Then he yawned and looked bored. Out the tavern window the heat was like a drizzle, the clumps of weed at the far end of the gravelled parking lot were matted with dust, the wires stung, and beyond that the sky was immeasurably blue and cloudless.
Ivan used to walk down this highway collecting bottles in the summer in a pair of grey shorts, Antony recalled.
He had a bag of songs written by the time he was sixteen – and he played a guitar, though it only had four strings. “Pining for You in Pineville” and “Des-perato Kid,” and one which he could never sing on the river without getting into trouble was called “Why Bigtooled Darlins Fight.” There were songs called “Newcastle June” and “My Chatham Park.” He wrote songs about Loggieville and Burnt Church, Bartibog and as far upriver as Storeytown.
When he was young, Gloria dressed him in cowboy boots and a small rhinestone blazer, with a cowboy hat with a feather, and took him to Dominion Day celebrations to sing, and people used to get him to sign their programs because he was famous. Then they would all go for ice cream. And Gloria had red lipstick, and Antony said she was so beautiful he cried, and they all laughed and bought Nannie a present.
Now, as Antony looked out the window, he caught sight of a young Indian boy carrying a sack full of bottles in the ditch.
The Indian woman with the orange hair and nutmeg cheeks looked in his direction, noticed his undershirt was on backwards, and laughed, holding her golden beer up to her lips.
After a while, knowing Eugene wouldn’t tell him anything, Antony left the tavern. He crossed the road – his truck was parked on the other side of the highway. There was a smell of stingers in the afternoon, and the scent of spruce gum also. When he got home the house was empty. The door creaked on its hinges.
Margaret had just finished her last exam. She had put on her shorts and was sitting behind the house. The horse, Rudolf, was in the small paddock on her left. There was the sound of the little spring that ran from their property down to Vera and Nevin’s. When he came out on the porch steps he stood and looked down at her. She didn’t look his way.
“Where is everyone – where’s Val?” he said.
“She went out to supper.”
“Out to supper – out to supper – out to supper with who–”
“Nannie and Grampie.”
“Nannie and Grampie – ha – what for?”
“I don’t know – because she finished school – they all went out to the mall – Nannie and Grampie and Valerie,” she said.
She glanced up at him out of the corner of her eye, and then back down towards Vera’s place. The back of Vera’s house was in bright sunshine but the windows were closed – it looked and even had the presence of an invalid’s house, with the sun shining on its white side and one rag on the line.
“Well, isn’t that something – out for supper,” he said. “Out for supper – why didn’t you go?”
“I didn’t want to go.”
“Why not–”
“I didn’t want to.”
Antony licked his sapphire ring and took it off, and then he pulled his knuckle. There was a small snap. Then he lit a cigarette. He looked at his daughter in her pink shorts and with her thighs very white in the late-afternoon sunshine, with the smell of wet grass under the porch.
“I don’t want you going out later either,” he said suddenly.
“I’m not going anywhere –”
“No,” he said, confused. “Well, are you going to make me some supper?”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“What do I want – ha – I have to take those pinball machines across the river. What do you think – I want some supper,” he said.
She looked at him as she always did, and then got up and went inside. The bottom of her shorts were covered in tar.
“You’ve been down at the wharf,” he said, “with those lads.”
“I have not,” she snapped, and ran in and slammed the screen door.
Antony then walked down the path towards Vera’s. At the point where he usually saw the bird’s nest, he stopped and looked about. Ivan pulled into the yard and got out of the car. Antony stayed where he was for a moment. Then he walked back up the hill, and came out by the shed. There was the smell of wood and torn tar paper.
“Where’s Cindi?” Ivan asked.
Antony took a breath.
“That’s what I been trying to find out for you,” he said.
Ivan said nothing. He had just come from the woods. He was covered in sweat. His body looked healthier at this moment than it had in some time.
“I went to the apartment and she’s gone,” Ivan said.
“Of course she is! What in hell do you think I’ve been trying to tell you? And I been down river all day trying to get some information – about where she’s gone,” his father said.
“Well,” Ivan said calmly, “where is she?”
“Gone – how the hell should I know. Oh, she’s got important friends now – she couldn’t give a fuck for her husband. That guy from Montreal there – Eugene – just the same as I went through, you wait and see. I’m going in to have supper – big-feelinged Nannie went out to the mall to eat – come on and we’ll have some supper.”
And with that he picked up a stick, took a look over his shoulder, went back to make sure the lock on the shed was snapped, and, whistling, he went into the house, a cloud of moths about his head. Ivan followed him, not knowing what there was to whistle about.
Margaret had tried to fry some hamburgers and had blackened them. Antony was sitting at the table, bent over, staring through his hands at his boots and tapping his feet, waiting for his supper. The more he tapped his feet and whistled, the more nervous Margaret became. Instead of turning the heat on the stove lower, she turned it higher and went into the other room to put on an album that she had saved her money for.
Grease spattered against the side of the walls, and smoke filled the room. Antony looked at the stove and shook his head, and Ivan went over and turned the heat down and took the pan off the burner.
“Christ,” Margaret said coming in, looking at her father quickly and then at Ivan.
“It’s all right,” Ivan said, “I got it.”
Margaret was at that age that some girls never reach. When she talked she sounded thirteen, she was fifteen and looked nineteen. Her feet were bare, yet her fingernails were long and painted and her breasts well formed. Upstairs she kept scrapbooks, and drew pictures of dogs and cows and coloured them, and had the names of boys written over her schoolbooks.
“What in hell are you doing?” Antony said. “You’ll burn the house down.”
Ivan looked at his father calmly and then at Margaret, who was nervously trying to pick the hamburgers up with a spatula, and said: “It’s all right – here.”
He told Margaret to go and sit at the table.
“But the soup,” she said, in French, “the soup is boiling.”
Ivan answered her in French that he would get the soup and moved carefully around her, not because of her, but because he didn’t want to upset Antony, who was licking his sapphire ring in order to put it back on.
It was after supper. A breeze had come up, and the trees across the road and along the dirt lane to Vera’s were waving, while the sky was filled with gold. On the chair in her room, by the window, Margaret sat painting her toenails while her brother Ivan, his shirt tied in a knot against his belly, and his belly as taut as a young welterweight, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, watched her.
He spoke to her in franglais – that mixture of French and English – that the French along the roadway spoke to one another. Margaret wanted to be a veterinarian. She loved goats and ducks. In fact, she drew pictures of ducks and put them all over her room, and she had ducks on two of her T-shirts.
“I just wonder,” Margaret said pensively, and trying to sound very grown-up suddenly, but sounding more like a thirteen-year-old than the nineteen-year-old, “will Cindi come down to vi
sit me?”
“For sure she will,” Ivan said. When he spoke he tried to sound as if everything had come to a conclusion that he himself had favoured.
Margaret looked at him out of the corner of her eye, while adjusting the Kleenex between her toes.
“I don’t know why she would leave you anyways,” Margaret said.
“Well, I have nothing to say about it.”
“Dad told Nannie you batted her about and kicked her – in the guts.”
“Ya, well Dad should take care of Dad,” Ivan said. Then he butted his cigarette after two drags.
After she adjusted the Kleenex between her toes, Margaret walked on her heels to the door and closed it.
“Everyone knows where she is anyways,” Margaret said.
“Where?” Ivan said. “Where in fuck is she?”
Then, as always, when she tried to sound as grownup as she looked, she managed to be childlike.
“Everyone knows – it’s where Ruby goes.” Although, at that moment, she didn’t seem to be quite sure of herself.
“Ruby goes where?”
“Well, that apartment down river.”
Yet before she could speak any more, say another word, Ivan had left the room.
Ivan decided he couldn’t go there. And that’s where Antony had the advantage over him. Not that Antony was waiting for an advantage – he, like all of us, never knew one moment what was going to happen the next – but he happened to be in his room and overheard most of the conversation. He could hear it as clearly as if he were in Margaret’s room itself. He waited until Ivan left, then he stood up and walked along the hallway heavily. The window at the end of the hallway was spotted and showed the back field. There was some yellow weed in the sun. Far away the bay was spotless, and he remembered swimming when he was a boy, and how they would all run through the stubbled hay field to get the cows to lick the salt off their skin, and then lay down against the hay bale and watch the blue sky above them while they ate licorice from the store. When he was fifteen he went to work for his uncle.
He walked into Margaret’s room. She had her small fan going and was drying her toes as she leaned back against a chair. She had taken Ivan’s cigarette out of the ashtray and had it lit – and though it had a hole in it where some tobacco seeped through, she was puffing dramatically on it, completely oblivious to her father’s presence.
“Now you went and told him everything,” Antony said, as if he’d known Cindi’s whereabouts all along.
Margaret sat up so quickly she almost caught one of her toes in the fan, and flipped the cigarette under her sweater.
“I don’t care,” she said. “He should know where Cindi is.”
“Yes, so he can put her through the same misery your mother put me through,” Antony said, “and beat her up again. He’s a dangerous man – that lad.”
“He will not,” Margaret said. “And Cindi is spose to come down and visit me too.”
“Well, she won’t come down and visit ya because she doesn’t like ya – she never liked you, matter-of-fact.”
Margaret became solemn and stone-faced.
“I’m sending you to a boarding school and a convent and let the nuns take care of you – and don’t think they won’t whip you into shape,” he said, coming to stand over her.
Margaret said nothing. She remained very stone-faced, while smoke seeped through the neck and short sleeves of her white sweater.
“I have a lot to do tonight,” Antony said. “I can’t go way down river and look out for her.”
His forehead and the hair on his head was damp. He was sure of only one thing – that it was his responsibility (and he could later relate this responsibility to Gloria).
“Well,” she said to him in French, “you always take everyone else’s side but your own family’s.”
He was stunned that she would say this to him, and yet as soon as she said it he felt that this was the one remark he had been anticipating from her for a long time.
And he looked the way Ivan had often seen him look – genuinely sad and confused. He made a shadow against the blowing curtain.
“I don’t know what kind of toe polish yer using,” he said, “but it smells like burnt shirts or something – I can’t get a handle on it. And another thing,” he said loudly, as he always spoke loudly when he was nervous, “I don’t know when girls grow up – how long it takes to make all their parts the right appearance, but,” he said, stammering, “be careful of yer shorts.”
She said nothing but looked mortified, and he, too, looked embarrassed.
“And,” he concluded, as if to negate what he had just said, “I’m taking one of yer ducks over to Val’s room – she should have a duck too. I never understood why you should have all the ducks.”
And with that he picked up a large ceramic duck that Vera had made Margaret and went out of the room. Margaret stood and began to slap herself frantically, as if to put herself out.
8
Two hours later, almost dead drunk, Antony was at the apartment, sitting in a big chair.
There was no food in the apartment as yet. Cindi had found some soda crackers and she drank water, with her big potted plant sitting on the waxed floor near the rolled-up rug. She had gotten twenty-five bags of tea.
There was no television in the apartment either. So Cindi sat in the chair in the corner, her eyes squinted shut and her feet tapping. Since she was a TV addict, this was driving her crazy. The telephone hadn’t been installed. The apartment had the look and feel of emptiness – which was saturated with a June heat wave. But people did come and go, day and night – like they do under certain conditions in dormitories or residences, or late-night places of business.
Antony, in fact, had arrived just like this. Bop, and he was there – with his friend Ernie. Ernie was staring at Cindi in the most peculiar way any man had ever stared at her. He looked at her as if he had never seen her before. He had worn his best pair of jeans. And whenever she looked at him he would nod urgently. He shook her hand three times, until, when he looked her way, she hid her hand behind her back.
“Momma don’t even know where I am,” he said. He looked at Ruby and smiled. He seemed to consider this a very bad place to be. It seemed that he wanted to tell them that he knew he shouldn’t be here, but soon, overcome with drink and sleep, he curled up in a corner and slept, infrequently letting out a cry and kicking his feet and punching.
Cindi felt frightened of this behaviour. But the most important thing for Cindi, as her mother – who looked and had the work done to look like an older Gina Lollobrigida – had taught her, was manners. And manners Cindi had. Because she clung to them as a device to save herself from all the wise people that she came into contact with. She was always polite and nice, and tried to be attractive. She never swore in her life. Her mother had told her that if she swore her mouth would fill up with dirt – and even when others said a dirty word, she would clamp her mouth shut. This is why Cindi had always fallen for older men – like Gordon Russell. Gordon never swore in front of her. He was married and he had left her in a motel on the Island three years ago, in fact, stranded her (like other men had), but he had never sworn at her or in her presence.
He was not that old either – only forty at the time they “loved” each other. She had been nineteen.
“It’s just because he has a wife, huh,” she said to Ruby.
“That’s probably it,” Ruby said.
“Oh, wow,” Cindi said, and she smiled.
Cindi had had a child by Gordon, which he had told her wasn’t his – and he looked so hurt that he broke up with her. He was hurt that it wasn’t his child, and Cindi, as always when people looked at her, had lowered her eyes.
“I think it is – if you don’t know,” she said. And she said this in a peevish little singsong voice.
“It’s not my child – I can’t have children,” Gordon had said.
“You – can’t?”
“No, dear – that’s the o
ne thing I have learned – unfortunately. It breaks my heart.”
“I thought you had children,” Cindi said, in the same singsong voice.
“My wife can have children,” Gordon said. He sat on the side of the bed, in the smell of the soiled clothes and sneakers, with suntan lotion over his skin. He sat with his head down, at the Seaview Motel, and Cindi sat with her eyes half-closed and her fingers clasped together.
“My wife has the children,” he said. “I mean – we adopted them – my wife loves children – my wife’s a good-hearted woman. I don’t want you thinking you’re better than she is,” he said, suddenly shaking his fist at her. He was shaking all over. He looked like he was going to cry.
Cindi said nothing. Lots of men had shaken their fists at her. But then he left her there. He started to cry about his wife and then he got mad at her.
Cindi went home, and for seven months she sat in the clapboard house near the trailer park with her mother. She had had two children now. Her sister kept one – she lived with an RCMP officer in Buctouche. Her mother kept the second child.
Ruby walked from the door to the window, looked out the window and then walked back to the door. Cindi watched her walking. Then, with nothing else to do, she whistled into the top of a pop bottle and tapped her feet. In fact, she was enjoying herself doing this. But she looked up to notice Ruby glaring at her. Then bravely she gave the bottle one final toot, and slowly lowered it and cleared her throat.
Antony was in a “blackout.” He started saying he was bringing a lawsuit against his father because he owned one-eighth of the Chevrolet engine in his father’s boat.
“He never takes that into consideration when he’s out gaffing onto lobster traps,” Antony said suddenly. “But he takes Vally and Nannie out for a big dinner at the mall.” Then he looked at Cindi blankly, as if wondering why she was here on such a beautiful night.
Every now and again Antony would look over towards Ernie, who was asleep, and give him a kick. “No – he never does,” he continued speaking. “He should be building me a house, Ruby – like yer father is building for you – but I never got a house – Gloria can tell you – I never got one house outta that cocksucker. Well anyways, I’m through with being Mr. Niceguy – fixing his driveway that time and paying his taxes.”
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