Help Me, Jacques Cousteau

by Gil Adamson

  In Bombay, as a young man, Bishop had leaned from the kitchen porthole of a luxury liner, rested his tired arms on a load of soap, and listened to a strange, constant hum coming from the city. It intrigued him, this sound; it was not mechanical, not the wind, no kind of sound he’d heard before. And then his mind identified human voices, tens of thousands of human voices, coming across the water to him from markets and streets, spilling into the harbour. When Andrew and I look at a globe, privately we think of India as a noise. Those voices followed Bishop back to work and clamoured in his head as he napped in the early afternoon shade. Bishop asleep in Bombay Harbour. Bishop asleep in the mud of the riverbank, hearing the voices of two children.

  It’s way past midnight and I am supposed to be asleep. I was asleep, anyway, until I heard our car pull up outside. I know my dad is home. He’s been visiting Bishop. My mother finds it unnerving, the way I can hear things through walls, doors, across great distances. Now I half doze and let the sounds of my father coming upstairs form themselves into an image of him, his coat over his shoulder, his shoulders bent. I hear my parents in their room, talking about Bishop, the aunties, a casserole, dogs, beer.

  Bishop is becoming a story of his own:

  I imagine it was dusk when Dad pulled up in his car, steam coming from the grill and a not-again look on his face. Bishop waved his hand hello, all jolly. He looked like the king of the mud clan, his fly undone. The two brothers sat in the light of a lamp by the kitchen, deeply breathing the cold air that flows off the mountains and picks up the scent of the river. They slouched down in their chairs, cradled beers, and closed their eyes, listening to an army of mosquitoes hum outside the screens. Once in a while there came the sound of an animal, something big, lapping at a puddle in the dark.

  Bishop was talking about a woman, how she had winged a casserole at his head, and then earlier, long ago, how she had looked and what nice songs she sang when she thought no one could hear. He said she’d been a nun once and she sang in a choir with other nuns, and wore a grey habit, and she played the guitar badly. But she’d given all that up.

  Still, she liked to get worked up on coffee and church singing; she attended surreptitiously, coming home like a tuning fork that won’t stop ringing, passing through the rooms of the house one by one, as if looking for something. She had a trick she did with her shoulder — she could grind the joint so that it sounded like a galloping horse — which had used to make the other sisters shiver. She grew one white hair, only one, an event that Bishop found creepy. She wasn’t scared of any of the usual things, like snakes or nuclear war, but she screamed if a light bulb blew out and left her in a dark room. She considered it a kind of ominous message.

  This particular auntie claimed she had second sight, but it was a faculty she summoned only to accuse him of cheating on her. She believed she could tell the other girl’s hair colour. In that regard, Bishop said, she was always wrong — but if you were listening to him, you never knew if that meant there was no girl or that there was a girl, but this auntie had got the hair colour wrong.

  “Why don’t clairvoyants ever use their power on the lotteries?” Bishop had asked her. “Why not do something useful?”

  He also wanted to know why she no longer believed in his stories and yet, being an ex-nun, she believed “the most outrageous yarn in history,” about how one young woman had managed to get herself pregnant. That’s when she threw the casserole, according to Bishop, and my father had to suggest that Bishop had got what he deserved. Bishop never cleans house, and so it was still there on the wall: a silhouette of a man in tomato sauce.

  “Now I’m alone,” Bishop said. “Single.” And he scratched at his mud-hardened cheek.

  I am lying in my bed, in my room, but my mind is fabricating a strange, calm scene: my father and my uncle in shadow; time has gone by, I imagine, and tomorrow comes up silently like a bubble through water. Morning birds appear and scrounge around in the bushes, making the branches shake as if possessed. A finger of light advances along the river, stirring, stirring, digging up the clay shore.

  “All these noisy birds,” my father says, his head drooping. Bishop’s voice is a hiss, as if he’s never stopped talking, asking about my mother: Does she sing any songs? Does she ever throw things? He wants to know how early kids get up in the morning — what do you feed them? He doesn’t wait for answers, but worries on about a life that is beyond him.

  When the sun comes through the front door and falls across their legs, the two brothers sit up and hold their heads. Bishop staggers off into the bathroom and quickly falls asleep in the tub, where it is cool and the light is dim. My father looks up to see two identical boys staring in at him, filthy boys with green collars of dirt round their throats. His head feels like a wet cardboard box.

  “Piss off!” he barks and the boys skitter off the porch and stand in the road. One of them starts to cry and then they go home. My father pictures Bishop in a wheelbarrow, limbs hanging over the sides like an octopus. Bishop with his scars, old and new, his fat lip, his choking snore from the bathtub.

  Something about Bishop, something nice about him, is that he talks to dogs. Not just “Come here” and “Aren’t you a good boy.” More like, “Never trust a hammer, Toby, even if you wedged the head last week”; more like, “It’s a sad world, Buster. Your friends should have told you so.” And the dogs stare at him and angle their heads and whistle in their throats. Where Bishop lives there are dogs that don’t belong to anyone — perhaps eight of them — big dogs that all look the same. It’s as if they’re a different species, my brother says, a race of giant dogs that only come out at night to trot along the riverbanks and snap at fireflies and dig holes in the clay and rip each other’s sides open. They come and go like raccoons at night and Bishop feeds them, sits alone in the light of a lamp and tosses old bread to the dark shapes moving beyond where the light falls. He talks to them, shouts at them, croons to them about what smart, sleek, beautiful dogs they are. At night they jam their noses against his screen door and puff at him, or sit by the river and yip and howl, and the sound makes Bishop feel at home.

  He’s awake now, floating in the white of the bathtub.

  “North,” he calls to my father. “Are you up yet?” He thinks the tub around him resembles the never-ending morning of the Arctic, blue sun reflecting everywhere — you can’t escape it. He’s listened to the ice sing and mutter, the hiss of dry snow moving in the wind. He’s shot huge, oily birds for food, shot caribou, shot dogs gone evil with hunger. His portrait has been printed in Life magazine: Bishop standing by a Quonset hut blown inside out by wind, his face obscured by scarves and beard and fur. The caption reads: This man saved my life. Bishop squirms in his bathtub and remembers the last auntie shouting, “It’s all such crap!”

  “Hey,” he calls out to his brother. “You there?”

  But my father is gone, having wiped strange paw prints from the hood of his car, slammed the door, and driven out to the highway. Mountains rise up on both sides of the road and in the car my father tries humming, which he always does when he has a headache. The air is light and cool and the tires flutter over the dry clay road. Dad slows when he goes over a bridge and sees the syrupy brown water where his brother passed like a snapped branch, singing and moaning and calling the last auntie by all her secret names. The names he whispered in her ear, and in the ear of the aunties before her, and in the ear of every small child falling asleep dreaming of the Arctic and the open sea and the many strange possibilities of life.

  HELP ME,

  JACQUES COUSTEAU

  ………… THE LIGHTS IN THE HOUSE have gone out. Andrew runs to the window, then heads out onto the street. He comes back in saying everybody else has got lights in their houses. I check and see that our upstairs lights are still on. So’s the TV. Jacques Cousteau is floating in the living room, staring out at me and my brother, and here we are in the dark, staring back at him. A huge black shark floats by. Dad crashes in the basement and s
wears long and anatomically. There is silence and then another crash. He’s rewiring the house again.

  This is the day I step on a live wire. I go down the stairs ready to bother my dad, ask him riddles I’ve memorized. I step down off the last wooden step onto the concrete floor of the basement and next thing I know I’m four feet ahead, still standing, and all my fillings hurt.

  “Jesus!” Dad says, shaking his head. “That must have hurt.” But I say no, and he relaxes, goes back to work. I don’t realize how addled I am; I tell him my riddles, except I mix up the endings and they make no sense. Dad laughs after each one anyway.

  He’s digging in the fuse box, holding a mini-flashlight in his teeth. He garbles something to me and points at the workbench. I figure it’s the screwdriver he wants because it seems to be sitting in the only clear spot on the bench. I go to get it for him, step on the live wire again, leap, then stand there watching the basement twinkle.

  When I go back upstairs, Jacques Cousteau is hiding behind a rock. Andrew runs to the TV and turns the volume way up. We both like it that way. Jacques ducks as a dark shape glides by, and there are drums and tambourines and a screechy synthesizer somewhere under the water with him. I grab Andrew’s cereal away from him, and he fusses and whines, tries to grab it back. We do this until we hear Mum pull up in the car. It’s like the starting shot in a horse race. Andrew tries to hide his cereal bowl under the couch; I jump up, snap the TV off, run to the dark kitchen, look around at the wreckage I should have put in the sink long ago; Andrew skitters right by me and down the stairs to hide in the laundry room. I hear him hit the bottom step, and then Dad’s voice: “Your sister did that too.”

  “That’s it!” Mum is stamping across the floor. Between Andrew’s panic about his cereal and me feeling guilty about the dishes I never do, I get ready for a gale force, but she’s not mad at me.

  “I’ve had it with Annette Batter, absolutely had it!” Mum’s been visiting and she looks nice, a silky dress and ultrahigh heels.

  “Janey!” Dad calls from the basement. “I’m down here.”

  “If I hear one more thing out of her,” Mum starts, clicking carefully down the stairs in her fancy shoes, “about that bloody fence, I’m going to strangle her. No, in fact, North, I’m going to strangle you.” I run to the top of the stairs, watch her feet descend, getting closer to the bottom.

  “Mum, don’t!” I call. “Mum-Mum-Mum!” She steps down, the wire fitting perfectly into the finger’s space under her high heel, and moves on, unscathed. She turns.

  “What, dear?”

  I stare at her. How does she do these things?

  “What is it, dear?”

  “I forgot to do the dishes.”

  “Do them now, then.” Mum turns to Dad and says could he please, please, please be more careful when he parks the car, if he cares for her sanity.

  My father drives his Plymouth Valiant like a crazy man: jackrabbit starts, corners taken at such a speed that groceries roll like waves across the back seat. The brakes are given a good workout and he parks in one move, palming the steering wheel and craning his neck to look out the back window. The parking space we have is exactly the size of our car, and every night he shaves a slice off the neighbour’s fence. Every morning, when the car leaps from the gravel and bolts out into the lane, he shaves off another slice.

  The woman next door dislikes us because our dog got her dog pregnant about forty-seven times, and also, she’s mad about the fence. The thing she finds so maddening is that Dad never does any damage to his car. It’s as if the Valiant is shaped perfectly to his task, the bumper poised, ready to peel her fence. Last year he tried to make up for it. He dug a new posthole and put in a new fence post, but she said it looked funny, stuck right out because it was new wood. He also sunk it right where the old one had been. The next morning, before he shot out into the laneway, he shaved a bit off that one too.

  I run the water and start doing the dishes. It’s quiet and I like the look of the soap bubbles in the dark. I splash around, flopping the soapy dishes up onto the drying rack. Both front and back doors are open and the dog comes clicking in the back door and heads for the front. Then he’s gone again. Just as I’m finishing up I see a shape at the door, a small, bulky shape in a striped shirt.

  “Why’s it so dark?”

  It’s Taylor. He’s five. Taylor looks like someone put Popeye in a saucepan and boiled him down. He spits with perfect aim. He gooses me once in a while, seeing as he’s down there anyway, and I have always suppressed my shocked reaction, thinking that he can’t possibly know what he’s doing. After all, he’s only five. But I’ve lately been wondering if that’s wrong thinking.

  “Where’s the lights?” Taylor says again, and I tell him Dad’s rewiring the house. He hears Mum’s laugh and his body gets all jumpy like an eager dog’s. Then he hears Andrew’s voice and thumps across the floor, heads for the stairs.

  “Taylor!” I shout.

  Soon enough, there’s Dad’s voice: “Holy mackinaw! Did you see him jump?”

  BIG BLUE SUIT

  ………… AMONG THE FEW THINGS I know for sure about my mother is that she loathes weddings. Take the one this morning. The limo is out of control on the snowy road, spinning round and round. We’re all screaming. The trees outside stutter past and the clouds go with them.

  We’re ten minutes from the church, and the weather has made us late already. The limo is crammed: there’s me, my brother, Aunt Netty, my mother, Auntie Odelia, and Mrs. Furstall, Odelia’s mother, whom nobody likes. My mother has my fist in her hands and she holds it to her cheek in an iron grip. White balloons around our feet swirl and hip-hop up the window and hang there, suspended, until the car finally halts with a soft yank. The world is on a funny angle. My mother is rigid. Netty is trying not to fall over Odelia, who is by herself on the wide limo floor with her feet against the door. She is standing, effectively, on the door, hysterical, laughing and flapping her hands.

  “Some driver you turned out to be,” Mrs. Furstall says to the limo driver, who must be no older than seventeen. He’s trying to scrabble his way out of the front seat, pushing upwards at the long driver’s-side door. Mrs. Furstall, from her perch on top of the rest of us, swipes at his backside with her purse.

  Odelia is another one of Bishop’s women and, for some reason, she wants to marry him. That’s why we’re here with our elbows in each other’s ears. We all slide out the door, careful not to come out in a slithering bunch, dropping one by one into the snow in our pumps and stockings and silky dresses, all covered over with our crappy everyday overcoats. The bride-to-be is holding her wedding dress up high, to keep it out of the snow, and you can clearly see her elaborate black panties through the tight white hose. The sight reminds me of someone’s face crammed against a window. She stares down in horror at the place where her legs disappear into the snow.

  “Mother!” she wails.

  This isn’t the only wedding we’ve attended lately. There was the one in the fall — me in my horrible pink dress, which barely fits me now I’m fifteen, and Andrew in his oversized powder-blue suit. Heather, a friend of my mother’s, was getting married for the second time, this time to a Scottish guy with an accent so thick he must have stepped right off the hillside and onto a plane bound for Canada. The church was unheated, unadorned grey stone with a huge oak altar at the front and a life-sized oak cross beyond. It put you in mind of a cold-storage room. We huddled in the front pews and my father blew his nose and the honk echoed around the walls. Then bagpipes bawled in the hallway, making our hair stand on end. We couldn’t understand a word of the service because the minister mumbled; the groom was paralyzed and had to be coaxed; the bride giggled her vows and pointed her toe behind her when kissed.

  Finally, the bagpipes harried us all out of the church and into the autumn leaves, where we stood around under a lopsided tent, our noses running and our lips blue. The groom’s father sat down with us and enthused incomprehensibly, his voice
rumbling, his rough hands spread out on the table like two grey steaks. I thought my mother might enjoy herself, seeing as it was a Scottish wedding. On her side, our family is all Highland people. But she hated it, especially the kissing and the pointing toe.

  “Heather used to be so forceful in school,” my mother said. “What in the world happens to people?”

  She says “people” but she means women. It’s not the emotion of a wedding that bothers my mother, it’s the ceremony itself, the sheer optimism of it, as if she’s the only one who knows we’re all on the Titanic. She’s superstitious, secretly superstitious about everything. She thinks of luck as a malevolent, watchful thing, always present in your life. But it’s not just bad luck that scares her — there’s something else, something worse. In this way she is unlike any of her friends.

  Gracey the librarian, for instance, is frustrated that none of her girls are old enough to get married. Angela and Gina are eight and twelve. But Gracey plans ahead; she already has a strong inclination towards blue for the bridesmaids.

  “Blue’s unusual, I know,” she tells my mother over the phone, “but my Gina likes blue.”

  “Gina’s a baby,” says my mother. “She doesn’t even have her period yet.” Andrew, who has been listening, turns white and then red.