Spit Delaney's Island (25 page)

“The highest mountain we can find around here,” she said. She put her
hand down over her friend's crotch, gave it a pat, then folded both hands
in her lap. She peered down close to the registration card on the steering
column. “Your name is . . . Albert Delaney?”

“Spit,” I said.

“Spit?”

The boy smiled. I wondered what it felt like to have somebody do that
to you in public, what she'd just done to him. What kind of world do these
people live in anyway? What kind of people are they? Stella would never
have done that if I'd promised her a fur coat for it.

“I've crossed the country, end to end,” she said, “for my next book of
poems.”

“Scenery?” I said.

“Especially
not
the scenery. It's humanity I want. It's evidence I want, of
the humanity that's hiding in man.”

Then why climb a mountain, I wanted to know. There wouldn't be
people up there. Not in our mountains.

“There'll be me,” she says. “I'm in search of my own too, especially.
What better place to find it?”

“Just drive,” the boy said. It was the first thing I'd heard from him, and
he didn't even turn to say it, just kept his eyes straight ahead. It was nothing more than I should've expected. You couldn't expect gratitude for the
ride, or even respect, you had to put up with the insolence too on top of
everything else. Burn up your gas, sit in your cab, take up your time, then
spit in your eye to show what a fool you are. That boy was looking for
trouble.

But not the woman. Phemie Porter. There was something else in her, I
was beginning to see it. She said, “You drive like a man that knows how to
handle a machine.” And of course she was right. There isn't a person down
at that mill who can handle a loci the way that I can, I don't suppose there's
a man on this island can get as
close
to an engine as Spit Delaney. Ask
around. It wasn't just accident they were able to sell Old Number One to
the museum at fifty years old and still going strong, it was because she'd
been cared for by me for so long. I know engines. Driving the pickup is
kid's play in comparison, but still if a person knows what to look for, you
can tell a man who's used to handling big machinery. Not that I'm such a
fool I let this Phemie Porter win me over with that one sentence or anything. I would still like to have dumped her into the ocean for a good bath,
and put some human clothes on her, and sent her back to her husband. I
still wanted to tell her to act her age, and put on some makeup and comb
her hair, make herself look decent.

We drove uphill through brush—fir mostly, with their limp yellowish
paws of new growth drooping at the ends of the limbs, in gravelly soil and
tangles of Oregon grape and salal—snaking around corners bright yellow
with broom. Once in a while the brush would disappear, suddenly, to give
us a view of big green fenced-in fields with Holsteins grazing, a gigantic
dairy farm, and far to the west, beyond more trees, the great jagged-peaked snow caps of the nearest mountain. It was far enough off to be blue
still, except for the lower slopes where sun was lighting up some patches
of green furry timber.

“There's a lot of climbing in that mountain,” she said. “My father used
to take us up the side of every hill he could find, to ski, or explore, or
simply to camp overnight. It was all part of the same thing, he said, going
into yourself. When I was eleven years old he sold everything he owned,
handed the money over to my mother, and disappeared into the Laurentians for a year. When he came back he was a changed man, but my
mother wouldn't have him. He should've spent the money on a psychiatrist, she said, and shut the door in his face.”

Then there we were, turning a corner to cross the tracks, and right in
front of us was the big bright yellow building with the red trim. Along the
top of the verandah was its sign: WOODEN NICKEL, with an oversize
1922 nickel between the words, and all along below were flower boxes and
old wooden barrels and a cast-iron kitchen stove and a big trunk and an
old wringer washing machine. The two big windows were divided into
dozens of tiny panes, with bottles and jars and vases showing through
from inside.

The minute she saw it she yelled “Stop!” and I slammed on my brakes
automatically and pulled over, even while I was saying “It's only a second-hand store, probably a whole lot of old junk. You're better to stay out of
there.”

Who knows how different things might have been if I'd just stepped on
the gas and gone on past it, or if I'd dropped them off there and said “See
you around” and come back by myself to the cabin? I'll never know, it's
impossible. Instead, I pulled over on the opposite side of the road, against
the high narrow-slat fence, and we got out.

There were cars parked every which way in the gravel yard, and several
along the side of the road. Some people were going in, tourists, and others
were coming out. Two women hurried out across the road, one of them
holding a plate and a couple of little bottles, and saying “I need these like
I need a hole in the head but I couldn't resist.” The other woman laughed.
She had a little change purse in her hand.

“It's a good place to throw away money,” I warned her.

But oh no, she had to go in. Anything old, even junk, fascinated her, she
said. “We're in no hurry, so why not take the time for a look around?”

The last time she was in a second-hand store, she said, she'd found a
crystal ball. Some fortune teller's. She took it to a party, she said, as a joke.
But she looked so deep into some of them they got scared, and told her to
leave if she wouldn't stop. “Some of them worked up a real sweat,” she said
and pulled her face into a horrible shape and showed me her claws and
cackled like a witch. “I . . . can . . . see . . .
ev
. . . rything,” she said. I could
see why they asked her to leave, but I didn't say anything. I just wasn't
used to women like that, who would do a thing like that in public.

Crossing the road she hooked her arm into mine and the Crotch walked
behind. I hoped nobody going by would think we belonged together. I
could just see somebody from work driving along and seeing that rig
latched onto me and thinking old Spit's gone around the bend, or acting
like a hippie, or got himself tied up in women's lib. I could just hear them.
I tried to hurry her across, but then I thought to hell with them. What do
they know about anything? It felt kind of good having somebody hooked
on my arm again. Fright as she was to look at, I think that woman liked
me. I don't know what the other one thought, the boy. That was his lookout.

While we were crossing the gravel, a family of overweight people came
out of the front door, one at a time. First the father, a huge balding man in
sun glasses and a hanging-out shirt and sandals, then a short chubby lady
in shorts, with her white ripply legs all exposed, then a whole line of kids
in descending order, all round and red-faced and pleased with themselves.
When they were all out onto the gravel yard they gathered around in a circle to compare notes or something. The old man handed sticks of chewing
gum out, all around, and they dropped all their wrappings on the ground.
“Excuse me,” Phemie Porter said, and went over. “Are you people from the
States?”

They all turned to her, identical faces chewing, curious. “Sure am,” the
father said, and patted his belly.

“Do you think this is a beautiful country?” Phemie says.

“Just lovely,” the mother bubbled. “Just lovely.”

Phemie put the toe of her boot out amongst the pieces of paper and tin
foil on the ground. “Then perhaps you won't mind leaving it that way?”
She said it so softly I could barely hear it.

The smiles all reassembled into scowls. Red faces got redder. The
mother's hands jerked to her throat. Old Father Tourist, though, just
started to laugh, that kind of forced jolly laugh some people have when
they try to cover up a blunder. “Talk about blights on the landscape,” he
said, and nudged at his wife. The wife looked Phemie over and put a hand
against her mouth. The kids all started to giggle.

But Phemie Porter just swung around and gave me a look out of those
eyes and walked back up to the verandah and into the store. It made me
feel sick, the way they treated her. It made me ashamed of us all, I wanted
to hit somebody. But I followed her inside the building, and Reef came
after. I bet those fat-assed farts would have the paper picked up by the
time we came out, though. There were others who'd seen them and heard,
they wouldn't have the nerve to just walk away.

Inside that place you didn't know where to turn, or where to start.
Phemie Porter got all excited and tried to see everything at once. The place
was all fixed up to look old, but it was tidy, not what you'd expect, and had
rows and rows of old used furniture fixed up in the first room. She ran her
hand over everything, tables, desks, chairs, sewing machines, as if it was
all something she'd never seen before, or heard of. “Oh, look at this,” she
said, or “Oh, look at that.” She wanted to touch and see everything all at
once. The fellow that seemed to be running the place—a young blond-headed fellow doing additions or something at a desk in the corner—looked up at her excitement and then gave me a grin. He was probably
thinking here was a sale for sure, nothing less than a hundred dollars. Or
maybe he was trying to tell me he'd seen plenty like her before, don't get
embarrassed. He probably had too, he looked at her as if he knew the type.
There was a green eyeshade on his forehead, and he was wearing a pair of
coveralls with engineer stripes the same as my cap. He went back to his
work. At least he wasn't going to try talking us into something.

There were plenty of things to look at, I've got to admit. You could
spend all day just looking. And every bit of it had been found on this island,
nothing was brought in from the mainland. A whole line-up of old tobacco
cans across the corner, I don't know who'd buy them or what for but they
brought back some memories: Clubman, and Hickory, Troost I think, and
Heine's Blend with its picture of a wooden-shoed Dutchman by a windmill. Old-fashioned druggist bottles of every shape.
Aqua calcic
, whatever
that means.
Ferri et quinni
. I wouldn't have minded walking out with the
swede saw I found hung up on the cedar-shake wall either, I don't know
what for, but it looked like a good thing to have.

I glanced up once, and found myself looking back from a gilt-edged
mirror. I'd forgotten to shave that morning, I was in such a hurry to get
out. This face of mine looked bruised, and old. Not something I wanted
to spend very much time looking at. In the background I caught the beanpole glaring at me, leaning up near the door. One hand laid out flat on his
narrow belly kept moving, slowly, in a kind of a circle.

“Oh, look at this!” she said, and dragged me back to see some old chest
of drawers that was still being worked on, in a little alcove off the back
corner. Someone had been taking old paint off, the good rich grain of old
oak was beginning to show through in patches. “Somebody else would've
slapped new paint on top and thought they'd improved it,” she said. “These
people know where the real value is found.” She didn't try to make a lesson out of it for me, the way Stella might have (everything to Stella had a
message in it aimed at me, the whole world to her was organized in patterns meant to straighten me out) but she did put her hand on mine and
made me run my fingers over the grain. As if I'd never felt oak before.

“I dedicated my first book of poems to a man by the name of Eloff
Nurmi,” she said, “and no one could figure out why. He was the little round
cabinet maker who built me my very own chest of drawers when I was
small, something like this one. Inside it, he told me, he'd built a secret
compartment where no one, not even my mother, would find it. It was the
invisible soul of the chest, he said, where I could keep things that belonged
just to me. But I never found it myself, and I was afraid to admit it to him,
so I learned to store everything important in my own mind, and later in
poems, and gradually began to suspect this was what he intended. He'd
moved away long before the book came out, though, and I don't know
what happened to him after that.”

When I got rooting around amongst the books and roller skates and old
crocks in another little back room, she came in and ran her finger down
the whole shelf of books, paused at one and said “This New Land” then
went on to the end and dismissed the lot. Suddenly she stooped and came
up with a bedpan, “What the best people are wearing this year,” she said,
and turned it upside down on her head. “Things, things, things,” she said,
and did a turn under the new hat, then stooped to make a face in a mirror. Then she swept the bedpan off, handed it to me, and I put it down. I
couldn't help thinking of all the bare asses that had sat on it, but of course
that would mean nothing to her.

“My husband is a doctor,” she said. “Speaking of bedpans. Deadpans.
He's crazy about me. He's crazy, period, he's a shrink. I was his patient for
a while, but he gave up and married me instead.” Those eyeballs took in
everything in the room, came back to me. “He intends to retire early, he
says, so he can follow me when I go off like this, and find out what I'm
after. But he'll never retire, and he'll never follow me, and he'll never be
able to see.

“Things, things, things,” she sang, scooping up a handful of cutlery out
of a tray and letting them clatter back again. “We're surrounded by thousands of things and what do any of them mean?”