“Bullshit,” I said, having never seen Mom even tipsy.
“Cross my heart,” Mick said. “But she got tired of waiting for him and went home. He tried to phone her when he got back, but she said she was beat and wet and wanted to go to sleep. The next morning, your ma-ma-oo came home and asked him who made the snow angels. Your dad went to the window, and the whole front yard was covered with them. Your mom doesn’t even remember making them, that’s how toasted she was. ‘That’s when I knew I was going to marry her,’ your dad told me.”
It didn’t sound like them at all. I thought Mick was mixing them up with two completely different people, and I said so.
“You can ask them,” Mick said. “Go ahead.”
“No way. They’d kill me.”
“Blackmail material,” Mick said with a wink.
We had a lot of time on our hands. Mom had said that she wanted to reach Kemano before us, so we hung out at the springs. Mick got out first, sitting on the edge of the tub, lighting another cigarette. He chain-smoked. I don’t think there was a moment when I saw him without a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. When he lifted his arm, I could see the pale scar along his side where the bullet had grazed his ribs.
After hanging out at the hot springs, we toweled off and Mick had another smoke. I hunted between the logs on the beach for shells, but didn’t find any. About noon, we went back to the crab traps. When he pulled up the first crab trap, he whooped, delighted. It was so full, there were crabs clinging to the outside. “Ready to jump in our pot!”
The crabs skittered on the bottom of the boat. We put them in buckets. I hated the sound of their claws rasping on the plastic. I hated the way Mom and Dad cooked them, the way they rattled against the pot as they were boiled to death. I liked it best when Mick cooked them because he stuck a knife through their bodies first, one quick thrust.
The next crab pot and the next were full too. Mick began to throw crabs back in the water. His whole face glowed with satisfaction. The last pot was so heavy, his arms were bulging with effort. The boat tipped, and I thought we’d flip. As the pot came over the rim of the boat, a halibut inside began to flap. There were three crabs clinging to it.
“Far out,” Mick said, panting.
“How’d it get through such a tiny hole?” I said.
Mick shrugged. “Don’t touch it. It means either really good luck or really bad luck, I think. We’ll have to ask someone. But meanwhile, there you go, big fella.” Mick opened the pot and dumped the halibut back in the water. It spiraled into the darkness, its pale white belly flashing as it sank.
“What’d you do that for?” I said.
“It’s a magical thing,” Mick said. “You aren’t supposed to touch them if you don’t know how to handle them.”
“It’s just a halibut.”
“Do you know how it got in the pot?”
I shook my head.
“Then leave it alone. We got enough crabs anyway. Let’s get going.”
He wouldn’t let me drive any more because I didn’t know the area. The mountains stretched on and blurred together. As the previous night of sleeplessness began to take its toll, my eyes drifted shut.
“Afternoon, sleepyhead,” Mick said, shaking my shoulder. “Day’s almost finished.”
The air had changed, was sharp and made me shiver. He’d put a sleeping bag over me while I napped and I pushed it aside, stretching. Mountains untouched by clear-cuts, roads or houses rose fiercely high. The bald rocks, scraped by the Ice Ages, were topped by glaciers that melted in the sunshine, the water glittering down the grey cliffs. A sparse treeline started halfway down, thickened into forest, then ended in lush green carpets that fell into the ocean.
“We’re near Kemano,” Mick said. “Look up there. That’s your ba-ba-oo’s trapline on that mountain. I think Al has it now.”
At the base of the mountain, there was a stretch of flat space that ended in a point. A square patch glinted like mica in the sunlight, a bright glowing spot swallowed by the surrounding dark green of the trees.
“Can you see it?” Mick said. “That’s where we’re staying.”
I picked up the binoculars. The house was still just a fuzzy patch. I searched up and down the beach. A tiny figure waited on the beach. I caught glimpses of buildings through the trees. The figure raised its arm and waved. As we got closer, I could see it was Mom in a kerchief. They must have passed us while we were at the hot springs, I thought. Mom waited until Mick landed the speedboat against the shore before she asked, “Did she give you any trouble?”
“Nope,” Mick said. “Look, we brought crabs.”
“I saw seals and ducks too,” I butted in after I jumped out of the boat. The beach at Kemano was all gravel, large round stones that sucked at your feet and made every step slow. “And we caught a halibut, but we had to throw it in the water.”
“I don’t believe you,” Mom said to Mick. She turned to me, “Go run up and down the beach a few times.”
“Is there a village here?”
Mom shook her head. “Used to be.”
“What happened?”
She looked down at me. “Most of the people died.”
“How?”
“They just died,” she said, her lips thinning.
Which meant that she wanted me to stop asking what she called my nosy questions. I wanted to go into the little town that Alcan had set up for the Kemano workers. Dad worked there for a month when me and Jimmy were little, and he said the money had been great but he hated being away from civilization.
Even though it was just around the corner from the old fishing village where we were going to be staying, when I asked if we could go, Mom looked down at me and gave an exasperated sigh. “Later, Lisa.”
I put my finger on the side of my nose and let out the loudest moose call I could. The sound echoed off the mountains, coming back faint and shaky. Uncle Geordie came down to help Uncle Mick unload fishing gear. Aunt Edith stood at the base of a path that led to a white house with a tin roof and gestured at me to follow.
“Here’s my crazy girl,” she said.
“I want to go to the townsite.”
“Hear that? Just like Gladys.”
Mick and Geordie laughed, passing each other bags and boxes.
I raced up the path but paused at the bottom of the steps that led to the front door. I felt a heaviness, like you feel emerging from water after swimming, pressing against me, making my skin tingle. I turned around, fast, to catch anyone who happened to be staring at me. The bushes near the house were still bare, the buds barely breaking from the cases, and the grass wasn’t even poking out of the ground yet. I looked back to the beach. Mom was helping out the others, and their laughter carried clearly across the beach.
I heard it then and thought it was an echo. But long after Mom, Mick and Uncle Geordie had stopped laughing, the distant, tinkling laughter came again from somewhere past the house, in the trees.
I ducked inside. The house was deliciously old, and each step I took was rewarded with loud, reverberating groans. It had to be haunted, I thought as I darted through the musty rooms with the saggy mattresses and skittering mice. I had been transported somewhere magical, full of endless opportunities for adventure.
“Lisa!” Mom yelled from downstairs. “Stop banging around!”
“She’s excited,” Mick said. “Let her be.”
“She’s going to get hurt. Lisamarie Michelle Hill, where are your ears?”
I stopped, dropped my bags and waited for the laughing ghosts to appear. The upstairs rooms were silent, but not ominous, just empty. I swallowed a heavy lump of disappointment and slumped onto one of the beds. Maybe, I consoled myself, they showed themselves only at night, which wasn’t too far away.
“Want to help me get the water?” Mick said, popping his head around a corner.
“What water?” I said as I came back downstairs.
“Our drinking water, silly,” Mom said, busily tur
ning bacon in the frying pan. The smell reminded me that the last time I’d eaten was hours earlier.
“No running water here,” Mick said. “We do it the old-fashioned way. We go and get it.”
He gave me a small bucket and took two large white pails. We went down the steps, Mick whistling. The air was cold and my arms goose-pimpled, the breeze biting through my sweater. I shivered but followed him along the beach. Mist crawled through the mountains, sluglike and pale against the darkness of the forest. Mick walked close to the waves, which surged and hissed listlessly.
He nudged my arm. I turned my head to see what he was staring at and glimpsed a black head bobbing in the waves. I stopped to watch the seal, but Mick kept walking and I had to run to catch up, my feet sinking in the stones and then slipping, so I had to concentrate on each step or fall. He swung his arms and made the pails clunk together. I stayed beside him, panting with the effort of keeping up to his long strides. Near the end of the beach, we turned up into the trees and followed a trail to a small stream and then up to a clear, dark pool.
He sat down on a log that was green with moss and lichen. As he set his pails down, I sat beside him, the log squishing underneath me, soft with rot. Mick leaned over, hand on his knees. I kicked my feet back and forth, letting them thump against the log and bounce off. The stream was quiet, making whispery sounds.
Mick finally stood up and dipped his pails into the pool. I handed him mine, and he filled it halfway. The water was clear, but littered with twigs.
“Taste it,” Mick said.
I shook my head.
“It’s good.” As if to prove it, he leaned over the pool, and dipped his hand in the water. “Ahhh.”
He moved aside, and I cautiously copied him. It was burning cold and sweet with the taste of trees. He grinned. I drank a few more handfuls. Mick lifted his pails. They sloshed over and splashed his legs.
My pail was so heavy that I carried it with two hands. We walked along the beach closer to the trees, following hard-packed sand until it disappeared into the stones. Mick paused to let me catch up to him. My hands hurt where the metal handle bit into the flesh of my palms.
“Smoke break,” he said, putting his pails down.
I let my bucket fall and sank into the beach, yawning, suddenly tired. Mick crouched down and cupped his lighter. He sighed as he let go his first puff. Sweat cooled on my face. I yawned again, aching for bed.
“Me and your dad used to do this all the time,” he said. “We used to have contests.”
“Like what?”
“Kid stuff. Who could carry the most. Who could get it back the fastest.”
I closed my eyes and tried to picture Dad running around with pails. An owl hooted. When I opened my eyes, Mick was staring at nothing, looking sad. The breeze stopped blowing and everything became still. The water went black and glassy.
“Dinner’s probably ready,” Mick said, stubbing out his cigarette on a rock and standing up.
“You want to race?” I said.
He grinned. “I’ll give you a head start.”
Most of the water ended up on my pants, and Mom made me go upstairs to change. The house was lit with kerosene lamps that buzzed like the electric bug killer Dad had bought at a garage sale. Mom had made fried eggs and set them with the bacon on the long wooden table in the front room. It was surrounded by old squeaky chairs. Uncle Geordie and Aunt Edith were already there, concentrating on eating. “Bannock’s in the kitchen,” Aunt Edith said. “Hurry, while it’s hot.”
Now that it was dark, the idea of sleeping in a haunted house wasn’t as thrilling. I changed into my sweats in record time and raced back downstairs. I was so hungry, I didn’t even mind that we were having eggs and gobbled some straight out of the frying pan on the table. Aunt Edith watched me with a sour expression.
While Mom and Mick ate, Aunt Edith opened her knitting bag and pulled out pieces of a sweater. Uncle Geordie tilted his chair back and filled his pipe. I hoped everyone was as tired as I was, so I wouldn’t have to go upstairs alone. I picked at a last piece of egg, squashing it with my fork.
Mick leaned over and whispered, “I think it’s dead.”
“Don’t play with your food,” Mom said automatically, not even looking at me.
“Remember the last time Al came up to the lake?” Mick was saying to Aunt Edith.
Everybody laughed.
“What happened?” I said.
Uncle Geordie chuckled. “Two years ago, wasn’t it?”
“Three, I think,” Mom said.” Jimmy was still in kindergar—”
“What happened?”
“We went up the Kitlope, me and your dad. Why’d he come with me? I can’t remember.… Oh, yeah. We were bear hunting. Well, we spent the night on the beach. It was warm that night, so we didn’t bother putting up the tent, just spread our sleeping bags on the sand. Woke up the next morning and the whole beach was just covered in seals. One was sleeping on the zipper side of your dad’s bag, so he couldn’t move—big one too, almost a ton—and he kept yelling, ‘Mick! Shoot it! Shoot it!’ Another seal was sleeping on my gun. Then Al starts hooting and making these moaning sounds and I thought he was being crushed.…”
I waited for Mick to stop laughing.
“He was making whale calls,” Mom explained. “It worked. The seals left.”
Uncle Geordie made a whiny, fluty sound, and they cracked up again.
Mick put his arm around my shoulder. “ ‘Didn’t you notice a seal snuggling up to you?’ I asked him. ‘I thought it was Gladys,’ your dad said. ‘She always hogs the blankets.’ ”
“Ha ha ha,” Mom said, cuffing the back of his head.
After dinner, I had to pee badly, but I didn’t want to go to the outhouse. It was only about twenty feet from the house, but I’d held my pee for what felt like hours so I wouldn’t have to go in the darkness. Mick said we were lucky it wasn’t summer, because the cold kept it smelling fresh.
“Mick,” I whispered. “Can you come with me to the outhouse?”
“Don’t baby her, Mick. You’re old enough to go to the outhouse alone.”
I gave Mick my most desperate look.
“Gladys—” Mick started to say.
“You’re spoiling her. There’s nothing out there but you and the mice, young lady.”
I got up slowly. Mick stood up too. “I’ll watch you from the porch.”
Mom gave a heavy, dramatic sigh.
“Thanks,” I whispered to him as we went through the kitchen and I dashed down the steps. I flung open the outhouse door, peed and didn’t even bother to wipe. When I got back to the porch, Mick was grinning at me, puffing away.
“I’m not a chicken,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’m not a baby either.”
“Didn’t say you were.”
“I just don’t like the ghosts.”
“Ghosts, huh?”
“Don’t you believe in ghosts?”
“Did you see them?”
I shook my head. “I just heard them laughing.”
Mick grunted.
Aunt Edith had left for bed by the time we went back inside. Mom had cleared off the table and was scraping the leftovers into a bag.
“She says she heard ghosts,” Mick said to Mom.
“Mick,” I said, glaring at him.
“Ghosts?” Mom said. “Dammit, what have you been telling her now?”
“Nothing!” Mick said, indignant.
“Right. Did you tell her about Ba-ba-oo?”
“No. Did you?”
“No. Lisa, has your dad been telling you stories?”
I sat in my chair and glared at my feet. No one ever believed me.
“Best way to keep ghosts away is to fart,” Uncle Geordie said.
“Na’, don’t tell her that,” Mom said, suddenly smiling.
“It’s true,” Uncle Geordie insisted.
I looked at him hard to see if he was teasing me. He crossed his heart.
Mick started telling me about the time Ba-ba-oo went hunting mountain goats up the Kitlope but Mom shushed him.
“She’ll have nightmares,” she said. “If you tell her about Ba-ba-oo seeing ghosts, I’ll have to take her to the outhouse every time she wants to pee.”
“Ghosts, my ass,” Uncle Geordie said. “Old bugger was probably drunk as a skunk.”
“Bedtime,” Mom said.
Late that night, I dreamed I was at the docks watching Jimmy dive off the breakwater logs. I waited and waited for him to surface but the water was still and dark. I woke, heart hammering. I heard groans. I pulled the blankets tighter. The moaning was soft at first, then got louder.
“Mom,” I whispered. “Mom. Wake up.”
Mom is a heavy sleeper. I knew that if I wanted to wake her up, I’d have to get out of bed and take two steps, then hop into her bunk. I couldn’t do it. My muscles felt all soft and shivery. Even if the house caught fire, there was no way I could move.
“Cookie.” I recognized Mick’s voice. The wash of relief made me giggle. Mick was having a bad dream about cookies. He was moving around, thrashing.
“Cookie!” he shouted. “Cookie!”
I poked my head out from under my blanket, worried now. I’d never heard Uncle Mick sound afraid before. I went over and shook Mom’s shoulder. She was about to say something when Mick started shouting again. I heard Aunt Edith whispering to Uncle Geordie. Mom wrapped the blanket around her shoulders as she shuffled out of the room and went down the hall.
“Stay here,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”
Mom’s footsteps creaked across the floor, and I heard her waking Mick up. Someone started to sob, deep, achy sounds that couldn’t be Mick because nothing made him cry. No one said anything, and when the light started to make the room grey, Mom came back. She bent over me.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
She put her finger to my lips. “Shh.”
Monkey Beach Page 9