Henry started taking the piss out of Paul. “Didn’t she say there were other ways of making it up, Paul?”
Paul glared at him. When he’d taken his four track down to the pub, it got him in trouble. Turned out Hardy was in town. The other men nodded and Bud actually winced.
“Who’s Hardy?” I’d asked.
Henry squinted through his cigarette smoke and said, “Hardy’s a cunt. A wife beater, a child abuser, and what else? A skidder driver, I think. Only in town once in a while. And here’s what I don’t get.” He folded his arms across his chest. “I can see a little fooling around, but I cannot understand a woman who sticks with an asshole like Hardy. I mean, what makes a reasonably intelligent whore demean herself further by hooking up with a guy like that? Unless he pays well, that is.”
Paul bit: “She’s not a fucking streetwalker!”
Henry winked at us. “She doesn’t have to be if everyone knows her phone number.”
Bud stood, clapped his hands together, and told us all it was time for a break.
Later, I saw Jacques stretched out in an easy chair in the living room. He had the tape turned up again and the banjo could be heard, tuning, over the noises of the bar. “Side two,” he said.
“Who’s gonna buy me a beer on my birthday? Huh? Which one of you bastards wants to shell out? I’ll make it worth your while…” Glory laughed, but a loud thump and a tape squeal cut her off. “Jesus Christ, Hardy, there’s no law says a guy can’t buy me a drink. Leave his recording stuff alone! Fucksake. Just forget it. Go sit down, the both of you. Bloody inappropriate, hey, Crystal?” Her voice tapered off and the guitar started.
Crystal’s voice joined in, slightly higher, pulling at Glory’s so a dissonance wavered between them. The bar noise disappeared and their voices rang in the quiet. Bears and true love, that’s what I remember. Blood and death in harmony. When the song ended, I found I’d been holding my breath.
Jacques opened his eyes. “She’s a siren, that one.”
I misunderstood, thought fire siren, air raids. “What?”
“Calls the sailors in off their boats and drowns ’em.”
PART TWO
Where She Goes Between the Songs
CRYSTAL
Glory said, “Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart,” and I wanted to slug her. Course we’d had a couple of drinks by then and I’d just finished telling her she could fuck right off. There was this undertow feeling all winter and spring, and I hated how it pulled at us. Everything we did, even if it was good, was strained with this tugging from below—Glory bitching about how we never got any good gigs, how we were stale, how it was better in Vancouver and all we had to do was go. I ignored her. I teased her and changed the subject. I hid the car keys and bought her strings off the Internet so she never had to go into the city and buy them and maybe be tempted by the Greyhound station right near the music store and the one-shot, one-hundred-bucks- to-the-coast, overnight and you wake up at Terminal and Main. No. I pulled just as hard as that undertow to keep us in Fort St. James because here we are famous, and here what we have is good enough: people want to hear us sing, pay us to do so, people keep us in drinks, take us to parties, and drive us home when the fun is over. Who knew what would happen if we went to Vancouver? Where would we live? Who would know about us? We’d have to start all over and we aren’t in our twenties anymore. Here we can gather a crowd just by showing up. There we’d be nobodies. And two nobodies can turn into nothing pretty damn fast.
Glory said, “Play, damn you. I can’t wait all night.”
I lay down my card. “Uno.”
“Fuck you,” she said, and threw in her hand. We were hardly awake at this point. Even Uno was too much. Glory got us more beers and I tried to relight the candles on the table. I couldn’t work the safety on the lighter.
“Here, give it to me.”
She took it and lit it in one try. I cracked my beer and took a drink. It didn’t taste near as sweet as the first sip I’d had after our set at the pub, but by that point it didn’t matter. I’d had about eight more waiting for her to get home, wondering how she’d do it since I took her car. She’d made it eventually, drunker even than I was, and I didn’t ask her how. The candles flickered against the plastic sheeting on the windows. We were out on Southside, at Glory’s little hideaway. It felt like no one could find us out there, even though everyone knew where it was, but they didn’t come if they weren’t invited.
“How come you don’t have parties out here?”
She lit her smoke. Dragged. Blew out smoke rings. She shrugged. “Don’t want to mess it up. Don’t want to clean up after. Don’t care to share it.”
I knew there was more to it. This was her mom’s old property. Glory and Anton built the hut after their mom died, and when Glory had that split with her dad and never talked to him again, she started staying out here. It smelled like beeswax and blankets.
We always did our songwriting here. Couldn’t do it at my parents’ place in town—my brother took that over after Mom and Dad left, and now Richard lived there with his bitchy wife and their friends. No place for me. I was living at the St. James apartments in a room facing the lake. Only had a bed and a fridge and a bathroom, but I didn’t need more. I had my banjo. I had Glory’s place and Glory. Or I did, up until she started in about leaving.
She lay back on the pillows and the mess of blankets we had out on the floor. I got down there, too, and found it was much better than trying to stay in my chair at the table. I brought my beer down and pulled the blankets over me. Glory stared at the smoke she exhaled, watching it curl its way up to the rafters and disappear in the shadows. I watched her breathe in and out. I knew every mood, every flaw, every curve and corner of her goddamn mind, and she was planning on leaving. She’d made it plain.
“You think we could rent a place cheap somewhere not on the Downtown Eastside?” She breathed in. “I mean, there’s gotta be apartments, or even basements, that don’t cost a million bucks. All kinds of people live in Vancouver, like really poor people, so there’s gotta be cheaper places.” We were stoned, too, so her thoughts meandered. “I bet we could walk to the beach. See the seagulls.”
“We got seagulls here. At the dump.”
She snorted. “Not dump gulls, ocean gulls. We could watch the boats, Crystal. We could feed the whales.”
“What in hell do you feed a whale? Jesus. You want to feed it bread crumbs, like a duck?” I laughed.
“Pop Rocks. I wonder what would happen if you fed a whale Pop Rocks?”
“That’s just cruel. Don’t you remember what happened when we gave Tiny pop rocks? And he’s a human. He cried. A whale would probably inflate or something. Christ, can you imagine?”
It struck us and we were off. We lay there laughing and crying even though it was all leaking under, everything we could count on, draining away because Glory wanted to leave. We laughed until the candles guttered.
I butted out her cigarette when she fell asleep with it still burning in her hand, then I covered her with a blanket. To me, she still looked like my skinned-kneed, dirty-faced little cousin, her black hair all wild on the pillow. She still looked nine to my ten, even if we were old ladies now, thirty-four and thirty-five, still in our hometown, still singing to the same drunks and assholes as we did when we were nineteen and twenty. She slept and all the drinking and the late nights fell away and she was perfect: long lashes resting on her cheeks, the line gone from between her eyebrows, her hands still for once, resting under the weight of all her silver rings.
I sipped my beer and watched her sleep and I knew it was coming to an end, and that hurt. I climbed back into my chair and watched out the window, but I couldn’t tell the night from the water through the storm windows. The wind howled. A pine cone fell from a tree and landed on the deck, scaring me, but I stayed at the window, waiting. For what? I didn’t know. Something certain to come back. Something as sure as the lake freezing in the winter, the water rising in spring
, the way our voices climbed together, no matter where we were or how much we’d had to drink or what would come next, like a tower we were building together, like a lighthouse against the dark. I wanted that.
I wanted something more solid than sand to stand on. We had mattresses on the floor and blankets, but still the cold seeped up from the sand and I knew the beach hut was only here so long as the lake allowed it. Someday a storm would come and wash away the beach to the roots of the cottonwood trees and then those would tumble down, too. Or else the hut would go up in flames. Or we’d be lost out there in the dark, in the deep black lake, like people in one of the songs we wrote.
I blew out the last candle. No fires tonight, at least. I crawled under the blankets next to Glory and set my head down beside hers on the pillow. She woke enough to gather me in and we cuddled up like we had since we were small, sharing a bed, while our parents partied in the next room. I cried a little because the feeling wasn’t there like it used to be, when we listened to them laugh and shout next door, that it was us against the world. Now it was just me in the night. Her arms felt good around me, though, and I fell asleep savouring that.
The next morning, I made breakfast on the little two-burner hot plate. I had the bread in the toaster and was stirring the beans while Glory fiddled with her four track and tuned the new strings on her guitar. She hadn’t got Tiny and Anton to take off the storm shutters yet, and outside, all blurry and pastel, the sun looked smudged through the layers of no-see-um netting and plastic.
“Tiny still married?” I asked her. It was a joke to get her talking—she always had something to say about her brothers.
“Hmm?” She plucked her E again and tightened the bolt. “Tiny? Yeah. He’s with Maureen still. She’s pregnant, I think.” She sniffed. “Least she acts like it—she’s got him running all over the place.”
I smiled. “Anton?”
“Nope. Not Anton. My most devoted brother—no loyalty except to siblings, first cousins, dogs, fishing, and drinking.”
I laughed because that was Anton for sure; he might have been asexual, for all I ever saw him with a woman. He helped a lot, though, came out just to check on Glory. My brother hung out with us to find out where the party was, but he never looked after me like hers did.
I had this memory of sitting on a dock, four in a line—me and Anton, Tiny and Glory—all of us under ten. Tiny dared Anton to jump off into the water, but it was dark under the dock and there were weeds, and none of us wanted to get in and swim. It must have been out at Cottonwood. I remember all the grown-ups in camp chairs by the fire, laughing and drinking, none of them paying attention. Glory jumped in, I remember. The smallest of us. I saw her hair disappear below the weeds, and then Tiny was in and Anton was in, so I jumped in and none of us could swim very well. None of the grown-ups saw us go in or haul ourselves out onshore, dripping and shaking, scared and covered in snot and tears. We had two towels between us, and Anton and Tiny rubbed us dry and warm. It wasn’t nothing. The thought of those weeds and the shadows under the dock still made me shiver.
I broke some eggs into the cast-iron pan. It was getting darker, even though it was morning. It finally, finally felt like spring—storm season was about to start. The wind was up, out of the trees behind us, not off the lake, so we were safe from any real storms. I poked the yolk of one egg with the flipper.
“Glory, remember when you and Anton got the quad stuck up in the bush past Sowchea?”
She snorted.
“I can’t believe you guys walked all the way back. What was it—ten K? Twelve?”
“It took us all night to get back. Anton was shitting himself—I don’t know any man more scared of bears. I had to sing for hours. Every time I stopped he’d whimper and grab my arm.”
I’d heard that story about six hundred times. Sometimes Glory threw in cougars and porcupines to make it more interesting, but it was Anton grabbing her arm I loved. He was the one who used to push us on the swings when we were small. He’d buy us beer, too, if we asked him. He was also the one picked Glory up in Prince George after their mom died and she fucked off to the coast in their mom’s old Ford until they put a stop on the credit cards. Anton drove her back here after she hitchhiked up to PG, her belly out to here. Anton never gave her a bad time.
I poked the eggs. “Hey, are you out here for the season?”
She shrugged. “Maybe.” She tightened the G. “Hardy’s back on Friday.”
“That motherfucker.”
She shrugged again. Looked at me as if to say, I don’t understand it any better than you do.
“Does he come out here?” I looked at the bench where she usually slept, barely wide enough for one. The other benches in the cabin were covered in stuff—sweaters and skirts, underpants, books, tapes. She had skinny bookshelves in between the windows, full of her mom’s paperbacks. The windows went from the ceiling down to the benches, and below the benches were shelves with boxes on them. I stood on a wood pallet in front of the eggs. Glory sat at the high plywood bench that stretched the farthest out into the room—her desk, dinner table, candleholder, and, right now, platform for her four track. She usually kept the four track in one of the boxes under the table.
She shook her head. “No. He doesn’t like camping out. Gets enough of that in logging camps. Likes to shower. Besides, this is too far from town.”
“It’s only twenty minutes,” I said.
“I know. But that’s too long. His trailer’s only five minutes from the pub.” She set her guitar down and stretched out her back and arms. “Those beans done yet?”
“Almost.”
The smell of brown beans wafted up warm and sweet. The wind whapped the plastic against the cabin. We listened for a while in silence.
“What about that other asshole? Todd?” I used as much slime on the name as I could.
She looked away out the window. “What about him?”
“He comes out here, doesn’t he?”
She pulled her hair back and started to twist it into a bun. “Yeah. When he’s in town.”
I knew he came out here. I knew he stayed with her in this little shack and I also knew that if Hardy found out he’d kill them both. Literally. I watched her fuss with her hair out of the side of my eye. She’d been fucking Todd since high school. He was a know-it-all asshole. But gorgeous. One of those good-looking nice guys who can get anything he wants. He went away to school and she was his home fuck; whenever he was in town, they hooked up, and it was awful to watch. Glory was the toughest girl I knew—a rock-hard, nasty piece of work, sometimes, but with him? Forget it. She was just a hopeless girl. And not his only girl, either. He had girlfriends in Vancouver. He had enough money to fly Glory out there anytime, but he didn’t. He came back in his good leather shoes and fancy jackets and he charmed her. They were a public secret—thought no one knew about them, but we all knew.
Hardy was hardly even civil with other humans, and there were rumours about him I didn’t want to believe—that he had a family back in Ontario he’d either killed or assaulted or abandoned, or he broke out of a maximum-security prison and got away. He treated Glory rougher than shit and he scared me, but somewhere in their fucked-up relationship there was enough mutual meanness to make them equal. Todd had a different hold on her. He froze her, somehow. She was still that high-school girl for him, but he was all grown-up—a lawyer in the city. He made her small and she waited for him and I hated to see it.
“Is he coming back soon?”
She kept looking out the smeary window. “Don’t know.”
In a way, I could see how she was stuck—Hardy was a source of money, sex, and some prestige because he would beat the shit out of anyone who sneezed in his direction. A girl might benefit from associating with that. But Todd confused me—she seemed to get nothing out of his homecoming but a whole lot of fear that Hardy would find out. She was wasting herself on him. There was no way in hell he would ever take up with her permanently, so he wasn’t a plane t
icket out of here and he wasn’t a meal ticket while he was here—in fact, he sponged off her the whole time he was home.
Well, I sort of got it. He had this way he’d drop his chin and look at you with his brown eyes like you were the only important thing on earth. He could melt anyone. Glory told me he just had to bat his lashes to get promoted. He got good marks in school, good jobs out of school, and now he was in the news for doing work for some Coastal Native Band on land-rights issues. Or something. If I heard his name on the radio, I changed the channel.
I licked the spoon. “Todd ever say anything about coming here permanent?” I was pushing my luck talking about it.
She looked at me slow and cool, careful to show nothing, which hurt more than a sharp answer because as if I didn’t know how broke up about it she was. “What do you think?”
My turn to shrug. I’d heard her cry about him before and I’d hear it again.
“He might come up for midsummer. Anyway. What about you?” she asked.
“What about me?”
“You shacking up with anybody these days?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m making you breakfast, what does that say?”
“Nothing.” She grinned. “You’re only domestic for me.”
She made me sound so stupid.
I said, “I been thinking about Bud.”
“Bud Shinnerd? Christ, Crystal.”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, okay, but Bud? Wasn’t that in high school?”
Oh, high school. If I let myself go there, I could almost feel the flannel of his new-hay-and-deodorant-smelling shirts, or see the golden fuzz on his neck. I wanted him looking at me, all gangly and sixteen again. But he was a man, now, with ginger sideburns and workboots, and I had no way to go back in time and fix it all. It made my throat ache. “Yeah. So? I was only thinking about him. I heard he’s been hanging out with that rich guy down the bay. The one up from Vanderhoof, bought that doctor’s house.”
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