Wolfe Island

by Lucy Treloar

  ‘Call them back. Get them on the bus! You’ve got to get going now,’ I shouted.

  The official at the bus steps looked at his binder blankly, as if it might contain instructions for what to do after a gun attack. He was a young man running to seed, with his jeans pulled high, the belt digging into his softness and his baseball cap digging into his thick neck, but he was giving a bit of his free time for others to do this simple job, which had become so difficult.

  ‘Hey. Hey, sir,’ I said.

  He stared and backed away like I might shoot him now, so I knew he’d seen me.

  I looked at his name tag. ‘Warren. They could be in danger. Get them moving. Do it now, Warren. Now.’

  He began calling, weakly at first, and then stronger, and people began rushing back. Folk were streaming out of the centre as well, the lawyer I’d handed my papers to among them. He took charge. ‘Come on, come on, before the cops get here. You want them going through your papers?’ he yelled at a lagging woman looking through her bag. She scuttled.

  People averted their eyes from the two bodies, and from Alejandra standing so still, and from Cat who had dropped to Luis’s side. She touched his grey face and peeled his coat back and saw his smashed chest. Alejandra’s head was tipped back and her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. No sound came out. Somewhere sirens were sounding. I went to the man I’d shot. He was just a guy in jeans and a padded denim jacket, a wispy moustache, short black hair covered by a knitted hat that was askew across his forehead. There was the outline of a small blue tear tattooed beneath one eye, like Tobe’s. He looked young lying facing the sky with his legs kicked out almost carefree, like a child being swung around. He was dead but I spoke to him anyway: ‘You got the wrong person. It should have been me.’ I wanted to kick him. I wanted to smash him and worse.

  I went to Cat and pulled her to her feet. I took Luis’s scarf from around his neck and thrust it in her pocket. ‘For later, so you have something,’ I said. ‘You’ll need it.’ I pulled the leather thong bracelet from his wrist and tightened it over Alejandra’s. ‘For later, so you have something,’ I told her. ‘I’m sorry you have to go, but you have to, for him.’ I hugged them – they probably wouldn’t remember that – and told them I loved them more than life and pushed them up the stairs and threw their bags up. Warren checked their names. A man helped them. I tracked their progress through the smoked-glass windows. They moved dumbly to their seats. There were three more people – two women and a child. Warren banged the bus doors which hissed shut and the bus drew out. I watched until it swung onto the highway and disappeared.

  I waited by Luis’s body with my hand resting on his chest. It seemed like he was cooling already. Would it happen so fast? I put my fingers to his neck. It was still warm, but unmoving. The fluttering of blood was in my own fingers, my own body. I stood when the police arrived and saw that some of Luis’s blood was on my jeans now, from kneeling in the run-off, I suppose, and my jeans stuck to my knees and I had to keep pulling the fabric loose. Luis’s soft black hair was lifting in the breeze. I stroked it and it felt the same as Alejandra’s. It made him seem alive again and the breath caught in my throat. What would I know about life and death and the signs of them? The police looked at him, lifting his sweater, pressed fingers to his neck. They draped a sheet over him, tucking it at head and foot so it didn’t blow away. So he was truly dead now. They looked at the shooter, lifted his jacket, felt his neck – it was nothing but routine to them – and draped him too.

  They asked for witnesses and a woman in her thirties told them about the shooter, and the names he’d called, which she’d forgotten. She asked me if I remembered and I said I didn’t. Warren looked away. A few others drifted around for the drama. The woman whispered to me, ‘I saw what you did.’ I didn’t reply. She said, ‘It’s okay.’ If people had seen anything, it was Luis falling, and if they weren’t running from that, the other man falling. No one else mentioned me or my gun, but my gun was in my pocket and I had used it. I told the police what I’d seen of the shooter, and said I hadn’t seen who shot him.

  ‘Assholes,’ the younger policeman said in a flat voice. His face was hardly touched by life.

  ‘What were you looking for on their chests?’ I asked.

  ‘Tattoos, their membership. One isn’t marked.’ He pointed towards Luis. ‘Must have really pissed someone off.’

  ‘Got him in the end,’ the other said.

  I gave them a name and number, false ones, in case they needed me, and I walked away. The man had known Luis and Alejandra’s true names, but the names I have written were not the names he called, which I can’t remember. Maybe it was Hector. I’m pretty sure it was H and G for Luis and M for Alejandra. They came out like water running. I’ve dreamed the moment and heard the names again, but they’re gone by the time I wake. It might be better that way.

  It is a dark moment leaving the people you love. It leaves a hollowness at your core, and life billows, buffeting and changing shape, shrinking sometimes until the idea of it is lost over a horizon. Other times the hollowness consumes. Likewise, no one can explain what it’s like to leave a place they love, that has held them and their family safe for as long as memory. Would I have left Wolfe if I’d know what was to come? Would I have sent them up highways on their own with nothing but the Silverado, a little money, a tin whistle (my father believed one essential to any journey from home) and a penny hug? In that life I would still have Girl; I wouldn’t know of the storms to come. Nothing new in that. Life is good and bad together: everything mixed through and all the parts growing in and out of one another: no sunrise without the sun setting; no future without a past; no redemption without a sin. I used to imagine the waters rising high. I was finding things out. Would I have done different if I’d known about the journey home?

  Chapter 22

  I moved in a dream on the roads heading south. It suited me that way. I didn’t want to be thinking. People in scattered numbers moved steadily along highways and down roads that led off them and on streets in towns, looking for places to stay for a night or places they might settle for a little longer to catch their breath or evade violence or wait for kindness or food or warmer weather. A tide of people was heading north, which I hadn’t known when I was in the stream of them. It was disconcerting being on my own after a year of company, like my return to Wolfe Island when I left my family behind – that walk up the road in the soft darkness, the aloneness of it, not a soul to watch my back or decide a single thing. It had been by turns a rapturous and fearful freedom. In the days and weeks that followed it came at me sometimes like a vicious animal darting in, biting my arm or stealing a finger. My heart leaped and I trembled and sweat prickled at my hairline. Wherever I was, I stood still and shut my eyes and waited to settle. I would not look behind in such moments or I’d forever be looking back, but it was not easy.

  Now I became accustomed to quiet again, to my mind roaming undisturbed as it used to on Wolfe Island. I’d forgotten. I heard everything there as clear as if I’d been half deaf before: the thin call of a gull, the whistle of a kite, the wind sounding like rain in the grasses. I might sit for a morning, watch the clouds, feel the wind on my left cheek, and how it shifted by noon, the way the clouds shadowed the sun and I shivered, insects going to ground, birds plunging to trees, everything but weather growing still and watchful, and without a thought I went into the house with Girl at my side and secured the windows and watched the storm. This was my world and I was its. I wished for nothing else. But life does not go on in the same way. Sometimes the world is a blizzard-filled snow globe. Things happen in the shaking and the settling.

  Some people I passed

  I saw a man travelling the same direction as me, though slower. His shabby-elegant pinstripe suit hung loose on his skinny frame, and he carried his hands before him, wrists close, as if the remembrance of shackles and trying to break free ran deep inside him. I caught
up with him by degrees. Eventually he sat on a fallen roadside tree, removed his shoes and shook them out – a courtesy to show he was no danger to me – and waited till I was well past before putting them on again. There is etiquette on the road that any new vagabond such as myself must learn. I count this man one of the most courteous I met.

  I passed a swarthy man with a red cap and blue jeans frayed at heel and a leathery old rocker man with a long sparse grey beard that drifted over his shoulder in the wind. I crossed the road to avoid him. He watched too hard and glanced around to see if we had company. I let him see the blood that stained my clothes and he thought better of whatever plan he was hatching.

  I passed two women and three tired children. The smallest, a boy, was crying hard. One of the women looked around and went back to the child. She knelt and he walked into her arms. She rocked him, passed a little cloth over his face, and smoothed his fringe out of his eyes. I had reached her by then and stopped to tell her about the man with the hard look and she thanked me. She stood and held the boy’s hand and they went on.

  I entered a region of low hills and forests – maples and beeches and dogwoods with an understorey of holly. A truckload of gunmen came over a hill and down the road. There were nine or ten men swaying in the tray, their guns sticking up, and no time for me to hide, so I waited, thinking they’d pass, because what would they want with me? They pulled up alongside. They were young and dumb-looking – costume warriors in hunting store fatigues, a couple with those ridiculous bandanas tied around their heads. They already had two handcuffed runners – a small woman and a beaten-up man and a little sobbing boy who reached his arms out stiffly and cried, ‘Mami, Papi, Mami, Papi,’ over and over.

  One of the vigilantes was truly mean. He pawed through my bag, then emptied it on the muddy ground, shaking it joylessly. I began picking things up. Before I’d straightened something behind me caught their attention – a new plaything; a silent, slight, ragged young man I’d just passed, I guessed. The truck reared forward, the gravel spitting up and smacking into my legs and jacket, leaving gritty mud on my lips.

  Evidently, the young man had slid into the woods. The truck came to a skidding stop and the men shot after him, haphazardly, it seemed. (The gunfire made me shake.) They went on their way. Perhaps the man was dead; perhaps he was wounded. I went back and plunged into the misty trees. It was quiet in there and still but for the drip of water from leaves. I called, ‘Hey there.’ My voice was an explosion. My heart raced. I lowered my voice to a loud hiss, ‘I’m the lady you passed before. Remember me? Do you need any help?’ But the man wasn’t there, and after some stumbling around I returned to the road, heading south again. At the churned section where they’d stopped me I slowed, looking for anything I might have missed and there was the man, a shadow between the trees, as quiet and still as a making.

  ‘Señora,’ he said. He had a desperate look about him, and a grey sheen to his young face. His hand pressed his side beneath his jacket. He swayed and took his hand away and turned it over to show me, as if he was giving himself up to me or to death. His hand was red.

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. I wanted to turn and run from him – more blood – but I skidded down the short embankment to his side and pulled up his jacket to see his wound, a deep welt sliced into his scrawny side. The bullet had not reached his guts. ‘No, no, no. You’re all right, honey,’ I said and made him look. I staunched the wound with my spare t-shirt and cinched it in place with his belt. He winced, then vomited, or tried to. His stomach was empty.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I know it hurts, but it’s not deep. You’re okay.’

  ‘Gracias,’ he said, and kept on talking. But I didn’t understand. I wished I’d picked up some Spanish in Freedom.

  ‘You need stitches,’ I told him.

  He didn’t understand, so I mimed sewing and he shook his head wildly.

  ‘No, no doctor.’ Tears turned his black eyes lustrous.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  He sat abruptly and shut his eyes and retched again. He had a drink from my water bottle. I listened to his shallow breaths. I gave him two dollars and was ashamed I didn’t give him all I had. When he was ready, I helped him back to the road and gestured south – would he like to come with me? He shook his head and pointed north.

  ‘Gracias,’ he said.

  ‘Be careful,’ I told him, and we parted. I turned back to watch him a couple of times, wondering if he might collapse, but his line was steady enough. People pass through your life and it can be hard not knowing what happened to them. I hope he made it, but I could not picture it. I could see a fever infection and hunger and fatigue setting in, him leaving the road to rest against a log, a cold night and an endless sleep. But people do surprise.

  Later, it began to snow, falling randomly at first, scudding across my vision in flecks of light. The sky was so heavy and low it seemed it would fall. The snow began in earnest. I needed shelter before dark – perhaps one of pine branches, like the ones we’d made on Wolfe when we were small, or I might get lucky and find a hollowed-out tree and it would be enough if I could just stay dry till morning. There was an opening between the trees down the embankment and I headed into it, stumbling and slipping, anything to get out of the wind. I trudged up a wide path – a fire or maybe a logging trail. Ahead, bare trees ran the ridges of the hilltop like a fine lace. The snow blew across them but I had my path. Oh, but I was cold and there was nothing to do but keep going and keep going, hoping I’d find something. I shivered till it hurt. A whiff of smoke came from somewhere, good wood smoke from a fire. It blew away. I thought I might sit for a minute or two and gather myself, but didn’t. I stopped, looked ahead, pulled my woollen hat low. A dark shape came towards me.

  ‘Ma’am?’ The voice drew closer. ‘Ma’am, are you lost?’

  ‘I think I might be.’

  Then the person, a young man with a light pleasant voice, was beside me. ‘Better come. Not the weather for it. Just heading home.’ He turned around and I made myself follow.

  It was a bad storm. I would not have made it without the kindness of Eddie, the young man. His home – part cave, part shack – was worked into the entrance of a sheet of overhanging rock, and was as snug as a gypsy caravan, lined with straw bales right up to the tarpaulin ceiling. He was a scarce-bearded, gentle, willowy sort of person; he had to stoop here and there so he didn’t knock the ceiling, something he did with the grace of familiarity. He’d crazy-paved the floor with pieces of slate, and wisps of straw were scattered across it as if it was a barn floor. More straw bales became benches, topped with tablecloths, wooden planks, and jars and saucepans all lined up neat. Two jars of honey stood in a pan of water. An old wood stove kept his home warm, and warmed me. I turned myself around and around, roasting one side and another of my chilled body, taking it all in. He’d pegged a pair of drying socks to a singlet-clad wood block pulled up to its side, and it seemed halfway to being a making. At the foot of a narrow bed covered in rich brocade (a curtain, perhaps) he’d fashioned shelving filled with blankets and clothes and books.

  Low-watt lamps hung from the ceiling (a generator ran from a nearby stream), and pieces of paper in plastic sheets pegged to fishing lines crisscrossed above, rustling and shifting like roosting birds as we moved. They were drawings and paintings of things he’d seen: intricate observations and notes of creatures taken from unexpected angles, the profile of a dead nestling, a raptor’s skull, mosses and toadstools and lichens, leaves and branches, spiderwebs, moonlight, constellations. (He didn’t mind my looking at them. With the storm outside there was time.) He paid attention to his world.

  One picture was of his dog, Captain, a retriever, drawn with a bulge on its neck: Captain: rattlesnake bite, the caption read.

  ‘Nice dog,’ I said.

  ‘He died.’

  ‘Oh no. I lost a dog not long ago. Nearly killed me.’

  H
e shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I waved my hand to shoo the thought away. ‘I’m sorry too – for your loss.’

  He shrugged, as if a shrug could dismiss a broken heart. We sat in the lamplight, each of us knowing that it couldn’t, that we were just agreeing not to sink into it. The storm got louder. He was unperturbed. He sat on an upturned bucket at a lower section of bench, one bale high, that contained his drawing and painting things, and began adding to a picture. He was comfortable with silence. He looked up once and said, ‘It’ll be a couple of days.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘The storm.’

  I believed him. I was getting used to his way of speaking. I thought he was taciturn at first, but I came to believe it was lack of practice. I wondered what I was like after a few months alone, getting my conversation going, taking a while to catch up with the way other folk talk and the directions their minds travel.

  Before dark fell he showed me an outhouse down the path (not an expedition to undertake lightly) and insisted I take his bed, which from the feel of it was more straw bales. I slept well for the first time since I left Wolfe Island. I felt safe there in that living space, as if I had some kinship with it.

  We fell into sporadic conversations like quick flurries of snow during the days of my stay. They left me somewhat breathless. I told him that once upon a time I had a husband and two children – son and daughter – and now I had only a daughter; I left the details vague.

  ‘How old are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Twenty . . . wait. Twenty-four.’

  The same as Tobe.

  Six years older than Luis and Josh.

  Six years younger than the prisoner on death row.

  Perhaps twenty years younger than the man who wanted to get Luis and Alejandra on Wolfe Island, who died on its sunken jetties.