Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

  As he stood wondering, it occurred to Robert that he had been wrong about the silence. The nest wasn’t quiet at all. In the darkness there was a drone of tiny jaws, working steadily at the greenery they had locked inside.

  Robert started as another sound came up. It was the whistle from his kettle, high and insistent as the water boiled away. When he went inside to quiet it, his hand was trembling.

  The morning went badly.

  The Torsdales were the first of the campers to rise, at just before seven, and when Jim, their youngest boy, saw the work the worms had done in the night, he screamed like a girl. The scream got Don and Jackie Torsdale out of bed—although their daughter Beth slept until they shook her a moment later—and before seven fifteen, Robert figured, the other two families that made up his camp clientele this morning were also wide awake.

  When he came out of the shed twenty minutes later with the canister of insecticide over his shoulder and his coveralls, goggles and filter mask on, he noted wryly that those two trailers were in the process of packing up.

  “Hey! That stuff’s harmful!” shouted Mrs. Poole, setting her fists on her wide hips and glaring across the nearly empty campground while her husband disassembled the canopy on their trailer behind her. “Don’t you go sprayin’ it while there’s people here!”

  No danger of that, he thought, not for much longer. Then he pulled aside his filter mask to answer: “Don’t worry, Mrs. Poole. I’m following the instructions.”

  “They don’t mean nothin’!” she snapped before turning to her husband. “Hurry up! I don’t wanna stay here no longer than I got to!”

  Robert slipped the mask back over his face and walked over to the spot where the branches hung lowest. The weave was thick here, hanging deep over the wood pile and casting a uniform grey shadow over the sandy soil. If Robert reached up, he could touch the silk with his hand, and even through the blur of the goggles he saw the dark mass of the caterpillars. They crawled outside the nest too, and as he stood there, they dropped in twos and threes, landing to die in the sand or insinuate themselves into the crannies of the wood pile. Absently, Robert brushed at his shoulder.

  Robert unhooked the hose on the end of the canister. It had a long metal nozzle, and he lifted it to the fabric of the nest. The silk felt rough on the end of the nozzle, and Robert hesitated a moment before pushing it through—he was struck by an image of the entire nest bursting, the nozzle a sharp pin to the tree’s balloon, and him trapped, exposed under the weight of a million summer worms.

  But the other option was fire. More than a few landowners in this part of Muskoka used that option readily, and Robert had in the past: just hold a lighter to the silk, watch it catch in gossamer embers and black curls of ash. Nature takes care of itself.

  But he wasn’t about to burn a nest this big. Any fire that could destroy this nest would take the maple tree, his cabin, maybe even the rest of the campground as well.

  The nozzle slid into the nest like a syringe, and Robert squeezed the valve lever. He did it in seven more spots around the tree, until the canister was empty, leaving ragged holes of a size that bullets might make. Finally, he stood back, squinted at his work.

  There was nothing he could see, of course—the silk wrapped it, and even in the harsh morning sunlight, the blackness underneath still clung.

  Robert pulled the goggles off, wiped the condensation from the inside. He skirted around the tree’s perimeter and hurried up the steps into his cabin.

  Robert stripped his coveralls off in the living room, leaving them draped over the sofa, and he ran the water in the shower until it steamed before getting in.

  Robert drove into Gravenhurst white-knuckled. As he turned onto Bethune Drive from the highway, he had to resist the urge to yank down his collar, pull out the worms. His stop at the Beer Store was quick, and the girl who worked at the counter looked at him funny—just for a second, as his twelve-pack of Ex rumbled down the rollers from the storeroom—and once again, he was tempted to brush his shoulders: what had she seen to make her look at him so? He hurried back to his truck, bottles jangling in their case.

  He parked on Muskoka Street and walked to the A&P, where he gathered his groceries like an automaton, filling up the little arm basket by rote: extra-large eggs, butter, bread, a two-litre carton of two percent, a package of bacon, a three-dollar pepper steak from the meat department. Some days, walking the aisles of the A&P, Robert would actually meet three or four people whom he knew by name. Back in ’69, when he came up from Kentucky and started Twin Oaks, he could count on doing so nearly every time he came to town. But Gravenhurst had grown over the past two decades, filled up with too many well-heeled strangers. Retired doctors and lawyers moving up to the brand-new subdivisions by the lakes. Younger families trying to beat the high cost of houses in Toronto. They were transitory, though, just like the summer people.

  Just like the women who passed through Robert’s home from time to time: summer women. Robert had to wait until the light changed behind him before he could pull onto the street, and he thought about it.

  Was Sharon another summer woman? She had escaped her marriage without the obvious damage that some of the others had brought with them; hell, Mary’s husband used to beat her up, and the asshole Lynn had married was cheating with her cousin before she left. They had been on the run, and in retrospect Robert knew he probably should have expected that anyplace they stopped was just a way station.

  But Sharon . . . Where was the damage, what was it in Allan Tefield that she really had to flee? She had said it herself: He’s finished.

  Then he remembered Pat, and her warning phone call.

  The light at Bay Street turned from yellow to red, and Robert put the truck into gear. He gassed it too hard, though, and it lurched as he swung onto the road.

  There was no evidence of the caterpillars in downtown Gravenhurst. But it didn’t seem to matter. At the Canadian Tire, Robert went straight to the men’s room, locked himself in a stall and stripped off his shirt. The raw pungency of his sweat hit his nostrils like belly-gas from road kill. With shaking hands, Robert pulled the sleeves of his shirt inside out, and when he found nothing in its lining, he threw it to the floor. He ran his fingers around his belt-line, reached inside—he was sure he felt something down there, nestling in the warmth—and snapped the elastic of his briefs hard enough to leave a sting. Then he sat down on the edge of the toilet, pants still up, and exhaled a long, jagged sigh.

  The nest was as big as a house. It was bigger than his own house; it would hold a two-storey townhouse and its basement, easy, and still have room for the worms that had spun it.

  Jesus.

  Finally, Robert reached down beside the toilet and pulled on his shirt.

  “Ah, Christ,” he said aloud, fingers fumbling as he did up his buttons.

  He stood then, tucked in his shirttails and left the stall. At the garden section, he picked up five more canisters of insecticide—as many as were left on the barren metal shelf. He paid for them from a roll of Canadian Tire money, and when he got them outside he put the canisters in the back of the pickup. He paused for a moment before getting behind the wheel again, to steady himself.

  “To hell with it,” he said aloud and climbed into the cab. The tent caterpillars had made him twitchy, and it was getting worse the longer he sat and stewed on them.

  When he got to Bay Street, he made a quick right and started off along the winding lake road in the direction of the Tefield cottage. If Sharon had a couple of things to do there, well she could damn well do them with him hanging around. If she didn’t need anything right now, he sure as hell did.

  The late-morning sun played across the ripples on Lake Muskoka like cascading jewellery as the road dipped past it. In the distance, a single motorboat hauled a water-skier in wide loops with a noise that, from this distance, sounded like a model airplane engine, a giant mosquito. Robert barely g
ave it a glance before the lake and the skier vanished behind a high tongue of bedrock.

  If the summer worms had left the Canadian Tire alone, they’d been more conscientious diners along the road to Parker’s Point—hell, by the time he got to the turnoff to their driveway, it looked as though they’d finished every last pea on their plate.

  The trees around here looked dead. Leaves dangled like tattered doilies, and silk strands drifted across the narrow dirt road to catch on the truck’s antenna, flying behind it like spectral pennants.

  The driveway was narrower still, barely wide enough for Robert’s pickup. It should have been a deep green tunnel this time of year, buried under the overhang of stands of mature maple and oak. But the light that filtered through the branches was grey, only occasionally broken by the shadow of one of the few fir trees. The rest were utterly denuded, not a speck of greenery left.

  And the summer worms themselves were nowhere to be seen. Robert couldn’t see a single caterpillar through the entire desolate bramble. They had finished the forest, and then they were gone.

  Robert pulled the truck up behind the Tefield cottage and got out of the cab.

  The packed-earth turnaround behind the cottage was empty, and at first Robert thought Sharon had parked her Volvo around the far side of the cottage, near the boathouse.

  But when he tromped down the steep driveway, what he first took to be her car wasn’t hers at all. It was a yellow Porsche. Its driver’s window was half down, and it was parked just outside the doors to the boathouse, at the far end of the driveway.

  Robert didn’t know what kind of car Allan drove—Sharon didn’t talk about him enough for details like that to stick in Robert’s mind—but from what he’d gathered over the past month, the Porsche was completely in character.

  Which meant, if Pat Shea were any judge of character, he had stumbled into what would at best be a very awkward situation.

  And at worst. . . .

  The damage Sharon Tefield would finally bring from her marriage was only starting.

  Robert turned back to the cottage. It was built high on a ridge so that the lakefront deck stuck out about three feet higher than Robert’s head. The branches rustled in a sudden breeze off the lake. The reflection of those dry branches, the electric sky, jiggled as the wind caressed the panes of the cottage’s immense picture window. Robert couldn’t tell if anyone was up there or not.

  “Hello?” he called, cupping his hands around his mouth.

  The cottage was silent.

  “Everything okay in there?” Robert dropped his hands to his sides and started up the path to the steps onto the deck. “Anyone there?”

  When there was still no answer, Robert started to run.

  “I’m coming up!” he shouted, taking the steps two at a time. He should have driven out last night, he told himself. No matter what Sharon had said.

  He stopped at the top of the stairs, nearly reeling backward off the deck at the sight before him. He grabbed the railing, righted himself and stepped forward.

  “Sharon!”

  She wasn’t anywhere amid the detritus on the deck, and he couldn’t see any movement in the dark beyond the picture windows, but Robert was filled with a sudden dread that she was still here—maybe in the bathroom, maybe locked up in the bedroom. Left there by her crazy ex-husband to rot and die. After he’d worked her over. And maybe after he’d done this to their deck.

  Robert stepped gingerly around the shattered glass that had once been the top of their patio table, through the torn strips of cushion fabric, the thick chunks of foam rubber scattered across the wood.

  Allan must have taken a butcher knife to this, Robert thought. He must have been crazy—completely Goddamn crazy.

  “Who’s that?”

  Robert looked back at the window in time to see a blur of motion—a flash of white flesh, quick across the darkness of the living room and blurred by Robert’s own reflection. The voice had been a man’s, muffled by glass and curtains. It had sounded rough, uncertain.

  “Bob Thacker.” He stepped over to the screen door, which was ajar. He pulled it open, then lifted his hands, palms outward, in a belated gesture of truce. The cottage stank, of liquor and spoiled milk, but he resisted the urge to cover his face. “I’m Robert Thacker,” he said again, squinting around the dim living room. “No trouble, okay?”

  It was a mess in here too. As Robert’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could make out more victims of Allan’s knife. There was a set of pine furniture—sofa, loveseat, and armchair—that had all been overturned. The pillows were sliced to ribbons, and the stuffing was spread across the floor in a way that reminded Robert of the caterpillar nests. There was a large picture on the wall—Robert recognized it as the work of one of the local artists, a watercolour painting of this very cottage, maybe as seen from the boathouse. The glass fronting it had been smashed and lay on the rug in a glittering jumble. A floor lamp with a stem of lacquered birch lay on its side, bulb smashed, and the ceiling fan had been knocked askew. The floor was also dotted with bottles. He bent to pick up a plastic mickey of Captain Morgan’s from a sticky puddle of rum at his feet.

  There was a sudden movement in the room’s far corner, behind the fireplace—like an animal, scrambling back into its hole. Cautiously, Robert crossed the floor to the fireplace.

  “Is that bitch with you?” The fireplace made a bong, a hiss of flesh on metal, as weight shifted against it.

  “I’m alone,” said Robert. Now that he was closer, he saw a single foot protruding from behind the fireplace. The tips of its toes were scabbed black where the nails had been chewed down to nubs. As fast as Robert had seen it, the foot withdrew.

  “Bullshit.”

  Robert stopped, shrugged. “Think what you like,” he said. “It’s just me. Where’s Sharon, Allan?”

  “How should I know?” Pat had been right about his voice, thought Robert—it sounded dried-out, whiskey-cured. “I’m not her keeper.”

  “Did she leave already?” Robert inched forward—he didn’t want to startle Allan, bring on another outburst. “Has she gone?”

  No answer.

  Robert tensed, kept his eye on the corner.

  “Did you do anything to her, Allan?” he asked, struggling to hold the tremor out of his voice.

  “Do anything to her?” A dry chuckle. “No.”

  Robert stepped around the fireplace.

  “I’d like to, I have to admit that. But I don’t really think I could,” he said, reasonably. “Do you?”

  Robert couldn’t answer.

  Nothing in Allan’s voice could have prepared Robert for the sight of him. He was completely naked, and his entire body was freckled with black scabs—including his scalp, which was nearly hairless. From his conversations with Sharon, Robert had placed Allan in his mid-thirties, but the emaciated creature behind the stove might have been in his seventies. His eyes were round and wet under naked brows, and his hollow chest trembled as he breathed. As though he were sobbing.

  “Sucks it out of you,” said Allan Tefield. “Sucks it right out of you.”

  Robert crouched down, reached out to Allan, but he scrambled backward. His hands flashed for an instant, and Robert saw the same thick scabs at their tips as on Allan’s toes.

  “No! Don’t touch!”

  “All right, all right,” said Robert, raising his hands again. “I’m not moving.”

  “Everything hurts.”

  “I know,” said Robert, although he knew he could only imagine. What had done this to him?

  “I’m sorry things have gone this way for you,” he said. “I truly am.”

  Allan looked up, his round eyes narrowing. “You’re sorry that you’re shacked up with my wife?”

  Robert didn’t know what to say to that one—he wasn’t sorry, wasn’t sorry at all—so he didn’t even try. “How—how did this happen?” He gestur
ed to the mess of the house, to Allan’s own ruined flesh.

  “The worms,” said Allan, a narrow, crazy smile growing on his face. “They’re crawling this year, aren’t they?”

  “They are,” said Robert. He felt goose flesh rising on his arms.

  “Well. They’re almost finished.” Allan’s peeled lips broke into a full grin, revealing incongruously clean and even teeth. “She’s almost finished.”

  Robert let those words sink in. “She’s almost—” he repeated, then: “You finished her?”

  Allan’s eyes were gimlets over his grin.

  The pity dissolved into fear, then reconstituted as anger, and Robert rushed forward. He bent into the space behind the fireplace and took Allan by the shoulders. Allan squealed as Robert’s hands closed around his clammy, prickly shoulders, and lifted him from the dirt.

  “Where is Sharon? You done anything to her?”

  “Nothing!” Now Allan was sobbing, tears streaming down his cheeks, streaking red where they crossed the scabs along his chin. “Nothing nothing nothing! Let me go! Please, please please, lemmego! It hurts!”

  Robert let go, and Allan stumbled backward, nearly falling in the mess at his feet. The scabs had broken where Robert had grabbed him, and had left a sweaty sheen of old blood on Robert’s palms. He raised his hand to slap Allan, but stopped as the other man fell to his knees, put up his hands.

  “Don’t!” he whimpered, his eyes pleading as he spoke: “She went back. Back to your place. Half hour ago.”

  “I’m calling the campground,” Robert finally muttered. “She better be there. And she better be okay.”

  Then he turned and picked his way through the detritus to the kitchen, where the telephone was, miraculously, still intact. As he dialled the number, Allan’s sobs turned into a wail.

  Waiting for an answer, Robert glanced around the kitchen. It was worse than the living room: a thick steak, going grey in a bed of Styrofoam and cellophane; puddles of liquor and milk, mixing into a pale oil slick on the counter; an overturned pot, spilling burned rice and vegetables into the dish-clogged sink; and everywhere, broken glass, smashed bottles and glasses and plates, jagged metal cans.