Spit Delaney's Island (24 page)

“That's an awful thing to say,” Stella said, but I waved her to be quiet.
I wanted a look at this creature.

There was a boy with her, who took off her fur coat, peeled it back off
her shoulders. He couldn't have been more than twenty, I'd say, and, oh,
seven feet tall, thin as a rake, with hair leaping out from his head like a
crown of wire. All hair and bulging crotch; the rest of him might have
been made of water pipes, wrapped in dirty denim.

And there she was, peeled out of her fur, with her tits hanging free in
an old wrinkled sweater, and a plaid skirt that could've been made from a
horse blanket. When she started to walk over to the corner table behind
the waiter I saw she had hiking boots on, probably the only first-owner
things on her body. Oh, I've seen lots of her kind around, especially in
summer, they come out of the woodwork or somewhere parading themselves, but this one was the worst of the lot.

But Stella just turned back to her food. She was too lady to stare. She
went on, telling me what my problem was, like someone reading a catalogue:

1. I put too much faith in things, and none in people,

2. I'm scared to think about anything in case I run into a question I can't
answer,

3. I act like I believe a broken-up marriage is a sign that I'm a worthless
human being,

4. I treat women as if they're all created for my benefit, but

5. I haven't got the guts to approach one now that I've failed with my first.

(She stopped here to order dessert—strawberries in ice cream—in a
voice that must've made the waiter want to go out and puke, so sweet and
thin and familiar. She smiled at his retreating ass, then turned back to me
and went on.)

6. I never learned how to tell anyone else what I was feeling, so

7. I was always getting hurt when people couldn't guess what I felt, so

8. I figured that once I was married and had kids and a job I liked I
didn't have to put any more effort into life, or try to improve, or imagine
there was anything left I could try to understand, and one more thing:

9. a man who would say a woman is ugly and think he's said all that
needs to be said about her has a lot of changing ahead of him.

And here I was thinking she wasn't ugly after all, my woman in the
corner table with her pipe-stem boy, she was
grotesque
. Stella went on talking about things, about people we knew, about the kids and their school
work, about what she figured I ought to be doing with myself, but I hardly
listened. I was busy watching that woman. The boy sat barely moving,
never changing the expression on his face. But she acted like a half-starved
logger just come into the grub-house after a day of setting chokers. She
laughed loud and coarse at the waiter doing his thing with the tray and the
flames, showing spaces between her teeth, and sat with her knees wide
apart in that skirt. (Stella, even in her black pants, sat so tight-together you
couldn't drive a wedge.) When her food came she dug in, got it all over
her hands, laughed with her mouth full, and hollered for the waiter to
bring her a better class of wine. I wished my mother could've seen this. Her
tongue would cluck in her mouth for a month afterwards. Me, I could've
watched that woman for ever, she was such a good show.

“Is that what your freedom will turn you into?” I asked Stella. “Is that
where you're headed? Liberated woman. Is that what you want to be
like?”

But she didn't answer me. She leapt up from the table, snorting the way
she does when she's holding back on a sob, and headed over towards the
door. I didn't think a thing like that would bother her, she always used to
like being teased a bit, I thought she'd take it as teasing. But she didn't. She
just up and got out of there fast and left me to pay the bill by myself.

On my way out, on my way past the corner table, that woman's hand
shot out and grabbed ahold of my pants, just above the knee, and held on.
When I looked at her, thinking What the hell's this all about? she went on
to finish chewing on something before she spoke. She looked at my knees
first, then all the way up to my throat, then at my face.

“Aren't you a find,” she said.

I looked at the boy but he was watching her, with a small paused-in-the-middle-of-a-chew smile on his face, like somebody waiting. He looked
like someone who thought everything she did or said was all right with
him, and more than all right. He had this fair, nearly invisible moustache
and a few pimples high up on his cheeks, and strange clear eyes.

The woman looked around the room, as if gathering an audience, then
looked up at me again. Her eyeballs were great scarred knobs, diseased
probably and discoloured too, nearly yellow. But they were not hard, or
cruel.

“You'll learn to walk, Mr. Man,” she said, nearly purring it. “Some day
you'll learn to walk.”

I nearly choked when she said that. You'd think she'd been listening to
the dream I never got around to telling Stella about. It gives you the creeps
to think how some people in this world know things they've never been
told, like they could see straight into your head. I don't understand how
they do it, I don't even want to know. I nearly choked when she said that,
I was so surprised, but all I did was get out of there as fast as I could go.

I'd seen the Wooden Nickel before, I'd been past it a few times since it
opened, but I never went in. Who wants to look at other people's old junk?
To me the place was just an old broken-down boxy house by the side of the
tracks no matter how much they fixed it up and painted it showy yellow
with red trim and hung up their sign. I would probably never have gone
inside it yet if it weren't for Phemie Porter.

That's what her name turned out to be. Phemie Porter. She's from Back
East somewhere, Toronto I think. A poet. I haven't seen her books in the
window of the bookstore in the village so I guess she's not very famous yet.
And she's thirty-two, not as old as I thought. The kid with the hair and
crotch is Reef.

I never slept that night, after I took Stella home. She wouldn't even
speak to me in the pickup and only got out and slammed the door to go
into the house, so I knew that was that, it was finished, I'd clobbered myself
good. So I went home to the Touch-and-Go and lay on the top of the bed
until six o'clock in the morning. When I looked out the window I thought
maybe I'd done some damage to my eyes or something, everything had
turned purple and mauve, or lilac. The sun had just cut loose from the
mainland mountains into the sky and still looked as if it had burned a
wide hole out of the mountains—a wide white gap of light—but the rest
of the coastal range made its jagged purple wall from one end to the other
of all I could see. The strait, nearly high tide, was all that lilac colour, too,
except for the bars of whitecaps and breakers near the beach. I got up and
went down to the edge of the water in my undershorts and there was this
body of a seal rolling there at the edge, rolling and rolling as each wave
slapped it up against gravel. It was all wrapped around in strips of seaweed and kelp and bits of bark. Poor old seal's eyes were open, dull and
brown; he wasn't the first that I'd ever seen like that. I don't know what
happened to him, it could have been only old age, his coat was all scratched
and ragged and torn. Maybe he was cut by an outboard motor, and bled to
death. He'd go out with the tide, later, and then come in somewhere else
down the coast.

But later I'd had a bit of sleep at last and got dressed and come out again
to see if he'd gone. The tide had moved far out, beyond tide pools and sand
and hadn't left him behind, so I walked out and started following the edge
of the water along, slapping my bare feet in the foam-edge, heading south.
I couldn't find my seal all the way around that bay, past the tourist cabins
and the hotels, so I walked up the slope to follow the seawall back.

And there, at the foot of the big totem, was that woman from the
restaurant, squatting on a pile of pack-sacks and sleeping bags and gear.
She was dressed exactly the same as she'd been the night before, probably
hadn't taken her clothes off, but her face was all puffed up from sleeping.
She laughed at me.

“Yes,” she said. “I thought this would be where we'd find you. Paddling
on the edge of the sea.”

Her boyfriend was standing up, leaning against the backside of the
totem, looking at me. I didn't like the looks of that fellow, I don't mind
admitting; there was something dangerous in his face.

“Excuse me,” I said, and went on past. No crazy woman was going to
make fun of me. What I do is my business. There's no law that says I've
got to put up with that kind of thing. They were loiterers, is all, they'd
probably slept right there on the beach like a lot of others I'd seen.

But she tells me oh please don't go by in a huff it was only a joke.

Then she said, “You're as touchy as my husband.”

I looked at the boy. “This is your husband?”

She laughed and threw up her hands. “Heavens, no! I left my husband
at home!”

I know I shouldn't have said this but I did. I thought it would be the
last I saw of them. “Then what is he, your son?”

Well, she let out one roaring laugh, you'd think it was a drunken old
wheezing man, they must have heard her all up and down this beach.
“Reef?” she said, and roared again, flapped her knees in and out. “He's just
my portable prick.”

What do you say? I've heard some coarse women in my day, in the parts
department of the mill and up in the camps years ago, but I could tell I was
blushing this time. It was one of those times when you suddenly get a picture of yourself, as if you'd stepped out a few paces and looked back. There
I was, this lanky old scrawny-necked bugger, blushing right up to the peak
of my engineer's cap. Forty years old, with big feet. I'd heard things in my
day and said things that would make her turn green, but here she was
making me blush. I'm glad Stella wasn't around is all I can say.

That boy just looked at me, never smiled, with a bit of a sneer. Maybe
he really was nothing more than what she said. There was no sign of anything else in his eyes.

“You got a car?” she said, and stood up, stamping the folds out of her
skirt. “Do you drive something?” I wondered how long it had been since
she'd taken those hiking boots off.

“I got a pickup,” I said, “and a camper.” I knew what she was after, she
didn't fool me. I'd seen them lined up along the road with their thumbs
out. But I don't lie. Ever.

Suddenly she grabbed my arm and pushed herself close. “Wonderful!
Because you're going to take us for a drive. Up into the mountains.”

“The hell I am,” I said.

But I did. I don't know how it happened. I don't know how anything
happens. I've always hated those hitch-hikers, dressed up in their stupid
costumes, expecting other people to waste gas on them. I've watched them
for years along the highway in front of the place, Stella's place now, too lazy
to lift a thumb, some of them. Lying down on the gravel. I don't know how
many times I've been tempted to go out in my truck, drop one tire onto
the shoulder, and run over them all. I wouldn't pick one of them creeps
up, I told Stella, if I thought he was dying. So don't ask what happened
here, I don't know. Why would I want those two freaks in my truck?
Why would I want to go anywhere at all on my day off from work?

It might have been the way she looked at the early swimmers, at the
kids playing in the tide pools, and said, “Let these fish splash around in the
water. People are meant to climb mountains. Take me inland, Mr. Man,
take me up into the hills!”

Maybe I'm just stupid. Or maybe it was the look of challenge in her eyes.
I'd never seen such big eyeballs, or so scarred. I wondered if you could get
your eyeballs scarred from what you've
seen
or does it have to be something
else. No woman's look had ever challenged me like that before, maybe I
just couldn't stand to turn it down.

If I'd known she was a poet I'd never have gone. If I'd known I'd get a
letter from her a day later with this piece of paper in it, one of these mixed-up modern unreadable poems called “The Man Without Legs,” she
wouldn't have got inside my pickup for even a minute. You can't trust
people who write things on paper, they think they own all the world and
people too, to do what they want with. It's probably a good thing I can't
make head nor tail of the thing, it's just gibberish to me. Some things
you're better off not knowing. Next thing I know I'll be hearing that thing
is in a book somewhere, for people to read. Good luck to them if they can
make more sense out of it than I can.

“I'll take you a part of the way,” I told her. “I'll take you as far as
Robinsons', I could do with some fresh eggs.”

So we were off. I've got to admit I was curious, it might have been
curiosity that did it. Maybe all I wanted to do was find out what made these
people tick, this woman anyway. You see them passing by from their own
worlds going somewhere, but you never know any. They kind of scare me
too, most people you can size up pretty fast and know where you stand,
but I always said to Stella you just couldn't tell what those hitch-hikers
were liable to do. How can you feel safe around people when you haven't
any idea what goes on inside them? Me, I like to know what people are
thinking, so I'll know what they're up to.

So the first thing I said when we started up from the coast was “Why?”
The woman was sitting in the middle of the cab, beside me, with her boy
by the door. All their gear was thrown in the back, inside the camper. We
drove uphill from the totem past the golf course and the big inn, and
through the cluster of little shops—drug store and variety store and
boarded-up theatre and Oddfellows' Hall. “Why up to the mountains?”