Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  “What is?”

  “To tell about thinks like that.”

  “Consumption,” Mr. Muir said. “Life is very frail.”

  “TB they call it now,” Birdie said.

  Webster was only too happy to close his eyes and let Mr. Muir fill in. He listened as symptom after symptom was laid out one after another; each one more gruesome than the last, and felt Balk-eyed Birdie’s face close to his—watching his expression for signs of delight or revulsion, whichever. She smelled of sweat and cauliflower.

  He opened his eyes and peeked at Mr. Muir, who was talking with so much enthusiasm in his face that he might have been describing a circus. His eyes rolled up to watch the beautiful picture he was painting, his hands darted back and forth, like busy birds.

  “And that’s not all,” he said.

  “Not?”

  “It’s only a beginning,” Birdie said, patting his forehead. “Nobody gets that any more. But there’s plenty others they do get. Hundreds and hundreds. Mr. Muir will tell you about them all and how easy they are to catch and what they feel like.”

  “Tomorrow,” Mr. Muir said. “Be in my classroom right after breakfast. I’ll be waiting.”

  But Webster didn’t make it. By the end of the day of the robbery he was coughing. He slept badly and woke up the next morning with a burning forehead and pains in his chest. When Birdie came in she made a face and opened the window. “It stinks in here,” she said. Then she took off her clothes and crawled into bed beside him.

  “Your chest rattles,” she said, and ran a hand down over his groin.

  “I can’t move,” he said. “I feel as if the ceiling has come down to sit on me.”

  She rubbed her hands in his sweat and dried them in his hair. She rested one huge white breast on his throat and sang a lullaby. She climbed on top of him and lay down but he couldn’t breathe so she wrapped her arms and legs around him, gave a few heaves, then rolled right over onto her back and held him prisoner. “You’re the best pupil we’ve had yet,” she said.

  And cradled in the soft arms of Balk-eyed Birdie, fighting for every breath, rocking gently on her white belly, he saw a quick dark movement out of the corner of his eye. It was the water carrier again, the boy, grinning at him through the open window. “This time I’ve got you,” he cried and threw a great chunk of coal that ripped a foot-long strip of flesh off Webster’s back, down almost to the bone.

  He rolled onto the sheets and tried to undo the deed. He lay on his back and thought the boy and the coal and the wound right out of existence. They were nothing. But they leapt back; the pain came back into his flesh and he sat up to scream. He tried again and again to think them away but he couldn’t remember the reasons. The logic was gone. He couldn’t think of a single reason for not believing that pain was as real as he was. He lay on his stomach and wept while Balk-eyed Birdie mopped the blood off his back and poured something into the gash and covered it over with cloths and tape. Then he fell asleep.

  The McLeans came in through the open window. First Allan the eldest, then Charlie and Archie (still a kid, two years younger than Webster), and finally Alex Hare, who looked as if he didn’t know why he was there. They stood around the bed and looked just exactly the way he had seen them in pictures. Allan, the bearded one, in jacket and waistcoat and bandanna, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants. Charlie, too, standing slouched and easy, in looser, dustier clothes. The two younger boys scowled at him as if they couldn’t see any reason for not pulling out their guns and shooting Webster Treherne right there in bed without a single word.

  “You’re a long ways from home,” he said.

  But Allan McLean just shrugged both shoulders and twisted his mouth a bit to one side. He lifted his head and turned it a little. “Them nooses,” he said, “they’re ready.”

  A short dry sound came from Archie McLean’s throat. “We promised that Makai something,” he said. “He’ll cut the rope.”

  The others snickered and shifted feet. They were proud of this final trick, this ultimate joke on their enemies.

  “At least if we’d robbed that store today we’d’ve done it right,” Charlie McLean said. “You don’t know nothing.”

  “But you’re learning,” Allan McLean said, and squeezed Webster’s knee. “It’s too bad them nooses’re ready so damn soon. You might’ve made out all right.”

  Archie McLean scowled and Alex Hare spat on the floor. Webster still wasn’t sure they weren’t going to shoot him or knife him to death. They had never needed much provocation before.

  “Let me come with you,” he said, his head spinning and the weight of the whole house on his chest. “Let me ride with you just once and find out what it’s like. Let me rob storekeepers and shoot Indians, let me scare strangers and threaten women.”

  “You’re nearly a hundred years too late for that,” Balk-eyed Birdie sang out. She came into the room and sat on the side of the bed and poured something down his throat. When he looked up again the four men were gone. “You’re graduating from this school without even taking all the courses.”

  “And what have I missed?” he said. “What would your class have taught me?”

  “Missed nothing,” she said. “You’re finding out for yourself. You’re going to die.” She sat up and folded her hands in her lap like a mother who has just delivered wonderful news. “By the sound of that chest I don’t give you long.”

  “Die?” he said, for no one had ever told him what it meant.

  “Die.” She nodded as if to unheard dirges. “Die. Expire. Decease. Nobody I’ve ever heard of got to the stage you’re at and recovered. That is the reward you get for learning your lessons well, to get sick and die and then rot in the ground. Just when you’ve found out what you are, you’ll cease to be.” She smiled on him as if to say he’d made her proud.

  He tried to speak, to tell her he wasn’t exactly thrilled with the reward she offered, but his throat was full and it took all his energy just to cough it clear.

  “I never seen anyone go through so fast,” she said. “You really must’ve wanted it. You’ve got more than TB.”

  The phlegm burst clear for a moment and he hurled curses at her. “Do you think this is the only reason I came from . . . from . . . ?” But he couldn’t even remember where he had come from. She could have convinced him easily that he had been born in this very room just a day or so ago.

  “From the mountains, yes. But don’t get upset. Mr. Muir will phone a doctor. We’ll get you help. They’ll send you to a sanitarium or somewhere. There’s no hope for you now, but I don’t want you kicking the bucket in my place. Do it clean and right, somewhere else, in a hospital.”

  From the mountains, yes. He had come down out of the hills without rest or incident, though once he had stopped just long enough to eat raw eggs by a stream and cut his finger on a jagged blade of cattail. Down out of the green hills, from the farm, the green and singing farm where grass uncut grew nearly as high as the buildings and an old man’s voice rang like stones dropped into streams.

  “I can’t believe this thing is me,” he said, and she swung to frown on him. “You’ll never convince me of that. This isn’t what I came down here to find.”

  “It’s what you found,” she said. “It’s what you wanted. A black and smelly grave. How do you like them apples, my friend?”

  “Then I’ve been cheated. This sack of sore bones will never be me, say what you like.”

  She scowled. “Oh yeah? Then what are you, a fish?”

  “Not fish or frog or sack of bones. Something else.”

  “A sack of horse shit, maybe. A bag of turds.”

  “An idea. Somewhere else, everywhere. An idea in the Old Man’s mind and therefore perfect. You can’t destroy that.”

  She cracked a shoe across the side of his head. “Is that the thanks we get?” she yelled. “Is that all the gratitude you can show us?” She stood up and threw things at him, tossed floor mat and lamps and books and pictures and
shoes and hair brushes at him until he was nearly buried. She stood in the doorway, her face twisted and red, and screeched. “I don’t think you’ve learned a goddam thing!”

  He was sorry that when she came back with the doctor he wouldn’t be there, that he would miss seeing them look under the covers and under the bed and in the closet, would miss hearing her curses and her attempts to tell what she didn’t understand herself. He was sorry that she probably would never be able to explain the heavy coins or the painted hallway to her staff or to anyone else. But he wished her well and hoped for the sake of her sanity that she wouldn’t discover his absence soon enough to go out into the street and somehow by accident discover him hiking in the pale April sunlight up the road that led away from town, up from the harbour past the coal mines, through the farmland and the swamps to the base of the hills. Or hear him sing in his freedom up the long gravel climb through the trees.

  After the Season

  About fifty miles up the coast past the end of all public roads, in a little bay where the wildest tides throw logs and broken lumber far up the land like spat-out bones, Hallie Crane ran a café and a small cabaret for tourists staying at the fishing camp. Although there was a wharf built well out into the bay so fishing boats could tie up without being smashed against rocks, and down in the curve of the shore there was a small gravel beach where the bravest American tourists could run in for a quick swim and rush out again, Hallie’s place and most other buildings were perched up on the rock and looked as if a good wind would fling them right out into the strait. The café was so close to the edge it had legs straight down into the water and whenever Hallie wanted to go anywhere, down the slope to Morgan’s boat rental or around the bay to the well, she had to walk on a rickety boardwalk that ran right past her door and hung out over the sea. Tourists kept life jackets on their children the whole time they stayed in the camp.

  Hallie liked it well enough, at least in the summer. When the last tourists left in September she squinted up her two bright green eyes at them and told them it had been fun just having them around. “Now there’ll be nobody here at all for the next eight months except Morgan and me.” She had a grown family down-island where the grey ribbon of highway went right under their noses when they sat in their living room, and she could have moved down to stay with them any time she wanted if she was willing to keep off the bottle, but she never did.

  She never went back, hadn’t seen her own daughter for eight years. They told her when she left not to bother unless she could stay sober, and though she hadn’t touched a drink now for two years she still hadn’t got around to packing up and catching the boat out for the winter. She could imagine herself landing in on them easily enough, tall and straight and good looking as ever, and hear their shrieks of surprise: “What? You can’t be old enough to be this baby’s grandmother!” But oh yes, she was, she was fifty-one years old. She could walk like a youngster on her long narrow legs, could tell a joke with all the youth she knew was still inside, could snap her eyes in anger or fun as sharp and quick as she ever could. She touched up her hair now; natural blonde faded out faster than any other colour. But her face, though it had added laugh lines around the eyes and the skin was drier than it used to be, was still striking, still pretty. She could see herself going back, could imagine the fuss they’d make, but every fall when the season ended, a sharp cold fear inside told her to put it off for another year.

  During the summer Morgan, who owned the camp and ran it practically single-handed except for Hallie’s help, lived down in his rooms behind the boat house and Hallie lived in the back of her café. They treated each other like strangers, like employer and employee, like invisible beings. When he came into the café and sat with his hairy arms folded on the counter, he ordered coffee without looking at her. When she walked down to his place, picked her way along the boardwalk hanging on to the rail, to tell him the plumbing was plugged up or the toaster needed fixing, she walked in and out amongst the boats while she talked, touching them as if feeling whether the paint was good enough to last the season. But when the tourists had gone and Hallie had tidied up the café and the little cabaret room beside it and closed the shutters over the windows, she moved down the hill into Morgan’s rooms and stayed there until the first lot of people arrived the next June.

  Not suddenly. Not just like that as if they had been thinking about it all summer and could hardly wait. Every year she was a little surprised all over again. Morgan was only thirty-three years old and still romantic, and he insisted on courting her, luring her, as if every October were their first. If she had just packed her suitcase and carried it down the hill and moved in he would have been disappointed, might even have tossed her out, and probably would have pouted all through the winter.

  Every October he arrived at her door soon after the others had gone: a grinning, hairy, solid little man. “Dammit,” he said, “you’re a good-looking woman!” He came up behind and put his arms around her and ran his hands down her breasts and stomach and thighs. “Dammit, you’ve got it all over them other girls!” She slapped his hands and he went away for a while. But he came back again and again. He told her he was getting so randy for you-know-what that he was scared he’d go crazy and run screaming over the hills behind. He asked her how would she like to be raped. He brought gifts: chunks of smoked fish, handfuls of shells he’d found, magazines left behind in the cabins by tourists. It was usually about a week before Hallie recognized the signals that said it was all right for her to start giving in now. She stopped slapping his hands, stopped threatening to radio out for help, stopped keeping her distance. She packed her suitcase.

  This year though, when the last boat had sailed out of sight down the strait, she didn’t feel like going through all that drawn-out procedure, she just didn’t have the energy. “Cut it out,” she said. “I can’t see any point in all this fooling around. Can’t I just pack up and move down?”

  But he insisted. “What do you want to be?” he said. “A whore?” His breath smelled of smoked fish.

  “All right, I’ll pretend then. I’ll pretend I won’t do it but we both know I will.”

  He put his hands on her and told her what a good-looking woman she still was but she slapped the side of his head hard enough to knock him against the wall. “What the hell?” he said, his blue eyes hot with tears.

  “You wanted me to pretend, well I’m pretending. Now leave me alone.”

  He grinned at her. “You don’t want me to touch you because you’ve put on weight.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “You’re afraid if I touch you I’ll find out how fat you’ve got,” he said, leering. “I saw you gorging yourself all summer on them apple pies. Putting on pound after pound.”

  “I’d like to know how you noticed what I was doing when you never once tore your little piggy eyes off that blonde bitch from Seattle.”

  “Shoving it in when you thought no one else was looking. Putting on layer after layer of fat. Turning into a big cow.”

  “I haven’t put on a single pound, and,” skirting his outstretched hand, “you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  Two days later they were just getting to the stage where he would threaten to force her when the stranger arrived and interrupted the whole business.

  It was the worst October she could remember. Black cloud moved in and sat on them like a heavy lid. Rain came down steadily through night and day. A wind had whipped the sea into such a turmoil and thrown the tide so high up the land that sometimes Hallie expected to wake up in the morning and find herself floating. It was always a small surprise to discover no walls had been ripped off, no windows bashed in, no pieces of roof lifted. She kept a fire roaring in the cast-iron stove and got up several times during the night to shake the grates and add more wood. If she didn’t drown, she would probably burn to death.

  She was on the boardwalk tossing garbage down for the few gulls that still clung to the coast when she saw the stranger’s boat
. At first she thought it was nothing but a driftwood log, dipping and leaping with the waves, and when it got closer there appeared to be something alive, a large bird perhaps, perched in the middle and riding. It wasn’t until it had entered the bay and came rushing in towards shore that she saw it was a small aluminum boat with a man inside holding on for dear life and not even trying to steer with the handle on the useless little outboard motor. She ran down the boardwalk and across the beach in time to see it thrown ahead onto the gravel, sucked back, then thrown ahead again far enough for the man to leap out, fall to his knees, get up again, grab the rope, and drag the boat up high enough to tie it to a log. He turned two pale runny eyes on her and said, “Thank God I got to civilization.”

  “You didn’t,” she said. “There’s only me and Morgan and all these empty shacks. Even our radio set-up went on the blink a couple days ago.”

  He wiped a hand over his wet face, shook himself like a dog, tipped forward to let water run off the back of his neck. “It’ll have to do,” he said, flicking an ear. “I’m not going back out into that.”

  Morgan came out of the boat house, walking—as he always did—as if his body besides being solid and heavy was also hot and he had to keep both hands and arms well away in order not to get burned. He looked the little man over like an interesting log the sea had washed in, then looked at Hallie as if to say, “Now what have you done?”

  “We better get you somewhere and dry you off,” Hallie said.

  The little man bent down again and wrung out his straight blond hair, then flung it back with a snap that could have broken his neck, and turned to look out at the water. “I wouldn’t want to’ve spent much longer on that,” he said.

  “You wouldn’t’ve,” Hallie said. “You’d’ve been in it before long, dead as a thrown-back dogfish. Come on, let’s get you over to Morgan’s place, warm you up.”