“I know that.”

“With a lot of influence.” Mel looked away, then down at his watch and frowned. “They said they couldn’t find him, this guy who showed up at your door? That’s what they said?”

“You’re saying they did.”

“Figure it out for yourself. I have to go.” He started his car.

“I’ll walk back,” I said, opening the car door. “I think better when I’m walking.”

He drove away and I headed for the beach strip, trying to put everything together in my mind, especially the idea that Walter Freeman might have killed Gabe and made it look like a suicide because Gabe learned something that the internal affairs crew suspected. Kill a man and make it look like a suicide? That was something a guy like Walter Freeman could do. But was he capable of it? How damned corrupt could the police be?

I worked out all the pieces and tried putting them together. I couldn’t. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men …

The only thing that could work, that might work, would be for Mel and I to keep working things out together. Perhaps I could find things that Mel didn’t know. And Mel, I knew, would work with me because … well, because, damn it, we shared the same memories from the last few weeks, and his weren’t weakened by guilt.

18.

What do men dream about? An endless supply of insatiable women? An endless supply of money and liquor to attract insatiable women?

Did my father have those dreams? Maybe, once. Maybe he fantasized about women or money or a cabin on a quiet lake somewhere, but those weren’t his dreams. The difference between dreams and fantasies is that dreams attract us and fantasies disturb us. Everyone wants their dreams to come true. Most of us are not so sure about realizing our fantasies.

My father had only one dream I knew about, and he died trying to make it true. I had a fantasy, and maybe Gabe died in part because I made it a reality.

My father’s dream was simple and attainable: he wanted to pay the mortgage on our house before he turned fifty and live the rest of his life working for pleasure instead of working for the bank. He was a victim of limited ambition. Instead of wanting to own his home free and clear, he should have aimed higher. Not president of the steel company. Too high. Maybe something in the executive suite. Plant manager. Head of blast furnaces and washrooms. Or flying to the moon. That’s a reasonable dream, isn’t it? Why not dream of flying to the moon? You could die in bed knowing you had tried to be an astronaut or an executive or a song and dance man, like Gabe wanted to be. You could swing back and forth between dream and fantasy, imagining how you might achieve your dream and fantasizing about what it would be like.

My father’s dream was to burn the mortgage on our house while he was still young enough to enjoy the freedom from payments. Then he would quit working at the steel company and do other things. Perhaps make furniture for disabled people. He liked that idea. He had drawn plans for chairs that were easy for disabled people to rise from, and tables with adjustable sides to accommodate people with wheelchairs. Or maybe he would buy a fishing camp on some remote lake up north. He liked that best of all. He described it to me once, how it would feel to wake up every morning to the sound of wind through pines and fall asleep every night while loons sang across calm water. My father was a dreamer. Some days I honestly believe the world needs more dreamers and fewer doers.

To realize his dream, my father worked double shifts whenever they were offered, or filled in for other men whose jobs were below his abilities. Like directing trains that carried steel and coal and whatever else was needed within the sprawling steel company. Just so he could make his simple dream come true for him and for us.

My father died before he could realize his dream or any of his fantasies. He did not die in bed imagining them. He died watching the back end of a train move toward him while he screamed for it to stop because he couldn’t move out of the way. He had been walking backwards, leading the locomotive to a string of railway cars loaded with steel coils, and he walked back into an automatic railroad switch just as it closed on his boot and held him like a mouse in a trap, on the side of the tracks where the engineer couldn’t see him unless he looked into his rear-view mirror or turned around, but he didn’t, and oh god, Oh God!, it has always been too horrible for me to imagine, and yet I do from time to time.

Some men who worked with my father ran toward the locomotive, waving their arms and screaming for the engineer to stop, while my father waved his arms and tried to pull his foot away from the rails that held him, but the engineer was looking the other way or down at the floor or up his own ass, I don’t know. He stopped the locomotive six feet too late, with my father’s body, or what was left of it, jammed under the wheels of a railroad car. My father suffered a lifetime of horror in the ten seconds between the moment the steel rails clamped on to his boot and the instant that the rear of the locomotive sent him backwards and cleaved his body. That’s how the coroner described it. “It cleaved his body.” Cleaver. Noun. A steel chopping instrument used to break apart carcasses.

The doctors said Mother’s stroke had nothing to do with imagining my father’s terror through the last seconds of his life when he knew what was going to happen and how, because my father’s death had occurred so many years earlier. I say my mother held back for years that knife-edge hemorrhage that prevents her from speaking, purely with the force of her will, and when she grew too old and too weary to keep holding it back, it sliced an artery in her brain like a microscopic cleaver.

Do we need a new definition of irony? Here’s one: my father screamed until his throat bled, and my mother cannot make a sound louder than a sigh. God needs a new comedy writer.

THE BEACH STRIP IS UNIQUE IN MANY WAYS, and one is the strange way the weather unfurls here. The silly weather boy on the local TV evening news called it a microclimate. A beach strip microclimate. Temperatures, wind, sky, all of it can be the same for miles around, and utterly different along the beach strip. The climate here is like one of those tulips you plant in the fall that are all supposed to be red, and a stupid white one shows up in the middle of the flower bed when spring arrives. Weather on the beach strip is the tulip nobody expects.

It had been cool and blustery beneath the highway bridges over the canal, but on the beach strip it was warm and benign. Walkers, skaters, and joggers herded themselves along the boardwalk like shoppers in search of bargains, which is what they were. This late in the year, every warm day is a clear-out, an end-of-season event. Get it while it’s hot and cheap.

While walking back to my house, I thought about my father and how horribly he had died nearly thirty years earlier. I entered the garden from the boardwalk on the beach strip. The garden shed door looked secure, the impatiens blooms were orgiastic, the grasses in the sand along the fenceline were harvest brown and no longer reaching for the sun. Everything had that melancholy feeling you recognize as a schoolkid when you realize summer vacation is over, and the feeling remains with us as adults.

At the wire fence separating the Blairs’ house from the laneway, Jock Blair stood puffing on his pipe, his head a mobile jack-o’-lantern, round and pink above a plaid shirt and dung-coloured trousers held up by red suspenders. His face bloomed into extra creases with his smile, and when he saw me he ducked his head and said, “Good day, good day,” repeating it like a shorebird’s call.