Cool Water

by Dianne Warren

  “Should we have a look?” Hank asks, and then he wheels the old man through the pasture once again toward the stone. Pushing the wheelchair along the rough trail takes more effort than digging the holes did and Hank works up a good sweat.

  When they get to the stone, they see the auger holes have expanded considerably in size, but other than that, the stone looks the same. The beer box is still sitting on top, just as it was before, not even disturbed, Hank thinks, but when he picks it up he sees that the bottles have disintegrated into a pile of glass in the bottom.

  “How about that,” Hank says, shaking the box and listening to the tinkle of the broken glass.

  The old man looks puzzled. “I thought we had ’er,” he says.

  “That dynamite was sitting around for some time,” Hank says. “Maybe it was past the best-before date.” He puts the beer box on the old man’s lap and says, “I don’t think I’m good for another go tonight. Best get you home.”

  He pushes Walter back across the pasture to the truck, the glass tinkling whenever they hit a bump in the trail, and when they’re just about to the gate they hear a crack, like river ice in the spring, and when Hank turns around he can see that the rock has split in two. Right up the middle, two near-perfect halves in the moonlight, and he turns the old man around so he can see it too.

  “That’s not really what I had in mind,” Hank says.

  “I figured we had ’er,” the old man says again.

  Hank would like to go back and have a look at the stone but he’s had enough of wheeling old TNT around the pasture.

  When he gets Walter into the truck and his wheelchair in the box, he goes back and pulls the wire gate tight to the fence post and latches it up. Then he gets into the cab and hauls the remains of his six-pack of cola into the front seat. He hands a can to Walter and cracks one for himself. It’s warm, but it still tastes good. He sees Walter struggling with the tab, so he turns the dome light on, but even then Walter can’t get it, doesn’t have the strength to peel it back, and so Hank does it for him and then Walter shakily lifts the can to his lips and spills some down his front and Hank pretends he doesn’t notice.

  “Well, we did half a night’s work anyway,” Hank says, and old TNT says, “We sure did, we got ’er half done anyway,” and then he says, “I want to thank you, Hank.” Quietly, but Hank hears it.

  “Hell,” Hank says. “You don’t have to thank me. I should be thanking you. Wouldn’t have got anywhere without a foreman. Likely would have blown myself up.”

  And they leave it at that.

  When Hank gets to Karla’s house, there are no lights on. Hank is going to take the old man over to Lou’s, but then Walter tells him to just take him inside.

  “I don’t know,” Hank says. “I’m a little scared of that Lou. Maybe I should do what I was told, eh.” He tries to make a joke out if it and cajole the old man into agreeing to go to Lou’s, but TNT insists that he wants to stay at Karla’s and he says that Karla will be home sooner or later. He’s just going to go to bed. He’ll be okay on his own.

  When they get inside Hank finds out that he has to help the old man onto and off of the toilet, and then out of his clothes and into a pair of cotton pyjamas. He doesn’t mind. Fair trade, he figures, for the help with the blasting. He gets Walter a glass of water, just like you would a child, and then he helps him into bed. He turns out the lights, all but a lamp by the couch in the living room. He sees the little pile of sheets and blankets on the floor by the couch and supposes that this is where Karla sleeps. Lucky man, he thinks, to have a daughter who’ll take care of him like that. He wonders what it is he can smell in the air and then remembers that Karla does hair. He thinks she’s done Lynn’s hair a time or two. He hears a rooster crow from someplace close by and wonders what a rooster is doing in town, and crowing at this time of the night. Must be lost, a country rooster lost in town.

  When he gets outside, the rooster is sitting on the hood of his truck. It looks at him and crow-hops a bit, up and down on the hood, but it doesn’t scramble off, so Hank makes a grab for it and catches it by the legs. He holds it squawking upside down, not sure what to do with it now that he has it. It’s a bantam rooster, too scrawny for the stewpot, but kind of pretty. He can see the green and rusty colours under the street lamp. He decides any rooster that is found hopping around on the hood of his truck belongs to him, finders keepers, and he opens the door and tosses the rooster into the cab. Lynn has a few chickens. He’ll add this one to her flock. The rooster settles right down on the seat of the cab like it’s used to riding around in trucks.

  On the way home Hank decides to stop and have another look at the stone, and when he’s walking up to it he sees that his yearlings have made their way around to this corner of the pasture and the way they’re standing makes him think of buffalo, and he can almost see the giant beasts wallowing in the dust and scratching up against the stone to rid themselves of their winter coats. And when he thinks of the buffalo he almost feels bad that he’s split the stone in two instead of leaving it up to nature to decide when it’s time for change. He walks around the stone, taking care not to stumble in a hole, and he leans in and runs his hand against the clean hard split. There’s a V between the two pieces, and the way the moonlight shines through, it looks like a gorge or a canyon, or perhaps the Red Sea parting. Hank steps through the opening and when he emerges on the other side he sees a white-faced steer staring at him. The moonlight shines on a pink fluorescent hand painting, and he places his own hand over the outline but his hand is much bigger, so he walks around the stone and tries a few more until he finds a lime green one that fits. He thinks about the compulsion humans seem to have for leaving their mark, the kids are no different, and maybe the art restorer would be kind of interesting with her white gloves and fancy tools and little jars of chemicals, like a scientist. Although her tools wouldn’t help her repair this latest assault on the stone, the split down the middle.

  He decides to leave the stone the way it is, not to try again to blast it to pieces. Maybe the split will be enough to keep the kids out of his pasture, since the stone no longer looks like a tabletop. He comes up with an official story: What next? If it’s not beer, it’s blasting caps. Just lucky they didn’t hurt themselves, or start a grass fire. If you stick to your story, who’s going to argue? Two people already know the truth—Lou and old TNT—but it’s his pasture, he can say what he likes.

  Hank walks back to his truck and cracks the last can in his six-pack of cola. He heads home, taking a shortcut across the pasture to the west, the truck bumping over the rocks and the gopher holes. He hopes Lynn is there. She stays in the restaurant as late as midnight if there are customers, but if it’s dead she closes up early. Won’t she be surprised, he thinks, looking at the rooster on the seat beside him. The fine-feathered present for his wife has settled in like a lapdog.

  The Oasis

  Offerings

  It’s late, almost midnight, when the owner of the lost horse pulls into the Oasis Café for a bite to eat. The parking lot is pretty much empty, just two semi-trailers and a half-ton, a car parked close to the door, a motorcycle in front of the Petro-Can. For a moment Joni worries that the restaurant might be closed but then she sees the lights on inside and she picks out two men—probably the truckers—sitting at a table by the window. She steps into the foyer between the Petro-Can and the restaurant and stops to look at the bulletin board, which is plastered with notices and ads: livestock sales, sports days, farm auctions, equipment for sale. There’s an ad for taxidermy services, a plea for hay from someone in Alberta. She finds a pen in her purse but no paper, so she takes the hay notice and flips it over and writes: Missing. Grey Arab gelding. Call Joni. And then her cell phone number. As she looks for a good place to stick her note, her eye lands on a small, plain poster in black and white, with photographs of children who are missing. Several of the photos are identified as being computer-aged. She thinks about her grandchildren—the ones she’s never
met—as she studies the photos, and wonders if these posters do any good, if any of these children are ever found. Would she recognize a child from the poster, she wonders, if a car pulled up right now and the child got out and spoke to her, said hello, or asked for directions to the washroom or a pay phone? She wonders if she’d recognize her grandchildren from their pictures if they walked up to her on the street. Probably not.

  There’s a bare spot on the board next to the drive-in movie listings. Joni pins her missing horse notice there and then reaches into her purse and turns her phone back on, thinking it must be safe to do so by now. She sees a pink highlighter pen among the gum boxes and gas receipts and other detritus in her purse, and she decides to highlight her notice to make it stand out. At that moment, a woman with an apron comes from the restaurant and passes her on her way to the washroom, a middle-aged woman with roots in need of a touch-up. She’s wearing pointed leather shoes that look like cowboy boots and Joni wonders how her feet can stand them.

  “Hello there,” the woman says, but she’s all business, so Joni doesn’t bother to answer.

  Joni draws a pink circle around Grey Arab gelding, and then enters the restaurant. She’s looking around, trying to decide where to sit, when her phone rings. She curses under her breath, then she reaches into her purse and turns the phone off again.

  When she looks up, she notices an older man in a plaid shirt watching her from where he sits alone at a table. He sees he’s been caught staring and says, “Damned phones, eh. A person could be up there in the Arctic, sitting on an iceberg, and someone would be trying to get him on the phone.”

  “No hiding from the phone,” she agrees. She’s been trying all day.

  This restaurant is like an iceberg, she thinks, thanks to the air conditioning, and she wishes she’d brought a sweater in with her. She chooses a table by the window and sits, thinking about what she should order to ease her hunger this late at night. She has sandwich fixings in a cooler in the truck but it’s too much trouble to get everything out in the dark. There’s a menu on the table and she studies it, trying to decide between something reasonably light (soup du jour and a bun) and the full meal deal (a burger with fries and coleslaw).

  The cold air makes her shiver, and it hits her how tired she is. She wishes she were in Peace River, or at least Edmonton, instead of freezing in an over air-conditioned restaurant in a town she’s never heard of. If it weren’t for that damned horse, she thinks, although it had been her own rash act that had put the horse in her possession in the first place, and she should have known that it would sprout feathers and turn into an albatross. As she searched the countryside around Juliet, she’d been tempted by the idea of leaving without the horse, selling the trailer cheap to the first dealer she could find, stopping somewhere to buy appropriate gifts for the children—lego, books, video games—and then carrying on unencumbered. But she was worried about the horse, that he’d been chased by coyotes or whatever chases horses, or got tangled in a fence, and she couldn’t just leave, so she’d driven the grid roads and had somehow ended up at a surprising stretch of yellow sand that rose in dunes as far she could see. She remembered the old cowboy in the campground mentioning the sand hills, and then the woman in the post office had waxed on about them as though they were a wonder of the world that shouldn’t be missed. Joni hadn’t paid much attention. She’d passed several such promises on her way through Saskatchewan, aimed at making people stop on their way to somewhere else: mysterious tunnels under Main Street, country mansions built and abandoned by old-world gentry, the longest bridge over the shortest span of water.

  Still, the sight of the dunes had tempted her enough that she’d parked her truck in the yard of an old schoolhouse and found a faint trail to follow on foot. It was mostly covered over by sand, but she could make out the two vehicle tracks worn into the surface and it was enough of a trail that she could stick to it and not risk getting lost. When she left the trail to climb one of the dunes and looked to the west where the sun was shining hot on the waves of sand, she’d thought, The woman in the post office was right, these hills are a wonder. The landscape was so vast and simple, reduced to sky and grass and sand. Yet in the surface at her feet, she saw patterns as intricate and complicated as the veins in an insect’s wings. The discovery of this spot was almost worth the aggravation of the missing horse.

  A rogue gust blew sand in her eyes and she had to turn away, blinking, her eyes watering. When they cleared, she slid back down the dune, and when she got to the bottom she saw something at her feet, mostly buried in the sand, a leather strap, so she reached down and pulled on it and it came loose. It looked like an old halter. The leather was warm in her hand from the sun and cracked and dry as toast, but it was in one piece, still buckled as though whatever had been wearing it had sloughed it off and wandered on without it. She wondered what else was buried under all this sand. She thought of taking the halter with her, but then she laid it back down to be covered up again.

  She’d returned to her truck then and driven more miles around the countryside, checking herds of horses in pastures, stopping at farmhouses to inquire. She came to a Catholic church out in the middle of nowhere, and across the road, an old woman named Anna working in her flower bed. When Joni asked her about the horse, she nodded and said, “You talk to that boy, Lee Torgeson. He might know something about your horse.” Joni had imagined a ten-year-old. Then Anna had insisted she come into the house for coffee, and Joni couldn’t say no and ended up telling Anna about her grandchildren and showing her the school pictures, and Anna had gushed appropriately over them. When Joni finished her coffee Anna had provided directions to the Torgeson place, back the way she’d come, but when Joni got to the farm there was no one there. Just a black-and-white dog that barked a few times and then came and rolled at her feet. More driving around until after dark and the hunger pangs got to her, and she’d seen the Oasis sign and pulled in.

  Joni makes up her mind to stick with the soup du jour, whatever it turns out to be, because it’s too late to be eating a big meal. Potato soup would hit the spot. She could hope for potato. When the woman in the apron comes back into the restaurant—the waitress, Joni assumes—she closes the menu to indicate she’s ready to order. She should maybe ask what kind of soup the du jour is just in case it’s clam chowder. Seafood that’s been sitting on a warming plate for hours is not likely a good idea.

  The waitress doesn’t make a move toward her table and Joni begins to wonder if this is the kind of place where you help yourself, like a cafeteria, or maybe go to the counter to place your order. She looks around and doesn’t see any kind of buffet table. She holds up her menu. The waitress just stares at her, or perhaps glares would be a better word. Joni wonders if maybe she missed seeing a closed sign hanging on the door, and is about to get up and ask if she’s too late to get a bite to eat, when the woman strides over to her table and says, “What can I get you?”

  “Just soup. Du jour. And a bun. What is the soup? I guess I should ask that.”

  “Beef barley.”

  She wants to ask about potato but is afraid to, the way the waitress is looking at her. “Beef barley’s good,” she says. “I’ll have that. And a bun.”

  “A bun. So you said. You can help yourself to coffee.” The waitress turns and goes through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

  Before Joni can get up to help herself to coffee, the man in the plaid shirt says, “I’ll get that. You just sit.” He gets a mug and the pot from the burner and carries them to Joni’s table, where he sets the mug down and fills it without saying anything else.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  He responds with a nod. Then he fills his own cup before he puts the pot back on the burner.

  Joni shivers and wraps her hands around the hot mug, wishing again that she’d put on a sweater or even a jacket. The waitress comes back through the kitchen doors and slaps Joni’s soup down in front of her. The broth slops over the edge of the bowl and splashes
the bun.

  “Thanks,” Joni says. She’s thinking how strange this is, this bitchy waitress, but the soup smells good and she would have dipped the bun anyway.

  The two truckers stand up from their table and make their way to the cash register.

  “Sorry,” one of them says to the waitress, “nothing smaller than a twenty.”

  “I thought you were a big tipper,” she says, following them.

  “Not that big.”

  After they leave, Joni can see the waitress is watching her again from behind the till. It’s unnerving.

  When the man in the plaid shirt says, “I wouldn’t mind another slice of that pie,” the waitress goes through the swinging doors and returns with a plate of something lime green.

  “This is the last piece for you, Willard,” she says to him. “You’ll be turning green.” She sets the plate on the table in front of him and asks, “So how’s the movie business treating you?”

  “Marian’s doing the movie tonight,” he says.

  The waitress goes back behind the till counter and begins replacing the menu inserts with new ones for the next day. Joni finishes her soup and pushes the plate and bowl aside. She watches as the man Willard eats the pie, wondering if she should maybe try a piece. As soon as he’s done he slides away from his table and stands, searching through his pockets. He checks one pocket, and the next, and the next, and then an expression crosses his face that clearly means he’s realized he has no money with him.

  “I left the house in such a hurry,” he says.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the waitress says. “If I can’t trust you, I might as well pack it in right now and give up on humanity.”