Shot-Blue

by Jesse Ruddock

  The opening of drawers, the smell and that light weight in hand, would from this day bring on a commanding loneliness. This loneliness would tell her that she must do something. But what, she had no idea. How lonely they all were, everyone she knew. Tristan somehow got his hands on this hummingbird, when what he must have wanted wasn’t the thing, but something like its spirit. He must not have wanted these few feathers and guts. And Tomasin was the loneliest, dropping the body as if it were too much to hold, weighing a sugar cube or two, and it would weigh less as it dried out.

  In the middle of the night, Marie awoke and opened the drawer a few inches.

  The next morning, she took the loosely wrapped hummingbird out and placed it on her windowsill with her other prizes: the reminder notebook that was her diary (she kept only short notes, with no room for anything more), a copper cup with a hole shot in its side that she’d found in the water at a campsite, a piece of driftwood like a bird’s wing, which she was always, every day, trying to find a match for, to make a pair, and a pitcher-plant shell from her father.

  Keb had invited her to look for beaver houses in the marsh a bay away. He wanted to trap the beavers because they were coming in the night and chewing down all the saplings on their island. Sometimes they took a big tree. Marie walked beside her father across the bog, the ground soft and giving underfoot, and if she thought about it now, she could feel her shoes breaking through the grassy topsoil, sticking ankle-deep in the muck. The bog was a mat of wind-woven grasses and sticks, mosses and flowers afloat over a shallow, stagnant pool. The water was gelatinous, jelloed thick with plant refuse and leeches. This is where the moose came to feed. They’d found a dead moose halfsubmerged, its hulking shoulder rotting. It smelled so awful she had to put her shirt over her mouth, and when that didn’t work she put her shirt in her mouth, which also didn’t work. Everything was softening to a paste. Keb picked the pitcher plant and said, ‘Marie, do you want this?’ She said yes, saving it from becoming one with the moose shoulder.

  ‘There’s wind here, but the trees don’t move. Do you see?’ he said. ‘The flowers don’t move either.’

  Marie wasn’t sure.

  ‘You can blow on them, and nothing.’ He told her it was like this in some of the marshes.

  ‘No,’ she said, so he wouldn’t think she was a sucker.

  Then she blew on some tall grasses but they didn’t bend. Until that day, she had no idea her father believed in things like that.

  The pitcher plant was the same shape and size as the hummingbird, but hollow. It had the same weight. She could have poured out the change she kept in it and slipped the bird into the mouth of the shell, if it weren’t for the stuck wing. She would have slipped it in whole, holding it by the tail.

  After several days of putting the hummingbird in her drawer at night, then on the windowsill by day, Marie dug a hole in the ground. She dug it down by the dock in the early morning before her parents were awake. She had tried to love it like the pitcher plant, the driftwood, and the copper cup, but it bothered her. It seemed to weigh less and less, evaporating like a glass of water by the bedside. And who was drinking it up? Was the air nipping at it? If it was the air, did that mean she was breathing the hummingbird in?

  On her knees beside the hole, Marie tried a last time to close the wing. It didn’t seem right to bury a body that was bent. ‘You don’t want to stagger in there,’ she said, about heaven, running her fingers along the tight small feathers of the bird’s back. This bird was like an open pair of scissors. She squeezed until a bone or two broke like sugar sticks, more easily than she’d imagined. ‘I’m not worried,’ she said, thumbing the red throat. ‘They give you new wings.’

  The guides took turns fishing off the dock, and it was Tristan’s turn for casting lessons at five o’clock. Five wasn’t a good time. The bass were stuffed from hunting in full sun. If you managed to catch one, its fight would lag and it would rise to the surface throwing up wan, shredded, half-digested minnows, little pieces of flesh that looked like they’d been run through a washing machine. The walleye didn’t rise to the surface to feed until dusk, two or three hours from now, and even then they couldn’t be caught off the dock, only in less trespassed waters. The lake trout were at fifty feet, too deep for casting.

  The interest for him wasn’t in the fish, but in seeing if the people would be defeated by reaching out and touching nothing. Four women tightly dressed faced the water. The first three held their bodies with apprehension, as if anything might happen to them and they couldn’t be ready. They were pretending to be more nervous than they were because that was fun. The fourth, standing at the far end of the dock, away from him, was much taller and stranger than the others. It was hard to tell if she was a woman or a girl. Her face was a young woman’s, fresh under the eyes. Her dark brown hair tied back under her hat was, Tristan had to think, a lot like his. But her shoulders and back were all bonework. Under a loose white shirt, they called fossils to mind. It was Stella, but he didn’t know that.

  The first three held their fishing poles away from their bodies. They didn’t make a move without instruction. But this one, at the end, looked down over the edge and held her pole close to her body, running the line through her fingers to feel if it was brittle or smooth. He always checked his line like that. He guessed she could cast as far as he could.

  The sky was a tableau to the north, with clouds blooming like it was their last chance before a frost. As they bloomed, they grew darker, rose and twisted in conflicting winds, and would come to ground. These clouds would be as tenacious in crumbling as they were in building up like this.

  He saw it coming. He knew she saw it too. There was no wind blowing across the dock, but there would be.

  ‘Let’s collect ourselves,’ he said, ready to begin.

  ‘If I collect myself, I’ll die,’ said Stella impatiently, but no one could hear. ‘There’s no question anymore,’ she said, ‘there never was. I used to collect things, but they fall apart.’ It gave her pleasure to say so. That no one could hear made it better.

  Tristan took his pole and shook it to show its give. ‘When you’re ready,’ he told them, looking over the water, ‘you can cast from this side or the other.’ And as he spoke, he showed them, but with his lure fastened a couple feet out. ‘You can be casual and flick your wrist.’ He flicked his wrist. ‘Or you can shift your weight and throw yourself into it.’ He opened his stance and showed them what he meant.

  People always wanted her to think and feel for them. Here, on this dock, she had only to feel the wind that was coming. Sometimes she didn’t want even this much responsibility. The wind was indifferent, but it took her over. Most people would not have felt it or seen it in the trees, but Stella was sensitive to her solitude breached: the more subtle the breach, the more she perceived it. And this wind was false in its warmth. All winds carried messages. She knew the rain would be cold today. The wind’s warmth was a sleight of hand; if she was taken in by it, she would only be more cold in the end. If she missed home, the deep south of her childhood – and she didn’t, knowing nothing softens the brain like nostalgia – if she missed home, she missed the rain. In the morning if it rained, it was warm rain. In the afternoon, warm rain. In the middle of the night, at three or four, raining as she was coming home from the bar: warm as blood. Maybe not always, but that’s how she remembered it. In the city now, even if the air was ninety degrees and the trees were labouring to breathe, and everything metal – from her earrings to the taxi door handle – burned to touch, the rain still fell cold. Cold rain didn’t bring anything. It brought relief from the heat, physical relief, but no soul’s respite. It didn’t smell of plants and animals. It didn’t bring the children outside.

  Stella ran the line through her fingers and felt capable of doing something beautiful easily. ‘Maybe the rain will wash me away and I’ll miss my chance,’ she said, still only to herself. ‘Where will I wash up? Will there be others? I don’t want to be followed.’ She
rocked a little at the edge of the dock, making the others nervous, which she could feel and liked. ‘Maybe I won’t get washed out, I’ll be a shore.’ Here was the question she’d been looking for, seeing the sky in the water. ‘Maybe I won’t feel anything then?’ She felt a few drops of rain.

  ‘You can watch,’ Tristan said, his voice timorous but body sure as he swung his pole behind his back and whiplashed it forward. He let go of the line with a light snap and his lure flew low over the water.

  She didn’t look at him but knew he was there, a boy, and there were the others but they didn’t have anything to do with her. She could see through them like shadows, even walk through them. She could step over them without lifting her knee high.

  The other women tried. Stella and Tristan watched them, Stella with disgust and Tristan with some concern that they would soon blame him for not being able to do it.

  Stella and Tristan saw each other through the others but made no sign there was something they shared. Independently but at the same time, it struck them through. They didn’t know each other but didn’t like each other, and maybe hated each other. Stella wanted him to be negligible and Tristan wanted her to go back to where she came from. He couldn’t see her face clearly under her hat – he wanted to and didn’t want to. Another afternoon and they might not have been so quick to feel defensive, such natural enemies, but the sky abloom was like music urging them to feel more right now – not to wait, but to do it, as the clouds broke into a downpour of raindrops, the first few huge, hitting the dock like wads of spit.

  Stella stopped rocking. Tristan put his hands in his pockets, something he never did. Don’t look at me, he thought. Why was she looking at him? Who do you think you are? she wanted to ask, feeling him recognize her. He recognized her whole way of being, a ruse to make people keep their distance. It was in him to do the same thing.

  Stella lowered the drag on her reel and pulled out a generous lead. The first thing she felt was the weight of her lure and it pleased her, heavy enough to carry far.

  The other women watched in admiration as she went through a motion so practised she might have been running her hands through her hair.

  Behind the dock were shrubs with branches worn bare by the constant rinse of waves. They were more like piles of wire than living and breathing things. On her backswing, Stella’s lure touched them, and to touch was to be caught.

  She snagged. It was a common mistake, but the breath it held back was uncommon and she sighed.

  The other women echoed her sigh, an obedient choir ready to do her bidding.

  Tristan almost sighed with them, but covered his mouth and yawned instead.

  Sighing wasn’t something he did.

  ‘Mother of god,’ Stella said, pulling hard to free her lure.

  She might have taken out some slack, but instead pulled so hard her pole bent like a ready bow.

  The boy was saying something now, but of no use to her. ‘I’ll get it!’ he was saying. He was here.

  To make him get back, Stella pulled harder.

  Drops of rain struck her face and hands. It was cold rain.

  She pulled so hard her line might snap. She could feel it stretch. ‘I’m getting it,’ the boy told her. But she was getting it.

  When her pole whiplashed, her body relaxed, understanding it was over – at the end of her line was nothing but a spit of air.

  But the line hadn’t broken. The lure was let go wild and precise as a slingshot. The hooks shook against the body of the lure, they all heard it. Then the hooks were silent, they heard that too. The lure didn’t strike so much as stick under the eye, sinking into the ridge of her cheekbone. The hooks sunk in the way the prongs of a fork sink and disappear into a cake to see if it’s cooked through the middle. But unlike the fork, which slips out when you pull up, the hooks were barbed, and if pulled now would tear her cheek apart.

  Tristan came up close to her.

  ‘I said cut the line,’ she told him calmly.

  She hadn’t said to cut the line, but Tristan understood what she was telling him: he shared the blame.

  He took out his pocket knife and worked on cutting the line. It wasn’t quick work because he needed to be careful not to pull on the hooks curled into her skin.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m being careful,’ he told her.

  The rain was coming down now and his hands were wet and shaking too, because they were so close.

  When the line fell away, she stepped back and told him to find someone.

  He would, he said, but he didn’t turn to go. He couldn’t stop taking looks at the lure hanging off her face. It was one of his, a minnow crankbait, black-bodied with a gold stripe down the back, head to tail. It had fleck orange eyes.

  Tomasin knocked on the door of Stella’s cabin and told them, ‘You can use me?’ and they let her in.

  Tristan was leaning against the wall behind the door. When she saw him, she pressed on the door to push it against him.

  He had stayed so that no one could say he’d run away.

  Emiel was standing in the middle of the room, loosely beside his father who was smoking and ashing on the cabin floor.

  Keb was kneeling next to the bed. He was no doctor but knew how to get hooks out of hands. He’d never done a face.

  ‘That lantern throws more heat than light,’ he said. ‘Go to the lodge and get the big flashlight.’ He was talking to Tomasin.

  But she didn’t want to leave now that she was in. ‘It’s raining,’ she said.

  ‘You’re wet from coming here.’ He didn’t look at her as he spoke. He was taking the body of the lure off the hooks. He clipped the two connecting rings one by one, with a pop from the pliers as each ring broke. When the hookless plug fell near Stella’s mouth, Keb picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  Tomasin wanted the lure for herself.

  Keb wasn’t a fisherman, Tristan knew. He wondered if he could pull the lure out of his pocket, and, yes, he thought he could.

  Tomasin kept pressing against the door. She was helping Tristan to understand something, she always was. This was the woman who had taken her away from him, he realized, and his hatred of her at first sight made sense. He should have known down at the dock. She didn’t belong, this woman. That’s what Tomasin liked. He didn’t belong either, but he didn’t have a choice. Maybe he had had a choice once, but Tomasin had made it for him, and was still doing it, even now, though she wasn’t trying anymore. She was implicating him. She was pressing against the door, pinning him. But she wouldn’t look at him.

  Tomasin wanted to stay because Stella was held down. She could be studied. Her hands resting on her ribs rose slowly with her breath, then quickly fell. She inhaled like she was saying something, but exhaled like she was spitting on the ground to get something out of her mouth. Her ribs weren’t buried but peaked to form a ridge down from which her stomach sloped to her belt. Tomasin wondered if her own stomach did the same thing. She would have to lie down. Someone would have to look and tell her.

  Stella didn’t like seeing her doctor around and about, and she’d seen Keb almost every day. She liked her doctors anonymous. She also liked them in clean clothes, or at least clothes bought in the last decade. If they smelled, doctors were supposed to smell mildly of soap or antiseptic. If they smelled of sweat, they were too much like men. She felt his hands, the skin callused like canvas layered in paint. Skin so hard it cracked without irritation. Keb’s hands were abstractions of hands. A doctor’s hands were supposed to be gently shaped, lithe, and fit to hold delicate instruments. Keb was holding rubber-grip pliers.

  ‘I can fix it,’ he told her.

  She didn’t like that idea, to fix a face.

  ‘We can’t pull them out. They’re too far gone, the barbs are sunk into the fat of your cheek, maybe the muscle. We’ll push them through one by one, then we’ll clip off the barbs and slip out the hook stumps.’

  The cabin was small enough that she and Stella
were sharing the air they breathed – Tomasin didn’t acknowledge to herself that she was sharing the air with anyone else; she didn’t admit the air tasted like a mixed drink of wet clothes and sweat – Keb’s sweat, Tristan’s sweat – and fetid smoke from Richter’s cigarette and the potbelly stove burning wet.

  ‘Go get the light. I’m not going to say it again,’ Keb told her.

  Tomasin pressed the door against Tristan one more time, as hard as she could, then jumped down the cabin steps and started running, reckless on the wet rocks of the path.

  In the city, when her lovers woke, Stella was already out of bed. She needed to be on her feet, to stand a critical distance from everyone. There was math in how she held herself, in how she came over to you close, then turned. There was math in how she made you wonder if her effect on you was pointed, or your misreading. There was no math in lying down like this. There was no math here.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Richter, looking at the hooks curl into her cheek, ‘you still look good.’ He gave her a sip of something out of his flask.

  Stella could tell he was lying by the way he was sucking on his cigarette. She wanted to tell him to fuck himself. She wanted to tell Emiel to get rid of his father.

  ‘This is going to be good for you. Your face will have a little more character,’ Richter said, blowing his smoke across her.

  Stella admitted something she’d been delaying to admit, because it was inconvenient. Richter was the most tedious lover she’d ever had. She would tell him. It wasn’t the kind of thing to think and not tell.

  When Tomasin came back with the flashlight, Keb told her to climb up on the bed and hold it. She pulled her shorts high to bend her knees freely and crawled until she was kneeling over Stella’s head. It felt tight, like two people in a telephone booth. At home, she’d gone into the telephone booth downtown with friends. They told themselves they did it to find out who was claustrophobic, but they did it to press their bodies together. She could see tacky black stuff at the sides of Stella’s eyes. It was mascara, but where it had clumped and dried it looked like tiny black flies. She put the light down and dabbed at the clumps with the bottom of her shirt.