by David Bergen
Later, Janice was waiting for him in the parking lot. He feigned delight or perhaps he wasn’t feigning at all. He said, “Nice to see you Miss Collicutt,” and she said, “Janice.”
Then she said, “What’s gonna happen to that sweetheart of a dairy cow?”
“Well,” he said, “She’ll be turned into glue.”
“That’s sad,” she said.
He took off his hat. “Never thought of it that way.” He looked around. “How did you get here?”
“I rode my chair.”
“On the highway.”
“Yes.”
“Would you like a lift back?”
“I would,” she said. And then she said his name, “Bev.”
As he helped her into the cab of his pickup he was aware of her arm around his neck and how her chest pushed against his ribs and he was aware too of how loose and floppy her left leg was. He found several two-by-tens beside the feedlot and used those as planks to drive the wheelchair into the bed of the truck. Threw the planks in alongside. Janice was tickled pink to see all the trouble he went to. When he dropped her off and settled her back into her chair, she touched his arm and said, “You might want to hold onto those planks. Just in case.”
The following evening, a Thursday, he arranged to pick her up and take her out for steak in Calgary. They drove up the Number 2 highway and found a Keg on the south side of the city. As they entered the restaurant he wondered if he could get used to being with a woman who wasn’t able to ride or rope or wrangle, a woman whose head would always only reach the height of his belt buckle.
She ordered a Silver Cloud and a sirloin medium rare and mushrooms on the side. She said, “You’re not particular. I like that.”
“Not sure what you mean by that.”
“Not squeamish.”
He lifted an eyebrow.
“You’re not put off by a gimp.”
“Never crossed my mind,” he said.
“You see. That’s what I mean. I tried Internet dating once, just for a month, and you should see the freaks that come crawling out from under the rug. One fellow wanted me to sit naked in my chair while he satisfied himself. I sent him home.”
“Sounds dangerous,” he said.
“Not really. These are very weak men. Morally. They have no backbone.” She watched him carefully. “Am I too blunt?”
“You are blunt. Too? I wouldn’t say.”
“I frightened you the other day, talking about sex.”
He smiled. “And now you’re talking about it again.”
“I don’t have a lot of time left. Maybe a year. All the old rules have been chucked out.”
The food arrived. “Would you cut my steak?” she asked, and pushed her plate towards him. He cut it for her and thought of children.
He said, “I couldn’t have babies. That’s why Dorothy left me.”
“I never wanted babies. Too old anyways.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just trying to be honest.”
“I knew who you were the moment we met.”
“Yeah? Did you know I’m celibate?”
“That a threat?” She laughed.
“I’m a Christian as well.”
“Makes sense.”
“How ’bout you?”
“I could be if it’s useful.”
“This isn’t a negotiation. It’s about faith.”
“I know all that.”
Driving home there was a deep silence that didn’t feel like silence because he sensed her breathing and her movements and at one point she reached out her strong hand, her left, and stroked his head and then ran it down to his neck. It was shocking to feel once again a woman’s touch.
“Could I spend the night at your place?” she asked. “I get tired of my apartment.”
“I only have one bed,” he said.
“Perfect.”
“What would we do with the wheelchair?”
“Put it in the barn with the horses,” she said. “You can carry me inside.”
He was quiet.
“You think too much,” she said.
“Think so?”
“This isn’t life or death,” she said. She took her phone out of her purse and entered a number. He heard her talking, saying that her door was open and that Keller needed water and food and she needed to go outside. “Don’t let her off the leash,” she said. “She’ll run.”
Bev had not had sex with a woman for twenty years, two months and three days, not as if anyone was keeping track. The last woman he’d slept with was his ex-wife Dorothy, who left him after years of trying to have children. The doctors determined that he was at fault, perhaps because of his acquaintance with Agent Orange during his tour of duty in Vietnam. When Dorothy left him she claimed to be heartbroken. And then she married a town man, manager of the Credit Union, who gave her three children. Bev saw them in church, sitting five abreast, all clean and wonderful and contented. He was happy for Dorothy, and this was his greatest problem, that he imagined happiness was found elsewhere, certainly not in his own home and heart.
The previous fall he’d driven to IKEA in Calgary and picked up kitchen cabinets and then gone home and installed them, laying out the boxes and reading the instructions, assembling the cabinets and then hanging them. Making love to Janice Collicutt was like putting together an IKEA kitchen, only in this case the instructions came from Janice herself, telling him to move her leg just so, to adjust his weight, and to help her hand find his cock. Sex with Janice was surprising for its mechanics. There were no tricks, there was no hesitation, everything fell together just so.
At night, he woke to find that Janice’s left leg had clamped him to the bed and held him with a ferocious possession. He lifted her leg and slid out of bed and walked naked into the kitchen and ran a cold glass of water. Drank it looking out at his yard and the pickup and the single yard light that fell like a sharp sun across the barn that held his three horses and a few layers and housed a motorized wheelchair. What was he doing? He laid the glass upside down in the sink and went back to bed and dreamed of a talking dog.
In the early morning, as Janice slept, he stepped out onto his porch and looked at the foothills to the west. They were not grand compared to the Rockies beyond, but they were a stepping stone to something greater, and he saw himself stepping into a new life, and the mountains dwarfed him and the foothills were miles away, and the sun rising behind him seemed just as happy for him as he was, in fact the sun seemed to wink at him. As a young man he had suffered anger and fits of rage and he had fought anything and everything that was presented before him. This all stopped one day. It had been immediate and true. A real conversion. He had been out riding fence, leaning into a westerly, fighting the snow and cold, and he’d gotten off to splice the fence when the barbwire snapped and wrapped around his neck and threw him to the ground. He would have bled out if his horse hadn’t nuzzled him out of the drifts and walked him home. On the horse, leaning forward, his face pressed against the mane, he’d had a vision of himself travelling down a wide road towards a bright light, and it was that bright light that stayed with him. From that day, he stopped all fighting, rid himself of his rage, forgave Dorothy, forgave himself, and he got himself a cat, an animal he’d always disliked. He grew to love the cat, a fat calico that proved to be a tremendous mouser. He was a changed man—still resolute, with little patience for fools, but kinder, softer, and sometimes leaning towards tears.
He saw her seven days in a row. He’d drive over to her apartment late in the day and roust her and wheel her out to his pickup and place her in the cab and drive the wheelchair up the planks into the box and then climb in beside her, and each time he did so he was delirious. He’d take a deep breath and then say, “Here we go.” And she’d grin and adjust her loose body and answer, “Yes.” They’d drive the roads below th
e foothills, watching the light fade pink and then dark green and then dusty grey and finally a soft blackness that verged on purple, which meant that the mountains were catching the last of the sun on their backsides. She was a bigger talker than he was. She’d grown up in town and been wooed by various men from a young age, perhaps because her father had money, or maybe because her eyes were different colours. “Men seem to like that,” she said. Her father had made his money selling mud to drilling companies. “A mud millionaire is what he calls himself.” He’d bought her a house after her divorce, and offered her a full-time nurse, but she preferred the company of the tenants at the Alton. “A lot of wisdom there, along with some unwanted advice,” she said. “My father flew me to Italy last year for that operation that opens the jugular venous system. That Zamboni guy discovered it. For a month I was leaping about like a newborn colt. And then, bang, I lost feeling in my leg and arm and I was back in a wheelchair.” She talked about herself as if she were describing someone else. Like she was watching her reflection in a triple-glazed window. And always, when darkness had arrived completely, he would drive her to his house and carry her inside and drop her on the bed and undress her and then take off his own clothes and lie down beside her and they would make love. One time, he discovered that he was crying, and she wiped at his tears and said that he was the sweetest thing she’d ever known. He said that with age his tears came more easily, and though it embarrassed him to admit this, he said it anyway.
For twenty years he had forsaken women and had even denied thoughts of sex. Like a monk who is faithful, he had cleansed himself. And now Janice was in his life and he had tumbled down the hill of virtue into the slough of carnality and he had never felt so free and so liberated and so full of life. She was beautiful and yet she wasn’t. He wanted to tell someone about her and one afternoon at a café just outside Calgary, when the waitress told him that he had a glint in his eye, he agreed and said he’d just met the love of his life. “It’s never too late I guess,” the waitress said, and he saw that she was calling him both old and lucky. He couldn’t argue with that.
On a Friday morning, after eating fried potatoes and eggs with Janice, he dropped her off at the Alton and he went to see Harv Engel, the manager of the Credit Union, the same man who had married and promptly seeded Bev’s ex-wife.
Harv was a big man. Some might have called him fat. He liked to say things like, “Let me be frank,” or, “Let’s cut to the chase,” or, “You need to line up your ducks.” Harv was in his office, holding down his chair. He was breathing heavily, as if he had run a long distance to meet with Bev. He sighed and said, “Let me be frank. I’ve cut you slack for the past year, reducing your interest rates, forgoing payments, but the time has come to face the music. You either sell the ranch or declare bankruptcy. Selling seems the better option.”
Here was a dreary flannel-mouthed barrel of a man who soaked up numbers and spat them back at you as if the numbers themselves were the only truth in the world.
Bev crossed his legs, laid his cowboy hat on his lap, and laid out a few numbers himself. “Give me sixty days,” he said. “May 30th. I’ll have the thirty thousand.”
“Where you gonna get that much money in that time, Bev? I hate to say this, but we can’t afford to keep postponing the inevitable. The feedlot’s looking for a new manager. They could use a good man like you.”
“Aww, heck, I’m too old to start all over again. And I can’t live in town, Harv. It’d kill me.”
“Ranch is killing you, Bev. Maybe there’s a little house in the country you could rent. I’ll keep my ear to the ground.” He touched an earlobe as he spoke, and Bev was aware of how his head was like a 20-gallon barrel sitting atop the 45-gallon drum that was his body.
“How are the kids?” Bev asked.
“Fine. Fine. Crystal’s playing volleyball this year. She has Dorothy’s legs. A real jumper.”
“Say hi to Dorothy.”
“For sure. For sure.” They shook hands. “Give the feedlot a call,” he said.
He drove home slowly taking the back roads, windows open, wondering if he was an ignoramus. He dismissed this thought and watched two geese, wings reared, land on the grassland.
At home, he discovered a Cadillac in his yard, parked near the barn. Jack Collicutt climbed out. Bev sat in the pickup and watched Jack approach. Rolled down the window.
“Mr. Wohlgemuht?”
“That’s me,” Bev said.
Jack stopped a few yards from the pickup. “Stay away from Janice,” he said. “She’s not terribly clear these days and is easily influenced.”
Bev waited. When nothing more was offered he said, “That it?”
“I think that’d be enough.”
“Last I heard you were married to another woman. Makes no sense why you should be concerned with Janice.”
“Like I said, she’s not at the top of her game. I’m concerned that you’re after more than Janice.”
“I’m not after anything, Mr. Collicutt. You can climb back into your slick car and get off my property.”
Jack looked around. “Tittle-tattle tells me it isn’t your property much longer.”
Bev opened the pickup door and stepped out. Jack moved backwards, palms held out, and then turned and scattered back to his shiny car.
Over the next three days, Bev and a neighbour boy who was all arms and acne rounded up bull calves and together they branded and inoculated and castrated. The skies were clear, the sun shone, the world was endless. During that time, Janice left him three messages that he didn’t reply to. He told himself that he was tired, that his ranch was demanding his time, but he knew that Jack’s visit had surprised him. He now saw himself as Jack Collicutt saw him—a bankrupt rancher who had fallen into the arms of a wealthy divorcee. It wasn’t a pretty thought. One night, late, the phone rang and he picked it up. Janice’s voice was soft and happy.
“There you are,” she said, as if they had been playing hide and seek.
“Yup.”
“What are you doing?”
“Soaking in the tub.”
“Nice. I miss you.”
“Well.”
“You wanna come over?”
“I’m naked as night.”
“Get dressed, come by, and get naked again.”
“I don’t know. I sort of fell off the path and I’m not sure it did me any good.”
“Good? What garbage.”
“You don’t know me at all,” he said.
“I know more than you think I know.”
“Well, put it this way then. I’d rather you didn’t know all that I think you don’t know.” He paused. “What do you know?”
“That you’re about to lose the ranch.”
“There a sign on my back or something?”
“Jack told me.”
“He informed me of the same.”
“You talked to Jack?”
“He paid me a visit. Warned me to stay away from you.”
“And you’re going to obey him? Get over here, Bev.” She hung up.
He climbed from the tub and shaved, angling his head to catch the dim light above the bathroom mirror. Splashed on aftershave. Dressed. Donned his white suede Sheplers. Stepped outside and smelled the air. A warm wind was blowing from the south. The stars were completely hung.
Going on 3 a.m. they were still talking. He’d told her everything vital about himself. His time in the mental hospital after his tour in Vietnam, the death of his father and mother and how much he missed his mother, his barren marriage, his unkindness to Dorothy when he learned that he was to blame for the lack of children, the money shortage, and his discovery early on in life that hard work kept him sane, even if that same hard work failed to provide him with the means to hang on to the little that he had. He said that he lacked generosity. In love, in life, and even with himself. He
paused, suddenly shy. He had never before spoken so clearly of himself, and his honesty surprised him, and the words and what they meant surprised him as well. He was like the man who wakes from a deep sleep and looks down at his feet and only comes to recognize those feet as his own by addressing them.
They were lying side by side in Janice’s bed. Janice held his hand as he spoke and when he was finished she said, “You’re way too hard on yourself.”
“I might disagree.”
“Not very bright then, are you?” She maneuvered her body on top of his. “Help me here,” she said, and he lifted and pulled until she had settled. Her weight was lovely. Her mouth was strong. Her generous heart.
The following night, alone in his own bed, he dreamed of a dog howling and he woke from a sinister sleep and heard the howling in his yard. He walked naked to the front door and opened it to discover Keller in the driveway howling at the fire that was consuming his stable. He ran for the barn. Blue was circling his pen, snorting and quivering. He laid a gunnysack over his eyes and led Blue out and set him free. He fetched the two remaining horses and then stood at a distance and felt the heat on his face and crotch and arms and he watched the sparks tear off into the night and he listened to the chickens burn. No use in calling the volunteer fire department.
He made sure no sparks came near the house. At some point he dressed and made himself a cup of coffee and sat on the stoop with Keller and together they watched the roof cave in. An unholy sound. Keller emitted a forlorn howl. Alley, his calico, appeared and walked a figure eight between his legs. He rubbed her ears. Jonesy, the neighbour to the south, drove up in his pickup and climbed out and asked about the livestock.
“Lost a few chickens. I freed the horses.” Bev waved a hand out towards the road indicating the direction they’d run.
