Of course if it doesn’t snow, the farmers are going to cry. They bitch about everything. At Chuck’s, over coffee, all you hear are complaints about the damn Americans. And quotas. They’ll be gone soon. Loraine with all her layers seems the least worried. Johnny mentions this and Loraine shrugs her shoulders, and says, “So, what am I going to do? I’ll keep gathering eggs, is what. And two years from now when the Americans ship up their cheap shit and poison us all, I’ll say, ‘I told you so.’ Until then, I’ll gather my quota and I’ll sell it and I’ll have this baby and I’ll get by.”
Johnny can hear Charlene from the living room where he sits looking
out the big picture window at the yard. She opens the fridge door and digs for ice. It spills out onto the floor and countertop. One finally clinks into the glass, a splash of liquid. She’s drinking too much lately; her face has been tight, her voice wobbling, like all her usual strength has been sucked from her. She’s falling.
A car passes; a burst of light and then darkness. Charlene appears and stands in the doorway. She’s holding her glass and sucking on an ice cube. She just stands and watches him so he watches back. Her size makes her homely tonight; her neck is slightly bent as if someone were pushing at the top of her head. Her mouth opens; she’s about to speak.
“Was talking to the girls at the Credit Union,” she says. Her voice slopes down, then rises quickly.
Johnny says, “Are you drunk?”
Charlene ignores him. She says, “They let slip some news that I think you probably already know.”
There’s a smell in this room that Johnny can’t stand. Never could, even as a young boy growing up. It’s a feathery, wet, mouse-dropping smell that appears only once in a while. But now it’s back. Johnny shakes his head. He waits for Charlene to say more. He’s not going to help her out here. Sometimes if you ignore her she just goes away.
But she keeps talking. “It was Karen. She said, quite by accident, that Loraine Wallace was going to have a baby and that the baby was yours.”
Johnny looks right at her now. He wonders how it came to be that he married this woman, as if by some accident they met so long ago and he felt sorry for her or she for him and they ended up in the same house. She took his name back then so now she’s a Fehr and it’s odd, he thinks, giving up her name like that, he’d never do it, become her name. Rempel has the ring of disorder and loss.
He watches her. Her tongue touches her lower lip, her eyes close and open. He would like to be good to her, to hold her now and say proper things, but he can’t, because her suffering is so obvious, so needy. “That’s right,” he says. “It’s mine.”
She wants to throw her glass. Her fingers squeeze and whiten. Her
brow is shining. Johnny knows what she would smell like if he were to slide his nose along her hair. Defeat. When she gets like this she stirs up his own desperation.
“Come here,” he says, and surprisingly she comes. When he stands and holds her he can smell her hatred. He takes her hand and kisses the wrist. “It’s Loraine’s baby,” he says.
Charlene bites his shoulder. She clamps down and Johnny wants to howl, but instead he grasps, through her top, the flesh at her waist and he digs with his nails, harder, until they both break each other’s skin and their eyes water. They butt foreheads. Johnny mumbles, “We’ve done things wrong.”
“Shut up,” she says, and kisses him. And then, there in the middle of the front room, curtains open to the yard light and the few cars and trucks that flash by on the gravel road, she undresses him.
She removes her own clothes and squats to take him in her mouth. Johnny lets her; she does this only when he has bitterly disappointed her. Johnny thinks that both of them are like those simians in the zoo, reaching out through the bars, stroking an arm, a shoulder, begging for a touch. He watches the back of her neck. The vertebrae glide beneath her skin. Her shoulders hump up and down. He poses his hands on top of her head as if praying. She licks and pauses. Looks up at him.
There is a gap at the centre of his being. Of hers too. Johnny knows this, knows he has to keep plugging it up over and over again. This is what he’s doing now. He takes Charlene by the face and pulls her up and kisses the taste of himself from her mouth and nose and tongue. Then he lays her down on the braided rug his mother made and cups Charlene with his hands. His hairy belly slaps down on her soft round tummy and “Oh,” she says, again and again into his right ear.
Later, she pours herself another drink but doesn’t offer Johnny one. She sits in a soft chair, crosses her legs, and pushes with a finger at her sore wet mouth. Johnny dresses. He goes into the kitchen and puts an antibiotic cream on the teeth marks. His shirt is un -buttoned, he’s still breathing with effort. He closes his eyes. There is
a wetness in his underwear. He shifts his hips and buttons his shirt. Puts on a jacket and cowboy boots. He steps outside and before the door swings shut he hears Charlene’s voice. He ignores her, finds his truck beneath the yard light, climbs in, and after starting up, shudders in the glow of the dash.
Johnny goes to the centre. It’s either here or Carol’s and tonight he doesn’t want to face Carol. There is a cot in the back room and a shaver and shampoo in a cupboard; he washes in the sink. That night he sits in a vinyl chair in the darkness of the centre and he smokes. He phones Loraine but Chris answers so he just hangs up. When he finally goes to bed it’s three in the morning but, still, he can’t sleep. He turns on the black-and-white TV he has beside the cot and there are these people, a man and a woman, talking about a frying pan.
“Nothing stuck,” the woman says, “It’s wonderful.” Her eyes open wide and she smiles.
“What is this?” Johnny says. “You’re on drugs.” He’s thinking about Charlene, her black hair spread out on the rug, her eyes closed, and the constriction of her throat, on, off, on, off, as he moved inside her. The body is an amazing thing; muscles and shit and blood and veins, and somewhere in there, behind those closed eyes, is a little trigger that tells Charlene if she is happy or sad or horny or hungry or thirsty; and that’s what makes her throat go on and off. Or maybe it’s Johnny. He doesn’t like to think about it too much.
“That’s incredible, Tanya,” the man on the TV says. “Nothing stuck.”
Johnny rubs his jaw. Tanya and the man keep discussing the merits of the frying pan so Johnny switches to a rerun of “The Rockford Files.” His toes are cold; he puts on socks. He eats a bar from the dispenser over by the pool table and, when the show’s over, switches off the TV. The centre feels hollow; water is dripping in the bathroom. He wonders about this place sometimes, what he’s trying to prove. People in town, they
laugh at him. Still, he believes that kids are more interesting than adults; teenagers are honest and hopeful.
Johnny wonders why adults are so cynical. That used to be the wonderful thing about Charlene; she supported him, told him he was fine, not to worry about others. Not any more, Charlene’s losing it. He knows it’s the baby, the blunt fact that he went and did this thing with Loraine so he’ll have this other body out there; his genes, cells, maybe even the same slant to the mouth. This is too much for Charlene.
“So what,” Johnny says. He finishes his bar and falls asleep, chocolate still melting into his molars.
The following morning he has breakfast at Chuck’s. He sits with Joe Emery who talks about the road—he’s a trucker—and about Melissa and his kids. Johnny knows that Joe’s boy, Roger, stole a car the other night. Chris and Melody were involved but Roger was the big push. He waits for Joe to mention it but he doesn’t. Later, driving to work, Johnny thinks people need to talk more, get stuff out in the open. It’s no good, this hiding. He’s guilty too, he knows it. Feeling this, he drives past the feed mill and turns up the three-mile road and over to his farm. Smoke rises from the chimney, a lazy curl, and he thinks that Charlene must have lit a fire.
He finds her in the living room, lying in front of the wood stove. She’s on her back, snoring, wearing a T-shirt and panties. The house is cold, the fire almost out. Johnny touches Charlene’s foot. Ice. He scoops up his wife, stumbles, then carries her to the bedroom on the second floor. He runs the bath, then removes Charlene’s clothes and bends to her again. She smells of vomit and gin. Her breasts slide to either side as he straightens and carries her to the tub. He lays her in. She groans and pushes at the water; her red fingernails sink. He holds her head above the water and leans his chest against the tub.
“Charlene,” he says, “I’m going to wash you.” And he does. He wipes
her face, pokes at her ears. He soaps her back, her front, her crotch. He scrubs her. Her hair he leaves; it’s too long. When he is finished she is awake but still limp and heavy.
“Stand up,” he says.
She tries but fails. He lifts her from her armpits and she hangs on to the towel rack as he dries her. “I’m sorry,” she manages at one point. Johnny puts her to bed and goes downstairs to make coffee and toast. Charlene is sleeping when he returns. He touches her forehead. He kneels beside the bed and watches her face. He loves her again. What had seemed so desperate last night appears brighter today. Johnny remembers when he married Charlene and she talked about how some day she wanted five children and a grand house and when she said this she smiled and pushed at Johnny’s chest with the heel of her hand, as if Johnny were on the edge of something and she wanted to check if he would fall. It was only later that Johnny saw Charlene as the earth’s moon, halved, light and dark. It’s the mother, Johnny thinks. Spreading herself like thick butter on Charlene. The mother calls Charlene and Charlene whispers into the phone and then finally hangs up and heads straight for the bottle. Clink, clink. These days she pours the drink while she’s on the phone, as if this were a small form of rebellion.
One time Johnny said, “Why do you talk to her? She’s poison.”
“She’s my mother,” Charlene said and she swung her head back and forth and her hair followed.
“She changes you, makes you ugly,” Johnny said.
“Does she?” Charlene’s voice was tougher, as if the bile she’d collected from her mother would fall onto Johnny’s brow. He didn’t mind. He’d rather Charlene fight back than sit and pout and get slapped around.
“Yes, she does, look at you,” and he pointed at the half-full glass in her hand where the clear liquid waved.
“Maybe you do this to me,” Charlene said, and Johnny ducked his head quickly as if avoiding something solid hurtling through the air.
“Don’t blame me,” he said, and he pulled Charlene onto his lap. A
splash of her drink fell onto Johnny’s chest and Charlene put her mouth there and licked. Johnny’s stomach lurched, but he said nothing, holding her head instead, wondering how it was that there were so many other people in the world who lived happily. How did they do it?
Bending over the sleeping Charlene now, Johnny touches her cheek and her nose and her mouth. He pats her rump through the blanket and thinks that he loves her and if it weren’t for Loraine they could be happy sometimes. Charlene is like a field that has lain empty for years and needs to be harrowed, ploughed, even seeded. In her best moments, like when they are out in Winnipeg for dinner, just the two of them, and she sits across from him and her shoulders are big and she consumes food and drink and cigarettes and she says how much she trusts him and she is proud of him the way he’s taking care of the youth of Lesser, that’s when Johnny loves her best and then he wants to keep her forever. He wants to lay the length of her out and tell her, first in one ear and then the other, how her simplicity excites him.
But this is not always so. And Johnny sometimes sees that he too may be at fault, as if he has through the years been erasing Charlene; he is a waterfall, just big enough, and Charlene is a rock upon which he falls and he is slowly wearing her down. Johnny takes his hand off her bum now. Smooths her hair. Bends to kiss her. Like a child, she is easiest to love when sleeping.
That afternoon Johnny does another drug talk. This time it’s to fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds. The supervising teacher is Ms. Holt, who never really liked Johnny when he was her student. He remembers a line she often said:
No event occurs twice.
He shakes hands with her and makes small talk. Odd, how things equal out, how this woman no longer has any power over him.
The kids this time are sleepy and uninterested. He recognizes one girl, Melody Krahn; she’s friends with Chris. He sees them together at the
centre. Ms. Holt gives Johnny an overhead projector to use in case he has notes or something important to show the group. He looks down at the glass top and sees himself; small-headed, sharp-nosed, a loose neck, a mouth that’s too big. He smiles and gets his image back. Takes a breath.
“At your age,” he says, “I was known as a stoner. I thought it was cool. I’d walk down the hall of this school, pull out a blunt instrument, and light up. Needless to say I didn’t last long in school. I think you could ask Miss Holt here how appreciated I was by the teachers.” The kids laugh. He’s got their attention now. Ms. Holt offers a slight lift of her mouth.
“Movies, music, they make drugs look sexy. But I’m not sure, personally, how much we should celebrate them.” Johnny pauses and looks around the room. He’s preaching and he hates that. His heart’s not in it today.
He tries again. “I don’t think we should glorify the heads in our schools. The guys, like I used to be, who think they have a corner on genius because they’re walking around stupid and stoned. Uh-uh.”
Melody Krahn is shaking her head. Johnny doesn’t know if she’s tired or disagreeing. When he’s finally finished, his mouth is dry and he wants to sip at something strong. Melody comes to see him as he’s putting on his coat. She’s wearing a T-shirt that claims Gandhi was just another skinhead
.
She pushes at her hair and says, “You don’t really believe all that, do you?”
Johnny shrugs. “Of course, why not?”
“I dunno.” She laughs, her eyebrows go up and then down. Her voice is fine, as if her life were full of secrets. “This short-term memory stuff you were talking about. You lost yours?”