The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  The maestro seemed to find it necessary to express hostility towards the tourists. Although the island’s population had always grown a little during summers, most visitors arrived in their own boats and left them tied up at their private docks, leaving their cabins only when supplies were needed from Lisa Svetic’s Store. “But now! They’re coming by foot and bicycle—because they can stay overnight in that damn B&B they’ve opened in the only commune building that might not collapse on their heads!” He didn’t seem to mind that the few strangers amongst them could hear his rant. He nodded sadly towards the cello case that Thorstad had leaned into a corner. “So—you have brought the unfortunate instrument home with you?”

  Thorstad did not feel any need to discuss the cello. Though Mrs. Montana had had the instrument re-strung, it still belonged, like so many things, to a past that seemed to have receded beyond his reach. Only gradually, while Travis was in school, had it recovered a few more fragments of its memory.

  The maestro went inside for a seat but Thorstad stayed out on the narrow deck to smell the familiar salty air of mid-July and watch the little wooded island grow larger as they drew near. Tiny buildings here and there along the coastline looked like toys wedged in beneath the dark and crowded timber that dwarfed them. Eventually, he was able to pick out the Free Exchange, whose old bleached planks and cedar shakes appeared to have been overlaid with silver by the lowering sun. Once they’d entered the little harbour, he could see that the rusted pickups and old sedans of weekly commuters were parked as haphazardly as they had always been, abandoned where they’d got to when the drivers saw the ferry was about to leave without them—some without doors, one without glass in the windows, but none without a few substantial dents and a coating of mud.

  Though Travis’s little Tercel was nearly as battered as these, it had almost matched his mother’s Jaguar for speed. After dropping Thorstad off at the dock, Travis had honked his horn as he pulled away from the parking lot, in a hurry to visit an uncle on an ostrich farm a half-hour to the north. His last words: “You really sure you want to go back? Raccoons could be living in your house.” He then reminded Thorstad of his cellphone number. “In case you change your mind. I can pick you up on my way back.”

  Travis might not have been so cheerful if the shooting hadn’t gone as well as it had for the remainder of their time in L.A. Once they’d returned to the Montana home for the run-up to final exams, Travis had been willing to apply himself to his courses, while taking one afternoon of each week for them both to volunteer at the drop-in centre—where Angus Walker had not been seen, apparently, since their one encounter. No doubt Travis’s good spirits today had something to do with his conviction he had “aced” his exams, though it was more likely he had simply “passed.” Confirmation had not yet arrived on government letterhead paper.

  Although he had not been “dumped” from the show, or even demoted to his original minor role, Travis had reluctantly agreed to attend the local university for the first-year program in Arts and Science to satisfy his parents. He would continue to fly to L.A. for specific episodes, but it hadn’t yet been decided whether Thorstad would be needed with him.

  Mrs. Montana had made it clear that Axel Thorstad would be welcome to return in September, not only to work with Travis but also to help her niece from Prince Rupert struggle through Grade Twelve. “Not a good student at all, but her parents have offered to pay you well if we provide the guest house.” He had not made any promises.

  His trunk would be delivered later in the week. Today he had only his luggage to drag past Lisa’s Store and down his trail through the woods, dirt and twigs collecting around the tiny plastic wheels. One of the feral sheep bleated somewhere to the south. Summer heat had drawn out the strong acid scent of needles from the Douglas firs. Here and there in small grassy clearings the foxgloves, some of them as tall as he was, were near the end of their bloom, all but the top few flowers having lost their colour and fallen to the ground.

  Yet something was not as it should be. His silent army of painted stumps stood about in the yard outside his shack like students who’d been rushed outside for fire drill, wondering why the bell-to-come-back-in had not yet rung. Their circle eyes waited for Thorstad to do something about this. His desk, too, was out in the weather.

  The grass between his shack and the retaining wall was littered with items of girl clothes and glittering costume jewellery. The horizontal arbutus trunk was in use as a clothesline—a row of socks and brassieres lay drying on it now. His property was every bit as messy as the rocky beach below it, where the retreated tide had abandoned heaps of kelp and scattered planks of yellow lumber amongst the stones and tide pools and irregular islands of sand.

  Gwendolyn Something made it clear she saw no reason to leave. “Losers-weepers, eh?” she said from his doorway. “It was a waste of a decent roof. I moved the older girls into Townsends’. This place is too small for us all.” She seemed to be suggesting he’d failed her in this regard.

  Not once in all those summers had he and Elena arrived to find someone living in their shack. He removed the cello from his back and set it against the cabin wall, reminding himself to be patient, there must have been a misunderstanding here. But there was no mistaking the internal flare of anger. “I have a deed of sale somewhere.” It was probably with the rest of his possession in that heap beneath the blue tarp.

  “You ever hear of squatters’ rights?” Gwendolyn stood with one hip cocked defiantly to the side. Pregnant now with Hairy Arnica. “Use it or lose it. It’s a universal law.” Despite the body language, she was quite cheerful about this. She was, he thought, an attractive woman. It was not altogether surprising that she’d spawned so many children from so many men. What was puzzling was why none of the men had stayed—unless, of course, she hadn’t wanted them to.

  He never felt so clumsy and oversized as when he was confounded by the unexpected—thrashing about for the right words. “I hope you didn’t put my books out in the weather.”

  “You kidding? When they burn so nice in the stove?”

  Perhaps she saw something dangerous in his face. “Don’t worry!” She laughed. “We haven’t needed them for firewood yet—but we wouldn’t know what else to do with them. You can have them if you want.”

  He didn’t ask about the letters he had tucked between the books. He moved up to stand where he could place a hand against the weathered corner post of his shack. “There are abandoned houses all over this island. Deserted trailers as well.”

  “Not with this nice view there aren’t,” she said. “I never knew you could sit on your doorstep and watch the sun go down behind the mountains over there.” She sat on the doorstep now, perhaps to demonstrate in case he had never thought of it himself. “You walked out and let it go to waste.” She raised her voice: “Girls!”

  Girls popped up from below the retaining wall. Girls in shorts ran out from the woods behind the shack. Two girls swung down from branch to branch of the hollow cedar, and dropped to the ground. A towhead ran inside and came back out with his shotgun, which she let hang at her side while she waited to see how this conversation turned out.

  “This gentleman wants us to move into some old farmhouse swarming with rats and stinking of raccoon poo, which everyone knows is hazardous to your health. You think he’s being fair?”

  The indigenous flowers hissed. The girl on the step stuck out her tongue.

  “I would rather not call the police,” he said.

  Of course she would recognize an idle threat. To invite police onto the island was to encourage them to investigate every rumour that had reached them in the previous year. They would comb the woods for grow ops the helicopters hadn’t spotted from above. They would check out every shack for fugitives from the law, and certainly find a few. The person who’d called them over would be ostracized for life.

  Gwendolyn explained that a room had been reserved for him in the Commune B&B. Another guest house! “Every room comes with its own
reconditioned bicycle for getting around.”

  His shock and indignation must have made a boiled cabbage of his brain. He couldn’t think of what to do. He hadn’t raised his voice in front of youngsters since his first year of teaching, when he’d learned that it did little good and left him with a headache for the rest of the day. And showing his indignation had always made him look a fool. Students had taught him that, too. If he left here in a huff, the girls would imitate him behind his back. Yet how could he turn away from his own home?

  Perhaps Gwendolyn understood his problem. “Go on to the Commune now and check in,” she said, almost sympathetically. “If you come back in time for breakfast tomorrow, the girls will whip you up one of their mushroom omelettes.”

  On the gravel outside the front step to Svetic’s Store, a bright red motor scooter stood at an angle, a shiny helmet hanging from the handlebar. When he’d stepped into the familiar scent of cinnamon, he saw that a bearded giant in black leather pants and vest had installed himself in Lisa’s chair to read the weekend coloured comics. Though Lisa saw him enter, she dusted shelves all the way down the aisle to the end before coming up to stand behind her counter with the undershirt-duster still in her hand. “Yes?” She spoke to Axel Thorstad as though to a stranger who wasn’t particularly welcome. “You remind me of someone I used to know, but he went off to live in Disneyland. You can’t be him, because he would have warned me he was coming before I heard it from others.” She bent to scribble on a pad of paper. “The trouble with summer is you never know who’s on the island. Anyone can sneak their boat into a bay and take over a deserted shack— free holiday!”

  She’d chopped her hair off just below her ears. Perhaps she’d despaired of anyone finding glamour in her topknot, or had grown tired of having it come down around her head every time she laughed. She wasn’t laughing now.

  “Gwendolyn has no intention of budging from my shack. The best I can expect is an omelette if I return in the morning— made by her daughters.”

  Lisa’s laughter set her flesh in motion. No hairpins dropped to the floor but all chins trembled. She hauled in a deep breath, placed the tips of her fingers on the counter, and leaned in close. “Avoid the omelette, whatever you do! Those girls would lace it with poison mushrooms and never bat an eye.” A small pair of crossed swords had been added beneath the thistle tattoo on her neck.

  The bearded man in the red-leather chair shook the comics vigorously, perhaps to protest the distraction.

  Lisa lowered her voice. “How’s anyone supposed to recognize you in those city clothes? How long you think they’ll last once you start prowling the bushes for junk? Or are you just a visitor?” She pronounced “visitor” as though it possessed a foul taste.

  Thorstad looked down past the two perfect creases in his dress pants to his polished size 13 shoes, and laughed. They had already accumulated a rim of mud. “I’ve been a traveller in a strange land, Lisa—where streets are paved, though not with gold, and my baggy corduroys might have got me arrested. And, as I’ve just explained, there’s a tribe of females living in my shack, where I’d expected to change my clothes!”

  She turned to fetch a stack of magazines from his mail slot. “So are you back or are you not?” She grabbed a bag of salted peanuts from the candy shelf to place on top of the magazines. “Can I count on making a profit off of you again, is what I mean. I’ve got oatmeal that’s gonna be crawling with weevils soon if you don’t take it off my hands.”

  Eventually she agreed to have a talk with Gwendolyn. “But I may have to make some promises you will have to keep.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well. Such as maybe you could fix up one of them other shacks for her. Lord knows there’s plenty around.”

  She didn’t seem to see what a preposterous demand this was. “I’m to become a construction engineer at my age just to win the right to live in the building I already own?”

  Rather than acknowledge this complaint, she reminded him that some of the buildings were off limits. The Radcliffes still came over now and then to camp in their old farmhouse. The Holloways liked to check up on their trailer, though never stayed overnight. “You want to stay clear of the old Salter shack though, down at the head of Deeper Bay. Kerry Holmes seen smoke—saw smoke—from the chimney when he was beachcombing yesterday and the Salters haven’t been on the island for twenty years. Somebody’s using that hidden place to distribute drugs, I bet you anything. You don’t want to run into them guys without an army at your back.”

  It was up to him to think of something that would appeal to Gwendolyn, she said. “Nothing is simple with her. I used to figure she told me every thought that went through her head— except the names of the girls’ fathers.” Her gaze shifted to the figure behind the comics but darted as quickly away. “But never mind, I’ll go down tonight for a chat. She’s a little scared of me, I think—I don’t know why.”

  She refused his money for the peanuts. “The Free Exchange will be glad to have you back. They’re running low on junk. You can start by turning in them spiffy clothes.” At the sound of an approaching engine running on just a few of its cylinders she stood up on her toes to peer through the window. “Here comes your hope for a ride.”

  His hope for a ride was a GMC pickup from the 1950s, without muffler, fenders, or much remaining paint. It pulled up on the wet gravel in front of the store, brakes squealing, the motor continuing to hum and cough and sound as though it were running backwards even after it had been shut off and the driver had got out and slammed his door. This was Alvin White, who must have rescued one more wreck from across the strait but hadn’t restored it yet to health.

  It was always a shock to see how thin Alvin was when he was upright, his white beard hanging to his belt. According to Lisa, he was on his way to work. “Real work for a change—isn’t that right, Alvin? Not just fooling around with motors.”

  Alvin shut the screen door behind him and admitted that he was now a paid employee of the Commune Bed and Breakfast. “Handyman. Cook’s helper. Waiter.”

  “It was that hospital shirt got him the job,” Lisa said. But when the fellow in the leather chair looked out from behind the comics and cleared his throat, she lowered her voice. “Anyone who can keep himself that clean while messing with motors is good enough to work in a kitchen, even if he don’t know a thing about food.”

  Alvin dipped his head to acknowledge the compliment. As usual he was indeed wearing one of his stolen baby-blue smocks. He reached to shake Thorstad’s hand without quite looking into his face, then turned to Lisa. “I forgot to get myself some smokes yesterday.”

  “Forgetting’s normal here,” Lisa said, reaching for a package of the only brand she carried. “Mr. Thorstad forgot he’d deserted us and accidentally wandered back. Now he’s just another tourist looking for a place to sleep. Maybe you can make sure Rainbow gives him a room? We don’t want him sleeping under wheelbarrows, scaring kids and wildlife half to death.”

  Only when Thorstad was about to follow Alvin out the door did she remember, or pretend to remember, that one more letter had arrived. “From Calgary,” she said. “I put it aside to send on.”

  As soon as he’d put his luggage and the cello in the truck bed and climbed into the cab, he asked Alvin if he knew the fellow in Lisa’s chair. Alvin chuckled as he rammed the gearshift into first. “No one knows who he is. Appeared a couple weeks ago and made himself at home. I heard a rumour Lisa went across the water to post an ad on the Internet. ‘Looking for love,’ or something. Then this guy shows up, I guess for a trial run. Handling your letters must’ve give her ideas, eh?”

  They were soon rattling down the road, slowing to skirt some of the narrower puddles and gearing down to plough through those that spanned the road and lasted for twenty or thirty metres. On the seat between them was a copy of Under the Volcano. “In case it’s a slow night,” Alvin explained, tapping two pink fingernails on the front cover. “I been working my way through some that Hammon
d left behind. This one’s got me beat.”

  The commune was no longer quite the “filthy pigsty mess” that Lisa had warned him of. Though Bo Hammond’s pyramid of logs and car tires and scraps of lumber remained, the dirt yard had been tidied up a little—rusted machinery hauled out of sight and some scotch broom cut back. The building’s slab-wood walls had been given a half-hearted coat of battleship grey, but one window was still boarded up and several shingles had come loose to slide partway down the roof. Thorstad resented the reasons that put him here but he was curious to see what the commune folks had made of this place.

  A potent bouquet of unpleasant smells was his first impression. His room reeked of the red paint that had been applied to the rough plywood walls, but this was mixed with the smell from saucers of scented wood shavings set down on the bedside table, bookshelf, and chest of drawers. There was even a scented candle burning on the windowsill. Where a proper hotel might have hung a framed print of a landscape, the managers of this B&B had tacked up a tie-dyed shirt, arms splayed so that every colour of the rainbow could be admired.

  After a brief knock, Alvin opened the door just long enough to say, “Supper in half an hour. Tonight there’s chili.” When he had almost closed the door, he opened it again. “Vegetarian.” His beard was crammed inside a hairnet attached to his ears.

  Thorstad blew out the scented candle and gathered up the saucers of potpourri to set them outside the window. He stood on the chair to remove the thumbtacks from the tie-dyed shirt, and rolled up the shirt to push it beneath the bed. He had tolerated scented candles in his classroom when it seemed appropriate for lessons on the poetry of Woodstock, and had looked out at tie-dyed shirts for longer than he wanted to think, but he did not intend to spend the night surrounded by these trappings now.