The Healer

In the kitchen the fridge started up, and shortly after, in the manner of a man who, even as he begins to speak, is extricating, with the greatest reluctance, his attention from something incomparably more interesting, he said, “This assumes she started.”

“Get off it, Ross!” Ardis cried. “These weren’t no-name strangers! And even if it was only the ones ignorant enough to have the faith, the point is it was her they were ready to put it in. She’s the one that’s got what it takes to bring people so far on side all she has to do is touch them with her baby finger and they tip over into perfect health. And don’t tell me that’s not a rarer gift than anything these pill-pushers are up to these days, with their tainted blood and their antigoddamnbiotics. Doctors are nothing any more but a bunch of little Chinese and Jews fresh out of the cradle who think they know everything, when in fact they’re stumbling around in the dark like everybody else.”

She stopped and looked to the kitchen. He was rubbing his face.

“Why’d she stop?” Ardis said.

The hands continued rubbing and then they fell away. “Just as well,” he said.

Another short silence, and Ardis said, “I honestly don’t understand how even you could say something that ignorant. Your daughter has the halt and lame picking up their beds and walking out to meet the new dawn, and you sit there and say it’s just as well if she doesn’t.”

He did not deny that this was what he had said.

“You know what I think?” she asked him.

“I do. You keep me constantly informed.”

“I think she’s up there having the same nervous breakdown she’s been having for the past month, and the reason is, you don’t turn power like that off and on like a kitchen tap. I say she hasn’t got the first clue in hell what she’s sitting on.”

“Not if it’s not her ass.”

“I can’t talk to you.”

There was a pause.

“Look,” he said. “If she’s up there thinking twice about getting herself canonized, it’ll be the first healthy sign out of her in twelve years.”

Ardis had moved on. “You know what she needs? An agent. All right. She was a, shall we say, unusual child with less than zero social skills and an overactive imagination. She flames out in high school, she’s got no aptitude for real estate, she hasn’t had a date in five years, and who am I kidding, she’s not going to be happy doing moustaches and bikini lines. But for Christ sake, Ross, look what she’s capable of! These reporters sniffing around here all winter. The world’s interested, if you aren’t. All she needs is some outside direction.”

“She’s got it. He lives in the sky and his take is one hundred per cent.”

Ardis was holding up the Chatelaine, rattling its pages to get his attention. “Why isn’t there anything on her in here, for instance? We’re just scraping the surface. Play our cards right and our little Two-shoes could be bigger than Jesus and the Beatles put together. These TV evangelists make fortunes, and they’re charlatans, every last horny bugger. I know. I watch those shows. The real thing does not come along every week, and when it does, believe me, the hunger’s there. It’s a market that never dies.”

“You know what?” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more about this.”

“No, I’m sure you goddamn don’t,” Ardis said quickly. “And for the life of me, I can’t imagine why that should come as no surprise.”

And pages of Chatelaine began to snap again, like little whips.

But of course nothing had been concluded, for it was not necessary for Ardis Troyer to know the reason she bothered in order for her to continue to do so, and slowly, with the persistence of fire, or life, the argument resumed, its participants ever more voluble and repetitive, luxuriant each in their refusal to yield, appearing never to progress but always progressing, like a dance or a sport or other human activity constantly on its way to repose, if never conclusion. And though patterns were retraced they were not on that account the same, informed as they were by histories of their own recurrence. Meanwhile overhead the high winds of the lower atmosphere had stripped all clouds from the face of the moon, allowing the light from the sun that reflected off that spheroid mass of dust and rock to brighten the air and the floor and the foot of the bed in the attic room where Caroline Troyer could see it by the translucence of her eyelids as she listened to the commotion from the street now generally waning but more raucous when it did erupt and the now gentler scrape of the curtains. And always the insistent resonance of the duct as her father made his stands on behalf of his version of her and of her few conceivable futures and of his own need, in response to her mother’s stands on behalf of her version and her need. And none of this was the same. None of it, ever. Because none of it was as it had been the last time, for there had been no last time, not really, and even were it all as old as that four-and-a-half-billion-year-old satellite lit by a star only slightly older, it would still be in the perceiving of it constantly new, because the perceiving was informed by the energy that all of it had come from and was still coming from and still falling back into, and that energy did not dance to time’s music but time to its.

Next morning, in the sudden sunless dark of the Troyer Realty office, Wakelin practically collided with Caroline Troyer, who was standing, for no visible reason, in a state of apparent complete idleness, in the centre of the floor. As he fell back he saw how tall she was, as tall as her mother, though not her father, and at least as tall as himself. A tall young woman wearing the same weed-coloured cardigan she had worn yesterday, this time with a cotton blouse buttoned to the neck. A plain skirt. She was not old, just dressed old. Old or schoolgirl. Unadorned even by the jewellery she sold. Big hands, hanging at her sides. Sober of mien.

“Sorry,” Wakelin said and added quickly, “Is he here?” He glanced around anxiously. He could see now but was not taking anything in.

She shook her head.

“You’re expecting him though,” Wakelin said in a tone caught uneasily between apprehensive and coaxing.

She seemed to notice. Then she said, “Truck’s out back, but I haven’t seen him.”

“Listen, he told me to come in today! I stayed over, at the Birches!”

She was still standing directly in front of him. Watching him. This ongoing accident his presence.

“What time did he tell you?” she said.

“He didn’t. But you said he was in in the mornings.”

“Well, he never mentioned anything to me.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“You could see what they got over to Mahan and try back here around eleven. If he comes in, I’ll try and catch him.”

“How far’s Mahan?”

“Twenty-five minutes. Pringle Realty 2000. Ask for Merle.”

“Hell,” Wakelin said and did a petulant knee-flex. He lowered his face a moment. When he brought it up he said, “Listen. You don’t want to go for coffee, do you? Or I could—What do you take? It’s just”—he put his hands to his face—“I really need to stay awake.” But these last words, being specious, echoed inwardly as noise and misgiving. “No?” he said, before she could respond. “That’s okay, I’ll just wait.” He plunked down on the nearest chair and looked up at her. Made a smile.

She turned to face him head-on once more. “What kind of property?” she said.

Swiftly Wakelin rose to make a short version of the speech he had made for her father and Bachelor Crooked Hand.

“Silence,” she said dubiously when he had finished. “You get far enough back in the bush you’ll have silence. In winter, anyways. Middle of the night. But daytime and evenings there’ll be the snow machines. And the chainsaws. Sound travels in the cold. On the lakes as soon as the ice is out there’ll be outboards, and jet skis.”

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. It doesn’t have to be on water. No 250 Evinrudes. No neighbour kids drunk on the next dock doing loon calls at two a.m. But also nothing next to an airfield. Or on a highway. Or a snowmobile run. Or an ATV route. Or railroad tracks. I don’t want to wake up to the five-fifteen. Or a lumber mill. Or a log sorting area. Or a firing range. No artillery. Nothing like that. Silence. A basic ground of silence. The wind in the firs. The snowflakes crashing down.”

“Why?” she said.

Wakelin opened his mouth. Shut it. Would, if it killed him, for once here, answer honestly, sort of. Leaven the guile. “I need to hear myself think. I’ve got a few … personal matters to sort out. I need peace. A little peace and quiet in my life.”

She nodded.

Wakelin followed Caroline Troyer through the plastic streamers and down a corridor of leaning headstones and realty signs and other clutter, umbral and glaring, toward the white glow of a screen door that opened directly into a chain-link bare-earth compound in eye-stabbing sunshine. There he climbed into the baking cab of a primer-grey Ford pickup, a smell of road dust, French fries, engine oil, the dashboard vinyl gaping dirty foam padding, an extensive crack system networking down the windshield like fork lightning. It was the kind of truck in which you would not be too surprised to see a rod come melting up through the hood.

“So how far to the first property?” he asked as she steered the rattling vehicle down a narrow alleyway, a grey board wall to the left, concrete block to the right. An inch to spare.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Practically to Mahan.”

“Mahan’s east.”

As they came out between parked cars and pulled onto the street, Wakelin saw Bachelor Crooked Hand. He was leaning into a sidewalk phone next to the Stedman’s, in a corner of the parking lot across the street. He was speaking into the mouthpiece, toy-sized in the meat of his grasp, and as he did this he was looking straight in through the windshield of the truck at Wakelin.

“What does that guy do?” Wakelin asked, the gaze following him as Caroline made the turn. “Besides make lures and brooches?”