only three other rooms—two bedrooms and a washroom—and it didn’t take Robert more than five minutes going through them to confirm Allan’s story.

  Sharon was gone.

  “I know all about you,” said Allan as Robert came back into the living room.

  “Is that so?” said Robert.

  “I called around.” Allan had an almost comically smug expression on his face. “I thought about helping you, at first.”

  I’m not the one who needs help, thought Robert. But he kept quiet.

  “People say you were a draft dodger. Didn’t want to go to Viet Nam, so picked Muskoka instead.” Allan’s hands trembled as he brought them up to his chin. “That true?”

  “I came up here from the States,” said Robert.

  “It is true, isn’t it?” Blood smeared across his chin, over his lips, as Allan’s hands drew circles on his face.

  “Where is Sharon, Allan?” Robert felt his fists bunching, and willed them open again.

  Allan snorted derisively. “Oh for Christ’s sake, Robert, work it out.” He gestured around him with bloody hands. “You saw for yourself that she’s not in the house. Did you see her car out there? What, do you think I drove it into the lake? Think about it. She went back to your cabin, like I told you.”

  Robert didn’t answer at first, but Allan had a point. The car was gone, and Allan was really in no shape to have disposed of it with any efficiency.

  “I’ll call again before we leave,” said Robert finally. “Look, Allan . . . .” He stepped forward.

  But Allan put up his hand. “So you bought a plot of land, put up a sign and cleared the driveway. Built yourself a shack. Then you just stayed on. I guess you put down roots pretty firm here.”

  Robert stopped. “It’s a good place,” he said.

  “It’s a shitty place.” Allan leaned against the windows, the skin of his shoulders making a rubber noise on the glass. “Sharon wanted to buy up here. But it’s shitty. Mosquitoes every summer, snow up to your ass every winter, two fucking days in the fall when the colours change, and then it rains until November. And this!” He gestured outside to the naked trees, their twisting branches a caricature of Allan’s own twig-thin arms. “The fucking worm!”

  “It’s where I am,” said Robert reasonably.

  “It’s where your roots are, Thacker.” Allan grinned. “These trees have roots too. And from the looks of them, I think they’ll have to come down next year.” He leaned forward, bare ass squealing obscenely along the pane. “Dead wood.”

  Robert regarded Allan, and it occurred to him: Sharon was fine. The only person who had come out of this relationship with any damage was Allan Tefield.

  “You’ve really screwed up,” he said. “You know that, don’t you, Allan?”

  “Go back to Sharon, you asshole.” Allan sneered, showing his white, perfect teeth. “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? Go back to Sharon. That’s where you belong.”

  “All right,” said Robert. “But before I go—tell me what happened to you.”

  “The worms.”

  “The worms didn’t do this. What happened, Allan?”

  “Eaten,” he said, eyes down. “Eaten by the worm.”

  At that, Robert made up his mind: Sharon could wait. Right now, it was Allan who needed his help.

  “Come on,” said Robert. “Let’s find your clothes.”

  “No clothes.”

  He wasn’t going to argue—Allan was beyond reasoning, and Robert wanted them both out of there as fast as possible. “All right. Then I’ll get a blanket from the truck to cover you up. We’re going to Bracebridge. I’m taking you to a hospital.”

  “Hospital?”

  “I think we’d better,” said Robert. “Don’t you, Allan?”

  The emergency room at South Muskoka Memorial was busy. There had been a pileup on Highway 11 just north of Gravenhurst, and the waiting room and the hallways leading off it were a conduit for paramedics and their patients. The early afternoon heat was filled with the sounds of sirens as more ambulances pulled in.

  Robert waited until the latest ambulance had cleared the entrance, then led Allan to the admitting desk. The nurse there was young, barely out of her teens. She looked first at him, and then at Allan. Her eyes betrayed only a little of what she must have felt seeing him.

  “I found him like this,” explained Robert. “In his cottage. He’s in pretty bad shape.”

  “I can see,” she said. Allan was wearing the cotton blanket from the truck’s seat, clutched around him like a poncho against the ER ward’s air-conditioned cool. His scalp was beginning to bleed again, and it covered his face in a deep pink sheen. “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know, exactly.” Robert leaned closer to the nurse, and whispered: “I think it may be self-inflicted.”

  “Like hell.” Allan sat down in one of the chairs, glared across the desk at the nurse.

  “I didn’t think he should be left like that,” said Robert.

  The nurse looked at Robert suspiciously. She was about to say something when an older nurse came up behind her with a stack of papers. She set the stack down on a bare spot on the desk.

  “Is it life-threatening?” she asked Robert, and when he said no, sent the two of them over to a vacant row of chairs, along with a set of forms to fill out.

  They didn’t wait for as long as Robert feared. Three more stretchers came in from the pileup—from what Robert could overhear, there had been eight cars involved—and once the paperwork was out of the way from those, an orderly came with a wheelchair to take Allan away. He was as young as the nurse behind the admissions desk, his blond hair spiked like a hockey player’s. He gave Robert an apologetic smile as they helped Allan up and into the chair.

  “What happened to you?” he asked as Allan settled.

  “The worm,” Allan said, staring into his lap.

  The orderly looked at Robert, and he shrugged.

  “Tent caterpillars,” said Robert. “Thinks they did it to him. They’re enough to make anyone buggy, I guess.”

  “It’s bad this year,” said the orderly, pushing the wheelchair along the corridor. “Did you hear about the pileup?”

  Robert made a non-committal noise.

  “I hear it’s caterpillars that caused it.”

  “Come again?” Robert slipped behind the orderly as they passed the stretcher of what might have been one of the pileup’s victims: a middle-aged man in a blood-stained Blue Jays shirt. He had a compression bandage on his scalp, a plasma bag hooked up on the IV tower, and he stared glassily at the ceiling.

  “A truck hit a slick of them, crossing the highway.” Once past the stretcher, the orderly slowed to let Robert catch up. “Tried to brake, but the tires couldn’t get any traction. They were like an oil slick. So the truck jackknifed, and the cars behind couldn’t stop.” He gave Robert a secretive litt
le smile. “Weird shit.”

  Robert didn’t know whether to laugh. It sounded like another wives’ tale—When the summer worms crossed the highway, they’d pile so thick you couldn’t drive. It was ridiculous: almost as ridiculous as. . . .

  As a nest of summer worms the size of a house.

  The orderly stopped outside a pair of double doors. “I’m afraid this is where we get off, sir. You can wait in the lounge, if you like.”

  “All right.” Robert’s throat was dry, and he cleared it. “I’ll do that.”

  Before he could leave, Allan’s head twisted to face him. “It was just two years!” he snarled. “That’s all we were together!”

  “Goodbye, Allan.”

  “Two years!” he called as the orderly wheeled him through the doors.

  Robert went back to the waiting room, fumbling in his pockets for a quarter for the pay phone. By the time he finished dialling his number, his hands were shaking.

  Sharon answered the phone on the fourth ring, and when she spoke, Robert nearly collapsed with relief.

  “Are you all right, Bobby?” Her voice was smooth, the worry in it no more than a vague undercurrent.

  “I was at your cottage,” he replied. “I’m all right. I don’t know about your ex, though.”

  “He’s there?” The worry turned into a rising alarm. “Bobby, you’ve got to come home.”

  Robert cupped the mouthpiece close. “He’s in pretty bad shape,” he said. “I’ve got him at the hospital in Bracebridge.”

  “I know,” said Sharon quickly. “I was at the cottage today. Look, just come home, okay? Don’t make it worse.”

  “I should stick around,” said Robert. “Make sure everything’s okay.”

  Now Sharon’s voice grew sharp.

  “Don’t bother. I’ve already called his parents in Toronto. I’ll call them now, tell them where he is.”

  “Sharon, will you please tell me what—”

  “Just come home!”

  Then Sharon said something softly, and when Robert didn’t hear, she repeated:

  “I need you, Bobby. I need you here.”

  And she hung up.

  Robert nearly missed his turn-off, and when he saw it, he braked so hard he thought he was going to spin out. He wheeled the car around, barely checking the oncoming traffic, and his tires spun on the gravel of the side road. He passed the TWIN OAKS CAMPGROUND-1/4 MILE sign at what must have been double the speed limit, and only slowed when he hit the first steep bend in the road.

  The caterpillars had caused the pileup. And the maple tree over Robert’s house was so enshrouded in caterpillar silk, it looked like rolls of cotton candy. And Allan Tefield had no hair, and when Robert asked him why, he blamed the worm. And Sharon was alone at Twin Oaks.

  And she had wanted him back there. She had insisted: I need you here, she said.

  Robert didn’t even look at the trees until he was almost at home.

  Robert stopped the truck at the foot of his driveway. He felt his heart racing, his breath raw in his throat.

  The sign at the entrance was nearly illegible, the silk had covered it so thickly. All the trees facing the road were draped with silk, and the driveway was obstructed by wide, worm-mottled curtains that caught shafts of afternoon sun like columns of dust. Robert heard the noise of the summer worms’ mouths over the pickup’s idling engine.

  They had sealed the campground off—nearly as effectively as they had the maple tree this morning.

  Robert threw the truck into low gear, and gravel crunched under his tires as he crept up the driveway.

  The first curtain of summer worms stretched like nylon hose where the grille pushed against it. Finally, the curtain came unmoored and the silk descended on the front windshield, like a sheet thrown over a fresh bed. Robert had to stop himself from flicking on the windshield wipers: there were too many worms; they would smear. He kept his foot steady on the accelerator, and the truck lumbered forward into the next curtain. His hands trembled on the steering wheel as another layer of silk fell in front of him, and another.

  By the fifth curtain, he had to stop. The windshield was completely opaque, and even the back and side windows were so thickly plastered that he couldn’t make out anything beyond the vaguest of shapes. He guessed that he was maybe a third of the way up, but it was hard to tell: even in winter he wouldn’t have taken the driveway this slowly.

  Robert turned off the engine. There were no two ways about it: he’d have to walk it from here. He opened the door and pushed the membranes of silk aside. It made a sound like tearing cotton batten, and maybe a half-dozen worms fell lightly on his arm.

  He resisted the urge to draw back, shake them away. If he were going to make the walk, Robert would have to get used to the feeling of worms on his skin. He opened the door the rest of the way and climbed out of the truck.

  The worms had made his driveway into a tunnel of white. Every tree was enshrouded with them, and the silk extended through the branches overhead to make a thick ceiling. The bright afternoon seemed overcast in here, under their shadow. Looking back through the tunnel his truck had made, Robert thought he could almost see the clean sunlight on the road. But the shrouds distorted distance, and it was hard to tell for sure.

  The truck itself was nearly as well-disguised. The silk draped across it from back to front, and the caterpillars moved across it in thick clusters.

  Arm in front of him to ward off the caterpillars that dangled from threads every few feet, Robert walked around to the back of the pickup. The bag containing the canisters of insecticide were packed back near the cab, barely visible through the mess of worms and silk. Robert reached into it, his hand gathering more worms as he did so, and pulled out the bag.

  Robert shut his eyes for a moment, then turned away from the road he imagined he could see and walked toward the next wall of worms.

  They gathered on him as he moved. His hands always touched the webbing first, and were sometimes black with the worms up past the wrists. But there were enough worms for all of him. They burrowed into his hair, and he was certain he felt them under his collar, moving down his back, among the copse of thick hairs that grew on his shoulders. When he looked down, he saw them all over his jeans, clustering by the hundreds around his knees and thighs, the tops of his boots. He kept his mouth shut and snorted whenever he exhaled to blow away the ones on his lip.

  But he didn’t brush them off. To do so would be to admit to the spiralling terror in his belly, and such an admission would paralyze him—or worse, send him crashing into the trees, running blind.

  He was nearly blind now. The farther along the driveway he got, the more intricate the weave became. Every few feet he had to clear another shift of silk, and at times it was only the feeling of gravel under his feet that reassured him he was still on the driveway at all.

  He stopped once, to bend over and breathe, shake the sweat from his hair. It was greenhouse-hot here, but the air seemed to hold little oxygen. Worms fell to the ground as he straightened and pushed forward.

  He knew the campground was getting closer as the silk in front of him began to glow with the yellow of the afternoon sun. At first it was just a dim hue, like the sun through a thinning patch of cloud on an overcast day. As Robert went on, the light grew, making each sheet of silk more luminescent than the last. Finally, with scarcely more than a sheet to go, Robert saw the bright shapes of his campground through the glowing threads of silk.

  He ran forward, nearly dropping the insecticide as he went, and burst from the wall of the nest, trailing silk like a bridal train. He shook off his hand, wiped the worms from his lips and opened his mouth to shout:

  “Sharon!”

  The campground was silent. The silk from the maple over his house now extended over all the trees. The canopy sloped down in places to touch the shrubs and saplings nearer the ground, in the clean parabolas of ci
rcus-tent roofs. There was a clearing in the trees maybe a hundred feet in diameter, which Robert used mostly as a cul-de-sac and parking lot for the day-trippers. The worms had left it a barren oasis of gravel and scrub grass.

  “Sharon!” he shouted again. “You there? You all right?”

  His cabin was nearly invisible under the silk, a peaked cube of shadow. No sound came from inside.

  Almost absently, Robert peeled the silk from his shoulders and strode across the clearing to the far edge. He tried to imagine how Sharon must feel in there—cocooned inside his already-too-small cabin, choking on what must be stifling heat. The worms hadn’t bothered her the day before; she’d barely given them a second glance these past few weeks. But this. . . .

  The cabin was too quiet. Christ, he thought, what’s happened to Sharon while I’ve been gone?

  I need you here.

  Robert started toward the cabin. If he’d made it up the driveway on his own, he surely wouldn’t have a problem making it through a few layers of silk into his cabin.

  But the silk was tougher here. Robert had to use his jackknife to cut through it, and the sound of his passage was like ripping fabric. There were fewer worms on the curtains, but the task was no easier for that: in the worms’ place were row upon row of hard cocoons, brittle like plastic and some as large as Robert’s thumb.

  He groped on, cutting and advancing, until he found his cabin—not by sight, but by touch. He had come through at a point in the middle of the south wall, underneath the kitchen window. His hand glided up to confirm the glass, the rough metal screen. But before he could withdraw, worms tumbled down onto his head, and he shook them away. Dim yellow light shone out from the kitchen, in the spaces where his hand had cleared the screen of caterpillars.

  “Sharon!” His voice was weak, gasping.

  She didn’t answer, but Robert thought he heard movement inside.