The Killing Circle

brake lights turning my raised hands from red to pink as it shifts into drive and slides away.

Starting back, I nearly fall over the bag of sand a second time. Except now I have the time to see that it isn’t a bag of sand at all.

A body, more or less. No: less.

Propped against the wall like a sleeping drunk. Legless. Also armless, noseless, eyeless. A man dissembled into disparate parts laid out over the cobblestones. A human anthology.

It makes me grateful for the dark. Still, I can see enough. And what I can’t see my mind fills in with what it remembers from the night in the shed with Petra.

Time to go. Someone else will discover this by morning. There is nothing to be gained by lingering here aside from being seen.

And yet I stay where I am a minute longer. Partly because all the air has been sucked out of the world. Partly because the man scattered at my feet was once a friend.

We were the last ones. This is how I know it’s Len even before I use the toe of my shoe to open the wallet next to the body’s cupped hand and squint to read his name on the driver’s licence inside. If you didn’t know what I know, there would be no way of connecting the grinning face in the wallet’s ID to his corpse—there is no identity left in him, all of the features that mark someone for who they are cut away. This has likely been Angela’s lesson all along: you take a person’s story and what remains is nothing more than skin and blood. The body is worthless. What counts is what it does. The lies and truths it tells.

I’m on the news in the morning. Once again they’ve used my taped statement from the first day of Sam’s disappearance. Since then, I have continued to refuse the cameras, as it isn’t doing me any favours on the suspicion front. Not to mention that pleading for Sam’s safe return isn’t going to make any impact on the person I know has him now.

A couple of the investigators come by to give me an update on the search efforts, but their eyes now openly betray their doubts. In the name of thoroughness they ask again if I’ve told them everything. Even after I repeat the same details, they wait for me to go on. It’s alright, their seen-it-all faces urge me. Just tell us what you did. We won’t judge you.

I start packing the moment the door closes behind them.

Before I go, I put in a call to Tim Earheart at a payphone around the corner. It strikes me that he’s the only person in the world I have to say goodbye to. But I’m denied even this. He’s not home, so I’m left to stutter some nonsense into his answering machine. All I remember is attempting a joke (“You know you don’t get out enough when you’ve only got one name on your speed-dial”) and asking him to “Look out for Sam if I—if it turns out Sam needs looking out for.” The kind of tight-throated message you wish you could erase as soon as you put the receiver down.

I stop off at home one last time after that, trying to think of anything else that needs to be accounted for. I look at the rows of children’s books Sam is too old to read any more and think A father and son used to live here. But that past tense takes all the life out of it. People used to live in every empty house you’ve ever stood in, and this makes them no less empty.

32

Whitley, Ontario, is one of the stubborn towns along the two lanes that ride the hump of Lake Superior. Today it is known, to the extent it is known at all, as a stop to fill the tank or, perhaps, find a damp-smelling motel room to sit out a snowstorm. A half-day’s drive past the last cottages anyone is willing to drive to, this is the land most can locate only through the abstract—on maps or in the imagination. A door that opens on to one of the last Nothings on the planet.

It’s a drive that tortures the Toyota’s four cylinders. North of the Soo, the Trans-Canada loses its nerve, coiling into endless aversions to every swamp, hillock and inlet, so that the four hundred miles to Thunder Bay requires an athletic slapping of wheel and stomping of brake. But it’s not the wheezing ascents that are so troubling, it’s the freefalls that follow, sending the car shuddering helplessly cliffward every five minutes, and each time the turn is made—with a yank at the gearshift and a whispered Shit, oh shit—it’s a close call.

Not that the driver behind me has the same problems.

Over the afternoon’s last hours of light, on the rare straightaways, I glimpse a black sedan in the distance. It could be the Continental I spotted on the way to my visit to Sam in St Catharines. Every time I slow to get a better look, it must slow as well, or pull off to the side altogether—I never catch sight of it unless I’m moving. Later, when the dark forest leans over the road to block out any hint of a slivered moon, it’s still there. Winks of headlight.

It was on this road, coming into one of these curves, that Evelyn and Conrad White met their end. And it was probably a car following them like the one following me that forced them into the turn too fast. It may have been the very same Continental. The same driver.

Whoever is behind the wheel doesn’t seem to want me dead just yet, in any case. They want to see that I’m going in the right direction. Up here, there are only two choices: forward or back. One of which is no choice at all.

I roll into Whitley some time after midnight. The town itself sits behind a stand of trees, hidden from the highway as though ashamed of itself. A bowling alley. Two “Pre-Owned!” car lots. A tavern with squares of plywood where the windows used to be. Nothing appears to be open. Even the streetlights have been turned off for the night. Or were never turned on.

The TV in the Sportsman Motel’s office is working just fine, however. It’s how I decide on it over the competition: the sad glow that signals there may be someone else awake in Whitley aside from me. (When was the last time, I wonder, that the manager had to flick on the NO in front of VACANCY on the sign featuring a hunter with a rifle in one hand and a dead goose in the other?)

The guy behind the desk is watching Canadian MegaStar! Shaking his head at a girl from Saskatoon mangling a Barry Manilow tune.

“Can you believe these people?” he says, handing over the room keys without taking his eyes off the screen. “What are they thinking?”

“They want to be famous.”

“Oh, this one here’s going to be famous, alright. Famous for having a fat ass and a voice like a choked chicken.”

He shakes his head at the TV, snorts, folds his arms over his chest, makes his chair squeak. But he doesn’t turn the channel.

The room smells of rum and used rubbers. I pour the shampoo from one of the bathroom’s little bottles on to the carpet to freshen things up. I’m lathering the floor with my shoes when I think I spot the Continental slide past through the window.

It’s already reversing by the time I get the door open. Outside, the cold is a fist to the chest. It holds me there, my breath a grey halo over my head. Not that there would be any point in running after the car, now accelerating back toward the highway.

Whether it was him in the car or not, I know he’s here. There is a taste that comes with the Sandman’s presence that I’m spitting on to the Sportsman’s pavement. He’s here. Which means that Angela is too.