— Katie? Listen. Just let me explain. I can explain everything. Sure, Explainer of the Year, that’s me. How can I explain anything? How can I tell you what you should be doing? I don’t know what I should be doing. But I think if I don’t tell you, it’ll look bad. If I could level with you, would we be further ahead? Do you really want to know what I’m like? I can’t believe it.
Stacey rounds up Jen and feeds her. The boys are playing in the back yard, and the fighting is at present suppressed and undeclared. Stacey peers into saucepans, turns the stove elements lower, and pours another gin and tonic.
— Where in hell is he? Knocking himself out for Thorlakson. He’s working too hard. Yeh, but doing well, you have to admit. Sure, doing splendid. On his way to a heart attack. If he’d finished university, everything would be all right. He’d have a profession. How come he could only stick to it for two years after the war? It was more fun to go out drinking with Buckle. I can’t imagine Mac ever being like that. Damn you, Buckle Fennick, you ruined my husband’s life. What nonsense. Things don’t happen that way. It was Mac himself who had to quit university. Because his dad was a minister? Because Matthew was upright to the point of unbearability? If only Mac were a doctor, say, or a lawyer. Yeh, that would solve everything. Last month in this city two lawyers and one doctor killed themselves. The lawyers used the exhaust pipes on their cars, the doctor simply swallowed the appropriate pills. Come on, Stacey, let me freshen your drink. That’s what Tess says. Yes, she does. She is a very dainty type. Freshen, indeed. Let me give you another slug of this drug – she doesn’t say that. She is also wont to say, in such places as the City Hall or the Hudson’s Bay Company, that she wonders where the Little Girls’ Room is, making the john sound like a council hall for countless nymphets. I shouldn’t talk. Katie is always saying how outdated my slang is. Gosh. Gee. Twerp. Heavenly days.
Clump-clump-clump. A man’s footsteps, but not Mac’s. Stacey thrusts her glass into the deep concealing blue bowl of the Mixmaster on the kitchen cabinet, and goes to the door.
— Mac’s father?
But it is not Mac’s father. It is Buckle Fennick. He stands there on the front porch, grinning. For Buckle, to swagger does not mean to walk boastfully, or not necessarily. Buckle can swagger while standing still. He wears a sleazily shiny sports shirt, cerise and silver, and jeans.
— Man of his age, I ask you. His jeans are always too tight and they bulge where his sex is, and it embarrasses me and infuriates me that it does, yet I always look, as he damn well knows and laughs at, one of the many unspoken small malices between us in our years of competition for Mac. No – that’s unfair to all of us. I didn’t mean it. Oh?
Buckle is only slightly taller than Stacey, but he is stocky with muscular hair-flecked arms. He has a face like an Iroquois, angular, and faintly slanted dark eyes. His hair is night-black and straight. He never loses the tan on his face and arms, not even in the winter, and on the occasions when he goes to the beach with Mac and Stacey and the kids it surprises Stacey to see how pale his legs are under the black hairs.
— Okay, so he’s sexy. It’s an optical illusion. How many men do I see? You could count them on one hand, and most of those like Jake Fogler, about three feet tall with heavy-rimmed glasses and semi-collapsed chests, talking earnestly about media or some damn thing. Buckle’s just around here half the time, that’s all. Mac’s dear old buddy from during the war. I detest him. I try to be nice to him for Mac’s sake, but sometimes I don’t try hard enough and make some private remark to Mac, very restrained, like Why does that slob always drop in at dinnertime? and then Mac is furious. He doesn’t know that Buckle scares me. It’s ridiculous. It’s untrue. That article – “I’m Almost Ready for an Affair,” which turned out to mean she wasn’t at all, ending in an old-fashioned sunburst of joy, Epithalamium Twenty Years After, virtuous while conveying the impression that dozens of virile men would be eager to oblige if she weren’t. She was probably like me – the only guys she knew were her husband’s friends.
Hi, gorgeous.
— Buckle, when are you going to stop talking like that? Where do you get your lines? Old B-grade movies? Oh God, I should criticize. Here’s me, dressed in none-too-clean slacks and a blouse which Katie discarded when indelible red ink got spilled on it, so I look like I’m bleeding severely from a chest wound. Thrice hell.
Oh hi, Buckle. Come on in. I’m just getting dinner. Mac’s not home yet, but he should be here any minute.
— My good-wife-and-mother voice. I can’t seem to talk to Buckle in any other way. I always sound so prim. Sometimes I wonder what kind of person he imagines I must be.
I just got back from a haul north, so I’m off for a couple days. Thought I’d drop in and see how the guy’s getting on with the new job.
Mac’s getting on fine.
You don’t sound too pleased.
Sorry – I’m tired. End-of-day bit. Want to stay for dinner?
Twist my arm.
— Will I, hell. Your arm needs less twisting than anybody’s I know, you cheap bastard. Don’t you ever have a meal at home?
Sure, do stay. There’s plenty. Let me get you a drink. Gin and tonic?
Don’t mind if I do.
— Buckle, can’t you vary the response from time to time? I once said this – Don’t mind if I do – and Mac told me later it was vulgar. I didn’t tell him it had been a takeoff. I was too overcome with shame at my spiritual acidity.
Jen is playing with her plastic tea set on the kitchen floor. Buckle picks her up and swings her around above his head. Stacey, preparing one drink, having adroitly lifted her own out of the Mixmaster bowl, gazes in the hope that Jen will scream bloody murder. But no. Jen chortles for more.
Hey, how’s my girl friend, eh? How’s the champion pisser of the neighborhood?
— Just once. Only, for heaven’s sake, once did Jen wet on him when she was a very young baby. He still thinks this is the wittiest remark going. Take your hands off my kid, you ape.
Here’s your drink, Buckle.
He sets Jen down and picks up the glass.
Here’s looking at you.
How was the trip, Buckle?
Buckle is a trucker. He drives a diesel dinosaur, a steel monster, innumerable great tires, heavy as a mountain, roaringly full of crazy power. Buckle loves it. It is his portable fortress, his movable furnace. It is his lover and himself all in one. He mainly goes north, up the Cariboo Highway and the Alaska Highway, up to the Peace River country where the forests grasp the ancient moss-covered rocks, to the last little towns raw in the mud of new clearings.
Same old shit. Bananas this time. Had to unload along the way, but the last of them had to get to Fort St. John before they rotted black. So what happens?
What?
Ten miles out of Williams Lake the steering goes. She’s supposed to be serviced before each haul. Those buggers of mechanics at Ace don’t know a spanner from their own cocks. Lucky it was me driving. Slightest thing happens, Harvey’s nerves go on the blink. I’d slowed to light a cigarette, and that was lucky, too. My luck’s still in – I make good and sure of that. If ever I go, it’s not gonna be that way, some dumb thing like the steering going. Doing! I brake. Hard, but not too hard, see? She shudders and skids and finally comes to a standstill. Oncoming car nearly swerves right off the road. Terrified tourist climbs out and screams What d’you think you’re doing? Listen, bud, I tell him, very calm, it’s a lucky thing for you my reaction time’s pretty good and this crate decided to go for the vergeand not for you, or you’d be strummin’ your motherfuckin’ harp this very second, and don’t you forget it, eh? Harvey’s sleeping in the back all the time. I swear that guy’s made out of plasticine. Six and a half hours we’re held up.
What about the bananas?
They got there okay. I never lost a load of anything yet. Harvey keeps peeking away at them, like he’s a hen with unhatched eggs or something. I tell him, Relax, I’ll take the night shift and we can ma
ke time.
I bet that pleased him no end.
He’s no good any more. Too slow. He’s getting on, and he gets jittery. I’m trying to work a change. I’d like to go by myself, if they’ll let me.
You never get jittery, I suppose.
Look, Stacey, I’ve told you. Nothing can happen to me while my luck’s in. See?
No.
No what?
I don’t see.
Well, like I know every inch of that goddam highway, and I know my vehicle, see? I know how she responds, and what she’ll do and won’t do. She’ll do what I want because I know. Anyway, it’s always Russian roulette to some extent. That’s not bad. That’s just the way it is. You know that before you start out.
— He’s never consistent. He contradicts himself all the time, and there are things he only hints at, or else mentions as though you were bound to know all about them – as though they were commonplace. His luck – something apart from him and yet within his control, like the steering wheel, although with the possibility of abrupt change. His head must be full of unnamed gods meshing like a whole set of complicated gears. He’s as superstitious as a caveman, but he always denies having any superstitions.
Anyway, Stacey, I don’t aim to get taken by some bone-head mechanic’s mistake, not if I can help it – I mean, not even something I did, or another driver.
What do you mean – another driver?
When I say another driver, I mean another driver, see? Not some jerk of a farmer or tourist. I don’t include Mac in that. He drives a car, sure, but he’s as near to a driver as you could get.
— Maybe Buckle has a recurring nightmare about being smashed by a Volkswagen. Fate worse than death. Well, so what? All he wants is a jury of his peers.
How do you keep your luck? Praying?
You kidding? None of that crap for me. Reilly keeps a St. Christopher medal strung up there in front so he can see it all the time. Lots of guys do. Everything from kewpie dolls to saints. I know a guy keeps his wife’s picture up there, framed with doodads and plastic flowers. All a lot of bullshit. I’m not superstitious.
Yeh, so you’ve said.
— His shrines are invisible. I wonder what they look like, and what fetishes and offerings lurk on those altars? Yeh, doll, that evening course Man and His Gods. Great authority, you. What do you know of it? Don’t be silly. Don’t think of it. It always seems unbelievable that I met Mac through Buckle, in a way.
Stacey Cameron walking out of the brown-wainscotted office at five, wondering if she wouldn’t be better off working for T. Eaton’s or almost anyone rather than Janus Importers. Stacey, well for the Lord’s sake, is it really you? Julie, a girl from Manawaka. Gosh, Julie, what you been doing? I should only tell you, kiddo. Everything from fruit-picker to hairdresser. Married now. Yep. True. Mrs. Fennick, that’s me. Real swell guy, a little on the nutty side but what a dancer. What about you? Oh, I been working for these importers, but my boss makes horoscopes for people – I think it’s some kind of a racket – think I oughta quit? Stacey went home for supper with Julie, to talk it over, and one of Buckle’s friends was there. Clifford MacAindra. Six months later she thought how fortunate, to have her whole life settled once and for all, so ideally, at twenty-three.
Whatsamatter, Stacey?
Oh – nothing. Want another drink?
Twist my arm.
— Julie left him four years later, when their boy was two. The last couple of years we saw very little of them. When she left, she never said why, not to me, anyway. She just lit out. Buckle blamed it all on her, how she complained about his long-distance driving and that, and wanted him to change, and he wasn’t having any of that crap, et cetera. Only a long time later I began to hear in his talk just how often he claimed somebody was trying to force him somewhere he didn’t want to be. I never knew how it was, for her.
How’s your mother, Buckle?
Buckle’s face takes on further concealment. He has lived with his mother in an apartment over a store on Grenoble Street ever since Julie left him. He has never asked Mac and Stacey there, so they have never seen the old lady.
Oh great. Always great, she is. She’s only got one tune.
What tune is that?
Be careful on them dangerous roads, she keeps telling me. She couldn’t care less about me, you understand. She just wonders what’d become of her if I went. I don’t blame her.
— Maybe he can’t stand anyone to go to his place because she probably calls him Arbuckle, which is his name and which he hates even more than Mac hates his name, Clifford.
Click, Slam. Mac at last. Stacey now realizes that she has not gone upstairs to fix her hair or put on a decent dress.
Hi, Stacey.
Hi. Everything okay?
Mm. Everything’s fine. You?
Fine. Buckle’s here.
That’s good.
— The automatic kiss bit. Does he actually not see me when he kisses me like that, or is it really the opposite – out of the corner of his day-beleaguered eyes he sees his life’s partner, slacks and scruffy blouse, sagging in all directions and doing damn-all about it, and he shuts off the sight like you shut off the street noises because if you didn’t, one day you might run amok and that wouldn’t do?
Mac picks up Jen.
Hi, princess.
Jen laughs straight from her belly, the deep delighted laughter of a child loved.
— He’s crazy about her. If ever I suggest maybe I should take her to the doctor and see about why she doesn’t talk, he nearly has a fit. Don’t be ridiculous, he says. It’s because he can’t bear to think anything might be wrong with her. Not with Jen.
Katie refuses to come down for dinner, and Mac inquires what the hell could possibly upset the kid like that. Stacey refuses to answer. Buckle goes into his steering story again. He is interrupted by Ian and Duncan, who argue over the relative size of each other’s dessert, both claiming that the other has the larger portion, until Stacey suggests that they trade, which both refuse to do.
— Spoiled brats. What have I done to them? Fighting over a square inch of frozen artificial cream. Not dying of hunger. Not even aware of the possibility. Squabbling over nil. Who made them so? What will happen when the horsemen of the Apocalypse ride through this town? Oh Stacey, enough.
Mac finally cannot bear the uproar.
Shut up, for God’s sake, can’t you? Stacey, can’t you keep these kids quiet for one minute? Here, you two – neither of you will get any ice cream, if that’s the way you’re going to carry on. Just you leave the table right now. You don’t know how damn lucky you are. When I was a kid, ice cream was a treat.
— I was thinking the exact same. Yet when it’s spoken, it doesn’t sound convincing. It sounds corny.
Mac – leave them. Please. They’ll simmer down. C’mon, kids.
— My placating voice. Running interference again, never knowing if rightly or wrongly, or whose side I’m on or why I should be on anybody’s side. Am I undermining Mac? “Are You Emasculating Your Husband?” I swear those articles are written by male anarchists, delighting in the tapeworms of doubt which they sound out to squirm through my guts. How do I know if I’m emasculating him or not? Every time I disagree with him I feel I’m knocking him down. So I agree with him profusely and then it’s me who’s doing the disappearing act. Now he’s on the point of real anger. Action, quick.
Ian! Duncan! You heard what your dad said. Eat your ice cream right now and then leave the table and no more horsing around, eh?
This is not what Mac has said, but maybe he will let it pass. Stacey’s voice sounds to her own ears like some harpy of the mountains, the cold shrill of the north wind. And yet, after dinner, Ian approaches Mac with no apparent qualms and it works.
Hey, Dad, you wanna see something?
What?
My bug. I got it finished today.
Yeh? How’d it turn out?
Not bad. You should see the steering – it’s really neat, ho
w I got it rigged up. C’mon – it’s in the back yard.
Okay. Want to come, Buckle? Big deal, here.
Sure, okay. I’ll come along. You know what you’re gonna be, Ian? A long-distance driver like me. You got the feel for a vehicle, eh?
Naw, I’m gonna be an inventor.
Great, boy. You can support me in my old age. The hell with driving, like your Uncle Buckle and I do. You invent a new-type rocket, see?
— It’s good when it’s like that. Why can’t it be all the time? Ian needs it so much. He doesn’t give a damn for my approval. He knows he’s got it anyway. It’s Mac’s he needs. And yet they turn around and knife each other with words, both suspicious. I should be able to prevent it, but I don’t know how.
The gin has completely worn off now. Stacey clears the table and perceives that Duncan is standing by himself near the kitchen door. She puts an arm around him, asking him to help with the dishes because he is so talented in this way, and he consents to the deception for the sake of belonging somewhere. Stacey takes a bowl of stew and one of ice cream upstairs and leaves them outside Katie’s door where Katie’s dignity may permit her to claim them in due course. Then Stacey bathes Jen, puts her to bed, calls the boys, gets them stowed away after a one-hour exchange of repartee, and finally changes her own clothes, from slacks to bronze linen sheath with ersatz gold pendant.
— Pour on the Chanel Number Five. Drench yourself in it, woman. Go On. Mac and Buckle will spring to their feet. Gad! they will exclaim. Who is this apparition of delight? Who is this refugee queen from The Perfumed Garden? In a pig’s eye, they will.
Mac and Buckle are not in the dining room or the kitchen or the living room. They are down in the basement, in the darkened TV room. Buckle is lighting two cigarettes, holding them both in his mouth at once. He hands one to Mac, who takes it without a word.
— I’d like to knock that damn cigarette to the floor and stamp on it hard. Yeh, that would be splendid. Mac would have me certified.
The Fire-Dwellers Page 5