Shot-Blue

by Jesse Ruddock

  ‘I’m not happy anymore.’

  ‘You were happy before?’

  ‘No,’ said Tristan.

  ‘You can’t come here.’

  Tristan sat down on the steps. This way they both sat facing the lake, which suited them. It meant less awkwardness in the pauses of their talk. It meant the loll of butterflies at the shore flowers, illusions of loons on the bay, and waves drawing out the sun a thousand ways.

  No matter what I do, Tristan thought, there will be these waves.

  If he tries to kill me, I might kill him by accident, Keb was thinking.

  ‘How long will you sit there?’

  ‘I know you take my pay. It’s the way a father takes a son’s pay. I never complained before,’ Tristan began, ‘but I need some things. I need a tent, a lantern, oil.’

  ‘Are you running away?’

  ‘It’s my money.’

  ‘They give you everything you need.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You’re a boy.’

  He probably was. He listened to Keb stand up, then he was doing something, sorting through his pockets. ‘Come here,’ he said, calling Tristan in.

  Tristan climbed the stairs and opened the door. Inside, he was surprised to feel calm. The closer he came to Keb, the more calm he felt.

  Keb kept looking out at the lake, even though Tristan was right there.

  ‘I need your help,’ he said. He held up his locked hands. ‘Today my hands are bad.’

  Tristan looked at his own hands to see if they were still good.

  ‘I’ve got bills here,’ Keb said, running his thumb across his shirt’s breast pocket.

  Tristan slipped two fingers into the pocket and pulled out a billfold. The money looked dug out of the earth. It had an oily film that made it hard to pick the bills apart. Tristan thought of people taking rings off the fingers of the dead, and taking everything out of their pockets. He told himself not to think like that, this belonged to him.

  §

  He didn’t know how the fire started. All he knew was that he needed to rinse out his mouth because it tasted like gasoline. Gasoline haunts the mouth more than something rotten, more than drawn blood. You can’t spit it out. It only spreads and melts, but won’t melt away. Tristan wiped the corners of his mouth.

  His hands, he could understand. But how was the gas in his mouth?

  He stepped lightly not to slip, picking his steps from shore into the shallows, and as he stepped next, sheet lightning spread across the sky, lighting the lake shore to shore, and Prioleau felt small, like a bedroom, like he could touch its walls. Lightning flashed again like a Coleman lantern swinging over his head on a hook, flickering on and off in the wind. He wondered if there was method in the flicker. The trunks of the red pines at shore were lit so clearly and for so long, their bark read like shoal maps. The flashes seemed to correspond with his next steps as he scrambled down the rocks. Then they corresponded with his kick. Pulling through the water, his hands fanned open like new leaves, or lungs, like his hands could breathe. What leaf opens in the dark? Every now and then, mistaken, one must. But the lightning flashes soon dimmed, subsumed in the awful glow of the fire building up behind him. He swam into the deep he dreaded. But what was dread for? What purpose did it serve him? From here, he could watch the island burn. Aflame, it looked like a sun rising off the water. It was the island as it used to be, without anything but their cabin on the eastern shore. The whole thing was rising. Then it started to sink. He didn’t understand at first, because he didn’t hear it coming over the water: the rain. It was a rain so penetrating he almost drowned with his head above the waterline.

  It wasn’t exactly a new dream.

  He was working the front dock. ‘Tristan!’ someone shouted, but he didn’t care. He wanted to know if he would be able to find Tomasin later. He would leave work and find her. He would not let her go.

  It was the end of the idea of summer. ‘These races are too timid to interest me,’ Stella told Emiel. They were on the swim dock low to the water, watching two boats criss-cross the bay. Richter was running races with his friends, but without guides no one was confident enough to drive full throttle. The water was black, then suddenly green or a crude brown-gold – only a sheer of water over a shoal, shallow enough to skin a swimmer’s knees.

  ‘How soon can we forget all this?’ Emiel asked.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘How soon is that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Tristan caught one of the boats and pulled it close to the dock, then let go without taking a rope. He would stand in Tomasin’s way and see what happened. If nothing happened, he would keep on standing. He was practising now.

  ‘Did you do that on purpose?’ It was Jer LaFleur.

  Maybe he had done it on purpose, he didn’t know.

  Tristan watched Jer get an oar from the side of another boat and use it to pull in the absconder. Tristan knew all these people were not the same – they were not all one person – but that’s how he felt about them: there were all these people. Then there was her.

  ‘Tristan!’

  Jer LaFleur is shouting my name, he thought. It was all awful. He hated it, names and boats. He didn’t want to answer his name. Why was his name something anyone could say, no matter how unfamiliar, or how unfriendly to him?

  Jer put something in his hand. It was a rope and it was wet from dragging in the water. It was tightening which meant the boat was drifting off the dock again.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ said Jer.

  Early in the morning, he had wet his hair and combed it with his fingers. He had looked into his mirror and rubbed his forehead to wake and smooth it. He was awake, he was sure, he was standing there, the wind in his clothes, but it felt like he was in the water, treading, waiting for something else.

  He needed her to come find him and say, ‘That’s enough, Tristan, come back in.’

  Tomasin sat on the steps with her arms around her knees.

  ‘She says she’ll come out here and beat you,’ said Marie.

  ‘She won’t beat me.’

  ‘I know.’ Marie pulled on Tomasin’s arms but couldn’t undo them.

  ‘I can’t, Marie.’

  Marie didn’t let go. She held on to the arms. ‘You can’t just sit here.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Because I quit,’ said Tomasin. ‘You tell them, Marie. Tell them for me.’

  ‘You can’t quit now, it’s the last day.’

  Tomasin was always dishevelled, and often unhappy, but Marie knew this was different. Today her pink lips were not pink but white, making the line between skin and lip hard to distinguish. Her lips needed to be moisturized not to peel. Her voice whispered through them like a draft at a window, something Marie could feel more than hear. Usually Tomasin’s lips were wet. And she never whispered, even when she thought she was whispering.

  ‘We’re having a party. We have to bring everything down to the front of the island. We have to make place settings. Please, Tomasin,’ she said, trying again to lift her.

  ‘Marie, don’t touch me,’ she said so quietly.

  Marie bent down and wrapped her arms around Tomasin’s middle and tried to hoist her.

  ‘Don’t you touch me,’ Tomasin said unconvincingly, leaning into Marie’s arms, wanting to be held.

  ‘You feel slippery,’ said Marie.

  ‘I feel sick.’

  ‘I’ll get you something to drink.’

  ‘I can’t drink anything.’

  ‘You should try.’

  ‘You don’t feel thin, Marie.’ She leaned further into her arms.

  ‘I’ve never been thin,’ Marie agreed.

  ‘You don’t know anything, you know.’

  ‘Probably I don’t.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ said Tomasin.

  ‘I don’t mind the things you say to me.’

  Anuta found them in each other’s arms. Marie let go and put her hands behind her back and held th
em there.

  Tomasin did nothing but miss Marie then.

  Anuta told Tomasin to get up. But rising to her feet, she feared falling back to her knees, already so painfully bruised. She could not fall down on anyone else’s knees.

  They were making meat pies. She didn’t want to throw up on the half-made pies. She tried closing her eyes to regain her sense of self, but waiting for her in the dark were so many possible selves and not one she liked. She moved without lifting her feet, pulling them across the floor not to lose touch. When she reached the door, she tripped over the strapping at the bottom of the frame and fell to one knee again.

  Did they know she had taken to falling?

  They didn’t know. They were sorry she fell.

  She stood up and coughed over the railing.

  It seemed that something had to give out, until something did. Her nose started to bleed. It bled the way it did in grade school, when she sat at her desk. She’d try to hide her face in her hands. But she’d learned you can’t hide blood in your hands. Now she didn’t even try. She felt nothing at the touch of the wet red. ‘Tristan should see this,’ she said.

  Marie pressed a cloth under her nose. ‘Slowly, slowly, tilt back.’

  And Marie kept pressing until the bleeding stopped. Tomasin never reached to take over the cloth.

  Stella and Emiel moved to a small table set out on the court. There were three or four other tables, but no one there.

  ‘If only I could be one of the useful people,’ she said.

  ‘You’re useful.’

  ‘I am not. I look around and everyone is always doing something. It makes me anxious. I don’t do anything.’

  ‘You do some things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘You talk a lot.’

  ‘I talk too much. I borrow money. Mostly I sit. Or I stand up and move around in patterns indiscernible to anyone but me, and maybe you. I wonder what it’s like to be useful.’

  She wasn’t asking Emiel. He wasn’t useful either.

  ‘Beauty has its uses.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘It inspires people?’

  ‘It inspires them to unrest,’ she said. ‘Do you see that man? What do you think of him?’

  Noah Coke was high on a ladder, hanging paper lanterns in the trees leading from the court to the water.

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  ‘We always talk about people we don’t know.’

  Noah dropped a cream-pink lantern and it fell slowly like a toy parachute. They watched him climb down, pick it up, and brush it off gently.

  Noah turned the lantern in his hands and thought it would be a good colour for a summer dress that someone like Tomasin might wear.

  ‘Why is it that I never invite him to sit down? I invite you. He could tell me what it’s like to be useful.’

  ‘We insult those we love. I think you love me too much, Stella.’

  ‘He might be a better companion for me.’

  ‘And who else?’

  ‘What about that one?’ she asked.

  He was walking along the low path, carrying full tanks of gasoline, one in each hand, stepping lightly despite the weight. It was the boy Tomasin argued against. But he was impressive. His dark hair tied against his neck framed his face and made his forehead and sharp nose startle like the first words spoken late in a day.

  ‘I don’t know him,’ said Emiel.

  ‘Tomasin knows him. But they are pretending not to know each other these days.’

  ‘He’s just a boy, how old do you think? Fourteen? But the way he looks – ’ Emiel said, unable to finish. The boy held his head so bluntly, a way Emiel never could. He did it with confidence or submission; some opposites were so close it was hard to tell them apart. What kind of girl was Tomasin to speak badly of someone who had what she wanted more than anything else? It wasn’t confidence or submission. It was something better: self-possession.

  ‘That kid, he’s not a boy or man. We don’t have a word for him.’

  ‘Maybe we should,’ Stella added.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because saying it would feel good.’

  Marie flattened out the creases and wrinkles in the cloth draped over the long picnic table.

  Tomasin didn’t understand why a table needed to be perfectly set when it so shortly would be ruined. It was like making a bed. They were in the middle of nowhere. Did Marie not know where they were? A made bed, a set table, clean clothes – these things were absurd against this background of waves, which was also the foreground. The waves were everywhere. She had tried to go on despite them, but they were tireless. The waves needed no sleep and nothing to eat. The waves were winning. And they reminded her of him. Had he defeated her? If he had, it hadn’t been fair from the beginning. Tristan had the waves on his side, she had nothing.

  She sat down on the ground to recover from Marie’s influence. Marie’s work and care were making things worse. The bottoms of her feet cramped, and then from her feet up through her shins she went into a kind of touch-and-go paralysis. It pattered through her legs to her waist, then up through her stomach, chest, neck, throat, finally hitting her lips and tongue. She spat on the ground to take her mouth back, but didn’t do well and half spat on herself.

  She tried to say, ‘Marie, I can’t get up.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ she said, crossing her arms against her chest and bowing her head to her knees. ‘I can’t move. I can’t speak to you anymore. Leave me alone.’

  ‘You can’t speak to me? You are speaking,’ said Marie, reaching out quickly to catch Tomasin though she was sitting down.

  Washing her face and neck at the sink and mirror, Tomasin noticed a smattering of blood drops on the front of her shirt. She took her shirt off, soaped it, and scrubbed it against itself. The blood didn’t come out but left pink halos, conspicuous for their subtlety. She put her shirt back on, a statement against desperation. She would wear it to show them she didn’t care.

  She walked to the front of the island in bare feet, carrying her painful new boots, swinging them in hand. She would dance a long time tonight, she planned. She would keep giving herself to Emiel to show it was not hard for her. It was not a problem. She tied the boots like ice skates, very tight, to make the pain less.

  Most would have said Tristan made no expression as Tomasin walked by in her wet shirt and boots that were too small, but Marie saw how still he grew. He didn’t make a face, not a gesture with his hands. He didn’t do anything. It was awkward to begin, then unnatural, as he held his stare at the place Tomasin had passed by long after she was gone. Marie wasn’t sure if he was breathing. He should breathe. She wasn’t sure if she was breathing.

  Tomasin sat down at Stella and Emiel’s table.

  ‘It’s you,’ said Emiel.

  ‘It’s also you,’ she answered. ‘And you,’ looking at Stella.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked Emiel, raising his hands.

  Stella excused herself by standing, taking one of Emiel’s hanging hands and squeezing it. She kissed Tomasin on the cheek but lightly and without warmth.

  Tomasin was exhausted but there was something else, some sort of depravity in her mood, which she could feel.

  Her shirt was wet and splotched pink, and Emiel could see through it. Her face was shiny. He didn’t know what to do, had no instinct. He would leave a letter that said he liked her so well.

  ‘So?’

  ‘We leave in the morning,’ he said, revealing his impatience to go.

  ‘I know. I’m also leaving.’

  ‘Of course you are.’

  ‘I’m not staying here.’

  ‘I’ve had a good time. Haven’t you?’

  She couldn’t tell him yes. She had had a bad time, she realized. She was too weak to pretend otherwise. She pushed the table into him. He had to block it with his hands. And when he took his hands away, she pushed it again.

  ‘I understand,’ he said
. He understood that she was not going to do well today.

  She stood up to get away from the table.

  ‘We’ll talk later,’ she said, but to the table. She couldn’t look at him.

  ‘Okay,’ he whispered.

  ‘I can tell you’re unhappy with me.’ She wanted to sit down again.

  ‘I’m unhappy,’ he agreed, ‘but I don’t know why.’

  Tomasin walked to the lower half of the swim dock and sat down alone. She wanted to get in the water because maybe it would make her feel better. She would feel more herself, less them. She didn’t want to be like them, full of contradiction. She didn’t even want to understand them anymore. The waves lapped against her shins and she felt the cold of the water, until it was all she felt, and it felt good. She wanted to be like this: full of one feeling.

  Tristan had taught her how to read the waves, how to fall in with their rhythm, not insisting on her own. He did it by example, telling her by the way he watched for hours that they were not as she had always imagined – not all the same, not all one wave – but temperamental, unpredictable, without rule. She urged the ones coming at her now to rise more before curling under, to break in a thick wash around her legs. She had never cared about the wind, but it suddenly occurred to her that there was not enough of it. There had never been enough.

  He didn’t teach her everything. Maybe she didn’t want to know it all or even very much. Some things were supposed to be mysterious. Before Tristan, she had looked at the far shore without noticing how the clouds over the land cast massive moving shadows, patches of black like islands adrift. Clouds had shadows. But not before Tristan told her. Now their shadows were all she could see over the land, how they moved like a search party covering and uncovering it. What were they looking for? If they were looking for her, they were on the wrong shore.

  She slipped in to her waist, walked until she couldn’t touch the bottom, then stretched out and swam. She didn’t cry tears because Emiel was unkind, or because of Stella, or even because of Tristan. She cried because nothing had ever felt as it should between her and anyone. She dove under, held her breath as long as she could, surfaced and dove again. The water hid her tears from them.