Spit Delaney's Island

by Jack Hodgins

  There were cars parked every which way in the gravel yard, and several along the side of the road. Some people were going in, tourists, and others were coming out. Two women hurried out across the road, one of them holding a plate and a couple of little bottles, and saying “I need these like I need a hole in the head but I couldn’t resist.” The other woman laughed. She had a little change purse in her hand.

  “It’s a good place to throw away money,” I warned her.

  But oh no, she had to go in. Anything old, even junk, fascinated her, she said. “We’re in no hurry, so why not take the time for a look around?”

  The last time she was in a second-hand store, she said, she’d found a crystal ball. Some fortune teller’s. She took it to a party, she said, as a joke. But she looked so deep into some of them they got scared, and told her to leave if she wouldn’t stop. “Some of them worked up a real sweat,” she said and pulled her face into a horrible shape and showed me her claws and cackled like a witch. “I . . . can . . . see . . . ev . . . rything,” she said. I could see why they asked her to leave, but I didn’t say anything. I just wasn’t used to women like that, who would do a thing like that in public.

  Crossing the road she hooked her arm into mine and the Crotch walked behind. I hoped nobody going by would think we belonged together. I could just see somebody from work driving along and seeing that rig latched onto me and thinking old Spit’s gone around the bend, or acting like a hippie, or got himself tied up in women’s lib. I could just hear them. I tried to hurry her across, but then I thought to hell with them. What do they know about anything? It felt kind of good having somebody hooked on my arm again. Fright as she was to look at, I think that woman liked me. I don’t know what the other one thought, the boy. That was his lookout.

  While we were crossing the gravel, a family of overweight people came out of the front door, one at a time. First the father, a huge balding man in sun glasses and a hanging-out shirt and sandals, then a short chubby lady in shorts, with her white ripply legs all exposed, then a whole line of kids in descending order, all round and red-faced and pleased with themselves. When they were all out onto the gravel yard they gathered around in a circle to compare notes or something. The old man handed sticks of chewing gum out, all around, and they dropped all their wrappings on the ground. “Excuse me,” Phemie Porter said, and went over. “Are you people from the States?”

  They all turned to her, identical faces chewing, curious. “Sure am,” the father said, and patted his belly.

  “Do you think this is a beautiful country?” Phemie says.

  “Just lovely,” the mother bubbled. “Just lovely.”

  Phemie put the toe of her boot out amongst the pieces of paper and tin foil on the ground. “Then perhaps you won’t mind leaving it that way?” She said it so softly I could barely hear it.

  The smiles all reassembled into scowls. Red faces got redder. The mother’s hands jerked to her throat. Old Father Tourist, though, just started to laugh, that kind of forced jolly laugh some people have when they try to cover up a blunder. “Talk about blights on the landscape,” he said, and nudged at his wife. The wife looked Phemie over and put a hand against her mouth. The kids all started to giggle.

  But Phemie Porter just swung around and gave me a look out of those eyes and walked back up to the verandah and into the store. It made me feel sick, the way they treated her. It made me ashamed of us all, I wanted to hit somebody. But I followed her inside the building, and Reef came after. I bet those fat-assed farts would have the paper picked up by the time we came out, though. There were others who’d seen them and heard, they wouldn’t have the nerve to just walk away.

  Inside that place you didn’t know where to turn, or where to start. Phemie Porter got all excited and tried to see everything at once. The place was all fixed up to look old, but it was tidy, not what you’d expect, and had rows and rows of old used furniture fixed up in the first room. She ran her hand over everything, tables, desks, chairs, sewing machines, as if it was all something she’d never seen before, or heard of. “Oh, look at this,” she said, or “Oh, look at that.” She wanted to touch and see everything all at once. The fellow that seemed to be running the place—a young blond-headed fellow doing additions or something at a desk in the corner—looked up at her excitement and then gave me a grin. He was probably thinking here was a sale for sure, nothing less than a hundred dollars. Or maybe he was trying to tell me he’d seen plenty like her before, don’t get embarrassed. He probably had too, he looked at her as if he knew the type. There was a green eyeshade on his forehead, and he was wearing a pair of coveralls with engineer stripes the same as my cap. He went back to his work. At least he wasn’t going to try talking us into something.

  There were plenty of things to look at, I’ve got to admit. You could spend all day just looking. And every bit of it had been found on this island, nothing was brought in from the mainland. A whole line-up of old tobacco cans across the corner, I don’t know who’d buy them or what for but they brought back some memories: Clubman, and Hickory, Troost I think, and Heine’s Blend with its picture of a wooden-shoed Dutchman by a windmill. Old-fashioned druggist bottles of every shape. Aqua calcic, whatever that means. Ferri et quinni. I wouldn’t have minded walking out with the swede saw I found hung up on the cedar-shake wall either, I don’t know what for, but it looked like a good thing to have.

  I glanced up once, and found myself looking back from a gilt-edged mirror. I’d forgotten to shave that morning, I was in such a hurry to get out. This face of mine looked bruised, and old. Not something I wanted to spend very much time looking at. In the background I caught the beanpole glaring at me, leaning up near the door. One hand laid out flat on his narrow belly kept moving, slowly, in a kind of a circle.

  “Oh, look at this!” she said, and dragged me back to see some old chest of drawers that was still being worked on, in a little alcove off the back corner. Someone had been taking old paint off, the good rich grain of old oak was beginning to show through in patches. “Somebody else would’ve slapped new paint on top and thought they’d improved it,” she said. “These people know where the real value is found.” She didn’t try to make a lesson out of it for me, the way Stella might have (everything to Stella had a message in it aimed at me, the whole world to her was organized in patterns meant to straighten me out) but she did put her hand on mine and made me run my fingers over the grain. As if I’d never felt oak before.

  “I dedicated my first book of poems to a man by the name of Eloff Nurmi,” she said, “and no one could figure out why. He was the little round cabinet maker who built me my very own chest of drawers when I was small, something like this one. Inside it, he told me, he’d built a secret compartment where no one, not even my mother, would find it. It was the invisible soul of the chest, he said, where I could keep things that belonged just to me. But I never found it myself, and I was afraid to admit it to him, so I learned to store everything important in my own mind, and later in poems, and gradually began to suspect this was what he intended. He’d moved away long before the book came out, though, and I don’t know what happened to him after that.”

  When I got rooting around amongst the books and roller skates and old crocks in another little back room, she came in and ran her finger down the whole shelf of books, paused at one and said “This New Land” then went on to the end and dismissed the lot. Suddenly she stooped and came up with a bedpan, “What the best people are wearing this year,” she said, and turned it upside down on her head. “Things, things, things,” she said, and did a turn under the new hat, then stooped to make a face in a mirror. Then she swept the bedpan off, handed it to me, and I put it down. I couldn’t help thinking of all the bare asses that had sat on it, but of course that would mean nothing to her.

  “My husband is a doctor,” she said. “Speaking of bedpans. Deadpans. He’s crazy about me. He’s crazy, period, he’s a shrink. I was his patient for a while, but he gave up and married me ins
tead.” Those eyeballs took in everything in the room, came back to me. “He intends to retire early, he says, so he can follow me when I go off like this, and find out what I’m after. But he’ll never retire, and he’ll never follow me, and he’ll never be able to see.

  “Things, things, things,” she sang, scooping up a handful of cutlery out of a tray and letting them clatter back again. “We’re surrounded by thousands of things and what do any of them mean?”

  “Money to the guy that sells them,” I said. And of course the boy in the coveralls was watching us, he must’ve thought he had a couple of loonies in there.

  “There is no truth in things,” she said, “except as they bring out the truth in a person. Tell me a thing that you love and I’ll tell you a thing about you.”

  “Old Number One,” I told her.

  “What? Old Number One? What’s that? Do you mean yourself? Then you are a man who is trapped by your own limits.”

  I didn’t bother to correct her, it would only confuse things.

  “Tell me this, then,” she said. “If I was going to buy you something from this store, anything at all, what one thing would you want it to be?”

  I should’ve said tobacco tin, or swede saw, or just anything at all. I should’ve said a book, or anything. But oh no, when she said that, I got this idea. “If there was a tape recorder around here I could give you your answer to that other question.”

  “A tape recorder?” she said. “There’s not going to be a tape recorder around here, not in a place like this. They sell old stuff, these things are nearly antiques.”

  Of course if she let it drop at that I’d’ve kept quiet and that would be the end of it. She could buy me a picture or something else if she wanted to, if that was her way of paying me back for the ride. But she didn’t let it drop, she asked, and of course there wasn’t a tape recorder for sale in the place. Just to borrow then, she said, I couldn’t believe the nerve she had, was there one we could borrow for five minutes. It turned out there was one, a little black plastic one, in that back room where they scraped the paint off old furniture. Phemie Porter made it sound as if lending that thing to us was an honour any storekeeper would be glad to break his neck for.

  “Now what is it I’m going to hear?” she said.

  I got scared. I’d been carrying that cassette around in my pocket for nearly a year, not playing it, just feeling it there and thinking maybe I’d play it again some day and maybe I wouldn’t, considering the trouble it already caused me. But I never expected to be playing it for a stranger, like her, in a public place. I wished I’d kept my big mouth shut.

  We sat on the edge of the verandah, up at the end by the flower boxes, and I put the machine on my knee. Reef stayed down at the other end, leering. Along the edge of the road the family of Americans was leaning all over a white Cadillac, having a picnic. They took food out of a big paper bag that sat up on the hood and went back to lean on different parts of the car to eat and throw back mouthfuls of tinned pop. When he saw us the father let out a single snort and turned his back, to show what he thought. Other people, coming in, paid us no attention at all.

  “I think there used to be a little train station somewhere around here,” I told her. “See that track going by? You keep your eye on where it disappears in the bush and imagine what you hear is coming from down there.”

  I pushed the button. There was nothing for a minute, then a voice: I don’t know where you’ll be when you listen to this, but this is one way I can be sure of being heard, you’re bound to listen some . . .

  I pushed the Stop button. That was Stella’s voice. What the hell was going on? I ran it ahead a foot or so and pushed the Play again.

  not enough, not enough at all, Spit. A man who . . .

  I shut it off again. I couldn’t believe it.

  “What’s the matter?” Phemie said.

  “She taped over it.” I just couldn’t believe it. “She taped over it.” I could feel the sweat breaking out on my forehead, and my upper lip. Everything got confused.

  “Who?”

  “Stella. She got ahold of it somehow and taped over it.” If I had her there, if I could get my hands on her. My shaking hands.

  I ran it up to halfway in case she’d run out of message for me and there was still some of the loci left, but when I turned it on again there she still was, talking: Some day you will have to learn how, she said, you’d never learn it being married to me and that train. Maybe your freedom will help you to . . .

  Freedom. I wanted to bash her with freedom. I wanted to strangle her with freedom. If she’d been there I would’ve pushed that tape machine down her throat sideways. I would’ve made her eat the thing. I could hardly see for the sweat that was getting into my eyes, stinging.

  “She must’ve done it back then before I moved out,” I said. “While we were working out the settlement. She must’ve known I would give in and play it some day.”

  People had stopped to watch us, to listen. The tourists were all facing our way so they wouldn’t miss a thing. Reef had come over closer and squatted, his wrists draped over his knees. He had long, long hands that hung down limply. I imagined those hands touching her. I remembered them peeling back the fur in the restaurant. I imagined them running up her arm, up her leg. It doesn’t make any sense—I shouldn’t have been thinking that, I should have been screaming about Stella, or throwing that machine over into the bush, or taking the cassette out to stamp it into the gravel. But I didn’t feel like that at all. I felt like putting my head on her shoulder, or crying. I had to haul my handkerchief out of my pocket and mop the sweat off my face, and around my neck, the way Marsten does.

  If I were making this up, if I were making up lies about myself, that is not how I would end the episode at the Wooden Nickel. Not like that. That was too calm to be the end of anything. If I was making it all up to work out the way it should, I would say I threw that little machine into the brush, and went yelling after it to stamp it to pieces, grind it under my heels. Then that family of fatties starts to laugh, see, like this is all a good show just for them and I yell something at them. I yell something obscene and violent and threaten to gouge out their eyes if they don’t shut up their faces. The owner of the store comes out too, and yells what am I doing with his recorder, but I tell him to go back in his hole in the junk and drop dead. Reef tries to quiet me, he comes over and puts one of those long narrow hands on my arm, tries to steady me into silence, but when I look in his eyes I see the hatred that’s been building up all day. He despises me. He would like to kill me. Without moving a muscle in his face, without changing his expression at all, he brings up a sharp bony knee and gets me hard in the crotch and I go down, puking into the salal, and he kicks me. The pain, the sickening pain, is everywhere inside me, ripping me open. I even think I may die there, on the ground. It isn’t until later when I have got back up onto my feet that Phemie Porter comes over, dragging her skirt through the brush, and crossing the tracks. That woman is wrong, she says. In all those years of marriage she couldn’t see it but she’s wrong. Everybody is standing around in the gravel and along the road and on the verandah of the store, watching us. Like a movie.

  It isn’t true, though. That isn’t the way it happened. Maybe a few years from now when I remember that day at the Wooden Nickel I won’t be able to tell which was true and which I’ve made up. It won’t even matter. I will probably remember the made-up one clearest, so that when I drive by the store in my camper I can think that at least I offered that fellow who runs it a bit of excitement, a story he can remember. And I will probably think that, for him and the others who work in there with him, I offered a bit of myself, I exposed something.

  They’re not likely to remember two people sitting on the verandah. A dumpy woman dressed up in those crazy clothes, with too much hair, and a lanky scrawny-necked engineer who needed a shave, the two of them staring at the little black plastic box of a recording machine as if there was a beast in it. And they won’
t remember that the woman put her hand on the man’s arm, and held on for a while, and then told him she could imagine the sounds of a steam loci easy enough, that she didn’t need a tape for it and neither did he.

  She told me this: “You’ve already got everything in you that you need.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “When those tourists were laughing at me,” she said. “For just a split second we touched, we overlapped.”

  I could’ve told her that was all a load of manure, the way Marsten would’ve. I could’ve told her she didn’t know a thing about me. But that wouldn’t be true. She did know. She knew plenty about me, and that’s what I’d guessed about her from the beginning.

  But maybe I shouldn’t have run away. Maybe I should not have left them there at the store and got into my pickup and driven home. There was a lot left I could offer. I could’ve told her all about the Doukhobor colony that lived across the road once, behind that high picket fence. A religious colony that didn’t believe in marriage. Maybe she’d have got a poem out of that. I could’ve told her about them, and about the mountain she was going to. I could’ve told her what to expect there, the distance to the timber line, and what she would find in the alpine meadows.

  But she scared me off. She said, “Come on up with me, Spit Delaney, come walking with me on the mountains. Learn to see. Don’t go back to your puddles.”

  As if I could.

  It’s something to think about, though. When Marsten sits out in his car waiting to be asked in for a beer I’m tempted to tell him, “Can’t ask you in tonight, Marsten, there’s a woman waiting for me, up a mountain.” Or when he gets nagging at me to quit brooding, to get back in the swing of life. What is the matter with him? Don’t people look at other people? Can’t they tell when other people start to change? But I know him, he doesn’t have an idea what anyone else is like. He just wants someone to talk to, and some place to drink beer, and he probably likes being able to argue with old Mrs. Bested who owns the Touch-and-Go Motel. Her magic hands haven’t done any good yet, and of course they never will. But she thinks she’s doing something, or tries, nearly every night when she comes in. She hasn’t looked at me either, really, in months. And she’s probably forgotten what those magic hands of hers are after. It’s all just habit, we go through, we act out. And they don’t know a thing about me. Not a thing. They haven’t noticed yet that there have been a few nights when I haven’t come straight home from work, and a few nights when I’ve gone out late and not come home until far into morning. They don’t notice a thing.