Just Beneath My Skin (9 page)

I LIE IN MY ROOM
on the bed and listen to them. It's like the world is hanging between them, and what they say. That's how hard I listen. I keep my light off, 'cause it feels like I can listen better that way. Sometimes Mom screams and shouts and sometimes she gets quiet and Jake talks low and I can barely hear him. And sometimes they say nothing at all. I strain in the darkness for some sound, for some whisper of what they are saying and where they are going and what Jake's planning to do.

Dear God, I whisper to myself. Please let Jake win.

WE FIGHT FOR HOURS, IT
seems like, and I'm already so tired from my run-in with Johnny Lang. I crawled from the river an eighth of a mile below the narrows. It was a miracle I didn't drown. It was even more of a miracle that somehow, even at that range with the double-aught shot, Johnny had missed. My legs and arms were bruised up from being tossed on the rocks, and I had to walk an hour to Carla's but by the time I got here I thought I was ready for this, that for the last six months I had been getting ready for this, but Carla is tough. Nothing is ever so hard as fighting with someone you used to love.

BROWN EYES. BLUE EYES. BROWN
eyes. Blue eyes. Once when I was real little Jake put me on his shoulders and I asked him to go in the bathroom so I could see us in the mirror like that. He stood way back and I looked at me sitting up there on top of him and the two of us like one person glued together. I laughed and Jake smiled and I asked him if he saw our eyes.

Brown eyes. Blue eyes. Brown eyes. Blue eyes.

“I see 'em,” Jake said.

“How come we got different eyes, Jake?”

“Brown eyes, blue eyes,” Jake said. “Not really that much different.”

“What colour is Mom's eyes, Jake?”

Jake stopped smiling a little. “They change,” he said. “Depending on the day.”

“DON'T YOU FUCKIN' TELL ME
what I'm supposed to do with him and how I treat 'im. He ain't yours to tell anything, and I'm not yours to tell anything to either, you goddamned no-goodfor-nothing son-of-a-fuckin'-bitch! You're the one who took off to Halifax and left us here with nothin' but a pot to piss in. Big man! Big fuckin' man. And who's comin' slinkin' back now lookin' for favours and lookin' to take 'im away? No way, Mister man. Mister smart-fuckin'-alec-Jake-fuckhead-McNeil. Not me. Not Nathan. You can take whatever you brought with you and stuff it up your fuckin' ass for all I care. You hear me? You goddamned well hear me, you bastard? Up your goddamned faggot fuckin' ass!”

I TAKE OFF MY CLOTHES
and fall asleep. When I wake up I see Mom standing over my bed with the light from the living-room lamp shining through the bedroom door. She's breathing hard and she stinks of beer. “Get up,” she says. The house is silent. Jake must be gone. “Get up,” Mom says. “I'm not tellin' you again.”

I get out of bed like she asks and go to put on my jeans. “Never mind those,” she says.

“I only got my underwear,” I tell her.

“I said never mind,” Mom says. “Get out there.”

I go into the living room and Mom pushes me towards the kitchen. I'm surprised to see Jake still here. He's sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window. I stand in the middle of the kitchen floor. The stove has gone out and the linoleum is freezing the bottom of my feet. I'm hugging myself and shivering. Jake looks at me. “Jesus, Carla. He ain't got no clothes on.”

“There,” Mom says, pushing me hard towards Jake. I stumble and fall to the floor.

Jake jumps up. “Stop it!” he says. “You stop it right now!”

“You want 'im,” Mom says. “You take 'im.”

“Where's his fucking clothes?”

I lie on the floor, still shivering, looking up at Jake. Then Mom kicks me hard in the ribs with her shoe. I cry out and Jake lunges over me at her and I scramble under the table to get away from them, my side aching from where she booted me. I turn and watch as Jake puts his hands around Mom's throat and pushes her up against the fridge. Mom's face is turning purple and Jake is screaming.

“You leave him the fuck alone, you hear me? You leave him the fuck alone!”

I think he's gonna kill her, and go to jail, but he lets go. Mom bends over coughing and sputtering and holding on to her throat. “You bastard,” she croaks.

Jake turns to me under the table. “Go get your clothes on,” he says.

“You fucking bastard,” Mom whispers, trying to stand up straight.

Jake reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and brings out his wallet. He takes out money, more money than I've ever seen, and holds it out to Mom. “Here,” he says. “Like we said. You take this for Nathan, and I'll keep sending you more. The services don't even have to know he's gone. But you don't let me take him, and I'm calling them. I'll do everything I can to make sure he gets taken away from you.” Mom doesn't say nothing. She's still rubbing her throat but she's also looking at the money Jake is holding out to her.

“How much?” she says.

“One thousand,” Jake says. “All I got, except what I need to live.”

“When you want him?”

“Tonight,” Jake says.

Mom looks past Jake at me crouched under the table, staring out at them like I'm in a cage. “You go get some clothes on,” she says.

I crawl out from under the table and stand up, careful 'cause it hurts my ribs when I move and take a breath. I watch in case she comes at me again. But Jake is standing between me and her.

“Where are you taking him?” she asks.

“To the city,” Jake answers.

“They won't let you keep him.”

“Who won't?”

“The services in there. You're not fit. Who's gonna look after him while you're at work? Who's gonna cook for him? And get his clothes? You can't take care of him. Someone will take him away, or you'll get tired of him and bring him back.”

But as Mom is talking she takes the money from Jake and folds it up and puts it away in her jeans. She sees me standing and watching. “Go on,” she says. “Git.”

I run through the living room into my bedroom and get dressed in the dark. Mom keeps talking real loud at Jake. “You keep that money coming,” she says, “or I'll tell the services why you want him.”

“And why's that?” Jake says.

“To have at him,” Mom says. “I'll tell the services that and they'll bring him home faster than lightning and put you in jail.”

“You'd be lying,” Jake says.

“Who'd know that?” Mom says. “I'll tell 'em you been at Nathan since he was little. That you're at him all the time and I can't stop you.”

“Nathan will tell the truth,” Jake says.

“No one believes eight-year-old kids,” Mom says. “Especially about that. They'll think he's protecting you, or hiding what he and you done.”

“You try that,” Jake says, “and I'll kill you.”

Mom laughs. “You? You don't have it in you, Jake McNeil. Anyway. You keep that money coming and I'll let you have him for a bit. Not forever, mind you, but for a bit.”

“Nathan!” Jake hollers. “Come on!”

I am dressed, with my sneakers tied and my jacket on. I come out into the kitchen. Mom's sitting down now with another beer. Jake is standing by the door, waiting. Mom looks at me. She looks wild and drunk-sick. “Don't you get nothing on your mind about staying for good,” she says. “You'll be coming back.”

“Come on,” Jake says and opens the door. It's not raining anymore and the sky has cleared. Through the open door I see tiny yellow stars shining above the trees in the woods past the yard.

We leave. “There's the moon,” I say to Jake when we get out into the road and start walking up towards the river. Jake looks at it, hanging over the tops of the trees. He takes my hand as we walk but says nothing.

“Where we going?” I ask, but he doesn't say nothing to that either.

So I look up at the stars and at the moon, like I sometimes did when I was coming home late from Cub Scouts at North River Community Hall on Tuesdays.

The tiny yellow stars. The moon.

MY OLD MAN LIVES IN
the Baptist Parsonage on the other side of the river. His church is in Middlebridge, four miles outside North River town limits, and the parsonage I lived in growing up was built in
1948
when the old parsonage burnt down and the bachelor minister got caught and died in the fire. It's a drafty old place, poorly built, with wood stoves in the parlour and kitchen and vents in the ceiling to let the heat up. When I was a kid and my parents had company I would lie over the vents in the hallway outside my room and listen to them play games in the kitchen. The Baptists in Middlebridge didn't go in for cards or dice, so the games my parents played with their parishioners had to be without. Sometimes they played charades — my father made them up beforehand and most of them were names or stories from the New Testament — and sometimes they just talked about people in the village. My mother used to joke that being a minister was the only job in the world where gossiping about the neighbours was a duty and not a sin.

My father laughed at this. Before she died he laughed a lot more than he did after. I blamed God when my mother died and stopped praying, and my father blamed the world and stopped laughing.

WE COME TO THE BRIDGE
and the stars are spinning halfway across the North River sky. Jake holds my hand in his. The moon is like a pale rider above the tops of the trees 'til a cloud drifts over it. I want to say, “Can you hear me, moon?” but the moon won't answer.

Jake squeezes my hand as we walk across the bridge.

I would be scared of the bridge in the dark if Jake wasn't with me.

AFTER AN HOUR OF WALKING
we come to Eight-Mile Bridge. Nathan squeezes my hand tight, like he's scared, just as the moon is crossed by a silver-grey cloud. I squeeze back and say, “Come on, squirt.”

I still don't tell him where we're going, though I guess he probably knows by now. My father usually goes to bed by nine or so, and I hope he'll hear the knock at the door this late. I decide if he doesn't we'll sleep in the garage until morning.

When we're halfway across the bridge, the moon comes out again and I can see the gabled roof of the parsonage thrusting up over the tops of the trees past the bend in the river. Beyond stands the squat wooden steeple of the Baptist church. Middlebridge is pretty compared to North River. Around the churchyard and the parsonage some soldier planted red maples after coming home from the Second World War. My mother loved those trees, and wouldn't let us climb them when we were young, though because of their smooth thick grey branches starting just a few feet from the ground we sometimes climbed them anyway.

“We're going to your house?” Nathan says, and I can hear something in his voice. He's never been to the parsonage, though once or twice when we were fishing for trout below the bridge at Granddad's hole I pointed it out to him. “Your father lives there?” he asks me now.

Your grandfather, I almost say, then stop. Why bother? Nathan's never seen him, even in a place as small as North River. Neither of them knows what the other looks like. We get off the bridge and turn onto Church Road. The lights in all the houses are out, though it isn't much past ten, and except for some dog barking up the road it's quiet. It feels so lonesome: Nathan and I, walking down the road hand in hand past those dark silent houses with everyone asleep. It's like we are stealing back into something, or coming from somewhere far away.

JAKE SAYS THE WAY YOU
become a man is to start acting like one. I ask Jake on the way to his father's house if he thought I could soon be a man, or would I have to wait a bit longer.
“What makes you think of that?” Jake says.

“I don't know,” I say. “I'm almost nine now. Mom says that's old enough to do some things.”

“Like?” Jake says.

“Wash the dishes. Sweep the floor. Go by myself to the store to buy milk and bread when we need it.”

“That isn't man's stuff,” says Jake. “That's woman's stuff.”

“What's man's stuff then?”

Jake doesn't answer right off. “I don't know,” he says finally. “Working a good job, I guess. Cutting trees or something, or fixing the car or hunting and fishing.”

“I hunt and fish, Jake,” I say. “You've taken me hunting and fishing lots a times.”

“And girls,” Jake says. “Girls are man stuff. You like any girls yet?”

I think of the girls in my class in Grade Three. “Melanie Winters has blond hair,” I tell Jake. “And she sometimes gives me her apple when she don't want it at recess.”

Jake squeezes my hand again. “That's man stuff,” Jake says.

“Do you like any girls, Jake?”

Once upon a time, Jake liked Mom. I remember when I was little they used to hug and stuff on the couch at night in front of the
TV
, and I used to sometimes sit all warm between them before I went to bed.

“I haven't got time for girls,” Jake says. “Girls ain't nothing but trouble anyway.”

I want to ask Jake how girls could be man's stuff, and he was a man, and they are nothing but trouble anyway. But I don't. Sometimes I can tell when Jake is getting tired of talking. Besides, we're almost at his father's place.

“You wait here,” Jake says when we reach the drive to the house. I say yes, and stand and wait for Jake while he goes up to the side door and knocks. Before long a light comes on in a window upstairs, then another light downstairs. The door Jake is standing in front of opens, and I can hear a voice speaking to Jake, though I can't make out what they are saying.

I stand there a long while, it seems, and watch Jake standing on the front step talking to his father, who I can't see 'cause he's in the house. Soon Jake's father sticks his head out the door and looks down the driveway at me, but I can't see him clear either because the light above the steps where Jake is standing is too bright. So I stand there and look up and down the road at all the other houses in Middlebridge.