Wallflowers (9 page)

Her feet slide in her platforms, her hard icy toes, the incandescent red of cold flesh, old flesh. Sometimes after long nights she can feel her blood spider into varicose veins. The smoke from his beach fire looks pearlier now, more acrid, like he’s burned old clothes to keep warm. Mouldy socks or plastics from the shore—salty milk jugs, chip foils, smooth blue litter from kids who dig holes and eat Dunkaroos. One more bend in the seawall and she’ll see the highest logs in his fort—strange symbiosis between Cliff and the beach kids, the Sunday construction of driftwood houses, which at night he reinforces with old curtain.

She saw his fort only a couple times. One log juts from the bank and props the lighter, card-tower eaves. He’d found the crate of old drapes at St. Vincent’s, said it took him all night to tuck the cloth between logs. He lifted each plank, threaded curtain under and over the wood like a pie lattice. You could see wedges of old polyester hydrangeas in the cracks. Swabs of newspaper too, which kept drier than you’d think, the fort shaded by the overhanging spruce. That’s how they used to insulate walls, he said. Newspaper. He said in his uncle’s cabin he found a newspaper from 1922. He kept the crossword. Folded the page inside his coat next to his navy tag.
The fibre of the gomuti palm
, ten down.
To sink in mud
, nine across.
What we should all be.

Down the steps to the logs, the beach-side balance beams, slick with rainwater. From the next bend, she can see his fire. And his fort. But his fire is too big—his fort is on fire. Her feet slide  again, ankles rolling when she steps to the sand and starts to run. Flames flick over the tilt of his eaves, halo one branch that booms up like a mast. On a log in a row are six empty bottles of nail polish remover. She can smell it now, the acetone, thick and sweetly stinging. The fire is shrinking into smoke—too much damp wood. But flames runnel up and over that branch mast, nip at the spruce bough. She calls Cliff’s name and kicks a plank off the centre log. The plank burns her heel. When she kicks off a second strip, the smaller logs fold in, and a swath of curtain. She can see his sleeping bag and wool blanket. The smoke swells into her eyes. She grabs at the bag. The bag is light. She yanks and the canvas shell snaps from the collapsing entrance.

She does not know where Cliff is, but she waits in case he returns for his bedding. She sits on the log with the plastic bottles, the row of them like pellet gun targets. An old
Vancouver Sun
lies ahead in the sand. Inside, maybe the Sunday crossword.
Ring of
, a clue might say.
Pants on, Trial by. Fire escape.
She flexes her palms to the embers, her feet, and warms her toes under a curl of polyester.

She sat with him here last week at the same time. The water was out, and they watched a heron pluck through the shallows, the tide pools lit by the lights off the bridge. Cliff warmed instant coffee in a titanium saucepan and poured hers into a speckle-ware mug. Only got one cup, he had said, waving the pot in the air to cool the metal before he lowered his lips to the rim. They talked again about summers on Vancouver Island, smooth stones, fat apples. He said he and his uncle slept on the beach. His uncle boiled the coffee in the morning with eggshells. Cowboy coffee, Cliff had said. It’s good.

At her turn to speak, she told him again how she had visited Tofino when she was sixteen, with her boyfriend’s friends and his truck, cheap gin and a case of Labatt Blue. Someone strummed a guitar, she said, “Southern Man,” “Pancho and Lefty,” and they drank as the tide went out, those stubby glass bottles. You could park on the beach then, she continued. Do you remember? Her boyfriend’s Chevy played tapes behind them, his keys still in the ignition. On the last night at low tide, she climbed into his truck and drove toward the ocean. She steered straight at first, past the high-water mark and bars of seaweed. Then at the last moment, she rotated the wheels left and carved donuts in the sand.

Where have you fallen, have you fallen?

EIGHT

In the long ago, the rivers bore monsters. One dwelt beneath the foam where the Mahatta ran quick from O’Connell Lake, where the river flowed in faces, geometric and flat and reflecting sun like a prism. Every ripple had a mirror, and for every mirror, the monster had an eye. Its tongue lolled beneath the rocks on the shore, and when villagers knelt on the bank to collect water, the muscle would flex, tremble the pebbles, and snatch the villagers into the monster’s jaw. When of all the villagers only a young girl and her grandmother remained, Hilatusala the Transformer visited to inquire what had happened. They spoke of their missing neighbours, of the monster with many eyes and its tongue beneath the sand. The Transformer listened, urged the girl to collect water, urged her not to be afraid. So she fetched her pail, kissed her grandmother’s cheek, and strode to the river’s edge. Before she noticed the shifting gravel, the girl was launched into the air with a speed that knocked her to her back. She opened her eyes to see real birds and clouds and jagged trees instead of their rippling reflections. Then the monster snapped its teeth shut. The fleshy plates that lined its throat shrugged and expanded and slid the girl deeper into darkness, which is when she heard Hilatusala’s song. The notes screamed all at once like a raven’s shriek and surging water and the whine of a jade knife against cedar. In response, the monster’s throat plates shrugged in the opposite direction and the girl was hurtled over its tongue. She landed in the river. Above her, the monster’s jowls shook, its lips parted, and the wet bones of the girl’s neighbours spewed onto the shore. Spines and sickle ribs and collarbones spilled from the corners of its mouth until the monster had vomited all the villagers and coiled back beneath the surface. And so the girl and her grandmother set to work. They matched ankle bones to kneecaps, hips to ribs, spine to skull, until they reassembled an entire skeleton. Then the Transformer sprinkled the bones with Life Water, and tendons bloomed between ligaments like elastic bands. The muscles grew next, then skin, then smooth black hair, until a villager was reborn. The more friends they reconstructed, the more friends helped them reconstruct. And so it was that notch to groove, vertebra by vertebra, the girl rebuilt her village.

SEVEN

The canoe poked from the pine tree like a wooden wing, and they crouched ten feet beneath it on either side of a stump. Her new friend, Milton, set the plates side by side and sprinkled them with fuel from a plastic lighter. He was the only young person she’d met so far. Everyone else was a friend of her uncle’s.

“My grandmother lived up north,” he said. “Where they burn food for their ancestors.”

Natalie zipped the collar of her track jacket, bounced on the balls of her feet.

“I found this in the
Gazette
,” he said. He dug into his pocket and passed her a folded news clipping.

It was the photo all the papers used—her mom and brother at a swim meet. Her brother wore goggles strapped to his forehead, and her mom’s good blouse was wet from his arm around her shoulder.

Milton tossed her the matchbook. She struck two matches at the same time and dropped them onto the plates.

“Normally you offer clothes,” he continued, as fire ballooned then shrank into smoke. “But the newspaper works.”

At the actual funeral in Vancouver, the reverend wore a collar and clerical robe, though he used to say he was a
necktie preacher
, someone who rolled up his shirt sleeves. She couldn’t help but notice that his robe looked like a hand-me-down. Faded from washing. Wrinkled at the back where he sat while they played the slide show. She was seated with her uncle in the front row, and could even detect a milk stain on the reverend’s chest. It felt so disrespectful, that stain. Here in the woods, under the pine tree, and the canoe kept in the pine tree’s boughs, her goodbye felt more sacred. She dangled the newspaper above the embers and let go. Their faces glowed as the paper floated and whirled into the half shell of a sea urchin.

“Do you still have the top?” he asked.

She had found the cedar spinning top yesterday in the surf. It fell from the canoe, she realized later. She tugged it now from her cut-offs and tossed it into the fire.

On the cardboard plates, the salmon shrivelled and curled, the fat spitting in hot pops. Inappropriately, she felt hungry again. As if she had not just feasted.

Milton drew the spool of thread from his pocket and nestled that in the embers too.

“Could you make the fire bigger?” she asked.

“Bigger?”

A smile pricked his cheek, which was otherwise long and flat, unaccented by bone.

“More lighter fluid,” she said.

He fumbled with the metal valve and dumped a stream of butane into the embers, snapping the flames vertical. The smoke burned thick from the plates, swelled into her nostrils with the fishy tang of oolichan grease. She watched the flames twist around lumps of camas root, watched the shadows cast on Milton’s cheeks, how they flapped across the bridge of his nose like crow feathers.

“Let me tell you about the girl who rebuilt her village from bones,” he said.

SIX

All the potlatch guests were in the Big House. They had set the food tables outside, in the covered eating area. The tables were papered now with napkins and cardboard plates. Salmon skins clung from the rims, shrouded the piles of fish bones on the tablecloth. Natalie poured herself pink lemonade as Milton walked to the food warmers and salad bowls at the far end. He uncurled the foil from the salmon plank and lifted a steak with his fingers.

“Come on,” he said.

“I’m full.”

“It’s not for you.”

Lemon pulp stung her tongue; she swished her mouth with a swig of someone else’s cola and joined him at the table. She’d seen the half porcupines at dinner, the orange meat that hung from their husks in tongues. She hadn’t tried one because she had no one to ask what it was.

“A sea egg,” Milton told her now, beside her.

She looked up and realized he was watching her. “A what?”

“An urchin.”

She took the half sphere and set it on an empty plate. The salmon remained on the cedar plank it was cooked on. Gummy fat oozed between the flesh and silver in spumes, and it slicked the insides of her fingernails when she separated a hunk from the skin.

“Did your brother like camas root?”

She shrugged. He laid a wedge of what looked like sweet potato next to his salmon. “How about bannock?”

“I think we baked that on field trips.”

“Where?” He tore a corner from the bread in the cookie tin.

“Squamish.” She shovelled wild rice onto her plate with her hand. “A cultural centre.”

She liked the feel of food in her palms, the grains of rice squashed beneath her nails with the salmon fat.

“Somewhere between ski lifts?”

“I guess.”

She felt embarrassed. Or rather, like she had done something wrong. And now, in this conversation, she was still doing it.

“They taught us to snowshoe,” she said.

“Damn. How to top that.”

“Ever tried?” she asked, to change the subject. “To snowshoe.”

“I can think of one time. With duct tape and my brother’s Ping-Pong paddles,” he said.  “But I think we were trying to ski.”

She maintained eye contact as he grinned at her, made a point to not look away first. He dipped his thumb into a jar of pale wax and stepped toward her, presenting his thumb like a birthday candle, like she should blow it out. After a whiff she leaned away. “What is that?”

“Oolichan grease.” He jerked his hand as though to smear it on her wrist.

She shrank toward the table and stabbed her own thumb in the jar. Then she faced him and shadowed his hand left and right.

He wiped his fingers on a napkin. “One, two, three, four, I declare a thumb war?”

“Bow, shake, corners, begin.”

But after a moment, he seemed to lose interest.

“We should go,” he said. “They’ll come back soon to clean.”

She smeared her thumb in a sunny arc on her plate as he slipped from the wood shelter, into the trees. When she looked back, he was gone. She caught the end of his shadow. It traced the path she found yesterday—toward the cove, the canoe in the pine tree, her friend who slept in its hull.

FIVE

Before the potlatch, Natalie sat next to an Orchid of the Western Sky. The clans were entering the Big House, though some still mingled outside, between the food area and wood clearing. The single flower sprouted behind the stump she had selected to wait out the crowd. Its pouch bobbed under a white hood, between two pea-yellow wings, so the orchid looked like a cheekless milkmaid, all neck and tongue and cotton frill cap, blond pigtails out the sides. It must have been planted. Her uncle said Western Skies were hybrids.

Sage burned on all sides of the clearing—narrow bundles tied with twine and secured in the dirt with rocks. The smoke smelled stiffly sweet and reminded Natalie of the kids at her old school, who shared joints in the snowberry bushes behind the smoke pit.