Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  I remember hitching my pants up over my ass. I mean, with a gut like mine, I know I’m always hitching up my pants. They’re always heading somewhere south, almost like they have a mind of their own, and they’d like to be somewhere warmer. Like Cuba. But I remember that time, that hitch, like it was some kind of punctuation, as if it meant something particular, as if it were a step forward the way a ratcheted gear turns—always forwards, never back.

  Always done—never undone.

  I went around to Lisa’s side of the car and looked in through the glass at her, and it struck me that she was a far prettier girl asleep—that talking, or at least talking when she was drunk, made her face move in almost unattractive ways. I thought that, lying there asleep in the soft light coming through the mist, she was possibly as pretty as she would ever be in her entire life.

  I opened her door, and she snored a little, but she didn’t move, and I lifted her legs out through the door, her head sliding back against the side of my seat. She shifted a bit, but her eyes didn’t open. Her mouth went slack, though, loose almost, and that was jarring.

  I was picturing her just like that, exactly in that position, leaning back against the seat—but I was picturing her after I’d taken her pants off, naked from the waist down and her legs spread and hanging out through the front door, the balls of her feet touching the ground.

  I mean, I could have done it, could have done all kinds of things, and no one would have known a thing. Even if she woke up or something, even if she called the cops, just her word against mine, and me a working stiff with a clean record.

  I could just say I didn’t do it. Just like that: I didn’t do it. Who would they believe?

  Somehow, all at once, even imagining it, even fantasizing, it wasn’t the way I thought it would be. It was like a crime scene photo on a television show. And in my head it was like someone had switched a light on for a moment, and just as quickly switched it off again. That spot where all the possibilities become impossible.

  Worse—they became ridiculous.

  I became ridiculous.

  I don’t like to think about that.

  Nothing happened. I swear. Absolutely nothing happened. Anyone says anything different, they’re lying.

  I don’t know why I feel like I have to keep saying it, but I do: nothing happened. I’d tell the police that if they asked me, and I’d try real hard to keep my face straight, because I always get nervous when I’m afraid someone thinks I might be lying.

  I left her, wide-eyed and sitting on a swing set by the school down there in the valley by the river, looking for all the world like she was ten years old or something. She was awake by then and the rain had stopped completely, and she was pretty much dry again anyway. Lisa thanked me for trying to find the cabin, and said it was good of me to pick up a drunk stranger and let her sleep it off in my car. Good that a stranger would be willing to keep an eye on her.

  I didn’t say anything about that. I told her she should just wait, but that I had appointments down at least as far as St. Vincent’s, maybe even Trepassey, and I’d keep an eye open for her when I was coming back up along the Salmonier Line, that if she was still there I’d give her a lift back into the city. Except I wasn’t going to be looking, at least not in the way that meant I’d actually stop if I saw her.

  After that, I kind of forgot about her for a while. I mean, there aren’t a lot of stores on the way down, but there was a lot of fog, and the road winds right along the coast, so I guess I kind of slipped into the driving part, and then, in the stores, right into my patter about which energy drinks were best and how, if nothing else, they’d get the cleanest, highest margins on ours, a storefront display and prizes for customers who could be bothered to peer down inside empty cans to find a machine-written code.

  By the time I headed back, six places had agreed to go on our distribution list, and that was a pretty good day for me, even if they never even managed to sell out their three-case introductory order.

  Coming back by the school, I tried really hard not to look—I tried just to keep my eyes to the front, but it didn’t work.

  She wasn’t there. At least, she wasn’t there in the quick little glance I let myself have in the end, speeding by. No Lisa, no T-shirt, no high little firm ass in tight jeans. Stop it, I said to myself, just stop it. Stick with exactly where everything stopped: no harm, no foul.

  I didn’t really start worrying until I stopped for gas and the guy who owned the store said there’d been all kinds of racket, and he hated when someone went ahead and had a big May party. “Four o’clock in the morning, and some drunk girl is pounding on my door, loaded, and don’t think I’m going to go out there to let her in. Pouring rain, and she was howling. But who needs the trouble?”

  I told him I’d given her a ride, that she was only a tiny thing, maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet—and she was soaking wet, too. And how much trouble could she possibly be, anyway?

  “I’d think twice before I did anything like that,” he said, and he was shaking his head, putting the sandwiches and the water into the bag. “You’re a guy alone in a car, and you picked her up?” He handed me my change. “These days I’d think twice about that for sure.”

  And that got me thinking.

  I mean, if she got it into her head to say something about me, to say I’d done something, it’s just my word against hers. It doesn’t matter that I could tell them that nothing happened, not if she was saying that something did.

  It would be even worse if I lost it and tried to lie about it, tried to say I hadn’t seen her at all. You hear about the police using DNA evidence all the time in the papers, about how there’s always a drift of particles, of skin and hair and cells, coming off us all the time—so even if I said I hadn’t picked her up, there’d be plenty of proof that I had.

  I can lie with the best of them about whether or not you need whatever I’m selling this time, but I’m not so good about lying to cops. Or to my mother. Or to anyone else who’s willing to stare hard at my eyes and wonder why I won’t look straight back at them and hold their gaze.

  What if she didn’t turn up somewhere afterwards? I mean, what if I dropped her off and something happened to her after that?

  I know I keep coming back to this, but nothing happened up there on the forestry road. Nothing I haven’t already said. I know it just makes me sound more guilty to keep coming back to it. But I’m not guilty of anything but thinking.

  You can’t be prosecuted for the things that go through your head. It’s only the things you do that are supposed to count.

  After I got back to Halifax, I started thinking that maybe I’m not meant to be on the road anymore. Too many hotels, too much travel. One too many close calls. I know for sure that I’m not meant to be picking up hitchhikers. Maybe the smart thing to do, the next time they offer me some management thing, is to park the car for good and get used to a desk instead.

  Buy a house. Meet someone. Get a real life.

  Me and a goldfish and a wife. And smaller things to worry about when everyone else is sleeping.

  LOOK AWAY

  T HE DISHES weren’t done again, just piled up in the sink, crusted with dried food. I could see the ring of grease around the upper edge of the tilted plates where the sink had been left full until the water went cold.

  I had pulled the plug out myself the night before, looking at my face in the black mirror of the night window, at the sharp silver-grey patches that had suddenly appeared in my hair at the temples. I thought that sometime in the morning the sink would get filled again with hot, soapy water and the dishes would be washed. But morning came and still they sat there, waiting.

  Through the narrow gap of the half-opened bedroom door, I could see a wedge of green sheets, crumpled in heaps like big round-topped waves, the comforter down on the floor. The bed unmade again, thrown back, thrown apart, the sheets and blankets looking as if they had been discarded as unnecessary. That’s the way she got up, the way she always
had: just flinging the bedclothes back as if they weren’t even there, padding away on bare feet to whatever morning errand she’d already set her mind to.

  She might be anywhere in the house, caught up in a book or another important project, down in the basement or even outside.

  Madeline doesn’t care much about anything anymore, living inside her own schedules and plans, and the kids are every bit as bad. Half the time they’re trying to hide from me, part of a petty little game I am far past appreciating, something that they keep doing over and over again, no matter how many times I’ve asked them—told them—to stop. Imagine a small boy hiding in the bottom of a closet, hands pressed across his mouth, trying to keep the laughter from leaking out, hiding while his father tries to find him and get him ready for school. Now imagine how irritating that is about the fortieth time in.

  So I did the dishes myself, listening carefully enough to finally be sure they weren’t somewhere in the house, wondering just where the hell they were this time.

  The lightkeeper’s house at Cape Pine is small, sure, but at least it’s got electricity now and running water, so we have a washer and dryer, fridge and stove, and most of the time the dirt road’s passable enough. It’s tucked down in the bottom corner of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, not quite far enough to the east for the kind of renown of a lighthouse like Cape Race, where ships used to cross the Atlantic just to pitch themselves ashore on the rocks, but it’s important enough to be staffed, even though it’s out of the way. In the wintertime we leave the car up near the St. Shott’s road and go in and out by snow machine or on foot, but it’s a far cry from the days when it must have been almost a day’s hike to get out to even the smallest town, let alone a larger place like Trepassey.

  I still remember when I got the registered letter telling me that I’d gotten the job. I’d be in charge of the Cape Pine light, a cog in the Coast Guard. Weeks would go by and I wouldn’t hear from anyone, except for the regular direct-deposit statement that made its way to my post office box in Trepassey.

  “Keith Pomeroy, Keeper” it said on the envelope, and Madeline and I both thought that was funny. For a while. Everything funny wears off with enough use.

  Cape Pine is a big old lighthouse, built out of ancient stacking cast-iron rings, and it dates back to the 1850s, the metal heavy and rusty and always damp to the touch, able to grab moisture out of the driest air, and with its fog and mist and wind, Cape Pine is anything but dry. Sometimes it seemed like the old structure was weeping rusty tears: the heavy, glutinous paint would bubble out in fat blisters that leaked liquid iron oxide, and no matter how carefully you painted it, it would only look new for a month or two. Climb the circular stairs inside to the top walkway and you become an apostrophe atop a column of white and red concentric rings, some 350 feet above the water.

  Up near the lens, the horizon is an absolutely straight and unforgiving line, except for the occasional uninterested passing ship. The joke about Cape Pine is that there are no pine trees anywhere near the light, anywhere on the cape—no trees at all, unless you count scrubby alders and bog spruce. But it was a job, and when I took it, jobs were hard to find.

  After I finished the dishes, and after I made the bed and took some meat out of the freezer for supper, I decided Madeline and the boys—Keiran’s six now, and David’s eight—might be down in Arnold Cove.

  On a warm summer day in the afternoon when there’s not much wind, it’s almost idyllic down there. There’s a stream that cuts down through the beach, and when the weather got really hot—years ago now, before I was keeper, when we used to drive down to the lighthouse and just dream—Madeline and I used to go swimming naked in the big freshwater pool under the overhanging cliff. I was always startled when she stood up, not by her nakedness or her breasts or her hips, but by the sharply defined V of her public hair. She could stand there as bold as brass, hands at her sides, and I’d have trouble tucking away the thought that I should really be looking away politely, officially pretending she had lost her suit in the current and somehow hadn’t realized it yet. That she could stand there so simply, so boldly—it was like she’d been deposited here from another, faraway place, unaware of anything like convention.

  Madeline’s features are small and precise—like a porcelain teacup—but she has a way of looking at you that moves back and forth between innocent and downright feral. Her upper lip comes to a small double peak in the middle that she used to accentuate with bright red lipstick, and those two small points give her a look as if she is always up to something, a sort of impish, eager look, waiting for trouble. Mischievous.

  In the heat, I could imagine her and the boys down barefoot in the landwash, the waves rushing in fast along the grey sand and quickly ironing everyone’s footprints away. Maybe building bonfires, although I couldn’t smell any smoke. The wind wasn’t exactly the right direction to bring the smoke back to the light, but I could see the cove, and there wasn’t an obvious smudge rising up.

  The walk to the cove is an easy one: half the ground is barrens, swept back and held in check by the constant wind. The highest vegetation is the August-yellowing strands of the cotton grass, and the wandering sheep pretty much take care of that. Paths wind into themselves, the tread of the sheep driven more by a search for food than by any particular destination. But no tracks from little boys in the soft, peaty dips of the cove trail, no sign of the long, even lope of bare feet left by Madeline, even if I could easily imagine her walking along the path in the sun, her sneakers held by the laces in one swinging hand.

  I knew that didn’t mean they weren’t at the cove. Madeline might have them all playing “Indian,” making their way across the barrens without ever setting foot on a path, carefully erasing anything like a human mark behind them. They might even be hiding along the spine of the next hummock, sighting at me with their hands over their eyes, seriously silent while I stumbled ignorantly towards them. They’d wait to the last moment and jump out at me, shouting “Surprise!”—all three of them, and they expect me to act surprised—which I always did, until they got so good at hiding that they would actually startle me, over and over again. The game stopped being even close to fun a long time ago. After a while, it just made me mad—in fact, angrier each and every time. I’d know they were out there watching me scrabble around, looking, and they’d all be up somewhere laughing to themselves.

  Anyone could get mad about that, right?

  Once, I came across all three of them walking backwards along the dust of the road, brushing away their tracks with scraps of spruce bough. They had walked straight down the middle of the road, avoiding the tire tracks so that it looked like our car had been the last thing to pass, walking lightly on the available patches of gravel and carefully obliterating any sign of their passing in the powdery dust.

  Madeline had looked up impishly, a co-conspirator, dirt smeared on both sides of her narrow face. “You were lucky this time,” she said. “We were almost out of sight.”

  Frustrated, I picked up a small rock and flung it hard at the ground. It took a strange carom, perhaps hitting another rock buried there in the dust, and it spun up off the ground and into her leg, opening a small cut above the point of her ankle that bled surprisingly freely. Looking up quickly at her eyes, I saw the flicker of pain, and then watched her eyes go pebble hard and shiny, like some sort of hidden shark’s eyelid had come down.

  “Like I said,” Madeline whispered. “Lucky this time.”

  I’d had enough of the game. I turned and walked back to the tower.

  Another time, I watched their bright shirts, two green, one red, from up on the catwalk around the tower where I was wiping the heavy salt spray off the glass, until, suddenly, when I looked over my shoulder, they were irretrievably gone. It was the kind of thing that makes you feel almost completely alone, makes you reach for the fridge and beer, even if it is barely afternoon on a Wednesday.

  Arnold Cove is caught between cliffs, grey crumbling stone on one side
, browning sheets of shale on the other. When the swell is just right, the waves roar directly in from the open ocean, shoulder high and cruel, the water collapsing and snatching itself back under. The small bay catches anything the ocean chooses to give up. There are plastic bottles up high at the tide line, discarded shoes, and the regular storm refuse of smashed lobster pots and buoys, along with the pieces of boats battered apart somewhere on distant and angry seas. Lost rubber red-orange Fireball work gloves, hopefully without hands inside, often lie palm up on the sand, begging attention.

  As I made my way down the steep incline, there was no sign of Madeline and the boys. If they had somehow been transformed into white bleach bottles, I would have seen at least a dozen of them.

  Once down on the beach, there was no real way to see if they were around. The tide was in, the water right up at the point where sand turns to fist-sized, jumbled round stones, and I couldn’t see anywhere they’d left anything like a track. There were ash pits where old bonfires had been, but they were cold and smokeless, and when I dug my hands down into the ashes, they were rain wet, at least a few days old.

  They probably weren’t there. Bonfires were almost a given. Once down on the beach, Madeline likes to get the boys playing Cornish wrecker, and they need to get the bonfires big enough, they’d told me, “to lure the sailors to their watery deaths.” Sometimes I can see huge clouds of smoke from the tower—big grey and black pillars of smoke. When I go down to see what they’re doing, I can hear their whoops and shouts while I’m still far away on the path. They always stop as soon as they see me, and stand seriously warming their hands as the salt-dried sticks spit and flare and burn impossibly bright and hot. The wood is stripped by the salt and burns like rage; it’s all fury and sheer flying-apart. Throw water onto one of their big beach fires and even the rocks underneath hiss and crack and explode in protest.