by Hadley Dyer
Bobby was leaning back on his chair legs, missing nothing. “I think I’ve seen him around,” I said.
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Half-Pint.”
Thankfully, the band started to play. It wasn’t metal, wasn’t country, wasn’t exactly rock or blues. It was a twang and a rumble and a steady, easy beat, and as they hit the bridge of the song, unexpectedly, between the second verse and the chorus, Mick looked up from his guitar, directly at me, and it was like a door opened, blowing winter air over my skin.
At the end of the set, Mick stepped up to the center microphone. “Thanks for letting me join you tonight, all you long fellows,” he said. “Before we go, another for the drunks at the back. But we need Bobby since this one is still new to me.”
Bobby pushed back his chair.
“And bring your friend,” Mick added, turning to tune his guitar.
“Let’s go, Half-Pint. You’ll know the words.”
Of course I knew the words, like everyone else in this corner of the world. As soon as the first chord rang out on Mick’s guitar, they flooded my head. But that didn’t mean I was prepared to sing to a packed bar. I’d never sung in front of an audience, other than carols in the elementary school Christmas pageants, and yet somehow there I was, onstage next to Bobby, still clutching one of my two pints, blinded by the stage lights and vibrating with panic.
Bobby’s voice was incredible. He may have looked like a biker but he sang like an Irish rover. He gave me a gentle push toward another mic as he rounded the first chorus.
For when I am far away
On your briny ocean tossed
Will you ever heave a sigh
Or a wish for me?
Beyond the lights, people were nodding and hooting and whistling. I whistled back. I whistled the entire next verse, the room growing still as I trilled the familiar melody. Oh, sure, Bobby could sing like an Irish rover—but I could whistle like a goddamn nightingale. It was the only real talent I had, and until then, it had been hard to imagine a more useless one.
Bobby joined me for the chorus and we did the rest of the song together, my whistling rising above his baritone. I couldn’t see Mick, but I could feel the thump of his foot on the floor behind me.
In the movie version of my life, I will raise my pint triumphantly as the music ends, setting off a roar from the crowd. They will demand an encore, something from Motown, naturally, and the entire bar will sing along. In reality, I was having a hard time shaking off the panic, despite the sloppy but enthusiastic applause.
I felt a hand on my arm. “That was amazing,” Mick said. His smile faded with the stage lights. “Or a really shitty thing to do to you.”
It all suddenly felt very precarious, the revelation that I was underage imminent. If there was any movie moment in the making, it would be someone who knew my parents parting the throng with shouts of “J’accuse!”
“No, it’s cool,” I said unconvincingly.
“I’m sorry. You struck me as fearless.” Reading the question on my face, he added, “You made a strong first impression.”
He placed his guitar on its stand. “Let’s get a drink. That beer looks like it’s warm.”
“I should probably go. I have to be up early tomorrow.”
This was not remotely true. They were touching up the paint at the lighthouse, so I didn’t have to go in at all.
“So do I.”
He took the glass from my hand, set it on a speaker. Waited.
“Okay,” I said. “But you’ll have to buy.”
Seven
He sat in the chair cornered to mine and slid a beer across the table toward me. “Were you the guy who said that a full pint only counted for one?” I asked.
He nodded. “Are you really nineteen?”
“I’m really twenty.”
“I guess I’ve hit that age where everyone born after 1969 looks like a kid to me.”
“Please. You’re barely old enough to be my babysitter.”
“Not barely. You know, we’ve . . .” He swirled his finger around his mouth. “But I don’t know your name.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be sorry. Scared the shit out of me, but . . .” I was sinking in my chair as though I could hide behind my pint. “Anyway.”
He fiddled with the broken end of a dart that was lying under the edge of the ashtray.
“George,” I said.
“Short for Georgia, Georgina?”
“It’s my middle name. Frances George.”
My father had been so sure I was going to be a boy that he didn’t allow my mother to talk about girls’ names and wasn’t prepared to change course after I was born sans le schlong. He let Mum tuck a girl’s name in front of it, but no one called me Frances.
Mick grinned.
“Shut up. Frances isn’t so bad.”
“I know. That’s my name. Probably spelled differently.”
“Your name is Francis? Your mother named you Francis.”
“Yeah—she did.”
“I thought everyone was calling you Mick.”
“Short for McAdams.” He nudged my elbow with his. “Did you ever tell that guy he was a lousy kisser?”
“Uh-uh.”
“It’s none of my business, but you should know that guys don’t start getting better until—well, until they’re old enough to be with women who are old enough to tell them that they need to do it better.”
The beer was soothing my nerves. Or maybe it was how our arms touched as we leaned in to hear each other and his breath fell on my cheek when he talked, how his shin grazed mine whenever his leg got jiggly under the table. “In case you’re worried, you’re more than fine,” I said. “Although you do like a run-on sentence.”
“You’re fine too. And a bit young for me.”
“Live a little, Francis.”
I pulled out my cigarette pack. He took it from me and lit two, passing one of them back. The cigarette was slightly moist from his mouth.
“Lived a lot, Frances,” he said. “Trying to rein it in now.”
We talked until the light flickered for last call. About how I couldn’t play the guitar after two years of trying to teach myself because I couldn’t get past the F or B-minor chords. Old-school country music composers that I’d never heard of but now wanted to listen to. How the colors of the sky at sunset—lilac, amber, coral, sometimes scarlet—reflected in the still waters of Lake Victoria in Kenya, a place I knew nothing about and now wanted to visit. About why I preferred to be called George and he preferred to be called Francis but ended up being called Mick wherever he went, and how “George and Francis” sounded like storybook characters who would get lost in Manhattan in one book and go on a safari in another. About how we’d both marry Tom Petty, given the chance, but would settle for Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip. Somehow I managed three good jokes and didn’t let on that the reason I’d never gone anywhere and done anything was because I wasn’t old enough to be in the room where we were sitting.
“One more?” he said, the lights flickering again.
“I think I’ve had enough.”
“You couldn’t be a cheaper drunk.”
I’d been nursing a warm pint for an hour.
A wide arse encased in tight, acid-washed jeans pressed against the edge of our table as one of the rougher-looking lady dart players made out with a guy who may or may not have been my toothless friend. It was hard to tell from that angle and with her entire head in his mouth. “Sorry,” she said over her shoulder to us as they shoved off, obviously going home together.
“I live with an old man, the owner of that pig,” Francis said to me. “Puts a damper on my social life.”
He was telling me this, I understood, to explain why he couldn’t invite me back to his place. What could I say? Not that I lived at home, that’s for sure. That I lived with someone too? He might think I meant a guy.
“I should go,” I said. “It’s late.”
I
was feeling awfully wobbly, given how long I’d made that last pint last and was supposed to be driving home, and I wondered whether it would be better or worse when I stood, but I couldn’t bring myself to be the first one to push back my chair, to move out of the halo of warmth around us. Francis didn’t get up either, just tossed the broken dart piece into the ashtray.
“Yo, Micky! Half-Pint!” Bobby yelled from across the room. “You want to go stand on the bottom of the sea?”
The incoming bay tide can overtake a man on a galloping horse, my mother says. I always picture a rogue wave rearing up and snatching anyone in its path, dragging them back into the sea, which is not how it goes. Point is, the water level rises fast.
“What’s fast?” Francis asked.
“In total, say, six hours?”
He laughed.
“No, but they’re the highest tides in the world! Every year someone needs to get rescued. People think they’re okay because they seem to have all this time, and then they’re cut off from the places where they can get back up to higher ground.”
“People like me, you mean. Come From Aways.”
“The sea will take you,” I said. “She’s thinking about it right now.”
We’d driven to the Baptiste Peninsula in the band’s van. “I probably shouldn’t be getting into a vehicle with strangers,” I said to Francis as we climbed into the back. “Oh well. I won’t rape you.”
“I notice you didn’t say you wouldn’t ax murder us,” Bobby called from the front.
When we got down to the shoreline, Bobby wandered off to perch on a large boulder like an ancient god of leather. The other guys walked ahead, taking the only flashlight with them. Or maybe it was more that Francis and I lagged behind and so we had to navigate the beach on our own by moonlight.
The wet slapping and sucking noises our shoes made in the muddy sand were almost embarrassing. We stepped over driftwood and rocks slick with seaweed, the tree-lined cliffs looming overhead. By sunrise all of this would be underwater.
The moon disappeared behind a cloud, the stars following behind it like they were dancing into the wings, and I could no longer see Francis, who was ahead of me. We stopped walking at the same time.
“Steady,” he said.
We were sort of laughing, but the darkness was unsettling. It felt as though we were drifting in space, as though the galaxy had winked off and there was nothing but infinite blackness around us.
It reminded me of the first time Dad took Matty and me outside in our pajamas to play hide-and-seek at night. “A tree’s a tree whether you shine a light on it or not,” he’d said. “Keep your cool until your eyes adjust. And stay clear of the skunks.”
Truth is, I’d been leaving on the hall light at bedtime. If my parents turned it off, I’d creep under my bed and sometimes stay there until morning. He was trying to teach us not to be afraid of the dark. But it was night that scared me; darkness marked the time to be afraid. I’d pull up the covers, mash my head into the pillow, and then my fears would arrive like worms wriggling out of the earth. What if the Soviet Union declared nuclear war? What if I never grew boobs? What if something happened to my family?
A hand swatted my hair. “Whup. Sorry.”
Then it was on my shoulder, sliding down and grasping my arm, and then I was holding on to him too and we were laughing again at our fumbling and nervousness in the dark.
“Steady,” I said.
His fingers traveled up my arm, faintly brushing the side of my breast, and traced along my throat. His face was close to mine and our mouths found each other, and when the clouds parted again I sensed the return of the light but did not open my eyes, just slipped my hands under his jacket and around his back—until the explosions erupted around us and Francis drop-pinned me to the mud.
Over his shoulder, the sky was filled with pink and orange and blue flames, fiery confetti raining down into the bay. “Are you seeing fireworks too?” Francis asked. “Or did I hallucinate myself into a movie?”
“Life’s a bad writer,” I said, gently pushing his elbow off my hair. My underside was groaning from tip to stern from its collision with the ground, but its complaints were smothered by his body running the length of mine, the feeling of his weight on me.
“I’m sorry, are you hurt?”
“Not at all. Thanks for taking the bullet for me.”
We lay there gazing at each other as the damp seeped into our clothes. I could have stayed like that all night, had Bobby not sprinted by. We helped each other up and followed him.
“What the hell are you doing?” Bobby was shouting when we reached the rest of the band, who were about to set off another round. I hadn’t noticed before that the bassist—whose name I think was Tommy—had brought a big backpack with him.
“Why did you think we came out to the beach?” Tommy said.
“To experience one of the world’s natural wonders?”
“No, to set off fireworks.”
Bobby turned to Francis. “I didn’t see this,” Francis said, holding up his hands. “If you put all that away, I didn’t see anything.”
“Jesus, Tommy,” Bobby said. “Mick is a cop, and it ain’t legal to set those off around here.”
That sound fireworks make on their descent back to earth? That was the soundtrack to my heart explosion, the fragments raining down upon my other vital parts. And then the questions started firing. A cop cop? In the valley? Municipal force or the RCMP? Did he—oh my god—did he know my dad?
“I’m not on duty,” Francis said. “But, yeah, it would be better if you didn’t break the law in front of me.”
By the time we got back to the parking lot at Long Fellows, it was nearly three and I was as sober as sin.
Francis walked me to my car. He didn’t look or move like any cop I’d ever met. Not that they don’t come in different shapes and sizes, but the job hadn’t taken over his body yet. He didn’t pull his shoulders back, stand on his heels, assess the scene before acting. How could that live-wire energy be contained by a uniform?
“She’s quite a ride,” he said, stepping back to take in the Town Car.
“He,” I said.
“Oh, he. Sorry.”
I was too tired to explain that his name was Abe because he’s a Lincoln, get it, ha-ha. Ha.
Francis felt around in his pockets. “Don’t have a pen, do you? Or are you in the book?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He knew something had shifted, just not why. “You don’t date cops.”
“Well . . . I’ve got a history you probably don’t want to know about.”
Excellent. Now I sounded like I had mental problems or a criminal record.
“I shouldn’t be getting involved with anyone,” Francis said. “Should stay focused on the job, settling in.”
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t say I didn’t like him, because I did. I liked him so much that knowing he was about to disappear was almost physically painful. But I was also very, very close to throwing up.
“Here’s a parting gift,” he said, pulling a stone from his pocket and placing it in my hand. It was about the size of a peach pit, salmon pink, and slightly shimmery. “From the bottom of Lake Victoria. Kind of a good-luck charm.”
“I can’t take your luck.”
“That’s okay. It’s not that lucky.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“Maybe one day you’ll go to Kenya and watch the sun set over the lake. You can exchange it for a luckier one if you need to.” He opened the car door for me. “Meantime, if you ever want to practice chords, you know where to find me. Or whistle.”
Eight
It was nearly dawn by the time I snapped off my bedroom lamp. I slept fitfully, in little sips, until I was awakened by my alarm—which I’d set on autopilot, forgetting I didn’t have to get up—then the phone ringing, the door slamming downstairs when my parents returned home, Matthew’s voice on the stairs. “I dunno,” he said. “I went to b
ed before she got home.”
A harrumph from my father.
I hauled myself out of bed, unsteady on my feet. I’d never felt more exhausted, was bizarrely hungover, given how little I’d had to drink, but needed to put up a good front. I stopped by Matthew’s room, where he was curled up with a comic and the mug of hot milk my mother made him every weekend morning. “Thanks for covering for me,” I said.
“I didn’t. I went to bed early so I wouldn’t have to cover for you.”
He looked glum.
“What’s wrong, buddy?”
“I was talking to Aunt Joanna this morning. She called to say Dad forgot to bring home a bunch of pamphlets they gave him at the hospital.”
“I’m sure she can mail them.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s— Do you know Dad’s not supposed to be home now? She offered to put him up in the city because the surgeon wanted him to stay near the hospital, but he said he had to sleep in his own bed. Now Mum has to keep driving him in.”
That my father’s obtuseness would require our parents to go out of town regularly might have been welcome news twelve hours earlier, but I’d vowed as I was peeling off my muddy clothes and hiding them at the bottom of my hamper that I would never leave the safety of the house again.
“Are you really shocked that Dad’s not letting people tell him what to do? Besides, can’t blame him for not wanting to stay with Aunt Joanna and all her grandkids. She doesn’t have room for him.”
To say nothing of her youngest son, Junior-Junior, aka Randall, son of Randall Junior, grandson of Randall Senior. He was between Matthew and me in age, and already in ardent pursuit of a life of incarceration.
My parents hadn’t talked much about the game plan with Matthew and me, but we knew that if Dad returned to active duty it would be a big deal for his detachment. He would be the first officer in the region, maybe even the entire country, to do the job with a prosthetic limb, and the staff sergeant was keen to see him do it. Sergeant Paul A. Warren wouldn’t wheel away from that. His job was his whole life, other than patrolling us kids.
“Don’t think I’m going to bed early every Friday so you can stay out all night,” said Matthew.