Cool Water

by Dianne Warren

  “Now who would buy a wrecked black-and-white TV?” the woman asks, looking at Shiloh as if he should know the answer.

  He notices that her eye makeup is smeared, as though she might have been crying. She has feathery yellow hair cut all different lengths and Shiloh thinks she looks like a canary.

  She says to Shiloh, “What possible use could an old broken-down TV be?”

  Shiloh says, “You could put it somewhere you don’t need to watch it, and listen to the sound,” just as Ernie is saying pretty much the same thing. The shop, Ernie suggests, or maybe the garage. “That way,” Ernie says, “a guy can keep up with his programs and still get his work done.” The announcer asks Ernie how much he wants for the TV and Ernie says three dollars or best offer.

  “Why doesn’t he just give it away?” the bird woman asks.

  “He’s having fun, Janice,” the driver says. “You remember what fun is.”

  Shiloh looks at him. He has tattoos on his forearms, like he just got out of the army, or maybe jail.

  “Who knows how many calls he’ll get because of that TV,” says the driver, whose name turns out to be Terry. “Keep Ernie busy most of the day.”

  “Well, that’s sad,” Janice says. “To think someone could be so lonely.”

  “He’s not lonely,” Terry says. “He’s inventive.”

  “I hope I’m not going to cry again,” Janice says. “I’m getting tired of doing my eyes.” Then she says to Shiloh, “You’re just a kid. Close your eyes if you don’t want to see crying.”

  There it is again. Just a kid.

  “I’m not a kid,” Shiloh says, trying to sit taller.

  Terry snorts, but he doesn’t say anything.

  Shiloh puts his arm across the seat-back behind Janice, the way he’s seen his father do when he’s riding with someone else. He’s careful not to touch her.

  “You shouldn’t take a ride with strangers, you know,” Janice says. “Where are you going anyway?”

  “There’s a construction site up ahead,” Shiloh says. “I’ve got a job there.”

  “I’m not buying that,” Terry says. “You’re too young to work construction.”

  Up ahead, the flag girl and her slow sign come into view. Terry whistles at her as they approach and Janice gives him a playful smack on the arm. Shiloh can see his father’s truck parked in the ditch, his father on the packer with his back to them.

  “So you want out here, then?” Terry asks.

  “No,” Shiloh says. “There’s another site up ahead.” He turns his head away from the packer as they pass slowly, and then he makes a decision that surprises him. He asks, “How far are you two going anyway?” Once he’s asked, it seems as though this had been his plan all along.

  “I don’t know if we should tell him,” Janice says to Terry.

  “Why not?” Terry asks.

  “Well, duh,” Janice says. “We’re on the run in case you didn’t know.”

  “We’re not on the fucking run,” Terry says.

  “It doesn’t matter to me if you are,” Shiloh says. Then he asks, “How far west?”

  “A lot farther west than your construction site,” Terry says.

  “Are you going as far as Calgary?” Shiloh persists.

  “Is that where the construction is?” Terry asks. “Calgary?”

  “I lied,” Shiloh says. “Bible school. I go to summer bible school in Calgary. I was supposed to catch the Greyhound, but I missed it.” He congratulates himself for coming up with this.

  “Well, you’re just lucky we came along, then,” Janice says.

  “I guess,” Shiloh says, thinking that Janice is about as smart as the canary she resembles. “Anyway, I’ll get a lift to Calgary, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t think so,” Terry says.

  “Terry,” Janice says. “The kid’s on his way to bible school.” She turns to Shiloh. “Just ignore him,” she says. She pauses for a minute, then asks, “So, how many brothers and sisters do you have? What’s your mom like? Do you have any pets?”

  Shiloh doesn’t answer her. Instead he says, “This radio station is so lame.”

  A woman is trying to sell living room furniture. “I have a sofa,” she is saying, “harvest gold, a little old-fashioned but in good condition. And a recliner, slightly worn. And two wingbacks, and a set of drapes, harvest gold also.”

  “What are wingbacks?” the announcer asks. “Sounds like ducks. Wingback ducks.”

  “Chairs,” the woman says. “They match the sofa set.”

  “How come you’re selling all your furniture?” the announcer asks.

  “I’ve had the good fortune of winning a little money on the lottery,” the woman says. “My daughter thinks I should give it away to charity. She’s born-again, and she doesn’t believe in gambling and says the only way it’s okay is if I give away the money, but I’ve ordered new furniture. I think I deserve that, even if my daughter doesn’t think so.”

  “Maybe that daughter will be at your summer bible school,” Terry says. Then he says to Janice, “The kid’s right. Change the station.”

  “Just let me hear how much she’s asking,” Janice says.

  “I’d like eight hundred dollars for the works,” the woman says. “It all matches.”

  “Way too much,” Janice says. “She’ll never get that for used furniture, especially not if it’s harvest gold.”

  She fiddles with the dial but doesn’t find anything to her liking and finally shuts the radio off. “I think it’s great that you’re going to bible school,” she says. “What do you do at bible school anyway?”

  “Bible things,” Shiloh says. Then he adds, “We sing. Hymns and junk like that.”

  “He’s not going to bible school, Janice,” Terry says.

  “Is that true?” she asks Shiloh.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Oh,” says Janice. “Well, I guess that doesn’t surprise me. Probably a good thing. Those bible girls are all so dowdy. They don’t wear makeup, you know. God, I just hate to think. You should see me with no makeup.”

  Shiloh listens to Janice and thinks she’s like a hard rubber ball bouncing around on a piece of concrete, veering off in whatever direction the surface sends her. He wonders what they’re running away from. The only thing he can think of is the police.

  As though she can read his mind, she says, “We’re really in love, you know, me and Terry. His wife and the whole town hate us, but they don’t understand.”

  “Janice,” Terry says. “He’s a kid. Stop telling him stuff, for Christ sake.”

  There’s a box of Kleenex on the floor at Shiloh’s feet and Janice reaches down for it, and then sits with it on her lap.

  “I’m not a kid,” Shiloh says.

  “Yes, you are,” Terry says, “and this is as far as your ride goes.” Terry pulls over onto the shoulder and reaches across Janice to open the passenger-side door. “Out you go,” he says. “Running away is serious business. Believe me, you’re not nearly old enough. Wait until you’re our age and then maybe give it a try.”

  “You go back home,” Janice says, beginning to sniffle again. “And watch who you get in a car with. If you smell booze, don’t get in.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Shiloh says as he slams the door. “And I hope you get caught.”

  Janice and Terry pull back onto the highway and he watches after them until their truck disappears. He doesn’t bother sticking his thumb out again. He doesn’t want to go to Calgary any more, but instead of crossing the highway to go back to Juliet he steps down into the ditch. The hay has been cut, but the round bales are a long way apart because it’s such a dry year. Shiloh walks toward the closest one, and when he gets there he settles down on the north side where he’s hidden from the traffic. He can hear the vehicles passing, cars and farm trucks and semi-trailers, and even a police car with its siren going. He opens his backpack and takes out the bag of cookies. He closes his eyes and eats an Oreo and smells the cut
grass and the sage growing along the fence line. A meadowlark sings from a fence post close by. The east and west traffic sounds compete with each other like duelling banjos, and as Shiloh listens, his bad day vanishes. The ditch doesn’t feel like any particular place, and it could be any hour. In the shade of the hay bale, the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold. It’s perfect. As Shiloh nods off, he thinks, I got to somewhere else after all.

  A Good Map

  The Watch

  The words mortal wounds keep popping into Lee’s head. Astrid used to tease him when he was little by saying, “I think it’s a mortal wound,” whenever he would acquire a cut or a scratch needing her attention and a Band-aid. He feels now as though his saddle-sore body needs attention, and he rides with the phrase repeating over and over, and after a while it switches to mortal remains, which he doesn’t like the sound of. And then for some reason earthly possessions, which is better because it leads him to think about things other than pain and discomfort. Astrid’s tea service, for example. How it needs polishing. Where the polish is kept. And what Use the silver tea service might mean, and in what context it could be taken as practical advice. In the light of day it seems simple: be hospitable. Astrid was always hospitable, and she admired people who used her well. Lee always thought that was a funny way to put it: She used me very well.

  The going is a little easier on this leg, as George said it would be. The ground is still sandy but the surface has been contained by the roots of grass and pasture sage. There are no more dunes, just sporadic patches like children’s sandboxes that have been allowed to spill over onto backyard lawns. Lee is grateful for George’s old hat, which is keeping his face shaded from the sun. He’s no longer thinking about who might haul him the rest of the way; he knows no one along this stretch. He tries to focus on the ground that he’s covering, where he is in proximity to home. A map begins to develop in his head. He almost wishes he had a piece of paper and a pencil with him so he could record his route. There are photographs of ancient maps in one of Lester’s atlases and Lee remembers the curious drawings included by the early mapmakers: exotic birds and animals, unusual landmarks, depictions of significant events along the way. Cartography was an art, Lester told him, before it was a science. Lee tries to remember the landmarks he’s encountered so far, mapping them in his head and adding little anthropological details much like the quotations he once kept about the Bedouins in his scrapbook: The dunes provide a handy place for local teenagers to drink their ritual beer away from the watchful eyes of adults. Or, George and Anna Varga are an interesting study of lifelong familial companionship, and Anna’s kitchen is welcome relief for the hot and hungry traveller. He has no idea where the word familial came from.

  He crosses a Texas gate into what he assumes is community pasture, and he sees signs of cattle: droppings baked dry in the sun, narrow trails that wind their way toward water. He follows one of these cattle trails, and when it reaches the lip of a coulee, Lee decides to get out of the sun for a while. The horse edges down the south-facing drop, picking his way through clumps of cactus. As they descend farther, they encounter low shrubs and scruffy stands of willow and black poplar, the welcome relief of shade.

  There’s a creek running through the coulee, not much of one, but when they get to the bottom the horse immediately steps into the shallow water and drinks. Lee closes his eyes and listens to the quiet sound of birds and leaves rustling. When he feels the horse shifting beneath him, he opens his eyes and realizes just in time that the horse is about to drop and roll in the water. Lee lifts the reins and gives the horse the heel of his boot, and the horse does a little start as though he’s just realized that a rider is still up there.

  Lee decides to give the horse a break by leading him through the coulee for a ways. He slides to the ground and splashes himself with water, and then sets off on foot. He discovers it feels good to walk. The horse follows him willingly, tugging just once in a while as he snatches at a mouthful of grass.

  Lee has to keep his eyes on the ground to avoid tripping on roots and deadfall. Even so, he steps on the rotten branch of a black poplar, and it snaps, and one end flips up and Lee sees a glint of metal, hardly noticeable except that the sun is shining through the trees right on it. He stops and brushes the dry grass away, and sees that it’s a tarnished and rusted pocket watch. He uses his shirt to wipe the dirt from the watch and tries to open the face but it’s too rusted. For the second time today he thinks about Lester’s pocket watch, the one he’d broken and thrown away in the sand in order to conceal his crime. As he walks through the deadfall, putting off the return up into the hot sun, he remembers how he’d surprised himself with his ability to lie, straight-faced, when Lester found the watch was missing.

  Lee knows the empty velvet box is in Astrid and Lester’s bedroom closet because he’d put it there himself, with the blankets and photo albums and other possessions, after one of the neighbour women found it when she was helping him with Astrid’s clothes. He’d hardly been able to bring himself to touch the box, he’d felt so guilty at seeing it once again. It brought back shame, for the old crime, and for every ungrateful thing he’d ever said or done.

  Now, with a different watch in his hand, he thinks again of how it all started with temptation, with his knowing the watch was in Lester’s drawer because Astrid had shown it to him one Saturday when he was eight years old and feeling dejected because Lester had lost patience with him. Lester had been trying to repair a combine and he needed Lee’s small body to reach into a tight space he himself couldn’t get to, which Lee did but he couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to do after that, couldn’t follow Lester’s instructions, and Lester finally said, “You might as well go to the house.” Go to the house was the ultimate dismissal. It was what Lester said to the dog when he was getting in the way. All the dogs they ever had were trained to go to the house and lie on the step, banished, at Lester’s command.

  Astrid, feeling sorry for him, took him up to the bedroom and opened the top drawer of the oak dresser, and withdrew the velvet box. Inside was a man’s silver pocket watch on a chain—a fob watch it was called—and Astrid said it came from Norway and had belonged to Lester’s grandfather. “That would be your great-great-uncle,” she explained. An impossible number of years for Lee to comprehend. Astrid told him the watch was an heirloom, and that Lester used to worry about who would get the watch, “but now he doesn’t worry about that any more,” she told Lee, “because he has you, and someday the watch will be yours.”

  Astrid let Lee touch the watch. He asked her if it worked. She said it did, but it was delicate because it was very old, so she didn’t want to risk winding it up. Lester, she said, would be upset if he even knew she was showing Lee the watch. After Lee had a good look at it, Astrid put the watch away and they went back downstairs. “Remember,” Astrid said, “that Lester may seem impatient sometimes, but you’re like a son to him.”

  A month or so later, when Astrid was in town and Lester was in the field, Lee took the watch out of Lester’s drawer again. He’d only meant to look at it, but the temptation to see if it worked was too great, and besides, he already thought of the watch as his. He wound it and listened to it tick. Then he wound it some more and it stopped ticking. He tried to unwind it and the winding mechanism came off. Through the bedroom window Lee could see Lester coming into the yard on the tractor and he panicked. He put the blue velvet box back in the drawer and the watch in his pocket and ran downstairs and outside to get his bike.

  He rode along the dirt trail into Hank Trass’s sandy lease northwest of the farm, climbed through the wire fence and up the first sand hill he came to, and pitched the watch as far out into the sand as he could throw it. Then he ran back down the hill, his shoes filling with sand, and he found a stand of poplar trees that had been covered right up to their leafy branches, so they looked like trees that had been chopped off and stuck back in the sand, and he stayed there all afternoon. When he got home Astrid sent hi
m to his room without supper because he’d been gone so long.

  The watch wasn’t missed for a year. Then one day Lester took Lee upstairs to show him something and Lee knew it was going to be the watch. When the watch wasn’t in the box, Lester called Astrid and Lee was terrified, sure that Astrid would know. But Astrid looked at Lee, and then she told Lester that she’d sent the watch away to be cleaned and it had gotten lost in the mail. She sent Lee to his own room and then she and Lester had a hushed discussion behind their closed bedroom door. Afterwards, Astrid had come to Lee’s room and asked him straight out if he had taken the watch. Lee had shaken his head and the watch was never mentioned again.

  All through his school years, whenever Lee went up the road and west onto Hank’s lease, he couldn’t help looking for the watch. He knew the chances of finding it were slim, and he didn’t know what he’d do if he did happen to find it, but he believed it was possible that one day he would be walking and there it would be. The sand was constantly changing, after all, covering and uncovering roots and bones and objects discarded by their owners. But he never found it.

  Lee slips the rusty old watch in his pocket, throws the reins over the horse’s neck, and lifts himself into the saddle. He groans out loud—like an old man, he thinks, but who’s to hear—and once again settles into a position that can’t in any way be called comfortable. Luckily, the expectation for comfort is long gone.

  Although the shade of the coulee is preferable to the heat of high ground, Lee knows the creek will wind and cut back endlessly, adding miles to the journey, so he urges the horse toward the north-facing slope. At the top, he sees a pair of antelope stock-still and staring at him. Up ahead, a fence and a waving field of yellow wheat. The crop confuses him for a minute, and then he realizes that he’s ridden far enough south that he’s back into cultivated land. To the west he can see a farmyard. He tries to remember who lives there: it’s the old Stanish place, he thinks, recently bought by a couple from Ireland. There was a story about them in the local paper, how they couldn’t afford to buy land in Ireland so they looked at Canada. They were planning to raise sheep and found the people of Juliet friendly and helpful. Lee looks for signs of sheep but he doesn’t see any. In fact, the place looks deserted and run-down.