by Jack Hodgins
“Well, nobody’s stopping you now. Nobody’s forcing you to stay. Go on up and get dressed.” If all he came up out of that ocean to tell about was a crack, he might as well go back in.
Which he did, on the run.
Straight back through ankle-foam, into breakers, out into waves. A black head, bobbing; he could be a seal, watching the shore.
Go looking for your crack, he wanted to shout. Go help push the continents apart. Help split the god-damned world in two.
“There’s no reason why we can’t do this in a friendly fashion,” Stella said when he got home. “It’s not as if we hate each other. We simply want to make a convenient arrangement. I phoned a lawyer while you were out.”
She came down the staircase backwards, on her hands and knees, scrubbing, her rear end swinging to the rhythm of her arm. Stella was death on dirt, especially when she was upset.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Spit said. “This isn’t Hollywood, this is us. We survived all that crap.”
She turned on the bottom step, sat back, and pushed her hair away from her eyes. “Not quite survived. It just waited until we were off our guard, until we thought we were home-safe.”
He could puke.
Or hit her.
“But there isn’t any home-safe, Spit. And this is Hollywood, the world has shrunk, it’s changed, even here.” She tapped the pointed wooden scrub brush on the step, to show where here was.
Spit fingered the cassette in his pocket. She’d smashed his machine.
He’d have to buy a new one, or go without.
“Lady,” he said, “that flat-assed logger don’t know what a close call he had. If he’d’ve known he’d be thanking me every day of his life.”
Though he didn’t mean it.
Prying him loose from Stella would be like prying off his arm. He’d got used to her, and couldn’t imagine how he’d live without her.
Her mother sat in her flowered armchair and scowled out over her bulging eyeballs at him as if she were trying to see straight to his centre and burn what she found. Her mouth chewed on unintelligible sounds.
“This is my bad year,” he said. “First they take away Old Number One, and now this. The only things that mattered to me. Real things.”
“Real!” The old woman screeched, threw up her hands, and slapped them down again on her skinny thighs. She laughed, squinted her eyes at the joke, then blinked them open again, bulged them out, and pursed her lips. Well, have we got news for you, she seemed to be saying. She could hardly wait for Stella’s answer.
“The only things you can say that about,” Stella said, “are the things that people can’t touch, or wreck. Truth is like that, I imagine, if there is such a thing.”
The old woman nodded, nodded: That’ll show you, that’ll put you in your place. Spit could wring her scrawny neck.
“You!” he said. “What do you know about anything?”
The old woman pulled back, alarmed. Her big eyes filled with tears, her hands dug into the folds of her dress. The lips moved, muttered, mumbled things at the window, at the door, at her own pointed knees. Then suddenly she leaned ahead again, seared a scowl into him. “All a mirage!” she shrieked, and looked frightened by her own words. She drew back, swallowed, gathered courage again. “Blink your eyes and it’s gone, or moved!”
Spit and Stella looked at each other. Stella raised an eyebrow. “That’s enough, Mother,” she said. Gently.
“Everybody said we had a good marriage,” he said. “Spit and Stella, solid as rocks.”
“If you had a good marriage,” the old woman accused, “it was with a train, not a woman.” And looked away, pointed her chin elsewhere.
Stella leapt up, snorting, and hurried out of the room with her bucket of soapy water.
Spit felt, he said, like he’d been dragged under the house by a couple of dogs and fought over. He had to lie down. And, lying down, he had to face up to what was happening. She came into the bedroom and stood at the foot at the bed. She puffed up her cheeks like a blowfish and fixed her eyes on him.
“I told the lawyer there was no fighting involved. I told him it was a friendly separation. But he said one of us better get out of the house all the same, live in a motel or something until it’s arranged. He said you.”
“Not me,” he said. “I’ll stay put, thank you.”
“Then I’ll go.” Her face floated back, wavered in his watery vision, then came ahead again.
“I’d call that desertion,” he said.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
And of course he wouldn’t. It was no more and no less than what he’d expect, after everything else, if he thought about it.
All he wanted to do was put his cassette tape into a machine, lie back, close his eyes, and let the sounds of Old Number One rattle through him. That was all he wanted. When she’d gone he would drive in to town and buy a new machine.
“I’ll leave the place clean,” she said. “I’ll leave food in the fridge when I go, in a few days. Do you think you can learn how to cook?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “How should I know? I don’t even believe this is happening. I can’t even think what it’s going to be like.”
“You’ll get used to it. You’ve had twenty years of one kind of life, you’ll get used to another.”
Spit put his head back on the pillow. There wasn’t a thing he could reach out and touch and be sure of.
At the foot of his obsolete B/A sign, Spit on his rock watches the hitch-hikers spread out along the roadside like a pack of ragged refugees. Between him and them there is a ditch clogged with dry podded broom and a wild tangle of honeysuckle and blackberry vines. They perch on their packs, lean against the telephone pole, lie out flat on the gravel; every one of them indifferent to the sun, the traffic, to one another. We have all day, their postures say, we have for ever. If you won’t pick us up, someone else just as good will do it, nobody needs you.
Spit can remember a time when he tried to have a pleading look on his face whenever he was out on the road. A look that said Please pick me up I may die if I don’t get where I’m going on time. And made obscene gestures at every driver that passed him by. Sometimes hollered insults. These people, though, don’t care enough to look hopeful. It doesn’t matter to them if they get picked up or not, because they think where they’re going isn’t the slightest bit different from where they are now. Like bits of dry leaves, letting the wind blow them whatever way it wants.
The old bearded man notices Spit, raises a hand to his forehead in greeting. His gaze runs up the pole, flickers over the weathered sign, and runs down again. He gives Spit a grin, a slight shake of his head, turns away. Old fool, Spit thinks. At your age. And lifts his engineer cap to settle it farther back.
Spit cannot bear to think where these people are going, where their rides will take them. His mind touches, slides away from the boy with the St. Bernard, sitting up against the back of that green pickup cab. He could follow them, in his mind he could go the whole distance with them, but he refuses, slides back from it, holds onto the things that are happening here and now.
The sound of Stella’s shoes shifting in gravel. The scent of the pines, leaking pitch. The hot smell of sun on the rusted pole.
“I’ve left my phone number on the memo pad, on the counter.”
The feel of the small pebbles under his boots.
“Jon and Cora’ll take turns, on the weekends. Don’t be scared to make Cora do your shopping when she’s here. She knows how to look for things, you’ll only get yourself cheated.”
He’d yell Okay!
He holds on. He thinks of tourists filing through the National Museum, looking at Old Number One. People he’ll never see, from Ottawa and Toronto and New York and for all he knows from Africa and Russia, standing around Old Number One, talking about her, pointing, admiring the black shine of her finish. Kids wondering what it would be like to ride in her, feel the thudding of her pistons under you.
&n
bsp; He’d stand at the edge of the water and yell Okay you son of a bitch, okay!
“It don’t look like there’s going to be any complications. My lawyer can hardly believe how friendly all this’s been. It’ll all go by smooth as sailing.”
Spit Delaney sees himself get up into the pickup with the youth and the St. Bernard, sees himself slide his ass right up against the cab, slam his hand in a signal on the hot metal roof. Sees himself going down that silver-grey road, heading west. Sees himself laughing.
He says, “My lawyer says if it’s all so god-damned friendly how come you two are splitting up.”
“That’s just it,” she says. “Friends are one thing. You don’t have to be married to be a friend.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Spit says. It occurs to him that he has come home from a trip through Europe and northern Africa and can’t remember a thing. Something happened there, but what was it?
He sees himself riding in that pickup all up through the valley farmlands, over the mountains in the centre of the island, down along the lakes and rivers, snaking across towards Pacific. Singing, maybe, with that boy. Throwing his arm around the old floppy dog’s ugly neck. Feeling the air change gradually to damp, and colder. Straining his neck to see.
“I got my Lodge tonight, so I better get going, it’ll give me the day to get settled in, it takes time to unpack. You’ll be all right?”
Sees himself hopping off the green pickup, amongst the distorted combed-back spruce, the giant salal, sees himself touching the boy goodbye, patting the dog. Sees himself go down through the logs, through the white dry sand, over the damp brown sand and the seaweed. Sees himself at the water’s edge on his long bony legs like someone who’s just grown them, unsteady,
shouting.
Shouting into the blind heavy roar.
Okay!
Okay you son of a bitch!
I’m stripped now, okay, now where is that god-damned line?
Three Women of
the Country
I
Mrs. Wright’s first thought when she heard all the racket coming from somewhere over on Starbuck’s farm was “Will it be something I can write up for the paper?” She was paid twenty cents an inch for sending all the news from Cut Off in to the weekly newspaper in town and nothing unusual missed her notice. More often than not her column was just a list of weekend visitors, but she hoped some day to write up a story so exciting they would print it on the front page under big black headlines, maybe even with pictures.
When the noise started she was down on her knees weeding the rose garden in front of her house. The July sun had just lifted itself above the fir ridge across the highway and she wanted to get the weeding done before it beat straight down on her out of that stainless-steel sky. It was no surprise to a woman like Mrs. Wright that the day was already the hottest one yet; her well was getting low and she couldn’t turn the hose on the gardens or the front lawn without the risk of losing all her drinking water. What else could she expect?
Mrs. Wright went up onto her back porch to see if she could find out what was causing the noise, held a hand up to shade her face from the sun. Not that she perspired, mind you; there wasn’t enough of her to produce a drop of sweat. But still, she suffered from the heat. A little stick of a woman, hardly taller than her porch railing, she wore a mop of white hair on top like an abandoned nest. Her skin, stretched tight over tiny bones, was mottled and dry.
Directly in front of her was the one field she still owned, its hay freshly cut and sold, and beyond the far fence there was one of Mrs. Starbuck’s fields with a few of her white-face cattle grazing. She could see, through a gap in the trees, Mrs. Starbuck’s house where Mrs. Wright had gone to live as a bride with her first husband. It was a tall solid-looking house with a huge poplar tree beside it and a rock pile not far away. The two high windows that faced this way were blank squares in the sunlight. And far on the other side of Starbuck’s farm, right back against the jagged rim of timber, was the white gable of Mr. Porter’s house.
But not a person in sight. She got her ladder and leaned it against the side of the house. Then she climbed up and stood on the red duroid roof for a better look. In the distance, beyond the farmhouse and the barn. Mrs. Starbuck was running this way, flapping her arms and carrying on, screeching sounds that weren’t even words by the time they got as far as Mrs. Wright’s ears.
My God, woman, Mrs. Wright thought. If you could only see yourself.
But of course she couldn’t. Mrs Starbuck was not the type to wonder what kind of impression she was making. The first thing Mrs. Wright would tell anybody about Mrs. Starbuck was that she was more man than her husband ever was. Naturally, as long as he was alive she pretended to be feminine, wore dresses and nagged at him and kept the house clean enough (though not nearly as clean as Mrs. Wright had kept it when she was Mrs. Left and lived over there), but the minute he died she put on his old clothes, let her appearance just go, and started clearing land. In the year since his death she’d logged off fifteen more acres, burned up the stumps, and planted it all in hay and oats. She drove her tractor as if she was born on one. And looked, Mrs. Wright couldn’t help thinking, as if she belonged on one.
Mrs. Starbuck had passed right by her own house and was starting down her nearest field. Those precious white-face cows of hers high-tailed it off in every direction to get away from her. Mrs. Wright was surprised she hadn’t stopped running to tiptoe through the herd so she wouldn’t disturb them. She always acted as if they were the only cows worth anything on this whole island, and nearly had a heart attack when Mr. Porter’s Holstein bull got through the fence. “If that black bastard ruins my herd,” she told him. “I’ll have your hide. I’ll sue.”
Mrs. Wright judged people by what she saw. She had five good senses, she knew, and that was all anyone was given for judging what was real. And what she saw when she looked at Mrs. Starbuck was bohunk. She hated to say it, she hated even to think it, because it was the ugliest word she knew; but friend or not, it described Mrs. Starbuck. She was no immigrant (though Mrs. Wright had heard once that Edna Starbuck’s parents were born in Norway, which would explain her height, and perhaps even her size—Scandinavians, Mrs. Wright had observed, often got heavy after fifty), but just the same she dressed and acted as if she came from another country where there wasn’t much money around and no one had ever heard of a thing called good taste.
Just look at her. How many normal people would come screeching across the field like that in the middle of a July morning? She hadn’t even thought of driving her car over, or getting Mr. Porter to drive her. It didn’t even occur to her that the people going by on the highway—Americans mostly, in their campers—probably thought she was crazy. All Mrs. Wright hoped was that after so much commotion the emergency was worth while. She hated to see people get all upset over nothing.
She sat down on the roof and waited while Mrs. Starbuck got closer. She wondered what her first husband, Mr. Left, would think of the way that woman ran their farm. He would probably faint from shock. She already knew what Mr. Wright thought of it: “Nothing about that woman surprises me,” he said. “If you told me she murdered her grandmother I’d believe you, she’s that foreign to me.”
And Mrs. Wright had to admit there were times when she thought the silly woman ought to be put away. Society should watch out for people like her, she said, but Mr. Wright just raised an eyebrow at the idea.
Everybody had had a good laugh when she changed her name from Mrs. Left. People said, “You did it on purpose. You chose Mr. Wright just because it sounded funny coming after Mr. Left and you probably don’t love him at all.” But they were wrong. Her maiden name was Baldwin and all the time she was married to Mr. Left, much as she liked him and thought he was a good husband, she still thought of herself as Milly Baldwin. And when her first husband was killed fighting a forest fire and Mr. Wright proposed, it didn’t occur to her that the shift in names was a strange coincid
ence until someone at the wedding reception said “I guess your third husband will have to be Mr. In-between.”
“Haw haw,” she said.
Her first husband was a good enough man. She had liked him for his efficient masculine ways. But she had never been able to talk to him about the things she could talk to Mr. Wright about. Since she’d married Mr. Wright she’d learned how to balance the economy, reform the penal system, control foreign investment, and wipe out welfare. He’d taught her it all, and her greatest regret was that there was no one else she could tell it to. She couldn’t think of a soul in Cut Off who would know what she was talking about.
Certainly, if she’d brought up foreign investment in front of Mrs. Starbuck the best she could expect to get was a blank stare. What did Mrs. Starbuck know about anything beyond farming? Words like economics or welfare recipient were lost on her, they were as foreign as the menu in a Greek restaurant. Mrs. Starbuck probably didn’t even know one word of the other official language in her own country.
Mrs. Wright did. She wanted to help out the government and make all those people back in Quebec feel good so she borrowed a French text from the local school and started memorizing. She learned un deux trois quatre cinq six quite quickly and decided she had a flair for languages. Je regarde autour de moi (she could remember it even now). But she couldn’t foresee an opportunity to say things like that, even if Mr. Wright ever got around to taking her Back East some time so she could try it out in a Montreal restaurant. She sent away for a LEARN FRENCH AT HOME record and it was in her stereo set right now, beside the Andy Williams album, waiting for her to have time to play it.
Mrs. Wright felt pity for Mrs. Starbuck. Imagine living in a bilingual country and not knowing one word of the other language! The worst of it was that Mrs. Starbuck wasn’t even very good at handling English, let alone something else. And if Mrs. Wright ever got so silly as to offer Mrs. Starbuck her French book or record, the crazy old bat would probably say something like “There’s no Frenchies in Cut Off. Where would I use it?” to show her ignorance and backwardness.