Wallflowers (8 page)

“Sure.”

Bea reached for her bag and withdrew the Thermos. A plaid Thermos that she now realized matched her shirt. She unscrewed the lid, and the Thermos mouth released a puff of steam.

“Kahlúa?”

“It's six in the morning.”

“Quarter past.”

“I'll go without, thanks.” He began to wind the mist-net drop cord around his thumb.

Bea poured hot chocolate into a speckled enamel mug and passed it to him, then pulled the Kahlúa from her bag and splashed some into her cup. She added the hot chocolate, clutched the mug with two palms, and watched the mist net. Then, under the theory of a watched pot never boils, she shifted her gaze to the sun, which straddled the horizon and warmed the treetops.

Huck leaned down to tie a loose shoelace and a tag poked from the collar of his sweater, so she stretched forward to tuck it in. Her fingers lingered beneath the wool and warmed against the back of his neck. He flicked his head toward her, the bristles of his cheek scratching her wrist, and she withdrew her hand.

“Do you know the song ‘Moon River,'” she asked.

“Hmm?”

Bea clinked her teeth onto the lip of her mug, then swallowed a sip. She hummed the first note to test how brittle her voice sounded. In fact, it sounded okay, so she sang a full line.

Her huckleberry friend knitted his fingers together and placed them in his lap. “My mother used to sing it,” he said.

Bea pressed her nose into her mug, then added another shot of Kahlúa.

“Bea,” Huck said, voice hushed. He nodded to the net, where a hummingbird buzzed outside the feeder, then he tugged the cord. The mesh veil unrolled from the top hoop and Huck opened his aluminum case. He handed Bea miniature scissors, a sheet of metal foil, and a nail file from a cloth bag. “Cut a band from here and file the edges,” he said as he withdrew a Ziploc bag of nylon socks from his pocket.

Bea snipped the tiny indentations on the metal sheet, and studied the band on her thumb. It occupied the space of a few spirals on her thumbprint, and she wondered how she'd know when the edges were smooth. She pinched it between her nails and rubbed each side with the file until Huck glanced at her expectantly.

“Hold on to it,” he said, and walked to the trap.

Bea followed. The hummingbird's throat shone a metallic red, and its bill needled into the drinking tube. Huck lifted the mesh and slid his arm through, the sock on his fist like a sock puppet. Then the sock puppet swallowed the hummingbird. He peeled the nylon off his wrist and around the bird and withdrew it from the trap.

“Band,” he said. Bea presented the band on her thumb, and Huck rolled the lip of nylon up from the hummingbird's legs.

“Can you hold him?”

“What?”

“Hold him,” he said, and passed the pointy warm sock into her palms. He pinched the band from her thumb with a pair of tweezers, then crimped it around the hummingbird's leg. He knelt beside his case and placed the digital scale on the grass. “Set him on the scale.”

She sank to her knees and hovered the bird sock over the scale, then released it onto the metal plate, her hands domed over to prevent it from falling. “How do you know he's a he?”

“You examine the primaries,” he said, and wrote the bird's weight on a pad of paper. “In males, the sixth primary feather is pointed.”

Huck cupped his hands under Bea's and lifted the sock from the scale. He unrolled the nylon further and measured the bird's bill with a ruler. Then he slipped the nylon off altogether. The bird glimmered from his palms and flitted up into the boughs of the crabapple.

 

There was a message from Louise when they got back—her nephew was out of the hospital, so they could stay with Bea for the remaining days of her recovery. She and Huck waited for her to arrive in the sunroom. They sat hip to hip on the wicker bench, Bea in a lavender sundress, Huck in jeans, glasses of iced tea balanced on their laps.

“What'll you do now?” asked Bea.

Huck tapped his index finger along the rim of the glass. “More landscaping?” he said. He sipped the iced tea, then fingered his breast pocket. “Look, I have something for you.”

Bea watched him withdraw a folded paper. He passed it to her—the sheet was the size of a page torn from a pocket book and marked with words in all capital letters.

“The recipe for nectar,” he said, then pressed a ribbon into her palm. “And something red.”

“Thank you,” she said, and wound the ribbon around her thumb.  

 

=

 

One cup sugar, four cups water. No food colouring. Watch the pot until it boils. Scoop sugar into the centre of a glass bowl, then pour in the water. Stir until the grains have completely melted. Wait for the solution to cool and fetch the footstool from the artichokes. Set the stool on the sunroom porch and step up. Unhook the feeder from the eave and weave the ribbon through the links of the feeder's chain. Red to attract the hummers.

Nightwalk

At Brockton Oval with the painted poles—thunderbird, lightning snake, one over the other like so many mounted heads. A stand of eight totems, cedar wings stretched, wooden goose steppers in a sidewalk sobriety test, place your right heel in front of your left toe, and so on—in clubs they call this the Dooeystep. (DUI-step.) They surround her, the totems, in that malted dark of  2 a.m., 3 a.m., who knows a.m., the digital clock on his dash blinked on and off midnight—always forgetting her watch and her bear spray and her overpriced box of advanced-healing blister cushions. She could stand in the centre of these beams and lift her arms too, lean against one pole for balance, like in theatre trust games: freefall back into carved cedar arms.

Long walk from the causeway in cork-wedge platforms, lily leather T-straps, baby toe red from the cold and the rubbing, and also it has grown toothy. The callus forming what feels like a second nail. Longer walk to the Regent Hotel, where she keeps her toothbrush, Hastings and Main, Wastings and Pain, the crinkled men and their carts, women rattling inside thin leather.

And now between rains, the warm husk of beach smoke: someone’s kept a store of dry wood. It’s too dark to see, but she follows the scent. Campfire summers at Sombrio Beach, smooth dusty stones you could build a bed on, the tang of broiled trout and fat apples wrapped in aluminum foil. She follows the seawall, the jogging path, the triplets-in-the-stroller path—smoke crisper as she treks, sharpened by the November wet.

Her dad burned caterpillars in his fifty-five-gallon rusted drum. Great sudsy tents of them, between boughs of the crabapple. Slinky black worms, nested together, fused to one another’s curl. How many of them are there? she had asked, and he laughed, tossed his Lucky can into the fire, cracked a second. One million, he said, and that seemed to her the largest number.

Tonight her date lived on Beatty Street, but he drove to North Van, as they do. There’s a spot near the bridge, in the firs and the hemlocks, by the shine of the moon, the lights off Grouse Mountain. She said forty-sixty-hundred, and he said sixty. She up-sold him to a hundred. When he dropped her on the causeway, he asked if she had a flashlight. She said no. He didn’t either. He said watch out for coyotes, then rolled up his window.

So she strolled on the shoulder, on the painted white line, lane signals above her, the neon arrows and
X
’s. Then a Nissan sped past, backed up, and a kid hucked a spoon. Spoons is a game the suburban boys play, when they’re bored of their cul-de-sacs, their
Call of Duty
and
Grand Theft Auto.
You cruise skid row with a bucket of spoons—plastic from Mickey D’s, or metal from Mom’s cutlery drawer. Hurl the spoon at a hooker, and if you hit her, you tear off; if you don’t, you pull over and climb out for it. A beef-cheeked boy arched from the Nissan, and his spoon skidded in the gravel at her feet. Then the car sped away and his face flapped out the passenger window like a stupid dog’s. The spoon was for soup, stainless steel, with a grapevine etched up the handle. It sinks in the pocket of her moth-eaten cashmere like a small stone.

She knows the fire will be Cliff’s. Milkman Cliff, they call him, because he sold milk before he joined the navy. He’s the only squatter who doesn’t sleep in the woods. Colder on the beach, exposed to the wind and the rain and the cops on their horses. But he misses the sea, says why sleep outside without waterfront? He keeps dry—camps in a fort beneath an old spruce. Wears military wool: olive sweater, with reinforced shoulders, cable-knit combat socks. In the daytime he retreats to the trees, or the sidewalks for cash. But he’s one of the few who don’t use.

The coil of this seawall, how it zigs in and over the bays like a snake, and she could be on the snake’s back, stepping over its smooth dry scales. From the beach, the funk of barnacles and kelp and soft-rotted crab. And there on her rock,
Girl in a Wetsuit
in oxidized bronze, sea-green and streaked with seagull shit.

She can see the smoke now, around the next bend or the one after that, a fat black billow of it, like he’s burning damp wood. She’s talked to Cliff a few times—downtown in front of an RBC bank, or on the water at nights in the park. As kids they both camped on Vancouver Island—she and her mother at Sombrio Beach, Cliff and his uncle in Tofino. She camped in Tofino too, when she was sixteen, and they talked about that. They talked about cold summers and salal berries and crab off the rocks.

She had met him in the park two years ago, in the woods behind Beaver Lake. There had been a show at the Bowl, and sometimes she scored dates in the queues, or at 11 p.m. after the encore. Cheers tapered, then exodus of fans—girls in grunge denim and glow-stick neck hoops, boys without shirts—Converse sneakers and chunk heels in the mud. You couldn’t trust college guys—they brought their friends and camera phones and didn’t pay. But one boy stood alone in his Thunderbirds sweatshirt. He checked his phone for the time, returned it to his jeans, checked his phone for the time and returned it. She said, Hey. He checked his phone, didn’t look up. But when she walked away, he jogged after her. She smoked and he walked with his arms folded over his chest. The night was warm. You could smell the sweet pine and water lilies.

At the lake they sat on a soft mossy tree trunk and talked about unimportant things—You know this park had a polar bear? he said. A polar bear, she repeated. In the zoo. His name was Tuk. She didn’t mind the chitchat. Some guys only needed someone to hear them. But then she heard laughter and the ferns swished behind her. Four guys stood between the tree trunks. One said, Dude, what the fuck, and the others kept laughing. A boy with wet lips and greasy eyelids stared at her as he swallowed the last pull of fireball from his mickey. She guessed she had twenty years on him, her cheeks worn for her age, her skin looser. She felt aware of it then. How the skin hung off her biceps. The boy lowered his mickey enough to speak.

Man, I invite you to
my
parties.

He spoke to the boy in the Thunderbirds sweatshirt but kept his eyes trained on her. He still clenched the empty mickey. The bottle ticked back and forth against his chest.

A heavier kid in a Kokanee toque laughed and glanced behind him.

Shit, man, he said.

The Thunderbirds boy wouldn’t look at her or his friends. He clutched his phone again and blinked at the screen.

The Kokanee boy tossed his empty in the bush. One of the other guys did the same. But the boy with the mickey held on to his. He shifted the bottle to his other hand. His finger and thumb had been looped around the bottle’s neck, and he kept the shape of this ring as he lifted his fist. He stared at it, as though gauging the size. Then he made eye contact with her through the hole. He had an erection, she noticed. He noticed that she noticed and smiled. That’s when she called for help.

Dude, said the boy in the Kokanee toque. He elbowed his friend. Dude, look.

Cliff stood on the other side of the clearing with an armload of firewood. He must have been there the entire time. When she met his eyes, he lowered the bundle and removed a bottle from the inner pocket of his anorak. He lifted one branch from the ground and doused it with liquid. She could see green leaves, but when he lit a match, the upper bough whooshed into fire. He strode to them. The guys stared. One said Jesus Christ, and Cliff stopped walking. He stood there in his anorak, damp hair lit by the blaze, and all the boys took off, sprinted into the trees. One stumbled over a fern, cursed as he fisted into the mud, kept running. Her own feet stayed planted. She watched Cliff with his ridiculous torch, and he watched her, until the fuel burned off and the branch loomed skeletal above his head. He mashed it into the dirt, stomped on the embers, then trod back to his pile. She helped him regather the sticks and old bark. He ordered them on the ground by their size—chunks of dead stump on the bottom, a pyramid of slim twigs overtop.

The next week she saw him in front of the bank. She dropped into the A&M market down the block and bought cookies and a carton of milk. She found him again on the sidewalk and plonked the milk at his feet. Hey Milkman Cliff, she said, and his blue eyes lit on her. She sat with him for an hour. They watched the young professionals pass in their young professional leather shoes, ate
Good Time!
strawberry biscuits and swallowed chin-dribbling swigs of the milk.