The question was met by silence. They all looked at each other, then at Jason.
“I am a member of Odin,” Jason said. “Why do you want to know?”
“She said if I wanted, I could come to buy fresh garden produce.” He glanced around the campsite. “No garden produce here, but from what she said this looks about the area.”
Jason pointed toward the trees. “In there,” he said. “If you bought once, they’ll come back.”
Tom nodded. When he turned and walked away, they never moved. They stayed watching him, none of them saying anything until he was halfway down the beach and they were certain he couldn’t hear them.
He didn’t believe them. They kept looking at each other. He expected them to be wary. Cops were the enemy. Cops looking into how they made their living, how they lived, always looking for drugs, ready to report them for not taking proper care of their kids. Drifting, drifting, one place to the next; but one or more of them might have a credit card and a rich daddy. He’d seen that before. The group’s cash resource. Used in emergencies. Maybe, maybe not. Groups like that scavenged, often stole on the principle that whatever they took, they needed more than the owner. Sold a few drugs. Panhandled. Busked. He stopped with that thought, mulled it over. Busking—that would explain the music around the fire.
Angel would have liked that, been thrilled to be with people who could perform, could teach her how to improve her playing. He tucked the thought away. Kept making his list. Sidewalk art in chalk. It got rougher if the leader was bent, if there was a real shortage of money, then the women could be sent onto the street to make a few dollars. A van parked close by a tourist area would do for tourist quickies.
It looked at first like an easy path. Drop out of school. Find friends who preached freedom and offered a home away from home. Life on the open road. A new family. He wondered about Joel and Myrna, what he and Sally had done wrong. Why hadn’t they had discussions about what they needed to do so their kids would get a degree, get a job, a spouse, a house in the suburbs?
They’d been busy trying to make enough money to pay the bills. A lot of the time, Myrna and Joel had been left to bring themselves up, and for a moment, he felt a hollowness, kids left to raise themselves in an empty house, looking for someone for guidance. For a moment, he regretted all the times no one was home when his kids returned from school. The shrink had said, “Give up on the blame. It’s a waste of time unless it gets you to change your behaviour.” It had been a challenge, but there was no going back, no making other decisions with the advantage of hindsight. “Let it go,” the shrink had said. “There’s enough blame in the world.” But when he paused to look back down the beach at the human wreckage there and who had taken on the mantle of leadership, he said, “Oh fuck.”
Chapter 13
Rig Pigs
Tom asked Sarah if there was anyone who made and sold meals besides the emporium. She reminded him of Dolly, the blonde woman who had sugar-coated donuts on a stick at bingo. Tom went to Dolly’s to ask her to make meals for him that he could put into the freezer. She opened the screen door a crack and peered out at him like he might be a home invader in the big city. He introduced himself, and she eyed him up and down.
“Sarah said you take orders for freezer meals,” he said. “She says you’re the best cook in town.”
The door opened slightly, but she was in darkness and he was in blinding light, so he could not make out any of her features. Her hand was on the edge of the door, and he could see her fingers. Every fingernail was a different colour.
“How many?” she asked. He wondered if there was a threshold. If he didn’t order enough, she might close the aluminum door and lock it. There were, he knew, unspoken rules that he would discover with time.
“Thirty. For September first. Sarah said I needed to get my order in.”
“Cash in advance.”
“Twenty-five per cent down. The rest on delivery.”
As Dolly made up her mind, the door wavered a bit. She pulled open the door with her right hand, held back a little girl with her left hand and shoved a small dog back with her left foot.
Her kitchen smelled of cinnamon and cloves. He took that as a good sign. She was short, blonde, maybe thirty, pretty.
When he was inside, she said, “Sit over there. I’ll get my order book and a pen. I use good ingredients. Better than that junk the Whites make. They use the cheapest stuff. Veggies they can’t sell and have got wrinkled. Canned food that’s after its expiry date.”
“Breakfast is sort of greasy,” he said, encouraging her. She chased her daughter and the dog away, got her order book and joined him at the table.
“They say they get their stuff from a wholesale. They don’t. They get it from a salvage place. Bankruptcies. Train wrecks. Most of it is out of date when it gets here.”
“You think they’re making a lot of dough?” he asked.
“Ha!” she said, spitting it up like a piece of food caught in her windpipe. “They’re rolling in it. They got all the summer business. And the rest of the year, unless you want to make a trip, you buy from them.”
“Where do you get your stuff?”
“I go to town with Ben. He makes deliveries and I shop.”
“Frenchie goes to town regularly.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but the Whites, they don’t like competition and, like, if you’re competition or they’re annoyed at you, Frenchie forgets to bring stuff you need, you know, or he wasn’t able to get what you want. There’s always a reason. You like meat pies?”
“Sure,” he said.
“You sure you want thirty meals? I’ve got to know so I can order. Everything has to be planned.”
“Thirty to start. Suppers.
“Fish okay?”
”No,” he said. “I’ll get my own fish.
“Five bucks, and that includes dessert.”
“Four and a quarter.”
“Four seventy-five,” she said. “You’re not exactly dainty. The portions have got to be good size.”
“Four fifty,” he countered.
“Done,” she said, “but you don’t get no fruitcake. You’ve got to buy that separately.” Sarah had said that Dolly liked to bargain. If he gave in to her first price, she’d tell everyone he was a pushover. “I don’t cheat on the quality, and I don’t cheat on the quantity. I thought the way you hang around the Whites you’d of gone there.”
“I ate one of your donuts at bingo.” It was all he needed to say to reassure her that he had come for the right reason. It explained everything, including the arrival at her door of a stranger, one she might have heard accused of secret, terrible things. There are those who make vast, convoluted explanations full of ifs and maybes, but he was not one of them. His explanation was simple and honest.
“Those Whites, they’re always chiselling. They wanted me to cook for them, wanted me to chisel on the food, wanted to chisel on my wages. They chisel the girls on their tips. Some people know nothing but chisel.”
“They sell a lot of different stuff.”
“Yah,” she said. “They’ve got the store, the café, those places they rent out. They charge for using the showers, they sell souvenirs. Horst’s got real estate; he takes big commissions. They got those little boats they rent out if you want to row around. They’re always figuring out how to chisel more money.”
“You’ve got a big garden.”
“Yah,” she said, putting the eraser end of her pencil in her mouth like it was a cigarette, then realizing what she’d done, taking it out. “You’ll get fresh vegetables. That’s why I’ve got to know. Thirty meals for the cop. So many green beans, so many zucchini, so many potatoes. People come with last-minute orders, maybe I’m all used up. Maybe I can get vegetables from somebody else’s garden, but maybe not. Then I have to use canned stuff. You order early, you get fresh. Yo
u okay with local meat?”
“Beef?” he asked. She shook her head. “Pork?” She shook her head again. “Mutton?” She looked at him in disgust. “Local meat,” he said aloud, then the light went on. “Oh, sorry, sure local meat is fine. Whatever, just so long as it’s not rabbit.”
“You want fresh eggs, you need to talk to Helga. She’s got three hundred chickens. You want chickens for freezing in the fall when she kills off most of the layers, you need to get in your order.”
“That the rooster that crows every morning?”
“He’s a mean bugger. She’s kept him for years. I don’t know why. He’ll come up behind you and peck your leg.”
“Anyone else I should know about?”
“Helga’s husband, Bolli, has sheep and goats. You want sheep milk, goat milk, he might sell it to you. Depends. Albert has milk for sale but not much.”
“Not many men in town.”
“Gone,” she answered and put her teacup down so hard the tea spilled over the side into the saucer. She picked up the cup, poured the tea from the saucer back into the cup. “Gone working.” She sat back in her chair. “And some don’t come back. They find a floozie.”
“Sounds like it would pay to go north and keep an eye on the guys.”
“I did before our daughter was born. Cooked on the tug. No place for a kid.”
“Tough to be apart so much.”
“Yah,” she agreed. “You ever stationed up there?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “For two years.”
“You know what goes on.”
He wasn’t sure what she was referring to. There was lots that went on. A wasp had got inside and it started to circle an open jar of honey on the table. She waved the wasp away and put the lid on the jar. “Local,” she said. “Fireweed. Wildflowers. Pastor Jon’s hives. It’s the best.”
The wasp returned, settled on the back of Tom’s right hand.
“It’s okay,” he said. “At this time of year they’re fine. He’ll drink my sweat and then fly away. In the fall they go crazy, unpredictable. They’ll stab you for no reason.”
“Pearl stabbed her husband when he came back five years ago. You’re not a cop anymore, are you?”
He shook his head and smiled. “I saw guys in a 3500 driving around, big tires.”
“The rig pigs,” Dolly said. “They go, they come back, they go. There’s no jobs here. Just welfare and fish. When they’re working, the guys live in dormitories. The company feeds them. If they live in town, they’re hot bunking because of the rent. Three guys, eight-hour shifts in bed. The rest of the time they’re working. They come back when they get a couple of weeks off.”
“When I came last winter, I asked Horst if I could get a hot meal. He said the café was closed for the winter. If I’d known about your cooking, I’d have knocked on your door.”
She shifted in her chair with pleasure. “Desserts,” she said. “Cakes freeze good, slices, cookies. I don’t use no sugar. I use honey straight from Pastor Jon.”
“No peanut butter cookies,” he said. “No peanut butter. I’m allergic.”
She wrote peanut butter down in capital letters then drew an X through it.
“The rig pigs get big money?”
“Big trucks. Big parties. Big, big, big,” she said. “They drop a hundred-dollar bill on the barroom floor, they don’t bother to pick it up. They know how to spend money, show a girl a good time.” Thinking about hundred-dollar bills on the barroom floor made her smile. She had a generous mouth, and when she smiled, her face lit up.
“You like rhubarb?” she said as she worked out the desserts. “When the rig pigs have money, Siggi calls me up and says, ‘Dolly, we’re having a party.’ Have you met Siggi?” Tom shook his head. “He says, ‘We need you to make stuff for us.’”
“Does he drop a hundred dollars on your floor?”
“He don’t argue about what I charge. He pays in cash. Right now, he’s short. He’s got to stay here for a while until stuff gets sorted out. His greenhouse business isn’t so good right now. He got a government grant to grow cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, but they quit giving the grant.”
“Are you here all year?”
“I used to go out places to cook. Can’t do that with a kid. There’s always people wanting a woman who knows how to cook in difficult situations. You like chili and stew?” She wrote down more items for the meals, and then added, “Then there’s them.”
He waited, wondering if he should ask who “them” were. She pushed her chair back and caught her daughter as she ran past, hauled her onto her lap and held her close. Her daughter squirmed and slipped under her mother’s arms onto the floor and was off again, running into the hallway on pudgy legs, chasing the dog that fled before her.
“Them?” he asked.
“Them.” She jabbed her finger toward the north. “Them. Odin. The crazy Vikings. They run around in costume. They got their own place. Them and their stories. Them and how we’re all going to be rich one day. Those of us who stay, who had people here when Odin first came and made everybody crazy.”
Her daughter came staggering back into the kitchen, her arms around the dog, under its front legs, the dog nearly as long as she was tall. It was, he thought, a patient dog—it didn’t struggle or try to bite her but waited until she let go, then bounded away and ran back down the hallway. With a high-pitched squeal, Dolly’s daughter ran after it.
“What do they say?”
“They don’t say anything. It’s the others, the ones that came before. The founders. They’re the ones. They’re the ones who had the gold, who hid it away in wooden chests. My grandmother saw it, the gold. Glass sealers full of it. They brought lots of money. The Godi wanted it. I don’t know why, since he said the world was going to end. The others didn’t come for gold. They came because they believed.”
“In God?”
“In Odin. In the one-eyed man. After he came, no one would ever get older. They’d get up every morning and drink and dance and feast and have sex.”
Instinctively, he reached up and touched the scar that ran from his forehead down his cheek.
Dolly laughed when she saw him touch his scar. “The ravens come onto your picnic table. Everyone’s seen that.”
Tom felt that he was becoming unhinged, that reality was sliding away, like he’d taken a drug that altered everything. In college he’d gone to a party where someone had slipped LSD into the punch and he’d felt like this; everything had melted, there was no substance to anything, everything became fluid and the desperate faces rose up, saying nothing but watching him with accusatory eyes.
He put his hand into his pocket and grasped the piece of broken taillight. He squeezed and felt the sharp edges cut into his palm. Pain always brought back reality, brought him back to the present, made everything solid and real. For a time in adolescence, when he thought he was going crazy and he couldn’t control his thoughts, he had used a razor blade, cutting himself under his armpit where no one could see it. He even tried putting his hand over a burning candle. Anything to keep from drifting away. That craziness had lasted a short while, and now the scars were faded, thin lines, there under his left arm.
She rubbed the right corner of her mouth with her tongue, looked at him speculatively, then took a cigarette out from a silver-coloured cigarette case, tapped it on the table, flicked her purple lighter and took a long drag. She tipped her head back and blew three smoke rings.
She held out the cigarette case. He shook his head. “Quit,” he said.
“Goody two-shoes,” she replied, as if his quitting was a criticism.
“No. Asthma. Runs in the family.”
He could see that she was relieved that he wasn’t a puritan, that he wasn’t going to be critical of her smoking. She put her tongue against the back of her front teeth and pulled it away so it made a poppi
ng sound.
“You know Pearl. She thinks you’re okay. I don’t think you should be asking her any questions. She’s done you a couple of favours. She told you about Jessie wanting to sell her house. Pearl’s got lots of her own problems. Bad nerves.” And with that, Tom thought about the brandy in her coffee, the little splash that was followed by another little splash. Dolly jerked the cigarette out of her mouth, and even though it was only half smoked, she butted it out in the ashtray.
“Six months is a long time for a man to be away. They’ve got needs. Short term. Men and dogs, everything’s got to be right now. You know what I mean? They were having supper, eight of them, and one of the men made a joke about my stepdad, Ragnar, having a girlfriend at Norman Wells. We all know he has a hard time keeping it in his pants. It shouldn’t have been a surprise or anything. It’s too bad they weren’t having spaghetti. They were eating T-bones. Steak knives. It happened so fast nobody could do anything about it. He was sitting across the table from her. She reached over and stuck her steak knife into his chest. Right between two ribs. She’s always been like that. Overreacts. She’s gotta have drama. I’ve never liked that. She thinks she’s living in a movie. You know what I mean? The guys got him into a truck and drove like hell for town.
“Good thing the road was passable. He lost a lot of blood, but he was okay in a week. He said it was an accident. She leaned over to try a piece of his steak and slipped. They all said the same thing. What was she gonna do if he decided to stay up north with his floozie?” She picked up the cigarette, straightened it out and relit it.
“Pearl was fifty. Get a job in a camp as cook? He had good life insurance, but if he’d kicked the bucket, I don’t know that they’d of said it was an accident.” She thought about it as she took another drag and let it out. “Yeah, they’d have said it was an accident. What the hell. What’s the point of her rotting in jail while he’s rotting in the ground? She pisses me off at times, but she’s a good mom. She’s taking yellow pills and green pills for her nerves.”
Her mother, he thought, was the blue puffball? That was a surprise. “She stabbed him since?”
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