Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  Morgan stood in their way and scowled at Hallie. Then, suddenly, he smiled as if the scowl had been about something else altogether, and said, “Don’t you think your place would be better?”

  “Nothing wrong with yours,” she said. “It’s good and warm.”

  “Too warm,” Morgan said. “And too small. I bet you’ve got a nice fire on up there in the café, maybe even a cup of coffee.”

  “Look,” the man said, “I don’t care where you put me, just so long as I can go somewhere to dry off. I may drown right here on shore if you keep arguing.” And he started walking up the slope towards the café.

  When they’d stripped him down to dry out his clothes there wasn’t very much to him. In his undershorts he looked like a young boy—Hallie had seen bigger bones in a turkey—but his face was the face of a man in his forties. When he handed over his clothes for her to hang up above the stove, looking so small and drenched and lost, she wanted to tickle him under the chin and say, “Cheer up, little man, you haven’t fallen off the end of the world!” But there was something about his face, a long narrow pointed face with sunken cheeks and pale fast-moving eyes, that told her if she so much as touched him, treated him like a child, he would snarl and growl and maybe knock her hand away with one of those frail arms.

  “Here,” she said. “You can put on my robe and we’ll dry out your undershorts too.”

  Morgan eyed him as if he expected to see him turn into a rat and start gnawing the house down. Hallie could see resentment already settling in around his mouth.

  “I’m a teacher,” he told them when his white jockey shorts were hanging on the line over the stove and he was wrapped up in Hallie’s red chenille bath robe. He found a cigar in one of his pockets but it was too wet to light and he threw it in the fire, spitting pieces of damp tobacco off his tongue. “I taught high school geography but I quit my job in June and started exploring up and down this coast.”

  “You should’ve tried elementary,” Hallie said. “The kids wouldn’t’ve been so big and scary there.”

  The little man looked at Hallie as if she were the stupidest pupil he’d ever run across. Then he looked up at the bare rafters. “My name is Hamilton Grey,” he said. “I have never been afraid of a person, big or small, in my life. Least of all a geography student. What scares me is not people but mankind.” And he looked at her again, as if it were all her fault, as if she were the mother of the whole blessed lot. “The stupidity of mankind appals me.”

  Hallie looked at Morgan and Morgan rolled his eyes. “I don’t know anything about smart or stupid,” she said. “Nice is good enough for me. If a person’s considerate of other people it don’t matter how much brains he’s got.”

  He looked up again and snorted. He and the rafters knew she’d just proved his point. “Nice people are spilling oil into the oceans,” he said. “Nice people are busy inventing new biological warfare weapons.”

  He told them he had this theory. Whatever your instincts tell you is right is exactly wrong. He told them instincts were good enough for the individual’s survival but all wrong for society. For example, he told them, everybody’s instinct says pornography increases sex crimes but the opposite is true, look at Denmark. He told them everybody’s instinct says if a kid is bad hit him, but that is the surest way to make him worse. Look at wild land, he said, instinct says tame it, kill all the scary animals, log off the useless trees, turn it into something we can handle. And prisons too, he said. The whole idea of punishment is instinctive but does exactly the opposite to what is good for society.

  “Mister Grey,” she said. “Is there anything at all good about people in your opinion?”

  He looked as if he’d never encountered that question before. He thought for a long time, stroking his pointed jaw. Finally, he said, “Yes, one thing. His potential. Man has one thing—mind—that makes everything possible.”

  “How long you plan on staying?” Morgan said.

  “I didn’t plan anything. My motor’s conked out.”

  “I can fix that,” Morgan said.

  “And I’m not setting out again as long as this storm keeps up.”

  When Hallie went out into the kitchen Morgan followed her and said, “You let him have your bed and come on down to my place tonight.”

  She told him he’d better watch his tongue. “There’s a spare bed in my back room,” she said. “Besides, what would he think of us?”

  “He already doesn’t think much of us. It wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “He’s a school teacher,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right. I just couldn’t do it.”

  Morgan sat down and tried to pull her onto his knee but she held back. “He doesn’t care. It’s none of his business.”

  “My son-in-law is a teacher,” she said. “I won’t do it.”

  “In that case,” Morgan said, “we will have to get rid of him.”

  But it wasn’t easy. All the next day he worked on the little man’s outboard motor. He took it apart, washed every piece in gasoline, put in new spark plugs. He replaced a part in the water pump. By evening it was running as smooth as a new motor but the storm hadn’t died down.

  “Looks like it’s settled in for a long haul,” Mr. Grey said, looking out the front windows of the café. “I’m not heading out into that.” He brought all his equipment in from the boat—his tent and sleeping bag and cooking utensils and food and books—and dropped them in the middle of Hallie’s floor.

  “Put them up on the stage out of the way,” she said.

  So he set up camp on the raised alcove beside the piano that Hallie played whenever there was a crowd that wanted to dance. There was a harvest moon painted on the back wall with SWING YOUR PARTNER printed across it. He set up the tent as if he could foresee rain coming through the roof, laid out his sleeping bag inside, and opened up his camp stove.

  “I’ll radio for a plane,” Morgan said.

  “No plane would fly in this,” Hallie said. “And besides, the set is broke.”

  And while he spent the next day trying to get the radio set to work, Hallie tried to find out more about Hamilton Grey. Because it was a long time since she’d talked to any teacher except her son-in-law, a sharp-eyed man who made her nervous, she didn’t know how to go about making conversation. She scrubbed floors and cleaned windows and stacked furniture in the dance room and he listened to her questions from behind a book, sitting on the edge of the stage.

  “You got somebody somewhere worrying about you right now? Somebody scared you’re drowned?”

  A page turned. “Mmph.”

  “No wife? No children, no parents?”

  He lowered the book and looked at her. “If I had all that lot hanging around my neck, would I be sailing up and down the strait taking my own sweet time? There isn’t a soul to care if I end up at the bottom of the ocean.”

  “It may not look like it,” Hallie said, “but I’ve got a family. A grown daughter.”

  There was no indication that he had heard her but she continued. “She’s married to a teacher too, like you, only he teaches chemistry and is a lot taller. They live in the same house my husband and I lived in for all twelve years of our marriage, right on the damn highway, only the highway’s been widened since then, and every time a car goes by you’d think it was coming right through the living room. I’m surprised they don’t move out and build a house of their own, but I guess all the savings they have get used up just living through the summer. They’ve got two kids.”

  He turned a page, then turned back to reread the bottom line and turned again.

  “I bet you never thought I was a grandmother,” Hallie said.

  He looked up to see if he’d missed anything, then looked down again.

  Hallie shifted chairs around noisily. “If bad manners is something they’re teaching at universities now you must’ve got top marks but I can’t say that I’m impressed.”

  He closed the book but kept a finger between the pages. “Wha
t I’m wondering,” he said, “is why you haven’t gone back to stay with your daughter. How come you’re all alone up here with that Tarzan the ape-man when you could be with your family?”

  “Scared I guess,” she said, quickly, because if she had paused to think about it she would have told him none of his business. “I’d be back on the bottle in a week if I went down there. I’d be so useless—don’t know how to talk to kids, not even my own grandchildren, without feeling like a fool—and that long beak-nosed son-in-law watching me like a hawk to see what makes me tick—I’d be throwing back the rye just to get through the day.”

  After supper Morgan came into her kitchen and said he hadn’t been able to get anything on the radio. He sat down at her table, spread out his elbows, and slurped up a cup of coffee. He swore after every mouthful.

  “Morgan,” she said. “Would you say I’m getting old looking?”

  “Naw.”

  “Well, since he came you haven’t said one nice thing to me. If I’m getting old and fat just tell me.”

  “Hell no,” he said, and pulled her down onto his lap. He dug fingers into the flesh of her thigh. “You’re still a good-looking woman.”

  “That Mr. Grey makes me feel old and stupid.”

  “Oh him,” Morgan said, and threw a sneer at the wall that separated the kitchen from the café and dance room. He ran one hand up the inside of her skirt but she put her hand on top of it and held it still.

  “You’re not doing much to get rid of him,” she said. “Maybe he’ll be here all winter.”

  He looked down at the lump his own hand made under her skirt and scowled. “I’ll get rid of the bastard,” he said, and pushed her off him so he could stand up. “But first I guess I better go in and tell him about the radio.”

  After Morgan had gone back to his boat house Mr. Grey told her the ape-man had nearly attacked him. His hair was on end, as if he had been running his fingers through it backwards, and his quick pale eyes were darting everywhere. Hallie couldn’t help feeling sorry for him; after all he was a teacher and probably not used to people like Morgan, mean and free, without school rules to hold him back.

  But just when she was beginning to feel warm inside with the pity she felt, he started to laugh, confusing her. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, one hard snort on either side. “You know what he told me?” he said.

  “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “Morgan’s liable to make all sorts of threats he won’t carry out. There’s not much harm in him.”

  “He said, ‘You know what you’re buttin’ in on?’”

  “What?”

  “He said I walked in on the middle of a mating ritual, that’s what he told me.”

  “A mating dance of two horny people,” Morgan had said. “You landed in here when we’d hardly got started. Hell, every year we go at it all over again like a couple of rutting mountain sheep, only we wait until after the season.” He rolled his eyes as if to say, You know what I mean. “Right through the summer while the tourists are here we don’t hardly talk to each other. She lives up here in her dance hall serving meals and I live down there in my boat house. A person wouldn’t even think we knew each other.”

  “This is none of my business,” Mr. Grey had said.

  But Morgan had gone on. “Then every October we look around, see, and there’s nobody left here. The tourists are all gone. The loggers, they’re back but they’re inland a ways. So pretty soon we’re sniffing around each other, see, and then we’re snarling and clawing each other. Finally we land in bed like a clap of thunder and that’s where we spend most of the winter.”

  “Like a couple of animals!”

  “You bet, mister,” Morgan had said. “You ever see a mountain sheep going after it? If he wants to he can run sixty miles an hour on his back legs. Think about that coming together!”

  Hallie didn’t wait for Mr. Grey to tell her anything more that Morgan had said or how he had got around to almost attacking him. She left the room and shut the door behind her, gently so he wouldn’t think she was upset. She stood stiffly for a long time in front of the little mirror that hung over the kitchen sink, her head throbbing like an inboard motor, her hand laid out stiff and white against the vibrations of her breast. She was a good-looking woman—the mirror told her that—and not even the dyed hair could make her look cheap. She was one of those women who kept their looks, who stayed smart and slim and attractive even into old age, but that was a different thing from what Morgan had made her sound like. It wasn’t a mountain sheep he made her sound like; it was a mink.

  She went out onto the boardwalk and sat on a bench that leaned against her front wall. The wind had died down a little and the rain had stopped falling but the surface of the water was still slate-black and heaving. There wasn’t a gull to be seen, gone inland for safety. She sat facing all of it, wouldn’t have moved even if an earth tremor had sent the whole building down crazily into the bay, and felt the hot flush of shame creeping up her face. The crashing of the waves against the pilings beneath her was no stronger in her than the beating of her own heart. She wanted a drink.

  Hallie Crane had felt real shame only once before in her life. She wasn’t a person who did things she later regretted. Most of her actions were deliberate, considered, and consistent. Memories were usually pleasant. But once, just once, she had fallen into something she was so ashamed of that even now, eighteen years later, its memory could send her to bed for a day or more. When the phone call came telling her that her husband had died in the Vancouver hospital, she was at a community dance, nearly drunk. Her daughter had taken the message.

  That wasn’t me! she wanted to scream at the memory of it. That wasn’t the real me, that was someone else.

  And now, too, she wanted to tell that little school teacher in there that he had been given the wrong impression. She wanted to set things straight in his mind. She went back into the kitchen, checked her face in the mirror again, and walked into the café where he was helping himself to a handful of sugar cubes.

  “You shouldn’t listen to Morgan,” she said. “He’s given you the wrong impression about us. Probably wanted to shock you.”

  He threw a sugar cube into his mouth and crunched it between his teeth. “Is there some place around here where a person can go for a walk?”

  When they both had their rain clothes on, she led him up the trail that climbed in a series of switch-backs up the slope of the hill behind the buildings. “Deer made this,” she said, “and elk.” The wet leaves of salal and Oregon grape knocked against their legs and soaked the bottom half of their slacks. When Mr. Grey hung onto a small scrubby pine to help pull himself up a particularly steep part of the trail, its roots were so shallow in the rocky soil that he pulled it right out and fell backward a few feet and rolled over against a windfall fir.

  At last they reached the top, however, and she stood aside for him to see that beyond it there was only a small swampy valley of burnt snags and another, higher hill. “From down there I thought this was the end,” he said, and she told him no, that it was only the beginning. “Just the first small step. It goes up and up and finally you’re above timber altogether and in year-round snow and then it drops straight down into the Pacific.”

  The fishing camp below was nearly obscured by the fine rain which had started, and by the mist. The small handful of buildings looked as if they too, like Mr. Grey, had been washed in by the tide and left stranded between the sea and this hill. Smoke from the little café stood up in a thin white column, then spread out level and flat as if somewhere between the roof and the top of the hill there was an invisible ceiling.

  Hallie sat down on a rock. No matter how hard she looked she could not see the mainland mountains through the dense grey wall of cloud. Below, the tiny figure of Morgan left one of the cabins and walked across to the boat house. “You shouldn’t pay him any attention,” she said. “He’ll just give you the worst impression of things.”

  Mr. Grey sat do
wn on the ground beside her. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “I don’t give a damn what you two do. When I get out of here I’ll probably never think of either one of you again.”

  She could see him going through his life, wiping out the people he met as if they were only figures on a chalkboard. Or as if he were that wall of cloud, blocking out the whole world.

  “There’s nothing about you that’s special. There’s no way that either one of you have touched me or entered me or altered my life. When I leave I’ll be the same as when I arrived, my life won’t be changed, and there won’t be a thing about my stay here worth remembering.”

  Hallie gritted her teeth. He may be a smart school teacher who thought he knew everything but there was one thing she knew better than he did. “You can’t touch someone else without it affecting your life in some way,” she said.

  “Ah, but here’s the difference: you haven’t touched me.” He broke off a branch of salal and started chewing on its tip. “You circle around me, you and that hairy ape of yours, making faces and screeching noises at me, but it’s as if I’m watching from inside a bubble of glass. You can’t penetrate. You can’t touch me. You never will. I’ll go on watching your mating dance without being affected in any way.”

  Hallie shuddered. “Mating dance?” He sounded as crude as Morgan. “Is that what you really think, just because he said it? Do you really think I’m like that?”

  But he didn’t answer. He found the veins in a salal leaf more interesting than her. He probably thought she had never done anything educational in her whole life, never even read a book. Well listen, she had. She told him about this story she once read, an old-fashioned tale in some book somebody’d given to her when she was a little girl. This girl in the story, this Proser-something, was out running around in a place something like this, pulling a bush right out of the ground just like Mr. Grey had and up out of that hole came old Pluto, the king of the underworld, riding in a chariot, and hauled her off against her will down into his deep horrible black place.

  “Proserpina,” he said. “I know the story, yes.” He got up and started following the trail back from the edge, towards the swamp. She hurried to catch up to him.