Shot-Blue

by Jesse Ruddock

  Keb picked up a tin cup from the bottom of the boat and held it out. She took it but didn’t understand. ‘There’s nothing in this cup,’ she said.

  He took it back, reached off the dock and dipped it in the lake.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, taking it back. ‘Is this your boat?’

  ‘It is.’

  He helped her in and untied the ropes.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asked.

  ‘You work in the kitchen,’ Keb answered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what you do. You work in the kitchen.’

  ‘Maybe I’m going to but I don’t yet.’

  She looked into the cup but couldn’t drink. She couldn’t drink because drinking water pulled from a lake was obviously a special and lovely thing to do, and she didn’t feel like doing something special and lovely.

  As the boat took off, the wind drew tears from her eyes. She expected so much but had no idea what to expect. She didn’t try to hide her face from the man. She held her head high like a boxer, showing it off at a loose, tempting angle. Keb thought things might go badly for her.

  §

  Tomasin had always been lazy but was somehow fit, with small round shoulders and high hips. She had a long walk. She was strong enough to help the boys down at the docks before and after her kitchen work. They let her join them because she was new blood. Anything new that far out was embraced and would be known. Her face was not impressive but small and indistinct under a tangle of blond hair she never brushed. She had green eyes that didn’t open very wide, and when she didn’t get enough rest, which was most of the time, her eyes were red-rimmed. These red rims were threatening, but she was only sixteen and what could she do. They liked having her around. During her first couple days with them, she kicked a fishing rod into the water, ruining the reel, and broke the tip off another rod by jamming it in the corner of the boathouse door. She coiled ropes so badly they unfurled of their own accord like snakes with full stomachs. She cut the inside of her hand trying to sharpen a knife on the hand-crank whetstone, then showed off her bandaged hand at every chance. But she also swam way out without complaining about the cold. She was good and bad, they wouldn’t overthink it.

  Most of the boys were privately ready to give in to her purpose, whatever it was. Jer LaFleur was first among them. A young guide, he would put his hand in the mouth of a wolf to see how rough the tongue was. The head guides, Noah Coke and William, were men and married, but even they paid attention to Tomasin. She was entertaining, at least unpredictable. The Ware brothers, Sean and Adrian, wanted to know more. Only the youngest, Philip, was afraid, but he’d never had a girl for a friend.

  Tomasin had her choice, she could feel it, and she chose the least likely boy to be hers. She chose him because he resisted. He never turned to look at her as she came down off the path to the dock. He had long hair like a girl, and it was the darkest hair she’d seen. She was jealous of his hair. He never came over and talked; the loudest racket he made was the rush of rope through his hands, while the others banged around in the hulls of their boats. He was always gone for the night before she could touch his arm to say goodbye.

  Tomasin and Marie were on the porch in the early morning, waiting for Anuta to call them into the kitchen. Marie stood with her back against the wall of the lodge, looking out at the water. She was thinking about nothing, which she loved to do but could never make happen. To think of nothing was, in fact, one of Marie’s favourite things to do.

  Tomasin was making the blood rush to her head by folding herself over the railing. She liked the feeling of the pressure building behind her eyes.

  ‘Who is that?’ Tomasin asked Marie, swinging up and pointing to the low path.

  ‘Who?’ Marie answered, not looking.

  ‘That!’ Tomasin said, blood pouring down through her shoulders. ‘Who is that boy, Marie?’

  Marie saw Tristan walking to the docks. ‘No,’ she answered, shaking her head back and forth, ‘not him.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘He keeps to himself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He does, that’s all.’

  ‘But who is he?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Marie said, lying. She pressed her back hard against the wall and hoped more or less to fall through it. ‘I guess he’s nobody.’

  ‘Nobody?’ said Tomasin. ‘I like that.’ She leaned over the railing again. ‘I want to know him. He must be more than he seems, Marie. He’s not nobody.’

  ‘Leave him alone.’

  ‘I feel like I know him,’ Tomasin said, trying to tell the future.

  ‘You don’t know him.’ Marie was the only one who did. Her father and mother knew too, but wished they didn’t. Marie was the only one who wanted to know.

  ‘What’s his weakness? What do you think gets to him?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Marie, pushing against the wall so hard it seemed to push back and almost pushed her forward onto her hands and knees.

  Jer LaFleur wanted to know.

  ‘It’s late,’ William told him.

  ‘But what’s with him? Say if you know,’ said Jer.

  It was late. The guides were on their bunks in the dark, within reach of each other.

  Soon they would be in dreams and they were all waiting for that: to be alone. They were also vaguely waiting for Tristan to come home. He always came in late, after the lights went out.

  He was an ongoing argument. He was present when spoken to but otherwise absent – if you wanted his attention, you had to say his name.

  ‘He’s always thinking,’ said William.

  ‘What?’

  William was twice Jer’s age, but Jer talked to him like they were young friends, urging him on. ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘By his eyes,’ said William.

  ‘His eyes? I haven’t looked at them.’

  ‘They’re black-like.’

  ‘Black like what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘This isn’t helpful,’ said Jer.

  ‘Like night,’ William offered. ‘But not in here. Not night inside. They’re like night out there, whatever kind of black that is.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jer. He didn’t look at people’s eyes. And besides, the night out there wasn’t black. There were two huge moons: one in the sky and one on the water.

  ‘If you don’t know what’s happening with him, that doesn’t mean nothing’s happening. It’s like night. Lots happens, but you don’t know.’

  ‘He is like the night? Bullshit!’

  ‘This isn’t really about him, Jer. It’s about you.’

  ‘It is not.’

  ‘You dig at him because you don’t know what’s going on in his head.’

  ‘If anything,’ said Jer.

  ‘You can get anxious about everything you don’t know, if you want. Like tonight, what walks past us, what flies over and how low? You don’t know. If it rains, you don’t know until you get to your boat in the morning and have to bail it out. You know less than you don’t.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know either. But I know that.’

  They fell quiet and listened to what the night was doing outside the cabin.

  ‘Head like a cedar,’ said Noah Coke calmly.

  Noah was in the bunk below Jer LaFleur. He knocked on the piece of plywood that was the bottom of Jer’s bed. ‘His head is like a cedar tree, Jeremy! Do you get that?’

  Jer laughed. Sometimes, as he floated off to sleep, he forgot he was in a bunk bed.

  ‘You know how cedars look fresh and strong, but you cut into them and your saw falls through the middle? You have to watch your front leg.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Jer.

  ‘There’s nothing in there but damp air,’ William added.

  ‘There’s a hollow,’ said Noah Coke.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jer.

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’

  ‘They g
row like that close to the water,’ said William. ‘Hollow.’

  ‘They do,’ Jer agreed.

  ‘Where do you go when you want to find that boy?’ asked Noah. ‘He’s always at the water. The end.’

  ‘Head like a cedar tree,’ said Jer, laughing sleepily.

  ‘Nothing in there,’ whispered Noah.

  Tristan had been dreaming but didn’t want his dream and rose before the sun. He reached over the side of his bunk, picked up his boots and pulled them on, still lying on his back and bending his knees to his chest. By the light of thick stars, he walked the long way around the pitched and rocky northwest side of the island. He walked along the cliffs until they sunk into the water. Then he walked low, where the waves broke, stepping carefully from rock to rock, the water sulking below.

  He sat on the rocks where he used to sit when he was alone. Of course his mother had been there, he had not been alone, but he did not want to think of her. If he looked out, he could imagine there was nothing at his back, no paths leading to stairs, no stairs leading to porches and doors, no walls and open windows, no tables planted with cut flowers, no strangers asleep in his house. He liked the beginning before the beginning of the sunrise, and this morning it lasted a long time. He didn’t notice that he was cold until the sun slipped its fingers in between the treeline and sky to split a space open like the gills of a fish, showing the red breathing ribbons.

  First light shed unsteady warmth like a young fire that was all kindling, thin sticks burning brightly and quickly. He reached his hands out to put them closer to the fire.

  The sun soon woke the wind, which carried the kindling light wavering in all directions, in white and gold, until everything was lit. The fire wouldn’t burn out but into daylight. Tristan pulled his hands back and rested them against his stomach. He was relieved it was over. The daylight brought warmth and shadows. The shadow of the porch over his head fell across his back and over the ground in bars of dark and light. One of the dark bars hit his sleeve and he shook it off like a spider.

  ‘Hi,’ said a voice dropping like another shadow.

  He leapt to his feet, looked for the voice and tried again to shake the shadow off.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s me,’ said a girl, climbing down the rocks behind him, and crawling into his hiding space under the verandah.

  He shook his wrist to wick off a new shadow.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said.

  He didn’t know her.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know why sometimes I can sleep and sometimes I can’t. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  He would have backed away, but his back was to the water and the rock sloped down like a sandbank.

  Tomasin thought about introducing herself, then thought better: she would pretend they were close and soon they would be.

  ‘What are we doing?’ she asked, assuming he was out early for the same reason she was. ‘I feel so restless,’ she told him, sitting down where he’d just been. ‘I guess we have to wait.’

  He wasn’t waiting for anything.

  ‘I never watch the sunrise like this,’ she said.

  ‘The sun’s already up.’

  Tristan didn’t know how to tell her to leave and never come back here.

  It was funny, she thought, that he was pretending to ignore her when there was no one else. She looked at the side of his face, at his dark hair tucked behind his ear, then at his cheek, so soft it surprised her, like the cheek of a little boy.

  Tristan leaned away under the pretence of picking up a few stones or a stick to snap into pieces, but nothing loose was within reach. He scratched a white line in black lichen with his fingernail.

  Tomasin knew that sometimes you have to go through uncomfortable motions to make a friend. It could be like getting into tight jeans.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, calling to him even though he was close.

  He turned.

  ‘I’ve never seen that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You have the darkest eyes. And your lips too, they’re dark.’ In discovering them, she claimed them. ‘I knew there would be something like that,’ she said, smiling to herself and sitting back.

  §

  It was still early summer, a quiet day of no wind. On her two o’clock break, Tomasin went down to the docks feeling that all was possible, nothing necessary. ‘I didn’t come here looking for you,’ she told Tristan affectionately.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, keeping his head down.

  Bending over rows of fishing lures, he thought of covering them with his hands to hide them from her. He would have swept them up and held them against his chest, but the hooks.

  ‘What is all this?’

  ‘They throw lures away when the hooks are bent or stripped,’ Tristan said, picking up a tear-shaped Red Devil. It fit in his palm. Two of its three hooks were gone. ‘A fish will do this, or a snag. I take the bad hooks off.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I replace them.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  Tristan’s lures were laid out like patients across the warm dock planks. There were spoons and crankbaits in rows by colour: white and silver, silver with blue-striped backs, black with yellow bellies, and monotones in Crush orange and chartreuse. It made Tomasin remember her grasshopper hospital. She might have been six or seven when she set up the row of red bricks in the backyard. There were three holes per brick. She folded squares of toilet paper and tucked them into the holes for sickbeds. Then she scoured the backyard on her hands and knees for hours. She missed meals. She borrowed her mother’s hairbrush to untangle the tall grass at the fence. But her desire to help the sick was frustrated, since all she could do was catch perfectly healthy grasshoppers that didn’t need her help. Wiry, crisp-backed. They didn’t need her until she pulled their legs off like she was plucking them out of the air.

  Tristan clipped off the bent and rusty flaking hooks with small wirecutters that popped.

  She enjoyed each pop.

  ‘You don’t want to scratch the paint off,’ he told her.

  Subdued by the sun and by him, Tomasin sat down. She looked at the eyes she’d discovered and liked them even more than before. They were darker than she remembered. But that was always their message: darker than you thought. His hair was almost the same length as hers, but hers was loose and white from the sun, while his was tied low at the back of his neck. It was purplish black, the kind of colour that rubs off on your hands. She wanted to untie his hair to see what it would look like down, and because she knew it would make him uncomfortable.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘If you don’t line them up, they get tangled,’ he said. ‘That’s why I do it in rows.’

  She wondered if he was stupid.

  ‘The new hooks will also break, or rust and crumble,’ said Tomasin.

  ‘I know that,’ he answered, openly smiling.

  ‘Just making sure,’ she told him, then did nothing but smile back hard.

  §

  The verandah for Richter’s parties hung off the edge of the island over water thirty feet deep. Tight and boundless as a pier, it inspired people to lean over its railing. It inspired commotion like a classroom, its sound carrying and breaking into echoes across the front bay, always slightly out of tune, since every night the piano was wheeled out into the weather’s mercy, its wood painfully swollen midsummer. In winter, you could break a piece of the piano off like a square of chocolate, using your finger and thumb, but now the wood was so damp you could leave a thumbprint in it.

  But if the songs were all sung out of tune, it was right – it would have been too much for the rest of the island if the music had been pitch perfect. Like this, it was faintly repulsive. It wasn’t going to save any souls. It was no reason for the uninvited to feel bad about themselves.

  Tomasin sat under the verandah because she loved parties. Tristan sat there because it was where he always sat. It seemed everyone above them had ea
sy voices that split emotions like rounds of wood. They knew so many songs, when to quiet down and when to shout, when to snap their fingers. Tomasin rolled her shoulders and mouthed the words. Tristan crossed his arms and legs and looked at his crossed arms and legs, at his knees sore from working, now bent at a painful angle. He wished to stretch his legs out but was too self-conscious to move a lot.

  He tried to look out, away from himself, but couldn’t. The calm he usually felt when he came here alone was gone. If she didn’t know the words to the song, why was she pretending? She sang a little behind the words, almost in round, her fingers flickering and picking at the air as if there were berries there. She couldn’t be still. He thought about taking her hands and pinning them down. He took a look at her long, narrow legs and arms – not a lot of strength.

  ‘If you can’t dance, one thing follows the other,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you can’t dance, you can’t be a good lover. I’ve heard that.’

  Tristan tried to see the water, the two round islands to the east, but his eyes held an afterimage of her forehead and face, and her hands. The hands were bright as if lit. If this was how it was going to be, he needed to leave.

  ‘I know what your weakness is,’ she told him. Maybe she could feel how weak he was then, as the singing grew louder. People joined in and the piano followed their lead until the dance was almost frantic. They were not laying their burdens down up there, but throwing them. ‘To hell with it!’ a voice cried, and more voices knew to answer, ‘To hell!’

  Tristan wondered what it was, and why they wanted it to go to hell. Tomasin kept saying ‘To hell!’ under her breath like she was in on it.

  ‘My weakness?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘You have to tell me now.’

  She didn’t feel like it anymore.

  ‘You have to tell me.’

  ‘It’s the way you are.’

  She picked more berries out of the air.

  There was nowhere for him to run. This was where he came when he ran away.

  ‘What I’m saying is hard to say.’ She was annoyed to stop dancing to answer him, feeling more akin to what was going on above, to all the people she didn’t know.