Spit Delaney's Island (2 page)

“They say we crawled up out of there ourselves,” she said. “Millions of
years ago.”

“Let's go home,” he said. “Let's get out of here.”

Within fifteen minutes they had Cora and Jon herded up off that beach
and pushed into the back of the camper and had started on their way back
across the island to their little house behind the gas station. It wasn't really
a gas station any more, though he had never bothered to pull the pumps
out; the shed was a good place to store the car parts and engine pieces he
kept against the day they would be needed, and the roof out over the
pumps was a good place to park the tow truck. Nor was it a real business—his job at the paper mill was enough for anyone to handle—but
he'd fixed up the tow truck himself out of parts and used it to pull people
out of snowbanks in winter or to help friends when they got their tractors
mired in swamp.

When he got home from the coast he did not go into the gas station to
brood, as he might have done, nor did he sit behind the wheel of his tow
truck. This was too serious for that. He drove all the way down to the
paper mill, punched himself in at the gate, and climbed up into the cab of
Old Number One. He knew even then that something was starting to go
wrong.
Where is the dividing line?
He sat there with his hands on the levers
deep into night, all the way through to the early morning when it was time
to fire up her boilers and start getting her ready for the day's work ahead.
And what does it take to see it?

And, naturally, that was the day the company picked to tell him what
they'd done with Old Number One.

Sold her to the National Museum in Ottawa.

For tourists to gawk at.

Sons of bitches. They might as well have lopped off half his brain. Why
didn't they sell the government his right arm too while they were at it?

The hundred-and-thirty-ton diesel-electric they offered was no consolation. “A dummy could run that rig!” he shouted. “It takes a man to put
life into Old Number One!”

He ought to be glad, they told him. That shay was long past her usefulness, the world had changed, the alternative was the junkyard. You can't
expect
things
to last for ever.

But this was one uncoupling that would not be soon forgiven.

First he hired a painter to come into the mill and do a four-foot oil of
her, to hang over the fireplace. And unscrewed the big silver
1
from the
nose to hang on the bedroom door. And bought himself a good-quality
portable recorder to get the locomotive's sounds immortalized on tape.
While there was some small comfort in knowing the old girl at least wasn't
headed for the scrapyard, it was no easy thing when he had to bring her
out on that last day, sandblasted and repainted a gleaming black, to be
taken apart and shipped off in a boxcar. But at least he knew that while
strangers four thousand miles away were staring at her, static and soundless as a stuffed grizzly, he would be able to sit back, close his eyes, and let
the sounds of her soul shake through him full-blast just whenever he felt
like it.

Stella allowed him to move her Tom Thomson print to the side wall to
make room for the new painting; she permitted him to hang the big number
1
on the bedroom door; but she forbade him to play his tape when she
was in the house. Enough is enough, she said. Wives who only had infidelity to worry about didn't know how lucky they were.

She was president of her Lodge, and knew more than she could ever
tell of the things women had to put up with.

“Infidelity?” he said. It had never occurred to him. He rolled his eyes
to show it was something he was tempted to think about, now that she'd
brought it up, then kissed the top of her head to show he was joking.

“A woman my age,” she said, “starts to ask what has she got and where
is she headed.”

“What you need is some fun out of life,” he said, and gathered the family together. How did a world tour sound?

It sounded silly, they said.

It sounded like a waste of good money.

Good money or bad, he said, who'd been the one to go out and earn it?
Him and Old Number One, that's who. Hadn't he got up at four o'clock
every damn morning to get the old girl fired up, and probably earned more
overtime that way than anybody else on this island? Well, was there a better way to spend that money than taking his family to Europe at least?

They left her mother behind to keep an eye on the house. An old woman who had gone on past movement and caring and even speech, she
could spend the time primly waiting in an armchair, her face in the only
expression she seemed to have left: dark brows lowered in a scowl, eyes
bulging as if in behind them she was planning to push until they popped
out and rolled on the floor. Watching was the one thing she did well, she
looked as if she were trying with the sheer force of those eyes to make
things stay put. With her in the house it was safe to leave everything behind.

If they thought he'd left Old Number One behind him, however, if they
thought he'd abandoned his brooding, they were very much mistaken; but
they got all the way through Spain and Italy and Greece before they found
it out. They might have suspected if they'd been more observant; they
might have noticed the preoccupied, desperate look in his eyes. But they
were in Egypt before that desperation became intense enough to risk discovery.

They were with a group of tourists, standing in desert, looking at a
pyramid. Cora whined about the heat, and the taste of dry sand in the air.

“It's supposed to be hot, stupid,” Jon said. “This is Egypt.” He spent most
of the trip reading books about the countries they were passing through,
and rarely had time for the real thing. It was obvious to Spit that his son
was cut out for a university professor.

And Cora, who hated everything, would get married. “I can't see why
they don't just tear it down. A lot of hot stone.”

Jon sniffed his contempt. “It's a monument. It's something they can
look at to remind them of their past.”

“Then they ought to drag it into a museum somewhere under a roof.
With air conditioning.”

Stella said, “Where's Daddy?”

He wasn't anywhere amongst the tourists. No one in the family had
seen him leave.

“Maybe he got caught short,” Jon said, and sniggered.

Cora stretched her fat neck, to peer. “And he's not in the bus.”

The other tourists, too, appeared uneasy. Clearly something was sensed,
something was wrong. They shifted, frowned, looked out where there
was nothing to see. Stella was the first to identify it: somewhere out there,
somewhere out on that flat hot sand, that desert, a train was chugging, my
God, a steam engine was chugging and hissing. People frowned at one
another, craned to see. Uneasy feet shifted. Where in all that desert was
there a train?

But invisible or not it got closer, louder. Slowing.
Hunph hunph hunph
hunph.
Then speeding up, clattering, hissing. When it could have been on
top of them all, cutting their limbs off on invisible tracks, the whistle blew
like a long clarion howl summoning them to death.

Stella screamed. “Spit! Spit!” She ran across sand into the noise, forgetting to keep her arms clamped down against the circles of sweat.

She found him where in the shrill moment of the whistle she'd realized
he would be, at the far side of the pyramid, leaning back against its dusty
base with his eyes closed. The tape recorder was clutched with both hands
against his chest. Old Number One rattled through him like a fever.

When it was over, when he'd turned the machine off, he raised his eyes
to her angry face.

“Where is the line?” he said, and raised an eyebrow.

“You're crazy,” she said. “Get a hold of yourself.” Her eyes banged
around in her bony head as if they'd gone out of control. There were witnesses all over this desert, she appeared to be saying, who knew what kind
of a fool she had to put up with. He expected her to kick at him, like some
one trying to rout a dog. Her mouth gulped at the hot air; her throat
pumped like desperate gills. Lord, you're an ugly woman, he thought.

The children, of course, refused to speak to him through Israel, Turkey,
and France. They passed messages through their mother—“We're starved,
let's eat” or “I'm sick of this place”—but they kept their faces turned from
him and pretended, in crowds, that they had come alone, without parents.
Cora cried a great deal, out of shame. And Jon read a complete six-volume
history of Europe. Stella could not waste her anxiety on grudges, for while
the others brooded over the memory of his foolishness she saw the same
symptoms building up again in his face. She only hoped that this time he
would choose some place private.

He chose Anne Hathaway's Cottage in Stratford. They wouldn't have
gone there at all if it hadn't been for Jon, who'd read a book on Shakespeare and insisted on seeing the place. “You've dragged me from one
rotten dump to another,” he said, “now let me see one thing I want to see.
She was twenty-six and Shakespeare was only my age when he got her
pregnant. That's probably the only reason he married her. Why else would
a genius marry an old woman?” Spit bumped his head on the low doorway and said he'd rather stay outside. He couldn't see any point in a monument to a woman like
that
, anyway. The rest of them were upstairs in the
bedroom, looking at the underside of the thatched roof, when Old Number One started chugging her way towards them from somewhere out in
the garden.

By the time they got to Ireland, where they would spend the next two
weeks with one of her distant cousins, Stella Delaney was beginning to
suffer from what she called a case of nerves. She had had all she could take
of riding in foreign trains, she said, she was sure she'd been on every crate
that ran on tracks in every country of Europe and northern Africa; and
now she insisted that they rent a car in Dublin for the drive down to her
cousin's, who lived about as far as you get on that island, way out at the
end of one of those south-western peninsulas. “For a change let's ride in
style,” she said, and pulled in her chin to show she meant business. She
was missing an important Lodge convention for this. The least he could
do, she said, was make it comfortable.

The cousin, a farmer's wife on a mountain slope above Ballinskelligs
Bay, agreed. “'Tis a mad life you've been living, sure. Is it some kind of
race you're in?”

“It is,” Stella said. “But I haven't the foggiest idea who or what we're
racing against. Or what is chasing us.”

“Ah well,” said the cousin, wringing her hands. “God is good. That is
the one thing you can be certain of. Put your feet up and relax so.”

She knew about American men, the cousin told them. You had to watch
them when they lost their playthings, or their jobs, they just shrivelled up
and died.

Stella looked frightened.

Oh yes, the cousin said. She knew. She'd been to America once as a girl,
to New York, and saw all she needed to see of American men.

Spit Delaney thought he would go mad. He saw soon enough that he
could stare out this farmhouse window all he wanted and never find what
he needed. He could look at sheep grazing in their little hedged-in patches,
and donkey carts passing by, and clumps of furze moving in the wind, he
could look at the sloping farms and the miles and miles of flat green bog
with its brown carved-out gleaming beds and piled-up bricks of turf and
at the deep curved bay of Atlantic ocean with spray standing up around
the jagged rocks until he was blind from looking, but he'd never see a
train of any kind. Nor find an answer. Old Number One was in Ottawa
by now, being polished and dusted by some uniformed pimple-faced kid
who wouldn't know a piston from a lever.

“We'd've been better off spending the money on a swimming pool,”
Stella told the cousin. “We might as well have flushed it down the toilet.”

“That's dumb,” Cora said. She buttered a piece of soda bread and
scooped out a big spoonful of gooseberry jam.

“Feeding your pimples,” Jon said. He had clear skin, not a single adolescent blemish, nor any sign of a whisker. Sexually he was a late developer,
he explained, and left you to conclude the obvious: he was a genius. Brilliant people didn't have time for a messy adolescence. They were too busy
thinking.

“Don't pick on your sister,” Stella said. “And be careful or you'll get a
prissy mouth. There's nothing worse on a man.”

A hollow ache sat in Spit's gut. He couldn't believe these people be
longed to him. This family he'd been dragging around all over the face of
the earth was as foreign to him as the little old couple who lived in this
house. What did that prim sneery boy have to do with him? Or that fat
girl. And Stella: behind those red swollen eyes she was as much a stranger
to him now as she was on the day he met her. If he walked up behind her
and touched her leg, he could expect her to say Get lost mister I got work
to do, just as she had then. They hadn't moved a single step closer.

I don't know what's going on, he thought, but something's happening.
If we can't touch, in our minds, how can I know you are there? How can
I know who you are? If two people can't overlap, just a little, how the hell
can they be sure of a god-damn thing?

The next day they asked him to drive in to Cahirciveen, the nearest village, so Jon could have a look around the library and Stella could try on
sweaters, which she said were bound to be cheaper since the sheep were so
close at hand. Waiting for them, sitting in the little rented car, he watched
the people on the narrow crooked street. Fat red-faced women chatted
outside shop doors; old men in dark suits stood side by side in front of a
bar window looking into space; a tall woman in a black shawl threaded
her way down the sidewalk; a fish woman with a cigarette stuck in the
middle of her mouth sat with her knees locked around a box of dried
mackerel; beside the car a cripple sat right on the concrete with his back
to the store-front wall and his head bobbing over a box for tossed coins.