by Jack Hodgins
“That’s an awful thing to say,” Stella said, but I waved her to be quiet. I wanted a look at this creature.
There was a boy with her, who took off her fur coat, peeled it back off her shoulders. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, I’d say, and, oh, seven feet tall, thin as a rake, with hair leaping out from his head like a crown of wire. All hair and bulging crotch; the rest of him might have been made of water pipes, wrapped in dirty denim.
And there she was, peeled out of her fur, with her tits hanging free in an old wrinkled sweater, and a plaid skirt that could’ve been made from a horse blanket. When she started to walk over to the corner table behind the waiter I saw she had hiking boots on, probably the only first-owner things on her body. Oh, I’ve seen lots of her kind around, especially in summer, they come out of the woodwork or somewhere parading themselves, but this one was the worst of the lot.
But Stella just turned back to her food. She was too lady to stare. She went on, telling me what my problem was, like someone reading a catalogue:
1. I put too much faith in things, and none in people,
2. I’m scared to think about anything in case I run into a question I can’t answer,
3. I act like I believe a broken-up marriage is a sign that I’m a worthless human being,
4. I treat women as if they’re all created for my benefit, but
5. I haven’t got the guts to approach one now that I’ve failed with my first.
(She stopped here to order dessert—strawberries in ice cream—in a voice that must’ve made the waiter want to go out and puke, so sweet and thin and familiar. She smiled at his retreating ass, then turned back to me and went on.)
6. I never learned how to tell anyone else what I was feeling, so
7. I was always getting hurt when people couldn’t guess what I felt, so
8. I figured that once I was married and had kids and a job I liked I didn’t have to put any more effort into life, or try to improve, or imagine there was anything left I could try to understand, and one more thing:
9. a man who would say a woman is ugly and think he’s said all that needs to be said about her has a lot of changing ahead of him.
And here I was thinking she wasn’t ugly after all, my woman in the corner table with her pipe-stem boy, she was grotesque. Stella went on talking about things, about people we knew, about the kids and their school work, about what she figured I ought to be doing with myself, but I hardly listened. I was busy watching that woman. The boy sat barely moving, never changing the expression on his face. But she acted like a half-starved logger just come into the grub-house after a day of setting chokers. She laughed loud and coarse at the waiter doing his thing with the tray and the flames, showing spaces between her teeth, and sat with her knees wide apart in that skirt. (Stella, even in her black pants, sat so tight-together you couldn’t drive a wedge.) When her food came she dug in, got it all over her hands, laughed with her mouth full, and hollered for the waiter to bring her a better class of wine. I wished my mother could’ve seen this. Her tongue would cluck in her mouth for a month afterwards. Me, I could’ve watched that woman for ever, she was such a good show.
“Is that what your freedom will turn you into?” I asked Stella. “Is that where you’re headed? Liberated woman. Is that what you want to be like?”
But she didn’t answer me. She leapt up from the table, snorting the way she does when she’s holding back on a sob, and headed over towards the door. I didn’t think a thing like that would bother her, she always used to like being teased a bit, I thought she’d take it as teasing. But she didn’t. She just up and got out of there fast and left me to pay the bill by myself.
On my way out, on my way past the corner table, that woman’s hand shot out and grabbed ahold of my pants, just above the knee, and held on. When I looked at her, thinking What the hell’s this all about? she went on to finish chewing on something before she spoke. She looked at my knees first, then all the way up to my throat, then at my face.
“Aren’t you a find,” she said.
I looked at the boy but he was watching her, with a small paused-in-the-middle-of-a-chew smile on his face, like somebody waiting. He looked like someone who thought everything she did or said was all right with him, and more than all right. He had this fair, nearly invisible moustache and a few pimples high up on his cheeks, and strange clear eyes.
The woman looked around the room, as if gathering an audience, then looked up at me again. Her eyeballs were great scarred knobs, diseased probably and discoloured too, nearly yellow. But they were not hard, or cruel.
“You’ll learn to walk, Mr. Man,” she said, nearly purring it. “Some day you’ll learn to walk.”
I nearly choked when she said that. You’d think she’d been listening to the dream I never got around to telling Stella about. It gives you the creeps to think how some people in this world know things they’ve never been told, like they could see straight into your head. I don’t understand how they do it, I don’t even want to know. I nearly choked when she said that, I was so surprised, but all I did was get out of there as fast as I could go.
I’d seen the Wooden Nickel before, I’d been past it a few times since it opened, but I never went in. Who wants to look at other people’s old junk? To me the place was just an old broken-down boxy house by the side of the tracks no matter how much they fixed it up and painted it showy yellow with red trim and hung up their sign. I would probably never have gone inside it yet if it weren’t for Phemie Porter.
That’s what her name turned out to be. Phemie Porter. She’s from Back East somewhere, Toronto I think. A poet. I haven’t seen her books in the window of the bookstore in the village so I guess she’s not very famous yet. And she’s thirty-two, not as old as I thought. The kid with the hair and crotch is Reef.
I never slept that night, after I took Stella home. She wouldn’t even speak to me in the pickup and only got out and slammed the door to go into the house, so I knew that was that, it was finished, I’d clobbered myself good. So I went home to the Touch-and-Go and lay on the top of the bed until six o’clock in the morning. When I looked out the window I thought maybe I’d done some damage to my eyes or something, everything had turned purple and mauve, or lilac. The sun had just cut loose from the mainland mountains into the sky and still looked as if it had burned a wide hole out of the mountains—a wide white gap of light—but the rest of the coastal range made its jagged purple wall from one end to the other of all I could see. The strait, nearly high tide, was all that lilac colour, too, except for the bars of whitecaps and breakers near the beach. I got up and went down to the edge of the water in my undershorts and there was this body of a seal rolling there at the edge, rolling and rolling as each wave slapped it up against gravel. It was all wrapped around in strips of seaweed and kelp and bits of bark. Poor old seal’s eyes were open, dull and brown; he wasn’t the first that I’d ever seen like that. I don’t know what happened to him, it could have been only old age, his coat was all scratched and ragged and torn. Maybe he was cut by an outboard motor, and bled to death. He’d go out with the tide, later, and then come in somewhere else down the coast.
But later I’d had a bit of sleep at last and got dressed and come out again to see if he’d gone. The tide had moved far out, beyond tide pools and sand and hadn’t left him behind, so I walked out and started following the edge of the water along, slapping my bare feet in the foam-edge, heading south. I couldn’t find my seal all the way around that bay, past the tourist cabins and the hotels, so I walked up the slope to follow the seawall back.
And there, at the foot of the big totem, was that woman from the restaurant, squatting on a pile of pack-sacks and sleeping bags and gear. She was dressed exactly the same as she’d been the night before, probably hadn’t taken her clothes off, but her face was all puffed up from sleeping. She laughed at me.
“Yes,” she said. “I thought this would be where we’d find you. Paddling on the edge of the s
ea.”
Her boyfriend was standing up, leaning against the backside of the totem, looking at me. I didn’t like the looks of that fellow, I don’t mind admitting; there was something dangerous in his face.
“Excuse me,” I said, and went on past. No crazy woman was going to make fun of me. What I do is my business. There’s no law that says I’ve got to put up with that kind of thing. They were loiterers, is all, they’d probably slept right there on the beach like a lot of others I’d seen.
But she tells me oh please don’t go by in a huff it was only a joke.
Then she said, “You’re as touchy as my husband.”
I looked at the boy. “This is your husband?”
She laughed and threw up her hands. “Heavens, no! I left my husband at home!”
I know I shouldn’t have said this but I did. I thought it would be the last I saw of them. “Then what is he, your son?”
Well, she let out one roaring laugh, you’d think it was a drunken old wheezing man, they must have heard her all up and down this beach. “Reef?” she said, and roared again, flapped her knees in and out. “He’s just my portable prick.”
What do you say? I’ve heard some coarse women in my day, in the parts department of the mill and up in the camps years ago, but I could tell I was blushing this time. It was one of those times when you suddenly get a picture of yourself, as if you’d stepped out a few paces and looked back. There I was, this lanky old scrawny-necked bugger, blushing right up to the peak of my engineer’s cap. Forty years old, with big feet. I’d heard things in my day and said things that would make her turn green, but here she was making me blush. I’m glad Stella wasn’t around is all I can say.
That boy just looked at me, never smiled, with a bit of a sneer. Maybe he really was nothing more than what she said. There was no sign of anything else in his eyes.
“You got a car?” she said, and stood up, stamping the folds out of her skirt. “Do you drive something?” I wondered how long it had been since she’d taken those hiking boots off.
“I got a pickup,” I said, “and a camper.” I knew what she was after, she didn’t fool me. I’d seen them lined up along the road with their thumbs out. But I don’t lie. Ever.
Suddenly she grabbed my arm and pushed herself close. “Wonderful! Because you’re going to take us for a drive. Up into the mountains.”
“The hell I am,” I said.
But I did. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know how anything happens. I’ve always hated those hitch-hikers, dressed up in their stupid costumes, expecting other people to waste gas on them. I’ve watched them for years along the highway in front of the place, Stella’s place now, too lazy to lift a thumb, some of them. Lying down on the gravel. I don’t know how many times I’ve been tempted to go out in my truck, drop one tire onto the shoulder, and run over them all. I wouldn’t pick one of them creeps up, I told Stella, if I thought he was dying. So don’t ask what happened here, I don’t know. Why would I want those two freaks in my truck? Why would I want to go anywhere at all on my day off from work?
It might have been the way she looked at the early swimmers, at the kids playing in the tide pools, and said, “Let these fish splash around in the water. People are meant to climb mountains. Take me inland, Mr. Man, take me up into the hills!”
Maybe I’m just stupid. Or maybe it was the look of challenge in her eyes. I’d never seen such big eyeballs, or so scarred. I wondered if you could get your eyeballs scarred from what you’ve seen or does it have to be something else. No woman’s look had ever challenged me like that before, maybe I just couldn’t stand to turn it down.
If I’d known she was a poet I’d never have gone. If I’d known I’d get a letter from her a day later with this piece of paper in it, one of these mixed-up modern unreadable poems called “The Man Without Legs,” she wouldn’t have got inside my pickup for even a minute. You can’t trust people who write things on paper, they think they own all the world and people too, to do what they want with. It’s probably a good thing I can’t make head nor tail of the thing, it’s just gibberish to me. Some things you’re better off not knowing. Next thing I know I’ll be hearing that thing is in a book somewhere, for people to read. Good luck to them if they can make more sense out of it than I can.
“I’ll take you a part of the way,” I told her. “I’ll take you as far as Robinsons’, I could do with some fresh eggs.”
So we were off. I’ve got to admit I was curious, it might have been curiosity that did it. Maybe all I wanted to do was find out what made these people tick, this woman anyway. You see them passing by from their own worlds going somewhere, but you never know any. They kind of scare me too, most people you can size up pretty fast and know where you stand, but I always said to Stella you just couldn’t tell what those hitch-hikers were liable to do. How can you feel safe around people when you haven’t any idea what goes on inside them? Me, I like to know what people are thinking, so I’ll know what they’re up to.
So the first thing I said when we started up from the coast was “Why?” The woman was sitting in the middle of the cab, beside me, with her boy by the door. All their gear was thrown in the back, inside the camper. We drove uphill from the totem past the golf course and the big inn, and through the cluster of little shops—drug store and variety store and boarded-up theatre and Oddfellows’ Hall. “Why up to the mountains?”
“The highest mountain we can find around here,” she said. She put her hand down over her friend’s crotch, gave it a pat, then folded both hands in her lap. She peered down close to the registration card on the steering column. “Your name is . . . Albert Delaney?”
“Spit,” I said.
“Spit?”
The boy smiled. I wondered what it felt like to have somebody do that to you in public, what she’d just done to him. What kind of world do these people live in anyway? What kind of people are they? Stella would never have done that if I’d promised her a fur coat for it.
“I’ve crossed the country, end to end,” she said, “for my next book of poems.”
“Scenery?” I said.
“Especially not the scenery. It’s humanity I want. It’s evidence I want, of the humanity that’s hiding in man.”
Then why climb a mountain, I wanted to know. There wouldn’t be people up there. Not in our mountains.
“There’ll be me,” she says. “I’m in search of my own too, especially. What better place to find it?”
“Just drive,” the boy said. It was the first thing I’d heard from him, and he didn’t even turn to say it, just kept his eyes straight ahead. It was nothing more than I should’ve expected. You couldn’t expect gratitude for the ride, or even respect, you had to put up with the insolence too on top of everything else. Burn up your gas, sit in your cab, take up your time, then spit in your eye to show what a fool you are. That boy was looking for trouble.
But not the woman. Phemie Porter. There was something else in her, I was beginning to see it. She said, “You drive like a man that knows how to handle a machine.” And of course she was right. There isn’t a person down at that mill who can handle a loci the way that I can, I don’t suppose there’s a man on this island can get as close to an engine as Spit Delaney. Ask around. It wasn’t just accident they were able to sell Old Number One to the museum at fifty years old and still going strong, it was because she’d been cared for by me for so long. I know engines. Driving the pickup is kid’s play in comparison, but still if a person knows what to look for, you can tell a man who’s used to handling big machinery. Not that I’m such a fool I let this Phemie Porter win me over with that one sentence or anything. I would still like to have dumped her into the ocean for a good bath, and put some human clothes on her, and sent her back to her husband. I still wanted to tell her to act her age, and put on some makeup and comb her hair, make herself look decent.
We drove uphill through brush—fir mostly, with their limp yellowish paws of new growth drooping at the ends
of the limbs, in gravelly soil and tangles of Oregon grape and salal—snaking around corners bright yellow with broom. Once in a while the brush would disappear, suddenly, to give us a view of big green fenced-in fields with Holsteins grazing, a gigantic dairy farm, and far to the west, beyond more trees, the great jagged-peaked snow caps of the nearest mountain. It was far enough off to be blue still, except for the lower slopes where sun was lighting up some patches of green furry timber.
“There’s a lot of climbing in that mountain,” she said. “My father used to take us up the side of every hill he could find, to ski, or explore, or simply to camp overnight. It was all part of the same thing, he said, going into yourself. When I was eleven years old he sold everything he owned, handed the money over to my mother, and disappeared into the Laurentians for a year. When he came back he was a changed man, but my mother wouldn’t have him. He should’ve spent the money on a psychiatrist, she said, and shut the door in his face.”
Then there we were, turning a corner to cross the tracks, and right in front of us was the big bright yellow building with the red trim. Along the top of the verandah was its sign: WOODEN NICKEL, with an oversize 1922 nickel between the words, and all along below were flower boxes and old wooden barrels and a cast-iron kitchen stove and a big trunk and an old wringer washing machine. The two big windows were divided into dozens of tiny panes, with bottles and jars and vases showing through from inside.
The minute she saw it she yelled “Stop!” and I slammed on my brakes automatically and pulled over, even while I was saying “It’s only a second-hand store, probably a whole lot of old junk. You’re better to stay out of there.”
Who knows how different things might have been if I’d just stepped on the gas and gone on past it, or if I’d dropped them off there and said “See you around” and come back by myself to the cabin? I’ll never know, it’s impossible. Instead, I pulled over on the opposite side of the road, against the high narrow-slat fence, and we got out.