Greg Hollingshead - The Healer

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?”

“That’s his,” she replied, indicating the red tow truck rising behind Crooked Hand like an image on a billboard, the shining grille rippling in the heat. The same tow truck Wakelin had seen parked outside the exhibition hall at the fairgrounds. “Nights he drives the ambulance,” she added.

“Busy man,” Wakelin said. He had twisted in his seat to look out the rear window of the cab. The eyes were still on him. Quickly Wakelin turned back around in his seat. “I met him yesterday, with your father. Well, not met, exactly.”

She didn’t say anything.

In two minutes they were moving out of Grant, a rhythmic bump from the left rear wheel like a bulge in a bicycle tire, a pulse accelerating. The Birches Motel came up on the right, and from his present unforeseen vantage Wakelin watched with improbable nostalgia his home of last night pass like something from a parallel life. A glimpse too of the person as recently as this morning he had been when there, as alien and spectral as the friend of a friend in an anecdote told in a dream. As a matter of fact, in the confidence that sometimes in the pursuit of a story, good faith can drive out the bad, he had not yet checked out. A small white-brick plaza then, and on that same, east side, beyond a spreading oak and under a blue H, the district hospital, clapboard ranch-style, like a retirement home. Past that and to the north and east, on their elevation, the fairgrounds.

“Maybe your dad’s back up at the exhibition hall,” Wakelin suggested.

If Caroline Troyer agreed that this might be the case, she did not acknowledge as much to Wakelin.

“Of course, we’ve got the truck, so how would he—” and Wakelin thought, Stop talking right now. You don’t know a thing about it.

“What are they building up there?” he said next, for conversation.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t been up. He’s on council.”

Wakelin nodded.

Pale fields rolling; sun-bleached barns on distant hillsides, like mock-ups; blue sky. Ahead a grey-black swell of the Shield. Through the window at his back the sun shone hot on Wakelin’s shoulders under his shirt. The truck after his little car felt spacious and high up off the road. She drove with the seat all the way back to accommodate her long legs, and she moved in a way that seemed to take possession of the vehicle and the road.

“So tell me more about these properties,” Wakelin said.

“One’s a two-storey frame with a view, the other’s a sixteen-acre farm run to bush. A two-storey five-bedroom brick.”

Wakelin waited. “That’s a lot of bedrooms,” he said finally. “I could sleep around.”

Silence followed here. And then, though of course he knew what it was, Wakelin said, “Can I ask you your name?”

“Caroline.”

“Tim.” He reached over. At first all his hand got was a glance, but he left it there, stubborn in the air between them, and finally her own came off the wheel and briefly, firmly, he grasped it. A strong hand as big as it looked. If this was the hand of a healer, it was no shaking hysteric’s. Or so Wakelin decided. As it returned to the wheel, his own returned to his right knee in an image of his left hand, thumbs in parallel. He had always liked sitting this way. He also liked the heat of the sun at his back. He closed his eyes. Maybe they could ride like this forever. He looked at the side of her face. Would this be a good time to broach the subject of healing? Just kind of segue into it? But how?

“Will I love these properties?” he asked instead.

She gave him a scant wordless look, and Wakelin thought, One thing about these country salespeople, they do not stoop to charm or flattery. Nor do they lay down a pitch. It is almost as if they were reluctant to sell.

The truck was labouring ever more slowly toward a chiselled slot in the horizon, a blue tab.

“Anyway, it’s nice to meet you, Caroline,” Wakelin said.

Just past the summit of the long climb was a Troyer Realty For Sale sign, at the foot of a gravel drive that cut back steeply to the top of the rock wall. They had passed other such signs on the way, nailed to fences and trees. This one had a diagonal of tape across one corner saying Reduced, and this time Caroline swung in. They mounted a gravel slope to a tar-paper house with black window frames. She pulled the truck right up into the shadow of it and turned off the engine.

“Needs a few panes,” Wakelin mentioned, crushing a mosquito against his temple as they stepped forward. The place suggested a rural bomb-site. “What’d they—blow out?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Where’s the front door?” he asked next. Looking around for it in every direction including away from the house altogether, he saw riddled pop cans on a rail fence. “Somebody’s been doing some target practice,” he called to her as he stumbled after her down the side of the house among scattered appliances and automotive parts to a slope of rock and brown grass. At the foot of the brown grass, a dead spruce with a russet crown.