Galveston

by Paul Quarrington

  The memory, then: Caldwell steps out of the corner store, a new Superman comic book tucked under his arm so that he can unwrap a few pieces of Double Bubble. Bob Janes is in the middle of Bloor Street, dodging traffic like a matador dodges bulls, swivelling his hips just enough to avoid getting hit. Then he loses his balance and falls backwards. A car, a red Edsel, smacks him, sends him flying through the air. Mr. Janes lands at the young Caldwell’s feet. A halo of red spreads out around his head. And, Caldwell sees, the man is smiling.

  BEVERLY WOKE FROM HER NAP with a start. She almost always woke with a start, something the professionals—the counsellors and doctors—said was atypical and therefore worthy of attention. But it was not atypical in her experience. Her grandfather usually sputtered to life already kicked into a state of advanced alarm, his lips formed around obscenities. And Margaret, her Margaret, had been visited by nightmares. Several times a night the child would bolt upright in her bed, shrieking as though she could keep the demons away simply with ear-bleeding pitch. The only person in Beverly’s intimate acquaintance who passed peacefully from slumber was her ex-husband, Don Peabody.

  Beverly took a look around and remembered where she was: Dampier Cay, the Water’s Edge, cottage “K.” The woman behind the check-in counter, Polly her name was, had assigned everybody quarters arbitrarily and rather imperiously. Gail and Sorvig were sharing a cabin halfway up the rise to the main building. When they asked if they could be closer to the beach, Polly shook her head, glancing at a clipboard as if to confirm the rightness of the declaration. Jimmy Newton was in A2, one of four apartments joined together in a squat row. “Just as long as it’s got a lot of electrical outlets,” he said. Polly didn’t respond to this, she was busy giving the phys. ed. teacher the key to cottage “J.”

  “J” and “K” were actually the same cottage, with a wall running down the middle. Beverly suspected that the phys. ed. teacher’s quarters were a mirror image of her own. She could hear him over there: he was sleeping, or at least trying to, and his bed groaned and squealed as he tossed.

  Beverly supposed that he, like her, had poor sleep habits. That was about the only thing the professionals were agreed upon, that she had poor sleep habits. They worked hard on this, they prescribed pills and recommended regimens. Beverly threw away the pills and ignored the regimens. For example, what she had just done was verboten according to the pros. It was late afternoon, and instead of sleeping before dinner, she should have stuck it out until ten-thirty, which was the bedtime she was supposed to maintain. It saddened and angered Beverly that they denied her the wholesome pastime of napping, but such was her life. In the land of the damned, there is no nap time.

  Beverly climbed out of bed and went to stare through the large window. Bushes and greenery pushed against the screen, as if the tendrils and leaves were seeking refuge. And perhaps they were, she thought; she vaguely believed in a spiritual confederation of life, with the most silent members—plants, animals, unborn children—in possession of the most profound knowledge. According to this theory—half baked, to be sure—the plants knew full well that the hurricane was coming, and pushed against the screen seeking communion.

  Beverly went into the washroom and turned on the shower. The plastic stall stood in the middle of the tiny room, pushed into this odd position by a small tank and a complex arrangement of thick pipes.

  One of the reasons Beverly had poor sleep habits was because Don Peabody had had proper ones. It was her own little act of resistance and rebellion. The professionals prided themselves on uncovering this (“You developed these odd sleeping patterns during your marriage? Interesting!”), but Beverly had never kept it a secret. During her marriage she purposefully stayed awake late, even if her eyelids were leaden. She arose early, even if every part of her, save a little pocket of perversity, wanted to stay in bed. It was a way of protesting Don’s doglike attachment to the conventional.

  Don Peabody embraced the ordinary, aspired to it as an ideal. When they were courting, for example, he had kissed her on the first date, felt her breast on the second, fingered her tentatively on the third and made love to her on the fourth. Then he proposed marriage. They honeymooned in Niagara Falls. Beverly went along with all this in a haze of incredulity that she was convinced was romantic love. She even enjoyed the conventionality, for a while.

  But to Don Peabody the ordinary was a drug, and he was hopelessly addicted. Perhaps this explained a great deal about their daughter Margaret; perhaps there was a genetic component. Not that Beverly believed any such crock, but she was so soured by her trips to the professionals, constant and court-mandated, that she sometimes played their little games with caustic irony. So Beverly conjectured (in a manner only she found amusing, and even then not very) that she should never have wondered at her daughter’s affinity for the conventional, seeing as the child was conceived during dutiful, straightforward intercourse on a heart-shaped mattress while Muzak poured down from tiny speakers in the ceiling.

  What it all boiled down to (the professionals always wanted to boil things down, they were the witches of the new age) was this: Don Peabody lacked an imagination. He was incapable, therefore, of improvising his life. Don relied on cues and clues that he’d gather from various sources: television, magazines, perhaps the odd newspaper column. It was as though he were always taking straw votes and going along with the majority. When the honeymoon at Niagara Falls was over and they were living together in a two-bedroom rented condo, Don found himself somewhat at sea. He didn’t seem to know how to proceed, how to conduct himself. He could only follow the charts. He went to work, he watched prime-time television, he went to bed at eleven. When Margaret was born, Don chucked her under the chin. That was the extent of his parental involvement, virtually all he could think of. He chucked the baby so much that Margaret began to scowl when he loomed near and turtle her shoulders into her ears. Still, everyone was reasonably happy—until Don recalled that there was one more thing he could do under the circumstances, something he’d seen on television, something he heard about a lot, something he’d seen his own father do. He left Beverly for another woman.

  One of the pros, Dr. Herndorff, had asked, “Why do you think you married him in the first place?”

  “Search me,” Beverly replied, adding a large, melodramatic shrug for effect. She was opposed on general principles to the quest for truth and understanding. This was, however, an area in which she had a little insight. For one thing, Don was basically a nice man, because it takes imagination to be evil or perverse. More importantly, he was unable to extrapolate imaginatively from her origins, which meant that Don Peabody was basically the only eligible bachelor the town of Orillia had to offer.

  The shower’s controls were finicky. To avoid scalding herself, Beverly had to concentrate as though she were a pilot landing an airplane. She stood beneath the water with a hand on each knob, mixing hot and cold. A minute into the shower the hot water ran out. Beverly cranked the left-hand knob as far as it could go, but the spray turned first tepid and then cool. Beverly defiantly pulled the cake of soap from the dish, worked up a lather rubbing her goose-pimpled flesh. She threw the soap down between her feet and let the water strike her. It was now so cold that she was short of breath. How could the water be so cold? Surely on sun-baked Dampier Cay it would be easy to keep water hot. She thought about this to prevent herself from thinking about the icy ache that enveloped her body. She stood in the shower until all of the suds had gone down the drain, and then she stumbled out, laughing, a bright pink from the chill.

  She glanced out the window then—which was not covered, the venetian blinds bundled together unevenly at the top of the frame—and saw Lester. He held gardening shears in his hands and was working on the council tree just outside the window, snipping away shoots from the gnarled branches. At least, Beverly gathered that’s what he had been doing, but his labour was now arrested as he stared into her room.

  Beverly turned away from the window. A hunger came
upon her, a deep, general hunger, but as she stood there, letting the warm air steal away the numbness, trying to decide how to dress, the hunger crystallized. It was actually food she was hungry for. She hadn’t eaten since … since when? Canada? Beverly started sorting through her suitcase and drew out a pair of shorts, hunter green and multi-pocketed, designed for an arduous trek through Ontario’s hinterland. She put these on and then selected a plain white T-shirt, pulling it over her head, spinning as she did so, and when her head popped through she was staring out the window once more. Lester had disappeared.

  She slid the big glass door to one side—a task that required considerable strength—and walked out into the world.

  The twinned cottages “J” and “K” were near the water, closer than any other of the resort’s buildings; she had only to walk across a gravel road and a patch of thistly growth to reach the beach. But they were the furthest from the rest of the complex. The resort ended just on the other side of “J” and “K.” Beyond was a small church, made out of plywood and painted blue. Beside the church sat a tiny, crowded graveyard. There were many stones there, the names obscured by lichen. There were also simple crosses, two pieces of barnboard hammered together, a name neatly rendered with whitewash.

  The Water’s Edge was a collection of buildings clustered around a small cove. The office and restaurant occupied a long, low building atop a rise. Cabins and rows of maisonettes spread out from there. The rise led to a more substantial hill—Lester’s Hump—but Beverly was not interested in high ground.

  The water on the leeward side of the island was calm, shone the colour of emeralds and sparkled with the setting sun. As Beverly mounted the stone steps to the main building, she could hear the surf pounding on the windward. When she got to the top, she was drawn forward, past the main building and a patch of manicured lawn. She found herself standing on top of a cliff, twenty, maybe twenty-five feet high. Looking left and right, she saw a series of boulders, little caves, tiny lagoons. It would be easy enough to climb down the rock face, which, Beverly noticed, is what Gail and Sorvig had done.

  The waves were large and loud, and the girls were romping about in the surf. They screamed and giggled as salt water licked their bodies. Thirty feet beyond them, Beverly saw, a dark shape moved through the surf, a shark, relentless and lonely.

  Beverly waved at the girls in a friendly fashion and went in for dinner.

  CALDWELL COULD NOT GET COMFORTABLE, not that he expected to, or even deserved to. He tried various positions: on his back with hands laced together behind his head, curled on his side with both arms driven between his legs. He even tried the other bed, for there were two singles in cottage “J,” at right angles to each other. Caldwell wondered what situation might demand this alignment, what union or family would want to sleep like that, heads close together but bodies divided so they could never meet.

  He could hear the woman in the room beside his. She was pounding about fairly heavily, and making little drumming noises, Bum-bum-bum. This was one thin wall; Caldwell suspected that a fart would rent it asunder. He heard a hissing sound then, water splashing. A series of images occurred to him, and he allowed them to pass without interference. He did not recognize all of the naked women in his mind’s eye, but then came an image he knew well, a woman with oversized thighs and breasts made to look plastic by wet Lycra. Caldwell closed his eyes and listened to the pounding of the surf. It began gently enough, but soon the noise, the roaring and the thumping, became almost unbearable. It sounded, thought Caldwell, as though a streetcar trestle had been torn loose and was battering at the very foundations. And he fell into the hole once again, the hole in the middle of his life.

  He had said, “Good idea,” to Matty Benn’s suggestion that he call Darla Featherstone. After he hung up, Caldwell cradled the telephone and didn’t move from beside it. He sat with his hands on his knees, his fingers gripping so tightly that blood left them. He made no further phone calls, even though this was monumental news. Caldwell didn’t earn much as a teacher, and he squandered what little he had. He didn’t know exactly how he squandered it, because his hobbies and habits were not extravagant. He enjoyed fishing, owned a fourteen-foot boat with a twenty-five-horsepower motor, but this was nothing, he had seen teenage boys out on Lake Simcoe with huge glittering bass boats, four-stroke engines as large as pagan idols. He played poker every couple of weeks, but just dollar, two-dollar stakes. There were, of course, the Friday-night visits to Mystery’s, where Caldwell would drink too many beers and purchase a table dance or two. Still, it was always only a dance or two. No, Caldwell did not know where his money went. It seemed to get picked up like leaves by the wind, blown out of his yard and into someone else’s.

  When the phone finally rang, Caldwell knew who it was. He lifted the receiver and said, “Hello,” in what he hoped was an intelligent or mysterious way, almost making a melody of the two syllables.

  “Is it true?”

  “Yeah. I guess so. I’ve got the ticket with the numbers.”

  “You have to go down to the lottery office. No, no. Wait. This is better. We’ll come to your house, we’ll film you with the ticket, right, then we’ll film you going down—are you sure the numbers are right?”

  “Yes. Quite sure.” Caldwell felt as though he were watching himself on television.

  “Okay, okay, excellent. Look, I’ve got to round up a cameraman. It’s Saturday. Fuck. Give me your address.”

  Caldwell did so, and even began giving instructions, but Darla Featherstone cut him off. “I know the street. How big a burg do you think this is?”

  She was right. In his head Caldwell had been briefly inhabiting some other city, some cosmopolis full of purlieus and quarters, a place large enough to allow the possibility of an illicit love affair. But all it took was Darla Featherstone’s saying, “I know the street,” to drive that notion out of his mind. That was as close as he came to unfaithfulness. But the wheels were already in motion. Something like a hurricane. Caldwell had thought about this, many times. A hurricane begins with the sun resting on the water, the two meeting as sun and water should.

  “Okay,” said Darla Featherstone, “don’t move a muscle. Sit tight. I’m going to round up a cameraman and—fuck, it’s really coming down out there.”

  He glanced out his window, and saw nothing but whiteness.

  Caldwell came back to himself with a start, alarmed by a sound from cottage “K,” a pained grunt. He heard a glass door being slid back into place, and understood that the woman next door had left her room.

  She was one of the women he had seen naked in his mind; oddly, the image seemed more an actual memory than many of the others did. I’ve done what you just did, this woman had said to him. Caldwell swung his legs off the thin mattress. “Like hell you have,” he said aloud, and he decided that he needed to eat, that he was, in fact, ravenous. He pulled open his own sliding glass door—he too gave out a little grunt—and headed for the main building.

  As he passed the small row of maisonettes, he heard his name called. Peering through a screened window, he saw Jimmy Newton sitting at a small table, in front of a small laptop, its screen providing the only light in a room that was unaccountably gloomy. The laptop was wired to paraphernalia, an odd little metal tower, a small sleek printer. There were pieces of paper everywhere, on the floor, the bed, even in the small sink in the corner. These were images of the storm as seen from heaven. Three were tacked to the wall.

  Jimmy Newton had a cellphone pressed to his ear, and five more lay at his feet. Newton muttered, “Jesus H. Christ,” and dropped this one down there too. “I pay for every damn system there is,” he snarled. “You’d think one of the fuckers would work.”

  “Who are you trying to call?” Caldwell knew that Newton had no family, it was one of the things he appreciated most about him.

  “I want to talk to someone at en-oh-double-eh. I need to know if they’re thinking what I’m thinking.” Newton had one more little phone to tr
y. He flipped it open, put it to his ear. He didn’t even bother pressing any of the buttons. He threw the thing away and muttered, “Talk about a dead zone.”

  “Can’t get through to anybody?”

  “I got the computer hooked up. Gee-ess-em. I’m bouncing off satellites, baby. But here on the third stone from the sun, you and I are sitting in a black hole. You know what? This is officially the armpit of the world.”

  “Huh. So he found it.”

  “You want to try making sense, Caldwell?”

  “William Dampier. He and his Merry Boys sailed around the world, you know, looking for the ends of the earth. The end of the earth. So now you’re telling me this is it. He found it.”

  “Christ,” muttered Jimmy Newton, shaking his head. “I’m surrounded by lunatics here.”

  “You hungry? You want to get some dinner?” Caldwell could not have said why, exactly, but he craved company.

  “Gimme a sec.” Jimmy stabbed at the return button on his keyboard, leant back and watched as a new image appeared on the screen. Caldwell couldn’t see it from where he stood, but the computer screen pulsated.

  “Oh-oh,” said Jimmy Newton.

  “What?”

  “I’m looking at the new NOGAPS. It looks a lot like the UKMET.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “You know. Global baroclinic readings.” Newton rose from his seat, stretched, pulled material away from his crotch. “What the hell kind of chaser are you, anyway?”