“We’re taking Wayner from a party and everything,” Hugh joked. “You’re the boss, bud.”
Thoughts of Charlie crept back into my head, and I pushed them away.
When we came to the chip-wagon/office, instead of pulling in Wayne kept going, up a short hill and around a bend, finally turning in at a yellow bungalow. The yard was packed with cars and motorcycles; I could hear things in progress. Wayne pushed inside ahead of us, and a thin woman in tight jeans came up and slid her arms around his waist. “What’s goin’ on?” she yelled above the noise, turning, not exactly friendly. Her eyes froze on me.
“Lemme grab a beer, then I’ll take youse over,’’ Wayne said, brushing past her.
Somewhere in the house, maybe the basement, someone was playing guitar, loud, wailing metal, and I could smell pot. Charlie would’ve had an absolute bird. You’re the mother of my child, for God sake! I imagined his voice. Then pictured him once more, sitting someplace hot and arid, near a tarmac somewhere in the world, with his shirt off, listening to his buddies’ jokes. I wondered what else happened on those leaves of his, where he and the others went. Suddenly I didn’t care.
We never got past the hallway. The case with Hugh’s sax sat beside a table, an antiqued piece with a doily on it and a fake-looking oil lamp. A swag hung on the wall above, made of artificial blossoms and twigs. There were a lot of tole-painted ornaments and dried flowers.
The thin woman acted like she didn’t see me. “Beer’s in the fridge,” she said, but Hugh didn’t seem to hear. He’d taken out the sax and seemed to be working something out, not playing but wiggling his fingers over the keys.
“Willa?” he said after a bit. “Drink?”
I started to say yes, smiling at the hostess who kept fidgeting with an earring, one of a slew of gold-coloured studs in her ear. She had a hardened look, her brows plucked so severely she appeared startled, caught off guard.
“We’ll pass, Reenie,” Hugh said before I could answer. “We’re just hanging out, waiting for bud.” He grinned at me, waving his saxophone along with that awful music—was it AC/DC or Black Sabbath they were trying to copy? A couple of women appeared, younger and fresher-looking than Wayne’s wife or girlfriend or whatever. One of them eyed Hugh like a cat fixing to rub against him.
“Got a present for me?” she said, her smile fading when she saw me.
“Tell Wayne we’ll meet him down the boat,” he shouted past her to Reenie, putting the sax back in its case.
“What was that all about?” I nudged him.
“Oh, you know.” He just grinned. “Some girls. Always on the lookout for a party favour. Loot bag.”
Minutes later we were slouching downhill in the twilight, Hugh lugging the sax. I thought of Sonny with a sudden pang, and wondered if he was having fun. We got halfway to the dock when I remembered my backpack in Wayne’s truck.
“He’ll bring it.” Hugh’s hand was on my shoulder. “The man wouldn’t walk an inch to save his life.”
I hated to think what shape Wayne would be in, meeting us at the boat.
“Don’t worry.” Hugh seemed to read my thoughts. “He could steer that thing in his sleep, and he’s only been drinking since seven.”
“What?” I tried to joke. “Out here the rules of the road don’t apply?” It was a last-ditch effort at being adult. An image of Sonny sprawled on a Hide-A-Bed in his Batman pyjamas spun off into thin air.
“Tsk, tsk.” Hugh elbowed me. “You think I’d get in with a drunk? Willa, there are about a thousand other places I’d rather capsize.”
I mustn’t have looked convinced. Once an adult, always an adult. Once a mother, always a—
“What time do you have to be back?” he asked. “In the morning—for Sonny?”
I was about to say eleven when the truck purred alongside us. Wayne peered out.
“You owe me big time, Gavin. Get in, guys.” He actually moved over, making room. “Nah, I’m just shittin’ ya. Look, if it weren’t for Reenie, I’d stay the night with youse. That is, if a guy could get anything stronger than tea to drink.” He smirked at Hugh and something tugged inside me: fear. Shame. The only guy I’d kissed in years—besides Sonny—was Charlie.
“Already she’s makin’ noise about cleaning up,” Wayne ragged. “Well. Let’s get a move on before it’s tot’lly dark.”
They talked for most of the ride across, about music, mostly. Guitar riffs and bands I’d never heard of. Then Hugh started discussing jazz. Wayne listened intently as he steered us in. The man’s mood swings were hard to figure. And I’d thought Charlie was moody; those spells when he’d hide out downstairs or in the bedroom, so quiet I’d almost forget he was there. Wayne’s silences hung like clouds. From what little I’d seen, I imagined he’d have the kind of temper that’d swing a person like a monkey by the tail.
Hugh got out first, helping me from the boat while Wayne sat smoking a cigarette and talking about makes of guitars and Reenie’s tole-painting lessons and how it was a good thing they didn’t have kids. Who knows how much Hugh had told him about Sonny and me. It was hard enough figuring out why they were friends, let alone what else they talked about on all those trips back and forth in the boat and in the truck, running errands like an old married couple. Men. On a certain level they mystified. Figuring them out was like analyzing the chemistry of a plank. There was wood, and there was wood. And then there was Hugh.
Waving Wayne off, he took my knapsack, hooking his arm through mine as we left the wharf and headed into the trees. A sliver of moon lit the path. Magnified by the stillness around us, the distant thunder of the container port rumbled overhead. Despite Hugh’s presence, the noise made me edgy, alert, and I was glad when we arrived at the beach with the lighthouse perched out there on the spit, the dark shape of the house beside it. As we crossed the sand, the tower flashed its solid beam, almost like that of a cruiser, lighting our faces every so often.
“It’s on a thirty-second rotation,” he said, gripping my hand. Hoisting the sax in his other one.
For an instant the light was a strobe, and I was in high school, the sand underfoot a gym dance floor. I was holding hands with a boy I had a crush on, one I would’ve dropped acid for, stolen for, done anything for.
Dotted with moonlight, the water raked in and out, a slow waltz. It breathed with us, licking our shoes. Hugh started to whistle, a tune vaguely familiar. The Carpenters: “We’ve Only Just Begun.” I picked up a stone and pelted it, just to hear the splash, something besides the hissing waves and his whistling. Then he laughed.
“Don’t they piss you right off,” he said, “songs like that.” This unleashed a rush of names, every bad song we could think of.
“The Bee Gees,” I said. ‘“I Started A Joke.’”
“Neil Diamond,” Hugh topped me. ‘“Cracklin’ Rose.’”
“The Village People,” I blurted out, giddy, my ears numbed by the wind and the pulling sound of the surf, “‘YMCA.’”
“You win,” he said, whistling bits of each through gales of laughter.
Squeezing my hand, he blew on my fingers to warm them. Where the sand gave way to stones, he let go and stopped to open the case. Gently, as if it were an infant, he lifted out the sax. Planting his feet, he started to play. A low, soft, smug sound. It took me a moment to catch the tune: “Moondance.” A gust of wind lifted the notes and spilled them back. I closed my eyes and for a second it was a woman singing. A woman with ropy hair, I imagined, flecked with seaweed and mother-of-pearl.
When I looked up, the moon had slit the clouds. Hugh kept on playing. If it hadn’t been so chilly, I’d have taken off my sneakers and danced barefoot, a slow, hippie spiral over the sand.
This can’t be real, I thought; any of it. The moon, the harbour, the moaning notes mixing then with a thrum from the marsh behind us—a sound like aliens landing.
“Nee-de
eps,” Hugh stopped to tell me, “also known as frogs.” The noise rushed in, stemming all other sounds. “Listen,” he said, wiping off the mouthpiece, then snapping the sax back into its case.
“It’s a chorus,” I whispered.
“Great backups, what?” He took my hand again and we laughed, stumbling along like drunks. The tide had come in over the rocks, and only the light kept us from missing a step and falling in. But we made it without getting a soaker.
In the kitchen blue light fell from the window, brightened every now and then by the tower’s flash. Hugh moved about quietly making a fire. We stood in silence, holding hands and watching the distant glow of cranes moving containers. Leaning against him, I shut my eyes. I imagined the harbour rising to the sills and spilling inside, filling the room like a fish bowl. I pictured chairs and pots floating out to sea.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, and then I imagined Charlie airborne, harnessed inside the belly of a chopper, listening raptly to each sputter and spin.
“Not really,” I said, swallowing.
“Tea?”
Standing on tiptoe, I shook my head, reaching my arms around him. I could feel the vertebrae under his shirt. Gently I untucked it, sliding my hand over his skin, pausing at each ridge of muscle. I thought of Sonny going on about wrestlers, their abs and their pecs, and somehow a giggle escaped.
“You’re sure you’re okay?” He caught my hand and pressed it to his lips, then led me past the table towards another threshold. Indigo light spilled in across the bare floor and a corner of the old-fashioned iron bedstead.
I made myself breathe.
There was a stubby red candle on the sill, which he lit; and as we undressed I caught our reflections in the glowing pane. Naked, he seemed even more…unlikely. Taller, longer-limbed and taut-bellied. His hands seemed bigger. I had to look away at first—away from his chiselled arms and the soft dark hair at his navel.
But his eyes never moved from me, as if he was greedy, almost, studying each pore.
I wanted to curl away and cover myself, until he put his ear to my breast as if sounding each heartbeat. He touched my stretch marks—what no woman wants—and asked about the spot on my arm where, when I was twelve, a girl had dug her pencil in. As I lay there, he traced every bit of me with his tongue.
A pearl gleamed at the tip of him, and I tasted it. And we lay on our backs, mute, catching our breaths, our skins just touching, until he drew me to him again and slid inside, stroking quickly until we both came.
He shuddered and lay still, gently winding a strand of my hair about his finger.
As a dampness settled around us, we listened to the harbour’s noises, sounds made as if in its sleep—of bell buoys tolling, and groaners. Before dropping off, he whispered about lanes and channels charted and marked like runways with navigation aids. He’d only got the job on a whim, he told me. It was the sounds that drew and kept him: their music.
By the sound of that music I tried to sleep, lulled by the creaks of the house and the waves shushing outside the window.
8
THE SEXTANT
Charlie worked his way into my thoughts, much as I tried to lock him out. It was as if he’d climbed through Hugh’s window and sat watching, and the draft creeping in was his breath. But it wasn’t guilt I felt so much as a sense of having jumped, blind, and bobbed to the surface.
I lay under the covers—a tangle of afghans and quilts smelling of wood smoke—and listened to Hugh’s breathing. His breathing and the night seemed measured by a sort of conversation; the ringing of a buoy answered by a moan. The mattress felt like a bog, our bodies like footprints. Eventually I fell into a half-waking, half-sleeping stew of dream and memories stirred by the wind’s creaking.
I was barely twenty years old again, meeting Charlie for the first time at a Red Cross shelter in Calgary. There’d been a mini-disaster, a gas leak; a tanker truck had spilled its load. A neighbourhood was evacuated, the people put up in a gym. I was volunteering. My job was setting up cots.
The military came to help, though besides making sandwiches there wasn’t that much to do, and still a stocky guy with a moustache rushed over to assist me. We’d stopped for coffee, when, his mouth wrapped around a Timbit, he asked, “Wha’d you think of Sly Stallone—the Eyetalian Stallion? What, you haven’t seen Rocky yet? I’ve seen it twice…wouldn’t mind going again.” And he’d asked me out.
Hugh shifted in his sleep, the mattress sighing like the waves curling just outside. His features looked softer, smoother in the revolving light.
I’d been put off by Charlie’s hair at first, or lack thereof, and his age. He’d seemed at least thirty, though he was only twenty-three. But then I’d had a phobia about people in uniforms, maybe from watching nurses tend to my mom.
While he and I were dating, the Red Cross gave me a job in a blood donor clinic. This was before AIDS. The blood was the easy part, even when bags burst and I felt like Bela Lugosi holding them. But there was something clean about it, healthy, as it went through a centrifuge, being spun into plasma, platelets. It could save people, after all. Accident victims, chemo patients. Except for my mother; nothing had saved her.
The house around me creaked like a ship. Hugh’s mouth twitched in a faint smile.
The blood never bothered me, but the uniforms did. Polyester pantsuits, aqua for inside, navy for outdoors, like the ones worn by Sally Ann folks ringing bells at Christmas. “I’m allergic to polyester,” I’d told the supervisor. “Excuse me?” she’d said, unamused.
I’d stuck it out three whole months when Charlie proposed. His wasn’t the kind of proposal you read about in Glamour. He was being posted, and wondered if I’d like to see the country. “Sure,” I said, with no idea what that meant. By the time I figured it out, Sonny was on the way.
A bun in the oven. Blood. I gazed at Hugh’s sleeping face, the strangeness of his features, their fresh familiarity. The doctors had ruled out more children after my miscarriage. A good thing now. Not that I’d planned any. Thinking up meals had become the extent of my planning, how to serve chicken six ways to Sunday. Which pretty much described base life, I’d learned soon enough after getting married. It didn’t matter where you lived, the fare hardly varied. What differed was the sauce, depending on what spices you added.
Watching Hugh, the soft rise and fall of his chest, my mind flitted then circled back to Charlie. At first, his absence had sharpened my longing. I’d slept with his clothes. A T-shirt scented with deodorant, a ball cap smelling faintly of mowed grass and barbecue. Those first couple of years, when he’d go away on exercises for five or six months at a time, his homecomings were honeymoons, the kind we’d missed when that first posting got bumped up by two weeks.
You can get used to anything, other women would tell me. As if they’d sampled Spam and felt qualified to say, Well, it’s not half bad, once you get a taste for it. Someone compared sex to potato chips; eat one and boom, you’re addicted. It made me think of dogs getting a taste for blood, which reminded me of my old job. Life would’ve been so much easier being hooked on carrot sticks.
But dogs and blood were the least of my worries the first time Charlie left on a tour. I was pregnant and much as I’d have loved an animal for company, he was right; pets were a millstone when you moved.
Charlie got called out again, a week before Sonny’s birth. The only familiar face was the doctor’s. She stitched me up—I was awake, it was a Caesarean done with an epidural—chatting as if over coffee about how hard it must be for guys coming home to an instant family. Instant, like soup mix or pudding.
After that, Charlie’s homecomings seemed different. Less kissing, more pounding in the basement. The last few years, they’d been more like the way you’d feel when you’ve just had something fixed on a car, say, the radiator, and a tire blew. Just when you’d hoped for a smoother ride.
Hugh turne
d in his sleep, his gentle snore in sync with the groaner rocking out there in the dark. The wind was a soft shush.
I pictured Charlie eyeing himself in the mirror. Once, he’d come home and shaved his head bald as a baby’s. I was almost scared to watch him undress in case he’d shaved his chest, too. By then he’d put on weight, got thicker, softer; his blond stubble began coming in a bristling grey. He’d lost the moustache; until then, I’d never seen him without it. When he shaved, his upper lip was like land cleared for a runway.
Studying Hugh’s face, the hollows of his cheeks washed every few seconds by that watery light, I felt a ghostly regret. What I’d have done, the last few years, for a kiss—a real kiss—the warmth of an embrace. How it had felt watching Charlie watch the news, the latest world crisis, and hear him bark at Sonny to put his bike away. How I’d wondered; who is this guy? He looked and talked like Charlie, left the seat up and the tissue holder empty, like always—but where was he? The guy who’d set up the cots had been hijacked. So what, if women like Sandi still turned to look when he walked by? That thickness of his had built up slowly, like the rings of a tree. Maybe it had started when he became an air technician. Less time on tour, he’d promised. But the choppers were useless without people like him.
Lying there, on the cusp between waking and sleeping, I quit trying to pinpoint who and where Charlie was. He was Sonny’s dad, was all. I imagined a Sea King taking off, then hovering over an ocean. Engaging in some sort of war game, something that made sense to him but meant squat to the rest of us.
My heart lifted with the whistling of Hugh’s breath. Charlie was in his heaven, and I…? Well, being alone had advantages: Cheerios for supper when you didn’t feel like cooking. But more than that, so much more than that, I was floating now, floating as if on a giant Cheerio, a life ring, kicking my feet and swimming.
Tracing Hugh’s ear with my finger, a feathery touch so as not to wake him, safe, I allowed myself a few more memories. Images drifted up like Polaroids. Charlie throwing a Frisbee to Sonny; Charlie cutting the lawn. His washboard ribs as he showered. His arms; Charlie had nice arms. But it was as if they belonged to someone else, and he wasn’t at home in his skin. Maybe I hadn’t been at home in mine, either. I wondered, vaguely, if he missed me, what he might be thinking now, high above the Mediterranean, somewhere under the sun. He wasn’t at home any place but in the tail section of a chopper. And where had that left me?
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