The Retreat

by David Bergen

  She didn’t answer right away. Outside, by the swing, Fish called and Raymond said something, but she couldn’t hear him properly. She finished her beer and put it down on the floor. Her parents were there, she said, her brothers were there, and so she was there too. “Where else should I be?”

  “I don’t know. You’re old enough to have a kid, you’re old enough to be somewhere else. The Retreat sounds like this church I went to as a teenager. Where one man has a vision and throws it out for others to lap up. Don’t you think?”

  “I dunno. Maybe.”

  “I was raised by a white family. Did Raymond tell you that when I was ten, I was taken away to live with a white family in a place called Lesser? You remind me of my stepsister.”

  Lizzy looked away.

  “The family I lived with was religious and I went to a Mennonite church for a while and then I went to the Pentecostal Church where people spoke in tongues and moved their hands through the air and one night Pastor Phil tried to raise a cat from the dead. There were good things, though, living in Lesser. We had linoleum on the kitchen floor and I learned to play viola. You play an instrument?”

  “No,” Lizzy said. “My brother Everett does.”

  “’Nother beer?” Nelson asked again.

  “No, thanks, we have to get back.” She rose and stepped out the door and said to Raymond that they had to go. “Okay?”

  Raymond grabbed one of the chains on the swing and slowed it and as he did so he said, “Whoa,” as if he were talking to a horse. Fish said, “Don’t want to go.” He was looking at the cat and he went over to it and took it into his arms. He scrubbed at the cat’s ears and then held his head close to the cat’s chest and listened to her purr. “Bull,” he said, looking up at Lizzy.

  Raymond was standing by the open door to the pickup. He slipped behind the wheel. Lizzy walked to the pickup and got in. Looked back at Fish who was taking his time. She said, “Nelson thinks that Fish is my kid? Did you tell him that?”

  Raymond was looking through the windshield at the sky. “Nope, that wasn’t me. I didn’t say anything about Fish, or you, or you being a mother.” He seemed pleased with himself.

  “Well, that’s what he thinks.”

  “Like I said, Nelson can be full of shit. Anyway, you know what’s true and what isn’t.”

  Lizzy called for Fish. Then she opened the door and went and took Fish by the arm and hauled him back to the pickup. Bull, suddenly out of Fish’s arms and on the ground, went over and rubbed the side of its face against the corner of the cabin. Fish started to whimper. Then he said he was hungry. And thirsty. Lizzy put him in the middle of the seat, so his feet were touching the stick shift. Fish began to cry.

  Raymond started the truck and said, “He’s thirsty.”

  “That’s okay. He can drink at home.”

  Raymond put the pickup in gear and crawled down onto the trail. She looked out the window at the trees and the sky and thought about Nelson. She wondered what he had done wrong to be taken away, but didn’t want to ask. The sun had finally come out and the puddles reflected the trees. Above them, as if drawn against the sky, a falcon hovered.

  When they got back to the Retreat, the only person visible was Emma Poole, standing at the edge of the treeline in her butterfly-catching outfit. She was leaning forward, peering into the bush. It turned out that no one had known Lizzy and Fish were gone; they hadn’t been missed.

  Everett was not happy. He yearned for where he had come from, the city, and he yearned for his clarinet lessons, taking the bus downtown to the apartment of his music teacher, Miss Douceur. She lived in a high-rise in downtown Calgary and her apartment overlooked the Bow River. There were large windows and from the balcony on the seventeenth floor you could see the river below and the streets and on the streets there were the small dark slashes that were people. Once, Miss Douceur had asked him out onto the balcony for a drink. They had sat on padded chairs around a glass-topped table and sipped at lemonade. The sun was falling onto their shoulders and their heads. Everett was facing the sun and he had to squint to see Miss Douceur, who was wearing a pale green dress that fell just above her knees. The dress was sleeveless and Everett snuck looks at Miss Douceur’s thin, tanned arms. She always wore shoes with heels, even in her apartment. She was married, he thought, because there were signs of a man in the apartment – suit jackets, loafers, a tie thrown over the back of a chair – though Everett had never met her husband and she did not speak of him. He loved her carriage and confidence. He loved her straight posture and the way she sat and kept time, tapping her hand against her thigh. He loved her apartment with the shelves filled with many different kinds of books and the wineglasses that hung from under the cabinet, as if in wait for a party. He imagined dinners in the apartment. A group of men and women, all well-dressed, all rich. And Miss Douceur would be the prettiest and the smartest.

  Once, when he had arrived a little too early for his lesson, she had invited him in and asked him to wait on the couch in the den. He had heard voices, hers and another voice, lower, that of a man, he thought, and then the front door had opened and then closed and she had appeared and asked him to come, please. That day she had worn a yellow skirt and a white blouse with black swirls. Her legs had been bare and her feet were bare. This was the first time he had seen her feet and he could not stop himself from glancing at her toes and ankles.

  For hours during the day, Everett read. Both Harris and the Doctor had collections of books that were kept in the Hall, though most of these books were strange and unapproachable, especially the Doctor’s. Lewis called them philosophical and theological tomes, and not very good ones at that. Everett discovered several short novels by John Steinbeck and he also read The Old Man and the Sea. He found a slim book on knots and so now he knew all about knots. He had not read any of Harris’s novels, though they were available; it was too strange to think of reading Harris’s words while the man was living next door.

  Down by the pond, in the afternoons, Lizzy and Harris talked while Everett lay nearby and listened. Harris spoke of his life as a writer and he spoke of trips he had taken by himself and trips he had taken with Emma. One time he spoke of a month that he had spent in the south of Italy, and he said that if he were a wealthier man, and if Emma would follow him, he would live out his life in that place, close to the cliffs that fell down to the Mediterranean Sea. Everett, listening, but pretending not to, imagined a world of villas and late-evening meals with the sound of laughter and the ocean crashing on the rocks below. He recognized, perhaps for the first time in a real way, that the family he had been born into was poor and not very sophisticated and he wished that it weren’t so. Lately, he had been aware of his parents’ battles, of quarrels that upset his father more than his mother. His mother seemed to slip around the fights; she would smile and turn her back on Mr. Byrd, or later in the Hall she would be leaning in towards the Doctor and enjoying herself as if everything was normal and good.

  One time, he had been asked to join some members of the Retreat as they drove into town to gather stale food – day-old bread and cast-off cinnamon buns – from the Dumpsters behind the Safeway. This was a regular event but Everett, curious at first, quickly found that he did not like the smell of the garbage. He was also uncomfortable with behaving in this way. He went once, and then decided to stay back at the camp and read, or to go down to the pond, where he lay, chest down, chin resting on his hands, conscious of Harris’s faint voice offering stories of lives that had been lived in other places.

  Visitors often passed through, staying at the Retreat for several days, and the Doctor entertained these people, sitting with them in the Hall and talking to them. The room was full of light and smelled of cooking. Everett sometimes went back to the Hall in the late morning after breakfast, or on several occasions after lunch, when the conversation had carried through the meal and into the long afternoon, and he stood and listened to the adults talking, aware of a tightness in his throat, the cause o
f which he could not locate. When he heard the Doctor speak on some topic – one time he had been talking about space and time, and he kept using the name Hider – Everett felt a twinge of excitement, and then loneliness. He felt the possibility that he might grasp in a small way what was being said, followed by the realization that he did not, nor would he ever, match up to the people gathered around the long table. A circle, like a fence, surrounded the Doctor, and it remained a mystery to Everett how a person might enter that place. Perhaps an invitation was necessary, or humour, or intelligence, or maybe there was a password. If there was, Everett did not know it. His mother must have known the way in, because she was often there, sitting close to the Doctor, and he wished that she would call him over and ask him to sit beside her, but she never did. Once, he heard her speak, but he did not catch what she said, only the Doctor’s response as he said, “Good question, Norma.” At that moment, Everett’s chest began to ache, and he stepped out of the room.

  Everett’s father rarely went to the Hall, because he said that the atmosphere was stultifying. “You know the word,” Lewis said to Everett one afternoon. “That’s what it is. Stultifying. The air is heavy with minds roiling in their own crap.” Everett was helping cut stringers for a new set of stairs, the same stairs that his mother had lost her footing on during the family’s second week there and broken her wrist. His mother and father had just had an argument. Everett had been sitting on the stairs of their cabin and he had heard his father’s voice as he said, “That may be, but he’s got a pecker, you know, Norma,” and his mother had laughed and said, “Lewis, Lewis.” And then his father came outside and he walked past Everett, got into the car and slammed the door, and then he was gone. Everett heard his mother behind him, on the porch, and she said his name as if surprised to see him there. Then she came down onto the first step and it gave way. She fell forward with a small “ohh” and put out her arms to stop her fall and as she landed her right wrist snapped backwards. Everett heard the sound that came out of her mouth. It was a sharp cry, and he felt embarrassed and looked away; his mother’s legs were spread and he could see her panties. He felt humiliation and willed his mother to close her legs. His helplessness kept him from moving. And then the Doctor appeared and bent over Mrs. Byrd and put his face very near hers and it seemed he would kiss her, but he didn’t. He helped her up, placing his hands under her arms so that he touched her breasts. Everett turned his head away and then back again. The Doctor’s mouth was close to his mother’s neck. He told her that her wrist might be broken. She shook her head and studied her arm. She looked at Everett, her face very white. She moaned then, and the sound was intimate and sexual. Her cheek rested against the Doctor’s chest. The Doctor asked for help and Everett finally stepped forward and gripped his mother’s arm. The three of them hobbled towards the pickup. His mother was muttering. She said, “Fuck,” and then laughed and she turned her face towards the Doctor and said, “Sorry.” Everett’s forearm was under her bare armpit and there was a slickness of sweat. This was her good arm, round at the shoulder and clean and straight, and Everett had been surprised at the strength in her bicep. Her dress, sleeveless and soft, had smelled of soap. “Tell your father,” she said. “Okay? Tell him I’m fine.”

  The Doctor drove his mother to the hospital, and when Everett’s father came back he had told him about the fall and he said that his mother’s wrist might be broken. He described the fall, the colour of his mother’s face, her bravery. He said nothing about the Doctor almost kissing her, or the tilt of his mother’s body as she whispered sorry to the Doctor. He wanted his mother and father to be happy, and he imagined that this accident might soften his father in some way. When his mother returned from the hospital, she had made her way onto her porch where the family gathered. She called out to Fish and put him on her lap and showed off her cast. When she saw Everett standing off to the side, she motioned for him to come, and she allowed him to write his name on her cast. As he did so, he caught his mother’s scent, a mix of leaves and sweat and soap, and overlying that, a slightly wet odour that reminded Everett of the sculptures he had created in his junior-high art class.

  It was Lewis’s job to fix the stair, and Everett asked if he could help, which really meant that he wanted to watch. In Calgary, when his father had worked Saturdays, Everett would walk over to the glass-blowing factory, sit on a crate, and watch. He liked the tools, the rubber tubing, the lapping wheel, the pastorale. His father would make him wear special glasses. He’d put them on and watch the liquid glass pulled from the furnace. The movements of his father’s hands, and the shapes and colours that suddenly appeared. He made vases, birds with long necks, butterflies, and fancy ashtrays. Sometimes, when a piece didn’t turn out, his father would set it aside, let it cool, and then hand it to Everett. “You can take it home,” he’d say.

  On this day, Lewis intended to rebuild the stairs completely. He held a pencil, eyed the square, and said that it was absolutely essential to measure the stringer at least three times so as not to waste a good piece of board. “Care must be taken.” And then he nodded in the direction of the Hall and said, “Like I was saying, it is not a pretty thing to watch men stew in their own crap. Or women. You know?” He seemed to want to say more, but then he shook his head and said, “Ach, I sound bitter.” Then he said that Norma was content at the Retreat, and if she loved dipping into those dull conversations in the Hall, who was he to complain about their mother’s happiness. “Eh?”

  Above them a V of geese was flying north.

  “Here,” Lewis said, handing Everett the hammer and some nails. “Drive in a few spikes.” The hammer was twenty-two ounces and Everett had trouble holding it. He tapped lightly at a nail and it went spinning off into the grass. He tried again and this time managed to put the nail in halfway before it bent. Lewis took the hammer back and said that he shouldn’t be timid. The hammer was a simple object really. “The less you stare at it, the more you seize and hold it, the more real it becomes. If you try too hard, you will either bend the nail or miss completely, or hit your own thumb. Sort of like life. Oh, listen to the wise man.” And with three swings, Lewis drove in a nail.

  Everett tried again and managed to put home a nail with many hits.

  “There you go,” his father said. “Feels good, doesn’t it? Sometimes too much thinking can get in the way.”

  One night, Everett woke and heard Lizzy and William talking. William was telling her about a dream, something to do with a cave and an animal inside the cave. Then Everett slept, and when he woke again the light from the moon was falling across Lizzy’s bed. He could see her hands resting on her chest, and he watched them to see if she was sleeping or not. She looked childlike, soft and innocent, though he knew she wasn’t innocent. When Lizzy and Lewis had drowned the kittens, Everett had been sad not because the kittens were dead but because his father had seen that Everett was incapable of helping. And, it was true. He might have failed. Choosing Lizzy made sense. She was efficient and she could be cruel. Lately, she had seemed to him distracted and restless, and one time she had asked him what he thought of Raymond, the boy who delivered chickens. When she asked the question, Everett felt as if she were turning away from him to look in another direction, and he did not like this feeling.

  The cabin began to open up and reveal its shape as dawn arrived. Everett crawled out of bed and dressed and went outside, and instead of walking up to the outhouse, he went into the bush and peed. He pulled up his zipper and stood in the grey light, listening. Everything alive in the bush seemed to be moving, crawling through the leaves, flying in the air, calling and screeching. “A cacophony,” his father had said late one night, cocking an ear towards the forest. His father didn’t like the forest, and neither did he. He missed hot water, television. He missed streets, sidewalks, pavement.

  The sky was getting brighter now, rosy. A door slammed and he heard footsteps approaching. Then he saw the Doctor step out of the far cabin. He walked right up the path, pa
st Everett who was still standing, out of sight, at the edge of the treeline. The Doctor was wearing only red shorts and he had a towel draped over his neck. He was talking to himself, something about declaring the facts. Everett went down onto the path and followed him at a distance. The Doctor turned towards the pond, and when he arrived at the pond’s edge, he folded the towel and laid it down, then he slipped off his shorts and looked up at the pink sky and walked into the water.

  Everett had cut around the pond and was standing in the trees off to the side, quite close to the Doctor. When the Doctor bent forward and removed his shorts and then straightened, Everett saw the Doctor’s penis. Then the Doctor walked into the water and Everett saw only his mouth moving. He was talking to himself again, nothing Everett could understand, and then he was singing. He had a deep voice and he sang so loudly that his voice probably carried back to the cabins. He came up out of the water and bent to retrieve something from his towel. A bottle of shampoo. He soaped his hair and his armpits and he soaped between his legs.

  The Doctor’s legs were thin and ropey. He was very blond and did not have much hair, except under his arms and at his groin, and even this blended in with the whiteness of his body. Everett turned away, and then looked back. The Doctor had gone into the water again and he was knee-deep and rinsing himself. Then he dove in with a soft splash and his head resurfaced far out into the pond. When he finally came back on shore and towelled himself dry, Everett’s legs were shaking and his mouth was dry and hot.

  For the next two mornings, Everett woke early and walked out to the pond and waited in the trees. The Doctor came. He undressed and he bathed. He towelled himself dry, put on his shorts, and walked back to his cabin. Everett did this for several more mornings and always it was the same. And always, standing there hidden in the bushes and watching the Doctor bathing, Everett felt a strange thrill and then shame. When he returned to the cabin that last morning, Lizzy lifted her head and looked at him.