It was not irony that tugged at Anna now but a gnawing concern: how deeply did
Murdock
care that she had marijuana hidden in a bedroom closet? She wanted to keep the stash, but only for a while. As he’d said, for
now.
Now was what she was in. Just give it up, watch it float away? No. Not yet. She rocked faster.
RED
M
URDOCK
W
AS GLAD
to see Anna at his back door near dark, holding out his packet of cigarettes, one of which she was smoking. A moon the colour of buttermilk was low and large behind her, a sliver of cloud lidding it like an eye.
“Peaceful, isn’t it?” she said. “Look.”
In the window frame a green spider, big as a grape, was knitting up its web, trembling in the wind. He asked her if she would like a drink.
“That hooch you said you make?”
“Hooch?” She had never tasted his liquor anyway. “Women have liked it.”
“Thanks, Murdock, it’s not what I need right now.” She turned toward him, smiling, a smile with shades to it. “Listen, I’ll have a drink of your stuff with you, if you’ll share some of mine with me.”
“Yours?”
Anna took from the pocket of her blouse a joint with a twirl on one end. Red Murdock nodded.
“Ah,” he said. ”
That
stuff.” He sighed. Not the same as a drink of his liquor, not at all. They had, he and this woman, shared a few things these last months and shared them well. But she hadn’t mentioned the contraband in her closet and he hoped that somehow it was gone. Her dark eyes seemed to be sizing him up, and he did not want her to see him as old-fashioned, as just country. “Why?” he said.
“Why do you drink, Murdock?”
“Not for fun, not anymore.”
“But it must give you something you like, you enjoy. Doesn’t it? And you like drinking with other people?”
“Not so much now.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t mean you.”
Anna lit the joint, held the smoke, breathed it out. “Don’t look at me as if I were shooting heroin, Murdock. This isn’t anything wild.”
“I wouldn’t know just what it was.”
“Here. I just want you to understand its appeal, why I might like it.
You
might like it.”
“You go ahead yourself. I’ll get a bottle of mine from the basement.”
“No, listen, I mean it. Don’t be silly now.
You,
and
me
.”
“You don’t give a man much choice.” He accepted it, scowling as he puffed.
“It’s not a cigar, Murdock,” she said. “Take it in gently and hold it a little.… There. That’s the way.”
He told her he didn’t feel a thing, that an unfiltered Export did more than this, but down in the cellar his head suddenly went light and his feet wandered a bit before he set them carefully down. He studied the light bulb swaying at eye level and his mind seemed to sway as well, slowly, broadly, everything clear but demanding more attention than he would usually give it. He listened to a drop of water, a single distinct spat somewhere in the dark crawl space, and for a few moments it magnified into a leak but his sense told him no, it’s condensation from a water pipe or a little weeping around a joint, nothing for worry. He smiled, and then more widely. A little giddy.
Guanach,
his dad would say. How did her funny cigarette get that name? He started up the stairs but had to back down because he forgot the jar of liquor. Up we go. He couldn’t seem to quit grinning. His eyes burned a little, like he’d been on the water in the sun. He asked Anna if she would take his moonshine mixed with pop and she said sure.
“Murdock, I thought you died in that basement.”
“I’m old enough. I could’ve.”
He poked noisily around the kitchen for a bottle of ginger ale until he could stop smiling. He had no idea if anything was amusing at all or just everything, but did not care so long as he didn’t look foolish. He measured out the drinks, held each one to the light, frowning like a chemist. It seemed important that all this be done exactly right, without rush, and he almost forgot Anna was in the room. He had framed her forge drawing and hung it on the wall and he studied it now with new attention, its powerful colours and shades, they seemed to have sound: the raised arm and the fist gripping the hammer, they were supposed to be his (weren’t they?), the flamelike light, the interior dark like a cave.
“You don’t
feel
old, do you?” Anna said.
“Not this minute.”
She’d pulled him into the flow of her mind, it seemed like. Things sang in his head. Her voice a ripple of light, of sound. The drums in his own life had quit, he knew that. There had always been some music he’d hummed to without thinking. He could taste the excitement of it, the life of it, and Rosaire had brought it back to him. God, how he would love to have her with him, in his arms, tell her every damn little thing tumbling through his mind.
He didn’t know what to talk about while he was feeling this way. I’m getting lighter day by day, Rosaire said, everything else heavier. See those little things of mine, Murdock? I couldn’t even pick up that paperweight over there. Pretty though, isn’t it, that crystal? Not that little marble box you gave me either, couldn’t lift it now. I’ll lift it for you, he said. No, she said, that’s not the same thing. I love you though.…
His sight drifted toward a back window: Black Rock Head, blunt in the sea’s blue darkness. Down the strait, a boat light swung. There was an early star, solid as the head of a spike. He wanted to know more about Anna, he hadn’t guessed he would. Her hair, glistening black in the ceiling light, had been teased by the wind, it was always fetching, her eyes dark and ambiguous under long lashes. She had put on lipstick, he didn’t remember seeing it before.
He said, reeling a little but catching himself, “This makes me your partner in crime, looks like. We’re in this together.” His voice was joking, he smiled, but his heart seemed to be beating loud enough to hear: she was from away, and she had brought that thing into Granny’s kitchen, that domestic place he’d known all his life.
Anna smiled. “Anyway, what are we
in?
Something deep and mysterious, I hope.”
Suddenly he was unsure of her tone, her intentions. Was she having him on?
“We should haul that bale back where it came from,” he said, then hearing his own gruffness, went on more lightly, “we could row her out and drop her, you know, let somebody else have the headache of it.”
“But I
want
the headache of it, Murdock. For a little while. I want to see what it’s like just to … have it.”
“It isn’t just you.”
“For God’s sake, Murdock, I’d never implicate you. It’s in my house, not yours.” She touched his hand.“My grandmother’s house. I’d go to sleep hearing her down in the kitchen, baking something maybe, or just fussing about. She used a spinning wheel, for God’s sake. A conch.”
He drank his liquor quickly, open to its masking heat. It was different from the smoke and he wanted to tell her how. Then he wanted to tell her a detail of his father’s only suit, that in the black gabardine cloth its pinstripe had been all but invisible. This was all tied up with
her,
with her company. Something came into his nerves, he felt it but he couldn’t describe it, some kind of gentle force had him, like filings lining up over a magnet. Warm. Like fine memories, like touch. His mind was easy with it now, he wasn’t afraid. She had relaxed and talked and he wanted to tell her things too, and his enthusiasm for it made his thoughts shift swiftly, each one as in need of telling as the next. Like the day Anna had baked him oatmeal cookies and he’d sat in his kitchen that evening with a cup of tea, the cookie tasted good, for a first go, but as he was chewing he felt a hair on his tongue. He pulled slowly through his teeth a strand of fine black hair and laid it carefully, without disgust, on the white saucer, trying to pinpoint its taste, the odd feeling it gave him. He’d imagined her at the old table, bent over a bowl, mixing the batter, her dark braid loosed in the effort of that homely task.
“Suppose we dumped the bale and it washed back in here, on
your
shore?” Anna said. “Now that would be funny.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“Okay, sort of funny. Where is your boat anyway, the one you salvaged?”
“She’s ready. I’d row her anywhere,” Red Murdock said. Many times these last months he had felt like pulling toward the ocean alone, rowing out there until he couldn’t lift an oar, taking whatever came until it was all nothing but expanse, then he would drift.He wouldn’t lie in the bottom this time, not like he did that day, his poor uncle anxious for the sight of him, not because he had loved Murdock so much but because he wanted to feel normal again, unafraid.
“Where do you suppose it came from?” Anna said.
“I couldn’t say. She’s not from here.”
“You’d think someone would be looking for it.”
“You know what I miss?” he said suddenly. “Swordfish hearts. Been a damned long time since I’ve had me some hearts. Almost as big as a deer heart. He hunted swordfish, my dad, and Uncle Hugh. He could fling a harpoon, I’ll tell you. Sometimes they got tuna too they couldn’t give away, giants, in those days.”
“Where did you get your tattoo?” Anna said. She had hold of his forearm, touching the faded blue maple leaf.
He rolled his sleeve up further. The tattoo looked somehow fresh to him, new. The air seemed warm, even the breeze from the window.
“Halifax. I decked on a cargo boat for a while, way back.”
“My husband got one a year ago. A phoenix with an arrow through its heart.” She pulled out another of Murdock’s cigarettes and lit it. “He and his girlfriend, high on pot and dinner wine. Romantic, I suppose, and maybe it was. You know, a little thrill. Sly glances from students and secretaries. He liked that. Then a colleague said, You never did time, did you? And the feminist theorist in the office next door told him it was aggressive, like drumming your chest, she said. I told him it was sexy in a ratty sort of way. The girlfriend’s was an elaborate butterfly.”
Red Murdock nearly said, as a helpful link of information, that a bosun he’d sailed with, an ex–petty officer, had a green horsefly tattooed on the head of his prick. Instead he thought, it must have hurt like blazes, the man was not that big.“Chet, my husband, sold his solid, safe Volvo sedan and bought a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.” She could see it, smell its exhaust. A simple-minded Freudian machine, gleaming between his thighs. From those high handlebars he’d slung his thin physique. On a downtown street one morning she had suddenly seen him blare by, hearing the Harley first, the chesty accelerating stroke of its engine, then looking up to spot his ponytail flying, his chin high, and she had actually admired him for those two or three seconds, that rushed grainy image of him, a person he might have been, braver, bolder in some way that mattered, but could never be except for mere moments in his wife’s eyes, she who had been his lover once, at maybe the best time of her life, of his life. Did Alicia Snow know that, would she reckon with it? Anna knew things about Chet that Alicia would never know or notice because she wasn’t looking for them. But now Anna wondered how fair this memory of him was, how she might easily exaggerate its vividness, mock it. Surely he could call up selective memories of her, embarrassing, unflattering. Had he? “His girlfriend liked to ride on the seat behind him. I never would’ve.”
Murdock, barely listening, poured himself half a glass. It sat warm inside him awhile and then spread quietly into his head, seeped into his tongue.
Tha’m pathadh orm,
his dad used to say, I’m thirsty. Nobody here now but old Malcolm down the Cape had the Gaelic. Red Murdock used to go down there and listen to him, just tossing out a line, a phrase, words clustering around a name, an incident, comforting sounds that Malcolm took and wove into a conversation.
So much had slipped through his fingers. And Rosaire.
“Chet’s seeing a therapist,” Anna said, as if she were talking to someone who was following his life.
“Why, did he hurt himself?”
“Well … yes. As far as I’m concerned, he did.”
Red Murdock smiled politely. He didn’t care about this Chet or who he was seeing. The sea was rushing the stones of the shore, a loud stirring. Ah, the trunk in the closet: it fixed and sobered his attention. The time to discuss it seemed to have passed somehow, and Anna, still garrulous, was telling him about the strange and appealing dresses Breagh had sewn, what they might do for the right women.
“How about yourself?” he said.
“I don’t draw that kind of attention.”
“You don’t want to, or you can’t?”
“Oh, any woman wants to, I suppose.”
Murdock pushed toward her the untouched glass of his liquor. “Your turn.”
“Fair enough.” She downed it in one swallow, surprised that its heat was smooth, not searing as she’d expected. She leaned back, her eyes glistening.
“That’s booze all right,” she said. “I’m spinning.”
“Don’t shut your eyes then.”
“Oh, I’ve done that already, Murdock, many times. Did you ever by any chance read
The Death of Ivan Ilych?
Tolstoy?”
“I haven’t. Doesn’t mean I wouldn’t. Books were never much to hand.”
“I was thinking of the story, you said one day your friend’s death left you not caring about things, objects, we really only want them when we’re not sick, when no one’s dying.…”
“We’re always dying, it seems to me now.”
“Ivan Ilych is the man’s name, he’s dying slowly. A Russian man. Cancer.”
“Yes.”
“Material things, they no longer matter to him, getting them, having them. What comes to matter is his servant who gives him relief from his pain. This peasant just sits at the foot of the bed and lets Ivan rest his legs on his shoulders while he listens to Ivan talk. That simple act relieved the man’s pain.”
“I don’t know what that’s like.”
“Tolstoy could help, you know, spiritual pain, that’s what he does.…”
“From the outside I know, but not further in, not where the real pain is. They’re alone with that.
She
was.”