Spit Delaney's Island (26 page)

“Money to the guy that sells them,” I said. And of course the boy in the
coveralls was watching us, he must've thought he had a couple of loonies
in there.

“There is no truth in things,” she said, “except as they bring out the
truth in a person. Tell me a thing that you love and I'll tell you a thing
about you.”

“Old Number One,” I told her.

“What? Old Number One? What's that? Do you mean yourself? Then
you are a man who is trapped by your own limits.”

I didn't bother to correct her, it would only confuse things.

“Tell me this, then,” she said. “If I was going to buy you something from
this store, anything at all, what one thing would you want it to be?”

I should've said tobacco tin, or swede saw, or just anything at all. I
should've said a book, or anything. But oh no, when she said that, I got this
idea. “If there was a tape recorder around here I could give you your
answer to that other question.”

“A tape recorder?” she said. “There's not going to be a tape recorder
around here, not in a place like this. They sell old stuff, these things are
nearly antiques.”

Of course if she let it drop at that I'd've kept quiet and that would be
the end of it. She could buy me a picture or something else if she wanted
to, if that was her way of paying me back for the ride. But she didn't let it
drop, she
asked
, and of course there wasn't a tape recorder for sale in the
place. Just to borrow then, she said, I couldn't believe the nerve she had,
was there one we could borrow for five minutes. It turned out there was
one, a little black plastic one, in that back room where they scraped the
paint off old furniture. Phemie Porter made it sound as if lending that
thing to us was an honour any storekeeper would be glad to break his neck
for.

“Now what is it I'm going to hear?” she said.

I got scared. I'd been carrying that cassette around in my pocket for
nearly a year, not playing it, just feeling it there and thinking maybe I'd
play it again some day and maybe I wouldn't, considering the trouble it
already caused me. But I never expected to be playing it for a stranger, like
her, in a public place. I wished I'd kept my big mouth shut.

We sat on the edge of the verandah, up at the end by the flower boxes,
and I put the machine on my knee. Reef stayed down at the other end,
leering. Along the edge of the road the family of Americans was leaning
all over a white Cadillac, having a picnic. They took food out of a big
paper bag that sat up on the hood and went back to lean on different parts
of the car to eat and throw back mouthfuls of tinned pop. When he saw
us the father let out a single snort and turned his back, to show what he
thought. Other people, coming in, paid us no attention at all.

“I think there used to be a little train station somewhere around here,”
I told her. “See that track going by? You keep your eye on where it disappears in the bush and imagine what you hear is coming from down there.”

I pushed the button. There was nothing for a minute, then a voice:
I
don't know where you'll be when you listen to this, but this is one way I can be
sure of being heard, you're bound to listen some . . .

I pushed the Stop button. That was Stella's voice. What the hell was
going on? I ran it ahead a foot or so and pushed the Play again.

not enough, not enough at all, Spit. A man who . . .

I shut it off again. I couldn't believe it.

“What's the matter?” Phemie said.

“She taped over it.” I just couldn't believe it. “She taped over it.” I could
feel the sweat breaking out on my forehead, and my upper lip. Everything
got confused.

“Who?”

“Stella. She got ahold of it somehow and taped over it.” If I had her
there, if I could get my hands on her. My shaking hands.

I ran it up to halfway in case she'd run out of message for me and there
was still some of the loci left, but when I turned it on again there she still
was, talking:
Some day you will have to learn how
, she said,
you'd never learn
it being married to me and that train. Maybe your freedom will help you to . . .

Freedom. I wanted to bash her with freedom. I wanted to strangle her
with freedom. If she'd been there I would've pushed that tape machine
down her throat sideways. I would've made her eat the thing. I could
hardly see for the sweat that was getting into my eyes, stinging.

“She must've done it back then before I moved out,” I said. “While we
were working out the settlement. She must've known I would give in and
play it some day.”

People had stopped to watch us, to listen. The tourists were all facing
our way so they wouldn't miss a thing. Reef had come over closer and
squatted, his wrists draped over his knees. He had long, long hands that
hung down limply. I imagined those hands touching her. I remembered
them peeling back the fur in the restaurant. I imagined them running up
her arm, up her leg. It doesn't make any sense—I shouldn't have been
thinking that, I should have been screaming about Stella, or throwing that
machine over into the bush, or taking the cassette out to stamp it into the
gravel. But I didn't feel like that at all. I felt like putting my head on her
shoulder, or crying. I had to haul my handkerchief out of my pocket and
mop the sweat off my face, and around my neck, the way Marsten does.

If I were making this up, if I were making up lies about myself, that is
not how I would end the episode at the Wooden Nickel. Not like that.
That was too calm to be the end of anything. If I was making it all up to
work out the way it should, I would say I threw that little machine into
the brush, and went yelling after it to stamp it to pieces, grind it under my
heels. Then that family of fatties starts to laugh, see, like this is all a good
show just for them and I yell something at them. I yell something obscene
and violent and threaten to gouge out their eyes if they don't shut up their
faces. The owner of the store comes out too, and yells what am I doing
with his recorder, but I tell him to go back in his hole in the junk and drop
dead. Reef tries to quiet me, he comes over and puts one of those long narrow hands on my arm, tries to steady me into silence, but when I look in
his eyes I see the hatred that's been building up all day. He despises me. He
would like to kill me. Without moving a muscle in his face, without
changing his expression at all, he brings up a sharp bony knee and gets me
hard in the crotch and I go down, puking into the salal, and he kicks me.
The pain, the sickening pain, is everywhere inside me, ripping me open. I
even think I may die there, on the ground. It isn't until later when I have
got back up onto my feet that Phemie Porter comes over, dragging her
skirt through the brush, and crossing the tracks.
That woman is wrong
, she
says.
In all those years of marriage she couldn't see it but she's wrong
. Everybody is standing around in the gravel and along the road and on the verandah of the store, watching us. Like a movie.

It isn't true, though. That isn't the way it happened. Maybe a few years
from now when I remember that day at the Wooden Nickel I won't be
able to tell which was true and which I've made up. It won't even matter.
I will probably remember the made-up one clearest, so that when I drive
by the store in my camper I can think that at least I offered that fellow
who runs it a bit of excitement, a story he can remember. And I will probably think that, for him and the others who work in there with him, I
offered a bit of myself, I exposed something.

They're not likely to remember two people sitting on the verandah. A
dumpy woman dressed up in those crazy clothes, with too much hair, and
a lanky scrawny-necked engineer who needed a shave, the two of them
staring at the little black plastic box of a recording machine as if there was
a beast in it. And they won't remember that the woman put her hand on
the man's arm, and held on for a while, and then told him she could imagine the sounds of a steam loci easy enough, that she didn't need a tape for
it and neither did he.

She told me this: “You've already got everything in you that you need.”

“What is it?” I said.

“When those tourists were laughing at me,” she said. “For just a split
second we touched, we overlapped.”

I could've told her that was all a load of manure, the way Marsten
would've. I could've told her she didn't know a thing about me. But that
wouldn't be true. She did know. She knew plenty about me, and that's
what I'd guessed about her from the beginning.

But maybe I shouldn't have run away. Maybe I should not have left
them there at the store and got into my pickup and driven home. There
was a lot left I could offer. I could've told her all about the Doukhobor
colony that lived across the road once, behind that high picket fence. A religious colony that didn't believe in marriage. Maybe she'd have got a poem
out of that. I could've told her about them, and about the mountain she
was going to. I could've told her what to expect there, the distance to the
timber line, and what she would find in the alpine meadows.

But she scared me off. She said, “Come on up with me, Spit Delaney,
come walking with me on the mountains. Learn to see. Don't go back to
your puddles.”

As if I could.

It's something to think about, though. When Marsten sits out in his car
waiting to be asked in for a beer I'm tempted to tell him, “Can't ask you
in tonight, Marsten, there's a woman waiting for me, up a mountain.” Or
when he gets nagging at me to quit brooding, to get back in the swing of
life. What is the matter with him? Don't people look at other people? Can't
they tell when other people start to change? But I know him, he doesn't
have an idea what anyone else is like. He just wants someone to talk to,
and some place to drink beer, and he probably likes being able to argue
with old Mrs. Bested who owns the Touch-and-Go Motel. Her magic
hands haven't done any good yet, and of course they never will. But she
thinks she's doing something, or tries, nearly every night when she comes
in. She hasn't looked at me either, really, in months. And she's probably
forgotten what those magic hands of hers are after. It's all just habit, we go
through, we act out. And they don't know a thing about me. Not a thing.
They haven't noticed yet that there have been a few nights when I haven't
come straight home from work, and a few nights when I've gone out late
and not come home until far into morning. They don't notice a thing.

Sometimes I'm tempted to tell them “I knew a poet once, for a while.
She invited me up into the mountains with her.” But they'd only say “Sure,
sure,” and go on with their arguing, and talking about magic hands, and
drinking their beer. Or say “How did a poet get into the mill?” which is
as big as they think my world ever gets. No, that isn't what they would say.
They'd just look at me (Marsten squeezing his eyes into a squint, old Mrs.
Bested leaning back to peer through her slits) they'd just look at me as if I
had left my brains behind me somewhere on the road, and maybe roll a
few sounds around in their mouths waiting for me to add more, something that would make sense to them, something that would fit closer to
their idea of what I am like. It just doesn't enter some people's heads that
others might not be what they seem. So I'll never tell them about the poet,
and anyway she may have come down off that mountain long ago now,
and gone home.

Though maybe not. I could go up there yet, to see. I should, to see for
myself. She just might still be there. The most she could've found up there
for company would be a timber cruiser or a half-crazy old prospector or a
party of university students looking at rocks. Still, I like to imagine her
stumbling into a camp of wild and desperate soldiers laying plans to set
the island afloat and liberate us all from something. They tell me the
mountains on islands in other parts of the world are just swarming with
these secret armies and escaped convicts, with passwords and smuggled-in machine guns and whispered meetings. Not us, as far as I know, but I
still like to think of her coming into a group of them, being caught by their
lookout. They would kill the Crotch right away, of course, but she'd
become one of them, and even more than that, she'd become a leader, too,
in no time at all. Maybe she's up there now, somewhere, plotting my freedom for me. I just may go up yet, to see for myself.

In the meantime, I've still got the poem she sent me, the day after the
Wooden Nickel, postmarked at the little village just up beyond it. It's
handwritten, not typed, scribbled out in her writing. Sometimes when I
read it, it starts to make a kind of sense to me, if I don't try too hard, but
if I look up from it for even a second the meaning just disappears and it
all looks like gibberish again. But she's in there, somewhere. She's in there
somewhere looking at me clearer than anyone's ever seen me before. If I
could understand, if I could get inside those words with her, I think I'd be
able to know what it was she saw when she looked at me, what it was that
made her believe I could manage, that I could survive and go on. But I
won't tell Marsten about it. I know him, the son of a gun would go
through the roof. Or die laughing. I wouldn't tell him a thing.

Jack Hodgins' fiction has won the Governor General's Award, the
Canada-Australia Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada and
the Caribbean) and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, amongst
others. He has given readings, talks, and workshops in Australia,
New Zealand, Japan, and several European countries, and has
taught an annual fiction workshop in Mallorca, Spain.
A Passion
for Narrative
(a guide to writing fiction) is used in classrooms and
writing groups across Canada and Australia. In 2006 he received
both the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lieutenant
Governor's Award for Literary Excellence in British Columbia. In
2009 the Governor General appointed him a Member of the Order
of Canada. His most recent novel,
The Master of Happy Endings
,
was published in 2010. He and his wife Dianne live in Victoria.
More information is available on his website:
www.jackhodgins.ca
.