Deep River Night

by Patrick Lane

  Joel turned, Coke spilling over his fingers, but before he could think of what to say Reiner was past Cliff and walking toward the front door, muttering something about Alice that Joel couldn’t hear.

  “Leave him alone,” Cliff said to Ernie’s back. “I mean it.”

  Joel listened to Reiner’s boot clumping down the aisle to the front of the store, the door slamming. He didn’t move as Cliff leaned over the counter and reached out to touch Alice’s shoulder. She jumped but, seeing it was Cliff, bent her head away, looking up at him sideways from her dark eyes.

  Joel stared down into his Coke, wishing it was him talking to Alice, saying things like what Cliff was saying and her listening to him, saying things back.

  “You never mind Ernie,” Cliff said to her as he turned away from the counter and followed Reiner’s footsteps down the narrow aisle between the shelves with their tired food and out of the store, the door banging behind him.

  Joel waited a moment before pushing his hat back up. He hoped she hadn’t seen what Reiner had done to him, but he knew she had. She was down by the cooler now squatting as she drained grey water from the spigot into a bucket. He wanted to say something but he didn’t know what, so he said, “It’s sure hot in here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she replied, not looking up from the rag she was pushing to sop up spilled water.

  It was quiet as she dried the scuffed board floor. When she was done she wrung the cloth out over the sink and said over her shoulder, “You want another Coke?”

  Time got still then, everything in the world moving except for what was in Joel’s head.

  He waited while she set the new bottle down in front of him and took the empty one away.

  We’re alone together, is what Joel thought. Everyone else is down at the cookhouse eating dinner.

  Alice went down to the end of the counter and began to fill the salt shakers, her mouth open a bit and breathing as she concentrated on the pouring. As she worked Joel stared at her lips and nose and chin, the small earlobe above the slender muscle by her cheekbone, the way her neck vanished into her blouse leaving the hollow at her throat open. He wanted to taste the dampness he saw glistening there. He could see her arched collarbones, could feel his hand reaching out to touch them, feel her skin. Her hair was bound with a red band tight around the gathering, the long tail of it falling down her back, alive, and him wanting to cut the string with his knife to see the black hair flare into sudden feathers around her face. It’s what he thought she was sometimes, a captured bird, that hair of hers tied back, and him wanting to undo it and let it fall through his fingers like loosened wings.

  As he watched her he thought of Myrna up on the mountain and what they did together in the high pasture of her father’s farm. He liked Myrna and when he was with her he almost never thought of Alice. They were both so different. With Myrna he could do and say most everything he wanted, but with Alice he was completely tongue-tied and he didn’t know why.

  But he didn’t want to think about Myrna. What he wanted was to sit somewhere with Alice down by the river. They would talk and that’d be all, not like what he did with Myrna. Alice could tell him what it’d been like down at the residential school in Kamloops and he could tell her about where he came from. He could tell her about the lakes and the long nights of winter when the northern lights danced over the Monashee Mountains. He could tell her about Alberta and the prairie, what the Rockies looked like when the morning sun lit up the high peaks, and while he was talking maybe she’d let him hold her hand.

  And he was going to say something to her, but right then she started back down the counter toward him and he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He tried to pick up the Coke bottle and pretend to drink, but his hand trembled in the same way his father’s did each time the old man came back in the old Ford pickup truck from the bar at the hotel in Nakusp. It trembled like Art Kenning’s did in the morning when he reached for his whisky, the dregs in his glass or the inch or two he always left in the bottle by his bunk. He hoped Art was all right.

  Joel would go down to Art’s cabin in the early morning on Saturdays and Sundays, other times too, and see if he was okay. If Art was awake and not too drunk or wrecked Joel would sit with him. Mostly they’d be quiet, but sometimes Art would go on about the old days when he was in the war. Joel felt safe with Art. Most of the stories were ones he’d heard before, but he liked hearing Art talk. Sometimes he wondered if Art even knew he was there. Joel wondered if he’d ever go to a war. There’d been the Korean one but he’d missed that.

  Some early weekend mornings he’d go and Art wouldn’t be there, so Joel would go to the cookhouse to see if he was still there smoking opium with Wang Po in the room below. Wang Po looked out for Art too, but in a different way than Joel. When he and Art were on the pipe they were lost in their worlds. A couple of times Joel had helped Art back to his cabin and stayed with him until he drifted off. It was Art who’d saved him from the train last winter. Joel owed him everything.

  Wang Po had explained a lot to him as well. Joel liked to sit in the kitchen, just the cook and him. Wang Po knew a lot of things. He told Joel that Art had a sickness. “Many soldiers had that same sickness in China too,” he said once when Joel asked about Art and the war. “Terrible things happen in wars and there are some men who can’t let them go. Women too, they suffer the same.” Joel asked him why he didn’t and Wang Po said he’d learned to forget them. He told Joel he was a Buddhist and because of that he was able to let things like the past go. “I saw bad things happen and I did bad things, some good things too, but they are far away now in the place I call the young man’s war. But it was a war,” he said, “I never forget that. In wars people do things you can’t imagine. In your English you say you forgive your own life back then. I am that,” he said. “I am a man who forgives.”

  Wang Po had gone back to cutting steaks from the side of beef, his saw cutting through the bone of the spine. When he finished he put down his saw and knife. “No one saves us but ourselves, Joel. Buddha told us the path each of us walk is our own.” Joel looked at him and Wang Po said, “Art is between two things: not going all the way and not starting. He has stayed between sword and shield. The war left him in the empty place called grief. It is what he has now.”

  Joel didn’t always understand what Wang Po told him, especially when he spoke in poems, but he liked to get lost in Wang Po’s spare stories of China, how he escaped, and how he came to Canada. Mostly he loved the quietness around him. There was a silence in Art too, but it wasn’t quiet. Inside Art there was a craziness, many worlds fighting each other, battles without an end.

  Joel loosened his grip on the Coke bottle and the trembling stopped. It was Alice who did it to him, not Art and not Wang Po, not whisky, not opium. She’d asked him if he wanted a second Coke and he’d nodded. “Sure,” he said, and she gave him the Coke and that was all. When he didn’t say anything else she took his dime and went back to the counter where she began to lay out slices of grey baloney, a chunk of margarine, some watery mayonnaise, and curled slices of white bread.

  Watching her put the food down on the counter by the sinks he remembered he had to go to the cookhouse to eat. Wang Po would have laid out the stew and he liked stew and if he didn’t go soon the other men would be grabbing for seconds and there wouldn’t be any left for him but gristle and cold spuds. But he wanted to say something more to her after saying it’d sure been hot today. The coldness of the glass entered his fist, water beads squeezing wet between his fingers. He wanted to say at least something like, hey, hi, how are you doing, not knowing how to say those words in that way or any word to her, say: thanks, thank you, for sure, okay, or words like, you’re real pretty, and what fear he had to say such a word, to say, pretty, to say, beautiful, you, your hands, your skin, stunned, to say such a word as strange to him as lovely, to say the word love knowing what he had inside him was and wasn’t love, for how could he have what he did not know, a word he ha
d only read, had never heard once in the home he came out of, his chest tight, his shoulders, belly, hips, and his legs, his legs jumping so that he had to let go of the Coke bottle, slide his hands under the counter and grip his knees, his cock suddenly hard, his belt cinched tight, his body gone crazy again, and then bowing his head, his face hidden by his stetson, looking, he knew, like some cornered animal, a badger gone mad, a fox frothing, a tick-thin bear, a rat, a rabbit screaming, and all and none, and wanting to say instead of nothing, hey, it’s a nice, good, pretty good, day, night, to her from under the shadow of his hat, and her turning from a sandwich saying at last into his frantic silence:

  “You want anything else?”

  ART LOOKED AT THE KID UNLOADING at the woodpile. Joel had come over from the cookhouse and begun working beside him in the cool evening air. Art hadn’t asked him to help. Joel just showed up like he always did when there was work to be done. Art set his axe down, loaded six split chunks on his arm, and carried them to the lean-to behind his cabin where he stacked them in new piles across from the four rows of dry wood left from last winter. He was drenched in wet salt sweat, his pants clinging to his thighs. He gripped the edge of the pile to stop his arm from shaking. As he did, Joel came up beside him, his arms full of split fir. Art let go the shed wall and lifted the chunks from the kid’s arms stacking them there with the others.

  They went back nine more times before Art sat down hard on the chopping block and said, “Enough.”

  When Joel looked at him, Art said, “Enough for now.”

  “There’s still lots here,” said Joel.

  Art held up his hand. “Enough,” he said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “You told me you were going to finish the wood today.”

  “When did I tell you that?”

  “Yesterday,” Joel said.

  “I don’t remember you being around here yesterday.”

  “It’s okay,” Joel said. “Never mind. Just let me help you finish.”

  “No,” Art said as he reached behind a broken stud in the shed wall and took down a half-full mickey of whisky and took a drink. The slide of the liquor down into his belly eased him. He shook his head to clear away the wraiths that shivered behind his eyes. Joel stood there waiting among the last of the scattered wood. The kid was always around.

  “You ever think about what you’re going to do?” he asked as he put the bottle back, what was left of the whisky swirling behind the pitch-stained glass.

  Joel shuffled his feet, suddenly feeling awkward. “Tonight?”

  “No, not tonight or tomorrow. I mean you’re getting deeper into the life around here. You’ve got Myrna Turfoot on that hill farm up the mountain. And by the way if I was Arnold Turfoot I’d have your hide nailed to my barn door. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing up there with her.”

  “What do you know about it, anyway?”

  “What? You think nobody knows about you and Myrna?”

  When Joel just stood there, Art said, “It’s hard to keep a secret in a little place like this.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Joel, hesitant and awkward.

  “And there’s that Indian girl at the store too,” Art went on. “If you’re not up the mountain you’re mooning around her at the café or standing on that cedar block back of the lean-to where she sleeps. It’s a wonder she doesn’t know you’re peering at her half the night. A dead-end mill town like this is no place for a young guy like you to make a life.”

  “But you’re here. Why are you staying if it’s so bad?”

  “Jesus,” said Art. “It’s different for me. You know, sometimes I wish I never asked Claude to have you hauled out’ve that frozen gondola car last winter. You never mind me. I’ve had a life. You’re just beginning yours.”

  “I don’t know,” said Joel, fiddling with his hat. “I like it here.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. You’ve got Myrna in the rocks and Alice in your head.”

  “Yeah,” Joel said. “Well…”

  “I know, I know,” said Art as Joel walked back to the chopping block and began piling another armful of wood to carry to the shed.

  Art crossed his arms on his chest and held himself tight as Marie slipped in and out of the shadows in his mind.

  Their tanks had moved on to Holland. Claude had told him the army had left Moerbrugge behind. It was the deepwater port of Antwerp the Allies needed and that meant taking back the fortress of Walcheren at the end of the Scheldt peninsula. Moerbrugge was being left for another day. Claude told him he was being sent back to his unit. Back to the war.

  He wished he could remember more of what had happened to him the day he was blown up, but all he could remember was the dead officer and the ring, the empty cup the soldier’s skull made. Yes, and the fieldstone wall, the garden. He had tried to reach for a carrot. How crazy was that? A carrot and a war?

  It was Claude who had sent him to Paris to recover. It was Claude who introduced him to Marie.

  It was the night before Art was going back to his unit. His shoulder had healed. There was nothing left of the shrapnel wound but an itch. The concussion was never talked about. He had always wondered if Claude arranged that too. And he could put his arm over his head and clench his fist. That’s all the doctors needed or wanted to know.

  He had sat on the edge of her narrow bed with a drink in his hand. Marie had looked up at him from the rumpled sheets. On the night table by the bed were the syringe and her little bottle of morphine she’d brought back from Marseille. How she guarded it. He could see it so clearly, the black leather thong coiled like a snake under her wrist, her pack of Gitanes with the gypsy dancer dressed in blue, and her Johnnie Walker whisky. Always the whisky, her glass half full, half empty, his own the same, another bottle of whisky waiting for him, for them, the one on the table by the door.

  She smiled up at him with the cunning innocence morphine gave her as he told her he would come back. She was so beautiful.

  “Jesus,” he said, rocking back and forth in front of the piled wood. “I went back to Paris. I came back to her.”

  “What’s wrong?” Joel said. “Is it that Marie from the war?”

  “Never mind,” Art said as he tried to still the invisible shakes inside his body. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Listen to me. The package from Vancouver is coming in on the Express in the morning. You’ll remember to pick it up, right?”

  “Yup,” said Joel. “The same as always.”

  “That’s right,” Art said. “Now go away. You’ve got the night ahead of you.”

  “You sure you’re okay?” Joel said. “There’s only a bit more wood here to stack.”

  “It’ll be there tomorrow. Now, go, go. And Joel?”

  Joel turned around.

  “Steer clear of that Indian girl. She belongs to Piet. You go up the mountain to Myrna if you want to get laid. She’s the one girl around here who is guaranteed to give you the kind of trouble you can spend a life with. Stay away from what’s not yours to have.”

  * * *

  —

  ART WATCHED JOEL CUT ALONG the gravel road and disappear in the shade of the brush line that separated the railway and the river from the village. Joel would pick up the package from Li Wei. The kid wouldn’t forget.

  He took the mickey from behind the stud, lifted it to his mouth, and drained it, shaking the bottle gently to get the last drops to fall on his tongue. He dimly remembered breaking a bottle so he could lick the broken glass for the whispered sheen of lost whisky. Where was that, Caen, or was that Utrecht? Somewhere in the war. In the distance smoke poured from the beehive burner at the sawmill. The last shift of the week. Six o’clock through to three-thirty tomorrow morning. He’d maybe go to the mill in an hour or so, but not yet. If he was needed they’d let him know. He’d hear the whistles. And Claude didn’t care if he was at the sawmill or not so long as he was close enough if there was an accident. At his cabin or in the village, so long as he was close by. The w
histles were his tether. Art listened. Behind the sawmill’s cries there was the deep sound of the river, a tree fallen in and sweeping against the bank, a hushed noise above the sullen heave of the heavy waters. Cobwebs came down over his eyes.

  The two of them were sitting in the afternoon at a table in front of the Café Olympique. Claude had just introduced them. After buying them a glass of wine Claude left with the blond girl who had come with him. She was very drunk. The last thing Claude said to Art was that he had a couple of weeks. “Don’t waste them,” Claude said as he stood up, his chair rocking back. He was smiling as he pulled the girl to her feet.

  And then it was twilight, a break in the cold rain, and they were walking together, he and Marie, along the Seine by Notre-Dame, the river whispering against the stones, and then another glass of wine back at the café, a bottle of whisky in his pack, the climb up the back steps to her room. He’d thought she was just another pretty putain, but she wasn’t, was she? She’d brought him to her room because she said she liked him. He was an injured soldier with extra leave, money, chocolate, cigarettes, and whisky. Sometimes it was all that was needed to get a girl to follow you or you her.

  What he remembered when he stepped into the room was her falling back on the narrow bed by the wall and scissoring her legs in the air. She asked him if he liked her legs and he told her he did, yes. Oui, he said, awkward, and she laughed at his wretched accent and pointed at the bottle of whisky he had taken from his pack. He grinned and filled glasses to their blue rims. She smiled a pretty smile and asked him if he had any silk stockings in his pack. Bas de soie? When he held up his empty hands she laughed and laughed.

  And then, standing there, he had suddenly forgotten her name, the one she had told him at the table outside the Olympique when Claude introduced them. His mind after the concussion opened and closed. It lost things, faces, names, the days and weeks of his life. He stood there by the bed, helpless, and asked what her name was and she turned her head to the pillow and looked sideways up at him as if she wasn’t quite sure who he was or what he was doing there.