All the Voices Cry Read Online Free PDF Page A

computer screen jiggling their way across the lenses of his glasses. Kelvin was all caught up in some kind of game. He said he had hoards of imaginary charm, plenty of character and wealth stored in the basement computer. Kelvin had lately turned twenty-one but the basement still smelt of socks and apple cores.
    Spring rain began to fall and Brian turned on the windshield wipers, found a Vermont radio station and got into the rhythm of the road. He noted a host of white birds feeding in a drowned field beside the river and even found himself able to appreciate the rumpled heads of the nut-brown pampas grass and the barrow-shaped clumps of sumac. Every stalk and bole was tinged with the green-gold of spring sap rising. And as for the billboards advertising local bars, each was a
teenager’s dream, dominated by a pair of bronzed goddesses coiled around poles, fully trained in the slithery arts of Bourbon Street and just waiting to entertain the weary trucker or the lonely man from the architectural firm in his crappy car.
    For a few kilometres Brian returned to one of his favourite fantasies: a willing woman in a dry sugar shack with a clean floor and no cobwebs. What such a woman would be doing in a sugar shack this late in the season Brian was not sure, but it did not matter. The stickiness and the sweetness were all.
    After the rain stopped the margins of the sky lay fringed and ragged with mist along the tops of the birch forest. By his calculations, Brian was not far off from the artists’ colony at Lac Whoozie, but the mega-coffee weighed heavily in his bladder. He pulled off onto a side road for four-wheelers. No need to risk going into a café. A quick whiz in the woods and he could be back on the road. He tucked his wallet out of sight, pressed the button to lock the door and shut it firmly. It would be a disaster if the camera were stolen.
    A ditch full of pampas grass and a low wire fence lay between him and the woods. He made an awkward leap and got across with only one boot soaked. He stepped over the fence, ducked in behind the trees and stood looking up through the branches as if he had never met himself, while he listened to the stream and sputter on the damp layers of foliage at his feet.
    Afterwards, Brian walked on into the woods a few paces in order to stretch his legs. He kept his eyes on the ground in case there was treasure to be discovered. Leaves of dogtooth violet
slanted in fat green stitches across the leaf mould. Brian had always envied the retired electricians of Great Britain, swinging their metal detectors over the sodden furrows, drawn to the unmistakable edge of metal rising out of the dull clods. Nose guards, helmets, pommels, cinctures: the biting beast and its winking garnet eye; words that spoke of gold warmed by a good grip had always excited him.
    He stopped before a pool of snow water. An object lay at the bottom of it. It was a metal disk, dull and serrated: a winch, a gear, cog-like. It could have been Champlain’s Astrolabe, only that had already been found.
    Astrolabe sounded like one of the drugs that Cynthia had been prescribed for depression. Cynthia’s psychotherapist had been as dedicated to ending Brian’s marriage as any divorce lawyer. As it turned out, Brian was the one with the problem, and Cynthia just needed a boyfriend.
    After she got herself into therapy, but before she reduced Brian to driving a car without cupholders, Cynthia had discovered that Brian was the reason why their son Kelvin had buried himself in the basement, draping his shoulders with the pixilated garments of the medieval role player. With the blessing of her therapist, Cynthia had called Brian immature: until he took control of his own life he could not be a proper father for Kelvin, or, by happy coincidence, a proper partner for Cynthia. Brian had never met Cynthia’s therapist. He had a thing or two he would like to say to her.
    Brian prodded at the metal disk with his foot.