Spit Delaney's Island (22 page)

Hallie shuddered. “Mating dance?” He sounded as crude as Morgan.
“Is that what you really think, just because he said it? Do you really think
I'm like that?”

But he didn't answer. He found the veins in a salal leaf more interesting
than her. He probably thought she had never done anything educational in
her whole life, never even read a book. Well listen, she had. She told him
about this story she once read, an old-fashioned tale in some book somebody'd given to her when she was a little girl. This girl in the story, this
Proser-something, was out running around in a place something like this,
pulling a bush right out of the ground just like Mr. Grey had and up out of
that hole came old Pluto, the king of the underworld, riding in a chariot,
and hauled her off against her will down into his deep horrible black place.

“Proserpina,” he said. “I know the story, yes.” He got up and started following the trail back from the edge, towards the swamp. She hurried to
catch up to him.

“Then you know her old lady found her all right,” she said, “but not before she'd half broken a promise not to eat a thing down there. So for the
rest of her life, if you can believe it, she had to spend six months with her
mother and six months down in the underworld with him.”

“With Pluto,” he tossed over his shoulder. “I didn't think anyone remem
bered those tales any more.” They were walking on logs now; the ground
was soft and damp, with a musty swamp smell. Burnt snags stood around
like silent black totems.

“Anyway, that's what I feel like. Only I don't get six and six. I get three
months, four if I'm lucky, of normal living with people treating me like a
human being. Then along comes October and he starts in dragging me
down.”

“Morgan?” Mr. Grey stood on the edge of the little lake, a hundred feet
of green scum in front of him, a log laid out on it like a wharf. He turned
and his pale eyes crinkled, as if he was ready to disbelieve whatever she
was going to say next.

Hallie stopped walking. “Pulling me down into his hell with him. Clawing at me and slobbering and pulling me down, living in slime.”

Mr. Grey walked out onto the log, straight out over that floor of scum.
“If I remember the story right, the girl didn't mind it so much. She got so
she kind of liked old Pluto.”

Hallie felt as if she might explode. “Nobody likes living in hell,” she
cried.

At the other end of the log he turned and faced her. “The whole world
loves it,” he said. He looked slightly amused, as if she were a child run up
against something every adult understood. “As soon as a human being
chooses to pay attention to his five senses he's electing to live in hell.” He
let her chew on that for a while, then bounced a little on the log to watch
it disturb the thick surface of the lake. “If he pays attention to the demands
of the senses, if he uses them to make judgments, if he listens to their
reports of pain and disease, he's living in hell. There's nothing so special
about you.”

Hallie walked by herself back to the edge of the slope and sat down.
After a while he came up behind her and she said, “All right, mister, you
know so much. Is there a way out?”

He chuckled. “Sure there is,” he said. He started down the hill. “I guess
you were hoping I'd say everybody is doomed to be miserable and so
you're pretty normal after all. D'you think that just because I'm soured on
humanity I don't see its possibilities? Well, lady, like it or not, there are
some happy people in the world.”

“Who?” she demanded.

He stopped on the trail and looked up at her. “It'd be a lot easier for all
of us if we didn't look around once in a while and see people who can
smile.”

“Who are they?” she said, running down to catch up and nearly crashing right into him.

He pushed his face so close to hers she had to step back. He spoke as if
he were chipping the words out one at a time, once and for all. “Those
who refuse to ride in the chariot!”

Hallie felt as if his breath had turned all of her into some cold rigid
material. She looked into his eyes, pale, murky, trembling from the force
of his words. A thin, barely visible red line ran from the edge of one grey
disc down into the corner by the tear duct, casual as a lost thread. He was
human. He was human. She lifted one hand and brushed a finger against
his cheek.

Mr. Grey leapt back from her touch and tripped over a rock. He rolled
over and over down the hill, slid a few feet, then rolled again until he
slammed up against a tree. By the time Hallie got down that far he was on
his feet again, walking with a slight limp down the deer trail to the fishing camp.

She'd handled it all wrong, she knew. She hadn't even behaved the way
Hallie Crane normally would. That night in bed she thought of all the
people she had known back home, the friendly nosy country people who
had been her neighbours for nearly twenty years, and she tried to see herself as they would. Hallie Crane? You want to know how Hallie Crane
would treat a little shit like that, spouting his nonsense? She'd throw back
her head and laugh. You'd see her long white throat. You'd hear her deep
harsh laugh. Hallie Crane has the sexiest laugh a man ever heard and
that's exactly what she'd turn on that smart-alec school teacher. She'd
laugh and ask him who the hell he thought he was.

But she hadn't done that. She didn't even have her old laugh any more.
She'd kept her looks and her figure and her long slim legs, but somewhere
along the way she'd lost her deep throaty laugh. Those people wouldn't
recognize her without it. No wonder she's scared to come home, they'd
say. Hallie Crane without her laugh isn't Hallie Crane.

And she knew that she would never go back. There was nothing strong
enough to pull her back to that place; not friends, not daughter, not grand
children. She didn't want to see her son-in-law again. She didn't want to
see the house again, or the small farms that surrounded it. Some day, maybe, she would send down enough money for her daughter and the children to fly up and spend part of the summer with her. That would be nice.
Her daughter could help out in the café, talk to the tourists, find out that
the kind of life her old lady lived wasn't so bad after all. Maybe Morgan
would take them fishing.

While Hallie was lying in bed planning her future she heard Mr. Grey
get up and go outside. Just keep on walking, she thought, walk right on
over the mountains and down-island until you find the road, then keep on
walking still. You've stirred up here all that needs to be stirred. How nice
it would be to wake up in the morning and find he had gone, that he had
shoved out to sea in his boat and disappeared. She would worry perhaps,
for a few minutes, that he was in danger or even drowned, but soon she
would say it was his own choice and forget him.

Though Hallie believed a little in the power of thought, she never
expected immediate results. The sound of lumber breaking, snapping like
kindling, and a long scream right outside the café brought her up out of the
bed and to her feet. Outside her front door she discovered a large section of
the boardwalk railing had been broken away. There was no sound below
but the slapping of the sea. “Mr. Grey?” she said, in case he was close by
and watching her. But no answer came so she yelled his name into the
dark. She felt for a moment as if she were alone, the only person left in the
world, abandoned. She screamed for Morgan, who came up the slope
eventually with a strong flashlight he aimed down into the water splashing sloppily around the pilings, and it wasn't until morning that they
found Mr. Grey's body, back under the boardwalk and nudging like a
dead fish against the rock her house was built on.

“You son of a bitch,” Hallie said to Morgan. “Did you do this?” Morgan
came up close and looked hard at her. The rain was rolling off his flattened hair and down his face, dripping from the end of his nose. “Do you
think that?” he said.

She looked into his eyes, steady as stone. “No,” she said, and turned
away. She went back into the café and waited until he had fished the body
out and came to bang on her door.

“We'll have to bury him,” he said.

She shuddered. “We're not
that
far from civilization. It doesn't seem
right.”

She turned away but he stepped in and walked around to face her and
wrapped his arms so tight around her she couldn't move. She could smell
the smoked fish on his breath, could see the black spikes of his week-old
beard. She tried to push away but his grip was too tight, his arms too
strong.

“What're you going to do?” he said.

“Going home.”

“Hell you are. You're home now.”

“I mean down-island, back to my family. I'll fly out as soon as the
weather changes. I want to get away from this goddam hole.”

“You'll never go back there again and you know it.”

During the following week the storm continued. Waves hit the rocks and
leapt up almost as high as the boardwalk railings. The wind, coming in
from the strait like a giant flat hand, bent the seaside pines and firs down
almost to the ground. Morgan walked up to the café every day and tried
to talk her into moving down to the boat house but she didn't talk to him
at all. She rolled up Hamilton Grey's sleeping bag and folded his tent and
left them piled on the stage beside the piano for the day when the RCMP
would be finally contacted and come to ask questions about his death.

At the end of the week Morgan came to the door and asked if she
wanted to help bury the little school teacher. She nearly laughed and said
“No, but thank you for thinking of me,” but instead just shook her head
and shut the door in his face. Through the window of a back room she
watched him drag the body out of the shed and haul it, wrapped in one of
her blankets and laid out flat on a piece of canvas, up the steep slope of the
hill. She ran out into the rain with Mr. Grey's books, scrambled up the hill
until she caught up with Morgan, and said, “Throw these in too.” She
tossed the books, whose titles she hadn't even noticed, onto the canvas
beside the body and hurried back down the hill before he started digging
the grave.

That evening the wind was quieter, the rain silent, but Morgan still
hadn't fixed the radio set. Hallie sat for a long time at the window, looking out to sea, listening to the intense beating of her own heart. Then she
packed her suitcase and walked down the boardwalk, slowly, casually as
if she hoped for a ship to appear from behind the point of land and sail in
to pick her up by the time she got down to the gravel beach. But no ship
came and Hallie Crane walked past the beach, gravel crunching under her
heels, walked past Mr. Grey's little aluminum boat still tied to a driftwood
log, and knocked lightly on the boat-house door.

Inside, she put down her suitcase and took a good look around. “The
first thing you can do,” she told Morgan, “is go up and bring down my
own bed. I'm just here for the company.”

“Sure you are,” he said, and shut the door.

“I can't stand being alone for long.”

“Sit down,” he said. “I was making some coffee.”

She smiled. “Did you dig a deep enough grave?”

“Deep enough so the rain won't wash him out, shallow enough for people or relatives to dig up if they want to see the body.”

“He had no relatives,” she said, taking off her coat. “He said he had no
one.” She smiled. She would like to have laughed, like the old Hallie, but
she turned instead to the window and looked out for a moment across the
little bay. “He told me there was no one in the world who could touch
him, not even us.”

I hate to think what Marsten would say if I told him I was doing this.
Nearly every day on the way home from the paper mill he sits in his car
out front until I invite him in for a beer, and then he says “By gosh, I don't
mind if I do” and comes in. We sit back in the only two chairs there are in
this motel cabin, facing each other across the table, while he complains
about all the people at the mill who wouldn't put in a decent day's work if
their lives depended on it, and can't be trusted to blow their own noses
without a boss telling them to. Sometimes he gets excited and yells at me
and calls me stupid fool for brooding about my marriage break-up, and
tells me I ought to be glad to escape from a woman like Stella Delaney. But
what does a man like Marsten know about the things that I'm thinking,
after what's happened to me? What does he know? Sooner or later he
stands up to leave, drives a fist into his stomach to trigger one of his belches,
and says “Yes sir; it's a bugger all right,” which is his opinion on the general affairs of the world. I've a pretty good idea what he would say if he
knew I was doing this, thinking these things, or if he found out about
Phemie Porter. I know Marsten; that son of a gun would go through the
roof.

I feel new at this life still. Stella and me've been separated for eight,
nearly nine, months now, and sometimes I still don't know what I'm supposed to do or how to act. Nobody tells you, you're just dumped. I feel like
I walked out into the middle of somebody else's play, right in the middle
of it, and nobody's told me what lines to say. Not that anybody'd catch me
going to a play, or to much of anything else any more for that matter, except
to work every day and then back home, if you can call this place home. It's
only a cabin, but I guess it's good enough, it's all I need it to be. On the
edge of the village, right on the beach, it's just a few minutes' walk from a
grocery store, and only the highway stretches out between me and my job
at the mill where I spend all the time that I can. Inside there's this double
bed with a sort of orange tattered chenille over it, a wooden table, a pile of
dog-eared old paperbacks I'll never read, a hotplate, a watercolour of these
stupid-looking wooden ducks trying to fly up off a phony lake, and my big
oil painting of Old Number One the steam loci they sold right out from
under me for those Ottawa tourists to stare at. And of course there's the
view, the strait, whose tides slosh forward up the gravel slope, nudging
driftwood and seaweed ahead, almost to the cabin door. And roar in my
window all night. The Touch-and-Go Motel. It's a good enough place.

Not that you'll ever catch Marsten admitting it. He's a big slow-moving
man with all the time in the world to live everyone else's life, and no interest at all in his own. He's worked in the yard crew at the mill for most of
the twenty years I've been there, and eats his pork-and-bean sandwiches
every noon in the shack with me, and tells me it's high time I got over
being a Separated Man, acting as if the world has ground to a sudden stop.
He's got this jowly head that seems to grow right up out of his shoulders,
like a walrus, with thick sagging lips, and a pair of pale little eyes nearly
buried in flesh. His body is like a walrus, too, tapered away from its heavy
top. When he sits down he tries two or three times to get one knee up over
the other, but never can, and always ends up sitting with his tiny legs wide
apart and his elbows planted squarely on the table. “Yes sir, it's a bugger
all right,” he says, and calls me every kind of fool, and belches, and thinks
of forty-seven different reasons why a man is better off without a wife and
ought to be glad. I tell him he's a decent enough friend but I'd like it a lot
if he could keep his nose in his own business for a change. Old Marsten.

“Make a joke if you want,” he says, squeezing both eyes up closed and
hauling a handkerchief out of his pocket to mop off the sweat from the
folds of his neck. “Make a joke out of it if you want, man, but you'll be
making yourself sick if you go on full of self-pity. It's time you started having some fun.”

How can I have any fun when he's always hanging around nagging at
me? Him and that other one, that Bested woman. Sometimes if Marsten
isn't quick enough at ducking out of the cabin, he gets trapped into a second beer by the only other person who ever visits me, old Mrs. Bested, the
woman who owns this motel. She comes in, whenever she can catch us,
with three bottles in her hands, and sits nursing one of them between her
knees on the side of the bed, her powdered face pointing out towards sea.
“It's a lonely life,” she says, her bit of blackmail. I don't know how much
she can see; she has these eyelids that never open, the kind that would have
to have been slit by a doctor's knife when she was born. She tilts back
when there's something that has to be seen, but usually only stares into the
insides of those lids, and sucks the neck of her beer bottle, and pouts out
her lips to release the gas. That woman always makes me feel cold when
she's in the room, I don't know why. There's something about her. If she
gets into the cabin before Marsten has left, and gets herself settled on the
bed, the two of them could be arguing there until late into the evening,
and forget all about supper, and never bother to count the empty bottles
that get lined up along the baseboard by the door.

“Vision is a thing of the heart,” she likes to say, rolling the bottle between
her hands. “A person could be blind as a bat and have vision clear as glass.”

“Excuse me,” says Marsten, “but that is a lot of hooey.”

“The important thing is to
see
,” she says. “It takes more than just opening your eyes to do that.”

“And that,” says Marsten, “is a load of manure.”

Old Mrs. Bested threatens to pout. “I know what I know,” she says, and
points her chin.

Sometimes she drives fingers into her hair, riles it all up into a bush of
blue-white flames. When the light catches it a certain way I expect her to
float away. A good blast of wind and she could go out under it, floating,
out the window like the helpless stem of a dandelion parachute.

“Have you been to see the children this week?” she nags at me.

“Is Mrs. Delaney well, up there at the house? Have you seen her at all?”

“Have you signed the papers for ever, so to speak, or is there a chance
that you'll patch it up?”

“Don't you ever go out for some fun, Mr. Delaney? It's not healthy for
a man to sit and feel sorry for himself.” Echoing Marsten, the big-mouth.
There are times when I can see myself smashing her skull in with a leg
wrenched out of a chair. Just to shut up her talking.

Eventually, if she stays long enough, she'll get around to talking about
her hands. They're magic, she says, and holds them up like jewels to turn
in the light. “I have magic hands.” They look like pretty ordinary hands
to me, but she holds them up as if they had the secret of life in them.

“Sure,” Marsten says, “and I have a big toe that can talk.”

“With these hands,” she says, “I can pull all of the pain out of your body,
out of your mind. It's a fact.”

And somehow she always manages to talk one of us, usually me, into
letting her prove it. She stands up behind the chair, digs her hands into my
neck, and explores down into the shoulders. Her thick fingers slide down
under my shirt, dig hard into muscles, threaten to shake me right off the
chair.

“Nobody believes in love any more,” she says. Her breath when she
leans close is beer-sour and hot.

Well, how could you? I want to know. Forty years have nearly managed to educate all that stuff out of me.

“Though the television seems to go on believing,” she says.

Marsten roars. “Oh the tee vee!”

Nobody in my family ever used the word “love” when I was a kid. Not
the way those actors use it. It was the kind of word, like “God,” which
would shrivel your tongue if you tried it, or make your neck burn and
cringe if someone else did. You didn't know where to look. Not that it
stopped me from thinking for a while there that I had a lot of it to give, but
I guess Stella finished all that.

“The end of every marriage—good or bad—is cataclysmic,” old Mrs.
B. says. She likes words she can wrap her tongue around. “Either you die
or you get yourself born again. Those are the only choices.”

This to me, who sometimes wonder if I've managed it even the first
time. I'm always getting this picture of myself legless, thrown up out of the
sea and shrivelling, drying up like kelp or a marooned starfish.

When Marsten and the old woman start arguing about religion I just
have to get outside, just far enough for the sound of the waves to drown
out their voices. In the new dark, it's hard to tell where the land dies and
ocean begins, except by sound. But where the eel grass saws at my ankles
and rotting crabs stink in my nostrils, I spread my feet and pee into gravel.

That's what it's like around here, that's what I've got to put up with. It's
a good thing I know more than I've ever told them, is all I can say. If I
really was brooding as bad as they think, their stupid bickering would
drive me up the wall. Sometimes I feel like telling them about Phemie
Porter to see what would happen, the looks on their faces. Just to see how
stupid they'd feel, after all their feeling sorry for me, and feeling superior,
and telling me to snap out of it. Those two stopped looking at me, really
looking, long ago.

It's because Stella got the place, that's what it is. They just can't accept
that. I let her keep the place, it only made sense to me, there was a good
chance she'd be saddled with that imbecile mother of hers for ever, and she
couldn't very well kick Jon and Cora out before they finished high school.
So I just let her have it. Why fight? I couldn't pretend I'd ever made good
use of the land, or needed all those car parts I had in the shed, or laid any
plans for the resurrection of the old boarded-up gas station. I couldn't
think of a single reason for hanging on, it was almost a relief to take my
pickup and camper and a few things and move down here to the beach.

Something happened when I was moving out that I can hardly believe.
Stella kept out of the way all the time I was rummaging through the house,
picking out what I wanted, which wasn't much, but when I was all set to
go she comes out onto the front step and said, “You forgot your own true
love,” and I said What is that woman talking about? “You forgot your picture of the one dearest to your heart.” Then I knew what she meant, my
big oil painting of Old Number One that I operated every day for twenty
years until they sold her on me, so I went back in and hauled it out to the
camper. It's a wonder she didn't just let me forget it and then do what she
always wanted to do with it, put an axe right through the middle. Stella
always said she could take a mistress easier than Old Number One, you
could scratch a mistress's eyes out, she said, but what do you do to a steam
locomotive? How can you fight it? Something I didn't forget was my little
cassette tape of Old Number One huffing and chugging down the track
and blowing her whistle, though I'd never played it again since the day she
wrecked my recorder throwing it out onto that street in the village in Ireland. I kept the tape in my pocket, always. I knew I'd get a new recorder
some day, I wanted to get one of them kind I could rig up into the cab of
the pickup, so I'd have it wherever I went. I'll never get over losing that
loci. Spit and Old Number One, we were a team. Roy Rogers and Trigger.
Who else in that mill got out of bed at four o'clock in the morning to fire
up a head of steam for the day's work? I'll never get over the way they
took her away from me, never.

Actually, there were two things that surprised me the day I moved out.
The first was forgetting that painting I went to so much trouble and expense to get painted. The second was Jon and Cora. They went out for the
day and didn't even offer to help. Didn't hang around watching. They just
went out. Cora I think went over to a friend's, where she'd sit stuffing
chocolate cake into her face and watching the soap operas on television,
and complaining about her tight brassiere straps. Jon rammed a book up
under his armpit, sniffed at us all, and went mincing down the road to
wherever. I don't mind having a son that's a brain, I told Stella, but if he
don't get that hump out of his shoulders and wipe that prissy look off his
mouth I'll be wishing he'd change his name. Well don't worry about it, old
Stella says, if I get married again some day, maybe my new husband'll
adopt them and then you won't have to be ashamed. That was about the
closest she ever came to being mean back then, last fall at the beginning,
and I can't blame her for that one, they're her kids too. I guess I was just
a bit put out by the way they didn't think it was important to stay around
home the day that I happened to be moving out. Didn't lift a finger to
help, or stand and watch, or wish me good luck or anything. I might as
well have been one of them hitch-hikers in off the highway to use the toilet or get a drink of water.