Now Betsy was walking into 3112 Avenue H North. Monica and Abe did not have to watch, did not have to make sure she didn’t try to run. Betsy had nowhere to go. It wasn’t that Abe and Monica had forced her to come here. She had volunteered. Betsy put the idea forward, offered an ultimate solution. It wasn’t an act of honour so much as a declaration of fuck it all. Fuck everything. Lets bring this fuckin’ show to an end. Get it done. I’ll show you bastards how it’s done.
Monica’s coat fit Betsy a little too tight and the scarf smelled of her perfume. The two men who sat in the running car across the street were obvious, bold, sure. Betsy felt an urge to wave, to tell them, “Okay, call on your brimstone, bring on your heaven, bring on your hell.” She didn’t. She turned in at the gate, walked calmly to the house and used Monica’s key to open the door. She took off the coat, dropped it on the floor, dropped the scarf and sat down on the pile to wait. She heard the sound of the car across the street drive away.
“Hey Freddy, hey Joe, how are you guys? I’ll be with you in a minute.” She may have spoken to the empty room at 3112 Avenue H North, Saskatoon, but she was back in the house in Lac La Biche and her friends, her true friends, were with her again.
“A dog sled?” Red wasn’t at all expecting this phone call. And he certainly wasn’t expecting that the person asking him to build a dog sled would be Ben Robe. “I could make you one, or I could give you the one in my shed.”
“What’s in your shed?”
“Oh, about a ten-foot toboggan, the canvas might be a bit rotten, but I’ve tried to keep it dry.”
An hour later, Ben and Benji helped Red slide a solid oak toboggan down from the rafters of his shed, over piles of “stuff” and out into the snow. “It was my Dad’s,” Red explained. He grabbed the canvas carryall in both hands and tugged, hard. The canvas did not tear. “Well it didn’t rot. It’s only been up there for about thirty years.”
“You’ve done a good job in taking care of it.” Ben stood at the back of the toboggan, gloved hands on the handles. It felt right, felt like something normal, real, something with history, from a time when things were better.
“See the rubber there,” Red pointed. “On the handles. My dad put that there. He cut an old inner tube into strips. Used to tie everything with that stuff.”
Ben gripped the handle harder, it had a good feel to it.
“My Dad had lots of tricks like that. If you tie something with rubber, it isn’t coming undone, and ice doesn’t stick to it.”
“I imagine it would be warm as well.” Ben’s hands had not left the handle.
“I suppose you are going to want harness too.” Red turned back toward the shed. A moment later and he threw a bundle of harness and gang lines into the toboggan carryall.
Benji knelt to check them out, to tug at nylon harness, to open a brass snap, feel the pressure of its spring, note that it wasn’t corroded or stiff. “What made you keep all this stuff?” He looked up toward Red.
“I didn’t keep it.” Red’s smile widened ever so slightly. “I just never bothered to throw it away.”
A child once played on this floor, crawled around on the hardwood, hands and knees slipping on the shine; not hers, not Betsy’s; Betsy never had any children. She ran her hand across the wood grain, stroking, perhaps even caressing — something from this world, solid, tactile before the moment of vapourization, before she crossed over to another world.
She imagined someone somewhere, perhaps he even looked like Ernie, perhaps it was Ernie himself at the controls, guiding a satellite, adjusting, lining up, perhaps there were even cross-hairs, and Google Earth type zoom, and he would put the satellite directly above her and drop a tungsten rod that would heat up in the atmosphere until it was pure vapour, then it would hit the house, and Betsy and the house and the hardwood floor would all be vapour, would all be ghosts.
Didn’t Ernie say that they were not using tungsten anymore, too expensive, they were using spent uranium? Just Betsy’s luck eh, hit with an old fuel rod from a nuclear reactor because someone didn’t want to pay the storage costs. That would be more like it — more fitting with the way the rest of Betsy’s life had gone, or hadn’t gone.
Fuckin’ Ernie. What an asshole. At first she’d thought — and that was decades ago now — at first she’d thought he was maybe like a Hell’s Angels guy or something; getting her to move stuff, a little something from here to there; something exciting, something with a bit of thrill to it. What’s a few guns from Ottawa to Edmonton? Then Ernie wanted her to become friends with people who were going to protest at the G-20 meetings, just find out what they were up to, go along, become one of them. “Hell, Betsy, even go to the protest, have a little fun. If you happen to get arrested I’ll cover your ass.” Fuckin’ Ernie.
There’ was no quitting when Ernie had his hands on you. You didn’t bow out on Ernie, Fuck no. There was only one out — only one exit — and this was it; the hard way out, the permanent fuckin’ door slam.
At least it would be quick. Betsy put her palms to the floor, pressed down, held her breath. What was taking so fuckin’ long? Let’s get this done.
And Monica; what a silly bitch Monica was anyway, with her ideals, her fuckin’ high ideals, her perfect world, perfect ecological order, perfect utopian crap. Crap; that’s all it was, fuckin’ crap. The world would never be the way Monica wanted it to be; there were too many Ernies, too many people who needed you to do what they said. And if you didn’t, if you doubted, you never did anything ever again, and if your family was lucky they found your body on the side of the highway and your family had something to bury, if you were lucky.
What a fuckin’ life. The hardwood wasn’t slippery shiny anymore; it was sticky, sweaty and sticky and she wiped her hands on her pants, and the sweat showed on the floor, a smear, a dull smear on the gold-grained wood. Was that it? Was that all her life was going to amount to, a fuckin’ smear on a beautiful floor where a baby once learned to crawl, and maybe even learned to walk?
She imagined a baby, a boy baby, crawling across the floor toward her, her imagination so vivid in this ultimate moment that she could almost see the child, her child, her child that never was. As soon as she began to feel, to experience an emotion other than anger; as soon as she started to open herself to the imagined child, Monica came unbeckoned and picked up the child from the floor and held it to her breast.
Fuck this.
Betsy hit the back door to 3112 Avenue H North at a dead run, across the backyard, through the place where someone once had a garden, and hurdled the back fence. At the alley she turned right, turned north, and ran as hard as her legs would carry her. At the house, just before the alley met the street, someone had left their car running, backed it out of the garage, left it in the driveway to warm up for a minute. Betsy didn’t have a coat or even shoes and now maybe there was a God, maybe there was life after Ernie. The car doors were not locked.
Abe wasn’t watching, he had turned away, just a glance down the snow-rutted street. Monica was watching. There was nothing that represented a falling star in the daylight. One second the house across the street was the same house that Monica had spent days and weeks confined to; it was the same house she had just watched her best friend walk bravely into, walk bravely to her end — and in the same second the house disappeared, replaced by a flash. It was very fortunate for Abe that he wasn’t watching. The flash lasted through the end of that second and through the next second and part way through the second that followed that, but the brilliant flare in Monica’s eyes did not end after the house was replaced by a glass-lined hole.
The flash continued, painfully, as though someone had thrown sand into her eyes, blinking hurt and did not dim the bright blue that Monica continued to see. Even though tears continuously poured from her eyes, they felt paper dry as she blinked and rubbed and desperately tried to relieve the pain. She considered using snow, but without sight was not sure she would select a handful clean enough to rub into the socke
ts and put out the fire that continued to burn there.
Monica clung to Abe — one hand with a desperate grip of his parka, the other constantly wiping at her face — as they both stumbled down a sidewalk that desperately needed the attention of a snow shovel.
Abe’s growing belief that Monica might be faking her injury came from his own experience with welder’s flash. Yeah, it hurt, your eyes watered, felt like there was sand in them, but you could still see. It wasn’t until he had Monica back in his basement apartment, seated in the leather armchair, and he couldn’t undo the zipper on his parka that he realized maybe her eye injury was serious. The nylon zipper, designed for cold weather, was melted together and would not open.
“They’re getting it. They’re trying to figure it out.” Ben untangled a dog from harness and gangline as Red looked on. “They mostly got it right.” With the dog free, Ben headed back to the sleigh. “What I really need is a leader.”
“How about the mom?” Red offered.
“Tried that, she won’t stay on the trail, keeps trying to take us through the bush after any rabbit or squirrel or grouse that happens to catch her attention.”
“Hunter.” Red summed it up in one word.
“Hunter,” Ben agreed. “One of these six has to be the natural leader.” He indicated the team in front of him. “I just have to find out which one.”
“How you going to do that?” Red held the lead dog by the collar, kept the team in somewhat of a line as Ben got back on the sleigh.
“Just have to keep trying — let them go.”
Red stepped away from the dogs and they responded to Ben’s “Hike!” by bursting into a sprint down the trail in a mix of puppy excitement and natural instinct. Ben held firmly to the sleigh handles. The team was a bit faster than he had anticipated and without his normal balance was having difficulty staying on the sled.
Red liked what he saw, liked the line of dogs and sight of his dad’s sleigh and Ben determined to make a litter of puppies into a team. He liked the idea of it even more when the snow machine didn’t start and he had to pump the primer again and again and pull on the starter cord again and again and again, until the engine sputtered, caught, ran rough for a few seconds before Red set off to follow Ben, thinking two-stroke engines were never designed to run on alcohol.
“Fuckin’ Monica.” Betsy turned the car toward the pile of snow that marked the side of the street. “Bitch!” she screamed into the still frosted windshield. The heater was doing its best, but the engine wasn’t warm enough yet and Betsy had the heat control set to the floor, toward her feet. As soon as she had the car in park, she immediately pulled her icy foot from the brake pedal. At first she just lifted it, like a shorthaired dog standing on the step whining to be let back inside, one paw in the air and then another. “Fuckin’ Monica.” This time the words were more resigned — and more determined.
She vigourously rubbed a foot rested on her right knee, brushed the snow from the wet cotton sock, switched and rubbed the other foot. Her body vibrated with more than cold, more than the pain of fresh frostbite; she clawed a frozen chunk of snow from the heel of her right foot, fingernails angrily into the stiff cotton. “Who the fuck does she think she is?” Betsy pulled off the wet sock and threw it on the passenger-side floor, cupped her toes with both hands and applied pressure, firm, steady, strong, breathed in, held the breath in her lungs a full long second. Her body slowed, stopped vibrating.
Betsy’s anger calmed, settled into a simmer, a glowing red coal that spread its warmth and chill. “Her and her fuckin’ ideals. Who does she think she is anyway with her fucked superior morality.” She sat sideways on the seat, her back against the door. She banged her head against the glass, hard. “Fuck Monica!” she screamed into the empty car. “Fuck her and her Ben.” She banged her head again, harder. “Fuck Ben.” She calmed, an idea forming, banged her head again, not so hard, “Yeah, fuck Ben.”
Ben read slowly, carefully, enjoying the imaginary landscape of Yoknapatawpha County and the character Joe Christmas:
At last the noise and the alarms, the sound and fury of the hunt, dies away, dies out of his hearing. He was not in the cotton house when the man and the dogs passed, as the sheriff believed. He paused there only long enough to lace up the brogans: the black shoes, the black shoes smelling of Negro. They looked like they had been chopped out of iron ore with a dull axe. Looking down at the harsh, crude, clumsy shapelessness of them, he said “Hah” through his teeth. It seemed to him that he could see himself being hunted by white men at last into the black abyss which had been waiting, trying, for thirty years to drown him and into which now and at last he had actually entered, bearing now upon his ankles the definite and ineradicable gauge of its upward moving.
Benji disrupted the quiet afternoon, scraped a chair back and put his book on the table, “So, exactly what do you believe in?”
Ben laid Faulkner on his lap, his finger keeping his place at page 313. He noted the author of Benji’s book: Russell, and answered accordingly. “I am beginning to believe in nothing.” He nodded toward the red dust jacket with big white letters in front of Benji, “I suppose he would call me a nihilist.”
“Really?” Benji looked closely at his father’s face, looked for an explanation, looked for something that he might not have seen before. He couldn’t find anything, it didn’t make sense, didn’t match with his understanding of Ben. “But, you pray.”
Ben took greater notice of Benji’s book, beyond the author, he noted the title; Why I am Not a Christian.
“I suspect your question is more religious than philosophical. Doesn’t matter; it amounts to much the same thing.” Ben put a bookmark in place of his finger, turned behind and placed the yellowed novel on the little stand against the wall; it would be a while until he returned to it. “What I meant when I said I didn’t believe in anything was that I am not a liberal, not a socialist, not a conservative; I really believe, more now than ever before, if we ignore government, maybe it will go away.”
“We’ll just pretend it isn’t there, just like that, and the Americans will go home?”
“Almost” Ben answered. “If we don’t participate, they have no power. The only real power the Americans have is that we accept them.”
Rosie perked up, tuned in to the conversation over at the table. The light coming through Ben’s front window was almost white, most of it reflected from snow. Rosie didn’t even pretend that the reason she was at Ben’s was because of the light as she sewed beads to leather, making a little pair of moccasins for Rachel. She was here because everyone else was here, Ben and Benji at the table reading, Elsie on the computer and Rachel asleep. It had been quiet, peaceful quiet, family quiet, a collection of people together, comfortable and safe with each other, comfortable with silence.
“I don’t know about that.” Benji rubbed his chin. “If we ignore the Americans they will just do whatever they want with no one to say they shouldn’t. I think we should at least speak against tyranny.”
“And what are you going to say?”
“How about, ‘Go Home’.”
“And do you think they will?”
“Maybe if enough of us shouted it.”
“I doubt it.” Ben settled into the conversation, prepared for a long, patient explanation. “If you and all your friends and all their friends start shouting at the Americans, all that will happen is that they will become more resolved to stay and show you they can’t be pushed around. You will only escalate the conflict.”
Benji sat and waited for the obvious more that was to come.
Ben continued. “When you fight someone, you make that someone stronger, conflict always does that. And, it is not the natural state of being. We are not always in a state of for-and-against. That’s just a simple pattern of thinking. The world doesn’t divide itself into dichotomies, left, right — good, evil — us, them — black, white.”
“Well, I appreciate that everything isn’t black and white, there are
grey areas.”
Ben cut Benji off. “No, not grey. That is still applying the principles of black and white, just mashing the two together. When people speak of the grey area, they are still caught in the dichotomy of opposing forces. There is more than black and white, a whole rainbow of choices. We have to be careful not to get stuck in these ideas”
Ben paused, thought through what he needed to say “We get stuck in ideas that out of oppositional forces we will arrive at truth. Look what happens when we apply that idea to anything; to law, to education, to religion. All we end up with is more conflict.”
“But law works, don’t you think? Two sides bring their dispute to a judge who decides based on the arguments put forward. It sure beats trial by combat.”
“See, that’s the thing. We’ve all been taught to believe that law works. It doesn’t. The dispute isn’t resolved by the judge. The judge just picks a winner and a loser, and it’s a winner-take-all situation. Disputes are almost never only between two people, the whole community is affected by the conflict at some level, even if it is only an experience of rising tension. Law says there are always two sides to a story. Well, there are a whole lot more than two sides to anything, I don’t know about everyone else, but my world is multi-dimensional.”
Benji felt stung, as though the words were aimed at him. “What do you mean, you don’t know about everyone else. Of course we aren’t two-dimensional.”
“But I don’t know that.” Ben spoke softer. “I don’t know what others experience. I only have my own experiences to trust.”
Rosie hoped Ben would get those ideas across to Benji; she was about to offer a prayer, a little something to those entities that were her constant companions, something to the effect of “give Ben the words he needs.” But she thought better of it, it was best to let Ben find his own words, find his own way through to his son. Prayer was for important things, like health and happiness. It was always good practice to let the universe conspire to do whatever it was the universe conspired to do. It would give Ben what he wanted, the same as it perpetually gave her what she needed. Now if only Ben could show his son how to walk in the balance of all things. She threaded another half-dozen beads, shook them down to the leather, and continued her creation, glass, leather and thread; and good thoughts — these moccasins needed to have good thoughts put into them so that her granddaughter wouldn’t trip.
The Cast Stone Page 26