Medicine Walk

by Richard Wagamese

  “Eldon Starlight,” he said evenly.

  “Who the hell are you?” the tallest one asked and spit tobacco juice at the kid’s feet.

  “Franklin,” he said. “Starlight.”

  “You his kid?” the one beside the tall one asked. He had a lazy eye and it made the kid check over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” the kid said.

  “Never knew Twinkles had a kid,” the tall one said.

  “Neither’d Twinkles,” a fat one said from behind them and they all laughed.

  “Hell, kid, have a drink,” the tall one said and motioned for him to lean against the verandah rail.

  “No,” the kid said. “Thanks, but no.”

  “Damn. Polite and he don’t drink. Can’t be Twinkles’ kid,” the fat one said, and they laughed again.

  The kid watched while they passed a gallon jug of wine around and when they’d all had a drink the fat one sat forward on the lawn chair he occupied and took a draw on his smoke. He breathed it out in a long stream and scratched at his chin with a big-knuckled hand.

  “What brings you here, kid?” he asked.

  “I’m aiming to see him.”

  “He ain’t right.”

  “I heard.”

  “Not all of it, you didn’t.”

  “Guess I’ll see.”

  “I guess. But just so you know.”

  “I heard,” the kid said.

  The fat one rose and waddled to the door. He was tall but equally rotund and the boards of the verandah sagged and creaked with the weight of him. When the kid stepped to pass he blocked the kid’s view of the street. He had a sour smell of old tobacco, stale whisky, and unwashed feet. The kid moved back a step and the man grinned.

  “You get used to it,” he said.

  “Don’t expect to.”

  “Your pap’s no better.”

  The fat one unlocked the door and pushed it open with one wide arm and held it for the kid, who looked at him and nodded. The man nodded back and when he eased the door closed behind him he farted, loud and wet, and the men on the verandah laughed and the kid strode quickly to the shabby stairs across the small foyer. He stood there a moment and looked around. It was drab. There were low lights in the ceilings and they served only to add a level of shadow to the murk of the decor. The walls were panelled a cheap laminate brown and the threadbare carpets had faded from pumpkin to a sad, mouldy orange and the newel of the staircase was split and cracked. He could smell cooking and hear the jump of fat in a fry pan. Spiderwebs. Dust. An old cat slunk out of the corner and eyed him warily, and when he turned to the stairs it hissed and arched its back and the kid shook his head at it and began to climb.

  There were men sounds coming from every room. Belches, curses. The pale blue light of televisions seeped through the cracks of half-closed doors and it gave his movements a spooky, out-of-time feel. He could hear a man’s raised voice. It was something addressed to a woman and the kid was embarrassed to hear it and when he came around the corner he tried to creep by but the door was open and the man who spoke turned to look at him. He kept rambling loudly. He stared straight at the kid and his eyes were crazed and the bush of his beard was mottled with tobacco and he had no teeth so the words were garbled some and crazy-sounding. As the kid eased past he saw into the room and there was no one else there. The man laughed suddenly, sharp like a bark, and he stood and shook his fist at the kid and stepped forward to slam the door.

  He came to his father’s room. The door was shut. Across the hall a tall, skinny man stood at a hotplate, turning baloney in a fry pan. He looked at the kid flatly and eased a foot up and pushed the door closed. The kid pressed an ear to his father’s door. He could hear murmuring voices and for a moment he thought it was a television or a radio but there was a guttural laugh and then a woman’s voice and the glassy thunk of a bottle set hard on the floor and the complaint of bed springs. He knocked. Silence. He heard whispers and scurried movements.

  “Well, come in, dammit.”

  The kid turned the knob and eased the door open. The room was bare except for a dresser, a wooden chair, and the bed, where his father lay with a woman leaned against his chest. There were empty bottles lined along the dresser mirror. Clothes had been flung and were scattered every which way along with empty fast-food boxes and old newspapers. There wasn’t a square foot of open floor in the entire room. The closet door dangled off its hinges and there were tools hung on nails and piled on the shelf. Saws, hammers, wrenches, a chainsaw, a rake and a shovel, and looped yards of electric cable. There was an old bicycle sitting up against the far wall partially disassembled with the wires and gears of it strewn around the back wheel and a rusted scythe with its hook bent up to the ceiling. The hot plate was crusted with grease and dribbles, and a coffee can overflowed with butts and ashes and a few jelly jars stuffed full of the same. A black-and-white television was tuned to a snowy channel. The man in the bed just stared at him and the woman eased her chin down and looked at the kid through the top of her eyes and batted her eyelashes.

  “Well?” the man asked and raised a bottle to his mouth.

  “I’m Franklin,” the kid said.

  “Jesus,” was all he said and took another pull at the bottle. “Got big, didn’t ya?”

  His father’s face was slack, the skin hanging off the bones like a loose tent, and there were lines and creases deep with shadow. There was stubble on his chin. His hair was weedy, gone to grey, and curled at his neckline, with bangs combed over one eye. He grinned and the teeth that remained were stained and crooked. When he raised an arm to wave him in it was rail-thin, the bones of it stuck out jarringly, the hand large with long, splayed fingers that told of the size he once owned, gone now to a desiccated boniness. But the eyes burned. They sat behind the twin fists of cheekbones hard and bright as marbles, and the kid was struck by the coyote amber of them, going to hazel but wild, intent, and suspicious. He stepped into the room, kicked a sweater out of the way, and shut the door behind him.

  “The old man said I should come,” he said.

  “Grab a chair,” his father said and pointed.

  The kid pulled the chair away from the wall. He spun it and sat with his arms folded across the back of it, looking at his father and the woman.

  “Drink?”

  “Got no use for it.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Got makin’s.”

  “These are tailor-mades.”

  “Makin’s smoke better.”

  His father laughed. It came out raspy and hoarse and he coughed a few times and the woman laid a hand on his chest and looked at him, worried and protective. The cough eased and his father leaned up on one elbow and pushed himself higher in the bed and looked at the kid.

  “This here’s Deirdre,” he said, hooking a thumb toward the woman. “She’s a whore.”

  The woman slapped playfully at him and blinked at the kid girlishly and it turned his stomach some. She pushed herself up in the bed to sit beside his father, smoothed down her lank blond hair and raised the bottle to her mouth, and the sheet tumbled down so that her breasts bobbed openly and the kid felt himself stiffen and blush.

  “You could have some. She’s okay with it.”

  “Thanks. No.” the kid said.

  “Go on. It’s free.”

  “Not havin’ to pay don’t make it free.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “I will.”

  They looked at each other and the woman eased the sheet up. They could hear the raving man down the hall and the sound of someone’s radio playing an old country waltz. The room was directly over the verandah and he heard one of the men shout at someone passing in the street and a woman’s voice let go a string of curses and the men laughed and hooted.

  “Well, I’m here,” the kid said.

  “I can see ya.”

  “So? What is it you got to say?”

  “I gotta have a whattaya call … agenda?”

  He shook a cigarette loo
se from the pack behind his pillow and lit it and blew a series of smoke rings and then raised the bottle to his face and drank. The kid waited.

  “Don’t like me much, I guess,” he said and set the bottle on the floor.

  “Don’t know you much is all,” the kid said.

  “I’m your dad.”

  The kid looked at him blandly. He took out his makings and rolled a smoke while his father and the woman watched. He lit up with a wooden match and when he blew it out he stuck it in one of the jelly jars filled with butts and ash. “Just a word to me,” he said.

  “We gotta talk, and I don’t aim to do it here.”

  “Where then?”

  “You hungry?”

  “I could eat.”

  His father prodded the woman with an elbow and she shrugged and pushed the sheet back and slipped her legs over the side of the bed. She was thin but her breasts were full and bobbed when she moved and the kid kept his eyes on her. She caught him looking and winked. Then she stood and turned to face him and stretched full out and he took another long draw on the smoke. She bent to retrieve her clothes and began to dress. His father slid out of bed and the kid could see the gauntness of him, his buttocks like small lumps of dough and the rest of him all juts and pokes and seams of bone under sallow skin. He watched him dress and finished the smoke and the woman took another jolt out of the bottle and walked to the door.

  “Later?” she asked.

  “Not likely,” his father said.

  She looked at him and the kid thought she was going to say something more but she just nodded and opened the door and stepped out and shut it quietly behind her. He could hear her move down the hallway. The raving man stopped suddenly then started up again once she’d passed, and he could hear the clunk of her steps on the rickety stairs.

  “That your woman?” the kid asked.

  “Told you,” his father said, poking at his hair with a comb. “She’s a whore.”

  His father sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on a pair of work boots and laced them up halfway so that the tongues hung out and flapped. Then he picked up a tattered old denim jacket and swung it on, stood and wriggled his shoulders, and looked at the kid.

  “Take ya to eat,” he said. “My treat.”

  “Guess you’re doing your father thing now.”

  “Not especially. It’s a belly thing is all.”

  He tapped another cigarette loose from the pack on the bedside table and tucked it behind an ear then walked past the kid, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway. The kid watched him walk away. He turned to look at the room, shook his head sadly, and walked into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. His father was a dim shadow at the head of the stairs. The kid followed him out into the street.

  4

  THE PLACE WAS A DANK HOVEL. It had the look of an old garage or warehouse, a low-slung one-storey joint that hadn’t seen paint in years. There was a hand-painted sign under a lone spotlight on a rickety pole held in place by guy wires run to the roof. The sign said Charlie’s. The windows were swing outs and one of them was held open by a broomstick. Sounds from a jukebox and the garble of voices and the clink of glasses, and when they stepped through the door the kid saw a plywood bar set up on old barrels and mismatched tables and chairs strewn haphazardly around the room. The lights were dim, giving the faces that turned to look them over a pall as if they were shrouded by shadow, and the talk lowered. As the kid followed his father across the room, the weight of their eyes on him was like the feeling of being watched by something unseen on a mountain trail. His father strode through the room, merely flicking a wrist in greeting to those who spoke to him, and opened a door at the far end and stepped out onto a deck. It was suspended over the dark push of the river by huge pilings and the kid could hear the hiss and gurgle of it from beneath the boards. There were propane heaters set around and there were knots of men at the tables. His father walked to an empty table close to the railing and hauled a chair back and sat looking out over the water. The kid shook his head and when his father still did not speak he took his makings out and began to twist a smoke. He drummed his fingers on the table. After a moment he lit up and took a draw and looked out at the river streaming past like a long black train. When he turned back he saw a tall, gangly man step through the door with a bottle on a tray and walk quickly to their table, set the bottle down and then stand and look at his father, who continued to look at the river.

  “Twinkles,” he said finally.

  “I’m right here.”

  “You still owe.”

  “I know. I’m good for it.”

  “You ain’t workin’ no more.”

  “I’m still good for it.”

  The tall man looked at him and squinted and studied him a moment.

  The kid smoked and looked away. “How much?” he asked.

  “He owes thirty,” the man said.

  The kid put the smoke in the ashtray and dug in his pocket for the cash the old man had given him. He counted out forty dollars and handed them to the man, who looked at the bills as though they were foreign things.

  “Change?” he asked.

  “How much for the hooch?”

  “You can have it for the ten.”

  “He wants to eat,” his father said.

  “All’s we got left is the chicken and some beans.”

  “Put it on my tab.”

  “I don’t know, Eldon.”

  “Hey, I made up what I owed.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well?”

  The man set the tray down and folded the money and tucked it in his pocket. He looked at the kid, who finished his smoke, ground it out on the deck, and stashed the butt in his chest pocket. “You want a drink with that?”

  “Coffee,” the kid said.

  “And you?”

  “I ate,” his father said.

  He nodded and walked back across the deck and the kid turned and looked at his father, who sat with his chin in one hand. “Your treat, huh?”

  The kid smirked and put his feet up on the chair across from him. His father opened the bottle and raised it and took a couple of heavy swallows and set the bottle down and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. The plume from the stack downriver was like a ghostly geyser and the lights of the mill all orange and hazed like a carnival lot. On the far shore the town disappeared into the shadows thrown by the dim run of lights along the thin streets. The line of mountain was a black seam above it all.

  The man returned with his coffee. The kid drank and waited, feeling angry and impatient. His father was silent. For a while there was only the garrulous talk of the men in the background, the high arch of a fiddle on the juke, and the swish of the river beneath them. The coffee was bitter and hot and he cradled the cup in his palms and watched his father.

  “So how come they call you Twinkles?” he asked.

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “What?”

  “Starlight. Twinkle, twinkle. You get it.”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t exactly the twinkly sort.”

  “What am I then?”

  “How in hell would I know? Cloudy, I guess.”

  His father shook his head and took another drink, smaller, more deliberate. “How I feel, I suppose.”

  “You fixin’ to die?”

  “Jesus. How’d you get so hard-assed?”

  “Just asking a question.”

  The man brought the chicken and beans and a tortilla, and the kid dug into them and ate hungrily while his father watched him and nursed the bottle along. It was good chicken and he slopped up the beans with the tortilla and washed them down with the coffee. He sat back in his chair. His father stared at him with flat eyes and for a moment the kid thought he was stone drunk. They sat wordlessly and looked at the river.

  “She cuts right through past the mill. Picks up speed and rolls out into the valley thirty miles or so downstream. You know it. Same valley leads to the old man’s. You come
up that way?” his father said and pointed at the line of mountain.

  “I know it. I hunted that whole territory,” the kid said.

  “She’s a good river. I been on her most of my life one way or another. Used to be in the old days we’d float log booms down from the falls. Mile long, some of them booms. Me and a pike pole walkin’ the length of them, keepin’ them movin’ right down to here. Then after a couple days we’d head back up and do ’er all over again. Right to freeze-up. But that was years ago.”

  “You lumberjack?”

  “Some. I liked it better on the water but you had to cut and fall in order to get out there. Got to be a boomer if you worked out well enough.” He shook his head sadly. “Nowadays they use trucks. Takes the heart out of it.”

  “When was this?”

  “Hell, I was young. Your age. I went to work when I was fourteen.”

  “So I guess you called me here to tell me that?”

  His father sipped from the bottle. “You get right to it, don’t you?”

  “Got to. Winter’s coming. Stuff needs doing.”

  “I got to ask you a favour.”

  “Seems to me you’re the one who owes.”

  “I do. I know that. Sometimes though, you got to give to get.”

  “I already give forty.”

  “I ain’t talking about money. Money’s no use in this particular thing.”

  “What then?”

  “I want you to head into the backcountry with me.”

  “You must be drunker than I thought.”

  “I want you to take me out into that territory you come through. The one you hunted all your life. There’s a ridge back forty mile. Sits above a narrow valley with a high range behind it, facing east.”

  “I know it.”

  “I want you to take me there.”

  “Why would you want to go out there in your condition?”

  “Because I need you to bury me there.”

  The kid sat with the coffee cup half raised to his mouth and he felt the urge to laugh and stand up and walk out and head back to the old farm. But his father looked at him earnestly and he could see pain in his eyes and something leaner, sorrow maybe, regret, or some ragged woe tattered by years. His father twirled the bottle slowly with a thumb and two fingers.