Saltwater Cowboys

by Dayle Furlong

  Chapter Seven

  The next weekend the town gathered at the Civic Centre. WELCOME TO FOXVILLE’S FIRST ANNUAL WINTER CARNIVAL, the sign in the gymnasium read. The kindergarten teacher, Miss Adams, had made the sign last week specifically for the festivities. She had requested that the children paint the graphics and asked the shy new girl, Katherine McCarthy — who’d started the school year a few weeks late and therefore tended to hover quietly on the edges of the jungle gym as the other kids played loudly during recess — to paint the bright red coat of the mascot, Fritzy the Fox. Katie had been delighted. She brushed the sign carefully with pumpkin orange and a holly-berry red and spoke animatedly with Lucy Douglas, a classmate who was filling the sign with feathery green strokes of her brush, representing the aurora borealis. In a few hours Miss Adams was happy to see Katherine giggling and chatting with the rest of the students.

  Many of town’s citizens — especially young parents with two or three preschoolers — sat on brown pullout bleachers in the gymnasium of the Civic Centre. They were fussing with their young children’s juice and biscuits, patting diapers for any changes in warmth or density, and giving older siblings handfuls of change to buy homemade treats, chips, and juice.

  The gym was awash with red balloons. They were tied to the children’s wrists with white ribbon, taped to doorways, and twisted up in animal shapes that were meant to represent foxes.

  There was a collapsible stage with microphones, instruments for a four-piece band, speakers, and games for the children at one end of the gym, ice fishing, they called it. Each child was given a little plastic fishing rod to toss over a white divider, an “iceberg,” and then someone hidden behind the screen hooked a little plastic toy onto the line. The children were delighted. Maggie and Katie couldn’t believe their luck. “Every time the line goes over,” they told Angela, “we get a prize!”

  There were other games: leg-wrestling contests, colouring contests, and for the adults outside the civic centre, tea-boiling contests. Supplied with only teabags, a pot, and two matches, teams of adults must build a fire in the snow, find sticks and twigs — hoping that some of them would be dry amongst the kindling available in the wet mulch — start a fire, melt fresh snow for water, and brew a hot cup of tea to satisfy the judge.

  There were bannock-baking contests. Teams had to make a batch of bannock using the flour, salt, and lard provided, and cook it on a stick over that same slow, weak fire. There were also flour-packing contests. Men competed to see who could carry the heaviest bag of flour on their backs. The men had to walk ten feet carrying a sack of heavy flour, moaning and groaning under the excruciating pressure. There were moose- and geese-calling contests; the winner of this particular game was the one who was the best at mimicking the sound of a mating moose or a flock of geese. The next day the dogsled races would start. The races were held on a small river a few miles away from Peace River, with packs of husky dogs and teams competing from as far away as Churchill, Manitoba, and Whitehorse, Yukon.

  At two o’clock, Bobbi Lake strolled into the gym. Her tight jeans were partially covered by a bulky black ski jacket with sporty race car decals and stripes on the chest and arms. Heavy, sultry makeup was caked on her eyelids and frosty red cheeks. Her suede mini-boots rolled low around her ankles. She tossed her blonde hair and wiped fur from her sleeves.

  She’d been at the fire station that morning. She’d set up a temporary animal shelter for some of the stray dogs that had been found nosing around the town dump. When she’d read an article about the woebegone dogs in the town paper, she immediately volunteered to nurse the animals back to health and find proper homes for them.

  Bobbi’s shelter had taken up residence in a large storage room at the back of the station. She’d ordered cages from the hardware store and made bedding out of old sheets and hamster wood chips. She’d also set up small cages for other types of animals. She knew that when people found out she’d set up a shelter, parents would be coming in and dropping off cats, birds, and bunnies, pets they tried to keep but couldn’t on account of having young children in the house.

  Twice before she’d taken friends’ animals; her neighbours in Thunder Bay had gotten a kitten for their three-year-old. The child had liked to squeeze the kitten’s neck until its tongue stuck out. When the child threw the kitten in the toilet and tried to flush it, they’d begged Bobbi to take it. Socks the cat was still with Bobbi. He hovered amongst her socks in the dresser drawer half the time, too afraid to get out and roam around.

  Bobbi never understood why some women wanted children — and always so many, not just one, but two, three, four, and sometimes five children. Children just grew up and turned on you, she had always thought. First they pinned you down so all you could think about was their well-being. You’d put them ahead of yourself for the most part, then they’d chide you for being overprotective and eventually deserted you. Bobbi preferred the company of animals; they were noble and loyal, protective yet subservient. She was the master of an animal, the one in control.

  As she walked through the gym she paused to watch the children ice-fish. Despite her dislike for children, a smile crept onto her face as two young girls removed their toys from the ends of their tiny plastic fishing rods. The blonde child and the other, small, dark, and wide-eyed, were adorable. She couldn’t help but be charmed by them. They looked like Jack, she thought, and assumed that they were indeed his children. She hadn’t seen him all week. He hadn’t met her at their usual spot on the bench for lunch. They hadn’t been assigned to the same stopes. She hadn’t seen him in the lunchroom or as she passed through security after their shift ended. She had been glum all week. She wasn’t sure what the next thing to say or do would be. That night they’d behaved hastily, and it was awkward, to say the least, but their passion had been undeniable, she thought. She wondered if there would be anything between them in the future. The thought of him leaving his wife for her hovered in the back of her mind.

  She crossed the room and scanned the bleachers, looking for Jack, and found him crammed in amongst the other families, waiting for the afternoon concert to begin. His floppy black hair was tucked behind his ears. He wore a fresh new red flannel plaid shirt and well-worn jeans. His face looked soft yet ashen. He sat with his knuckles bunched on his knees. She panicked, wondering if what they had done caused him to feel guilty. Angela sat beside him, her back turned toward a child. When he got up she rushed toward him.

  “Jack,” she shouted and put her arms around his waist. “How are ya?”

  Jack pried her arms from his waist. Her grip made him feel caught in a net with a pincher insect he wanted to squash. He stood limply before her, his crooked foot twitching, and asked how she was.

  “Fine! No — wait, yes I’m fine, but I would like to see you again. Wouldn’t you like to get together?

  “My wife is sick.”

  Sick? Bobbi thought and her perky smile vanished. She looked up at Angela seated on the bleachers, her eyes smoky with hurt. “She doesn’t look very sick,” she said and smiled half-heartedly.

  “I love my wife.”

  “Why were you with me?”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “There’s more between us than a bad decision,” she said knowingly.

  “A work friendship that crossed the line. I’m sorry,” he said and walked away.

  Bobbi skulked to a seat on the bleachers. She sat alone, ashamed and angry with Jack.

  Jack scurried to the washroom and exhaled loudly in the stall. In the white and silver sterile room he felt uncomfortable. It was too cold and clean — neither a scuff nor a stain on the floor, walls, or sink. When was a men’s washroom ever this clean? There should be the stink of piss, toilet paper on the floor, muck on the sink, because we’re all a bunch of filthy pigs, he thought, every last dirty dog one of us. He grabbed the faucet and expected grime to flow freely from his fingertips. He scrubbed his hands furiously with the bubble-gum pink soap. He couldn’t wash away the feel
ing of filth that he carried like a shroud.

  He stared at himself in the gleaming new mirror and recoiled. He looked like a sneaky raccoon: black hair matted at the crown, beady eyes shifty and yet fearful, surrounded by engorged black rings of flesh. Katie had once told him — after reading from her children’s science magazine — that raccoons were once believed to be part of the dog family. A nocturnal dog, he thought, that’s what I am. He’d been foraging for comfort. He hadn’t wanted to cry in front of Angela because of the bar brawl — nothing worse than crying in front of a woman, especially your wife, Peter had once said — so he buried himself in Bobbi’s flesh like she was a strong oak tree with warm hollows and crevices prepared to keep him safe. How could I have done this to my wife? Why didn’t I just go home and let her see me cry?

  In truth, he’d used Bobbi like she was a bag of household waste — left on the curb with the lid of the silver garbage can askew for a raccoon to gain easy access. He looked at his feet, expecting to see a ring of ash appear. He felt so dirty, he thought he’d spread grease, muck, and filthy debris throughout the room merely by breathing.

  Jack had never betrayed Angela before, or any other girl he’d dated. There’d been Louise Payne, who tried to tempt him away from Cheryl Courage after the high-school graduation dance. They had been drinking all night at the swimming hole and she’d kissed him and rubbed his bare chest. She’d asked him to sleep in her tent while Louise was at the canoe hauling a beer from the ice. Jack had felt a stirring for her, with her long straight blonde hair and black eyeliner oily on the inner rim of her eyelids, but he hadn’t taken her up on her offer, despite the doe-eyed affection she held for him.

  Jack hated the way Bobbi looked at him, like he was the only hope in her world.

  Why does she look at me like that?

  Angela didn’t even see him. She didn’t see anything at all, he imagined — she’d been lost in thought all week, falsely cheerful but focused on the children as if their next breath would be their last. He stared at himself. Did she secretly see what he’d done? If she did see the hounded dog in his eyes, she hadn’t said a word. She’d said very little over the past week.

  Wanda wouldn’t let him talk to Peter when he’d called the morning after the fight. When Peter returned to work the gashes on his face had been sewn shut with black thread. He’d tried to laugh it off, drunk and fighting over the hockey game, he’d said, and the other miners had slapped him on the back and cheered. At the end of their shift, Jack had slipped Peter a few hundred dollars. Peter had tried to smile, but the taut stitches at the corner of his mouth began to tear, so he gave Jack a quick pert shake of the hand instead.

  Jack and Angela were now out of the allotted money for Lily’s diapers. He would see if he could get overtime next week. He could work a few night shifts — forage through the rock for his family, and for Peter’s. He’d have to be clear with Bobbi; she needed to know that he could never again do what they’d done on Friday night.

  As he scurried out the bathroom, head low, he realized he’d forgotten to get Angela a cup of tea with double cream and double sugar from the canteen.

  Peter and Wanda entered the gym. Peter’s voice, once full of vigour and rakish rebelliousness, was reduced to a mumble as he greeted Angela and Jack, limping to a seat beside them. The pulpy bruises were recovering; scars from stitches on his cheeks and forehead glistened freshly, little pink pinches on his skin with white tracks separating one side of flesh from the other. They made him look old, tired, and defeated.

  He tried to force an easy-going smile to hide the prickly burr of paranoia that grew in his mind. What are they all staring at? They’re all talking about me. They know I’m weak. He smiled lightly and raised his bushy brown eyebrows as high as he could. Rats, he thought, I can stomp on all of you, so don’t look at me like I’m some stray dog. Peter knew he could take on each and every one present, rip them apart with his big bare hands. But those salesmen, the cowboys from Calgary, they’d approached him when he was drunk and caught him by surprise.

  They were the strongest now; he’d have to get in that pack somehow. He’d have to find a way. He couldn’t handle pity from strangers. I will do whatever it takes, he promised himself. Right now all that was required was an affable demeanour — the ability to laugh it all off as a good old boy brawl. But the stone that had settled in his gut was a shield hiding the truth from everyone, the truth of the pain of his defeat, the truth of the pain of losing all of his money to a two-bit con artist. He’d even kept it hidden from the one who knew him best: Jack. It was easy to fool Jack, though. How else did Jack really think Peter consistently won at card games? He would bet Jack actually believed it was luck or skill. It was neither, Peter knew, nothing but cheating and cunning. That’s what he’d been the best at in Brighton, simple out-and-out cheating. But here he’d been made a fool of in nothing short of a month or so. He hadn’t dreamed of this at all. It hadn’t occurred to him that his family would encounter such misfortune. He hated what it was doing to Wanda. She’d reverted to some caricature of herself, or the way she thought of herself now: a frumpy housewife with nothing. He’d told her this week; he had to. She had cried and screamed at him for days.

  Wanda stood beside him now with one bulky winter boot on the bleacher hunched over the other, untying the laces. “We won the tea boiling contest. I threw in four extra tea bags right before the judge came around. My teammates were furious. The judge took a sip and said ‘Finally, someone who knows how to make a good strong cup of tea.’ I turned to my teammates and said, ‘Don’t ever think a Newfoundlander don’t know nothing about making tea.’”

  Jack smiled. “I never heard tell of anyone make a better cup of tea than you,” he said graciously.

  As the lights dimmed, Katie and Maggie squeezed between Wanda and Pete, hands full of toys, chips, and pop, and sat next to their mother. Lily was wide awake on her lap.

  Angela clung tightly to Lily and silently watched Katie and Maggie. Her pups, with their milk teeth, settled in around Jack and herself. She was mesmerized by their joy. They had each received a tiny plastic doll from the ice fishing game and were talking in baby language, a secret tongue they used when they were playing with dolls. Lily’s warm body grew heavier as she nestled into Angela’s chest and fell asleep. A woman waved to Angela from across the room. Her new neighbor, Olive St. James; earlier this week she’d overheard Maggie outside with Olive’s daughter, Brandi.

  Maggie had stared at Brandi. She was as brown as mud and her eyes glowed like shiny round beads, the type Maggie had seen in sparrows. She was her papoose doll from Labrador come to life, like the little Inuit doll Grandma McCarthy had given them. She wore a white jacket with a hood ringed with white fur pulled tightly around her face by two strings with big pom-poms. A pattern circled the waist of her jacket: forests, mountains, and rivers, voyageurs in canoes, carrying them on their backs in some spots, sitting and paddling in them in others, red, yellow, green, and blue stripes on the cuffs of her wrists.

  “Are you the ghost of Mary March?” Maggie had asked innocently.

  “My name is Brandi St. James. Who are you?”

  “Maggie McCarthy. You look like the ghost of Mary March and my papoose doll.”

  “I’m too big to be a papoose, nincompoop, but you look like an icicle or a snowflake. A cloud with two blue sky spots poking through.”

  “I’m not a cloud or an icicle!” Maggie shouted.

  “I’m not a ghost then!”

  “Wanna play ghost?” Maggie asked mischievously.

  “Sure,” Brandi answered, “how do we do that?”

  “Is your mom at home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we sneak in and hide in the cupboards, and when she comes to find us, we make a lot of noise and scare her.”

  Angela had listened at the kitchen window then run to the closet to put on a coat.

  The two girls crossed over to the trailer next to the McCarthys’, owned by Olive and
Eugene St. James, a Cree couple from Brochet, Manitoba. They had moved in less than a week ago. Eugene had found work in Foxville as a janitor at the mine. Olive stayed at home with their two children.

  Once out the door, Angela watched Brandi lead the way. The snow had hindered the little girls who trudged through it, little slugs in coconut flesh, worming their way silently, breath as milky as coconut juice, thick, white, and cloudy. Angela was a few steps behind as they reached the trailer and Brandi opened the aluminum screen door. The smell of bacon fat and cigarettes reached their nostrils. Angela caught a glimpse inside; the trailer was bare, a small wooden table with two chairs. A chipped teacup, and a stubby candle sat on the kitchen table. A ripped sofa, an old basinet and an acoustic guitar — one stray and crinkled string dangling from the neck — in the living room.

  Olive St. James, a tall, dark brown woman with long, straight black hair, had stood in the kitchen, hoisted her tiny breast out from her top, and put it in her infant’s mouth. She’d been singing softly, her long thin lips gently curled at the sight of the girls, and she welcomed them in with a nod, her long, flat nose, heavy cheeks, and bushy black eyebrows moving when she smiled and settling tenderly when she looked back at her infant.

  Coming up behind them, Angela could see through the open screen door. Brandi wiped her nose with the back of her mitten and bent down to untie her homemade leather and fur-lined mukluks. Maggie had thrown her white and grey nylon rubber boots to the side. They both crept over the linoleum, the same pattern as in Maggie’s house, brown and off-yellow foliage, fleur-de-lis-like crowns in the centre of each square, and headed to the panel board cupboard.

  After watching the two children for a minute, Angela knocked on the door, and Olive rushed over to open it. Angela came in slowly, her hair still wet, pink parka undone, housedress hanging out of a pair of grey jogging pants, Jack’s wool socks covering her legs, hanging off the end of her feet, and Lily on her hip.