by Morris, Ian;
“It could be,” he said. He looked at me as if he knew what he was saying might not be true and didn’t really care.
“No, it couldn’t.”
“Grey,” Callie yelled from the other end of the hangar.
“In a minute,” he yelled back.
“Grey,” she yelled again.
He rolled his eyes, licked his fingertips and squeezed the end of the joint. “She’s killing me,” he said.
“I should split,” I said.
Grey said, “Cool about tomorrow?”
I waved over my shoulder, a wave that could have meant anything, though I already knew I would go. Once I got outside I looked for light in the window of our place, which all of a sudden looked pretty shabby.
Trudy Schmidt’s car was out in front of the house. They weren’t in the kitchen or living room. Heading for the can I heard splashing in the bathroom. I had to go bad and was about to knock. Then I heard Trudy laugh and thought better of it.
I went to the kitchen and pissed in the sink.
6
TALES OF THE NORTHLANDS
Grey jerked the starter cord. The Briggs & Stratton shook itself awake after its winter hibernation. He guided the tiller back and forth in easy, fluid arcs as he steered us out of the slip, the marina, and the harbor, at which point he turned west. From there he rounded the long tip of St. Raphael and made due north for Cowards Island. Callie and Ashley sat on the forward bench, Ashley with her legs twisted sideways and her feet up in a calendar pose so her new sneakers didn’t get wet, while I squatted amidships with a Folgers can, bailing for all I was worth. Waves pounded the hull with the hollow clang of a steel drum. Before long, it was only water in every direction. At twelve feet and sixty-five horses, the boat was too small and the motor too underpowered for the open lake, but Jack never refused us the use of it because we always came back and because he believed—we liked to think—that we had a natural right to these waters.
I’d remembered during the night when we had talked about making this trip. Now things had changed. I was starting to resent Grey for talking me into missing a second day of work. It was easy for him to tell me to blow Pop off. When the day was over he’d have Callie and he’d have Jack and Agnes and the Toad. All I had was Ernst, which might not have been much in comparison, but he was all I had just the same, and it didn’t do any good for me to go out of my way to make him mad. Before I went down to the water, I’d written him a note that said, “Gone to Washburn to get kerosene, back aft.” That was plausible. We used kerosene to clean grease and oil and dirt off of bike parts and he’d talked the day before about needing more. As for what I would say when I came home, I had no idea.
Callie got seasick. She sat with her head down and a St. Cloud State U sweatshirt wrapped around her shoulders. “Focus on a spot on the horizon,” Grey said, “you’ll feel better.”
Callie shook her head. “I don’t care if I puke.”
Cowards Island, the smallest of the Green Islands, lies five miles due north of St. Raphael beyond a narrow channel between Long Cape and Federal Island. The guides on the tour boats tell the story of how it was once a lush wood until a disgraced Ojibwa warrior was exiled here, his tribesmen hoping that, with the abundance of food and shelter, he might live many years of shame and contemplation. But the manitou of the water was angered by the cowardice of this warrior and turned the rains and the winds and the fish away, leaving him to die a wretched death of starvation and exposure. And that is why, supposedly, to this day nothing grows on the island, little more than a quarter-mile long stretch of sand and limestone with a crown of scrub brush and a single ragged elm, which they say is the soul of the deserter.
They tell the same story in school, though it is strictly crap. The truth is the island was named for Alfred J. Cowards, a majority stockholder on the Soo Line Railroad.
We beached the boat in a shallow cove on the windward side of the island. A Budweiser can near the water line, footprints in the sand, and the charred remains of a fire among a circle of rocks, Cowards Island was known to all who sailed these waters, but we had always thought of it as ours. Callie spread the blanket and we dropped the jug of water and carton of cigarettes onto the sand beside it. Grey started a fire. He and I took off our shirts and lay on our backs on the blanket while Callie sat on the bottom edge, between our ankles, with her arms around her knees and watched the water. From where we sat we could see eight of the other islands of the chain, all of them uninhabited, looking as they must have looked when the French trappers paddled this coastline.
This was the last day we would spend together and, the way I saw it, the reason for this was Austin Jacobs, AP English teacher at Ashton High. Jacobs came from New York City by way of Madison where, he told us, he’d been a big shot in something called the Socialist Student League. We liked him at first because he rode a motorcycle, and he seemed to like us, particularly me and Grey for what he called our working-class paradigm. The first half of the year he cut us all kind of breaks. But as the weeks went by, as we found new ways to take advantage of him, he was forced to recognize that we had no political consciousness. By the time we got to Hamlet he was pretty much through with us.
The funny thing was Grey really liked Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet, much more than he liked all the other classics that Jacobs had tried to get us to appreciate. Grey said the play was about how the old want to destroy the young.
He wrote an essay called “Old People Screw You,” in which he proved that the evil of the characters was proportional to their ages, which we would have all thought was what Jacobs was looking for, but Jacobs returned the paper drowned under a river of red ink, with a note attached saying the grammar skills were so poor he couldn’t grade it. Grey flipped out. He stopped coming to class altogether and Jacobs failed him—failed him in more ways than one, I guess you could say, though Grey thought Jacobs did him a favor.
We’d planned this day as a chance for us to get away by ourselves before we split up. Now we didn’t know what to do or say. Mostly we smoked and talked about dopey things, things we used to do but didn’t anymore. Callie told a story about when she and her sisters were young and they all got stuck in the mud in Winona, Minnesota, and her father had come and pulled each of them out of their boots. The story took a long time to tell because she was laughing so much, and there didn’t seem to be a point to it, but we laughed too, hoping, I think, to make her laugh some more.
Ashley was restless. She hadn’t been our friend, and a lot of the stories we told were at the expense of kids she hung around, the Gustafsons, the Rossmeiers, the Talbotts, and the others whose parents hobnob with the FIBS who keep houses up here in the summer. I wanted to feel sorry for her, but I couldn’t somehow.
Callie got up, stripped, and walked naked to the water. Wading up to her ankles, she stumbled on something beneath the water, raised her arms from her sides to steady herself and, standing on one foot lifted the other out of the water, catching it in her hands and turning up the sole to look for damage. She looked like a crane, like a creature not born in the water but native to it.
Grey jerked off his shorts and sprinted down the beach. He splashed past Callie as he dove in and thrashed around, wildly cartwheeling his arms and kicking up flumes of white water, saying, “Come on in, the water’s divine.”
Ashley said, “Up for a swim?”
“It’s fucking freezing,” I said.
“You won’t even notice it.”
I didn’t believe her but I didn’t want to look chicken. We got up and pushed our shorts down to our ankles.
“Hold my hand,” she said. I did and together we ran to the waves and dove. The force of the dive carried me a long way before I had to kick my legs. She was wrong about the water. I did notice and came up shivering and gasping for air. I saw that Ashley was ahead of me and I kicked hard to catch up. I’m not a great swimmer, but I’m better than most, and didn’t want to be beat by a girl, especially not this girl. I speared t
he water, driving through my shoulders with each stroke, but when I looked again she was still ahead, gliding on her back. Like Callie, Ashley was at home in the water, like all of us, a manifestation of the geography of our childhood. She swam just fast enough to stay ahead of me. I rolled over on my back trying to hide how bad I wanted to catch up to her and was surprised at how far we’d swum from shore. Grey and Callie, now sitting at the water’s edge with their legs intertwined, looked small against the Soul of the Coward towering behind them.
“I’m going back,” I yelled to Ashley, hating this game of tag, and hating being It.
“Okay,” she said, not winded at all.
“You coming?”
“No.”
Ashley said, “We should let them alone, don’t you think? Let’s go up here a ways.” And we swam parallel to shore for a couple of hundred yards before turning toward the beach. Again we raced. This time I kept even, though I couldn’t tell if she was tired or if she just felt she had made her point. When we reached the shallow water, she scrambled to her feet and churned through the breaking waves onto the sand.
I watched her run, her skin pink from the cold water. I charged out of the water and chased after her, figuring even if I was a slower swimmer, I could at least outrun her. Which I did: grabbing her by the hips from behind, I tried to pull her toward me. “Quit it,” she said, slapped my hands away, wriggled free, and ran ahead over the rise at the center of the island and down the other side. There I caught her again. “Here,” she said swiping at the sea grass and dropping to the sand.
I lay beside her. She grabbed the back of my neck with her palm, pulled me toward her, and stuck her tongue down my throat. As a rule we didn’t kiss on the mouth, but I felt how much she wanted to by how hard she held my skull.
She sat up cross-legged and slouching, her pale nipples pointing tiredly toward the sand.
“I wasn’t sure if I should ask Callie about her dad.”
“I wouldn’t. It’s a sore subject.”
“Did you?”
“We’ve talked about it. She called down to his house. Her stepmother says he left when he told Callie he was going to. She called the State Patrol. Dolores thinks he just took off, said he talked about it all the time.”
“Do you think he would?”
“Search me.”
“If you could go anywhere in the world where would you go?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “Australia.”
“Let’s go.”
“You mean like now?”
“Why not? See the world and be back in time for school.”
“Can’t afford it.”
“I’d pay.”
“Yeah, you would.”
“I’m serious.”
“It’s not going to happen.”
Ashley pouted. “You want to stay here with them.”
“For as long as I can,” I said.
“Come on, I don’t want to talk about this,” she said and to prove her point slid her hand up my thigh to my crotch. “I don’t want to talk about this now.”
She opened her legs and took me inside her. She slid up and down, coming down slow and then going up fast. When I came it felt like a flood pushing outward from my spine. Then I lay with my head on her belly, the sounds of her stomach rushing like the waves. We both fell asleep, tangled up like that, or we fell into something like sleep, the heat of the summer sun and the exhaustion of the day and the sex. When I opened my eyes again, it felt like late afternoon. The wind rustled the trees along the shore. I lay with my eyes half shut, squinting into the setting sun, as Ashley sat up, looking dazed and sleepy, rubbing her eyes—her skin blotched red all over—and becoming suddenly modest when she caught me looking at her, as though she had awakened from a dream that she was naked outdoors to discover that she really was naked outdoors. And suddenly it was like we were both a little shy and embarrassed. Without talking much we went looking for Callie and Grey.
“We were going to send a search party,” Grey said when he saw us.
We smoked and drank warm water from the plastic jug. Callie raked her hands through the sand, gathering twigs, smooth-worn pebbles and bits of sea glass. These she shook in her cupped hand like she was rolling dice and scattered them on the blanket. Grey asked her what she was doing.
“I’m going to see what’s ahead for us.” She spread the treasures around with the palm of her hand and pointed to a green triangle of glass. “Tom, this is you,” she said. “See how you’re alone?”
“Where are we?” Grey asked.
“Here and here,” she said, pointing to a red granite pebble and a bleached birch twig.
“Are we together?” he asked, trying to see over her shoulder.
I saw that they weren’t, but Callie said, “Yes.”
“Does it say if I’ll come back?” I asked her.
She looked at the configuration for a long time before she said, “Yes, it says you will—but we won’t be here when you do.”
“Where are we going to go?” Grey asked.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “Only that we won’t be here.”
“What about me?” Ashley asked. “Tell me what’s going to happen to me.”
“This is you,” and she nodded to a flat, almost perfectly round stone, far away from the others. “In California.”
“She’s making this up,” Grey said.
Callie looked like she wanted to sock him. “It’s true,” she said. “I’m making up our future.”
Grey shrugged then, not knowing the future was closer than we ever could’ve guessed. By six o’clock the sun was in our eyes, and the shadow of the Forsaken Warrior of Cowards Island stretched away from us across the sand. “We have to go, if we want to get back before dark,” Callie said. Instead, we talked about spending the night. There was enough water and the fire and the blanket. For a few minutes we sat quiet, all picturing, I imagine, the night ahead. Then, without any other conversation that I can remember, we were packing to leave. We made it halfway to the harbor before sunset and then it was dark—nothing but the sound of the motor and the waves on the hull—the four of us alone on an immense, black, shimmering sea, steaming south without running lights toward the beacon on the breakwater.
As we idled into the slip, Grey saw them first. “Hey, Cal,” he said, “is that your mom’s car?”
Callie looked where he was looking and said, “Shit.”
Under the floodlights, Dolores sat on the hood of her LeBaron convertible, her legs crossed and her feet perched on the front bumper, smoking a cigarette. Mr. Reed stood next to her, with his hands in the pockets of his beige windbreaker, leaning against the bumper, scanning the bay.
“Did you tell them where we were going?” Ashley asked.
“I told Jack,” Grey said. “Cal?”
Callie nodded, but I don’t think she was listening.
“I hope they didn’t call the sheriff,” Ashley said. “My folks will kill me.”
Grey said, “Do you see the sheriff?”
Dolores was so lost in whatever she was thinking about that she didn’t notice the boat approaching. She had her hair tied up in a green scarf that matched her blouse and tight white slacks that stopped halfway up her calf. Grey jumped onto the dock, knotted the line on the davit, and shouted, “Hey,” as casual as anything. And still Dolores looked for another second before she recognized who it was. When she did, her face got serious. She threw her cigarette into the water, slid off the hood, tapped Jack on the shoulder, stomped down to the dock, wagging her finger, and said to Callie, “Out, now.”
Jack waited until he saw that Dolores had a bewildered Callie out of the boat and halfway up the dock before he said to the rest of us, “Go home.”
“What’s going on?” Grey asked.
“Just do it,” he said.
Grey cocked his head as though he was about to object when we heard a wail from shore, a girl’s voice, Callie’s voice. She was standing with her head on her mother
’s shoulder, gripping her mother’s arms, her whole body shaking.
We looked at Jack. He flattened his hair to his head with the palm of his hand. “Her father is dead.”
The kitchen was dark but the radio was on. There would be rain tomorrow with winds southeast, gusting to twenty miles per hour, a small craft advisory likely. I stuck my head in the front room. The lamp was on but Pop wasn’t in his chair. Then I heard him breathing. I turned around to see him asleep at the kitchen table in the dark. His head was on his Bible—the German one, which was always a bad sign—and he was clenching his walking cane in his right fist. A voice in my head screamed: “Run.” The Reeds would let me stay at their house. But if Pop came looking for me, that would be the first place he’d go. Which meant if I was going to run, I’d have to run farther than that. This was the first time I’d ever disobeyed him on anything that mattered.
Untying my laces without moving my feet, I slipped out of my sneakers, and bent to pick them up when I heard a crash behind me. Schnapps splashed my feet, the thick peppermint smell suddenly everywhere as though I’d stepped into a tub of it, and he was standing over me. I said, “Hi,” and the cane came down on my neck, sending heat rushing down my spine.
“Wait,” I said, and he hit me again. This time I made a run for my room, but he shoved me into a wall, and I fell. He hit me again, on the arm, as I fought off the blow. The cane went up again and came down on my collarbone. My right arm went numb. When I tried to stand up, pushing myself up with the one arm that was still good, he swept the shaft of the cane along the floor and took my legs out from under me.
He was smaller than I was, past forty, and blind drunk. I could have jumped him in the dark, taken the cane and beaten him to death with it if I wanted to. But I didn’t. I didn’t I guess because I figured I had it coming. And so I curled up in a corner and let him hit me until his arm got tired and he cussed me in German and dropped the cane at my feet.
7
