Catherine Leroux - The Party Wall

Marie feels all the blood draining out of her body through one of the thousand invisible doorways through which life comes and goes; without thinking, she squeezes Monette’s hand.

“I’m so sorry. I was the one who recognized him the night of the meeting. I should never have said anything to Richard. Anne, he took his gun. He’s heading toward your house.”

The straight road between the centre of town and their house is a fifteen-minute drive. Marie covers the distance in nine minutes that seem an eternity to her. The asphalt sticks to the wheels, the false flatness turns into a steep mountain. Her head is swimming, her skin itches as if a nestful of wasps were planting their stings in it at once. When she arrives there’s a van parked in front of the soundless dwelling. Darting from room to room, she shouts Ariel’s name. There is no sign of Vernon either.

Only when she reaches the porch does she catch sight of him in the distance, to the west, where the plain lies. She runs toward him for a few seconds then slows down, unable to go any farther. Richard Vernon is walking toward her with a pistol in his hand and reeking of turpentine. His strides are slow but he is moving at superhuman speed. He soon reaches Marie, who can do nothing but lift her hand to her throat as if to protect herself from the fatal gunshot, from a lack of air. But he does not raise either his fist or his weapon. His look transfixes her, a look damning her for the rest of her days. Then he disappears from her field of vision. All that’s left is a small fire in the distance, its heat distorting the horizon and the threshold of reality. Marie treads toward the flames like a zombie.

They say the smoke produced by a burning man is black if he was bad and white if he was good. Ariel emits no smoke at all. Only the golden birds escaping from his chest, his skin already almost completely consumed, his boiling organs, his bones devoured by the fire. Kneeling beside him, Marie tries to take hold of whatever is left of him, the incandescent limbs of which she has licked every square centimetre, the heart that seems to be still beating inside the flames, and the head she has loved with an epileptic rage. She thrusts her fingers into the fire and she is not burned.

A finalgust sprays the two little girls’ faces with fine soot, and all at once the horizon becomes visible again.

“Thirty-nine! Thirty-nine wagons!” Monette exclaims in a voice whose enthusiasm never waned as the train rolled by.

Angie does not respond. She was not counting. She was preparing to confront whatever she thought she had seen through the fleeting gaps between the wagons. She diverts Monette’s attention to the flutter of butterflies the train has stirred up and discovers what the train was hiding from her. A few metres away, two half-naked people are rubbing against each other. The man is tall and tanned except for his buttocks, which move back and forth while he presses the girl against a tree. A long, thin braid whips his dirty T-shirt with every movement. A rat’s tail, Mam would say in disgust.

He appears not to have noticed Angie and Monette and grunts, “Lie down, I’m getting tired.” The girl obediently stretches out on the grass, which Angie guesses is strewn with rocks and traps. Her body, slender and very fair, is a weave of delicate ovals. Only when she turns her inscrutable face toward the two girls does Angie recognize her. It’s Eva Volant, a ninth grader who lives near them. Their eyes meet and Eva looks like she’s received an electric shock. She murmurs something in the man’s ear.

This has the effect of a detonation. The man jumps to his feet and into his pants. Angie grabs Monette by the arm and yanks her onto the train tracks.

“We didn’t pick up the penny!”

“It doesn’t matter. Hurry up!”

Behind them she hears Eva.

“Don’t worry, I know them! They won’t say anything!”

Monette hops from one tie to the next holding a daisy. The sun has planted itself directly overhead. The scent of lunch reaches them from the little houses backed on the railroad. Angie quickens the pace. Behind them Eva begs the man not to leave. Angie does not turn around.

The wind picks up as they come to the bridge. The pong of seaweed and fish skeletons prickles their noses. Thirty metres below, the river has carved a ravine.

“It’s dangerous!” Monette protests.

“Nah, the train just went by. Come on, hurry.”

Monette grasps her big sister’s hand as they set foot on the dizzying structure that straddles the precipice. Everything happening below is visible through the tracks: the flow of muddy water, the circling of bees gone astray, the snake skins scattered on the rocks. With her eyes glued to the void beneath her feet, the little girl walks on bravely. Angie can’t hear Eva or the man with the rat’s tail anymore.

Halfway across the bridge she realizes her mistake. The wind had covered the rumbling, and the impulse to run away had kept her from thinking. She excluded the possibility of two trains coming through within fifteen minutes of each other as if this were mathematically impossible. A serious error of judgment. She turns around. The locomotive has not yet rounded the bend. But if the vibrations rising from the tracks to her legs are any indication, it’s a matter of mere seconds.

“Monette, we have to run.”

Looking squarely at her big sister, the little girl’s eyes fill with terror. She has never been given such an absurd order. Run? Now? When they are perched over an abyss? It’s impossible — Angie sees this in her sister’s face. Already, the train whistle is blaring out behind them. Monette is paralyzed. Without a moment’s hesitation, Angie lifts her off the ground and begins to stride awkwardly over the ties, powerless to pick up the pace as she would like. Calculating the risks at breakneck speed, she entertains the notion of jumping into the river with Monette but is immediately dissuaded by the rocks poking out of the water. Hanging onto the guardrail is too much to ask of the little girl, and it’s too late now to consider reaching the far end of the bridge in time. The train is so close she can feel its breath on her back. She keeps running as best she can amid the shriek of the whistle and the awful screech of the engine bearing down. Tears spring up in the corners of Angie’s eyes. They are going to die.

Then the solution comes into view. Ahead of them is a niche set into the guardrail, a sort of balcony whose floor consists of a beam just large enough for a man to stand on. In a few nimble movements, the final grace of her child’s body, Angie leaps toward the niche and shoves Monette at arm’s length against the railing, tumbling forward on the beam in the process, still firmly grasping her little sister’s trunk to prevent her from tipping over. Monette screams as if one of her limbs has been slashed away. Only when she sees the blood spewing over the pastel clothes and chubby face does Angie grasp that tons of steel are rolling across her legs. A surge of heat bellows through her body.

The icywind, the chapped skin, the crusts of blood freezing in her shoes, the frost stuck to every fibre, every strand of hair — all of it is lost in the chalky cadence of her steps in the snow. For the past forty-eight hours Carmen has been running in a world of shadows where night and day have become indistinguishable, and she still has some ten hours to go before the finish line. But she has stopped counting. She has stopped thinking. The all-powerful beat of her running, her regular strides striking the ground — this is the only order, the only law, the only statement in this sharp-edged land.