A Bright House
Chapter 6

“He ain’t right since he come back.”

Those are the first words uttered to constable Will Pritchard after the initial opening of the front door and handshake hello. He is off duty and has driven to the town where the dog named Whisky lives, to follow up on a perplexing incident. The teenage boy is at work, having changed his mind about meeting Pritchard, taking an offer to fill in for a sick employee at the last hour. The father, truly the man of the house, a behemoth encrusted in gruff bullshit-free grit. He eyeballs Pritchard before making a forward finger point and wave gesture with a meaty index finger.

“We gotta go round to the shed, behind the house.”

Will steps back on the small front porch to allow the bigger man room to pass.

He follows the homeowner down the driveway, crosses an unkempt back yard filled with yellow splotched snow, dog feces, scattered vehicle parts and assorted junk. They come to a square aluminum sided shed with two sliding doors that sit half open and are both dented from the outside. Pritchard has a quick mental flash of this big man kicking at the doors, yelling “shut the fuck up” to a barking Whisky.

Moments later, it becomes apparent that Whisky is not much of a barker. He is curled up in the far corner of the shed. A whimper at the sight of the two men looking through the door rectangle, followed by a brief swish of his tail and another longer, more plaintive whimper that seems to say “please leave me be”. Pritchard looks into the dog’s eyes for the brief seconds before those eyes are lowered. He feels a sudden edge. A deep sick stomach churn. His instincts at first point to the obvious; that the big man beside him has been beating this poor animal, possibly for running off... but Will’s truth and lies meter is thrown out of whack by an unsettling recall of the smashed car and strange feathers that have haunted his sleep. He will go to the source of the freshest information.

“Where does your son work?” he asks.

“Over at Knechtel’s grocery, on the main street near the Tim Horton’s.”

Pritchard steps away from the shed as the once vibrantly alive Whisky turns to face the aluminum back wall, tucking his tail beneath him with a low whimper.

“Yup” offers the homeowner as the two men crunch across the snow toward the driveway, “that dog come back scared all to shit.” Sᴇaʀᴄh thᴇ FɪndNøvel.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Will glances around at the defecated urinated yard blanket, adjusts his glasses.

“I can see that.”

A day can reflect all the character in a face. It can be named and lived, marked by event and remembered for all time. A day can belong to an individual, be shaped by the perceptive subjectivity of that person’s awareness. It can be divided into synthetic increments that count hours, minutes, seconds, and yet the day itself is no more than a natural occurrence that nonetheless contains every ingredient of life. Every allegedly known component-now, smashing atoms with the vast unknowable. Each familiar segment of routine a tiny sliver of what is actually there in the bandwidth of light, reality, dream, other-worlds in veils too thin to know of. A day named “Saturday” can arrive in two human perceptions; it can arrive with a slow anticipatory crawl in two minds that have somehow instantly recognized a unity that may have always looped between them.

As we know, a singular day can alter a world; the assassinations, the mushroom clouds, the decision to vote a certain way, a child born, a life ended, a kiss, a truth told when most needed. A singular rotation of a planet filled with lives can begin one way and conclude entirely changed, irrevocably.

This was the Saturday that belonged to Jenny and Ray.

Jenny proceeded through the morning pre-work ritual that was hers, felt in her belly an unidentifiable hybrid emotion; the low end of it seemed akin to bass notes on a cello, struck in minor chords that resonated into dissonance. This was the unease. This was the lingering power of her dream, and that lower abdominal vibration melted seamlessly into the higher frequency that carried the vivid recall of the young Ray’s face, stricken through in horror at the sight of the woman who had forced herself through the portal exit on the front veranda of that old country home. It had to have been his mother, she knew in the dream and during the morning’s replay of it. The higher emotional frequency in Jenny seemed to sit within her chest, where a subtle anxiety met a less muted excitement. She found her heart beating at a more insistent tempo as she moved around the house, preparing to leave for work.

Almost a certainty without details, it felt like. In the bathroom, where she doubled up her hair into a thick pony tail, Jenny lost a few moments in the mirror. This Saturday morning had the feel of a threshold.

For Ray Townes, dragging himself through his own morning ritual of showering and shaving, braiding his hair, there were far more potent lingering effects of his visions based around the alluring mystery of the woman named Jenny, the man named Scott, and the tenuous connection details not yet clear. That she had lost him was a certainty. That it had switched her off from the world, equally sure a feeling, but even the finely self attuned Ray couldn’t recognize the truth of his own attraction to troubled souls.

In a supermarket dairy aisle, a young man removes all of the yogurt containers from a section of counter where the cooler fans have failed. He neatly stacks the various sizes of yogurt along the bottom of a cart and doesn’t see the approach of a large man behind him.

“Excuse me” comes the raspy voice, followed by a clearing of throat. “Are you Bradley?”

Answered with an affirmative nod, Will Pritchard asks the young man when his next break occurs, and it is arranged that a brief question and answer conversation shall take place within the hour. Pritchard uses the interval to do a little shopping, and at the prearranged time meets young Bradley in an adjacent coffee shop that shares the tiny strip mall with the grocery store. Although Pritchard has read the report several times, he asks familiar questions and watches for telltale signs of prevarication. None are given, and the lad seems both annoyed and weary. His beloved dog friend, Whisky, has returned home a different animal... a cowering wreck of nerves who will respond only to Bradley with a hint of his previous love.

Twenty minutes after their conversation, Will Pritchard is back in his car, now informed with specific directions as to the location of the strange event that seems to have indelibly stamped the psyche of both a canine named Whisky and his human friend, Bradley. Pritchard won’t be able to drive to the location; it will be a two mile walk from where he must park. Two miles along an out of service freight rail track, until he passes over the Mill Creek bridge, and then another five hundred yards. This is Will’s next reason not to spend another weekend locked up indoors, buried in a bottle.

Ray boarded the westbound trolley car just outside his hotel. He still wasn’t sure whether he would ride directly to the Eaton Centre on Yonge street or if he would go directly to the Logan Street Grill. This was not gamesmanship on his part, for his stomach remained unsettled from the emotions of the previous evening. Ray Townes had not a posturing bone in his body. His entire adult life had been devoted to self exploration and the beneficial use of his clairvoyance, where possible. It was his every intention, more aptly his every need, to go to Jenny once more, just to be sure. Sure, of what? That was what puzzled him as he rode the streetcar and peered through dirt smeared windows at the passing storefronts.

Jenny glanced at the diner’s wall clock, then at her watch, in that sequence, far too many times for her liking as the duration of linear metaphoric molasses hung like a string of unanswerable questions in the egg and bacon infused atmosphere. This was the span of unfocused work ritual motion between seven and nine of that Saturday morning. She found herself moving about the busy room, pouring and carrying and wiping, speaking and nodding, doing the job doing the job checking the clock looking at the watch, and... tightrope walking between tempered angst and annoyance. She had expected something. She’d expected the visual of a tall striking man with a huge aura, coming through that front door, making high contact eye contact, then taking a seat. This should have happened long before nine. Jenny fought with herself in rising urgency, battling the introspective tidal wave that threatened to engulf her before noon.

Ray approached the intersection that held the building that held the woman named Jenny. The metallic squeal of the “red rocket” on its tracks, slightly grating, jolted him from a half-present stupor. With his left hand he pulled the cable to indicate his wish to get off at the Logan street stop. Still, honestly with his self assessment of that hour, between nine and ten o’clock, he was not feeling the keen emotional gumbo that was boiling within Jenny at the time. He had a heaviness of lingering clairvoyant vision, a caring need to learn more and assist if possible, and a wish to postpone all the pain in this world until the Creator itself could intervene, explain, alleviate, enlighten. The streetcar reached its designated stop and Ray departed via the rear double doors, stepping into late Spring’s already announced heat for the day... as the vehicle squealed away, he took a long moment to stand across the street. His eyes into the glass of the front window, where the front counter, cash register, stool, and the lone figure of Jenny formed a silent frozen inevitability for him.

After possibly her one hundredth glance at the clock and wristwatch, during the normal lull in business between nine and noon on weekends when she could occupy the time filling condiment bottles and cleaning, Jenny left the main dining space to use the washroom. Only one customer who was in the final stages of sipping her coffee refill, and who always paid with a ten dollar bill left on the table, gave Jenny a chance to relieve herself. She had been having to go for almost two hours, which was quite unusual... that lower abdominal tension no doubt the cause. As the universe would have it, the front door swung open precisely during that washroom break. Ray Townes stepped in out of the bright sun and took a moment in the doorway to allow his eyes to adjust, their lupine grey roving from front to back the long room. He spied the restroom signs and walked easily toward that rear section of the space, taking a seat facing the front of the diner. Again, this was not tactical. He wasn’t striving for maximum dramatic effect by taking a place at the very back of the room. It was simply darker and cooler there, he didn’t feel particularly well, and that corner of the diner had a pleasingly neutral energy about it.

Jenny finished up, washed her hands and dried them with paper towel over the sink. She looked at the mirror and saw with displeasure a haggard quality around her eyes. Why did she feel that buried-within wish to look pleasing beyond the norm? She wouldn’t allow herself the notion of that being rooted in a want to appear attractive to mister Townes. Only the passage of the illusion of linear time, and expanses of silence for introspection, could bring to light an admission of such. This is the magic trick among many, this retrospective clarity that illuminates an individual intent. Only looking back at the footprint of history, or the however small whisper of undiluted self-truth when the receiver is perfectly tuned, brings with it the neutrality of lucid cognizance. Jenny dried her hands. She turned off the light switch and left the small washroom. Stepped out into a narrow hallway. Placed one foot ahead of the other and walked back to the main room, by that point amber radiant in angled sunlight. Of course, her gaze scanned the space and didn’t see that he had entered during her brief absence.

Ray sat with his chair pushed against the wall. His head was tilted back to rest against its cool plaster, and he heard Jenny’s soft steps approaching. Even then, even as some future crossroads would light the way forward, backward, he felt only an urgency to know. With his ability to somewhat contain the sight as it came to him... his self taught exertion of willpower that he not free-fall into those never ending cascaded images unless giving himself permission... Ray also unwittingly filtered himself emotionally.

She entered the room and he watched the dozen steps taken. The subtle but increasing falter in them.

By the time she stopped, put a left hand up to the back of her neck beneath the thick ponytail and pivoted around to see him there, Ray sensed an enormous inner surge of information that carried no detail and it washed through him as their eyes locked across so much more than linear measurement.

Will Pritchard has left his private vehicle, also on a Saturday, parked on the northernmost residential street that will give him access to the old rail line. It is a bitterly cold winter morning, and Will totes a tall thermos of coffee, a camera, a notebook and pen, his service revolver and holster strapped around his waist... he climbs the grade at the end of the street where the last house sits against open land, snow crunching underfoot, his breath billowing and forming small mustache icicles. The hill tops out where the retired tracks stretch for as far as he can see heading away from the township. Those tracks offer a tidy mirror to his forced retirement, as they appear in fine working order but have been bypassed in favor of the new. This being an unofficial investigation of a nagging hunch, Pritchard has not informed anyone of his walk out into the open areas and parallel forest regions that were divided long ago by those who laid the railroad. Though he found nothing to distrust in the young man’s face or voice, and though he himself witnessed the cowering behavior of the dog, Whisky, Pritchard expects that this long cold walk will bring no fruit.

At approximately a mile distant from where he parked, Pritchard stops to pour a cup of strong black coffee, his eyes finding the distant Mill Creek bridge as it contrasts the snow cover. The sky is a heavy uniform curtain of dappled greys and off-whites, but there is no snowfall and very little wind. He wipes a gloved hand across his whiskers, knocking away tiny icicles, and sips deep from the cup. There is a warm satisfaction in that moment; a peace borne by mission. His mind is fully engaged. He feels twenty years younger, and a lifelong connection to the land has never seemed more apparent. For ten minutes, Will savors the quiet joy of his standing there. He swallows the hot coffee and watches his breath, listens to his breathing, loves the cold bite of air in his nostrils. Bending to pack pristine snow into the cup, moving it around within before tapping it out against his thigh and screwing it back on the thermos, Will remembers that he didn’t remember to bring his binoculars.

Such a seemingly minor thing, that.

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