What They Wanted (25 page)

He spluttered for a bit, and then started sounding stronger, asking me about the trip back, when I was coming home again. There was nothing of resentment in his tone, and I breathed a bit easier knowing that.

“You keep a watch for Chris, Dolly,” he croaked. “Headstrong, he is—like your mother,” he added, mischief creeping into his tone. “Should see her, more white in the face than me, I think she rather herself lying in bed, getting the attention.”

I heard Mother chiding him in the background, and the clatter of trays—his lunch, he said, they were serving him lunch, and what a poor fare supper was last night. Spuds with no salt or butter.

It bolstered my feelings, hearing Father joking like that, and if not for Mother, I’d have been feeling rather chirpy by the time Ben came swinging in through the doors. He shook his head as I looked past him for Chris.

“Out in the truck,” said Ben. “Bull-headed like his old man. Not budging from his decision to work the rigs, and he’s not budging from the truck because he don’t want to fight with you. So.” Ben looked at me questioningly. “I meant it yesterday—about you coming to work with us.” He looked past my shoulder, making a face. “I better get outta here, you’re boss don’t look happy. Listen, change your mind, gimme a call.” He pulled a card from his back pocket and tossed it on the tray. “Here comes your boss, you’re gonna get fired, you makes a lousy waitress anyway.”

He quickly left the bar, leaving me facing a snarling Cork. An effusion of apologies and I was back to cleaning tables. Through the window I caught sight of Ben crossing the street. I saw Chris sitting in a huge, godawful truck that was encrusted with dried mud and with a rusted wheel-wench soldered to its front grille, and its flatbed loaded with sacks of spuds and bagged groceries. Ben climbed into the driver’s seat, settling beside Chris. Lowering their caps to the sun, they gave each other a high five. The engine jolted into life and they rattled down the road, leaving me with a pang of sudden loneliness, of having become the dissonant chord in the song of camaraderie that had once been ours.

I picked up my tray and turned back to the room, back to those roughened hands and wearied eyes of the men, cigarette smoke coiling around their heads like phantom nooses.

A cheer rose from the bar. The hookers were rising from their table with three older men. One of the girls turned at the door, blowing kisses around the room. The rejected young fellow from earlier staggered to his feet with a loud howl, ducking kisses as a gunslinger might dodge bullets, drawing louder cheers from his pals. I looked back out the window, mechanically taking orders. The godawful truck was heading west, towards the campsite. Dumping dirty ashtrays into a sink, I slapped them about, hosing them with hot water. Cork snatched the hose from my hand, waving his cloth crossly before my face, threatening me with firing.

“Know what, Cork—you got a real bony butt.” I took off my apron, chucked it on the bar, and followed the hookers and their fat-assed piggy banks out the door.

I plucked a parking ticket from beneath my car wipers, flung it onto the dash, strapped myself in, and started down the street. The sun was burning through the windshield and I lowered my window to a warm wind, shoving a Jim Morrison into the tape deck. Cranking the volume, I turned onto the highway, thinking oddly of Mother again, sympathizing with that unrealized desire of hers to travel abroad when I was but a girl. And I thought of Chris, those feelings of unrest pummelling through him. Good then. Good for him. He was taking that extra step away from our father’s door, the one I’d already taken, the one our mother had failed to take. I felt the first sense of peace since leaving home, for as Chris said, I had no right to decide his path.

Or had I already forged the twist that had taken him thus far?

It was a question I would return to many times during the few short days to come.

EIGHT

T
HE MUD-CRUSTED TRUCK
sat near the campsite looking like something dredged out of the river. I pulled up beside it and started across the campground, the multicoloured tents like enormous kites resting on the grass, gaily strung clotheslines stretching between them like tails. Along the riverbank lazed some of the motley-haired campers with their guitars, their bared skin already browner than the river running alongside them as they hummed and played popular folk songs of the day. A dog yapped after a squirrel scampering up the trunk of a tree. Two crows clutched the limbs of a birch, staring beady-eyed at a shiny pot of water heating on the fire pit below as two young girls scraped and sliced a bundle of carrots and spuds. Chris stood outside my tent, heavily dressed in dark clothing, the beak of his cap turned backwards, his face wearing the dazed look of a missionary happening upon his first tribe in some unmapped land.

“Baywop!” I muttered with a scant trace of affection. I glanced at Ben squatting beside a trio of girls near the river, their laughter tinkling over his words like spring water over ice crystals. Chris watched me coming with a pained expression.

“Already told you, not arguing with you,” he said, and ducked inside the tent. I ducked in behind him, falling to my knees, rolling up my sleeping bag just as he was. He sat back on his ankles, watching. “What’re you doing?”

“Ben didn’t tell you? My, but he likes a secret. I’m coming, too. Uh huh. Got a job. Cook’s helper.”

His mouth gaped open. “What—wait a minute, you can’t come—you can’t cook—”

“Give back,” I said as he pulled the sleeping bag from my hands. “Unless you comes to your senses and stays home, too.”

“Home!” he scoffed, punching at the side of the tent. “Freaking la la land—look, you can’t come—you’re nuts, you can’t follow me to the rigs, smothering jeezes—” He looked appealingly to Ben, who was pulling back the flap, staring in at us. “Will you talk to her—she’s gone nuts! She’s cracked! She thinks she’s coming to the rig!”

“Can’t be fighting on the rig,” Ben said and dropped the flap back in place.

Chris stared after him in astonishment. “She’s not coming— Ben! Jeezes, look at her, like the cat,” he cried as I clawed my sleeping bag out of his hand. I ducked out of the tent, Chris ducking out behind me.

“She’s not coming,” he said to Ben. “Jeezes, man, I can’t have her on the rigs with me.”

“
Man!
” I mocked him. “Well,
man
, guess you’re just gonna have to.” I stood bemused as Chris fixed his eyes on a tangled-haired youth climbing out of the tent next door, a white cloud of smoke puffing out behind him.

“What’s they doing now, smoking themselves?” he asked with a snort. “Thinks they’re capelin or salmon or something?”

Ben busted out a laugh.

“Go hide your ignorance,” I muttered to Chris, and crossed over to the fellow for a quiet word. Minutes later I was back. Ignoring Ben’s retreat to the girls by the river, I stared calmly at my brother. “Tent’s rented, the car’s looked after.”

Chris was staring at me like a disenchanted monk. “Fine, then, fine,” he snapped. “You’ll love it in the woods, especially when you gets a grizzly on your tail.”

“Be you up in the tree, little bugger—you wouldn’t hear a train coming, you goes into a trance. Out of the way, I have some packing to do.”

A SHORT TIME LATER
and we were heading down the highway, bouncing and jolting on the springy seat: me in the middle, Chris clinging to the door handle, Ben hunched over the wheel and complaining about the frost-pocked pavement as he drove us straight south.

“Ribcage. Riding a ribcage,” said Chris for the hundredth time as Ben plied the gears with relish, both of them leaning into the cab’s heaving and jolting as might riders on cranky horses. “So, tell me about the rigs,
man
,” urged Chris, elbowing me, “like, what I needs to know,
man
. Did you know, Ben’s giving up his job for me,” he said to my testy look. “What do you think of that—moving himself up to roughneck and giving me his greasing and scrubbing job.”

Ben mustered a smile. “Not something I’m bloody happy about, bud. Moving up on the rigs is a backwards step to me.”

“Right, so what’s that agin—what’s my new job—rousty. Roustabout. Like it, Sis?” He kept elbowing me, making me laugh. “So, what else do I gotta know?” he asked Ben.

“Keep the hell outta the way.”

“Keep the hell outta the way,” repeated Chris.

“Else they’ll have you running around looking for bird cages.”

“Bird cages.”

“Bird cages. For their seed.”

“Their seed—ahh, their
seed
,” said Chris, inadvertently scratching his groin, chuckling softly. “How about I bring them fresh socks instead?”

“See, he’s getting it,” said Ben.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Heh heh, hope not,” said Chris. “So, all right. So, how do you know what’s gotta be done?”

“See, he’s getting it,” Ben whispered to me, “told you he’d get it. Now, then, here’s how you know what’s gotta be done: if it moves, grease it, if it don’t, scrub it. And that’s it, Pablo, that’s the life of a roustabout—have a grease gun or a bucket of diesel dangling from your wrist at
all
times, and be going somewhere at
all
times. The best place is behind the mud tank. Warm as toast when it’s cold, shady when it’s warm. Thought out lots of stuff curled up behind that mud tank—see that pine?” He pointed through his side window. “Ever see pine like that?”

“Big, hey. Jeezes, never seen pine that big,” said Chris. He leaned within an inch of the windshield, the beak of his cap shading his eyes as he took in the jack pine and balsams flanking the roadside, the mossy forest floor, and the multitude of meadows patchworked with the deepest and tenderest of spring greens. “A garden, a frigging garden, what do you say, Sis? What’s the matter, not saying much—changing your mind, aren’t you. Told you not to come. Want us to take you back— not getting sick, are you?”

I waved him off.

“Sure you’re not getting sick? We can stop if you’re getting sick.”

“I’m not getting sick.”

“You getting sick?” asked Ben.

“She always gets sick on bumpy roads. Couldn’t take her nowhere when we first left Cooney Arm. First sight of a car and she was carsick.”

“Oh, Chrissy,
please
.”

“Just saying—every time we drove to Ragged Rock, first thing we had to do was put buckets and wet rags aboard the back seat—used to get sick myself, just watching. Ooh, man, look at that,” and he was leaning into the windshield, pointing at a bald eagle gliding overhead.

“Two—two of them,” said Ben, “see that, buddy—two of them.”

“Them heads … whoo, man, look at them white heads— and that wingspan—see them, Sylvie?”

“Yuh, I see.” I gazed along with him at the snow-white heads of the eagles gliding through the blue. I pulled back, laughing as he craned his neck further, near busting through the windshield with excitement, like when we were youngsters combing the beach and he’d burst ahead in his eagerness to see what new thing lay just ahead—a sunfish, a dead shark, a pretty bottle cast ashore during the night.

“Look at that tree over there—cripes, the size of it.” He clutched the dash as Ben hit a rut, exclaiming, “Jeezes, what pine, what pine. Wouldn’t Father love this.”

His face shadowed. He sat back, resting his elbow on the window and leaning his cheek against the ridge of his knuckles.

“Hey,” I nudged him, “so we’ll take a picture and send it to him. Think he won’t like that—nice picture of a pine tree to look at?”

He half smiled. “Six weeks’ burning is what he’d see.”

“Yep, that’s our da. And them birds would make a damn fine gravy.”

“Hey.”Ben tossed us both a glance. “Your father’s got some rounds left in him yet. Tough as hide them old fellows are. Cripes, the old man’s been smoking and dragging about boats and houses since he was nine. Nine! I was still wrapped in me blankie when I was nine.”

The truck hit a deep rut, throwing me against Ben, my bare arm pressing against his. I felt its heat, smelled it. His ratty white T-shirt was stretched so tight across his chest I could see the padding of chest hair beneath, pressing spongelike against the thin fabric. He rubbed his jaw, making a scratchy sound with his day-old stubble, and I saw a nick where he’d shaved too close. Could he smell me, I wondered, and tried to remember whether I’d dabbed my collar that morning with a bit of lavender from the vial Mother had given me and that I always kept in my purse. I hadn’t. Cigarette smoke. Cigarette smoke from the bar is what he smelled. I shifted sideways towards Chris.