Saltwater Cowboys

by Dayle Furlong

  After supper Jack fussed with the water hose, sprinkling water over his freshly planted lawn. Is she going to tell Angela? Will she trot on back here with that saucy look on her face and spoil everything for me? She might. The likes of that is not to be trusted. I’ll call her a liar if she tells Angela. Peter will back me up. I’ll say she’s been pursuing me and I’ve been letting her down. I’ll say it’s all in her head.

  Angela won’t believe a word.

  Try as he might, Jack would not be able to pull it off, not with Angela. She’d see through me in the dark. I’ll just have to face it. If she tries to destroy my marriage. I’ll just have to come clean and hope Angela will let me off the hook.

  He slapped at a mosquito and the smashed bits were black and red in his palm. He continued to water the lawn. Little pinpricks of grass shot through the black earth in scattered clumps and patches. Whatever is under the tarp and pool will die, he thought. There would be a giant circle in his back yard, a giant, round, dead hole, yellowed and dry.

  His father would have had his grass ready by now. A pool covering a spot for a few weeks wouldn’t have been a matter of dying grass and dead spots; he would have found a way to preserve it so it flattened only a little and could be fluffed up in late August with a rake. In late August Jack’s lawn would exhibit evidence of lack of savvy, know-how, and care. There would be a gaping hole in the greenery that he’d have no idea how to manage.

  Dad won gardening contests every year in Brighton, and here I am, his son, with a disaster for a lawn. I was too busy stealing. Here’s your failure of a son, standing here with a house full of money and an untended lawn with dead holes. I’ve got all the money in the world, and you, a plumber in a province full of ghosts, had the best gardens I’d ever seen.

  The sun hung red and ripe as a pomegranate. It had been up until midnight last night. The Arctic has twenty-four hours of sunlight, Katie had told him. “It’s winter in Australia right now,” she’d said. He smiled at the thought of Katie and her love of knowledge.

  He knelt to pick up a few pastel-pink sweet-tart candy wrappers the girls had dropped at the edge of the backyard. The forest began at the foot of his yard; a clump of rocks crushed the smaller weeds, followed by a blackish-green army of pine trees with engorged craggy moss on the trunks. It was full of hungry foxes and wolves in the winter, skunks, bears, blackflies, and mosquitoes in the summer.

  Barry hadn’t taken very good care of his garden this summer. His children had made caves, little ponds, and bridges for their Dinky cars on his meagre plot. Olive’s husband Eugene had planted his garden, but he’d neglected to water it, so the scruff of grass lay dying under children’s toys and discarded pop cans.

  Jack shook the hose vigorously, turned off the water, and wound the hose around the reel. He sat on a lawn chair and watched the sunset. A clam-grey sky crept in and sealed the light of day in its shell, night’s blue-black void in tow, ready to smother all light.

  That night Angela flicked on the little black plastic lamp on the night table. The alarm clock ticked loudly. The first and second hand passed the twelve. It monitored the activities of the world: the sun and its routines, the rotation, and the revolution of the Earth. Time, tangible to the human eye by three little sticks that rotated on a never-ending wheel, the concept captured and earthbound as it foreshadowed days, weeks, months, and years. Whole lives. She numbly stared at the clock and stopped musing. She sat up and turned to Jack.

  “I know,” she said.

  “What?” Jack whispered.

  “Don’t play dumb,” she said hotly.

  He turned over in bed toward her. Angela stared at him, her lower lip trembling.

  “Oh, honey,” he said softly and reached up to touch her lip.

  She lowered her head and a tear welled up. “How could you do this to me after all I’ve been through?”

  She thinks it happened after her miscarriage, Jack thought.

  “We were drinking and it was only the once. She reminded me of you before we left home.”

  “What about in the woods last week?”

  “We just stumbled upon her, my love, walking her dog, I swear. I don’t talk to her anymore. I’m sorry,” he said and tried to hold her. She roughly pushed his hand away.

  “We’re through. I’ve had enough.”

  “You don’t —”

  “I mean it, alright. Now get out,” she said and threw a pillow at him.

  Jack curled up on the sofa with the pillow rammed between his shoulder and forearm. He lay numb with shock. It can’t have come to this, he thought. There must be a way to talk her out of this. She’s just tired, she’s just thinking about home. She’s homesick. She’s scared. She’ll see that it was nothing but a mistake with Bobbi. I’ll stop this with Peter. I will. I’ll do whatever it takes. She’s all I could ever want. She’s everything to me, and if I don’t have her and the girls, I have nothing.

  Jack lay awake most of the night, agitated, angry, and full of remorse. He knew now that he’d have to stop. He’d have to do something to get back his wife and restore his family.

  We once thought we had nothing. Now I know what it feels like to have nothing, he thought and rammed his foot in the back of the sofa, where it stopped short due to the pillowcases full of money he had put there last month, sewn the neatly torn cloth back into place while the girls and Angela were returning their library books, lingering, Maggie told him later, because the air conditioner cooled their backs and stopped their shirts from sticking to them wetly.

  He’d filled the cavity at the back of the sofa with two pillowcases full of money, and now here he lay on top of it, uncomfortable and alone, while his wife turned him away.

  At work on Monday, Bobbi planned to avoid all contact with Jack. Getting over someone who doesn’t love you should be easy, right? All she had to do was ignore him. It would go away eventually. She opened the door to the fridge in the lunchroom and placed her lunch tin on the shelf. The shelf gave out, and all the tins fell open on the floor. Great, she thought, another reason for these jerks to pick on me. She got down on her knees to pick up the sandwiches, cans of pop, and bags of chips the miners had brought to work. Jack’s lunch tin was ajar; she picked it up tenderly and opened it to repack his food. A small hinge had given at the back to reveal a cloth bag filled with lumpy rocks. She opened it, and when she saw the ore, it all made sense. No, Jack, say you’re not involved with this — you can’t be.

  A montage ran through her mind: Jack when he first arrived, how timid and shy he was, his friend Peter getting swindled, then beaten up — the severe changes in Jack’s mood, his self-absorption, his giddiness yet nervousness this spring. Me. I thought it had something to do with me — you foolish girl — he probably never thought twice about me after last winter. I thought he was worrying about us and his wife, when it’s all been about this. The torment and the worry I saw him go through — and the smug bastard he’s become lately — it’s all been about this. Stealing gold? Oh my god.

  After a dreadful morning on the stope she walked wearily to the lunchroom. She’d been numb with shock. Numb with anger and overwhelmed by too much truth. Too much had been revealed, and she couldn’t pretend anymore.

  In the lunchroom, she noticed his lunch tin was out of the fridge. Knox, Wisnoski, and Watson were eating and talking hockey. She barely heard them. Someone made a snide remark about her legs and shouted that they “wanted some” from her. Normally she ignored them, decrepit lot that they were, but today she turned around slowly and faced them with a sardonic smile. She spoke slowly and deliberately.

  “You want some, eh?”

  One of the men whistled.

  “Well, I’ve got some for you. Some news to share. Something that’s worth its weight in gold,” she said and straddled a chair backwards beside Wisnoski. She swallowed what was in her nose, spat it up on the concrete, wiped her hand roughly across her mouth, and told them what she’d seen in Jack’s lunch tin.

  Afte
r work Jack waved to the cowboy as he pulled up in the parking lot. He wiped the salt from his seat, a plate of fried chicken and chips from the tavern snack bar on his lap. He’d been waiting outside the tavern for an hour.

  “We had a late sales conference at the mine,” the cowboy said.

  Jack grunted and pushed the duffel bag through the window.

  The cowboy handed him the bag of money. “Join us for a beer before we head back to the city?”

  “Nah, gottta get home to the wife.”

  “Smells good, that fried chicken. My daddy was a chicken farmer in Strathmore. I used to snap the heads off the chickens when I was a kid then we’d fire them up with a blowtorch or set them ablaze with a magnifying glass,” he said and laughed through his greenish buck teeth.

  Jack nodded and cowered behind the wheel of his new car. He drove home faster than ever, all the while checking his rear-view mirror for the cowboy who liked to kill chickens.

  I took too much; I’m going to get caught! No, not too much. I’ve only taken three-four-five nuggets; they’ll never be missed. In the dream that woke Peter up, the heavy ore was strapped to his boots, thighs, and hard hat. It had pulled his feet downward into a black hole. He’d forgotten to tie himself to the safety belt and he could see himself falling. He woke up startled, his mouth dry and the back of his neck wet.

  Wanda snored beside him, soft spurts of quiet exhalations, a contented, gentle sound, a warm mammal coasting on easy waters.

  He needed air. He got up and threw on the new pair of jeans that Wanda had bought for him. They were too fashionable; he craved his old Levi’s. She’d thrown them out. He yearned for them; soft and comfortable around the waist, with threadbare areas in the knees and pockets, they were what he knew, they were what he always wore. He waddled to the door, picking denim out of his rear as he wriggled inside the too-tight material.

  He left the house through the back door, almost tripping over Wanda’s gigantic backyard flowerpots. She’d subscribed to a decorating magazine and these were suggested items to give “backyard charm” it had said, and Wanda wanted plenty of people to envy and admire her yard and think she had charm.

  The night was warm, the sun still red and low. A grey oyster colour seemed to drench the fringes of the horizon. The town was quiet. It must have been close to midnight. Peter wandered the length of town and found himself back at the foot of the trailer court in an hour. Angela was seated at the edge of a mossy hill that overlooked a sand dune succession that led to the forest.

  “Out awful late?” he said and winced as he climbed the hill in those tight jeans.

  Angela smiled. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Me neither.”

  He sat beside her and they stared at the forest scrub, lost in thought.

  “I’m sorry about the baby.”

  “Sorry you got beat up.”

  “Those were a rough few months.”

  Angela woefully turned to him. “What’s been going on?”

  He stammered evasively.

  “Don’t try to fool me. I’ve been watching you, and you don’t see or hear anything else besides the wheels spinning in your head. Plans of glory, or money, or whatever it is that’s got you so wrapped up in yourself. You’re not the same person I grew up with. All you do is flash money around. What good has money done except make you want more? It’s a pit as bottomless and dark as the mine you work in, and now that you’ve left everyone for that pit and all its promises, you’re gone. It’s taken you away from us. I know I’ve no right to say anything, I’m not Wanda, but I can see no good come of it, and you can’t even see further than your fistful of cash.”

  “I’m providing. There’s light — happiness and pride — shining from my wife’s face for the first time in a long time.”

  “Even the light underground eventually gets filled, Peter, with leftover rock, throwaways and disposables, and whatever you’ve got going on. Guaranteed you are disposable.”

  “I —”

  “All of us are going to go down with you, you know that, don’t you?”

  He slumped forward and buried his forehead and temples in balled fists.

  “Fix this. There’s still time,” she said urgently and walked toward her trailer.

  That Monday at work Jack entered the underground lunchroom last; he’d had a box of defective blasting dynamite to tend to and reported it to Russell Knox, who had blamed Jack for not being careful enough. Duties in the warehouse complete, he stumbled in the lunchroom. The light was blinding, men’s voices, rough and irritating, talking about sports, fishing, or their cars. He grabbed his lunch tin from the fridge, sat down heavily on a chair at the end of the table, empty seats on either side of him, and unclasped the hinges and swung open the creaky lid. More nuggets were nestled atop his sandwich. He closed the lid quickly.

  Watson watched him quietly, his mouth full of a Klick and lettuce sandwich. “Something rotten in your lunch tin?” he said and smiled smugly.

  “Pack off, for Jesus’s sake,” Jack said.

  “Touchy,” Watson said and laughed.

  Jack ran out of the room, lunch tin under his arm, and headed to the washroom. It was dark in every corner and crevice. Rats stumbled alongside him, heavy machinery wailed. The light on his hard hat went out. Where’s the light? Where the hell is the light? Walls, hard studs, and support beams cut and slashed his fingertips and palms as he felt his way along. He counted his steps toward the washroom. His hands were bloody. His fingers slipped on the doorknob. He grappled with it again and the door creaked open. The light bulb suspended above sent out a weak swell of light. Jack sighed and stumbled in. He put the lunch tin on the little bench and let warm water run over his cuts. It stung. He’d add salt if he had some to keep the wound sterile and his blood fresh. It was too late, dirt had gotten deep under his skin and he could see the black lines under the folds of skin. Mine muck, thick black, dirty as sin, full of chemicals and toxins. Jack desperately washed his hands, reared back toward his lunch tin, kicked it over, and the nuggets flew. His can of pop swelled and the top was punctured. Brown, bubbly liquid hissed out of the small nip in the aluminum.

  “Oh, Christ!” he roared. He leaned over to pick up a nugget and hurled it at the mirror, to watch cracked glass splinter and collapse on itself, spilling into the sink. “Goddamn fool’s gold. Gold stolen by fools,” he whispered contemptuously. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth, aren’t you?” He leaned over the sink and cried. He heard the heavy clump of work boots and the dull rattle of a miner’s belt and scurried around the room after picking up the gold and throwing it in the trash. He watched the nuggets sink under piles of crumpled wet paper towels. They disappeared quickly, nestling comfortably like eggs in a brown nest.

  The next morning Wanda screamed for Peter’s attention.

  “Peter!” she yelled. “This outfit looks terrible!”

  Peter put down his glass of Canadian Club.

  After talking with Angela last week, he had hid for hours in the dark basement of his brand new house. He didn’t know if he could face the outside world; all he wanted to do was be alone. He’d built a bar with plush brown leather bar stools and installed brown maple veneer cabinets with glass doors and mirrored tiles speckled with golden flecks on the wall beside it. He liked being here, alone, away from everyone, including Jack, especially away from Wanda and her whining, demands, and schemes to inspire envy in others. Just last week she’d bragged to Darlene, the clerk at Papineau’s Grocery Store, about the remodelling. Darlene had silently checked out her items, dirt under her chipped fingernails.

  So Peter stayed downstairs, counted his money, and dreamed of the possibilities.

  He drowned himself in alcohol to assuage the guilt — a guilt he’d never let Jack know he was experiencing. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, dreaming of flashing red lights, always the flashing red lights or the eyes of a hungry fox caught in the headlights with a fish between its lips or blood-red berry stains on
its paws.

  When he woke up in the middle of the night like that he disturbed Wanda. She worried about him, and he would tell her that he had to get up to check for prowlers, intruders, raccoons, or skunks in the back yard. No need to worry, he’d be back to bed soon. But he always stopped for a drink in the basement — most nights never returning, and Wanda would find him asleep on the sofa, alone in the basement, drink spilled at his side.

  He climbed the stairs.

  “Is this dress the best one for the mayor’s barbecue?” she asked and smoothed the skirt of her floral yellow-and-blue cotton dress.

  She wanted the best, and he’d given it to her. They lived among the richest families in town — the province, for that matter — on the best street, in the best house, and she was one of the best-dressed wives. He’d become the best thief in town, the best liar, and the best cheat.

  “It’s lovely.”

  “Peter, lay off the booze today, okay?” She swooped down to pick up Susie and smoothed the girl’s sprinkle of hair. Peter reached for Wanda’s wide bare back. Soft and supple, it warmed his hand as he touched it tenderly. As his nimble fingers caught the zipper and pulled it up, the wilted fabric around her lower back rose and unfurled like blooming petals.

  “I have something to take care of tonight,” he said slowly.

  “It’s Mayor Cooper’s birthday party.”

  “Just a little thing. It’ll only take a few minutes.”