“Are you going to take upgrading next year like you promised?” she asked, rubbing his nose with hers,
“Maybe — if you want me to,” he said,
She smiled, held his face in her hands, looked at him intently, then gave him a lingering kiss that tasted like jam and butter. Then she suddenly leaned forward so he could kiss her eyes, like a child who has just seen something that has scared her,
“There, that’s better” she said, “My eyes are kissed all better again”
And Tom hugged her, knowing he was profoundly in love,
At this time Michael was firmly established with his new friends, but they realized that at any time he could give this life up for a safer, more sedentary life. And in certain poignant ways Madonna tried to stretch the boundaries of her relationship with him,
Sitting on the opposite side of the table from him, in her small house, she would shake her head and say: “Someday I’d like to see your house — I’ve never been in a house like that — well, I was at a house where I made curtains once — Rita Walsh showed me — but other than that, no, I’ve not been in a house. Now Karrie Smith has a nice house I guess — I been down there.”
Michael would nod.
“Some day Madonna is goin to get her own bicycle,” Silver would say, smiling. “She never had a bicycle before, didn’tcha, Madonna”
“Well, I don’t care about no fuckin bicycle now, Silver, for Jesus Christ sake — I’m nineteen fuckin years old — “
Madonna would blush, embarrassed that this secret about her childish wish to have a bicycle was now revealed.
“Well, I’ll get ya one anyway someday, ya stupid quiff — I tol’ja I would.”
“Silver got on pills and tried to knife himself, and went and stabbed hisself in the leg — and now he’s back into sniffin the glue.”
“Ya ya ya ya ya, so what the fuck,” Silver would answer, angry that this had been told about him.
“Stay away from my fingernail polish is all I’m saying.”
“Ya ya ya ya ya “
One night, near the time Tom went to visit Karrie, Everette came to Madonna’s house. He mentioned that a friend of his was coming to trial for rape, and wanted to know if Michael could put in a word for this man. And for the second time Michael heard the name of the girl he’d once taken to the school dance: Laura McNair. She was prosecuting this friend of Everette’s.
“I want you to help him out if you can,” Everette said.
In ways in which he himself never understood, Everette’s entire life was obsessed with and dealt with institutions and the courts and the law. His eager face showed this as he waited to hear Michael’s answer. It was as if this obsession were a chess match, where the morality of right or wrong, or the sense of right and wrong, never mattered, but the idea of winning or losing was paramount. In this way, all things were simply business to him.
While maintaining his friend’s innocence, he casually mentioned that the rape victim was deaf and dumb, aged twenty-two, and had a four-year-old son. They had been hitchhiking, and her son witnessed the entire assault. The man had been sure he would get off, because the woman could not speak to defend herself, or to say no.
But Laura McNair had got enough clinical evidence to support the case against him, and the man was no longer sure, so he had gone to Everette. And Everette, as a matter of course, had come to his new friend, Michael Skid, who was “a good guy.”
“Could you please put in a good word for him with your dad? He is the best of lads,” Everette said, and his face looked touching and reflective. “I know your father — I hold nothing against someone doing their job. As you know, he put me in jail and it was fair and square. I was reckless and did a reckless thing that I is — is ashamed of. But this man is a friend of mine. He never did nothin to that woman — she was beggin for it. He just took her back to the lane and give it to her as she wanted.”
“I’ll try,” Michael said.
Everette came over to him and squeezed his arm. There was a seductive quality about this. He remembered how Silver had squeezed his arm trying to get him to leave the shack the first night he had met this man.
The case was odious to Michael, but to have Everette’s friendship was a certain valuable plus.
Then Everette lit a huge chunk of hash and put it to Michael and Madonna’s nose.
“Here you go.”
Madonna began to giggle, but moved away when Everette tried to hold her around the waist.
In May, Michael decided to go home to Newcastle. He wanted to do more research for the article on the private school he was committed to write. There was a certain moment when it became clear to him that he should take this no further. His father wanted him to take a job collecting soil samples for a mining operation in Labrador. It was far away, and it paid well, and there were no temptations. Michael knew this. His friend Professor Becker asked him to go back to university in September to begin his master’s. But Michael knew Professor Becker liked having students around because he wanted to be seen as youthful and boyish.
Still it was time to go.
When he told his friends, Madonna said nothing. She only tore paper from a cigarette box and then set it afire, so the smoke came up in front of her brilliant eyes.
“So I think I will go back up to town,” he said finally.
“Well, I’ll come visit you, okay?“
“Sure,” Michael said. “Anytime.”
However, when he went down to say goodbye to Everette he got a different reaction. Everette looked disturbed, even irritated. And it pleased Michael to see such a reaction.
“You’re a friend of mine — what are you doing? Summer is just starting and you’re thinking of leaving — wait until the summer is over — you know I’d love a trip on that sailboat of yours — just once.” Then he looked at him, and smiled, “Well, if you have to go — I wish you could wait — but I understand important things — always important things keep friends apart. Look, if you don’t have the money, we could pool our money and booze and drugs together so everyone would get a share.” And here he lifted up a pickle jar, poured a tiny bit of moonshine out, wiped the jar clean, and took twenty dollars from his pocket.
“Now, that’s the pickle jar — and that’s the money, and it’s your money- so you don’t have to spend the summer up in Labrador, working for that mining company your father wants you to. Anytime we have something well just pool it together!”
Michael smiled, and was happy he was so well thought-of. But he didn’t know how Everette would have heard about the job in Labrador. As he started towards his car he heard a short shrill whistle, and turned to see Everette coming out behind him.
“Come here — just for a moment,” he said.
Michael hesitated, shrugged and went back into the shack. Everette sat at the table smiling, a huge grin on his face.
“You didn’t think you were going to get away this easy, did you?”
“What do you mean?” Michael said, feeling nervous.
Everette then said that Michael owed him at least one favour.
“One favour — okay,” Michael said, smiling, “One favour before I go. What is it?”
It was a warm, white night in May, with some snow still at the edge of the woods. The birds were singing late into the evening, and tamaracks were budding behind them, while a whiff of dark smoke rose from the dump a little ways away.
“What?” Michael asked.
“I want my chopper back,” Everette said. “My Harley.”
Then he picked up a hammer and tossed it against the wall, so close to the little boy’s head that it surprised everyone, except, it seemed, the little boy himself. “And I’m not paying 426 dollars either.”
“Why, where is it?”
“Ken’s shop,” Everette said.
He wanted to get his bike out of the shop where he had taken it to get it painted. The shop was across the river on a back street behind a half-dozen houses. The man had threatened hi
m, Everette said. The man had used him, and tried to “besmirch Gail’s name with bad language and called Gail a slut.” (Here her little boy looked up.) The man was out chasing Gail even though he had a wife at home. Here Everette shook his head as if he couldn’t go on.
Michael formulated a vision of Ken as a conniving, machiavellian, unprincipled man who was trying to steal Everette’s bike and ruin the Hutch reputation in the neighbourhood where they grew up.
“Always it is the same” Everette said. And then he ended by saying: “Will you come with me? I need you with me. The man’s as much a bastard as that Tommie Donnerel. I tell you about Tommie — we owned a fishing camp together — put money in a pickle jar just like this — but his drunken old man kept interfering, and finally stole the money, so I ended with nothin — “
Michael did not like to hear this. Yet he felt for some reason he did owe Everette at least one favour. He did not know why he felt this. He felt in fact that he owed him a great deal. Cicero once wrote that men are sometimes grateful when men of power do not kill them, and Michael had read Cicero before — read that very line, and felt it could never pertain to him.
Michael sighed. That night Michael’s parents were having a special dinner, and had invited someone to meet him, as a surprise.
“Okay, but I have to get it done — and get on home. And then I’m done with all of this!” Michael smiled.
“If we get caught — we’re in a scrape,” Everette said simply, looking down and spitting between his legs, tapping his boots on the dusty floor, and then looking up and yawning, to watch Michael’s reaction.
But Michael was not at all frightened of this, not at this moment with the sweet-smelling air, the feel of springtime, and the feel of his own strong body.
Michael caught little Gail Hutch’s look at that moment. She had been waiting for days for him to talk to Everette, to try to get him to settle down. With her hopes dashed, she went over to the bed and sat down, stroking her son’s hair.
The smoke from the dump seemed solid and pleasant as they left and drove to Chatham in Everette’s truck,
The shop was small and cramped. There was the smell of earth and oil and wood, and the gleam of four or five bikes in various stages of being painted or repaired. It looked like the shop of a man who bore no relation to the description he had just suffered.
The door was wide open and Everette’s Sportster was sitting near the front, behind a small Honda. They moved the Honda and rolled the Sportster towards the truck, lifted it quietly, tied it down with bungee cords, and moved off.
“He didn’t even do the job right — the tank is streaked, there’s no flames painted — I’m going to have to do it meself. And why would he not guard it? Anyone could have come in and stolen it.”
“Won’t he know you took it?” Michael said, and Everette looked over at him with gleeful savagery Michael remembered when, in the winter, Everette had tried to steal Mr. Jessop’s little baby pig, and then had taken a pitchfork and thrust it into its side so it squealed in terror. Everette’s eyes were exactly the same now.
“Don’t worry, Michael Skid, I got something good on him,” Everette said emphatically.
What Michael did not understand, what Silver and Madonna and possibly Tom Donnerel did, was that Everette Hutch kept tapes on certain of those whom he considered his well-to-do friends — for future embezzlement and blackmail — such as the tape he was wearing at the moment, inside his left boot, as he smiled.
FOUR
Michael went home to his parents’ three-storey brick house and met Laura McNair. She was the special guest and was sitting with his father and mother in the living room when he came in.
Dinner was over, and though he didn’t mean to be, he was abrupt with Laura. He answered her questions simply and vaguely and felt bored.
Just once the name of Everette Hutch came up, in connection with some ongoing investigation, and Michael blinked monotonously. And when Laura asked casually if he ever saw Tom and Vincent Donnerel any more, he flushed.
“I don’t know why everyone hates Everette Hutch, why he’s blamed for everything. He’s as good as most of us,” he blurted. But though he tried, he could not do what Everette asked, to plead for the man accused of rape. And so he became sullen and looked bored again.
At one point, when his mother mentioned the re-zoning law for the industrial park coming into effect in August, he called the mayor an embezzler. Laura had dated the mayor’s brother in grade eleven, which made her laugh in embarrassment when he said this. She then said she had to go.
But when she left he knew his mother was angry
“She’s just lost her brother Lyle — he was killed two weeks ago —” his mother said. “How could you ever be like that? Is that how your new friends who we never see, and who never come to the house, and all look like refugees, just like you, taught you how to be?”
At that moment the whole evening, Laura’s sad laughter when he spoke about the mayor, the way she looked about the room at nothing at all, as if she sensed he was attacking her, took on a far different meaning. And he realized how close he once was to her.
So he went to visit her the next day The McNair house was the last house in a cul-de-sac. The presence of death still clung to it, and the spring air amplified this, with the sweet smell of lilacs and the trickle of a little manmade stream, placed tactically behind their hedges.
The graciousness with which he was brought into the house also signified a kind of rehearsal and mourning as did the coloured stone wall, Mr. McNair’s nervous volley of movements and nods.
Laura came down from her room and the two of them sat in the den and spoke. She told him her brother had died trying to rescue someone from the river. He and two friends had been on their way home from first-year university They had stopped to have a beer near one of the old bridges and lit a smoky fire on the shore. The ice was still moving out, and the water was high.
“You know what kids are like. We have to watch them nowadays — there are so many things they can get into,” Laura said, and she squeezed her hands together. “One boy walked out over the old bridge. He turned to wave and slipped, and Lyle ran and jumped in to help. He was always helping others. But the water was too cold. He tried to help his friend onto one of the ice floes, but the boy panicked and grabbed him about the neck, couldn’t let go. Both of them were gone.”
Her brother had been everyone in the family’s pride and joy, and had died in simple unplanned heroism.
“I wish I had been there,” Michael said. “I’m a very strong swimmer. I wouldn’t have allowed him to drown. I would have gone out with him.”
This brought tears to Laura’s eyes and she started to cry. “I know — I know — I know — I know what people are like in this community — people risk their lives for each other in a second — I know you would have. I was waiting for him to arrive home when Constable Deborah Matchett came and told me.” Then she whispered, looking at him and smiling, as if this was what he had come to find out. “I was friends with Constable Delano for a few months — but it was a very silly mistake. We both know it was a mistake, you see. He still tries to protect me, though, and now that Lyle is gone he is often here worrying about me. So you’ll probably see him around, protecting me.” Here she sniffed, held the Kleenex to her nose, gave a surprised cry at her own vulnerability, and looked about. “Oh my God — here I am talking about my problems — “
“Don’t be silly,” Michael said. He looked at the curtains, the fine ordinary collection of Royal Doulton, and the well-creased, vacuumed carpet with just one small piece of lint. Outside the day was warm, the street dry. He suddenly disliked police officers like Constable Delano who would take advantage of her.
In the trees jays squawked. Laura’s mother came in and sat down for a moment and asked about his family and if they still owned their cottage. Mrs. McNair was a tiny lady with red lines in her tired, long face, who looked at him and Laura in timidity, as if she expected an
other jolt or shock at any time. She asked Michael if he remembered once taking Laura to the dance.
“Of course —” he said. And instantly he remembered her young brother Lyle that night, peeking his nose about the door of the den. Their eyes met just briefly — and that was the only connection Michael had had with him.
When he stood to go he shook Laura’s hand.
“I’ll see you again,” he said. “If I knew you’d be around — I’d change my ways,” he said, laughing.
“Oh,” she said, surprised. “Yes — okay” Because she didn’t know his ways. And she took more Kleenex.
Michael stayed home for over a week and a half. He mowed the grass, painted the outside of the garage, and cleaned the deck chairs. He chipped some golf balls and now and again met his father for a round at the golf club. All about him now was talk of the man named Everette Hutch, the man from downriver, who had stolen his bike back from Ken’s shop. Once or twice Michael would say, “Oh yes, well, I know him, and he’s not so bad.”
“Yes, well, that’s like knowing Mephistopheles,” one golfer said, looking at him and smiling. Then he teed up his Titleist and drove the green.
His father would ask him about Laura, and he would say, “Laura is fine,” or “Laura is sweet.”
But just as his mother was making plans to have her over again, and just as he was thinking it would be nice to see her, Silver phoned him and said that Michael had to come down for a lobster boil at the Hutches’.
“Madonna wants to see you tonight,” Silver said. “She has to.”
“I don’t know if I can”
“For her sake — just tonight — just for one night!” Silver said.
And Michael, knowing he could have Madonna again that night, instead of waiting on Laura McNair, perhaps for months, went back downriver.
He arrived at nine o’clock at Gail Hutch’s shack and learned that Everette was planning a robbery He was startled, but tried not to show it. He also was in a conflict of interest, and wanted to stay out of any involvement.
The Bay of Love and Sorrows Page 4