Spit Delaney's Island (19 page)

Webster slapped the loose flesh back into place and undid the deed. In
a universe where all space is taken up with an infinite God of Love there
is no room for hatred or harm. An idea cannot be hurt. It had never happened. Going back down towards the school he walked on the concrete
sidewalks which were painted in bright colours and inlaid with electric
pipes to melt the snow in winter. He nodded to an old lady who came out
of an import shop and showed him the fondu pot she'd just bought (on sale,
though she admitted to having two better ones at home) and shook hands
with a long-haired youth in undershorts who told him he was part of this
world, they were
all
part of this world. The sports car went by again, accelerating noisily from a stop light, and the two yellow-haired girls made
faces at him. One girl put her thumbs in her ears and flapped her hands.
Her tongue flicked in and out like a frog's.

A robbery would be nice. A nice beginning. After all, this was coal, not
cattle, country and even the McLeans if they had lived here would probably have got their start by robbing a store. They could hardly expect him
to go out and steal cows or horses, after all. What would he be able to do
with them if he did?

“It may be interesting for you to go exploring around the town,” Balk-eyed Birdie told him, “but Mr. McIntosh has been waiting for you. He
wants to get your class started.”

“That's all very well,” said Webster Treherne, “but when are you going
to repaint this ugly hallway?”

They started right away. He went out for the paint while she spread out
newspapers on the floor and set up the step ladder.

“White,” she said. “What kind of colour is that?”

“The trim can be gold,” he said, “or if you want it could be green.”

And Mr. McIntosh, who watched them work from the doorway to his
classroom, held up one finger and said “Aha.” He waited there until they
had finished painting the whole hallway, right down to the smallest trim,
then scooped Webster into his room and slammed the door. “All right,” he
said. “It's time we got started.”

After his class Balk-eyed Birdie led him upstairs to her own rooms and
sat him down at a little table by the dormer window. “Young man,” she
said, driving a knobby finger into his chest, “I know you from somewhere.
I've met you before.”

“Not unless you came up the mountain once. And even then I would
have been too young for you to recognize.”

She shook her head. “It doesn't matter. You're all the same.”

The little dormer window looked out across the roofs of other buildings to the harbour. Directly ahead, blocking his view of the strait, was a
little island of twisted trees and a few shacks. She told him it was called
Gallows Island. “They used to hang people there, right on that point, in
the old days.”

“Hanged who?”

“Indians. Others.”

“What for?”

“Stealing. Shooting. Killing. They hanged the buggers right out there
and sometimes just left them a while, in plain view of the whole town.”

She made a face at the thought and slapped a basket of fruit onto the
table in front of him. Then she sat down across the table and started peeling an orange. “The whole town used to go down to the waterfront to
watch that. Everybody. Every single person who could walk and some that
couldn't, lined up along the beach watching. There were years when the
First of July parade was a comedown by comparison. One time they strung
up three all at once, all at one time, three scruffy-looking Yanks who
killed one of our police. When they were marched up to the gallows across
on the island there the whole crowd on the beach sang right through ‘God
Save the Queen' and there wasn't a dry eye in sight.”

But Webster Treherne was daydreaming again. That island and what
she said about it reminded him of the McLean gang, so he told her how
his plans were to practise up until he was good enough to be as bad as they
were and then go join them.

“Now?” she said.

“Soon.”

“Well, suit yourself. There's no telling how long it'll take for you to pass
your courses here.” She popped the sections of orange into her mouth and
then started breaking the peel into little pieces which she stacked up one
on top of the other until the whole pile swayed and fell and scattered all
over the top of the table. “Some people need more time than others. Those
other schools now, all they do is try to fill heads up with things and they
can't figure out why it never works. The reason it don't work is they forget you have to knock other stuff out first, to make room. That's what
we're here for. To knock stuff out.”

Mr. McIntosh knocked stuff out all through the next day. Webster
Treherne sat in the classroom listening to a hundred reasons why love
wasn't a natural thing for man to feel and how there wasn't anything in
this world that deserved it anyway, but all the time one part of his mind
was following the McLeans across dusty sagebrush country in hot sun.
With them, he pointed guns at terrified ranchers, listened for the sound of
an approaching posse. With them he rode into the night, surrounded the
pig-scalding farmer by his fire, teased him with the tales of their deeds,
then rode off without killing him after all. They had nothing against him;
there were too many who really deserved to die. He felt the thudding of
the horse's hoofs beneath him, the quick touch of air against his face. He
smelled the dust and the horse sweat and the high white smell of fear.

Mr. McIntosh pulled a cluster of grapes out of a paper bag, ripped a
handful free and tossed just one at Webster. “If I loved even so much as
that one single grape,” he said, “I would also have to love God. And then
where would I be?” Webster ate the grape and held out his hand for more.

“I didn't come all the way down out of the mountains for fresh fruit,”
he said. “You'll have to try a little harder than that.”

So Mr. McIntosh waited until Webster was asleep on his narrow cot in
the back-corner room and hung a hand-painted cardboard sign on the
wall beside him. Sometime in the night Webster awoke and lit a match to
get a decent look at the big white patch on the wall. It said:

WARNING

If you express even the tiniest bit of love

you will be a part of him. . . . BEWARE

Webster blew out the match and turned away. He decided that tomorrow he would begin, take the first step, move a little closer to his goal.
Asleep, he dreamed of the Old Man, the commune, and a huge black
shadow-hand which beckoned him up towards the dark and busy hayloft
of the sagging barn.

When he awoke the next morning he had lost all interest in Mr. McIntosh's lessons and went out into the town as soon as Balk-eyed Birdie had
given him breakfast. First, though, he helped himself to the gun he found
beside the Bible in the drawer by his bed and tied a large red-and-white
handkerchief loosely around his neck. Outside, he stopped to watch a
miner lead two mules up the street and stop to talk a while with a dressmaker who came out to sweep the boardwalk in front of her shop.

At the door to Hugh Carmichael's triple-duty store he pulled the handkerchief up over the bottom part of his face and took out the gun he'd kept
tucked down inside the waistband of his pants.

“I want the money from all three tills,” he said.

“At this time of day?” Carmichael said. “There's nothing in them but
the little I put in for change.”

Webster wondered if he should shoot the proprietor but remembered
there were no bullets in the gun. And anyway it was hardly worth while
for three near-empty tills.

“What you want to do,” Carmichael said, coming closer, his hand buried
in his beard, “is go away for now and come back later when there's been a
bit of business. This is no time of day for a stick-up.”

“Just hand it over. Start with the Post Office.”

“And besides, that's the same jacket you had on when you come in here
yesterday. Looks like some kind of thing I never seen before, with a rip in
the shoulder. I'll recognize your face the next time I see it, you won't get
away with this.”

But he handed over the money when Webster jabbed the gun in his
stomach. Three handfuls of heavy coin. They dropped to the bottom of his
pockets and nearly pulled his pants off his hips.

“My wife's sick,” Carmichael whined. “Don't do this to me. She's dying.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” he said, heading for the door.

“It's the consumption. It's got her for sure.” His voice hung onto that
last word, dying slowly.

At the doorway Webster turned for a last look at the room. The Mc
Leans would shoot the fat man, put a bullet right into his ugly face and
watch that body collapse to the floor. But he couldn't do that, not even for
them. And besides, it had been a successful hold-up; even they wouldn't
be ashamed.

“I hope you get it, too!” Mr. Carmichael yelled after him. “I hope you
come down with the exact same thing and suffer just the way she's suffering!”

Webster took a taxi well out into the country, then hitch-hiked a ride
back in with a farmer in a pickup truck. The farmer listened to rock music
on his radio all the way in and let Webster off behind Birdie's school.

“What's consumption?”

“Consumption?” Birdie said. Her bad eye shivered like a struck bell.

He hid the money beneath the bed, took off his clothes, and crawled
under the blankets. Balk-eyed Birdie came in with Mr. Muir and pulled
up a chair to sit where she could look right into his face. “That's Mr. Muir's
job,” she said.

“What is?”

“To tell about thinks like that.”

“Consumption,” Mr. Muir said. “Life is very frail.”

“TB they call it now,” Birdie said.

Webster was only too happy to close his eyes and let Mr. Muir fill in. He
listened as symptom after symptom was laid out one after another; each
one more gruesome than the last, and felt Balk-eyed Birdie's face close to
his—watching his expression for signs of delight or revulsion, whichever.
She smelled of sweat and cauliflower.

He opened his eyes and peeked at Mr. Muir, who was talking with so
much enthusiasm in his face that he might have been describing a circus.
His eyes rolled up to watch the beautiful picture he was painting, his hands
darted back and forth, like busy birds.

“And that's not all,” he said.

“Not?”

“It's only a beginning,” Birdie said, patting his forehead. “Nobody gets
that any more. But there's plenty others they
do
get. Hundreds and hundreds. Mr. Muir will tell you about them all and how easy they are to catch
and what they feel like.”

“Tomorrow,” Mr. Muir said. “Be in my classroom right after breakfast.
I'll be waiting.”

But Webster didn't make it. By the end of the day of the robbery he was
coughing. He slept badly and woke up the next morning with a burning
forehead and pains in his chest. When Birdie came in she made a face and
opened the window. “It stinks in here,” she said. Then she took off her
clothes and crawled into bed beside him.

“Your chest rattles,” she said, and ran a hand down over his groin.

“I can't move,” he said. “I feel as if the ceiling has come down to sit on
me.”

She rubbed her hands in his sweat and dried them in his hair. She rested
one huge white breast on his throat and sang a lullaby. She climbed on top
of him and lay down but he couldn't breathe so she wrapped her arms and
legs around him, gave a few heaves, then rolled right over onto her back
and held him prisoner. “You're the best pupil we've had yet,” she said.

And cradled in the soft arms of Balk-eyed Birdie, fighting for every
breath, rocking gently on her white belly, he saw a quick dark movement
out of the corner of his eye. It was the water carrier again, the boy, grinning at him through the open window. “This time I've got you,” he cried
and threw a great chunk of coal that ripped a foot-long strip of flesh off
Webster's back, down almost to the bone.

He rolled onto the sheets and tried to undo the deed. He lay on his back
and thought the boy and the coal and the wound right out of existence.
They were nothing. But they leapt back; the pain came back into his flesh
and he sat up to scream. He tried again and again to think them away but
he couldn't remember the reasons. The logic was gone. He couldn't think
of a single reason for not believing that pain was as real as he was. He lay
on his stomach and wept while Balk-eyed Birdie mopped the blood off his
back and poured something into the gash and covered it over with cloths
and tape. Then he fell asleep.

The McLeans came in through the open window. First Allan the eldest, then Charlie and Archie (still a kid, two years younger than Webster),
and finally Alex Hare, who looked as if he didn't know why he was there.
They stood around the bed and looked just exactly the way he had seen
them in pictures. Allan, the bearded one, in jacket and waistcoat and ban
danna, thumbs hooked into the pockets of his pants. Charlie, too, standing
slouched and easy, in looser, dustier clothes. The two younger boys scowled
at him as if they couldn't see any reason for not pulling out their guns and shooting Webster Treherne right there in bed without a single word.

“You're a long ways from home,” he said.

But Allan McLean just shrugged both shoulders and twisted his mouth
a bit to one side. He lifted his head and turned it a little. “Them nooses,”
he said, “they're ready.”

A short dry sound came from Archie McLean's throat. “We promised
that Makai something,” he said. “He'll cut the rope.”