by Tony Burgess
One of the effects of this shape, this place, Bewdley, is a peculiar abundance of environmental estrogen. As if the molecules themselves were female, estrogen drifts through chromosomal chains, up along the food chain and into the clouds that rain down on hard-backed men. These men, fishermen and hunters, real estate agents and truck drivers, have smoother faces, more shapely legs, quicker hips than their counterparts in Wiarton. No one has ever noticed this, but it’s true, and the reason for this, the slow shapeshift, is hidden in the trees on an island in Rice Lake. A strange and dangerous island that is the scene of crimes so shocking, so bizarre, that, even if they were discovered, there is no legislature in existence which possesses the language to contain them.
★
April retouches her bright orange lipstick, rolling her lips together. With one hand she holds a compact and with the other she extends a thumb across the shoulder of Highway 401.
April is a twenty-five-year-old knockout. Her long legs, tanned perfectly, reach up into her cutoffs, which are drawn snugly against her crotch. April’s breasts, large certainly, lift the front of her tiny top away from her flat stomach. When a truck stops ahead of her, April runs to the back, hurls her purse over the side and waves the driver on as she pulls herself up. The truck is spinning its tires on the shoulder as April lands on the boarded flatbed. She can’t quite believe what she sees there and she tries to blink away what she thinks is a hallucination. Five women, all in cutoffs and shirts knotted below their breasts, are seated and joined at their ankles with chains. They all stare at her as if in a trance, save for one, a small blonde woman, who is shaking and crying. One of these women, her features suggest she’s Puerto Rican, sits up, hooking her elbows on her knees.
“My name is Maria,” she says with an evaluating squint of her eyes. “You just made a very big mistake sister.”
April rises to her feet and, leaning into the corner, drapes her arms outside the low plywood walls. She looks out over the marshes that rush past her and, as the sun falls beneath a low cloud firing its rays long across the tops of trees, flips her clear-rimmed sunglasses off her forehead onto her nose. She slides her hand on the walkman at her hip and hits the play button. April is not interested in these woman, in fact they make her angry. And rather than even look in their direction she holds her face toward the sun, letting her hair fly in the wind. She watches as a Great Blue Heron ramps over the reeds, pumping the air beneath it as it climbs onto the wind. In her earphones Guided By Voices pound into another plump song — “I have entered a shiny new realm, a very different and very spoiled world.”
The truck comes to a stop, jolting the women as it fishtails slightly at the edge of the lake. April rolls her eyes and letting out a low whistle, flicks her hips at the woman and salutes them with two fingers off her temple. As she goes to leap over the back of the truck, the hatch swings down from under her, sending her to the ground.
“Hey, man. What the fuck …” April slaps the stones from her knees and looks up to see two tall men in filthy overalls standing in the sun with their thumbs hooked in utility belts.
“Hey Peter. Look at this wild rabbit. I think she fancies you. Look at the way she looks at you!”
Peter looks down at his belt, flipping the butt of a hammer away from his thigh.
“Oh, you are hopeless! Look here, we picked up five women and now we have six. I think it is fated that you two should get along! Here help me get her on her feet. Hold her tightly, Peter, this rabbit is ready to make a run for it!”
April has, in fact, been looking at Peter. His eyes are strong, innocent and blue. His eyebrows are quick and nervous and handsome. April is surprised by what she feels and before she can process this she feels the pinch of handcuffs. April kicks backward savagely and one of her breasts flies loose of her top.
“I’m warning you bastards! This time you picked up the wrong chick!”
As April struggles frantically, Peter is knocked to the ground and his partner, Rick, bursts into a walrus laugh, holding his sideburns, and April breaks free. Behind her the women call out whoops of encouragement, pumping their arms into the air. They suddenly fall silent as the men retrieve her roughly from the ditch she falls in.
“That’s enough fun for now! Here comes the boat! We’ve been making too much noise! Be silent, Rabbit! Take her to the boat, I’ll get the rest!”
Rick leads the women, chained and sullen, to a long aluminum outboard that has just pulled up to a small dock on shore. The women are ferried slowly across the lake by a small, wizened man who takes frequent pulls on a large bottle with no label. He tugs his flat captain’s cap and let’s out occasional yips to punctuate his drinking. The women glower at him until Maria eventually reaches her hand over the side of the boat and splashes the old man.
“Thirsty, you old coot? Why don’t you turn this boat around and let us go, bastard?” Maria reaches overboard again, this time splashing the blonde whose sobbing turns into shrieks.
“Don’t splash her! Look at my engine. It’s dripping, you bitch! Please, stop! Look what you’ve done to the blondie! Please, Blondie, shut up! Look, here’s the island, now everybody stay quiet, please.”
The boat drives up onto the sandy edge of an island. From this perspective there is no clear indication of its size. The only thing visible is a high wall of trees five feet from the shore. The women climb from the boat, stumbling in their chains. Their legs gleam through the clinging sand and their nipples are dark and slick against wet shirts. They stand five together, shaking out their hair, their hands open at the ends of their strong arms, and Maria wipes her nose with her wrist.
“Hey, where’d the old man go? What is this shit? This isn’t the P4W. Hey you, Barbie, you’re our point girl. Check it out.”
April is sitting on a log in the sand, her arms handcuffed behind her back.
“If I go anywhere sister, it’ll be to leave trash like you behind.”
The blonde woman has stopped crying. In fact she’s smiling; actually, she’s laughing. Very loudly. Maria wheels around, slapping her; and this throws the pair off balance and into the water. The blonde sits up, her wavy hair now plastered to her face, and she begins to bawl with all her lungs’ capacity. Maria rolls her eyes heavenward, pushing her jaw out in a way that makes her upper lip cave in.
“It’s all my crackhead piece of shit boyfriend’s fault! Fuck you, Johnny! Look at this stupid scene! It’s your fault you rat! Do you hear me!”
April is chuckling to herself on the log when she notices the last woman on the left, a tall thin girl with black hair and wide hips. The woman is staring at the blonde’s completely visible breasts. April smiles as the girl’s eyebrows climb up her forehead and her tongue flicks once between her lips.
A man dressed in loose white cotton steps from the trees as if he’s been standing there for some time. He approaches the women, bows quickly, and with his head down gestures with one arm towards the trees he’s just stepped from. As the women file past, Maria slaps his ass, sending him up in the air. He remains rigid, standing on the beach after the women have disappeared. He purses his lips and rolls his eyes before following them from a distance.
Inside the forest is a clearing, cut away by the machetes that hang off the trees like strange fruit. There are three black hills in this clearing. On the highest stands a white house with two pillars adorning its front. On a patio that extends out from between the pillars a stone dolphin dribbles over itself into a large blue shell. On the second hill a jeep sits on blocks beside a hut of corrugated steel. A chemical heavy smoke drifts across the front of the white house from a barrel tilting in the soil halfway down this second hill. A structure made of thick bamboo and rope lies across the third low hill. A shirtless man lies on his side on a blanket outside this crude pen, reading a book and taking regular deep gulps from a labelless bottle. Inside this structure the shadowy shapes of pacing women can be seen. A
n arm stretches from between the bamboo bars and flips a hand at the man. The face of a woman, streaked with dirt and sweat, pushes through, and she says something to the man who waves at her without looking. She closes her fist extending her middle finger, which she stabs vigorously toward the man. The man turns a page of the book and slaps a mosquito on his cheek.
On the second hill a man in overalls rolls out from under the jeep, wiping his hands with a dirty rag. Rick stretches his arms across the ground above his head and lets out a deep breath.
“Loverboy! Hey, virgin! Where is my carburettor, you pretty little piece of shit?”
Peter practically falls out of the shed, releasing the carburettor he carries into the air. It lands directly on Rick’s forehead. Peter clutches his jowls and flees back inside.
“Get back here you no good! It’s OK. I’m not mad! Hey, get over here, I have something for you!”
After some time Peter emerges, twisting his fingers against his belt buckle as he shuffles around the side of the jeep. Rick sits up, wiping his face with the rag, transferring its grease onto his forehead.
“I received something in the mail today. I’ve been waiting a long time for this and now that I have it I want to give it to you.”
Peter becomes so excited that his handsome eyebrows begin to jiggle.
“Give it to me! What is it?”
Rick flattens his hand over a book in the top pocket of his overalls. He looks around carefully to make sure they are alone and pulls out the paperback.
“This is it. Paradise by numbers, Ruby Red Dress, oh I’m so excited, here diagram forty-nine, oh diagram forty-nine, and thirty-eight, I can’t even make you out you little devil, but it’s heaven trying!”
Rick snaps the book to his chest as Peter makes a grab for it. “Lemme see, lemme see.”
“Ten bucks.”
“Ten bucks? But you said …”
“I said heaven on earth for ten bucks.”
Peter dives his hands into both pockets, producing several coins and crumpled bills. Rick flattens the bills across his knee as Peter stumbles down the hill absorbed in his book, What Women Really Want in Bed. The chapter that interests him most, and the one he sits on a tree stump to read, is entitled, “What She Wants to Hear and How to Make Her Listen.” After he has finished the chapter, Peter engages in practice conversations with bushes. He attempts to juggle three separate conversations with three separate bushes, careful not to confuse them: “A man’s biggest sex organ is his memory.” Once he is confident that he can recall the parents’ names on each tree, he selects one and goes for a stroll with it. In order to do this he must preserve the identity of the bush in each one he passes as he walks. He soon discovers that this is very distracting and the conversation stumbles. Not only that, he finds that he’s beginning to feel disloyal to the original bush. He looks over his shoulder and sees it at a distance, quiet and sad among all the others. Peter has now walked close to the women’s pen and a hushed voice calls out to him. Peter jumps and puts the book behind his back, holding it there with both hands.
“Pssst, hey, come here.”
A woman’s pretty face appears between the bars of the cage. She looks as far over to the adjacent hill as she can and raises a hand between the bars beckoning him. Peter recognizes her. She’s the one who had tried to escape. He frantically searches his memory for her name, twisting himself up, reluctant to approach her without it. He slams his palm against his forehead, squeezing his eyeballs for her name, her name. He drops the book behind him and panicking he spins around kicking it high into a tree. April pulls herself back behind the bars to shake her head and provide this man with a bit of time to pull himself together.
“My name’s April. What’s yours?”
“Uh … April? April?”
“Yeah, silly, what’s yours?”
Peter claps his hands to the sides of his face, pulling his lips back into a smile. He could not have known her name. He cannot speak.
“Hey, I think you’re cute. Come back at midnight and meet me here. See you then.”
April disappears again and Peter turns quickly, running to the tree where the book landed only to discover that it has vanished. Peter notices Rick halfway down the hill, waving one hand with the other behind his back. His clothes are torn and his hair is tangled with leaves and twigs. He furtively licks the blood from a small cut on his lips.
★
As night falls the lights of Bewdley begin to shine. The red and green winks of colour on returning rental boats and the occasional reverse lights of drivers changing their destination shimmer on the edge of Rice Lake. Across the lake a dark and confusing island hides itself in the same vegetable animosity as it has during the day, only now this animosity is a chatter of teeth, a warning rattle across the water. A light breeze finishes itself against the shore of the island, falling to sleep on the boughs of the first trees. Beyond them hide small fires in the bases of drums, intense toxic fires that don’t as much burn as hiss out a smoke that is remarkable against the night sky because it is darker. Nothing is visible in this atmosphere, except this smoke. The only sound is that of a woman’s voice, low and continuous, it is like the sound of sleep when everything else is dead. April has devised a plan. She is telling a story to the women, to calm them, so that they will fall asleep before midnight. As she speaks she is aware that the darkness inside her body is shared by the darkness around her, and that her mouth doesn’t mark the brink of these two places anymore. It floats between them, carried at times away from her, tilting over the other beds. In her head, April sees the same dark and wonders where the story comes from, where the April comes from, where it is in all this empty air. The sound of her voice, however, is there, intermittent and soft, like April, and she tells her story in each of the ears that break off in the solid black.
“In the small resort town of Bewdley, Ontario, population five hundred and ten, lived a woman whose name was Amber. Amber lived in a little house in the sand and she danced at night by the fires on the beach, whipping her skirts across her knees to the clapping hands of families seated on the ground around her. Children would grab at her toes trying to catch them. Women would reach for her breasts to squeeze them. And men held their faces out hoping she would caress them. But she danced so quickly, every step a surprise, that no one could touch her. As the night wore on and the fire died, Amber swayed against the stars, her feet warm at the bottom of the moon, as the families fell asleep in each other’s arms. Usually the families would sleep until they were woken by the sound of Amber’s door closing as the sun rose, but this one night Amber didn’t want to go home alone, so she grabbed one of the older sons by the hand and took him into her small house. After a wild, hot melding of flesh and a calling out of names, Amber returned the boy to his family, who all awoke briefly to touch her, which she allowed. This was the beginning of a terrible time for Amber. Her belly grew large and when she danced and the families reached for it, she was unable to pull back. Soon Amber stopped dancing and stayed inside. She was convinced that a monster was inside her. She watched in horror as horns scooped along under her flesh, and would lay frozen in pain as a dragon’s tail curled up around her lungs, squeezing them. When she gave birth it was an eerily quiet event. The baby slipped itself out gently, and walked over to the corner of Amber’s bedroom and stood by her bureau. It watched his mother silently. The baby grew long pointy sideburns within a week, and within a month he was making passes at his mother, who had taken to her bed. Amber was so frightened and ill that she was unable to fend off her son. Eventually she moved out to the beach with the families. She hid there, wrapped in their towels. The baby, who Amber had never named and who called himself Paul, lived in the beach house until his sixteenth birthday. On this birthday he stepped out onto Bewdley’s main street. He was tall and thin and beautiful, with tattoos and snakes and a tiny human bone through his collar. He had a long hard sto
mach that fell far into his pants where his cock furled softly against itself. The people of Bewdley regarded Paul with deep suspicion: inwardly however, they grunted a knowing secret to themselves. They thought satisfaction walks the streets of Bewdley. Meanwhile, on the beach, Amber curled up behind the McNaughtons’, kicking sand on their dog in her feverish sleep. It is only a matter of time before Paul snatches a purse. He is arrested, put in a jail like ours, where he lies like a cat on the floor in a pool of sunlight. His mother twitches in the sand and awakens. She sits up, and the families are humming in the glow of a large fire. Amber staggers to her feet and walks through a hole in their circle; she steps barefoot in front of the blazing fire. Amber sways slowly to their humming, the yellow flames snaking across her back, lifting her hair into the sky. She does not burn as she dances mindless of the danger, her toes curl into the cool of the sand and then into the white heat of the fire. And then it’s the two of them, Paul and Amber, dancing slowly in each other’s arms, their skin glowing orange, their hands crawling, their fingers, like torches, digging into each other’s backs. The night around them descends out of the sky like velvet and it pushes at them, pushing them together, into each other. And when she throws her head back the fire jumps into her hair, protecting her. Paul’s thrusting becomes rapid, the McNaughtons push their children to the front, and Paul’s father dips his hand into his brother’s pyjamas. When the fire reaches Amber’s brain it melts against her thighs. It falls into her like swords thrown from a window, and she squeezes her thighs together hardening the light that breaks them. The families shift their position, allowing two police officers to approach the fire. They handcuff Paul and kick sand on the families who look away — who cannot look Amber in the eye as her son is taken away. When the people look up she is gone, vanished. Beyond the fire the stars are stitching a rope in the sky. When they hang Paul the very next day, as his neck crumples and he looks inward, the people who watch feel Amber’s tongue jump to the roof of their mouths, mimicking his interrupted voice, that little squeak, and all their heads bump together in a collective hiccup. The people disperse, snickering with their hands held to their mouths, and when they reach the beach they burst into gales of laughter.”