Bush Poodles Are Murder. Lou Allin
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aging region and a health care system ravaged by conservative bean counters in the legislature at Queen’s Park in Toronto. Residents were allotted mere minutes per day with a qualified nurse.
“Hold your horses, Gary Cooper! It’s barely high noon,” Belle said, opening the boxes and settling into a plastic scoop chair as he tucked in, filling the room with the fragrant aroma of gravy.
His ever-present TV was blasting out a news show, so she lowered the sound to normal. Munching a bun filled with tender slabs of back bacon slathered with honey mustard, she noticed fresh paint and new tile in his room. Through the door ambled a plump bichon frisé, black nose testing the air. “Puffball. Hungry lad,” her father said, holding out one gnarly hand for a lick. “Nothing for you from this. We miss our shrimp.” After a recent, near-fatal choking incident, the legendary seafood delight had passed into history, but to him food was food, the more the better. Every meal her mother had ever placed on the table had been his favourite.
“You probably fed him half your toast at breakfast,” she observed. The recreation director’s dog performed pet therapy duties and added casual cheer to the place, dancing to guard its feet from the shuffles of unsteady residents.
Minutes later, after nearly inhaling the food and draining his cup, he blotted his mouth carefully and met her eyes with mild suspicion. “Cherry pie, like your mother’s?”
“À la mode, Captain Bligh.” She cleared the laptop on the cruel but necessary gerry-chair-jailor that kept him from wandering and falling, shoved the trash into a wastebasket, and set up the dessert, mashing the crust into the ice cream as he drummed knobby fingers.
“So why not Tuesday, Tuesday?” he asked, using the peculiar double language that often signalled increasing senility. Would a time come when they’d no longer be able to talk, much less reminisce about seeing “every film ever made,” his unchallenged boast? On the dresser was a snappy photo of himself and her mother, circa 1945. A tweed suit and briar pipe for him, an ocelot coat with padded shoulders and Andrews Sisters coiffured rolls for her.
“A blip in my scheduling. Murder, for example.”
“Murder most foul?” His shaggy eyebrows ruffled like fussy, albino bees at the prospect. “Do we need to call in Maggie Rutherford to comb for clues?”
She laughed, recalling mutual delight at the beloved elderly English actress who moved like a bag of toys. Until he retired to Florida, his job as a theatre booker, a kid’s dream, had glued them together twice weekly for a sneak preview double feature in the company screening room. “I’m serious. The victim was Melibee Elphinstone. A . . . friend of Miriam’s. She’s my partner at work.”
“At Harold’s business?” For a moment, she thought he might ask about his brother. Often his timeline warped, as he recalled Hitler invading the Sudetenland, but not the current Prime Minister. Still, many school children thought Canada had a president. His downcast eyes spoke more than words. “I forgot. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Not “passed on” or “gone to his reward.” At eighty-seven, in a speeded-up world where faces came and went, a room heavy with identity one day, vacant briefly the next, the silent but telling witness an empty row on the resident board by the nursing station, her father spoke without artifice. “I miss him, too. But Jesse will get us back on track,” Belle said. “Do you remember her?”
He glowered, pounding the table until his mug spilled. “Ben-Gurion toss that uppity she-male out of Israel? Every time Harold had us over for holiday dinners, she’d start an argument. Civil rights, feminism, health care, American imperialism. Five opinions seven days to Sunday and never let a man get a word in edgewise. Don’t know how my sainted brother stood her.”
“A bit outspoken for your pampered personality,” she observed, a smile flickering the corner of her mouth. Through the seven ages of man, all his needs had been attended to promptly, passed from mother to wife to girlfriend to her. When her mother had died and his abilities had flagged, she’d been lucky to arrange his quick return to Canada.
“So don’t keep me in suspenders. What happened to the guy? Chopped up like Evelyn Dick’s poor husband? Jesus, she could still be on the loose.” Revving up his historical engine, he related for the umpteenth time how the torso of John Dick, railway worker, had been discovered in 1946 in Hamilton, followed by the corpse of a baby boy in their house. Evelyn had been sentenced to hang, but served little more than ten years, released with a new identity in 1958. Rumour said that she went on to enjoy a prosperous career as a businesswoman.
“She’d be as old as you. Any new arrivals?”
He did a double take, then read the humour in her voice and grunted.
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