Gwen became more animated despite my confusion and seeming indifference. Now it was she who began to explore down my body with her tongue. That soft tongue dancing over my bony chest. I was ready to get up, to open the door, and plunge out into the dark night, go running naked and screaming along the beach, crying, wailing in pain to let her know how much all this hurt, how much harm she was doing to me. But I couldn’t move.
And then the anger swelled up in me again. I grabbed Gwen’s hair, twisting it in my fist, pulled her face back up to mine and assaulted her mouth with a kiss, biting her lip and pushing my hand down to grab one of her breasts. Love had turned to lust and the lust was mingled with the hurt pride of the male ego and pain. I still wanted Gwen, I still wanted her then and there but I knew it was no longer making love. It would be something else.
I pushed myself over on top of her and pulled her arms out to the side. As I entered her, she made movements with her body to let me know it was okay, that she wanted me. I looked down at her as I lifted myself up from the waist, still pinning her with my hips, still possessing her. We were both gasping for air and I could not look for more than a second at her sweet face because I feared she would see the anger in my eyes. Instead, I went about my work, feeling the thrill of sex and the hammerlock of lust on my brain until it was over and I was satisfied and I slipped off her sideways, gasping for breath.
I lay there nearly unconscious, feeling I had done the most awful of things because it had not been love. Gwen had betrayed me, but I had betrayed her and myself. I could not understand why I had done this. I could understand nothing. I was both a victim and a criminal, jailed forever in some crippling emotional prison.
But Gwen was still lying there naked beside me. She ran her fingers through my hair, pulled herself gently to me. I could see that her lip was bleeding. I tasted the blood as she kissed me gently on the mouth. If time had continued to flow, it was indifferent to me. I was locked in some expanding present, a place of grim loss and solitude. And then she was whispering in my ear. “Let’s do it again. This time more slowly because I love you so much and I want this night to go on and on.”
She knew how much she had injured me and she had not held me to blame for the way I had acted and then, through her gentle encouragement, she led me back to the land of the living and helped me translate lust and guilt into love. Soon we were making love again, the way it should have been. We spoke very little for the hours that followed but made love, then rested, made love, then rested until we were both exhausted. A dim silver sun was coming up over the sea. Outside, the world was grey and dismal. The wind, up out of the northeast, was setting the coast up for a stormy blast of ugly weather. We were two slightly sore, overwrought kids in the back of a ‘57 Chevy who were still very much in love and who had forgiven themselves but not the world that was about to drive them apart. But we both knew it was what had to be and there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it.
37
By three o’clock the next day she was gone and I was alone with my island. My mother sent Casey looking for me. I had already wandered, lonely and lost, to the beach at Back Bay, to the stony barachois where the gaspereau would pass upstream, to the look-off ledges that jutted out over the sea. I made my pilgrimage to all the old sacred Gwendolyn places.
Casey was fourteen now — a funny, awkward girl with long black hair and glasses. Smart in some ways but not school smart. It had been a rough year for her and she had almost failed. She had lost all self-confidence and I had not been much help to her. For me, there had always been problems larger than Casey’s, crises more important. She still didn’t understand why our father was around so rarely; she couldn’t fathom politics or the expansive geography of our family. Casey was a child who had gone through phases so diverse, so striking that I sometimes didn’t know who she would be when I woke up. When she first came into the world during the hurricane, she had screamed and wailed but then fell asleep and when she woke, she made very little noise for almost a month. When she opened her mouth again, she had learned to coo a musical sort of melody that sustained her for nearly a year. Then more screaming, more silence, a Niagara of language at one point, silence again. Moodiness followed by alert, perceptive insight.
Casey missed her father and had not even had those few “good years” that I had experienced with him. I think I’d been a poor excuse of a brother for her. Casey and my mother had a bond deeper, stronger and weirder than any I had with my mother. My mother, wanting to pass on to her daughter what protective powers she could, got her started on the occult quite early. It would be years before her intuitive, psychic powers were honed but by the age of eleven, Casey could make salt shakers fall off the table for no reason, cupboard doors open and bags of flour slide to the floor. She claimed that she could make a sparrow go silent at fifty feet or start singing up a frenzy at her mental command and “proved” this to me time after time although I always believed that there were other more natural forces at work.
Now that she was fourteen, I would come home on an evening and find a pair of twisted spoons on the table. “Your sister is developing a sharp mind,” Dorothy would say, pointing at the warped silverware. Now that we were both older, my mother preferred that we call her by her first name. I guess I conceded to myself that they could mangle spoons with their minds but it was never actually performed in rny presence. Casey even claims that, in a desperate moment while failing a geometry test, she made Mr. Hawkings’ belt come loose and his pants fall to the floor as he leaned on the chalk trough, waiting for his pupils to finish. The class dissolved into an uproar. Casey still failed the test, but she had realized another survival weapon in her psychic arsenal. Soon after that, however, Casey decided that she would set aside all interest in the paranormal. She had decided that she wanted very much to be “normal.”
Everyone on the island lived somewhere near the perimeter — by the bay, by the sea, or along the several little inlets. The bulk of the island was the unused and relatively uninspiring interior, about a hundred and fifty acres of bog, jutting rocks, tundra-like field and a few briny ponds. For the most part we considered this communal land although no one had ever tried to “do” anything with it. In the winter it would freeze up, the snow would glaze over and it would be a good place to trek around as if lost in the frozen arctic wastes — or so I used to pretend. But now, early summer, it was generally a damp, dismal place where you might sink up to your elbows in the bog or trip over the tangled juniper roots that snaked over the lichen-covered rocks. But it was a place that Gwen and I had not visited often and it was, on that unhappy, lonely day, where I wanted to be.
I was hiding, I guess you could say, behind a high granite boulder that perched like an egg on a flat shelf of rock. It had always looked off-balance, like it would topple over any second. As a kid I’d tried to budge it and found it strange that it could not be moved. There was a small pond below. I assumed it would one day roll off the ledge and plug the pond and that would be the end of its journey, its final destination after being left here high and dry from the retreating glacier. I often thought about that old dead-and-gone glacier that had scraped this island clean and left the odd deposit of boulders to sort out their fate through geological time. I was sitting alone there on the pond side of the rock, ready to accept my fate if forty-five tonnes of granite should decide that today was the day to slip free of the whims of stasis and let gravity have its way.
“I knew I’d find you here,” Casey said as she arrived, scaring me half to death. She was lying of course. I’m sure she had searched the island’s shores first and had finally turned inland in a final attempt to locate her morose brother. She parked herself beside me. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m doing nothing. It’s what I was cut out to do.”
“That’s good,” she said. “People do too much of everything and it takes patience and practice to do nothing.” Casey picked at the dry bayberries on the ground, crush
ed them to make them give off that fragrant scent of summer — last summer trapped in its fruit. “Weren’t you and Gwen in love with each other? Why did she leave?”
My little sister was in her blunt phase. She’d ask anybody anything directly. But her question annoyed me because of the illogical answer that was necessary. “Question number one: yes. Question number two: she had to.”
“It was only a quiz, not a final exam.”
“No more questions, okay?”
“Okay.” Casey tried to sit quietly by me as I brooded. A low bush nearby was filled with starlings eating dried berries. We sat in silence again until Casey grew bored and pulled out her pocket transistor radio. “Want to listen?”
I shook my head no. She plugged in the tiny earphone and started to move side to side to the music. I couldn’t bring my-self to show it, but I was glad she was here. I started to get my mind off Gwen. I began to think about the upcoming election. The Tories would have to choose a new leader. Colin was in some sort of hot water — some hints of scandal, kickbacks, minor corruption just as the political clock was ticking down to election time. I tried to follow the papers nowadays, wanting to keep up with my dad and his party. It was always so strange to read his name in the Mail Star. They made him sound so very important.
But the Tories had been slipping in popularity since my father was first elected. It was possible the Grits would return to power. It was possible my father would not be reelected. For selfish reasons, I was praying for his defeat. Bud Tillish had already announced he would try to regain his seat. Bud had cleaned up his image and brought himself some local favour by luring a couple of small manufacturers of fishing gear to our part of the Shore. But I just couldn’t see how Bud’s recent success could match my father’s charisma. I almost wished I could think of a way to help Bud out.
Then my quiet, desperate mood was broken by the sound of a truck engine. It was getting closer, even though we were nowhere near the road. As I listened to the gunning engine, the curses of men and the spinning of tires in bog muck, I realized that some asshole was trying to drive a truck right out into the middle of the island. But why?
I pulled the earphone out of Casey’s ear and told her to turn off the radio. We both looked as a jacked-up black Ford truck with monster tires came chewing, spewing, spitting and gouging its way across the bog beneath us. It left a trail of deep, ugly ruts that immediately filled in with dark inky water and mud. There were two men in the cab. I had never seen them or the truck before. My instinct was to go running down the embankment, screaming at them to get the hell out of here, but I could see they had a gun rack in the back window with two rifles. Hunters? Nothing much to hunt here but skinny shore rabbits and bushes full of sparrows and starlings.
Maybe they were crazed criminals. What else would explain this illogical terrorizing of the land? If Casey had not been there, I’m sure I would have run down to give them hell, but the way they were tearing up the place was so inexplicable that I didn’t trust them at all. So I pulled Casey around to the back of the balanced rock and we lay low to watch.
The truck stopped on a section of level, dry rock — not granite but something that crumbled when you scraped your boots across it. There was a name on the side door of the truck in big bold letters: MANNHEIM/ATLANTA. It meant nothing to me. The two men got out. One was fat at the belt buckle and wore a cowboy hat. The other was tall, bald and impatient. “What kind of god-forsaken place is this?” the fat cowboy shouted in an accent that seemed so out of place here that he might as well have arrived from Mars. I tried to place it. American South. Deep South.
The other man tried to wipe the mud off his shoe onto the fender of the truck. “Goot place, I think. Goot place as any.” Another weird accent. Foreign, but not American. “He sounds like Colonel Klinck in Hogan’s Heroes,” Casey whispered to me.
“Let’s just get our sample and get out of here before we get our asses sunk up to our eyeballs in this sludge.” The American heaved some sort of long pipe-like contraption with a motor on one end out of the back of the truck, pulled on a cord and started up what sounded like a chainsaw motor. He put one end of the shaft to the ground and the engine roared into life.
“What are they doing?” Casey asked.
“They’re drilling,” I answered.
“Drilling for what? Who are they?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t like it.”
We watched as they made three holes and extracted loose rock which they put into three separate containers. When the drill was back in the truck, they each grabbed a bright red can of Coke, slugged it back and then heaved the cans into the bog.
“Let’s get out of this shit hole,” the beer-belly with the drawl said.
The German shrugged and got back in the cab. The driver jerked the truck around and headed back out of bog, leaving a new set of knee-deep ruts as they departed.
When they were gone, Casey and I went down to where they had drilled and saw the three perfectly cylindrical holes bored into the crumbling rock. “What are they looking for?” Casey asked again. All I could think of was the gold I had once found near here, the gold my father had asked me to never mention. Around the holes was the dry, whitish-yellow powder of disturbed rock. I put some of the dust in both my pockets and walked Casey home where I told my mother I was skipping dinner.
Hants Buckler was playing checkers with himself when I stepped into his kitchen. “Who’s winning?” I asked.
“I am. I always win.”
I sat down on an old wooden crate labelled “100% Virgin Olive Oil” with fancy blue-green lettering and a picture of a young Italian woman painted on it.
“Hants, who owns the bog and all the land in the middle of the island?”
Hants kinged his opponent and shifted over to the other side of the board. “Nobody owns it. Guess it’s kind of public land. Nobody ever worried about who owned it ‘cause nobody ever really wanted it. Not good for much unless you want to harvest sundews and pitcher plants.”
I told him what I’d seen today. He said he’d heard all the racket and would have gone to check it out himself only he was in the middle of pickling hard-boiled eggs. “Somewhere on paper, somebody must have legal rights to it,” I suggested. “And I’m worried.”
“Hell, we’re all worried. There’ll always be something to worry about. World’s probably gonna end next week if they keep building bombs and if that little war in Asia flares up into something big, it’ll probably burn us all to living hell. But you gotta take it like me. Don’t pay too much attention to it. Mind your business. Wait and see what washes up. Accept things as they are and make yourself happy.”
Hants had turned sixty-nine this year. Maybe I’d see the world the same way when I turned sixty-nine. He got up to pour us both a cup of tea, then sidled over to his cupboard and poured a cap full of black rum into each of our cups. “Here’s to ‘er,” he said. “Barbados tea” he called it.
I sucked on it slowly. It was hot and burned twice on the way down my gullet. “How many acres do you own?”
“Frig knows,” he said. “I never had a proper deed. I don’t pay taxes, neither. Still doesn’t mean I don’t own this place. No one really ever owns a place. You borrow a piece of land to live on while you’re alive and then you give it to somebody else. Kind of like a contract with the island itself. I figure if I don’t take care of the place while I’m living, the island’ll get back at me somehow after I’m dead and buried here. Send maggots into me box or something. Who knows?”
“Yeah, but who do you think the government would say owns the middle of the island?” I could see it was going to be hard to get an answer here, but Hants was the only real link with the deep past of the island. I was sure he knew what I was getting at despite his attempt to wax philosophical.
He scratched his jaw, producing a sound not unlike a coarse file honing the blade of an axe. “I reckon they’d call it Crown land.”
“Which means that it’s owned by t
he government, the province itself, right?”
“Belongs to the people, really. We all know that. Belongs to everyone and no one, just like the entire island, what your father always called the Republic of Nothing.”
“But if the government wanted to do something with the land, or if someone wanted to buy it and the government was willing to sell, they could do it, right?”
“Who’d want it, though? Ain’t nothing there.” Hants was baffled.
I reached in my pocket and poured a small amount of the yellow-white dust on his checker board.
Hants looked puzzled. He slugged back his Barbados tea, wet his finger and lifted some of the dust up to his nose. He sniffed it like a dog would.
“What is it?” I asked
“Whatever it is, it’s worthless,” he said.
“But you don’t know what it’s called?”
“Nope.”
It was one of the few times that Hants had ever come up empty for an answer. “Thanks, Hants.” I had a nice little buzz on from the tea, but I wasn’t exactly cheered up. It looked to me like the Province owned the interior of the island. But wasn’t my old man helping to run the goddamn Province? I could not imagine that he would have sent the Mannheim/Atlanta truck out here. Something was wrong.
I thought of going the long way home to avoid walking by Gwen’s house but, if I did that, I knew it would only be harder to go by there the next time. Tennessee Ernie Philips was out in his front yard making adjustments to his interstellar radio dish. When he saw me coming, he dropped his screwdrivers and came out to see me. “Gwen is not an easy girl to under-stand, Ian,” he said. “We were opposed to her going to Boston, but in the end we let her go. She would have gone one way or the other. I’ll tell you the truth. I wish you were down there with her.”
“Thanks,” I said. I knew her parents trusted me.
“I’m worried about her getting into some sort of trouble. But she’s a good kid. I understand why she’s doing it. I just hope she doesn’t get hurt.”
The Republic of Nothing Page 26