by Dolly Dennis
“Why the hell are we here?” I once asked Payton. “We’re here to love,” he told me. Sure, sure. How is that possible when people are so hateful? And when I asked Shylene the same question, she said that we’re here to die. Then what’s the point of living? Everyone has a different opinion, everyone a needful burden. I just don’t know anymore. I guess faith is needed here and I lost mine a long time ago.
I didn’t see how Frosty could be so strong and brave. Never complained about the pain and the nausea. Didn’t know how much time he had left. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t tell me until it was time for the surgery to remove the tumour on his lung and then the chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He wasn’t one to show emotion, except when he was angry. He didn’t even want anyone to hear him vomit. I guess it’s the cowboy way. Sometimes he couldn’t help himself. Made me feel pukey just to listen. Still smoked his brains out, and I guess no harm done when you consider the inevitable. He seemed to be doing okay. His face was filling out some, as though he’d put on some weight. Must be all that beer he was drinking. Don’t know how he did it.
Mona returned, a monarch butterfly, to show me that there is an afterlife. Keep the faith, she was telling me. My days were spent chasing butterflies, searching for her. She stayed a while and then disappeared, like she just wanted to land nearby to check if I was all right. I don’t know anymore. Do you understand?
Anyhow, that’s the story there.
DISCOVERY
In the evenings, before daylight trades places with the night, Adeen often joins Miss Pauline on her deck and shares the latest gossip. The long summer light still dapples through the trees framing the trailer park. This northern climate brings eighteen hours of daylight. Adeen now lives on four hours of sleep. She thinks of taking one of Irene’s sedatives but decides against it.
“You don’t think we should leave?” Adeen says. “Just in case this fire takes off?”
“Naw, well under control. These guys know what they’re doing.”
Miss Pauline is one of those well-worn cowgirls, skin like scuffed leather boots, always a cowboy hat perched on top of her bleached, damaged, Tammy Wynette–platinum hair. In her heyday she worked the rodeos, rode wild horses, roped cows. She can still balance herself standing up on a moving cow or doing a handstand after a couple of drinks, if asked. Miss Pauline would have been a perfect mate for Frosty had she been younger, or he older. Both wear the odour of horse manure and quiver for a wrangler’s life that Adeen still struggles to grasp.
Adeen and Miss Pauline like talking to each other. Sometimes their conversation is chatty, casual; sometimes it’s serious, reviewing the news of the day, arguing about politics.
“Did you see that editorial, Adeen, in the paper today about the Latimer case? He was released from Victoria jail for a four-day unescorted leave to visit his sick mother. Remember how he made headlines when he killed his twelve-year-old daughter because he couldn’t stand to see her suffer anymore? The girl was a quadriplegic. He ran a hose from the exhaust to the cab of his truck and put the girl inside to die. Terrible. Terrible. Said he loved her. Compassionate homicide, they called it.”
“Yes, I saw the article, too. Mercy killing. Mercy for whom?”
“You know,” Miss Pauline changes the subject; it’s her nature to flitter from one thought to another. “I just noticed the other day that when I get up from a night’s sleep, an hour later I seem to have this new wrinkle, I mean, crease on my right cheek that won’t go away, as though I don’t have enough already. My skin doesn’t snap back like it used to.”
“Miss Pauline, you’re seventy years old, for God’s sake. We should all look so good.”
And so they would google what to order in the way of creams and rubs, or marinades as Miss Pauline would call them, to revitalize their skin to its former lustre and elasticity. Adeen herself is beginning to resemble an overripe apricot. All that sun sucking up the moisture from her complexion.
“That warden sure was cute,” Adeen digresses.
“Sure sorry I missed him.”
“By the way, I left some posters in your office in case you needed more. He was going around telling everyone about these prescribed burns they do to save the healthy trees from the sick ones. Euthanasia with assistance from Mother Nature, I guess you’d call it. Makes me nervous. What if the fire takes off?”
Both women peer intently through the negative spaces of trees, with their dead branches and twigs.
Then Miss Pauline says, “Won’t happen. By the way, saw Frosty at Bo’s last night. He looked just fine. Didn’t want to talk about the cancer. How’s he managing?”
“I don’t know. Blames me. Blames that I brought him to drink. Never mind all his smoking all these years. Like I’m the one who put the cigarettes in his mouth.”
Adeen is despondent. Miss Pauline jumps out of her patio chair and hurries over to give an assuring hug.
“I can see you still love him. But, Adeen, we’re all responsible for our own lives. We’re adults. You’re not his mother, so just stop it now. Not your fault.” Miss Pauline is Adeen’s new Mona. “Look at me and repeat. Not my fault. He’s going to be okay. Miracles do happen.”
She takes a moment, considering whether she should reveal Frosty’s secret, but decides to keep her promise, at least for the time being. Let Frosty be the bearer of good news.
Always difficult to find true friendship in the later years. Adeen relishes Miss Pauline’s company and wisdom. After their usual morning coffee on deck, they can hear Irene thumping on the trailer door.
“Better go. She’s awake. Plus I have laundry to do.” Adeen unbolts the door and Irene falls into her reluctant arms.
She follows the usual schedule for Irene: washing up, feeding, distributing the medication, and then setting her down in front of the TV as Adeen goes about the daily business of living. Frosty rarely hangs around, preferring the company of his cardplaying, gambling, drinking buddies at Bo’s. He usually escapes from the trailer early, staying out all day until he tires and needs his rest. Adeen is stunned by his physicality and will to live, even in the face of a death sentence.
“It’s the western air.” He will pump out his chest. “Hard to keep a good man down.” The ex–cowboy poet is determined to live forever.
Adeen is putting away clean laundry in the tallboy when she notices one of the bottom drawers is jammed, as though something has fallen behind. She jerks it open, causing the drawer to slip off its runner. Frosty’s underwear spills to the floor. She spots something wedged in between. That’s when she discovers the envelope with Velvet’s photo — she’s lying there naked, her arms reaching out to someone or something.
Adeen straightens up, transfixed by the image, unable to believe what she is seeing.
“You bastard,” she says. “You damn asshole. You lied. I should have listened to Mona. You bastard. I gave you so many chances, you bastard.”
She whips the envelope with the photo into her jeans pocket and holds it there until she decides her next move. Right now, she needs a moment to assimilate what she’s just unearthed.
ADEEN
The following morning I could see a billowing mass of smoke beyond the distant mountains. Frosty, wearing only cut-offs, was already in the backyard, reclining on the hammock in the shade with his beer and cigarettes. He had found my spare six-pack of Molsons behind Irene’s bedroom door. No surprise there.
“Reckon you thought me stupid,” he said with such finesse. He told me that if I wanted to drink to just go ahead and don’t be secretive about it. He didn’t give a fuck, his word. That’s what he said. Didn’t give a fuck about me.
And I argued that it wasn’t about me. I had enough things to deal with. I was just trying to help him by hiding the beers. I know, I know. It was stupid of me because I knew he went to Bo’s and he was going to do what he was going to do.
He gave me this disgusted look, like he was ridiculing me, and with the defiance of a rebellious juvenile, he l
it another cigarette, finished his beer, and opened another can right there in front of me.
I shivered against the memory of this past New Year’s Eve when the roads were choked with the first winter snowstorm. Freezing cold. Packed hills of powdered snow obstructed roads and highways as we bulldozed our way home from a party. It was Frosty’s wish. One last boozy hurrah with friends in case this was his last year on the planet. Frosty lit the wood stove for more heat and stayed up to listen to the blustery wind that never let up. I went to bed and slept.
He was diagnosed just in time for Christmas 2006. “Merry Christmas,” I said to him with a fatal sarcasm. Frosty broke the news to me after we opened our presents at midnight. In a drunken stupor, he bellowed, “If I’m dying, then I might as well enjoy myself for whatever time I have left!”
I retaliated in anger: “Bastard, you don’t care about anyone, not even yourself. You stupid bastard! Bastard!”
Later the depression set in and that was the last straw for me. Those damn voices just never stopped. I guess Frosty’s cancer was just one more thing to deal with, and I was so, so tired. We are responsible for our own lives, I remembered Miss Pauline’s motto. But we are responsible for those who can’t take care of themselves, no?
Frosty survived surgery early spring this year. They removed the growth in the right lung, followed the operation with some heavy artillery — various cocktails of chemo and radiation treatments to beat this sarcoma, as they called it. Two months ago the cancer returned, like scattered cigarette butts, on the surface of his lungs. He told me the doc said these fibroids were inoperable. They would leave the tumours there and see what happened. See what happened? See what happened? “You’re dying,” I said to him, that’s what’s happening. There wasn’t much else they could do but wait. I wanted to talk to the doc but Frosty forbade me. Like I didn’t trust him. Just a matter of time. I didn’t know what to do.
But there he was, Frosty, in all his glory, maybe tired some days but still alive and kicking, drinking and smoking and carrying on like he was Superman. The man was made of steel. Even put on some weight.
So I kept my mouth shut and ignored Frosty’s condition. I suppose I made it easier, hiding all that beer, but deep inside I suspected he would find them anyhow. Enabler is what you would call me. Perhaps he had a death wish, so who was I to interfere. His life. Not mine. I had enough problems. I just kept losing more and more respect for the man until that photo … well, that photo ripped out the last piece of whatever was left of my heart. I felt numb. I couldn’t take any more. I’d reached my limit.
Anyhow, that’s the story there.
SMOKE SUMMER
Adeen carries a large salad bowl of chipped ice and joins Frosty on the patio in back. She can feel the electrical currents of heat rippling around her like some magnetic field.
“Oh, my, would you look at that smoke!”
Frosty, with an apathetic grimace, takes no notice of her and continues smoking — wheezing, hacking, rasping, coughing — spitting the thick mucus with purpose into the air. A half-inch cigarette sticks to the centre of his lower lip, seemingly in a midchew, as he rolls the thing side to side with his tongue. She cringes at the flying phlegm and averts her eyes, choosing instead to look at the flat colourless sky. She has grown accustomed to the loss of his body hair, his bald head, and lashless eyes. This poet cowboy now inhabits a putrescent body — the pasty skin, watery eyes, and burn marks branded on his chest from the radiation treatments.
One morning, in the early stages of his disease, she caught him spitting blood into the toilet, and he angrily motioned her to let him be. How many more months of endurance, Adeen wondered? His execution of his role as a dying ex-wrangler would have garnered him an Academy Award for best performance by a cowboy in a western drama.
“You feeling okay?” She tosses some of the chipped ice particles into her mouth like so many handfuls of salted peanuts and chomps down in a grind of torture. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
“Weatherman says it’s going to be a blistering thirty-eight degrees Celsius,” she says. “That would be somewhere about ninety-six Fahrenheit.” She still converts everything from the Canadian metric measurement to the American imperial system just to understand the idea of how hot it really is.
She slurps the last shards of the pulverized ice cubes, the shrunken pieces sitting in her cheeks before they melt.
She grabs another mouthful and slathers more of the frozen crystals on her face, neck, and chest. “Want some?” Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. “It’ll cool you down.”
He winces at the sound of ice cracking, keeps his eyes focused on the fire looming over the skyline.
Day dwindles into an evening sky coated with lacerations of pink and pearl oyster. The patch of smoke has thickened and bears resemblance to a fireball. Adeen and Frosty observe the weighty sun spill its palette over the mountain peaks, which reflect in a nearby shallow lake, painting the trees and rocks along the shoreline.
“It’s eerie, isn’t it? Like someone just dropped the Hiroshima bomb over there.” Adeen elongates the word: Heerosheema. “That cloud looks just like that, Frosty, doesn’t it? So nuclear. Maybe we should get ready to hide in the root cellar.”
He ignores her suggestion; she increases the nervous rhythm of mincing ice chips with a steady compulsion. He finally rouses from his seat, but Adeen halts him, forming a barrier with her arms.
“Where you going?”
“Can’t take your crackin’ them ice chips no more. Goin’ inside.”
And then she hurls the envelope at him.
“You might like to check what’s inside, Frosty Whitlaw.”
He picks it up from the ground and says, “What you doin’ goin’ through my things?”
“Our things, Frosty, our things, remember. I was putting away the clean laundry and when I couldn’t pull out the bottom drawer, I checked behind the drawer, and lo and behold that piece of shit was blocking it. The Scotch tape came undone and screwed up your secret.”
His sallow face carries the expression of a schoolboy caught reading Playboy in class and preparing himself for punishment. “I liked the photo. Is all.” He sheepishly lowers his head, avoiding her angry gaze.
“Right,” and she grabs the envelope from his hands and tears it to smithereens, hurling the evidence into his face until the fragments trickle down to his feet like confetti.
“There was nothin’ between me and Velvet. I just tried to help her.”
“I saw you guys kissing at Klondike Days and you hugging her when you were evicting the mice at the Complex Arms.”
“Thought you woulda forgotten all that by now. I just felt sorry for her. Tried to help her find her boyfriend. Is all.”
“Is all. Is all. You are such a lying hypocrite, Frosty Whitlaw. Don’t know what I ever saw in you. Die.” And then she catches herself. “I didn’t mean that.”
Adeen can hear his voice following her footsteps as she speeds down the road in a confusion of emotions.
“Adeen, Adeen.”
He angrily pitches his still-lit cigarette butt into the compost bin and slumps to his knees to retrieve the ripped pieces, wills his still-weak body to move inside, and begins to reassemble the photo with Scotch tape, putting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Adeen bolts for the nearby park and sits on a bench to evaluate the situation. She always thinks best in the dark, so she dawdles until the last blur of light in the west disappears. There is no moon. The street lamps startle her when they switch on. Adeen hurries home only to hear Frosty gagging, spitting phlegm in the bathroom, and Irene snuffling on the couch.
Midnight. Too hot to sleep in that sardine can of a trailer with its stifling smells and sounds. The small portable fan oscillates in its unsuccessful high-speed efforts to chill the interior.
Adeen rises, unlocks the door, and tiptoes outside to escape the somnolent noises of snoring and snorting. She parks herself at the picnic table, a pitcher of crushed ice by her
side. It will cool her down, if nothing else.
Miss Pauline appears on her patio as though on cue. Their properties abut one another, separated only by a chain-link fence.
“Can’t sleep either, sweetie?” She lights a cigarette. “I find smoking helps me.”
“Oh, Miss Pauline. Hope I didn’t wake you up.”
“Yes, I could hear you chewing on those ice cubes.” She laughs and blows smoke toward the ebony sky.
Adeen smiles. “Yep, can’t sleep in that trailer. It’s a furnace.”
“Something happen?”
“Does it show?’
“According to Google I am an intuitive person. So spit it out.”
Adeen tells her about the discovery of Velvet’s nude photo behind the dresser drawer and how Frosty denied ever having an affair.
“I just don’t know what to do. Why would he keep her photo if there was nothing going on?”
“You want to google to find out why?”
“Not in the mood for humour, Miss Pauline. I’m serious.”
“Okay, so how about checking that dating service I showed you. Maybe it’s time for you to have an affair yourself.”
“Don’t want to get involved with another man ever. They just want someone to take care of them, and I’m done with that, too.”
“Can’t blame you. Sorry to leave you, sweetie, but can’t keep my eyes open anymore so off to beddy-bye I go.” And she disappears inside.
“Be going in myself shortly,” says Adeen.
A pungent smell, like a concoction of discarded simmering garbage, fills the air. At first Adeen thinks the stench is coming from Miss Pauline’s firepit. She wonders if the nearby forest fire has escalated. Then she sees it! The compost is smouldering.
She is rooted there, paralyzed, terrified, in a panic; her mind escaping from her body. She dashes toward the bin as though approaching the finish line in a marathon but then suddenly stops in her tracks. The hot embers burrowed deep inside the compost heap burst into sudden, spontaneous flames. The fire, with a breakneck speed, licks up the sides of her trailer home and leaps over the roof. She stumbles toward the door, which is lava hot.