Just Beneath My Skin (6 page)

ONCE JAKE AND I WATCHED
the total eclipse of the sun.

An eclipse is when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun and blocks it.

“The sun is bigger than we can imagine,” Jake said.

“How big is the moon then?” I asked him.

“Smaller than the Earth,” Jake said, “but still pretty big.”

“So how can the moon block the sun if it's smaller than it?”

Jake said that was a good question. He ruffled my hair and said I was smart. Mom didn't watch the eclipse. She said she didn't have time for stars-and-moon foolishness. She stayed inside and did laundry and drank beer. It was in January, and kind of cold.

We spent all afternoon getting ready for it. Jake said we couldn't look directly at it because we would go blind, but he made this thing out of Coke bottle glass and a piece of paper to watch it with.

We watched on the paper as the shadow of the moon crawled across the face of the sun.

At one point it got so dark it was like it was night out.

It was so quiet.

It was like the world stopped breathing.

Jake held my hand.

It seemed like the two of us stood there forever in the darkness while the moon ate up the sun.

JOHNNY IS IN THE BATHROOM
so long I nod off in the chair. I dream my father and I are fishing on the Memragouche River up by the Sandbanks Cemetery. He's wearing his hip waders and standing midway out in the water, casting his line. I am on the shore with my little rod and reel and worm bait, and my father keeps shouting back to me to see how I'm doing.

I am six or seven in the dream, and it might be more of a memory, because my dad and I used to do this a lot before my mother died.

Then suddenly, in my dream, I am in the hip waders, casting the line and looking back. I see Nathan behind me on the shore with the rod and reel. Nathan is smiling. Behind him is Johnny Lang with a shotgun to his head.

I wake up sweating, and remember where I am. Johnny, the son-of-a-bitch, is still not out of the bathroom.

ALL AFTERNOON MOM PACES THE
house waiting for Jake to show up. She can't sit still in front of
Another World
, although she never misses a show if she can help it. I try to stay out of her way. I read
Archie Digest
in my room but she keeps coming in and asking me things.

“What's he look like?” she says to me the first time this happens.

“What's who look like?”

“Jake, you dummy!”

I shrug. “He looks like Jake.”

“What was he wearing, then?”

“His leather.”

“The same leather?”

“It could have been the same. Or it might have been different. I don't know.”

“Some help you are,” Mom says, and stomps out of my room. Another time she comes and asks me exactly what time he said he was coming.

“He didn't say,” I tell her. “He just said tonight.”

“Late tonight or early tonight?”

“I don't know. He didn't say.”

A few times I think she's gonna get mad but she never does.

She goes back out to the kitchen and walks the floor some more. At four o'clock, after
Another World
is over, Irene Lang comes for a visit. “That Iris,” says Irene as soon as she gets through the front door. “What a piece of work that is, isn't it?”

“I didn't watch the stories today,” Mom says, and tells Irene all about Jake being back in town and me seeing him with Johnny and Charlie at Douglas's. They forget all about
Another World
. I go out and sit on the floor in a corner and listen to them. Irene is curious why Jake has come back.

“Has he left anything here?” she says. “Clothes, or the like, that needs to be picked up?”

“He ain't left a thing, as far as I know,” Mom says.

“Does he owe anything? Anything that couldn't be paid by cheque?”

“Not that I know.”

“Maybe he's come back to see his father?”

“Jake? He'll see him all right, but he wouldn't make a trip special to see that old coot. The two of them get along about as well as fire and water.”

Irene looks sideways at me, sitting in the corner looking up at them, and bites her tongue. It's clear as day Mom thinks Jake's come back to see her and clear as two days Irene doesn't. When the kettle is hot Mom pours them both a cup of tea and Irene goes on about her nephew.

“Well, if he does have any money, like Nathan says, it's a sure bet he'll be broke by the time he gets in tonight. Johnny'll have him sucked dry as a Baptist supper come evening.”

“Jake can handle himself next to the likes of Johnny Lang,” Mom says. “He'll come with money, don't you worry.”

“Well, I certainly hope so. But that Johnny has all the ways of the devil and then some for getting what he wants. I've not seen the beat of him for using and abusing other people. Just like his father, he is. God knows what ever possessed me to go and marry Tom and tie us up with a family like that for all time.”

Mom isn't listening. She's staring out the window into the driveway as if she expects Jake's purple Pinto to turn into it at any time. Irene settles her eye on me.

“You glad to see Jake again, Nathan?”

“Yup,” I tell her. “Jake says he's gonna take me to Halifax to visit him sometime.”

“Don't count on that,” Mom says without turning from the window. “Jake's none too good on keeping promises.”

Then Irene does something strange. She winks at me. It's strange seeing an old woman like Irene wink, especially 'cause she goes to Bible class and all. I don't know what she means. She looks away before I can ask. “Well, I should be getting back. I've got a load of clothes in the wash, and Tom'll be wanting his supper when he gets home.”

“What you having?” Mom asks, but like she doesn't care about the answer.

“Corned beef and cabbage,” says Irene, sighing and getting to her feet. “Picked up the beef on special from the
IGA
last week. Tom's favourite.”

“Ay-yuh,” Mom says, and Irene turns to go. But before she does she looks at me again and nods, like she knows something Mom and I don't. “Come on up and see me sometime, Alexander,” she says. “I've got a tin of biscuits in the cupboard with your name on it.”

“I will,” I tell her.

Irene leaves, though Mom hardly seems to notice. She sits and stares out the window from the kitchen table and I slink
back to my room to read comics. But my heart is beating fast and I'm excited. Mom didn't notice that Irene called me by my secret name, by Jake's name. That is the first time anyone besides Jake called me that. It's as if Irene knows — knows that some great storm is coming to tear me out of Macedonia and into the great wide world.

CHARLIE IS STILL ASLEEP AND
mumbling away to himself and twitching like a crazy man on the sofa. Suddenly he wakes up again and looks at me. He looks halfways sober this time. “Where's Johnny?” he says.

“Bathroom.”

Charlie nods. Asks me for a smoke. I point to them on the table. Charlie leans over slow as an old man and takes one and tries to light it. His hands are shaking so bad he can't touch the flame to the cigarette, and so I reach over, pry the lighter from his hand and do it for him. He leans back, takes a long drag, and sighs as he exhales the smoke.

His eyes are closed.

I feel sorry for Charlie. He's Carla's cousin but she don't ever have him over. His own mother doesn't let him past her front door 'cause he's stolen from her purse too many times for money for booze and dope. No one knows where his father is. He left 'em when Charlie was just a kid. Most times he stays at Johnny's house but sometimes he'll sleep at another friend's if they don't mind him on the sofa for a few days.

He's twenty-nine, but he looks forty.

And he's dumb.

In school he was in my class for a year until I passed and he got held back again for the third time. Sometimes I'd try and help him with his homework. He could never get it, and quit eventually. He didn't have a car. He was picked up by the
RCMP
a couple of times a year for being drunk and disorderly, and they drove him to Oldsport and threw him in the drunk tank for the night. Everyone says Charlie Whynot is a bum, and he'll be dead by the time he's forty.

They're probably right, but still. I remember when we were kids together, and he could be kind of funny. He had more guts than any of us, even Johnny. If you dared Charlie to do something, he would do it. No questions asked.

“Johnny's acting funny today,” I say, hoping Charlie will help me.

He doesn't look up at me. He's staring at his own lap, still smoking the cigarette. “Any more White Shark?” he says finally.

“It's all gone,” I say. “Did you hear me? I said Johnny's acting funny. He's got a gun out and he won't let me leave.”

Charlie looks up at me then, but I'm still not sure he understands. “What's the city like, Jake? You like it there?”

“It's all right, Charlie, but …”

“I should go,” he says. “Get outta North River. Nothing tying me here, 'cept Johnny. They got girls there? Nice ones?”

“Lots of 'em. But Charlie. I need you to help me with Johnny.”

Charlie still acts like he doesn't hear. Maybe he doesn't. “I had a girl once. You remember her? Jane Marie Wambolt. Cute. Kinda fat, but cute. She could fuck too, Jake. Near wore me out she did. I never see her anymore. She still around here?”

I shake my head. “I don't know, Charlie.”

He isn't going to be any help. He's still too high to know what's going on, and even if he wasn't he'd likely just get him self in shit if he said anything. Johnny doesn't punch Charlie, or threaten him. He doesn't have to. Charlie's no threat.

I watch as Charlie finishes his smoke, then watch as his head inches forward and he falls asleep again. I feel such a blackness of mood wash over me. Maybe today is the day Johnny gets to kill somebody else and maybe that somebody will be me. Maybe he and Charlie will cut me up into little pieces with the Husqvarna and it will be weeks before anyone traces me out here and finds the pieces.

But find them they will. I have no doubt about that. Johnny has one more murder in him, and then he's gonna get caught and sent away for good, and maybe then North River will be safe. It's too bad I have to be the unlucky bastard Johnny Lang nails to a fucking cross in order for everyone else to be saved.

JAKE'S FATHER IS AN INDIAN.

“Only part Indian,” Jake tells me, but that doesn't matter.

It means I'm part Indian, too.

I have dreams sometimes where we are all living in teepees and hunting and fishing and there are no cars or airplanes.

Jake used to take me fishing.

It was in South River, where these two trees with funny shapes leaned out over the water and we'd put our lunches and water bottles in the shadow of the trees out of the heat. Jake'd tell me stories and sometimes we'd come home with trout for my mother.

My mother loves trout.

I'd hold them on a stick while Jake slit open their bellies with a jackknife and removed the guts. I'd stare into their dead fish eyes when he did it. Thinking I was glad I wasn't a trout. Thinking I was glad I was part Indian, and how someday I'd like to ride in a birchbark canoe.

WHEN JOHNNY COMES OUT OF
the bathroom I am so restless I can barely sit still in my chair. I think he's stayed in there so long because he wants me to get antsy. He wants me to try and leave so he can shoot me. The acid is working in him hard now. I can see by his eyes things are starting to change. They aren't good changes either.

“Get up,” Johnny says to me. He still holds the gun down at his waist, but he waves it threateningly towards me.

“Why, Johnny?” I say. “I've been sitting here like you asked me.”

“Get the fuck up, McNeil. We're going for a walk.”

By now Charlie is passed out again. I can't understand how he can sleep with a whole hit of acid in his blood, but he's snoring away, curled up like a baby on Johnny's sofa, his back to us. Johnny looks at him once and then back at me. I am on my feet like Johnny asked, but standing there, looking at him. “Johnny, man,” I say. “What you gonna do?”

“That depends on you,” says Johnny.

I can see I am fucked. Somehow, Johnny has convinced himself I am the enemy, that I have done something to him, even if he can't say what that something is. I give up, turn, and go outside.

It stopped raining hours ago, but I left my coat inside and it's cold. I ask Johnny if I can go back and get it.

“You won't be needing it,” he says. “Get going.”

He herds me across the driveway and across to the walking bridge over the river below his house. The river here is narrow, but too fast for a boat, and his father built the bridge out of mooring rope and old dory planks years ago so he wouldn't have to walk up to Eight-Mile Bridge to get across to hunt. I hated walking across that bridge with Johnny when I was young. It swayed when you went, and there were big gaps between the boards and I was afraid it was going to let go. Now, for the first time, I was hoping it would, as Johnny told me to walk across it with the gun at my back. I kept looking down so I wouldn't miss the boards, and for a minute I thought of this other book we read in college, called
Inferno
, by this other Italian guy named Dante. He wrote all about these people dying and being herded across this river called Styx, where on the other side this monster with a long tail would wrap it around them and then toss them into whatever circle of hell held their punishment.

Dante was a sick fucker.

People got burnt alive, or eaten by birds called harpies, or had to eat each other and then crap each other out, or were buried up to their necks in shit forever.

I try not to think about it.

On the other side of the bridge there is a narrow worn path. In the fall when Johnny and I go deer hunting this is the way we come. Johnny built a blind in a clearing about a quarter mile back, and we used to sit and smoke and wait for the deer to wander out. Even as kids we used to go there with our
BB
guns and shoot squirrels. I ask Johnny if this is where we are going. Johnny says nothing, except to tell me to keep moving. I'm trying to think of ways I can get out of this. I'm not so scared anymore. For some reason, the dream I had about Nathan and my father when Johnny was in the bathroom made me feel stronger, just as it now makes me want to get out of this somehow. Johnny is gonna try and kill me. There is no use pretending otherwise. Never mind it doesn't make a lick of sense. Later he'll blame it on the acid, and that I kept trying to get away from him.

“Hey man,” I say. “You remember the time we sent Charlie back here in the middle of the night to check your rabbit snares, and we came in after him and made noises like we were ghosts?”

Johnny stays quiet.

“Remember how he shit his pants, and went running off the path and scraped his face and hands all up? You remember that?”

The path hasn't been used much this year — it's overgrown in places. I keep having to push wet branches out of my way, and then hold them back for Johnny, because he's right behind me with the gun. I'm getting soaked, because every time I move a branch, water from the tree drips down on my shoulders and soaks my hair and shirt.

“Hey Johnny,” I say. “I gotta take a piss.”

“So take one,” Johnny says.

“Can I go behind a tree or something'?”

“Take it here,” growls Johnny. “Or piss in your pants.”

“Ah, come on, Johnny,” I say. “I don't want to take a piss in front of you.”

“Why not?” Johnny says. “I seen what you got before, McNeil. It ain't nothin' special.”

I'm thinking I can go behind a tree and run far enough to get away from him, but Johnny figures out what I'm planning. I give up on it. It's probably too dangerous anyway — Johnny's a crack shot and quick on the trigger. But I do have to piss. That much is true. I stop and pull my cock out. Steam billows from the ground and old leaves and needles where I piss. I shake off, shove my cock back into my pants, and zip up.

Johnny pokes the bore of the gun into my back. “Keep moving,” he says. I do. We walk for five minutes without talking. We are far enough into the woods now that he can shoot me and even Charlie probably won't hear the shot.

“Johnny,” I say. “I —”

“Shut the fuck up, McNeil,” Johnny says. “You talk too much.”

There is a turn in the path, around a deadfall I remember from years of coming back here hunting with Johnny. Up beyond it, once the path swings back on track, is a swamp, and then a clearing. Johnny is gonna shoot me there and chuck me in the swamp. No Husqvarna treatment for me. Johnny must think the swamp is safer. He is right. Once the swamp gets me, he might get lucky and no one will ever find my body.