The Western Light

by Susan Swan

  After school, Ben and I liked to stand behind the wire fence and stare up at the prison’s Tuscan arches and rooftop belvedere. Some days we called out John’s name, begging him to talk to us. No answering call came from inside the prison. A weird silence hung about the place as if nobody lived there. And no guards appeared either. We were the children of hospital staff, so we were like no-see-em bugs as far as they were concerned. On other days, Ben and I would try to guess which window belonged to John. Ben thought they put him on the top floor, so he was out of the way, while I was sure he had the largest window on the first floor because he was a famous murderer.

  According to Ben, John’s cell window was too high for him to have a view. There was no way John could see the water, which ran between two long wooded headlands before it opened out into the Great Bay. Ben told me that John couldn’t see anything except other prisoners doing their business. From Ben, I also knew John was watched by guards and not by the attendants who took care of the harmless patients. The prisoners in Maple Ridge were expected to do chores like the harmless patients: under supervision, they milked the hospital cows, pushed rollers over the clay tennis courts, and stitched up the leather covers on baseballs in the Ball Shop with waxy pink string. In the fall, they harvested squash and pumpkins. No matter what time of year it was, the men at Maple Ridge worked all day. John was a creature of routine, just like Morley, except that Morley didn’t try to run away and John did.

  A Word about Ben

  I should point out that Ben wasn’t interested in John because John was a famous killer. Ben admired John because he wanted to grow up and play for the Detroit Red Wings. Unfortunately, Dr. Shulman wanted Ben to become a psychiatrist, like him. He often complained to me about Ben’s marks. “My son will never get into medicine with a B-plus average,” Dr. Shulman said. “Can you help him get an A-plus, like you, Mary?”

  I did what I could, although Ben was more interested in playing road hockey with the Bug House boys than doing his schoolwork. But he never stopped hoping they would take him on, even though Sam’s gang said Ben was too fat and that he talked with a lisp like a girl. Sam was the worst. In school, he would poke Ben’s arm with a steel-tipped ruler. Or he’d yank a handful of Ben’s red curls at recess and hiss, “Eat my dust, you tub of lard!”

  Inside the Bug House

  One day in late May when a rhesus monkey, called Able, and a squirrel monkey, named Baker, rode off in the nose cone of a Cape Canaveral missile, Ben and I took our usual shortcut through the Bug House grounds. In no time, Ben was far ahead. Every so often he stopped and waited for me to catch my breath and then he ran off again. It was true that Ben was on the plump side, but he was light on his feet, the way some fat people are. I found it hard to keep up with him. Then, too, going downhill for me was harder than going up. I had to pick my way carefully, throwing my right hip to the side and lifting up Hindrance. “We can do it,” I whispered and Hindrance hissed back, “Fingers crossed, Mouse.” I tried not to think of what my grandmother would say. She was against me taking excursions of any kind, except when the weather was nice and then she made me go at a snail’s pace so I wouldn’t get exhausted.

  I stopped to catch my breath near the hospital’s vegetable garden where some patients were lumbering around like zombies with wooden hoes. It was a humid, overcast day in late June and I was panting hard, so at first I didn’t see John. But there he was, on the far side of the vegetable patch. Sib Beaudry was supervising a work crew made up of patients. John was handing down sod in the back of the truck, while Sib yelled at them to work faster. John looked hot and tired in his neatly pressed hospital overalls, and I thought of his hands, with their nails as shiny and clean as a woman’s, wrestling with the grassy lumps of dirt.

  He didn’t look my way, and I stole closer and hid behind a tree to watch. When his group took a work break, he jumped off the truck and started to play his harmonica. A few sadsounding chords of “Red River Valley” floated over to me. Sib and the other patients stopped their work to listen. Some of the patients in the vegetable garden listened, too. I couldn’t hear what Sib was saying, although Sib’s lips were moving rapidly up and down. Suddenly, John said in a loud, scoffing voice, “If Sib Beaudry were Santa Claus, there wouldn’t be a Christmas.” Some of the patients laughed. Now all the patients were laughing. I giggled, too. “Hey, Pilkie! Ready to cool off?” Sib snatched John’s harmonica and beckoned to a guard who tied John to a leather rope dangling from Sib’s waist. Then the guard uncoiled a hose hanging off a shed and turned it on. The water bounced off John in all directions, splintering into miniature rainbows that glistened orange, yellow, red, and blue, then faded and glistened and faded again. John didn’t flinch; he stared down the hose wearing the same calm, self-satisfied expression he wore at the train station, as if he was saying, Do your worst. I can take it. Or maybe that was wrong. Maybe the look on his face meant he believed he deserved to be treated badly. The thought made me shiver. Now the hose was turned on full force; it soaked the front of John’s overalls, turning the fabric dark with moisture. He closed his eyes. He wasn’t ducking or trying to turn away. Of course, he couldn’t run anywhere, not when he was attached to Sib by the leather leash. But he could have tried to protect himself. The other patients went back to laying sod, afraid they were going to be sprayed too.

  “Please fight back!” I whispered.

  Now the guard lifted the hose to John’s face. The spray of water hit John between the eyes, flattening his cowlick. Immediately, John’s expression changed to a look so threatening it stopped my breath. Or was I seeing things? Now John was wearing his calm, self-satisfied expression again. “Had enough, Pilkie?” Sib asked. John looked at his feet and didn’t answer. The guard pointed the hose at John’s mouth until he doubled over spitting. When he recovered himself, Sib and the guard hooted.

  “Tell us, Pilkie. Had enough yet?”

  His lips opened. He must have been saying “yes,” because the guard untied him and pushed him over to the truck. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt and started handing down pieces of sod again. I felt ashamed of myself for spying on him, and it struck me that all of us — Ben and me and the Bug House boys — were guilty of a mindless indifference. How could we run around in freedom while John’s life was worse than anyone imagined? Nobody except his jailors knew what happened to him. He could have been in China as far as the people in Madoc’s Landing were concerned.

  BEN RAN OUT OF THE maple bush, swooping his arms and singing, “Up in the air, Junior Birdmen.” Sam Mahoney was right behind making finger goggles around his eyes. He waited while Ben ran over and whispered: “The Bug House boys want to show us something at the icehouse.”

  “I don’t play with meanies,” I whispered back.

  “Please, Mary? Pretty please with sugar on it!”

  “Pretty please sounds babyish. I don’t play with babies either.”

  Ben’s face crumpled.

  “Okay,” I said, knowing I would regret it.

  BY ONE OF THE COTTAGES, where some of the harmless patients lived, Sam motioned for us to crouch down under a window. We did what he said and peered in at the patients. We couldn’t see them very well because a cloud of cigarette smoke hid their shoulders and heads, but their legs were visible in workpants and these truncated appendages dangled from benches or stomped back and forth. As we stared, the men’s hands disappeared up into the smoke, and then slowly descended through the air to rest again on their trousers. Some of their boots were so worn the owner’s toenails poked out through the leather.

  “Guess what,” I whispered to Ben and Sam. “I just saw John Pilkie get soaked with a hose.”

  “You did not!” Sam sneered.

  “I did so!” I retorted. “Sib Beaudry did it.”

  No sooner were the words out of our mouths than a pair of trousered knees bent outwards and two workboots clomped towards us. “Up in the air, Junior Birdmen! Up in the air, upside down!” Sam ran off whooping.
Ben jogged after Sam while I lurched after Ben, carrying my satchel with my composition.

  DOWN BY THE ICEHOUSE, SAM and Ben huddled with the Bug House boys. When he saw me, Sam tapped the shoulder of a boy standing on an overturned milk carton. The boy jumped down. “If you want to see, you have to pay twenty-five cents,” Sam said in a low, quiet voice. Ben handed over a quarter. With Ben’s help, I got one leg on the carton and then I pulled up Hindrance while the boys talked in whispers behind my back. Inside, Sal’s cousin, Archie Beauchamp, was marching up and down between blocks of straw-covered ice singing, “Old Macdonald Had a Farm.” The goofy way he was swinging his arms in time to his song suggested he wanted to be funny. According to Sal, Archie was locked up for asking women to kiss his scalded face, but Ben told me that Archie was put away for starting a fire in a schoolhouse that burned off his own lips and ears. It struck me that John’s face should be scarred too, considering.

  “Old Archie whipped the Christly buggers, EE-EYE-EE-EYEOH with an ouch ouch here and an ouch ouch there …” Archie opened his mouth so wide I thought I could hear his teeth chattering.

  “Sam, let Archie out,” I cried. “He’s freezing to death.”

  “Make her get down!” Sam shouted. “She forgot to whisper!”

  One of the boys grabbed my shoulder and, because I was not as steady on my feet as I wanted to be, I pitched forward, dragging Hindrance like a dead weight. I hit the sandy earth, palms first and, when I rolled onto my back, the Bug House boys stood over me, their eyes wide as if they were looking at a giant earth worm. At first I thought they were gawking at my underpants because my skirt was hitched up around my chest. I yanked down my dress but their eyes remained glued to something below my head. Then I understood. It was Hindrance. Nobody except my family, along with some nurses and doctors, had seen Hindrance up close. To be honest, Hindrance was pretty withered-looking. The outer muscles of my left thigh would get strong again, but my atrophied muscles never did. Those muscles were wasted, practically useless.

  Oh, Hindrance, I’m sorry, I thought, gazing up at the sky. I didn’t mean for this to happen. For once, Hindrance didn’t answer.

  “Pull down her pants,” one of the boys shouted. “Let’s see her hole!”

  “Maybe cripples don’t have holes,” another boy said. He nudged Hindrance with his toe and a great wash of hopelessness passed through me. Ben couldn’t take on Sam and the Bug House kids by himself, and we both knew it. When I looked up again, Sam had on my cowboy hat and he was limping around in front of me, his weight sinking down on his right leg the way my weight did when I had to lift up Hindrance. In his hand, he held my composition. A stab of anger brought me back to myself. “Sam, give that back!”

  Sam told me to shut my mouth. In a squeaky imitation of a girl’s voice, he read out its title: “‘A Short History of My Great-Grandfather, an Oil Baron of Canada West.’ Well, la-de-dah! Mary thinks well of herself, don’t she?”

  Before I could stop myself, out popped the curse words that Big Louie had used in church: “Bugger off —!”

  “Take it back, Peg Leg.”

  “No. And I won’t lend you my coloured pencils anymore either.”

  Alarm flashed across Sam’s face. It strikes me now that Sam was remembering I was the girl who sat across the aisle from him in school; and, not only that, his partner in the square dancing class every Friday afternoon when he would steer me carefully across the floor so I didn’t stumble. He would politely allemande left with me and dosey-doe, before leading me back to one of the blond plywood chairs set against the gymnasium wall. Throughout our awkward dance steps, I would feel slightly ashamed but proud. Sam was not without his charms. He liked to laugh and he wore his hair in a smoothly woven ducktail, like John Pilkie, although Sam had been wearing it that way before John came to town, so it was more likely he was copying Elvis Presley than anybody else.

  “You’re going to be really sorry now, Peg Leg!” Sam shrieked and tossed my composition up into the air. Ben and I watched helplessly as the wind picked up the pages and blew them into the harbour, where they bloated with water and sank.

  “Mary is a looney,” Sam cried. “And we know what happens to them. Don’t we, gang?”

  The shrieking boys knocked Ben down and crowded round me, sneering and giggling. They were so close I could hear the dirty things they were saying about me under their breath and smell their sour boy smells, the stink of sweat and dirty socks and embarrassing pee dribbles on their underwear. Then their snickers stopped. Sam held up something that glinted in the sunlight. My spirits sank: it was a hypodermic syringe, the type with a sharp point and transparent cartridge that let you see the fluid inside. Sam must have stolen it from the hospital infirmary. The sight of its glistening metal needle made me swoon with terror.

  While we watched, Sam took off his sweater and twisted it into a rope, and it came to me that Sam intended to act out his own dumb version of the way hospital guards handled violent patients. Sal had described in detail how Sib and the other guards choked a troublesome patient with a towel until the patient couldn’t breathe; then they injected him with a drug to calm him.

  From behind, something woolly and soft fell like a lasso around my neck. The touch of Sam's sweater set me off. I screamed Blue Murder. And, as if from far off, I heard my own voice yelling so loud and high I sounded like a whistling kettle blowing hot, wet steam. The boys stared down at me in shock. They were too surprised to hear the new sound, down by the harbour, where a hospital truck was driving along the lower road. The rumble of its engine grew louder and the heads and shoulders of men in the back of the truck came into view. Suddenly, John’s head emerged among the patients holding rakes and hoes. He waved, but I couldn’t wave back because somebody had pinned my arms behind my back.

  “You little bastards, I’ll skin you alive and hang you out to dry!” John cried. In a single, sure-footed motion, he threw himself over the side of the truck and took great, leaping strides in my direction. He seemed to fly up off the ground as if a tornado was blowing him my way.

  “It’s the hockey killer!” Sam cried. “Let’s vamoose!”

  Sam’s gang galloped away screaming. “That’s right, scram!” John shook his fist, his black, pop-out eyes fierce. “And don’t come back or you won’t know what hit you!” He collected himself and, smiling his big dimpled smile, he placed his hands under my armpits and lifted me up.

  “Mary, nobody’s going to bother you now,” he said, holding me upright until I stopped shaking. “I figure it was a Mexican standoff. Am I right?”

  I gave him a wan smile. In M.B.’s Book of True Facts I’d noted that a Mexican standoff referred to bandits who ran away instead of staying to fight, but maybe John didn’t know about that.

  “Good for you. The world would be a bad place if it was run by little boys, eh?” He brushed the dirt off my dress. “Just a few grass stains. Nothing serious.” He put my cowboy hat back on and picked up the first page of my composition, the only one that hadn’t blown into the water. “Did you throw away Mary’s homework, son?” he asked Ben.

  “Mr. Pilkie, it was Sam Mahoney’s gang.” I pointed at the icehouse. “And they locked Archie Beauchamp in there.”

  John loped over and jiggled the icehouse lock. Down the road, the work truck stopped. Patients holding rakes and hoes hung over the sides watching while Jordie and Sib ran our way, angry looks on their faces. I stopped breathing. Was John going to get beat up again?

  “What’s going on, John?” Jordie called. Breathing hard, he and Sib pushed us aside.

  “A man’s freezing in there,” John said. “Let’s get him out, eh?”

  Jordie climbed up on the milk carton to look. “Archie’s in there all right,” Jordie said. John jiggled the lock again, and Archie stumbled out, tears leaking from his strange flat eyes, staring out from the burned skin of their sockets. Ben and I watched him, our mouths open. It wasn’t only Archie’s sad, scarred face that hypnotized us. We had never see
n a grown man cry before.

  “Hey, Mary!” John tipped his chin towards the road. Go home, he was signalling. I nodded. Yet I couldn’t move my feet.

  “Quit your bawling, Archie,” Sib said, sneering. “Act like a man.”

  “Hey, Archie. It’s not your fault.” John clapped Archie on the back. “Sib doesn’t have the courage to pick on somebody his own size.”

  Sib grabbed John’s neck in a wrestling hold and squeezed hard. “Take back what you said, you crazy bastard!”

  “Want a ciggy, John boy?” Jordie stuck a lit cigarette in John’s mouth and John puffed on it nonchalantly, staring out at the harbour as if he was somewhere pleasant and nice. Sib’s elbow was still squeezing John’s neck. The droll effect of a man smoking, while he was being half-strangled to death, made everybody laugh. Sib dropped his arms, muttering, and Jordie offered him a cigarette, too. Soon they were all puffing away on their smokes as if they didn’t have a care in the world.

  When John realized Ben and I were watching, he smiled sheepishly and tossed down his cigarette. Throwing up his arms, he flung himself into a cartwheel. Now his legs flew up, and for a breathless second, his torso froze into a giant V shape. Then his legs tilted dangerously forward and he started walking on his hands. The sight hit me in the stomach. The manly grace of him. His shapely, dark head. His shiny cowlick. Then, worse luck, I could feel my cheeks burning. Gravity had pulled the cuffs of John’s baggy workpants up his legs, exposing the dark hairs growing on the muscles of his calves. And now without warning, the feeling in my stomach moved down there, which is how Sal described the most womanly part of us, as if she was referring to Australia and its position vis-à-vis the rest of the world. I averted my eyes hoping he wouldn’t notice.