Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  “Then you know her old lady found her all right,” she said, “but not before she’d half broken a promise not to eat a thing down there. So for the rest of her life, if you can believe it, she had to spend six months with her mother and six months down in the underworld with him.”

  “With Pluto,” he tossed over his shoulder. “I didn’t think anyone remembered those tales any more.” They were walking on logs now; the ground was soft and damp, with a musty swamp smell. Burnt snags stood around like silent black totems.

  “Anyway, that’s what I feel like. Only I don’t get six and six. I get three months, four if I’m lucky, of normal living with people treating me like a human being. Then along comes October and he starts in dragging me down.”

  “Morgan?” Mr. Grey stood on the edge of the little lake, a hundred feet of green scum in front of him, a log laid out on it like a wharf. He turned and his pale eyes crinkled, as if he was ready to disbelieve whatever she was going to say next.

  Hallie stopped walking. “Pulling me down into his hell with him. Clawing at me and slobbering and pulling me down, living in slime.”

  Mr. Grey walked out onto the log, straight out over that floor of scum. “If I remember the story right, the girl didn’t mind it so much. She got so she kind of liked old Pluto.”

  Hallie felt as if she might explode. “Nobody likes living in hell,” she cried.

  At the other end of the log he turned and faced her. “The whole world loves it,” he said. He looked slightly amused, as if she were a child run up against something every adult understood. “As soon as a human being chooses to pay attention to his five senses he’s electing to live in hell.” He let her chew on that for a while, then bounced a little on the log to watch it disturb the thick surface of the lake. “If he pays attention to the demands of the senses, if he uses them to make judgments, if he listens to their reports of pain and disease, he’s living in hell. There’s nothing so special about you.”

  Hallie walked by herself back to the edge of the slope and sat down. After a while he came up behind her and she said, “All right, mister, you know so much. Is there a way out?”

  He chuckled. “Sure there is,” he said. He started down the hill. “I guess you were hoping I’d say everybody is doomed to be miserable and so you’re pretty normal after all. D’you think that just because I’m soured on humanity I don’t see its possibilities? Well, lady, like it or not, there are some happy people in the world.”

  “Who?” she demanded.

  He stopped on the trail and looked up at her. “It’d be a lot easier for all of us if we didn’t look around once in a while and see people who can smile.”

  “Who are they?” she said, running down to catch up and nearly crashing right into him.

  He pushed his face so close to hers she had to step back. He spoke as if he were chipping the words out one at a time, once and for all. “Those who refuse to ride in the chariot!”

  Hallie felt as if his breath had turned all of her into some cold rigid material. She looked into his eyes, pale, murky, trembling from the force of his words. A thin, barely visible red line ran from the edge of one grey disc down into the corner by the tear duct, casual as a lost thread. He was human. He was human. She lifted one hand and brushed a finger against his cheek.

  Mr. Grey leapt back from her touch and tripped over a rock. He rolled over and over down the hill, slid a few feet, then rolled again until he slammed up against a tree. By the time Hallie got down that far he was on his feet again, walking with a slight limp down the deer trail to the fishing camp.

  She’d handled it all wrong, she knew. She hadn’t even behaved the way Hallie Crane normally would. That night in bed she thought of all the people she had known back home, the friendly nosy country people who had been her neighbours for nearly twenty years, and she tried to see herself as they would. Hallie Crane? You want to know how Hallie Crane would treat a little shit like that, spouting his nonsense? She’d throw back her head and laugh. You’d see her long white throat. You’d hear her deep harsh laugh. Hallie Crane has the sexiest laugh a man ever heard and that’s exactly what she’d turn on that smart-alec school teacher. She’d laugh and ask him who the hell he thought he was.

  But she hadn’t done that. She didn’t even have her old laugh any more. She’d kept her looks and her figure and her long slim legs, but somewhere along the way she’d lost her deep throaty laugh. Those people wouldn’t recognize her without it. No wonder she’s scared to come home, they’d say. Hallie Crane without her laugh isn’t Hallie Crane.

  And she knew that she would never go back. There was nothing strong enough to pull her back to that place; not friends, not daughter, not grandchildren. She didn’t want to see her son-in-law again. She didn’t want to see the house again, or the small farms that surrounded it. Some day, maybe, she would send down enough money for her daughter and the children to fly up and spend part of the summer with her. That would be nice. Her daughter could help out in the café, talk to the tourists, find out that the kind of life her old lady lived wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe Morgan would take them fishing.

  While Hallie was lying in bed planning her future she heard Mr. Grey get up and go outside. Just keep on walking, she thought, walk right on over the mountains and down-island until you find the road, then keep on walking still. You’ve stirred up here all that needs to be stirred. How nice it would be to wake up in the morning and find he had gone, that he had shoved out to sea in his boat and disappeared. She would worry perhaps, for a few minutes, that he was in danger or even drowned, but soon she would say it was his own choice and forget him.

  Though Hallie believed a little in the power of thought, she never expected immediate results. The sound of lumber breaking, snapping like kindling, and a long scream right outside the café brought her up out of the bed and to her feet. Outside her front door she discovered a large section of the boardwalk railing had been broken away. There was no sound below but the slapping of the sea. “Mr. Grey?” she said, in case he was close by and watching her. But no answer came so she yelled his name into the dark. She felt for a moment as if she were alone, the only person left in the world, abandoned. She screamed for Morgan, who came up the slope eventually with a strong flashlight he aimed down into the water splashing sloppily around the pilings, and it wasn’t until morning that they found Mr. Grey’s body, back under the boardwalk and nudging like a dead fish against the rock her house was built on.

  “You son of a bitch,” Hallie said to Morgan. “Did you do this?” Morgan came up close and looked hard at her. The rain was rolling off his flattened hair and down his face, dripping from the end of his nose. “Do you think that?” he said.

  She looked into his eyes, steady as stone. “No,” she said, and turned away. She went back into the café and waited until he had fished the body out and came to bang on her door.

  “We’ll have to bury him,” he said.

  She shuddered. “We’re not that far from civilization. It doesn’t seem right.”

  She turned away but he stepped in and walked around to face her and wrapped his arms so tight around her she couldn’t move. She could smell the smoked fish on his breath, could see the black spikes of his week-old beard. She tried to push away but his grip was too tight, his arms too strong.

  “What’re you going to do?” he said.

  “Going home.”

  “Hell you are. You’re home now.”

  “I mean down-island, back to my family. I’ll fly out as soon as the weather changes. I want to get away from this goddam hole.”

  “You’ll never go back there again and you know it.”

  During the following week the storm continued. Waves hit the rocks and leapt up almost as high as the boardwalk railings. The wind, coming in from the strait like a giant flat hand, bent the seaside pines and firs down almost to the ground. Morgan walked up to the café every day and tried to talk her into moving down to the boat house but she didn’t talk to him a
t all. She rolled up Hamilton Grey’s sleeping bag and folded his tent and left them piled on the stage beside the piano for the day when the RCMP would be finally contacted and come to ask questions about his death.

  At the end of the week Morgan came to the door and asked if she wanted to help bury the little school teacher. She nearly laughed and said “No, but thank you for thinking of me,” but instead just shook her head and shut the door in his face. Through the window of a back room she watched him drag the body out of the shed and haul it, wrapped in one of her blankets and laid out flat on a piece of canvas, up the steep slope of the hill. She ran out into the rain with Mr. Grey’s books, scrambled up the hill until she caught up with Morgan, and said, “Throw these in too.” She tossed the books, whose titles she hadn’t even noticed, onto the canvas beside the body and hurried back down the hill before he started digging the grave.

  That evening the wind was quieter, the rain silent, but Morgan still hadn’t fixed the radio set. Hallie sat for a long time at the window, looking out to sea, listening to the intense beating of her own heart. Then she packed her suitcase and walked down the boardwalk, slowly, casually as if she hoped for a ship to appear from behind the point of land and sail in to pick her up by the time she got down to the gravel beach. But no ship came and Hallie Crane walked past the beach, gravel crunching under her heels, walked past Mr. Grey’s little aluminum boat still tied to a driftwood log, and knocked lightly on the boat-house door.

  Inside, she put down her suitcase and took a good look around. “The first thing you can do,” she told Morgan, “is go up and bring down my own bed. I’m just here for the company.”

  “Sure you are,” he said, and shut the door.

  “I can’t stand being alone for long.”

  “Sit down,” he said. “I was making some coffee.”

  She smiled. “Did you dig a deep enough grave?”

  “Deep enough so the rain won’t wash him out, shallow enough for people or relatives to dig up if they want to see the body.”

  “He had no relatives,” she said, taking off her coat. “He said he had no one.” She smiled. She would like to have laughed, like the old Hallie, but she turned instead to the window and looked out for a moment across the little bay. “He told me there was no one in the world who could touch him, not even us.”

  Spit Delaney’s Island

  I hate to think what Marsten would say if I told him I was doing this. Nearly every day on the way home from the paper mill he sits in his car out front until I invite him in for a beer, and then he says “By gosh, I don’t mind if I do” and comes in. We sit back in the only two chairs there are in this motel cabin, facing each other across the table, while he complains about all the people at the mill who wouldn’t put in a decent day’s work if their lives depended on it, and can’t be trusted to blow their own noses without a boss telling them to. Sometimes he gets excited and yells at me and calls me stupid fool for brooding about my marriage break-up, and tells me I ought to be glad to escape from a woman like Stella Delaney. But what does a man like Marsten know about the things that I’m thinking, after what’s happened to me? What does he know? Sooner or later he stands up to leave, drives a fist into his stomach to trigger one of his belches, and says “Yes sir; it’s a bugger all right,” which is his opinion on the general affairs of the world. I’ve a pretty good idea what he would say if he knew I was doing this, thinking these things, or if he found out about Phemie Porter. I know Marsten; that son of a gun would go through the roof.

  I feel new at this life still. Stella and me’ve been separated for eight, nearly nine, months now, and sometimes I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do or how to act. Nobody tells you, you’re just dumped. I feel like I walked out into the middle of somebody else’s play, right in the middle of it, and nobody’s told me what lines to say. Not that anybody’d catch me going to a play, or to much of anything else any more for that matter, except to work every day and then back home, if you can call this place home. It’s only a cabin, but I guess it’s good enough, it’s all I need it to be. On the edge of the village, right on the beach, it’s just a few minutes’ walk from a grocery store, and only the highway stretches out between me and my job at the mill where I spend all the time that I can. Inside there’s this double bed with a sort of orange tattered chenille over it, a wooden table, a pile of dog-eared old paperbacks I’ll never read, a hotplate, a watercolour of these stupid-looking wooden ducks trying to fly up off a phony lake, and my big oil painting of Old Number One the steam loci they sold right out from under me for those Ottawa tourists to stare at. And of course there’s the view, the strait, whose tides slosh forward up the gravel slope, nudging driftwood and seaweed ahead, almost to the cabin door. And roar in my window all night. The Touch-and-Go Motel. It’s a good enough place.

  Not that you’ll ever catch Marsten admitting it. He’s a big slow-moving man with all the time in the world to live everyone else’s life, and no interest at all in his own. He’s worked in the yard crew at the mill for most of the twenty years I’ve been there, and eats his pork-and-bean sandwiches every noon in the shack with me, and tells me it’s high time I got over being a Separated Man, acting as if the world has ground to a sudden stop. He’s got this jowly head that seems to grow right up out of his shoulders, like a walrus, with thick sagging lips, and a pair of pale little eyes nearly buried in flesh. His body is like a walrus, too, tapered away from its heavy top. When he sits down he tries two or three times to get one knee up over the other, but never can, and always ends up sitting with his tiny legs wide apart and his elbows planted squarely on the table. “Yes sir, it’s a bugger all right,” he says, and calls me every kind of fool, and belches, and thinks of forty-seven different reasons why a man is better off without a wife and ought to be glad. I tell him he’s a decent enough friend but I’d like it a lot if he could keep his nose in his own business for a change. Old Marsten.

  “Make a joke if you want,” he says, squeezing both eyes up closed and hauling a handkerchief out of his pocket to mop off the sweat from the folds of his neck. “Make a joke out of it if you want, man, but you’ll be making yourself sick if you go on full of self-pity. It’s time you started having some fun.”

  How can I have any fun when he’s always hanging around nagging at me? Him and that other one, that Bested woman. Sometimes if Marsten isn’t quick enough at ducking out of the cabin, he gets trapped into a second beer by the only other person who ever visits me, old Mrs. Bested, the woman who owns this motel. She comes in, whenever she can catch us, with three bottles in her hands, and sits nursing one of them between her knees on the side of the bed, her powdered face pointing out towards sea. “It’s a lonely life,” she says, her bit of blackmail. I don’t know how much she can see; she has these eyelids that never open, the kind that would have to have been slit by a doctor’s knife when she was born. She tilts back when there’s something that has to be seen, but usually only stares into the insides of those lids, and sucks the neck of her beer bottle, and pouts out her lips to release the gas. That woman always makes me feel cold when she’s in the room, I don’t know why. There’s something about her. If she gets into the cabin before Marsten has left, and gets herself settled on the bed, the two of them could be arguing there until late into the evening, and forget all about supper, and never bother to count the empty bottles that get lined up along the baseboard by the door.

  “Vision is a thing of the heart,” she likes to say, rolling the bottle between her hands. “A person could be blind as a bat and have vision clear as glass.”

  “Excuse me,” says Marsten, “but that is a lot of hooey.”

  “The important thing is to see,” she says. “It takes more than just opening your eyes to do that.”

  “And that,” says Marsten, “is a load of manure.”

  Old Mrs. Bested threatens to pout. “I know what I know,” she says, and points her chin.

  Sometimes she drives fingers into her hair, rile
s it all up into a bush of blue-white flames. When the light catches it a certain way I expect her to float away. A good blast of wind and she could go out under it, floating, out the window like the helpless stem of a dandelion parachute.

  “Have you been to see the children this week?” she nags at me.

  “Is Mrs. Delaney well, up there at the house? Have you seen her at all?”

  “Have you signed the papers for ever, so to speak, or is there a chance that you’ll patch it up?”

  “Don’t you ever go out for some fun, Mr. Delaney? It’s not healthy for a man to sit and feel sorry for himself.” Echoing Marsten, the big-mouth. There are times when I can see myself smashing her skull in with a leg wrenched out of a chair. Just to shut up her talking.

  Eventually, if she stays long enough, she’ll get around to talking about her hands. They’re magic, she says, and holds them up like jewels to turn in the light. “I have magic hands.” They look like pretty ordinary hands to me, but she holds them up as if they had the secret of life in them.

  “Sure,” Marsten says, “and I have a big toe that can talk.”

  “With these hands,” she says, “I can pull all of the pain out of your body, out of your mind. It’s a fact.”

  And somehow she always manages to talk one of us, usually me, into letting her prove it. She stands up behind the chair, digs her hands into my neck, and explores down into the shoulders. Her thick fingers slide down under my shirt, dig hard into muscles, threaten to shake me right off the chair.

  “Nobody believes in love any more,” she says. Her breath when she leans close is beer-sour and hot.

  Well, how could you? I want to know. Forty years have nearly managed to educate all that stuff out of me.

  “Though the television seems to go on believing,” she says.