Cara sat right up front with each of her hands braced against the gunwales, her arms stiff, her palms flat on the hot metal. The sun beat overhead, but behind them—beyond Hill, should Cara turn to look at him—the clean blue horizon had suddenly tinted violet. The wind, hot, began to jab and gust.
In the newly roiled air, Hill seemed to make a decision. “Weather’s coming,” he said. “Let’s call it a day.”
“Sure?”
He cut north then, abruptly, jostling Cara where she sat on the hard aluminum bench. “Hold on,” he called too late, and opened up the motor to move with great speed across the middle of the lake, back toward the marina where their day had begun.
When they pulled close to the public dock, he cut the motor, and she—momentarily wanting to feel capable—stood and held a foot out in space, waiting to step up onto the broad planks and catch the boat. She did so, then walked the boat up toward shore and tied it off. Hill tossed her the keys to the truck. He began offloading their things onto the dock as Cara nervously backed the trailer down the ramp and parked it, the lake lapping over the trailer’s wheels and consuming its trusses. Over their hot heads, clouds folded like batter and the air took on a green, aqueous light.
Hill untied the boat and backed it off, then aimed the nose into the centre of the trailer. He gunned it forward, and missed. “All my previous accomplishments account for nothing,” he said, “but this my labour shall measure me.”
Christ, Cara thought. Another martyr.
She waded down into the water and attempted to catch the boat by its gunwales, but before she could, a frustrated Hill cut the motor and jumped into the water himself. Hands clamped around the aluminum edge, he hauled the boat toward the shore so it would catch in the trailer’s little rubber wheels.
While he was thus engaged, his back turned, she realized could reach into the boat, retrieve one of the oars, and swing its broad side into his temple. Lay him out cold. Maybe even kill him, if she chose. She smiled, and then she rolled her eyes back into her head and stuck her tongue out. Dead-puppy-dog eyes.
***
Then they were in the truck.
Each was experiencing their own impatience, interested primarily in nursing their own private animus, in finding their own paths to the dark end of the day, to their respective ideas of wildness and abandon. Eager for their weekends.
Just get on with it.
Hill looked up at the clouds and whistled. He pulled the white pickup forward, dragging the boat out of the water, dripping, and pointed the nose toward Kingston. They drove most of the way in silence.
No rain ever came, only the threat of it. It would be days before they were hit with a real good storm.
Emmylou
SECONDARY HIGHWAYS latticed bankrupt counties, shuttered berry farms, and cedar trees. Weeds consumed empty gas pumps.
Out here, Wendell’s Korean subcompact felt inadequate. Perfect for parallel parking, but nothing here required such concision. Out here you could afford to be imprecise. You could park in the tall grass if you wanted and nobody would say boo. You could leave it in a field, and in time it would be accepted as part of the landscape.
I’d been offered respect, kindness, loyalty, and warmth—a home—but grew suspicious and selfish, and fled, which is far from noble, I know, but Wendell had fathered a child somewhere and then bolted. We’re from that kind of stock. My dad collected convertibles, DUIs, debt, but was very clear that I’d be solely responsible for bailing myself out of any scrapes. Wendell’s father, my uncle Sandy, felt intellectually overmatched in any argument and usually answered with his knuckles.
Cowardice, like the lakeside cabin where we were headed, was something to which my entire family had year-round access.
***
We turned off the highway and onto the gravelled and signless fire route. The car crept along for ten minutes, then came to a stop beneath big, precarious oaks. We looked upon the cabin, decrepit and listing. The key was on a nail on the underside of the back deck, where it had overwintered for the sixtieth year among the spiderwebs and mouse shit.
Loveless, motherless, we were submerged beneath cartoonish desires to be the men we thought we could be when we were nineteen and twenty-two. But at thirty and thirty-three, we still weren’t. It likely had never been possible. That’d been someone’s joke.
In the cabin, Wendell stoked a fire in the stove. I put a cassette into the old tape deck, because that’s all we had up there. Emmylou Harris sang a Louvin Brothers chestnut and Wendell stared into the flames. We ate stale peanuts and drank coffee mugs full of whisky.
“I just wish I’d had a chance to fall in love with Emmylou Harris,” Wendell said, listening.
“She’s a Yankees fan,” I answered.
“So?”
“So, not perfect.”
“I’d get Derek Jeter’s face tattooed on my back to have her love me.”
“You don’t know. Maybe she’s awful.”
“Listen to her.”
He was right.
But what if it was all performance, a stage persona? That’s nothing to love, I thought. That’s all I’ve ever given out, and it brings nothing back. I’ve shortchanged everyone I’ve ever kissed. But I didn’t tell him that.
“She sounds like the most incredible woman in the world,” I said, and meant it.
***
At midnight, we floated in inky water with stars winking overhead and ribbon-like vegetation winding around our bicycling limbs. The water was warm and the air above was cool and clean, and our toes and asses wiggled free and uncovered, while our cocks dangled like unsheathed hunting knives. The mosquitoes buzzed a beautiful drone. Summer, we called it, but really that was just a name we’d tacked onto the strange place we’d come to, a place where I’d just sabotaged the best love I was likely to know, while Wendell had chosen weed and sleeping late over a life actually worth pursuing.
It was the middle of June and smelled like it. We swam out through the shallow bay and beyond the mouth of it, to the open water, which was colder, and deep, and as dark as sleep. I wanted to find somewhere to float on my back and mimic my own death, my ears submerged, cradled by water, the darkness all around me. Wendell wanted to go to the little island we’d always called the swimming place and jump in the water from its high stones while shouting Tupac lyrics.
There was a cottage around the bend from the swimming place. I never knew who owned it. It was rented out to city people, so every time we’d go up, there’d be a different group staying, barbecuing their burgers, playing their music, shouting at their children. Wendell swam past the swimming place and toward that cottage, its glass face blank.
Down on the rocks near the shore, there glowed a fire. When I lay still in the water, I could hear women there, their laughter spreading out over the water’s surface concentrically, moving over my fevered head.
Wendell hauled himself out onto a rock, a hundred yards away from them, so he could vomit. He hacked and sputtered, then washed his face with lake water and motioned at me to come with him. I slid myself out as soundlessly as possible and stood in the buzzing air next to him. Bare as infants, we walked over the rocks and between the pines and bushes until Wendell stopped behind a tree and leaned over to look at the women.
There were seven of them, in their thirties, I guessed, bright and animated, wine-happy. The fire’s orange light carved their faces into caricatures. Wendell stood totally still, but in my peripheral I could see him breathing deeply. There was a watery, animal scent coming off him. I could feel the heat of his haunches, leaning as we were around the other side of the same pine tree, staring. We didn’t want to alarm them. I was at once glad and sorry that I wasn’t more drunk.
“I wanted to care more than I did,” said one of the women, willowy, angular. The others laughed. “But in the end, you know.”
It was dead easy to sense their vulnerability. We watched them and they had no idea we were there. I defy you not to feel the awful po
wer in such a scenario. It felt like there was heat in our blood, a physical tell of our grotesque wills. The violence we possessed, though if pressed we’d deny it, always. Even at our lowest, it felt so good to be us, and so terrible. We were gifted with everything anyone could ask for, and we asked for more. We were all cock and skin and teeth. They did not know just how afraid they ought to have been. Even accidentally, we could be brutal. Maybe especially accidentally.
The shortest one noticed us first. She stared furiously at the tree behind which we sheltered, and when something resolved itself out of the darkness—Wendell’s face?—she started and said, “Who’s there?”
Some of the others gasped in alarm, and they rose as one. One of them held up the stick she’d been using to poke the fire, brandishing it against us, against the shadows.
We turned and hotfooted it down to the water’s edge, then threw ourselves in, keeping our heads low. I took great gulping breaths and tried to keep my face underwater as long as I possibly could, crawling forward in that perfect, swallowing darkness. We swam. Our line was direct.
If we’d stuck around and spoken to them, I’d have told them that we posed no threat. All the if onlys. I had a life built out of them.
We hauled ourselves onto the land in the lee of the cabin. Once inside, we towelled off with the terry-cloth rags I’d known since childhood, and drank some more to steady our digits, to thin and cool our blood. Then we slept on a pair of decades-old chesterfields, our jeans rolled up and placed beneath our heads for pillows.
In the morning, we woke coffeeless and ate last year’s Raisin Bran for breakfast, dry. We were aware of our own piteousness. Against a cold sky that proffered no clemency, the stove burped a syrupy heat that stretched out minutes and bred in us a disinclination to move.
“Jesus, we’re awful specimens,” I said to Wendell.
Even absent indictments, there’d been crimes.
Sometime in the night I had dreamed that the willowy one had followed us and, upon finding us, smirked a large, victorious smile, as she’d confirmed for herself all that she’d suspected. We protested, claimed to be victims of our public educations, of our grandmothers’ attitudes, of things deep within the structures and biases that supported us. Hazards we could not swerve. Of course, we wished to be innocent, which is distinct from blameless. We wished it so fervently that we believed we were. We felt as though Emmylou had let us down. Emmylou had been our defence—inadequate, silly, convenient, heartfelt.
Wendell and I sipped from mugs of warm water. His: Swedish country aesthetic; mine: Big Hug Mug, browned, burnt sienna lettering. We inventoried all we felt was wrong with our lives, produced a list of complaints so mundane it bored us to name them. We talked about what had happened the night before.
“I think they knew it was in good fun,” Wendell said.
“I don’t believe that you believe that,” I said.
“We could be good men,” he said.
We had a pretty good laugh about that.
Waterfalls
ABOUT MY BROTHER’S DEATH there is really very little to say, except maybe that he’d long wanted to die and had finally succeeded in doing so.
Pedro. That wasn’t his name, but I’d called him that from a very early age. I don’t even know why. His name was Philip. There’s no explaining childhood. There’s no explaining brotherhood.
Pedro was born two years earlier than I, but he was fifty years wiser. I don’t know how these things happen. Before he was shaving, he had plumbed the mysteries of the heart. He told me about all of it from the top bunk, and his voice floated down to me as I lay in my lower berth, staring up at photos of Star Wars action figures I’d torn from the Sears Wish Book and stapled to the underside of his bunk.
My memories of boyhood are fragments. Pedro and I hucking rocks at a fat light-bulb moon. Where were we? The silver fog coming down upon the fields, fuzzed at its edges by the moon’s glare, its coolness slapping our bare baby cheeks. Clouds like dollops of cream in a sky the colour of hot wind, our father baiting our hooks before we dropped them into the amber water of a nameless lake. We had a drinker for an uncle who taught us to curse. Ours was a sunburned and largely happy young life.
It must’ve been two years ago, at our cousin Barb’s wedding. The last wedding I’d attended was my own, to Jane, but Jane had opted out of attending this one.
Pedro and I were finishing the bottles left behind the bar in the large white tent. It was four in the morning. Everything was kind of blurred and blue and sickly-tasting, but we persisted because we thought it was the right thing to do. Barb was our favourite cousin and she was marrying a terrible man, so our protest—our act of mourning for her happiness—was to finish all the liquor and then smash all the bottles on the stage where the cover band had done awful things to the Rolling Stones and the Bay City Rollers.
Pedro held a very large Cuban cigar in his hand, and only occasionally puffed on it. We were wearing crisp and lovely suits we’d bought in a strip mall. Since it was a wedding, we thought ostentatious display was in order.
He wanted to describe for me a trip to Niagara Falls. He told me this:
Pedro and his wife, Rebecca, had reserved a room billed as having a view of Niagara Falls, but when they got there they found that another hotel was blocking their view. All they could see was the river as it neared the lip and the mist that rose above it all. Pedro had wanted to complain, but Rebecca convinced him not to. She said, It’s lovely anyway. She said, If you’re more interested in looking at a waterfall than you are in looking at me, then we have problems. He saw her line of reasoning and, though he was stingy with the details, told me they made love with the curtains open and the illuminated mist hanging in the air outside. Then they went to sleep.
She woke, did Rebecca, screaming and panting and staring right through him, whispering about a terrible dream she’d had. Pedro said they should go for a walk to see the falls, so they dressed and headed out into the cool night. At the railing, looking down into that watery hole, Rebecca was glassy-eyed. Pedro said she looked like she was in shock. Not about the falls, though she’d never seen them before, but about whatever it was she’d dreamed.
A man, she said.
They sat on a bench, damp in the mist, and she relayed to him something she’d never told before, a horrible thing that had happened to her in her past, a man who’d hurt her. There were no details to speak of. You know the awful things men can do. Just saying that something had happened brought the tears out of her and inspired in him a murderous rage.
Everything changed, Pedro told me. He said it was like he didn’t know her.
My foolish brother, who could not accept that life had occurred before him. I loved him, the idiot, and I threw rocks with him and fished with him and drank with him, and I would do all of these things gladly still, if it were possible. I’d do it all until I die. But Pedro’s moral blind spots were sizable. Though filial attachment dictated that I love him, and self-imposed tragedy compels me to hold his memory dear, I would very much like, were he still alive, to slap him with a sock full of nickels.
I wish I’d had the nerve to do it when he first told me, in that mellow post-nuptial tent, spiffed up in our dark suits. But I didn’t. I was too full of Lamb’s and Malbec and schnapps. I was mellowed, too, by the understanding that his reaction was natural and animal. It’s what might occur to any of us. Though maybe some of our most natural inclinations could stand to be smacked out of us.
He told me what he did next: He consoled her. He took her head in his hands and said, Shh, babe, shh. He walked her back to the hotel and he gave her one of his Clonazepams and a little tiny bottle of vodka from the mini-bar, and she found sleep right there, on the starchy hotel pillow she’d left an hour earlier. Then he lay in the dark for a good long while, still in his clothes, before finally rising. He slipped out the door and strode once more, agitated, to the falls. At the edge he gripped the railing and fixed his eyes on the line right where those
millions of gallons of water tipped over. He ground his teeth together and felt his temples throb. He wallowed in homicidal anger. He yelled. He sobbed. He asked all the gods he didn’t believe in why she hadn’t told him about this horrible thing when they’d met, or before they’d married, or soon thereafter. Why she’d waited so long. He made it about himself—and that might have been just as damnable as what the other man did to her. Then Pedro took the ring from his finger and he wound up and hurled it like a stone into the tumbling water, where it was lost forever.
He ended his story there, because I knew the rest. They drove back to Toronto in silence. Rebecca moved out. The few times I saw her after they split, I hadn’t known why she’d looked so hollowed out; his confession filled in the blanks. She’d put her trust in the man she loved and he turned away. He blamed her. He’d peeled back his ribs and shown her the muck and sewage he kept there. There’s no unseeing such a thing.
Our dad, who had himself kept many grudges—against co-workers, bosses, political parties, sports franchises—once said to us, Grudges are just loyalty to your own animosities. But there was nothing commendable about what Pedro had done. To feel something does not mean that you need act upon that feeling. You must ask questions of it. You must interrogate it. And after that, even then, it’s necessary to leave some things unexpressed.
He came to see that, soon after everything settled down, but by then it was too late. He’d already gone over the edge. Said and done things. There was a blankness in his eyes after that, an obvious regret, knowing what he’d done to her, how he’d compromised the safety of her passage through life.
That, I expect, is why my brother killed himself. Truthfully, he’d always been romanced by death; realizing that he held within himself such cruelty was the best excuse he was ever likely to come across. You can’t carry around a thing like that. So he stopped carrying it. Not that it made Rebecca’s load any more manageable.
Lands and Forests Page 4