Monkey Beach

by Eden Robinson

  He showed me his hand, momentarily speechless. There was a bright red mark where my teeth had been.

  “Well, that’s what you get for being mean,” I said.

  “That’s rich, coming from you.” He turned his back to me and lay down. I was down to my last two cigarettes. He turned back and held his hand out. I took mine, then his and handed it to him.

  After a while, he said “What was Vancouver like?”

  “Sad,” I said. “But I was pretty bummed.”

  He tilted his head. “I never understood why you missed them so much. Mick was a nut and Ma-ma-oo was a cold fish.”

  I punched his arm. “How can you say that?”

  “It’s true! Mick was always doing something crazy and I never saw her crack a smile.”

  “You didn’t know them. You were too young. I don’t know what you see in Karaoke. Have you ever seen her fight?”

  He grinned. “Yeah. Wicked, huh?”

  “Men,” I said, mildly disgusted. There are limits to what you want to know about your brother.

  “She’s smart, too. She knows all about the stars. See that, right there? That’s Cassiopeia. And that’s Ursa Major, and over there, that’s Ursa Minor and the North Star.”

  “Karaoke knows astronomy?” Disbelief did not even begin to cover what I felt.

  His grin faded. “I don’t know. We never talked about it.”

  I sighed. “Now I’m jealous of you all over again.”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve got the perfect life.”

  “No, I mean it. You’re in love. I’ve never been in love. Sure, it bites at the moment, but give it a few years and you’ll be laughing about this.”

  “What about you and Frank?”

  “We’re just friends.”

  “Come on—”

  “And if you marry her, we’ll be in-laws.”

  “Well,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about that now.”

  I lay back against my blanket. I thought he was asleep but he said, very quietly. “I used to think you were weak. I mean, everyone has people die on them and they don’t … give up. But all it took was my shoulder and I quit.”

  I didn’t look at him. I kept staring straight up at the stars. “It was your dream. I think it’s harder when they go.”

  “I dunno. Everyone tried so hard. Do you know how much money they spent on me?”

  “Did you actually add it up?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Do you have any more smokes?”

  “Sorry. Those were my last ones.”

  “That’s okay.” He shifted, putting the life jacket under his neck. “I was kind of relieved when it happened. It was like an out. I kept thinking, what if I fuck this up? I used to have nightmares where I was halfway through the pool and everyone was passing me and I kept getting slower and slower.”

  “Huh. All this time I thought you were having fun.”

  “I was. In the beginning. Then it stopped being fun and started being about not fucking up.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “Like who?”

  “Mom. Dad. Anyone.”

  “Nope.”

  “Well,” I said. “You’re talking to the queen of fuckups and you’d have to do a lot more to take my crown away.”

  He reached over and kept giving me nudges until I looked at him. “You weren’t that bad.”

  “You weren’t the one that ran away.”

  “You’re back now. You’re dealing with things. I didn’t understand what it was like to lose something. Now that I do, I think you’re doing fine. I mean, Karaoke didn’t die on me. She just dumped me and I flipped. I don’t know what I’d do if someone actually died on me.”

  I laughed. “You call that flipping? That was a little spaz.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  We drifted off in a comfortable silence.

  We had visitors in the morning, two sea otters rummaging through the empty Spam tin. Jimmy opened one eye, then both, then hollered. The otters scampered down the beach and dived into the water, poking their heads up to watch us from a safe distance.

  “Why don’t you be useful and get us some crabs,” I said.

  “You want crabs, you get them.”

  “Fine. You can work on the motor.”

  He whipped his blankets off, shook them out with more energy than necessary and tidied up before he said, “Where are the crab pots?”

  “Just run after them with a net. Or do some fishing. I don’t care what you bring me as long as it’s dead and cooked.”

  Jimmy heaved a great, put-upon sigh. He rolled up his pants and waded gingerly into the water. He took off his shirt and splashed himself, then scrubbed his face. I rolled off the sand, my back aching from sleeping at an awkward angle. I wanted to go home and have a nice hot soak in the tub. While eating a big slice of apple pie and ice cream. Instead, Jimmy triumphantly produced two smallish crabs. We stared at them.

  “Well?” Jimmy said. “Now what?”

  “Start a fire,” I said.

  “How?”

  I thought he was just being lazy, but he really had no idea how to make a fire. I went through the basics, and he enthusiastically built one capable of keeping an entire village warm. I vaguely remembered that we could roast the crabs in a pit, but I suggested that we barbecue them instead. Jimmy squeamishly killed them, then skewered them with the marshmallow sticks. They were slightly singed, but still better than Spam.

  I put the motor back together before sunset. Jimmy wanted to hop right in and take off. I said we could go only if he developed infrared vision in the next five minutes, because if we left now, we might as well kiss our asses goodbye.

  “I don’t care,” Jimmy said.

  “I like breathing,” I said. “And I want to keep doing it. You want to go kill yourself, go ahead. I’m not stopping you.”

  “What the hell were you thinking?” Jimmy said for the hundredth time.

  I lay awake with the stars revolving overhead, the fire dying and Jimmy snoring beside me. The moon, a sliver of white light, rose a hand above the horizon, then, tired, fell back. The purple blackness overhead faded into grey, the grey into pale blue; this was followed quickly by pastel reds and oranges, and finally, yellow rays streamed through the trees as the sun climbed. The water was a muddy green from the spawning clams. Sea otters chittered as they spun, playing in the kelp. At the end of the beach, I saw what I mistook at first for a large grey dog but realized was a wolf. It padded to the edge of the water, sniffed, swung its head to examine Jimmy and I, then loped back into the trees.

  That morning, Jimmy woke with a groan. He sat up, and when he saw me grinning at him, he grumbled, “Sasquatches didn’t carry you away in the night. I’m disappointed.”

  “Maybe they smelled your cooking,” I said.

  “My cooking? Point that finger at yourself, Spam Queen.”

  His sarcastic cheeriness lapsed back into grumpiness, and he began answering me in an unhappy monotone again as we pushed off and left Monkey Beach. I tried to point out the things Ma-ma-oo had pointed out to me, but he said we could skip the tour.

  A pod of killer whales lived in the Douglas Channel at one time. They stayed there all year long. People thought of them as another family who lived in the area. I’m sure they had names for them. Sometime around the turn of the last century, however, some whalers came and killed them all. Once in a while, a stray whale or two will still come poking around up the channel, turn around and leave.

  On the way home, Jimmy saw the spout. He told me to shut the motor off, but I was afraid that if I did, we wouldn’t be able to get it going again. Then I saw the dorsal fins.

  “Orcas,” Jimmy said.

  They were coming straight towards us. I froze. They were so big. They slid alongside our boat, ignoring it, sleek black bodies with white spots shining in the water like glow-in-the-dark stars. One slid by the boat, its fin coming up to my waist as it broke surface and lifted the boat slightly, tilting it so that
we rocked. It was longer than our boat, longer and almost as wide. Jimmy kicked off his shoes and jumped in.

  “Are you crazy!” I shouted. “Jimmy!”

  I thought they would eat him but they moved by him like they didn’t see him. They passed us and Jimmy hit the surface of the water, trying to get their attention. He dived. When he came up, he shouted, “Come in! Come see this! You’ve got to come see this!”

  I said, “Get back in the boat, Jimmy.”

  He wouldn’t get in until the whales had passed, and then he wanted to follow them. He sat with his teeth chattering and his clothes dripping over everything. I wouldn’t let him have the motor. The whales left the channel.

  “You should have come in,” Jimmy said. “You don’t know what you missed.”

  I hold him there in my memory, smiling, excited, telling me how they moved like submarines, and how the water looked so much more magical when they were swimming in it.

  I jumped when I heard a heavy crash coming from Jimmy’s room. I went over to investigate and found him packing his trophies and medals into file boxes.

  “What’cha doing?” I said.

  “Clearing out the trash,” Jimmy said.

  Dad had beat me to the room and was trying to take the boxes from Jimmy. “You’re going to throw them away? Are you sure you want to do that?”

  “I’m moving on.”

  “Why don’t you just put them away? Here, I’ll help you put them in the attic.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You have to keep something to bore your grandkids with.”

  I was anxious for him to move on too, and hoped his next step would involve letting go of his noisy crows.

  “If you aren’t swimming any more,” I groused over coffee, “you don’t need their luck, do you? Why do you keep encouraging those stupid things?”

  “Did you know that crows have the biggest brains for their body size of all the birds around?” As I watched him over the rim of my coffee cup, I carefully said nothing as he rambled on about the virtues of the biggest brained member of the Corvidae family. Instead, I pictured him with kids, and imagined that he would probably get beat up by other parents for bragging about his offspring.

  “I’m going to set up a research centre to study them,” Jimmy said.

  I chuckled. “Yeah, right.”

  He started to pace. “I’ve already decided, this is what I want to do. I have a new direction. When my arm snapped, I thought that was my whole life ending, but it’s just starting. Do you know how free I feel? I feel like everything’s just opened up. Everything. The sky’s the limit!”

  I smiled uneasily. “Good.”

  “I wasted hours—no, days, days—in that pool going back and forth and back and forth. You have no idea how much time I put into that part of my life. It was like I was possessed.”

  “I remember.”

  “You don’t know what it was like. No one who hasn’t done it knows what it’s like. I’m better off without it. You know it, I know it. I’m having fun now. I couldn’t have fun before. Everything was so serious.” He enthusiastically slapped my shoulder. “Now I’m letting loose!”

  Ah, sweet denial, I thought.

  Two weeks before Karaoke came back, I had a dream about Ma-ma-oo. I saw her sitting at her kitchen table. She had a dark purple bruise covering her left cheek and smaller bruises on her arms. Ba-ba-oo was singing in the shower. A thud came from the bathroom and then there was silence. But instead of moving or asking if everything was all right, she sat and gripped her mug of tea tightly between her hands. I heard the sound of water hitting the tub and the shower curtain. “Nothing’s wrong,” she whispered, even when the water seeped under the door. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  I snapped awake. I reached for my smokes and went downstairs to the back porch. The crows were flapping around the railings, squawking when I shooed them away. I leaned against the railing and stared out at the channel. I was on my third cigarette when Jimmy’s favourite crow, Spotty, landed beside me. I looked at her, then back at the ocean. I saw something small floating in the water, stuck in the long, half-submerged grass near the shore.

  The water glistened like green silk as the morning light slanted over the mountains behind the reserve. It came then, a light touch on my shoulder. No one was near me. Out on the water, a dark head bobbed. The seal rolled twice, creating ripples that distorted the reflection of the mountains. Then it dived and the water smoothed. I was walking down to the beach. Something in the water was drifting out with the tide and I didn’t want the seal to get it. I thought it might be a cat, but the closer I got, I knew it wasn’t. For a moment, it looked like a baby in a christening outfit. But when I was a few feet from it, it was just a bucket.

  “Lisa! Lisa, what the hell are you doing?”

  I was standing waist deep in the ocean. I could feel the cold, was aware that I was cold, but it didn’t bother me. The bucket sank slowly in front of me. I should catch it before it’s lost, I thought. I couldn’t remember wading in. My clothes were heavy with water.

  “Lisa!” Jimmy said, running down the path. “What are you doing?”

  He was alarmed by something I was doing. I could see this but couldn’t understand it. I reached for the bucket, felt it bump against my legs. My arm went numb as I plunged it under the surface. I had trouble grasping the handle. Something caught my ankle then and yanked me under.

  I remember looking at Jimmy from under the water. He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me up. When we were back at the house, he put a blanket over my shoulder. Mom made coffee. Dad asked if I wanted to go to the hospital.

  “What were you doing?” Jimmy kept saying.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I really don’t know.”

  Jimmy didn’t want me to be alone. If he couldn’t get Mom and Dad to watch me, he baby-sat me, dragging me to some bad summer movies, giving me help with my finals or driving me everywhere, talking to fill the long silences. One night we ended up on Alcan beach, looking across the channel at the lights of Kitamaat Village twinkling against the blackness of the mountains. We sat on the hood of Dad’s old car, leaning back against the windshield, smoking.

  “You know what was weird?” he said.

  “About what?”

  “When you went into the water, Spotty woke me up. She was flapping against the window like she was trying to get in.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Finals approached and I started to cram. Jimmy seemed to think I was okay, so he began to leave me alone. I didn’t know Karaoke was back until I saw her with Jimmy; they were holding hands as they walked. I almost stopped the car and offered them a ride, but they were absorbed in talking and I didn’t want to butt in. It looked like they had picked up right where they left off.

  Someday, I thought, I want someone to look at me like that, like there’s no one else in the world.

  Erica told me Karaoke had stayed in Vancouver at her aunt’s place, where she—depending on the rumour you listened to—had another boyfriend, or was selling drugs, or herself, or in court getting charged with murder, or getting an abortion, or joined a Hell’s Angels gang, or—my personal favourite—had become a nude model.

  Jimmy dragged me out of bed at five in the morning. While I was still half-asleep, he pushed a box into my hands.

  “What’s this?” I’d muttered.

  “It’s for Karaoke,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” I sat up. I opened it. Inside was a slim, gold band with a diamond so small that I had to squint to make sure it was really there.

  “Promise ring,” Jimmy said.

  “What kind of promise? That the next one will be bigger?”

  “You’re a big help,” he said.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “So you’re going to ask her to get hitched?”

  “She makes me feel like … like,” he stopped, frustrated.

  “Like a king?”

  “No. Yes. When I’m with her, I’m a better person.
I’m not a fuckup with her. No, that’s not right. I’m strong. I’m fast. I can leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

  “So you’re asking her today?”

  “No. It has to be right. I’ve got it all planned. I’m going to take her to this field. There’s all this fireweed there where we had our first real—” He paused. “Date. Do you think she’ll like it? Is it really too small?”

  I pushed myself up and gave him a peck on the cheek. “She’ll love it.”

  At breakfast, he asked Mom how much a wedding cost. Not a cheap one either, he insisted. A real one—the church, invitations, renting the rec centre and a live band, everything. After she choked on her toast, she said a minimum of five thousand dollars.

  “Oh,” he said. Then he rallied. “I don’t care. That’s what I want.”

  Dad piped in that he could probably get Jimmy into Alcan if they applied right away, and they started to work out how long it would take for him to save enough for a wedding.

  “The bigger the wedding,” Mom muttered as we did the breakfast dishes, “the faster the divorce.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said. “He’s got it bad. Just think about the grandkids you’ll be getting. Lots of bouncing little babies.”

  “Well, it’s your turn now,” she said. “When am I going to see you settle down?”

  “Mom,” I said.

  “I know, I know. You’re young now. But you’re not getting any younger, you know.”

  I watched Jimmy and Dad at the table, working through the figures and I thought, Thank God at least one of us is getting a happy ending.

  The greengage tree is a shadow against the morning light. I shade my eyes with my hand as I walk down the steps of our front porch. A large flock of crows is perched in the branches, silent and shifting anxiously, but when I get close, it lifts like a dark cloud, blocking out the sunlight. The crows wait on the roof of our house.

  I can’t move.

  “Lisa,” they say.

  “Come closer,” the first voice says.

  “Just listen to us. Come over to the trees.”

  They’ve been calling to me, but I don’t know for how long. I know I should get in my boat and ignore them. I know I should leave. If I stay any longer, I’ll be at Namu tomorrow morning and Mom and Dad will worry. But if the things in the trees can help me, maybe Jimmy can keep his happy ending. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, just this once. I reach into my bag and dig around until I find my knife. When I pull it out, the voices hiss into silence. A crow begins to caw.