A Circle on the Surface

by Carol Bruneau

  Noise erupted out in the hallway. Fearing someone might burst in, he didn’t dare get completely naked. The steamy, squalid air made it impossible to sleep. His shins itched as if his scars had fleas. But this was not the worst of it. The urge for a good belt of alcohol burned clear to his eyes and ears and down into his gut. And into the night’s belly the noises piercing the walls were like cats in heat—couplings so vivid you wondered if it was something the Grove put in the water, some sort of drug driving things.

  Well, it gave him time to think, though this was not wholly a blessing. He thought of his friend. He imagined the car smashed up or lying at the foot of the dam dividing O’Leery Lake from the Run. People joked about the junk on the bottom: a baby carriage, an outhouse on its side, bodies, for all anyone knew. In his mind’s eye eels wove in and out of Ma’s picnic basket. Worse was the thought of those jerry cans of water sitting there, while Una made do without a drop. Although, from what he heard, the water supply in town was gone to rat shit, so to speak, gallon upon gallon fed into ships making the ocean crossing—so much so that a church had burnt down when the firemen’s hoses collapsed for want of pressure.

  Twice he got up, cupped his hands under the tap, and drank, guiltily, to slake a fierce, galling thirst. She would be beside herself, his poor darling. Or making the best of it, which was more like her, Una being resourceful. It was brash, unkind, of him to underestimate her. Possibly, Hubley Hill wasn’t the only fella with his head up his arse, considering her to be ever so slightly inept, a bit of a prima donna perhaps, Enman thought. And what would Hill know?

  So there you go, he comforted himself. It’s not like the inconvenience will be forever. Una will make out just fine.

  It wasn’t till dawn seeped through the blind that he slept—or, alerted by sounds of life below realized that, in fits and starts, he had dozed. But nothing opened till eight at the earliest, and who knew if and when there would be someone around to help. There was nowhere to get something to eat, and cabs didn’t run out here. He waited till seven-thirty to pull on his clothes and creep downstairs to the phone. He hesitated, but knowing it was the responsible thing to do, dialled.

  “A car stolen in O’Leery? You don’t say.” The police dispatcher might have asked why he was calling. “You’re in luck, though, apparently.” A party heading south this morning had their fishing trip sidelined by a vehicle blocking the road. A blue Chev less a fender, found with its hood up, suggesting the driver had done some tinkering before abandoning her. “Not even the decency to push her into the bushes so’s others could get by,” the cop said. She was blocking “a major artery” and in the event of an air raid or evacuation, “putting lives at risk.”

  “Dumping’s illegal,” Enman heard, and that he would be ticketed.

  So he wasn’t going to get off so easily, being freed of the car. “But what about those responsible?”

  “No need to get stroppy with me, mack. Get her towed. Right away. Hop to it.”

  Busily eavesdropping, the desk clerk filled in details of the discovery. The party of guests had turned around and come back disgruntled, setting lesser sights on O’Leery Lake, where they might hook a boot or bicycle wheel if they were lucky. This was supposed to cheer him up? She asked if he wanted to wait around for breakfast.

  Bleary-eyed, he went out and strolled up and down the main drag’s dusty shoulder till the garage opened. Maybe someone could run him out the inland route, give him a tow, or the car troubles would be ones he could fix himself, enough to get him home? “Keep your shirt on,” said the mechanic, who also agreed they would take a look.

  By now, of course, Isaac would be shitting bricks wondering where he was, forget it was Saturday. This in itself was no big deal, Enman was used to working six days a week, having done so at the bank. Luckily he had change and the phone outside the Magnet was working. “Serves you right for driving that heap. Don’t worry, take the time. We’ll settle your pay later.”

  Dialling Una, he couldn’t help but think of Ma’s amusement at Isaac’s name, which someone said meant “God’s little joke,” Isaac defying anybody’s urge to laugh.

  Una sounded sleepier than he felt. “When will I see you?” The ache for a drink stirred again but he swallowed it back: a pill no less bitter, it occurred to him, than what Ma must have gulped down whenever Hannah Twomey had crossed her path. Now Una knew all about Pa and Twomey’s sister, she had reason to look down on Barrein, on him. He should have kept it to himself, since Ma had acted as if the old man had never taken a shine to that tease, Cecelia. “See what happens when drink dictates?” Ma had said. Though the old man’s lapse had followed a broader dictum: the flesh wants what the flesh wants.

  “I’ll see you when I see you, sweetie—could be this morning or this afternoon, hard to say.”

  “Later, alligator.” Her sigh sounded resigned but miffed. Anxious.

  There was barely time to hang up the phone as the mechanic barrelled up in the truck. Though less macabre, this was like going to claim a body. Climbing in, without a moment’s hesitation, Enman accepted the mickey the grease monkey dredged from under the seat. It was early to be tippling. He really didn’t want the stuff, but neither had he fully expected this errand.

  He and the mechanic drove in silence. So it mightn’t be the end of Beulah, after all. Then he thought, What about trips to town? What about seeing the doctor? O’Leery’s doctor didn’t count. Without a car, how would they manage Una’s restlessness, that restlessness her reason for bringing Hannah around in the first place. Or was it simply to show other people up? The idea lodged like a pill in his gullet. Surely she hadn’t meant to rub his nose in his laxness, his ignoring Hannah. Not his sweet Una. Rub your nose in what? she would have said, had he framed it so.

  “You okay, buddy?” The mechanic nudged the mickey at him again.

  Enman preferred to let sleeping dogs lie, especially when he saw Cleary’s eyes in Hannah’s, watching him. The old man’s cravings, the kind that fed Bart Twomey’s dealings, staring back from his own eyes whenever he looked long in the mirror.

  “Can’t be too much farther, is it, man? When didja say she went missing?”

  Enman shrugged. Perfecting a playing technique meant more carefully observing the position of his wrist, hand, and fingers, best accomplished by further scrutinizing himself in the mirror. One reason to hang up the violin, the fiddle. Let single-minded Steady Hill and his steadier strumming score a radio hit, if that’s what Hubley wanted. Avoiding liquor-soaked dancehalls was another way to free himself from Cleary’s ball-and-chain.

  “Hey. ’Nother drink, bud?”

  Enman reached for the bottle, sipped. “It runs in families, you know,” Ma once whispered, “the love of drink.” Except giving up violin, the pastime that kept his hands busy, that is, literally off the bottle, would only allow for more time to drink and mean never playing Dvořák’s largo. But no sane person wished to see the eyes of a drunk or the feeble-minded staring back from the looking glass.

  Taking a last swig, the driver grimaced, then fired the bottle out the window. “Not saying much, are you?” It sounded funny coming from a fellow half his age.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got another of those tucked away?”

  The mechanic made a bored sort of noise, shook his head.

  Could say the same for you, kid, you’re not exactly talkative, Enman wanted to say. But it was nice riding up front, higher than usual. Around them the dry woods resembled tinder. Only the tenacious trees thrived, spruce a damn sight tougher than his marigolds.

  Tougher than the thirst that rode him.

  Then, after a while, there she was: Beulah, jammed like a cork in the road.

  Slamming into reverse, the grease monkey jackknifed and backed up.

  Nothing to be done but jump out and direct the guy. Dizzy on his feet—oh, that smidge of whiskey on an empty stomach, the sun beatin
g down—he could barely look at her, Beulah like a friend after a falling out. A falling out with George. A day’s falling out with Una would have been a thousand times worse, a permanent falling out unbearable. He would have sooner fallen out with Ma at times.

  Blame cheap whiskey for allowing him to even imagine the notion of being separated from Una: another damn good reason for quitting, he knew. Which he had done, was doing now—yes, definitely. No question, no going back on it—now that the mechanic’s offering left no more than a headache and an opening for groundless worries to pour in.

  The dispatcher had been right about Beulah. Her raised hood was an invitation for critters to nest there. He imagined Ma’s voice—“rust and moths, my son”—while peering at the engine’s crumbling parts criss-crossed with electrical tape. Store not things of earth but of heaven. None of it lasts, life or its disappointments, though one thing that persists is this: We’re our brother’s keepers. No mention of sisters or wives.

  Those itchy, crawling hours at the Grove had offered time, too much time, to mull over plenty of things. Not just things about him and Una, but Ma’s death, his holding her hand. The horrified flash of something in her eyes right before she stopped breathing: had she glimpsed the old man waiting across some gauzy divide? Yet Una had found Ma peaceful—“Finally,” she had whispered, tidying the bedside, with the doctor on his way, too late. “Guess she got tired of waiting,” Una had told the man. Would she speak that way to Snow? Una’s disappointment with Dr. Brunt was not as strong as Enman’s was with her at the time, though he’d soon gotten over his. He knew she was disappointed about living in Ma’s house and staying on in Barrein, and he hoped her disappointment would not grow bigger than her, bigger than them. But you accepted things. And no, Ma hadn’t looked peaceful at all but plagued, panicky—if not fighting death, then unwilling to succumb. For all he knew her Blessed Mother had appeared at Ma’s window, a broken figurine.

  And he heard Ma’s voice again in his head: “Never mind how others behave. You’re to act properly. Any son of mine—” she would say, an eye cocked at the Meade kids traipsing by, dragging with them Sylvester’s reputation for being no good.

  “Buddy? First things first—them tires,” the mechanic was yelling. He had brought replacement ones, but Enman didn’t want to think what they cost. Gad, the cost of things as basic as food and gas, especially when Una demanded, deserved, a certain style of upkeep, beyond having nice clothes. Dinners out, movies. Peter Peter pumpkin eater, leapt into his head while the guy cranked the jack: the nursery rhyme Ma had recited—Had a wife and couldn’t keep her—those last weeks when her mind wandered—Put her in a pumpkin shell—and barely knew what she was saying:

  There he kept her very well.

  For Una, living in Barrein might feel like living in a pumpkin. In the Grove’s dingy light this had come to him, and the unthinkable—entering and exiting his brain faster than a bullet would have—that the decent thing might just be to let Una go.

  Let her find someone more equipped to give her what she needed, what he seemed unable to, given whatever it was he lacked. Whatever might make her happy, given whatever her disappointment spoke of, beyond the city things she missed, since doing a lot of the things most wives did didn’t seem to. There was more to her dislike of cooking than fear of the stove.

  The “new” tires were as bald as Hubley Hill’s head. After getting the mechanic to come all this way, Enman could hardly balk. At least they held air, and already it was practically noon. “You in a rush, bud?” The kid waved his wrench. “Good news. Like I tells you, there’s nutting here that can’t be fixed.” Yet, at first, no amount of tinkering would get Beulah to start. He gave the shiniest tire a kick.

  “Ain’t she like a woman,” the kid mechanic piped. Like a woman? Had he let Beulah’s name slip? “Cars, man—can’t live without ’em. Can’t live with ’em unless you’re rolling in dough.” The guy hitched and winched her up. She was bucked so high in front her taillights scraped the dirt.

  The entire ride back to O’Leery, a chokeweed of cares twisted around his conscience, frustration and guilt over Hannah and Una. He was a little afraid of his failings further catching up with him. His old salary had been enough that he could have helped pay for someone to take Hannah in, if someone had been willing to. Helping Twomey with Hannah’s keep would have been a waste of money; Twomey would’ve squandered it on himself. Enman’s earnings at Inkpens’ were half what he’d made at the bank. Una’s goodness to the girl was like compound interest on his debt to both of them, for putting up with him.

  He remembered Ma saying, “Una’s a nice enough gal. But lofty, don’t you find?”

  Call it loftiness, call it Una’s airy determination, it was what he liked, loved most, never mind that sometimes it set them apart. Una was like the wind personified depicted on a nautical chart at Inkpens’, a face shown blowing from one top corner.

  A more primal navigational aid than a compass.

  Where would he be without her?

  “New brakes for sure, carburetor needs looking at, plus body work. Could take a few days,” was the garage’s verdict. Up on the jack, Beulah looked even worse from underneath. His gut’s emptiness caved to a rocky feeling. He had to get home, couldn’t hack a second night at the Grove, let alone a third. He needed to see his wife, needed to make up with her—though make up for what, precisely, he felt queasily unsure: maybe whatever it was was bigger than anything you could put into words?

  And probably it was foolish, downright superstitious, but as soon as he had a second he would find glue and mend Ma’s statuette.

  He hated asking, but there was this urgency: “Any chance bumming a lift?”

  “Slim to none—unless someone’s going that way?” the kid yelled out to the owner manning the cash, then turned to him again. “More good news, though. Got the parts, and things’re a bit slow, so, you never know. Might getcha on the road a bit sooner, anyways.”

  “Get yourself a bite, meantime.” The owner dug inside his coveralls for a pen. “They got the panfried haddock over the Grove there, not bad. But before you head over, just need your John Henry, okay pal? In lieu of a deposit, just say.” A grimy thumbnail indicated where to sign the guarantee that Enman would return. “Take your time, eh. Have a beer. Heck, have one for me too.”

  “Sure,” he said, then hurried to the grocery up the hill. If it was half as good as Finck’s it would have what he needed. When he walked in, heads turned and eyes narrowed—not surprising, him being a stranger. But then the clerk sang out, “No big deal, folks. Buddy’s from Barrein, seen him with the Goodrows, can’t be all bad, then. What can I do you for? It’s just, well, we’ve had some trouble with foreigners."

  “Suspected ones—Jerries.” Tucking her hands in her apron, the fat girl at the cash breathed the words slowly from rosebud lips.

  “Last thing we need’s the RCMP on our case too, you catch me?”

  14

  The phone woke her, clamouring below, in the midst of a dream impossible to shake off. Una had been washing dishes in the vast, bright kitchen of the house she’d grown up in, a house in which she’d often felt lost. But she was the mistress, the master, of it, with its bay windows and balustrade, chandeliers, and carved cornices and lintels—the house exactly, vividly, as it had been when she was a child.

  Except, Una remembered as she leapt from the bed, the rooms were empty, the walls a uniform khaki green, the smell of mothballs everywhere. Even as she flew downstairs the smell lingered, and the dream’s trenchant sunlight, pouring through hallways, leading her to the draughty tiled bathroom where her mother was being sick.

  As she grabbed the receiver, breathed “Hello,” the dream’s chilly aura was a shawl around her shoulders. Too late she remembered the thermometer.

  “So Clint didn’t land you in the ditch?” Enman’s voice was smooth and easy and frustratingly calm. He, after a
ll, had spent the night somewhere with hot running water.

  “Great,” she replied to his news, disappointment clouding the picture in her mind of a shiny new car, herself at the wheel, wearing sunglasses and a chiffon kerchief like Kit’s.

  He babbled about rides, taxis, and getting home as soon as he could but not to hold her breath.

  Hold her breath—for what?

  Through the window she caught the sea’s tight glint: another beach day in five or six weeks of such days that had gone beyond being monotonous. She pictured herself knocking on Isla’s door again, flailing her bucket, and Isla’s daughter burping her baby, its legs curling like a kitten’s. And Hannah, she pictured Hannah too, the girl’s eyes lighting up at practically nothing.

  The futility of life here sank in with the heft of a knife cutting softened lard. The day ahead loomed like all the rest, as prescribed as paint-by-numbers canvases Kit deemed art for those lacking imagination. Una saw Kit’s point but tended to disagree. Because wouldn’t it be grand to be Kit—just a moment’s pettiness crept in before she banished it—making such judgements, coming and going as she pleased.

  Hormones.

  This feeling of hers, a slow whirlpool of ennui, had to be more than the effects of a dream to be dismissed. Progesterone was Dr. Snow’s name for the culprit. She thought again of Isla’s granddaughter: infant fingers soft as the chamois Enman used to polish his car. But how long before tiny fingers turned grasping? Picking and pointing. The nastiness of children, who could deny it, even if you loved their imaginations? Peed pants, snotty noses, hectoring voices, and that way kids had of never questioning that the world revolved around them. Perhaps Kit was right: minimizing exposure to them spared you becoming cynical.