Bled

by Jason McIntyre

  “Eat up,” She said with weight as she dropped the plate in front of him. It landed with a clang and the pineapple shifted.

  And as she retreated through the thinning onlookers again, and as she saw Frank Moort take his first forkful into his mouth between exchanges with his pleased compadres, her first two fingers on her right hand sent a bolt of itching pain snaking up through her wrist and past her elbow.

  5.

  In the ladies’ room, she had cold running water blasting into the sink—spraying—into the sink and dotting her arms with icy drops. From her purse, she had a needle from a matchbook-sized mending kit hovering over the finger tip of her right index finger. The finger was now swollen to twice the size it had been the day before. The pain was excruciating and the first two knuckles had no bend left in them. When she tried to force them, shots of hurt wound backwards to her forearms.

  Infection. Clearly, it was a bad, bad mother of an infection. She knew she should go to the town doc. Knew she should. But she hated him. Hated ever going to a doctor, wanted to live the rest of her life without ever needing have one lay his practiced hands on her.

  She had her pink apron bunched up in her mouth, wedged in between her jaw teeth on both the top and bottom. She looked up at herself in the mirror, seeing the intensity on her own face. Then she looked back down at the needle to make sure it was in place, squeezed her eyes shut tight and jammed the point in as deep as she could stand it.

  6.

  It took Frank Moort over an hour to finish his cheesecake because he was chatting with nearly everyone in town. Those in the restaurant when he’d made his announcement had sent family members and friends out onto Main Street to round up more folks—some just to congratulate Frank Moort on his windfall, others to try and get an order in to the kitchen on his dime before he realized that they weren’t in the café when he’d said his piece.

  If Frank Moort was worried his new cash wouldn’t cover all these extra dinners and desserts, his face never showed it.

  By the end of his meal, he downed the final swallows of his cool coffee and the last two bites of extra pineapple on his plate. Now he was feeling a little heavy around the middle. Someone pushed a pack of cigarettes his way but he didn’t take one. It was hot and heavy in here, and Frank Moort needed some air.

  Helen came to take his plate and noticed he was looking even less coloured in the face than before. Heavy rings stood out under his eyes. And his eyes themselves didn’t seem to be focusing on anything. They were looking at things faraway like those of a man who’s had too much scotch.

  “Add these to my bill, Dab,” Frank said, blurry-eyed to his left where Dab was having an in-depth talk about football with Mr. Parson, proprietor of Parson’s Hardware. And then Frank Moort got up, and pushed his way to the door. “I’ll settle up in a few days. No problem.” With a dingle from the door’s overhead bell, he was gone.

  7.

  Teeny had come awfully close to passing out in the ladies’ room. All that blood--all her blood--going down the drain after it poured out of her fingers made her wretch into the sink after it so she had needed to sit down on the cold tile floor and put her head between her knees while the swimming motion left her brain. The bleeding stopped quickly, staunched by stacks of paper towel bunched up and wrapping her right hand like poor man’s medical gauze.

  No more aspirin, she had thought. No more today. More would just thin the blood and make it gush again.

  She had been heavy-headed enough to get on her feet and come out of the ladies’ room in time to see a grey-skinned Frank Moort leave the café without paying his bill. He had staggered against the door jamb on his way out and Teeny’s eyes shot to the empty plate in Helen’s hand as she came towards her at the back of the restaurant.

  “Good thing Frankie-Moort’s so generous t’day, Teeny,” Helen said.

  “Yeah,” Teeny said, “Why’s that?"

  “Takes all the attention away from you having an effin’ meltdown in the back alley.”

  8.

  It was over the next week and a half that Teeny’s imagination really got the better of her.

  Where is Frank Moort?

  She had said goodbye to the sweepstakes ticket, had said goodbye to the way of life she imagined it would buy her. She realized she’d been hanging on to even the last scrap of that life, right up to the moment she served him his dessert.

  Where on earth is he?

  She leaned on the prep counter, her elbows black from the newsprint under her. She’d been paging through the Press, looking at store ads from the mainland, dresses mostly— dresses she and her mom wouldn’t be able to buy.

  But now she was just staring out the porthole window on the kitchen’s swinging doors. It was past ten A.M. A tiny smattering of breakfast customers had cleared out and now it was just a waiting game for the early lunchers to start ambling in. But this was Wednesday, mid-week, and that crowd would be lame too. No tips. Silently, Teeny thanked Helen for switching shifts so Helen could get a prime Saturday and Teeny could get this lame-leg Wednesday one.

  Where in God’s name could he be?

  Teeny couldn’t concentrate on the ads, couldn’t concentrate on much today. Frank Moort hadn’t been back for his customary chicken salad sandwich, pickles on the side, coffee, ice water and cheesecake. He hadn’t been back to the café since the day he stiffed on all those lunch bills. Teensie wondered how solid his friendship with Dab was now.

  Teeny’s ideas about Frank Moort were this. That he had been ’sitting’ on that sweepstakes ticket—waiting till his wife left him so he could have all the money to himself. Jesus, maybe she didn’t leave town. Maybe he killed her so he could enjoy the winnings. Now she was sweating. That was ridiculous.

  But maybe only as ridiculous as it was to serve a customer pineapple out of that messed up tin in the back room. She’d disposed of the rest of it, told Dab they were out and they’d gotten a half dozen fresh new cans of the stuff brought in a few days later.

  Where?

  She realized she was absently picking at the corners of a clipping she’d taken from the Island Press weeks ago. She’d been holding onto it, tucked inside the front pocket of her pink apron, now dusty and covered with coffee and tea stains. The clipping, of course, was the sweepstakes numbers and the piece of newsprint was already starting to yellow. The numbers were now an ashen shade of grey, not black.

  The bell over the Highliner’s front door jingled. Teeny’s eyes shot back to the porthole and did a long focus on the patron entering there.

  She saw a pate of salt and pepper hair, plus the shoulders of a brown suit coat and a matching brown dress hat being hung up on a hook. Then, behind the suit coat she saw the postal uniform of Rod Davies, the town mailman. He was pretty nearly on the nose for his schedule this morning. The man in the suit was talking to Rod as they moved out from beyond the view through the porthole. Teeny pushed through the kitchen doors at once and moved down the main aisle of the café towards them.

  When she got to them, Rod looked up at her, the notorious gossip that he was, and said, “Tina? You taking time off today for the funeral?"

  The man in the brown suit coat turned around. It was Mr. Parson, the owner of the hardware store. She couldn’t tell it was him from way back in the kitchen because the suit coat’s arms hid his war tattoos. From the back, and at such a distance, he could have been Mr. Moort, was nearly the same age and wore roughly the same shades of thin hair, at least at the back. Ah, who was she kidding? No, it so obviously wasn’t him, wasn’t the same build or stature at all. But she wanted it to be him. Needed it to be.

  Teeny rubbed her healing fingers on her brow. “Whose funeral?" she asked, knowing full well the answer but not wanting to.

  “Franklin Moort’s o’course. You didn’t hear the news? He was a regular here, wasn’t he, Tina?"

  Teeny’s guts sank like a pile of oily stones all the way down to the deepest pits of her midriff. She felt the heavy weight of them sin
king, sinking. Her mind clouded and threatened to float away in the cool cafe’s air, up to the fourteen foot ceilings where the paint was cracked and yellow.

  “Uh, yeah. I mean no,” Teeny finally croaked out of a dry mouth. “—No, I didn’t hear. What?”

  “Neighbours found him on the weekend. Been dead a few days, started to—uh—ripen... if you know what I mean.”

  “’S that so?” Teeny asked absently, no longer looking Mr. Parson or Rod the mailman in their eyes. Her gaze drifted out the big filmy windows to main street and the tiny sample of the harbour she could see from here. It was a partly cloudy day. Cooler than the last few weeks. Maybe rain tonight.

  “Yuh. Died in his sleep, they think. Not sure what for. Man his age, might go with a heart attack or some such. But Ol’ Doc Sawbones ordered an autopsy. Gonna be a memorial this afternoon anyway, without the—uh—body. Union Rail’s puttin’ it on. He was pretty high up there, as I understand it. The weirdest thing, Tina? Word around town is, Frankie-Moort’s hair all fell out of his head. It was scattered all over his house. So was flecks of his...his skin.”

  “Oh.” Teeny felt faint, and reached for the backrest of one of the booths. It was Frank Moort’s customary booth. Mr. Parson helped her to sit and gave Rod a dire look as he sat across from her, as if to say, Cut it out, man. Can’t you see the girl doesn’t want to hear this stuff?

  But Roddy kept on. “Yuh. Crazy, huh? His teeth all came out too, soft as molasses, right there on the floor, they say. Skin as grey as an elephant. Ol’ Doc wondered if it was some kind of poison. Maybe Ol’ Frankie went a bit off his rocker after Caroline left. Maybe even drank some thinner out in his garage or something. Who knows, right—?"

  Then Rod, finally aware of Mr. Parson’s glare, cut himself off. He was fumbling in his ruck sack of mail and small packages and fished out a rubber-banded bundle of letters and cards. He padded through them and brought out some. On top was one addressed to Tina McLeod, c/o The Highliner Café, Dovetail Cove.

  “Here’s today’s mail, Tina. Take care, now. Try not to think about all that stuff I—I just said. Sorry.” He turned and Mr. Parson stood to put his hand on the mailman’s back and guide him out while scolding him under his breath. “Jee-zus, man, what are you thinking…?”

  Teeny didn’t really see them go, or hear them. They were far away now and she was thinking about...wrath. Thinking about the hand of God. She took the mail, turned, and went back to the kitchen. As she pushed back through the double swing doors, the word damnation came to her. The tears came then.

  Oh good lord in heaven, why, why, why did I do that? Why?

  Then she spoke aloud, not worried if one of the cooks was back here, if Helen was around or even if Dab Saum, was either. She was bawling, bawling and screaming skyward. She was shivering and her hands and arms strained with tension.

  “Sorry I questioned you. Oh Looooord. Oooooooh. Sorry I took your name in vain. Sorry I wondered of your great plan.”

  Spit was blowing out of her mouth, water ran down her cheeks and hit her dress shirt and apron. She squeezed the clutch of mail almost crushing the handful of it.

  Then she looked down at it in the mail, gently willed her hand to open, the one with fingers that looked like they were beginning to heal.

  The envelope on top, the one with her name on it—could this be from the secretarial school? It didn’t matter now, nothing much mattered. After everything, after her losing it all and after Mama losing it all, nothing much mattered.

  But she opened it anyway. She opened it because it made no sense that she would get mail delivered to her at the Highliner. She needed it to make sense. She needed something to make sense. If it was from the secretarial school on the mainland, or anywhere else, it would have come to her home address and that would be delivered by Rod Davies to a neighbourhood mailbox out at the end of Lannen with the mail for everyone else on three or four streets out that way.

  Inside was her sweepstakes ticket, crumpled but obviously hers. The envelope and other mail fell away to oblivion. Everything did. The prep counter, the whole kitchen, the Highliner Café—all of it was not important. She pawed at the pile on the floor and grabbed up the envelope again. There in the upper corner it read, F. Moort and then he and Caroline’s address here in town.

  Teeny grabbed at the clipping from the Press in her apron to double-check that it was the actual ticket, the right number and not some duplicate or some replacement ticket.

  When did he mail this? When?

  It was her ticket. By God, it was the very same she’d been coveting, the very same that she’d dropped on the dining room floor, the very same Frank Moort had curiously leaned over to snag up with a curious, quizzical look knit into his eyebrows.

  A huge rush of warmth came into Teeny’s body. Not a painful one, but a luxurious one, a heat wave of great vigour, of strength. “Is this your plan, oh Lord?” she said. “Is this it? I was to go through all of that...for this?”

  Then Teeny looked at the date on her newspaper clipping. Despite the greying text and yellowing paper, the date was unmistakable. Mar 22, 1972.

  The date on her ticket was different. It said May 22, 1972.

  It was twelve noon.

  Part VI

  A Tale of Two Men, A Tale of Two Women

  Contents: Typewritten letter, signed, notarized

  To: Tina Abigail McLeod, Dovetail Cove (pending address confirmation)

  From: Caroline Moort Nee Osborne, Seattle, Washington

  Dated: December 31, 2002

  Receipt: Not confirmed as of May 26, 2003

  Office record copy; file closed

  Dear Tina,

  It’s a bit strange to start that way. You neither knew me or probably felt that you would ever be dear to me. And now, here, closing in on the end of my life, I wish I’d had a daughter like you. Or a daughter at all.

  You’re probably open-mouthed right now. Wondering whose voice this is from beyond the grave, as they say. Not, mind you, because you have heard about my passing, because, let’s face facts, missy, if you ARE reading this then that means I HAVE passed. But it’s more because you probably never thought much about me past about 1972 after my husband Frank died.

  And, yes, he was still my husband. Estranged is the word they used at the time of his death. Separated, though not legally, as my lawyers term it. I have been living in Seattle, Washington these last years. Took up with a banker by the name of William H. Linnen. He took good care of me despite me never wishing to marry again. Truth be told, I didn’t want to come clean with him about this one thing that I had been carrying. That I had been the wife of Franklin Moort and all that went with that marriage.

  Despite this, and despite my continued health problems, William stayed by my side. He’s here now, in fact, in the other room while I sit and slowly dictate these words to my home care assistant. I’m on a ventilator and I can’t write no more, you see. Haven’t been able to in some years.

  Now, the real purpose of this letter. Fact is, there are two reasons.

  First is, I knew your daddy. And I want to tell you what I know about his life...and his death. You may well crumple this up and throw it away. I suggest you save your anger at me for the end and refrain from doing that. You’re going to want to read this. Not all of it, no. Some of it will be harder than H-E-double-hockey-sticks for you to read. But, by the end, my money says you’ll want—no, NEED—to read the majority of my words.

  My apologies. For certainly, these words come too little and far too late. That is part of why I write them.

  A primer, then.

  Oren McLeod worked for my husband, Franklin Moort at Union Rail in the township of Dovetail Cove for seven or eight years over the course of the 1950s. Oren was a train engineer, worked right on the lines, drove the trains, twenty, thirty cars full of raw uranium ore, sometimes, the unhealthy variety, yellowcake straight from the mill. It wasn’t enriched because plants that used enriched were pricy and there wasn’t one wi
thin several thousands of miles of Dovetail Cove or the mine out there. But the island reactor was a whole new kind. Some smarties figured out how to build one that only needed a high concentration of the fissile material to work. Some smart politician figured out how to make the island’s natural deposit of the stuff work in a tidy type of what they called a ’vertical integration’—one that would make it into business courses years later.

  It would also make Frank and me richer than any two people have a right to be. The politicians were bent on bleeding the poor island for their political power. Others opted for the financial kind of compensation. And surely my Frank thought, hey, count me in. Eventually, he bled the whole island dry. But that was his style—to never take second place when it came to using something up.

  Union Rail’s part in all of it was the pivot point. Without the trains to cart the raw materials around, or the milled stuff, there’d have been no reactor built, no mill, thousands fewer jobs and the island would have stayed as poor as it had been for the first fifty years of the twentieth century.

  You might have been too young in the heyday, but there were three rail lines at the peak, Only two in the beginning, but three when things were really cookin’. One south line went direct from the uranium mine to a processing mill, mid-island, then on to the reactor and cooling tower at the far north end of the island. Another line went direct from near the processing mill east to the shipyards. Oren McLeod worked these main two lines daily.

  It was the first partnership of its kind in North America and was all over the evening news in black and white: Union Rail, Sheeling Electric, and the government-run nuclear power station. So many politicians and scientists patted themselves and each other on the back. They did that for years too. Dovetail Cove and the entire island was rich in the fifties and early sixties, until people started getting sick.