by Lisa Moore
Slaney was offered a violin and he played it like a fiddle, jigs and reels, and then something slow and full of need that he made up as he went along. Ada had rolled over on her side now, her head in her hand, and she stared up at him.
All the need he’d felt in prison came out of the wooden instrument under his chin. All the longing, terse and barbed and broken, hung over the bonfire. The flames near the crackled black logs were blue and flicking. It seemed like the fire breathed up and sank down with the music. The ocean roared and shushed. Someone had bongo drums; someone had a tin whistle. There were a few stringed instruments made of gourds. A silver flute. Everybody playing together, improvising. Looking up into each other’s eyes so they could all know where they were going with it. Slaney leading the way, sawing gently, tapping his foot, urging them on by nodding yes and yes.
If Slaney had a reason for going on this trip in the first place, maybe it was this: so he could be on a Colombian beach playing all his sadness out under the stars, stoned out of his mind. He was there for the sense of abandon he felt.
That’s why, he said out loud when he stopped playing. Ada had stood up and brushed the sand away from her elbow and dropped into the empty chair next to him. She was wearing army fatigues someone had loaned her, the fabric faded from washing. She rubbed her shoulder back and forth against his shoulder. She was flushed and grinning.
What’s why?
What, he asked.
You just said, That’s why. What’s why?
You’re why, he said.
I’m why what?
You’re why. You’re why, he said. His flimsy lawn chair, with its chrome frame and woven nylon strips of plaid, collapsed under him then. He stood, with great effort, and the trees behind them lurched sideways and he bequeathed the unharmed violin to the man next to him and took the flashlight and headed off to find the lye pit.
The flashlight beam bounced and jiggled over rocks and tree roots and then the swaying beam found a girl with shiny black hair tumbling down one shoulder. She was sitting on a wooden chair, her knees apart, her boots planted firmly. She was plucking a chicken and she had a kerosene lantern that lit her like a painting by Rembrandt, golden and shadowed. The denuded, incandescent and pimpled bird hung by the claws from the girl’s raised fist.
There was a tree stump and the axe stood up in it, the blade sunk into the blond wood that was stained with blood. A chicken’s head lay in the dirt, and when the flashlight beam strayed to it, the chicken’s yellow eyeball with its black pupil and red warty-looking eyelid stared at Slaney, unblinking. The eye looked full of consternation and acceptance.
The woman spoke a few words to him and he told her: No entiendo. But she kept talking.
White feathers filled the air. They seemed forever suspended in the beam of his light.
She was pointing toward the lye pit and kept talking and plucking though he didn’t understand a word of what she was saying. But he knew the gist. He had a good idea she was talking about the bathroom. The crude toilet was an entrance to hell. He must be very careful.
She was saying life is magnificent. Freedom was running in his blood now, it was part of him. Nobody could take it away. She was reminding him of the light on the water, how bedazzling it had been on the way down and the crack of the sails when the wind picked up and the horizon and the smell of salt in the air and the fish they’d eaten the minute they pulled it out of the water and how fish as fresh as that could affect your dreams. She was saying Hearn had been right about one thing: they were no longer who they had been before.
They had been changed.
She warned him that once he was back in Canada he must forget Hearn. They should go their separate ways. Hearn was weak and dangerous, she said. Hearn had lied about Lopez and the first trip. Lopez knew everything. How they had failed the first time. What they owed.
You owe so very much, the woman said. She asked him did he think about his mother. What this was doing to his mother.
The feathers stirring in the little beam of the flashlight.
Watch out for the girl, she said. But it was unclear if she meant he should protect Ada, as a guardian angel might, or be afraid of her.
Everything the woman said came out all at once, every thought overlapping, currents of converging thoughts and tidal pulls and he was following her drift. She was speaking Spanish very quickly and pointing toward the lye pit, but what she communicated came in a gush of interior voice that Slaney understood without effort.
Then a man came out of the woods behind the woman and stood like a sentinel with his rifle, his hand on her shoulder.
What are you looking for? the man asked. For a second Slaney believed he had broken through the language barrier once and for all. Because he understood. Then he realized the man had spoken in English.
Looking for the bathroom, Slaney said. He thanked them with everything he had in him. He hoped they understood his sincerity. He thanked them in English and Spanish and he turned and stumbled on through the woods to the pit.
The three of them ended up sleeping in the same small tent, Ada in the middle between Carter and Slaney. He’d hit the ground hard after he stumbled through the tent flap. The ground rose up to meet him and fell with the rhythm of the sea. Great swells lifted him and let him slide down.
Slaney could not remember getting into the tent but he woke in the middle of the night with an amorphous terror pounding through him.
Nothing stirred outside except the surf. The ocean roared up over the beach and drew back. Carter was snoring the clotted, wavering honk of the trumpeter swan.
In the beat while Carter inhaled lived the hope the noise would stop. But Carter kept snoring.
There was the terror and then Slaney felt himself falling, as though from a great height, falling backwards into forever, arms and legs flailing. Below him, his friends had stretched a white sheet that glowed in the dark as the dancers’ white clothes and teeth had glowed under the black light at Hearn’s party. They were waiting to catch him. But as he got closer he realized the white circle was an aerial view of the lye pit. He was heading straight for it.
The fall gathered velocity the closer he got to the ground and finally he thumped down hard and his heart burst out of his chest and he passed out until morning.
He woke with his arm wrapped tight around Ada’s waist, her bum sunk into his hips, his cock hard against her. He got up and tore the tent flap open and a shaft of bright light struck him in the face.
Slaney walked down the beach until he was sure he was alone and took off all his clothes and ran into the surf.
He strode forward until he was up to his chest and he watched for the right wave, rolling in from the horizon. The wave rose higher and higher, sunlight blazing through the thick glassy wall of it, the crumbling white crest plowing toward him. When it reached him he threw out his arms and let it carry him into shore.
Animism
On the first two days sailing up from Colombia, along the Pacific coast, Carter maintained a profound level of drunkenness. The drinking gave him a level gaze and his face slackened and his speech became prim and elegant. The effort of becoming sober for the visit ashore with Lopez had withered him.
It had been a mistake for him to get that sober. Now he was saying he didn’t believe the man’s military credentials.
He said that the lobster, which he had gorged on, dipping each morsel in a bowl of drawn butter, had disagreed with him. He thought he had been poisoned.
Carter told them there was a religion of animism practised in the region where they’d partied. He’d read about it in National Geographic. A mix of witchcraft and Christianity that made use of hallucinogenic roots, ground to powder.
Some of these rituals involved the ancient art of voodoo, he said.
Carter believed they’d given him something altering on the night of the party. Slipped some
thing in his whisky. He’d given up on the idea of drying out as soon as Lopez offered some wine after lunch.
Don’t mind if I do, he’d said. Now he believed they’d been trying to kill him. A formality crept into his diction that frightened Slaney. Then he became very sick.
I have acute indigestion, he said. He was flushed and pale by turns, clammy and sour-smelling, vomiting every hour or so. Ada said his temperature had reached one hundred and four. He’d broken out in a rash and the touch of the bedsheets hurt his skin.
Ada screamed for Slaney and he found that Carter had fallen out of the bed. He was wearing a Stones T-shirt and nothing else. His grey pubic hair a shock.
He sees rats, Ada said. The three of them stared at the bedsheets.
They were all over me, Carter said. The T-shirt was soaked through and Slaney helped him take it off and then he was cold and shivering. He collapsed, banging his head against the wooden bed rail, opening a gash on his cheekbone.
But he kept drinking. Carter believed the alcohol would kill whatever bug he had. He called out for whisky and Ada gave it to him. He slept deeply and sometimes they couldn’t shake him awake. Slaney and Ada had to sail the boat by themselves and nurse Carter. She was determined and waxen from lack of sleep.
He’d started muttering to himself. Sometimes he looked straight through them and spoke about a teapot with a crack. He asked them to bring him a particular teapot and grew agitated when he saw it wasn’t the one he wanted. He called out to his wife through the night.
We’ve got to get him to a doctor, Ada said. I am frightened out of my wits. She had her fists in her hair near her temples and she slid her back down the wall until she was hunched in the corner.
Please, David, she said. A fever like that could kill him. That’s how my mother died. It was so fast. Please.
We’ll get caught, Slaney said. They were off the coast of Nicaragua. He could go in there and try to find a doctor, but they would get caught. She looked up at him from the floor, her eyes glassed over with tears, her nose pink at the tip. She was pitiable and commanding.
Or brain damage, she said.
Okay, I’ll bring him in, Slaney said. I’ll get him to a hospital or clinic or whatever they have. First thing in the morning.
Oh, David, she said, and she rested her forehead against her wrist and sobbed.
The dread that coursed through him straightened his posture. He stood upright and rigid. He must have looked like he had been called to attention.
Why are you with him? he asked.
That doesn’t matter now, she said.
But the fever broke the next morning and Carter became docile and grateful. He drank broth, cupping the bowl with both hands, slopping it all over the sheets. He looked like a mendicant or he looked cursed, munching the soda crackers Ada handed him one by one.
He stayed in bed except to go to the toilet. He hardly spoke to them. After three days Carter was up again, on the deck. Two days later he had fully recovered. By then they were sailing past Mexico. One beautiful morning Slaney found them necking in the galley. Ada had a frying pan on the stove and a pat of butter slid across the black surface, sizzling.
Darling, it’s beautiful on deck, Ada told Carter. Go up and get some sunshine, I’ll call you down when the pancakes are done.
She picked up the chrome bowl with the batter and the whisk chimed against the sides. She had been restored. The haggard fortitude that she’d called on to keep Carter alive had disappeared. She was girlish again.
I feel kind of light-headed, Ada said. Slaney wedged himself into the bench at the table. Ada swivelled more butter over the hot frying pan and put it down on the gimballed stove and poured the batter in and the smell filled up the galley.
I had a flying dream last night, she said. Ever had one of those, David?
I slept the sleep of the dead, he said.
Watch this, Ada said. Are you watching? She jerked the frying pan and the pancake flew up and flipped in the air and she caught it.
Did you see that? Ada asked. She turned to him holding out the pan. Her face was lit up.
You’re making me hungry, Slaney said. She tried to open the bottle of honey, hitting the metal lid with a butter knife, holding the jar between her knees.
Give it here, Slaney said.
No.
Pass it over. He got up to wrestle it away from her but she turned her back and they were roughhousing over the honey and he had her pinned against the counter, but she was curled around the jar with her back to him.
I can do it, she said, and she was laughing. They were both laughing. Then the lid gave and they were embarrassed. They both blushed and Slaney stepped back and she poured out the honey and twisted the jar. A line of it wiggled over her knuckles and she licked it.
I am grateful, she said. I know what getting a doctor would have meant.
They were looking at each other, and her strange eyes, blue and hazel, and what the hell was she doing, she was only nineteen and she seemed without guile.
Slaney thought there was something true in her. He could not understand how she had come to be there with an old drunk. They were overtaken by stillness. The sea was still and there wasn’t a breath of wind.
Carter yelled for Slaney to get up on deck and she had the open jar of honey and they were both self-conscious. Slaney sat down at the table and picked up his knife and fork. He held them upright in his fists.
There, she said. She put the plate in front of him.
Fluffy, Slaney said.
Timing is the thing, she said.
Slaney, Carter yelled. I need you up here. He sounded sober and amazed.
Caroline
Hello, Staff-Sergeant Patterson, O’Neill’s secretary said. She stood up from the desk and left the telephone, lit up and ringing, to lead Patterson down the corridor to the screening room. He’d been following the sailboat’s progress over the weeks and he’d heard about the hurricane on the news.
Superintendent O’Neill is grateful you could come in on such short notice.
That’s my job, Patterson said.
And how’s Mrs. Patterson? the secretary asked. She was trotting down the corridor and Patterson had to rush to keep up. His wife would be making crayon shavings with a cheese grater. The children put the shavings between sheets of wax paper and his wife ironed them, melting the crayon, and they cut out autumn leaves to decorate the classroom.
Mrs. Patterson is fine, thank you.
Still reading her poetry, I guess? she asked. The secretary spoke as if she and Patterson were in collusion about how to deal with his fey and capricious wife.
Patterson had driven Delores through the New England states last year to see the fall colours. She was fond of Emily Dickinson and they’d visited the poet’s cottage.
Oh look, her inkwell, Delores had cried out, startling the other people crowded together in the little rooms on the tour.
The guide had said, Don’t touch. Delores spun around and her hand flew to her cheek as if she’d been slapped.
No, no, I wouldn’t, she blurted. But she held up the inkwell before her like a weapon.
He’d been married for just over twenty years and it was a solid and narrowly focused marriage. Delores taught kindergarten and had kept her figure doing calisthenics and he could trust her to cook meals he loved; or he had grown to love the meals she cooked. She had lots of girlfriends, a rich social life with which he had very little to do.
The poetry mattered to her and she wrote it and went off to meetings and came back tipsy and raw. He didn’t know what went on there but when she returned from a meeting she was distracted and amorous, or obscurely hurt and closed off.
He loved that there were things he didn’t know about her. He couldn’t say what made her tick or why she stayed with him but he felt lucky to live in her orbit.
The soap and candles and chocolates she brought home when kindergarten was over for the year.
The ardent and unformed love the school children had for her — he’d once witnessed a mobbing, each child hugging her waist, digging in against one another for a handful of his wife, and Delores on tiptoe with a box of Popsicles raised over her head.
Their son, Basil, was a cadet in the RCMP, and Patterson would not brag. He would not boast, but it was an effort. And their daughter had broken his heart.
The secretary knocked on a door at the end of the hall and listened and opened it.
Superintendent O’Neill, Staff-Sergeant Patterson has arrived, she said.
He’d been called into the office and there were men with white shirts and ties standing in the dark room and they were facing the screen.
Patterson, O’Neill said. The men all turned to look at him. Come in, Patterson.
O’Neill and Simmonds and Tony Belmont were there and they had called in a few guys Patterson hadn’t met before and O’Neill introduced him. Patterson looked them in the eyes as he shook their hands. He repeated their names, Greenwood, Capardi, Bennett, and Hughes, but he felt the magnetic pull of the screen.
It was a juddering picture full of snow. Washes of emptiness. Grit. There was nothing to see.
We think they’re gone, O’Neill said. They may be lost at sea. We’ve lost them. The screen turned to sand and reconfigured. The picture swished away and came back and the whole image vibrated like the pelt of a frightened animal.
What’s wrong with the signal? Patterson asked.
They hit Hurricane Caroline and we’ve lost the picture, Greenwood said. They are right in the middle of that thing. It’s very doubtful a vessel of that size will get through it.
The device must have been damaged, Bennett said.
There’s no signal, O’Neill said. There’s been a lot of wreckage along the Pacific coast, they’ve got flooding, fires, twenty-four people injured, twelve deaths reported since September 4, the count is rising. Fishing boats crushed. Cattle. Crops destroyed. We’ve got calls out all over the coast. But they haven’t turned up. We think they must have been hit by the storm early this morning.