A soft heat seeped through my skin. I stopped counting, but kept my eyes closed; I didn’t want to scare him away, or change the mood in the room. His lips tasted of salt, and of the wind, and I could smell the wildness in him, something elemental, as of fire, storm, and the fluctuant sea.
He took my face in his hands. We were so close it was as if he were breathing for me — I couldn’t tell where his breath stopped and mine began. Toop gave a wounded, pay-attention-to-me kind of bark, and Hooker pulled away. I opened my eyes and felt dizzy again, this time for a different reason.
“You taking advantage of me?” I said, smiling with my eyes.
“I hope so.” Hooker kissed Toop, too — who drooled — then wrestled his dog to the ground. “I had an ulterior motive, though,” he said, laughing. “Toop wants breakfast — I thought maybe you could feed him while I finish fixing ours.”
I asked what my reward would be (I would rather have gone back to bed and kissed him all morning long) and he said he might take me to the beach with him, later, to see the wreck of his red pickup before it disappeared in the winter storms. A north wind had got up in the night, which meant it would be a good day for beachcombing, and I could help Toop find the left-footed running shoe he knew was out there somewhere, riding the swells, waiting to be washed onto the shore for him. When Toop heard his name he fetched a shoe from the pile of waterlogged runners stiffening in front of the woodstove, and dropped it in front of me.
A container ship from Japan had broken up in a high sea, Hooker explained, and the runners, after being tossed around by the waves and knocked against the rocks, had washed up along the beach. “Toop finds them for me. All right feet so far. I need a ten-and-a-half left. To go with the right. Same’s I need a left hand, come to think of it.”
Hooker passed me a blue enamel pan of warm water to wash in, and a roll of toilet paper to dry myself. I got out of bed, still fully dressed, splashed the sleep from my eyes, and rinsed my face, being careful to avoid the area around my mouth. I wanted the taste of Hooker Moon on my lips for as long as possible.
When I had finished I called Toop, who was standing by his bowl, waiting, and spooned some leftover seal organs mixed with halibut cheeks into his dish. Toop looked at it, then went and stood by the door, his tail between his legs. When Hooker let him out I heard him throwing up in the bushes. “What’s the matter, don’t like barfaroni?” Hooker asked when he slunk back inside. Hooker looked at me and shook his head, passing me the bag of sandwiches he’d brought home from the feast. “This is the only thing Toop eats. Chicken salad sandwiches.”
“I hope he’ll forgive me.” I arranged the sandwiches in Toop’s dish, but he stood, looking at it, his ears sticking straight out on either side. Hooker shook his head. “Not like that. I’ll show you.”
He took out his hunting knife, bent down, and began slicing. Toop nearly decapitated me with his tail when Hooker stood back to show me his handiwork. “Chicken salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off. You wouldn’t think from looking at him he’d be such a picky eater.”
I sat watching Toop eat as sunlight stabbed through the gaps in the weathered planks on the windowless side of the cabin. “I’m making breakfast,” Hooker said. “You like Indian food? Mussels and seaweed and shit like that?”
Hooker, and his way with words. He removed the garlic from the butter then set to work steaming the mussels he had picked off the beds at low tide while I was still dreaming.
“I’ll try anything once,” I said, but then had to admit that wasn’t true. I had heeded all the warnings about paralytic shellfish poisoning I’d seen posted along coastal beaches, how one bite of a contaminated bivalve could kill you before you had time to spit it out.
“How do you know they’re safe?” I asked.
“You worry too much,” he said, shaking his head and laughing at me. “Worry’s going to kill a person quicker than anything you eat off the beach.”
On Tranquilandia they had a saying: “Don’t worry, at least not until they start shooting. And even then you shouldn’t worry. Don’t start worrying until they hit you, because then they might catch you.”
“If you’re seriously worried,” Hooker said, “touch one to your lips. If your lips start to tingle, that’s a warning sign.”
My lips had tingled when Hooker’s lips had touched them. I had been fairly certain, falling asleep last night, we weren’t meant to be lovers, but this morning after that almost-kiss, I felt there might be a faint hope clause at the end of the tunnel of love. Hope was one thing I’d taught myself it was best to live without, though I’d heard it said there is more hope on Death Row than in any place of similar size in the world. To me, hope had become another phase to grow out of, like wetting the bed, like picking at the skin around your fingernails until you bled.
Hooker set up a table outside so we could watch the ravens eat. We ate with our fingers, sitting on a couple of chunks of wood he used as chopping blocks, dazed by the fiery orange of the mussels, purple inkiness of the seaweed, and the fragrance of alder from the fire. A barge of mist floated through the trees towards the sea, and dragonflies, iridescent blue, darted back and forth as if they were stitching up the air.
I looked up at the sky, flecked with bright ticks of cloud, then down at the stream where a dragonfly landed on top of another, and two pairs of wings became one in a whirring over the red-brown water.
“I can see why you stay here,” I said. “It feels . . . it’s like the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to this place yet.”
Hooker licked his fingers and looked past my eyes to the beach. “I like it out here because not too much is happening,” he said, after a while. “I’ve got this personal feeling so many things aren’t meant to be happening to us so much of the time. We’re not built for it.”
It was true, I thought, that in many ways my life had been much simpler at the Facility. There I’d had only Rainy and Frenchy to feel responsible for, and the rest of eternity to contemplate. Every day had seemed important because each act was, potentially, the last act of our lives. We used to say we lived in the last place on earth a woman could feel safe — a maximum security penitentiary. The only threat to our security was that of our pending execution.
Hooker boiled more water and brewed Labrador Tea. Neither of us felt the need to talk. Once the ravens got used to me they flew down and began tearing at the chunks of sea lion meat Hooker had brought home from the feast. “Ravens find roadkill, they act like eagles,” Hooker said.
After rinsing our dishes in a bucket of sea water we set off across the point — over the beds of blue-violet mussel shells waiting for the tide to come in — that separated Hooker’s bay from the white sand beach. Hooker whistled for Toop who had disappeared into the foam covering the sand from the high tide mark to the sea’s edge.
I left Hooker and walked through tangled mounds of kelp, across a series of old weathered planks from a ship that had broken up in a storm, out to where the sea met the sand, and jogged through the knee-deep foam, letting my shoes get soaked, the foam stick to my clothes, my face, my hair as the sun played hide-and-seek behind a blustery cloud. I emerged from the foam onto a clean stretch of sand and saw how the sea absorbed all the little streams that trickled down the beach as if they couldn’t wait to become part of something bigger, while the ocean went its own way, breaking up on the shore, pulling itself back together, breaking up on the beach again.
I heard Hooker shout, and when I looked up saw him crouch down a small distance from the carcass of a sea lion half-buried in the sand. A conspiracy of ravens hunched over their find, taking the occasional nip out of its flesh, as if they were testing it to see if it tingled on their beaks.
I rubbed my hands together and stamped my feet. The wind off the sea had a chill in it, the first bite of winter. At that moment I saw a solitary raven plummet out of the sky into the foam, and rise up again, his black head white.
The trickster raven dive-bombed his brothers, who
were still hopping around the carcass; they flew off leaving him to feast, until the foam on his head began to disappear and they recognized him as one of their own — not a bald eagle, after all — and chased him away. Hooker shouted at me to hold my breath and plug my nose as he moved closer to the sea lion, and the ravens flew up before us, and wheeled back towards the surf.
I turned around, letting out my breath, and saw Toop, in the distance, a new find, a shoe, in his mouth, running so fast his back foot overtook his front feet, chasing sandpipers up and down the sand. Further down the beach I could make out the metal frame of Hooker’s red pickup lying on its side, half-sunk into the sand, already a permanent part of the landscape. “I’m going for a run,” I called to Hooker, “up to your truck and back.”
I ran, wishing I could make Angel return the way Rainy and Frenchy had come back from the dead, so that he would know how it felt to run against the wind, to hear the wild music of the world, to stumble from his dreams and hear the trees speaking in tongues, to taste rainwater on his tongue.
I was halfway to the wreck when I found the shoe. Dry, almost weightless, no longer than my lifeline, it fit in the palm of my hand. It was the same brand as all the others Toop had brought home, but unlike the ones heaped in front of Hooker’s woodstove, this one had scarcely been damaged. It was small enough to have been spared, to have been cradled across the surface of the waves.
In this world there is an unending supply of sorrow, and the heart has always to make room for more. I grasped the shoe to my body, trying to make it disappear the way I’d tried to make love disappear in the years I’d been separated from Angel. I’d always imagined that, given time, my love for my boy would lessen, so that the closer I got to the end of my life, the less I would remember it. I don’t know what I expected love to do — maybe curl up and die the way I’d seen people do.
I looked back; I could see Hooker, his hair the same blue-black as the mussel shells he’d steamed open that morning; he had taken off his shirt and tied it around his waist. In his hands I could the blood-red strips he’d cut from the sea lion’s bloated sides.
I felt the wind blowing through me, and a soft rain coming down as I started back, turning the shoe — left or right I couldn’t tell which — in my hands, as if it were some hopeful relic the sea had coughed up, trusting I would find it, knowing it had come home. It was perfect in every way but one. The logo, which appeared to have been Boss Angeloss, had almost disappeared. All I could make out was the ghost of an impression, the word Angel, and I knew — a message had been sent to me, written by the wind.
I hardly remember the walk back up the beach and over the point to Hooker’s cabin. I do know the rain stopped for a while and the sun peeked out and that I felt, once again, like a ghost inhabiting my own body. I watched Hooker stock his birdfeeder and we stood together in the doorway as the ravens descended one at a time, and then flew up with pieces of bright crimson meat in their beaks.
Toop flopped down beside the woodstove, licking the salt from the waterlogged runner between his paws. I buried the baby shoe deep in my jacket pocket and stretched out on the bed. Hooker woke me, later, with a cup of nettle tea and some fry-bread he’d made while I’d slept. I thought about the mussels he’d picked that morning, trussed together with hair-like bonds, and looking at Hooker, then, a thin layer of trust began to form, like a scab, over my heart. I wanted to tell him about my son, show him the shoe I’d found on the beach — a shoe the same size as the ceramic impression — the “cherished sole” footprint the curandero’s assistant had made for me the day I’d left Desaguadero — as if it were further proof of my child’s existence beyond the grave. But Hooker said back in a minute and left to go outside.
I sat on the floor by the open window, sipping my tea. I had no idea of the time — impossible to tell time when the sky loomed grey and vague — only that the tide had come up and started out again since we’d risen earlier in the day. When Hooker returned he said a storm was coming in.
He had begun to look edgy again, the way he’d looked the night before leaving the community hall, and after a while he came and crouched next to me, and asked if he could trust me, if I considered him a friend. I thought this an odd question, since we had just spent the night in the same bed, even if nothing had happened, in the traditional sense of the words nothing and happened.
“Of course I’m your friend.”
“Can I trust you?” Hooker wasn’t going to let me hedge on the wheel. “I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking if I can trust you. If you are that good a friend.
At the Facility we had a saying: A friend helps you move; a good friend helps you move a body.
“It depends on how you define good,” I said.
Hooker said he had a favour to ask; he wanted me to drive him to Gracie’s. I said I’d take him anywhere, though given a choice I would have opted to stay in his cabin, closing my eyes and practising opening them slowly to look at him lying half-naked on his bed. “When you fall in love you have to stupefy yourself and become blind otherwise love would never happen,” Vernal used to say, after I’d left him to live on my own. “When you wake up, and open your eyes, that’s where love stops.”
But my desire for Hooker had almost transcended love. Almost. My desire now was to crawl inside his skin and live there, behind his eyes, to feel his heart beating away in the hot darkness.
Hooker kept glancing at the sky as we left the cabin and started up the trail followed by Toop with his pointy ears drooping as if he took the unsettled weather personally. By the time we reached the graveyard the clouds in the west had turned a lurid red. “Cloud gets that much blood in it, means we’re going to have a real humdinger,” Hooker said, swatting at a fly that buzzed his face. There were flies everywhere. I knew what this meant.
Toop snapped at a bluebottle and gave me a puzzled look, as Rainy materialized, sitting on a decomposing nurse log that had become host to a colony of hemlock and spruce seedlings. Her twins, who had manifested themselves back into their fine red mist, and Frenchy, still wearing my shades, appeared beside her. The HE clung to his mother’s leg. His face, I saw, had become one suppurating wound, and a breeding ground for maggots.
My friends had promised to stay at the farm, and I gave them a look to say as much. You promise you be home this morning, yo own self, Frenchy said. We get tired of waitin.
Rainy held her whole body clenched, even her eyes. We figure we hitch a ride home in yo dead-wagon, she said, as I opened the door on the driver’s side. She and Frenchy pushed their way in, pulling their offspring after them. They draped themselves across the front seat; I told them, under my breath, they had to ride in the back.
Rainy took a hard look at Hooker, and whistled. He be the lookingest guy I ever seen, she said, her voice gone all congested. He be a statue in a park, no one spray paint over him, best believe.
The HE had begun picking at the pieces of shrapnel trapped under his skin, going glock-glock-glock as he tried to clear his nose. Frenchy massaged her boy’s shoulders and listed off sniper rifles: Barret M82, Barret M90, Barret M95, Barret M99, Nechem NTW-20, until his breathing returned to normal and he went limp in her arms.
Toop had to be picked up and lifted into the hearse, where he cowered low to the floor, trembling. Rainy perched between the rollers in the back, hissing like a cat, to further terrify him; I gave her an irritated shhhhhh as I took off my jacket and tossed it over her head.
“You talking to lumaloos now?” Hooker asked, as he got in the passenger’s side. He glanced over his shoulder and narrowed his eyes. I remembered what he’d told me, about learning the secret of seeing into shadows, and wondered what he knew.
Talcum pole creep me out. Make my head stand on end, Rainy said, as we drove past Lawlor Moon’s memorial pole. Every time she spoke, Toop growled. “Something’s spooking him,” Hooker said, as his dog jumped into his lap and sat up, ears pricked forward, as if he were trying to ignore what was going on behind h
im by concentrating on the road.
The hearse, the road, even the black clouds were awash in an ocean of cochineal. The sea itself, and the few boats left in the bay that hadn’t headed for shelter looked as if they had been bathed in Al’s tainted blood. As I drove I wanted to reach into my pocket to make sure the tiny fragile shoe was still there. I pictured slipping my child’s foot into it, the way he would curl his turned-in toes and I’d have to tickle his sole to make him straighten them out again.
As I pulled in at Gracie’s house, the sky opened up and let loose a downpour. Hooker told me to back up against the mudroom door, then got out, telling Toop to stay close.
I ordered Rainy and Frenchy to wait for me, and followed Hooker into the carving shed. He said, “right back,” then went into the house, and this time he kept his word, returning at once with garbage bags, a rope and a gas can. “I guess it’s dark enough,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
He led the way through the carving shed to a door that opened at the front of the house, facing the water, onto what Hooker called their appliance garden. The ghost of a bathtub overflowed with empty bottles, and a cook stove bloomed corrosively.
The refrigerator lay on its back, white, closed-coffin-like. I understood, in that instant, what Rainy meant when she said, “one door closes, another bangs shut.” Some part of me didn’t want Hooker to open the fridge door because I knew it was going to close off, bang shut, a part of me, of us, of what Hooker and I might have become.
“I need your help,” Hooker said. Toop sniffed the air, panting, making excited yipping sounds. I sat down on a toilet that had mushrooms sprouting from the mossy bowl. “We need to get him out of here.”
For one naïve moment I thought he meant Toop, but then as he opened the fridge door I saw the hand, a human hand, poking out of the fridge. I remembered, then, what my son’s father said to me in the big yard at Mountjoy, shortly before he was shot down in the botched escape attempt and the contra-bandistas flew me away to Tranquilandia: “It is much easier to kill a man than it is to make love to a woman. There’s no risk in killing. Bang. He’s dead. You go on living.”
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