That man. That is the man Calv is following through the snow tonight. There had been no other man to follow. His dad never told him the difference. He couldn’t ask Amanda. He tried to ask her once when they were sixteen. He asked her how to make girls come because he didn’t know and it embarrassed him to think he was doing it wrong.
She had said yuck, b’y, I’m your sister.
This had made Calv feel dirty and too handy to incest to ever ask her again.
If Amanda had her time back she would’ve been honest and said she didn’t know but would tell him when she found out so he wouldn’t spend his whole life listening to Roger.
Honesty would get everyone out of some lot of scrapes.
Roger hasn’t even bothered to zip up the front of his coat. There is snow all down his neck everywhere, clumps of it in his beard, around his eyelashes. Calv has never noticed what long eyelashes Roger has before. Like a girl’s. Pretty and perfectly curled back toward his sockets. Calv almost makes mention of it but stops cause Roger is liable to take anything the wrong way right about now. He looks like a man apt to strike his own granny. And then, as they’re almost back to the truck, the world changes again.
For a minute, Calv thinks he is after blacking out.
But he’s not blacked out. He is still upright. He can feel the weight of his body on his knees. The strength of the wind against his chest as he leans into it. His eyes are still open and adjusting to the new vantage. He can tell he is still cogent by the headlights turning up Prescott. The snow has turned to a sleet mixture. He sees it shimmer in the light. For a moment he feels trapped inside a comic book movie. Why do they call it black and white when everything is throwing shade? Nothing is called as it should be called. Calv catches a glimpse of the dark street lights swinging.
He misses when the colours were friendly. Already misses them. He knows they’re only just gone but he feels how dreary it will be for the rest of his life without them. Two large hands have finally got hold of Calv by the shirt and he is being shook to his boot bottoms. He feels his guts churning out bile and gas. His discomfort grows as a small voice inside his head says, look, b’y, look at what you’ve done, the only colour you’re left now with is yellow, cause that’s the colour of your jesus heart.
Little yellow heart.
And he brought this on himself. Calv is growing numb here stopped steady on the corner peering around this miserable intersection. You used to be able to see the mouth of the harbour. But they stacked capsules like Lego atop each other to block the view. And it occurs to Calv that there is something really not right about cobbling together such blankness at the very start of where they all begin. Calv feels like he is losing hold of something. Someone. Everyone. Or that he is just now realizing a loss has already occurred and it is singing on the inside of his ears as he strains to recall the voices he has many times wished away. He can’t hear their warm words but he can still remember what they sound like in full revolt. Colourful language, disaster and delight. And then, vision and volume return momentarily to remind him he is utterly lost.
Donna in her purple yoga pants grinning about a new bikini that he will just love.
Amanda giggling and blowing dish soap bubbles with a straw, get em, Calvy, get em!
His mother holding a Dream Whip–covered whisk out to him after taking one quick lick.
All of them smiling in his direction. These women shining love through to his heart this whole time, the brightest amongst them the first who loves him so steady and hard that he feels heavy how the truth of him will break her.
He hears her say knock yourself out kid as she hands him the whisk and runs her hands through his hair.
And he knows his mother’s love has the strength of ten thousand wood stoves stoked and blazing against every shitty remark ever aimed at him for having an accent or a crooked nose or being shy. Calv had felt less cold around her broiling affection and wanted to always stand on that sunny side of the street where she thought he was the best one. Her favourite boy. The captain of her cherry heart. Flushed and full. Calv was always just waiting for her to turn toward him so he could tell her all the things he couldn’t tell other people about his feelings. He had been envious of the time she spent turned toward his sister. He did not understand then.
But he understands now and feels this first painful surge of grief. Maybe he will be sick. The balloon of shame sickens him as it rises through his abdomen to his throat. He was so wrongfully jealous of Amanda who loved him second only to and seamlessly just like their mother. Amanda had just needed more of everything when they were little cause girlhood is maybe harder. Calv should not have begrudged her the extra hand she was given, he should have helped pull her up. If he could go back to there, he would be a better brother. That’s all Susie ever wanted for him anyway.
I wants you to be a kind man when you grows up, Calvy.
I wants you to be nice to the girls and be good to your sister.
That’s the most important thing, Calvin, I wants you to always be good to your sister.
Promise.
Listening to him practise his comedy for the variety show. Laughing. You’re a talent, my boy, a natural talent. His mother, rearranging her life to go watch his wrestling, watching it even though she hated it. Worried that every smack would bang up her boy. Come now, what about softball, what about cross country skiing, they got swimming lessons to the community pool now. Saying she would drive him even though the community pool was almost an hour away and she was nervous driving after dark. Whispering in the kitchen to his father that she can’t hardly watch him down on the mats. Cause she’s scared to death he’s going to make a mistake and get hurt. Or hurt someone else. That would be worse. She never wanted that to happen either. Cause she knows her boy and hurting someone else would be worse for him. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself.
She is going to be so mad at him. Susie won’t hold Calv up into that kind of stuff at all. She will not call the open line to defend her son. Susie will wipe her wet eyes in her dirty apron, sit on the floor and mourn what he has done even if he didn’t totally do it.
She will be so disappointed in him for bringing that young one to that place.
It will totally defeat her because she had tried very hard to make him kind. All this time, she was outnumbered and overwhelmed by the meanness everywhere, but she still tried. And Calv feels his mother’s confidence shatter for what has happened. He knows she will replay every moment of his childhood trying to identify some pattern of behaviour she might have run off course. Susie will ignore outright the random nature of Calv’s choices that brought him to this dark place, because the inability to prevent an outcome makes her feel powerless.
Calv stands watching the dark street light lamps swing on their hooks and feels the same.
They look like any moment all might come free and crashing down. He thinks on the many times he has driven upon the same scene and watched the lights swing before racing through them to avert disaster. He had always felt relieved that he had got through, but not now. Now, he stands and waits, wishing he could take it back. This night. That night before Christmas. Every night he was mean to a woman before now. There are so many nights, and Calv is so sorry for them all in this one moment.
But sorry is as sorry does and Calvin is one sorry fucker.
* * *
The man ahead of Olive is giving her a hard time in the blackout.
Is you some kind of mute?
He made a joke when the power flicked off and Olive did not respond.
She is too aware that she is in a dark gas stat
ion in dirty weather with three strange men.
After Olive’s pop died, she was sent to stay with an aunt and uncle. Olive lived there until she did not live there because sometimes the uncle wasn’t really an uncle but boyfriend of an aunt. Sometimes not even boyfriend. Sometimes just a man Olive is made to call uncle.
Then she lived with her mother’s cousin for a time. And then a single mother who had small twins with asthma. These were not ideal living conditions. Her stomach couldn’t adjust to the shifting dinner plates. She found it all hard to digest. And this made school a bother. Olive couldn’t think to learn.
Every teacher from town soon became convinced Olive was deaf. There must be something wrong with her ears, they said in pencil skirts bought at outlets in Orlando. These trips: proclaimed rewards for having taught up North. Not real North but northern. Even Olive’s north was found insufficient.
Everyone muttering it could be worse, instead of it could be better.
Halfway through the freeze, frustrated young teachers would hand Olive off to eager new social workers fresh from accreditation, who would then in turn usher Olive to a foreign doctor.
But it wasn’t her ears. Her ears were fine. Unfortunately. It would be easier if her ears were broken. They knew how to fix ears. Bewilderment, concern and disappointment from all as Olive caused them to fail more. She brought out the worst in grown-ups. They could not teach her. Counsel her. Or doctor her. She was impenetrable to their years of education, skill and practice. A child pretending the world did not exist with hands on her small face cupping the sockets of her tiny eyes. Later squeezing them shut when her hands were not available.
Conversations happened over her head like she wasn’t there.
Well, there must be something wrong, they would say through arms crossed. There must be something wrong with Olive. Because if there was nothing wrong with Olive, it would mean there was something wrong with them. Something much bigger than one mixed-up baygirl who did not see when a teacher stood in front of her. Olive just tuning them out, turning away, sometimes with her head, later with her body. Olive did not blink. Would not. Refused. She registered no expression on her face.
There must be something wrong with her brain then surely, they would say in the staff room before planning Friday supper. Might be slow, someone would offer. Pizza Delight, another would suggest. Then, over cheese fingers lacking in cheese and garlic bread lacking in garlic, they would wonder how could she possibly not feel the feelings they told her to feel.
Another time, it was her tongue. Olive’s tongue was the culprit. Or what lay beyond her tongue. Perhaps her cords were in need of repair. Could be her tonsils required removing. Because the child barely spoke.
Which was not normal, the educated professionals who had only read about suicide agreed. They felt confident they knew more about being Olive than she did and so tried to advise her even though their advice seemed like something from another place. Sometimes she tried to inform them of their wrong ways.
My home is a hard home. There are moose. Black bears. A lot of dead rabbits on the road.
Sometimes your pop dies by suicide when the fish plant closes and they send you away because your nan is too sad to cook. Your dad pretends he’s not your dad and everyone laughs at your immaculate conception. Your cousin tries to fuck you at a party and your mother leaves. No one says it is okay to feel hurt. No one says anything. Everyone just goes on living. We all go on living until we lose more of each other. And then we are made lesser.
But they could not hear Olive’s words through her ragged accent. They didn’t even want to hear them. They wanted Olive to play pretend all white, play pretend all happy, play pretend they had all fixed her.
But actually fixing anything or anyone would mean a lot of work. And a lot less money. More work and less money was not what anyone in charge was striving for, so couldn’t Olive just speak up in a way everyone could ignore? They were just trying to pay back their student loans so they could get married, buy houses and have kids. That’s all they were doing when they were teaching Olive math and trying to get her to speak the Queen’s English.
Her silence bothered them.
They knew nothing of the hurt in having a crippled tongue. Olive’s tongue had been hobbled generations ago.
So it doesn’t matter if men yell at Olive anymore.
It doesn’t matter if Damian yells at her for being so slow with the smokes. Or if the men ahead of her in line at the gas station taunt her now in the dark. Olive has been made ready for them all. Every reaching, grasping, clawing embrace has prepared her for the moment she opens the truck door and climbs in, answers the Tinder message and goes out, takes the draw and forgets again, swallows the pills and feels numb.
Olive doesn’t want to be a woman anymore if this is what being a woman is like.
* * *
Iris registers the sound of the wind first.
The power loss has created a vacuum seal temporarily absent of human sound. The first wave of shock cascaded over them but now everyone is held in place willing the music to return. They can suddenly and properly hear the storm surge against the corner picture windows. It is swirling and unpredictable. Great arms of it feel hauled up by a Precambrian grudge as if the weather patterns themselves were trying to break the place even further apart to right an ancient wrong. A great shoulder of air heaves itself against the door and blows it open. The candles near the entry fall victim to the gale and the whole front of house falls into complete darkness as Ben dashes out from behind the bar to push closed the door again. Shuttering them all in here together. Everyone can hear things being picked up outside and thrown down.
Don’t want that. Don’t want that either. Don’t want none of this.
Tossed against the neighbouring buildings. Slapping surrounding signage. Rejected by mother nature. Shovels accidentally forgotten. Garbage can lids not tied on. A sandwich board pulled out in general pervasive denial. Blue recycling bags holding one-time remnants are tossed around in defiance. Everything gets swept up. The internal consistency of the swiping and slamming cannot be clarified. The noise that thrashes them violently is all things at once.
Snow changing to rain changing to hail changing to sleet changing to snow.
The noise against the window suggests they are all barrelling toward undoing as if all progress made has always been futile. And then, against the grain of glass, they silently witness the storm whipping itself into a further frenzy as each swipe like a large hand throws great fistfuls of rock salt in everyone’s face.
More. No. More than that. No. Stop. No. Even more. The storm cannot be satiated.
There will be no respite from it because someone made up an arbitrary day to waste paper.
The storm does not care for beautiful lies. It rages on. Killing in the name of not listening. Because this storm does not humour liars. It knows only facts. Recognizes reality for what it is. A blizzard is a blizzard. That bad guy is a bad guy. Believe him when he tells you. Iris looks toward the window again. Hopeful it will clear. But it won’t.
This here is a whiteout.
The diners gasp and murmurs break through the register. Iris takes a headcount of the tables low-lit by candles made with her own gentle hands. She wonders if Olive is out in this and then feels guilty for not thinking this before and then feels guilty for every time she has not thought on Olive because she was much much too busy obsessing over a man ignoring her. The whole mess of her and Olive’s relationship brought on by another man ages ago ignoring them both.
I asked your Uncle Brian once if he was
my fadder?
What? Why?
Nan told someone on the phone my fadder was over on the wharf again talking big when I never had school supplies.
Uncle Brian used to fish with Dad.
Scared the shit out of him.
What did he say?
He asked me who my mother was.
* * *
George hurries to the front to relight the tables that had gotten caught out in the gust.
She is attempting to make merriment even while her mind searches for solutions to this unexpected payment problem. No one carries cash. There is no way anyone in here is carrying enough cash to pay for their dinner. They all knew this was a possibility but forged ahead anyway.
Why? Why was it so important to open the restaurant today?
They could be home in front of the fireplace with the dogs.
Oh god, she hopes the dogs are okay. The dogs are probably okay. George doesn’t know what she would do if something happened to them. Sometimes they feel like all she has. She knows this is not true. She has Miranda. And her father. And John. Of course, she has John. But sometimes she thinks that she would not recover from losing the dogs. Because it was what got her through losing the babies. They weren’t babies, of course. Embryos would likely be more accurate. Not even fetuses.
But she thought of them as babies that her body lost.
And then after, John had given her the dogs, and that hurt too because it meant he had given up. But then it didn’t hurt as much. And then it only hurt sometimes. And now, she mostly feels okay. George mostly feels like she’ll be okay no matter whose baby they get. She hopes the dogs aren’t scared in the dark. She hopes the alarms are not going off in the house. She checks the blackouts on her phone.
Apparently, they are rolling.
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club Page 33