Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  He was rotten, she thought. But right now she wouldn’t even mind if he came back and went upstairs and cut that boy’s throat and took him away. It would be a solution and no one would know.

  Mrs. Starbuck put her hand over her mouth at the thought. She opened her eyes. The room was nearly dark, dark furniture had blended into its own shadow so she couldn’t distinguish one from the other. They had always moved at night.

  She ran both hands down her body. Mr. Starbuck’s plaid shirt, worn thin from a year’s washings, was stretched tight across her chest. His pants were still strong and smelled of grease. She had had to take the seams apart and sew in an extra ten inches down either side to fit them around her hips and thighs.

  Suddenly Mrs. Starbuck sat up. My God, had she worn these things over to Mrs. Wright’s? No wonder the woman thought she was mad. Had she gone into that house and sat down and drunk coffee looking like this? Her face burned. Thank goodness Mr. Wright hadn’t been home. He would have been sure she was crazy.

  They had always moved at night. She could feel it now, the gentle rocking of the car under her, the cool night breeze across her face as they drove slowly and quietly down a new driveway. She could hear the night calls of unseen birds and the squeak of a bottom step welcoming them home. She could taste the salt taste of tears as she picked up the sleeping boy from the back seat and carried him inside, following the flashlight beam of her husband who led them silently to his newest prison.

  Richard Starbuck, famous actor, famous inventor.

  Mrs. Starbuck got off the bed and removed her clothes. Then, in the dark, she took a dress from the closet and slipped it on over her head. She was going for help. She gave the telephone only a glance as she passed; she hated it and used it only for long-distance calls that couldn’t be avoided.

  She didn’t realize she was barefoot until she was in the car but had no intention of going back for shoes. While the movement was in her she was going to use it before it died out. She backed the car around and drove up the driveway to the gate. Just being behind the wheel of this old car could make her feel better. It was a battered old sedan as plain and bulky as herself, and responded as if it could read her thoughts. How many times, she wondered, had it helped them out of trouble?

  At the fork in the road she hesitated. Since Charlene Porter was the one who had discovered the boy in the first place maybe she should go there first. Charlene liked her. They were steady people. Their religion or whatever it was had got them through a lot of rough spots. But they would want to pray or something, probably, and that was one thing Mrs. Starbuck was not prepared to do.

  Besides, hadn’t the girl herself, that Charlene, told her once that prayer doesn’t change the truth? She said it just puts your thinking more in line with it or something like that. Mrs. Starbuck didn’t want to be put in line with what seemed to her right now to be the truth.

  Going to the Larkins’ place passed through her thoughts. She saw herself knocking on their door and going into the shack and asking for someone to help (How? How? How help?) But she saw their faces, three blank stupid faces showing her only their contempt. Shelley would show pity too, of course, but like the boys she would feel disgust at the sight of a woman as solid as Mrs. Starbuck going to pieces. They expected her to be a rock, it must seem to them that anyone with more intelligence than their own should be able to solve any problems the world was capable of serving up.

  Probably they wouldn’t even feel that much. She could see them watching her like a cluster of vacant indifferent cows, three stupid Holsteins with no more feeling for her or anyone else than Mr. Porter’s bull. There was no point in looking for any kind of aid in that direction.

  And that left only the Wrights.

  “Edna Starbuck, you’re barefoot,” Mrs. Wright said. “Have you been drinking? And this is your third visit today.”

  Mrs. Starbuck went up the steps and into Mrs. Wright’s house. It was cool inside, and very light. She had to squint to see and couldn’t seem to find a place to sit down.

  “For heaven’s sake, woman, what’s the matter with you?” Mrs. Wright said. “Can I get you something?” She pushed papers into a neat pile on the table. “I was just writing up my column. You look as if you’ve stepped right out of a coffin.”

  “Your husband. Is Mr. Wright home yet?”

  “Good heavens no. They stay after the game for a few drinks in the clubhouse. Edna, if you could only see yourself.”

  Mrs. Starbuck sat down on something. “Then I’ll wait,” she said. “He’s got to come some time.”

  Mrs. Wright looked as if she were going to explode. Her rooster-leg arms were folded tightly across her little chest. Her lips were pressed together. “I’ve never been one for judging others,” she said. “But when I do I always judge only by what I see. I believe that’s only fair. And today I think I’ve seen a lot more than I should’ve.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you,” Mrs. Starbuck said, waving one hand as if that were enough to make Mrs. Wright disappear. “This is business.”

  “Business?”

  “Yes. Business. Lawyer business.”

  Mrs. Wright whirled around twice, as if she were looking for something to hit Mrs. Starbuck with. “You don’t know any lawyer business. You’ve never even talked to a lawyer before. What kind of business?”

  Mrs. Starbuck was tired. She felt as if a terrible weight were sitting on her head, pushing her down. She expected to collapse like a telescope, head inside her shoulders, chest inside her hips. “This will be strictly between me and him,” she said.

  “What you should be looking up at this time of night is not a lawyer at all but a psychiatrist.” Mrs. Wright stepped back after those words and watched Mrs. Starbuck’s face, waiting to see if this time she had gone too far.

  Mrs. Starbuck shook her head. “Maybe I’ve been crazy all my life,” she said. “Maybe I’ve been asleep and just dreaming my life. But right now I think I am saner and more clear-sighted even than you are.” She paused for a moment, then added, “If that’s possible.”

  Mrs. Wright pushed her face in very close and spoke softly. “In that case, Mrs. Starbuck, Mrs. Level-headed and Clear-sighted Starbuck, you just may understand what I’m going to say. Mr. Wright does not come home on Friday nights. After he’s played his golf he does I-don’t-know-what and gets home just in time for breakfast.”

  Mrs. Starbuck’s eyes opened wide and watched Mrs. Wright step back. She stood up. “Oh my God,” she said. She got out of the house as fast as she could and dropped her heavy body onto the front seat of the car.

  Mrs. Wright called from the bottom step. “Wait. Can’t you tell me? Can’t I help?”

  But Mrs. Starbuck backed out onto the highway and drove halfway home before she remembered to change out of low gear. The car, which she was sure had caught some of the panic she felt, trembled and sputtered and coughed. When she stopped in front of her own house she put her forehead down on the steering wheel and waited. She didn’t know what she was waiting for but she listened hard, breathing silently, as if she expected a bolt of lightning to zig-zag down the sky and strike the whole lot of them at once.

  Strike Mrs. Wright, she thought. Wipe that white-haired little scrunch right off the earth and do everyone a favour. Nobody’d miss her. And Charlene too, wipe that mind of hers so clean she can’t remember a thing, or recall betrayal. Then come over here and get us both, that boy, that shell of a boy, then me.

  When she looked up she was surprised to see that her headlights were still on, that they cut a piece out of the night, a long rectangular room between her and a wall of trees, silver-leafed and still. A cat slunk through the grass, paused to turn headlights of his own back on her, then moved on out of sight. She strained her eyes to see into the space behind the trees but there was nothing. It was as if any light that passed through gaps in the leaves uncaught had abandoned the effort and died out without reaching any goal. This wall, this blank unfeeling wall of trees, was wra
pped like a stockade fence around them all: the Porters, the Wrights, herself.

  Mrs. Starbuck sighed. There was to be no lightning then and sitting here accomplished nothing. She found herself wishing again for the mean little man who had always packed them all off in the middle of the night to some place where they would be safe again for a while. At least he could act, move, while she felt as if she could sit here until she starved to death or died of fright.

  At last, though, she stirred. She got out of the car and walked to the house, her bare feet slapping on the narrow concrete walk, then went inside and climbed the stairs to the second floor. She turned on every light switch she passed. At the top of the stairs she stopped to catch her breath, her heavy body aching from the effort, both hands on her knees and head bent right over as if she’d lost something on the floor.

  Then she moved forward with a deliberateness that surprised herself. She couldn’t have stopped. She opened the door to the storage room, went in, and slid her hand up and down the wall until it bumped into the light switch and turned it on. Then she set up the ladder and climbed it, puffing, both feet on each rung, and pushed her head up through the door in the ceiling.

  The boy was asleep and too heavy for her to carry this time so she shook him awake. “We’re moving again,” she whispered to him over and over until she was sure it connected somewhere inside that head with other memories and made sense. “We’re moving again, going some place nicer this time.”

  She went ahead of him into each room to turn out the light, then came back and guided him forward. “This time it will be different,” she promised him. “This time it will be nicer.” And she helped him down the steps as if they were both blind, both unsure, both frightened. Telling herself: it will soon be all over, we’ll be able to relax, the nightmare will end.

  When he was in the car she slammed the door and went around to her own side to get in. “I still don’t have any shoes on,” she said, swallowing a giggle. And remembered too, that she hadn’t packed a suitcase for either of them. “I’ll come back and move the rest,” she said.

  Again the headlights hit the wall of trees. “We’ll find another place, nicer than this,” she said. “A little farmhouse somewhere, surrounded by apple trees, a little house covered with cedar shakes.”

  She started the engine and backed the car around. She patted the dashboard gently: Help me once more, she told it, just one more time. Then said, “This time we’ll never have to move again,” and put her hand on the boy’s knee. His head rested against the window on his side. He looked as if he had gone back to sleep.

  I won’t turn the headlights out, she thought. This time I won’t sneak away. She drove slowly up her driveway, feeling the car vibrate beneath her like a purring cat. Don’t stop, she thought, don’t stop for anything until you’ve got us somewhere safe. “And something else, Richard,” she said, trying his name aloud for the first time in fourteen years. “There won’t be any prison in this next house, no locked doors. You’ll live with me the way a son should.”

  For a moment she thought that somehow the door on his side of the car had fallen open and she slammed on the brakes. But he wasn’t falling, he was leaping free of the car, squealing; he landed on one foot, rolled, then leapt to both feet again and started running, ahead of her, down the road.

  She didn’t get out to catch him, she drove behind, her front bumper inches from his legs. He’s never run before, she thought, he’s never even done much walking. Sooner or later he will tire or fall or forget how to move his legs, or realize he doesn’t know how to run. Then I’ll stop and pick him up and take him away. Just take it easy, she whispered to the car. And felt something of herself drain down through her fingers and into the wheel.

  His figure in the light ahead of the car was like a puppet dangling, his legs and arms all uncoordinated and loose. And yet he kept on, slowly, and did not duck off to the side to escape or fall to his knees to be caught. He fled before her as human as a shadow, down the darkened tunnel of road beneath the trees.

  But as Mrs. Starbuck was approaching the bridge another pair of headlights came around the corner and bore down on her, coming too fast.

  “You’ll hit my son!” she screamed, and jammed one foot down on the brake pedal. Without taking the time to pull on the handbrake or turn off the engine or even change out of gear she pushed open the door and leapt out (commanding “Wait here” as if to a servant or child), then ran ahead to catch the boy before those other headlights could hit him. In front of her own still moving car her hand touched him, just brushed him, a split-second before she stumbled and fell to her knees. The other car squealed, sprayed gravel, stopped only a few feet away from her.

  The bumper of her own car, like a chrome-plated hand, caught in the back of her dress and dragged her forward in the gravel. She fought, thrashed her hands about and kicked her feet, but it was as if she were fighting a monster she couldn’t see, as if all the world was on her back. Pieces of gravel got into her mouth, stones scratched her legs, dust clogged her eyes. A tooth broke and the flesh on one arm peeled back like a wet sleeve. Then, almost gently, the car nudged her over the bank and pushed her ahead of it down the slope like an insistent policeman to the creek, gaining speed, and then rolled ahead to rest one tire in the middle of her back. The other front tire sat in the water and lost air through a hole punctured by a sharp piece of stone.

  Mrs. Wright got out of her pickup and ran to the edge of the bridge, the edge of the world. “What is it? What is it?” she screamed at the dark. But no answer came from all that empty space, and below there was nothing to see but slow water, moving like thick brown syrup through the circle of light thrown by the one unbroken headlight. Then, somewhere, there was the sound of trees rustling and something—perhaps a deer leaping free— moved through the night away from her, so close she could hear breathing.

  She went back to the pickup and got a flashlight from the glove compartment, then picked her way carefully down the bank to the edge of the creek and shone the light on Mrs. Starbuck’s face.

  One of Mrs. Starbuck’s eyes was under water; the other, a dull plastic ball, stared swollen and incredulous up at Mrs. Wright as if Mrs. Starbuck in the last failing moment had seen something she badly needed to tell about. But from her open mouth only dark fluid bubbled out and was carried away by the moving water. Mrs. Wright snapped off the flashlight and let the dark fall around her again like a collapsing tent.

  “I can’t believe it,” she told Charlene later, when she had used the Porters’ phone to call the police. She sat down at the kitchen table as if the knowledge was too heavy for such a small person to carry standing up. “And yet I saw she wasn’t right. I could see there was something wrong with her. That’s why I was headed over to her place tonight, to see what I could do.”

  Charlene watched the little woman’s tight scaly fingers bend and straighten. “Wasn’t anything wrong with her,” she said. “She just didn’t know what was what.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, like two women who did know what was what, and then their eyes slid away and towards the window that faced the road. As if both hoped to find Mrs. Starbuck out there in that dark, coming towards them, shouting that it was all right now, that it had all been a mistake.

  “But the boy!” Charlene cried, suddenly remembering.

  Mrs. Wright eyes jumped. “What boy? What are you talking about?”

  Charlene put her hand over her mouth. “You didn’t even know about him?” she said. “She never told you?”

  “About who?” Mrs. Wright folded her little arms and sat back. “All I know is what I see. How am I supposed to know anything else?”

  And, staring into that window which in the night was only an inferior sort of mirror, she contemplated the two pale reflections of their startled faces.

  II

  The Trench Dwellers

  Macken this, Macken that. Gerry Mack had had enough. Why should he waste his life riding ferries to wed
dings and family reunions? There were already too many things you were forced to do in this world whether you liked them or not. “And I’ve hated those family gatherings for as long as I can remember,” he said. “Why else would I move away?”

  The problem was that Gerry’s Aunt Nora Macken really did believe family was important. She used to tell how the Mackens first settled on the north slope of the valley more than fifty years ago when Black Alex, her father, brought the whole dozen of his children onto the Island in his touring car and started hacking a farm out of what had for centuries been pure timber land. And would tell, too, that by now there was hardly a household left in all the valley that wasn’t related to them in one way or another. What Aunt Nora called The Immediate Family had grown to include more than four hundred people, three-quarters of whom were named Smith or O’Brien or Laitenen though she called them all the Mackens.

  There wasn’t any real substitute for having a lot of relatives, she said. And the people who knew her best, this tall big-footed old maid living out on that useless farm, said that yes, she was right, there was no substitute for family.

  And because Nora Macken lived on those three hundred acres of farmland which had gone back already in two generations to second-growth timber, she thought it her duty every time there was a wedding or a funeral to call a reunion of The Immediate Family the day after the ceremony. More than three hundred relatives gathered. The older people, her own generation, spent the day in the house telling each other stories about Black Alex, reassuring one another that he really was as mean and miserable as they remembered, but that it couldn’t be denied he was a bit of a character, too, all the same.

  The young adults drank beer outside in the grassy yard or on the verandah and talked about their jobs and their houses, and each of them tried to find out how much money the others were earning. The children chased each other between the dead orchard trees and climbed the rickety ladders to the barn mow and fought over the sticky slices of cake Nora Macken put outside on a folding card table in the sun.