Spit Delaney's Island (20 page)

The others snickered and shifted feet. They were proud of this final
trick, this ultimate joke on their enemies.

“At least if
we'd
robbed that store today we'd've done it right,” Charlie
McLean said. “You don't know nothing.”

“But you're learning,” Allan McLean said, and squeezed Webster's
knee. “It's too bad them nooses're ready so damn soon. You might've made
out all right.”

Archie McLean scowled and Alex Hare spat on the floor. Webster still
wasn't sure they weren't going to shoot him or knife him to death. They
had never needed much provocation before.

“Let me come with you,” he said, his head spinning and the weight of
the whole house on his chest. “Let me ride with you just once and find out
what it's like. Let me rob storekeepers and shoot Indians, let me scare
strangers and threaten women.”

“You're nearly a hundred years too late for that,” Balk-eyed Birdie sang
out. She came into the room and sat on the side of the bed and poured
something down his throat. When he looked up again the four men were
gone. “You're graduating from this school without even taking all the
courses.”

“And what have I missed?” he said. “What would your class have taught
me?”

“Missed nothing,” she said. “You're finding out for yourself. You're
going to die.” She sat up and folded her hands in her lap like a mother
who has just delivered wonderful news. “By the sound of that chest I don't
give you long.”

“Die?” he said, for no one had ever told him what it meant.

“Die.” She nodded as if to unheard dirges. “Die. Expire. Decease. Nobody I've ever heard of got to the stage you're at and recovered. That is the
reward you get for learning your lessons well, to get sick and die and then
rot in the ground. Just when you've found out what you are, you'll cease
to be.” She smiled on him as if to say he'd made her proud.

He tried to speak, to tell her he wasn't exactly thrilled with the reward
she offered, but his throat was full and it took all his energy just to cough
it clear.

“I never seen anyone go through so fast,” she said. “You really must've
wanted
it. You've got more than TB.”

The phlegm burst clear for a moment and he hurled curses at her. “Do
you think
this
is the only reason I came from . . . from . . . ?” But he couldn't
even remember where he had come from. She could have convinced him
easily that he had been born in this very room just a day or so ago.

“From the mountains, yes. But don't get upset. Mr. Muir will phone a
doctor. We'll get you help. They'll send you to a sanitarium or somewhere.
There's no hope for you now, but I don't want you kicking the bucket in
my place. Do it clean and right, somewhere else, in a hospital.”

From the mountains, yes. He had come down out of the hills without
rest or incident, though once he had stopped just long enough to eat raw
eggs by a stream and cut his finger on a jagged blade of cattail. Down out
of the green hills, from the farm, the green and singing farm where grass
uncut grew nearly as high as the buildings and an old man's voice rang
like stones dropped into streams.

“I can't believe this thing is me,” he said, and she swung to frown on
him. “You'll never convince me of that. This isn't what I came down here
to find.”

“It's what you found,” she said. “It's what you wanted. A black and
smelly grave. How do you like them apples, my friend?”

“Then I've been cheated. This sack of sore bones will never be me, say
what you like.”

She scowled. “Oh yeah? Then what are you, a fish?”

“Not fish or frog or sack of bones. Something else.”

“A sack of horse shit, maybe. A bag of turds.”

“An idea. Somewhere else, everywhere. An idea in the Old Man's mind
and therefore perfect. You can't destroy
that
.”

She cracked a shoe across the side of his head. “Is that the thanks we
get?” she yelled. “Is that all the gratitude you can show us?” She stood up
and threw things at him, tossed floor mat and lamps and books and pictures and shoes and hair brushes at him until he was nearly buried. She
stood in the doorway, her face twisted and red, and screeched. “I don't
think you've learned a goddam thing!”

He was sorry that when she came back with the doctor he wouldn't be
there, that he would miss seeing them look under the covers and under the
bed and in the closet, would miss hearing her curses and her attempts to tell
what she didn't understand herself. He was sorry that she probably would
never be able to explain the heavy coins or the painted hallway to her staff
or to anyone else. But he wished her well and hoped for the sake of her
sanity that she wouldn't discover his absence soon enough to go out into
the street and somehow by accident discover him hiking in the pale April
sunlight up the road that led away from town, up from the harbour past
the coal mines, through the farmland and the swamps to the base of the
hills. Or hear him sing in his freedom up the long gravel climb through
the trees.

About fifty miles up the coast past the end of all public roads, in a little bay
where the wildest tides throw logs and broken lumber far up the land like
spat-out bones, Hallie Crane ran a café and a small cabaret for tourists
staying at the fishing camp. Although there was a wharf built well out into
the bay so fishing boats could tie up without being smashed against rocks,
and down in the curve of the shore there was a small gravel beach where
the bravest American tourists could run in for a quick swim and rush out
again, Hallie's place and most other buildings were perched up on the
rock and looked as if a good wind would fling them right out into the
strait. The café was so close to the edge it had legs straight down into the
water and whenever Hallie wanted to go anywhere, down the slope to
Morgan's boat rental or around the bay to the well, she had to walk on a
rickety boardwalk that ran right past her door and hung out over the sea.
Tourists kept life jackets on their children the whole time they stayed in
the camp.

Hallie liked it well enough, at least in the summer. When the last
tourists left in September she squinted up her two bright green eyes at
them and told them it had been fun just having them around. “Now
there'll be nobody here at all for the next eight months except Morgan and
me.” She had a grown family down-island where the grey ribbon of highway went right under their noses when they sat in their living room, and
she could have moved down to stay with them any time she wanted if she
was willing to keep off the bottle, but she never did.

She never went back, hadn't seen her own daughter for eight years.
They told her when she left not to bother unless she could stay sober, and
though she hadn't touched a drink now for two years she still hadn't got
around to packing up and catching the boat out for the winter. She could
imagine herself landing in on them easily enough, tall and straight and
good looking as ever, and hear their shrieks of surprise: “What? You can't
be old enough to be this baby's grandmother!” But oh yes, she was, she was
fifty-one years old. She could walk like a youngster on her long narrow
legs, could tell a joke with all the youth she knew was still inside, could
snap her eyes in anger or fun as sharp and quick as she ever could. She
touched up her hair now; natural blonde faded out faster than any other
colour. But her face, though it had added laugh lines around the eyes and
the skin was drier than it used to be, was still striking, still pretty. She could
see herself going back, could imagine the fuss they'd make, but every fall
when the season ended, a sharp cold fear inside told her to put it off for
another year.

During the summer Morgan, who owned the camp and ran it practically single-handed except for Hallie's help, lived down in his rooms behind the boat house and Hallie lived in the back of her café. They treated
each other like strangers, like employer and employee, like invisible
beings. When he came into the café and sat with his hairy arms folded on
the counter, he ordered coffee without looking at her. When she walked
down to his place, picked her way along the boardwalk hanging on to the
rail, to tell him the plumbing was plugged up or the toaster needed fixing,
she walked in and out amongst the boats while she talked, touching them
as if feeling whether the paint was good enough to last the season. But
when the tourists had gone and Hallie had tidied up the café and the little
cabaret room beside it and closed the shutters over the windows, she
moved down the hill into Morgan's rooms and stayed there until the first
lot of people arrived the next June.

Not suddenly. Not just like that as if they had been thinking about it all
summer and could hardly wait. Every year she was a little surprised all
over again. Morgan was only thirty-three years old and still romantic, and
he insisted on courting her, luring her, as if every October were their first.
If she had just packed her suitcase and carried it down the hill and moved
in he would have been disappointed, might even have tossed her out, and
probably would have pouted all through the winter.

Every October he arrived at her door soon after the others had gone: a
grinning, hairy, solid little man. “Dammit,” he said, “you're a good-looking woman!” He came up behind and put his arms around her and ran his
hands down her breasts and stomach and thighs. “Dammit, you've got it
all over them other girls!” She slapped his hands and he went away for a
while. But he came back again and again. He told her he was getting so
randy for you-know-what that he was scared he'd go crazy and run
screaming over the hills behind. He asked her how would she like to be
raped. He brought gifts: chunks of smoked fish, handfuls of shells he'd
found, magazines left behind in the cabins by tourists. It was usually about
a week before Hallie recognized the signals that said it was all right for
her to start giving in now. She stopped slapping his hands, stopped threatening to radio out for help, stopped keeping her distance. She packed her
suitcase.

This year though, when the last boat had sailed out of sight down the
strait, she didn't feel like going through all that drawn-out procedure, she
just didn't have the energy. “Cut it out,” she said. “I can't see any point in
all this fooling around. Can't I just pack up and move down?”

But he insisted. “What do you want to be?” he said. “A whore?” His
breath smelled of smoked fish.

“All right, I'll pretend then. I'll pretend I won't do it but we both know
I will.”

He put his hands on her and told her what a good-looking woman she
still was but she slapped the side of his head hard enough to knock him
against the wall. “What the hell?” he said, his blue eyes hot with tears.

“You wanted me to pretend, well I'm pretending. Now leave me alone.”

He grinned at her. “You don't want me to touch you because you've put
on weight.”

“Go to hell.”

“You're afraid if I touch you I'll find out how fat you've got,” he said,
leering. “I saw you gorging yourself all summer on them apple pies. Putting on pound after pound.”

“I'd like to know how you noticed what I was doing when you never
once tore your little piggy eyes off that blonde bitch from Seattle.”

“Shoving it in when you thought no one else was looking. Putting on
layer after layer of fat. Turning into a big cow.”

“I haven't put on a single pound, and,” skirting his outstretched hand,
“you'll just have to take my word for it.”

Two days later they were just getting to the stage where he would
threaten to force her when the stranger arrived and interrupted the whole
business.

It was the worst October she could remember. Black cloud moved in
and sat on them like a heavy lid. Rain came down steadily through night
and day. A wind had whipped the sea into such a turmoil and thrown the
tide so high up the land that sometimes Hallie expected to wake up in the
morning and find herself floating. It was always a small surprise to discover no walls had been ripped off, no windows bashed in, no pieces of
roof lifted. She kept a fire roaring in the cast-iron stove and got up several
times during the night to shake the grates and add more wood. If she
didn't drown, she would probably burn to death.

She was on the boardwalk tossing garbage down for the few gulls that
still clung to the coast when she saw the stranger's boat. At first she
thought it was nothing but a driftwood log, dipping and leaping with the
waves, and when it got closer there appeared to be something alive, a large
bird perhaps, perched in the middle and riding. It wasn't until it had
entered the bay and came rushing in towards shore that she saw it was a
small aluminum boat with a man inside holding on for dear life and not
even trying to steer with the handle on the useless little outboard motor.
She ran down the boardwalk and across the beach in time to see it thrown
ahead onto the gravel, sucked back, then thrown ahead again far enough
for the man to leap out, fall to his knees, get up again, grab the rope, and
drag the boat up high enough to tie it to a log. He turned two pale runny
eyes on her and said, “Thank God I got to civilization.”

“You didn't,” she said. “There's only me and Morgan and all these
empty shacks. Even our radio set-up went on the blink a couple days ago.”

He wiped a hand over his wet face, shook himself like a dog, tipped forward to let water run off the back of his neck. “It'll have to do,” he said,
flicking an ear. “I'm not going back out into that.”

Morgan came out of the boat house, walking—as he always did—as if
his body besides being solid and heavy was also hot and he had to keep
both hands and arms well away in order not to get burned. He looked the
little man over like an interesting log the sea had washed in, then looked
at Hallie as if to say, “Now what have you done?”

“We better get you somewhere and dry you off,” Hallie said.

The little man bent down again and wrung out his straight blond hair,
then flung it back with a snap that could have broken his neck, and turned
to look out at the water. “I wouldn't want to've spent much longer on
that,” he said.

“You wouldn't've,” Hallie said. “You'd've been
in
it before long, dead
as a thrown-back dogfish. Come on, let's get you over to Morgan's place,
warm you up.”

Morgan stood in their way and scowled at Hallie. Then, suddenly, he
smiled as if the scowl had been about something else altogether, and said,
“Don't you think your place would be better?”

“Nothing wrong with yours,” she said. “It's good and warm.”

“Too warm,” Morgan said. “And too small. I bet you've got a nice fire
on up there in the café, maybe even a cup of coffee.”

“Look,” the man said, “I don't care where you put me, just so long as I
can go somewhere to dry off. I may drown right here on shore if you keep
arguing.” And he started walking up the slope towards the café.

When they'd stripped him down to dry out his clothes there wasn't very
much to him. In his undershorts he looked like a young boy—Hallie had
seen bigger bones in a turkey—but his face was the face of a man in his
forties. When he handed over his clothes for her to hang up above the
stove, looking so small and drenched and lost, she wanted to tickle him
under the chin and say, “Cheer up, little man, you haven't fallen off the
end of the world!” But there was something about his face, a long narrow
pointed face with sunken cheeks and pale fast-moving eyes, that told her
if she so much as touched him, treated him like a child, he would snarl and
growl and maybe knock her hand away with one of those frail arms.

“Here,” she said. “You can put on my robe and we'll dry out your undershorts too.”

Morgan eyed him as if he expected to see him turn into a rat and start
gnawing the house down. Hallie could see resentment already settling in
around his mouth.

“I'm a teacher,” he told them when his white jockey shorts were hanging on the line over the stove and he was wrapped up in Hallie's red chenille
bath robe. He found a cigar in one of his pockets but it was too wet to light
and he threw it in the fire, spitting pieces of damp tobacco off his tongue.
“I taught high school geography but I quit my job in June and started exploring up and down this coast.”

“You should've tried elementary,” Hallie said. “The kids wouldn't've
been so big and scary there.”

The little man looked at Hallie as if she were the stupidest pupil he'd
ever run across. Then he looked up at the bare rafters. “My name is Hamilton Grey,” he said. “I have never been afraid of a person, big or small, in
my life. Least of all a geography student. What scares me is not people but
mankind.” And he looked at her again, as if it were all her fault, as if she
were the mother of the whole blessed lot. “The stupidity of mankind appals me.”

Hallie looked at Morgan and Morgan rolled his eyes. “I don't know anything about smart or stupid,” she said. “Nice is good enough for me. If a
person's considerate of other people it don't matter how much brains he's
got.”

He looked up again and snorted. He and the rafters knew she'd just
proved his point. “Nice people are spilling oil into the oceans,” he said.
“Nice people are busy inventing new biological warfare weapons.”

He told them he had this theory. Whatever your instincts tell you is right
is exactly wrong. He told them instincts were good enough for the individual's survival but all wrong for society. For example, he told them,
everybody's instinct says pornography increases sex crimes but the opposite is true, look at Denmark. He told them everybody's instinct says if a
kid is bad hit him, but that is the surest way to make him worse. Look at
wild land, he said, instinct says tame it, kill all the scary animals, log off
the useless trees, turn it into something we can handle. And prisons too,
he said. The whole idea of punishment is instinctive but does exactly the
opposite to what is good for society.