The Retreat

by David Bergen

  “Does it hurt?” Lewis asked, running his hand over his son’s head.

  William said it didn’t.

  Lewis said they would drop by the hospital for just a quick visit. It wouldn’t take long.

  The doctor on duty inspected William and said that the boy was stressed or malnourished or both. He asked if something bad had happened lately in his life. He asked William if anything was bothering him. The doctor was facing the boy, their knees almost touching, while Lewis sat in the background. William shook his head. He was thinking, his dark eyes not moving from the doctor’s gaze. The doctor asked if he was getting enough to eat up there, and as he said “up there” his voice dropped, as if the father and son had descended from a sinister place. The doctor turned to Lewis and said that his son should get plenty of sleep. He should be encouraged to talk. He should eat more green vegetables. There was science and then there was voodooism, he said, and science made more sense. He wrote out a prescription for an ointment and handed the paper to Lewis.

  They drove to the drugstore where Lewis had the prescription filled and then they went to an outdoor market and Lewis bought broccoli and fresh peas and corn and carrots. He climbed back in the car and William pointed with his nose out the window.

  Lewis leaned down and looked through the passenger window to see Raymond passing by, singing or talking to himself. Lewis watched him for a bit and then told William to sit tight, he’d be right back. He got out of the car and called Raymond’s name. Raymond looked sideways and paused. He nodded. Then continued to walk on. Lewis fell in beside him and said, “You have a moment?”

  Raymond stopped and turned.

  His dark eyes found Lewis, then fell away.

  “You and Lizzy,” Lewis said.

  Raymond nodded.

  “She’s been spending time with you,” Lewis said. “Do you love her?”

  Immediately he knew that this was wrong. The boy couldn’t know if he loved her. He had a hard enough time loving himself. So Lewis backtracked and he apologized. He said that that wasn’t the point, except he was concerned for Lizzy, that she would get hurt, and he didn’t want that, no father wanted that. He said that he knew Raymond had a grandmother on the reserve, Lizzy had told him, and he thought that his grandmother must be concerned about Raymond as well. Wasn’t she? And when he was older and had children he would learn all about this part of being a father, not much fun, really, and so Lewis wasn’t saying he couldn’t see Lizzy. But.

  He stopped talking.

  Raymond looked down at his feet and then back up at Lewis.

  “I won’t hurt her,” he said. “I have no plan to do anything like that. She knows it.”

  Lewis nodded. He raised his chin as if to add something, but then he stopped and said, “Okay, good,” and he reached out a hand to shake, as if they had, the two of them, struck a deal. Raymond looked at Lewis’s hand and then took it and they shook briefly and let go at the same time. Lewis turned towards the car and he saw that William was watching, pressed against the side window, no expression on his face.

  One morning, when Raymond drove past Anicinabe Park on his way to work at the golf course, he saw police cruisers and barricades at the gate entrance, and he recalled the time up in the cabin with Gary and Lionel. The occupation of the park had been part of their plan, and now it was happening. A few days later, in the afternoon, he parked his pickup a ways back from the gate entrance and he stood watching in the sunshine. There were four police cruisers parked alongside the road and a number of constables patrolled the barricade. Inside the gate stood two men wearing bandanas and carrying rifles; bandoliers criss-crossed their chests.

  That night he told Nelson that he was going to join the protest. He didn’t want to just watch from a distance. He’d heard that the best way to get into the park was by boat, from Bare Point. He would go that night and he said Nelson could join him if he liked.

  Nelson laughed. “Don’t be stupid, Raymond. You’re walking into a mess. Lizzy not exciting enough?”

  “This isn’t about her.”

  “You haven’t even fucked her yet. Have you?”

  “Piss off. You think everything’s about sex. It isn’t.”

  “I’m a pacifist. I don’t believe in guns.” He lifted a hand, showed Raymond his thick fist, and said, “Though I could beat the shit out of you.”

  Raymond turned and walked away. He heard Nelson call out that he was joking, but Raymond didn’t turn back. He drove down to the highway and sat the pickup on the shoulder and turned off the engine and killed the lights. The windows were down and the night sounds drifted across the highway. When they were young, before Nelson was taken away, they used to walk out into the bush to an abandoned shed where they would build fires on the large bare rocks and let loose. One time, in the oppressive heat of a summer day, they ran naked through the bush, laughing and chasing each other. At some point Nelson tackled Raymond and sat on him. Raymond struggled to free himself, but Nelson had held him down. “Gotta boner,” Nelson said, and he punched Raymond in the chest, hard enough for Raymond to bruise up later. Another time, he’d fallen from the roof of the shed and landed on his back, all the air knocked out of him. As he gasped and thrashed, believing he was dying, Nelson kneeled beside him. “You’re okay. Suck in the air, that’s all. You won’t die.” And he’d been right.

  And then Nelson had been taken away and the sadness was absolute and complete and there were days when Raymond would go out to the abandoned shed and he’d imagine Nelson arriving. He had not known, at that time, that Nelson would be gone for ten years, or that when he returned he would be unrecognizable.

  Raymond drove his truck to Bare Point, unmoored his boat, and headed out onto the lake. He approached the park landing in the dark, cutting the engine and drifting towards the shore. A man holding a rifle stepped out of the darkness and called out to him. Raymond said who he was and why he was there, and he was taken to see Gary, who was sitting by a fire, rifle at his feet.

  Gary said that he remembered that night with his brother Nelson. And he remembered the white girl.

  “I’m alone,” Raymond said. “I want to help.”

  Gary looked him up and down, told him to sit. He said that the police were trying to starve them out of the park. “They arrested four of our people today as they were leaving the park.” He asked Raymond if he had a vehicle.

  Raymond said that he had a pickup, he had a gun, and he had a boat.

  Gary nodded, lighting a cigarette. Then he moved away from Raymond and talked to the other men.

  That night Raymond lay under a picnic table, close to one of the fires the men had gathered around to talk. He slept off and on, the conversations drifting around him. Sometimes the only sound in the night was the wood cracking in the fire. He wished Nelson had come with him. They’d be talking right now, just the two of them, telling jokes, pretending to know things that they didn’t. It felt good having him around, and sometimes up at the cabin, when Nelson wasn’t aware, Raymond would watch him closely, as he would a stranger; this person who had seen a different world, who knew things, and who never spoke of the past or what had happened. He didn’t seem to hold it against Raymond that he was the one who got to stay.

  Just before dawn, Raymond woke and went to stand by the fire. After a while, Gary came to him and said he had a job he wanted him to do. He handed him a bundle of money held together with a rubber band, and he put a grocery list into his pocket. He said that everyone had something to do and this would be Raymond’s something. He didn’t ask if Raymond wanted this job, he simply instructed him. He said that Raymond shouldn’t buy all the supplies at one place, as that might cause suspicion. He said that food was the priority. Some food had been brought in two days earlier by bus from Winnipeg, but then the police had laid barbed wire across the entrance to the park and no more outsiders were allowed in. He would have to bring in the food by boat. Adults were now limited to one meal a day. The children were fed twice a day, morning
and evening.

  Raymond wondered where the children were. He’d seen only one, an infant at a young woman’s breast. He pushed the money into his pocket, looking up at the man beside him. Then he went down to his boat and pushed it off of the shore and climbed in. By the time he’d reached Devil’s Gap, the sounds of the men had faded and all he heard were the waves lapping at his boat. The campfires on the shore flickered and then disappeared.

  The journal had been deep in the back of the top drawer of the dresser in his parents’ cabin, wrapped in a silk scarf, a small notebook with a black leather cover, dated on the inside. Everett had found it one evening when he was looking for matches to light the lamps, and he read it clandestinely and with guilt.

  The writing was intimate and bold. His mother wrote that she had put on the red dress for the man and danced and imagined she was someone else. She sat on the man’s lap and they kissed. Another time she sat on a chair and smoked while the man was at her feet and he touched her while she blew smoke in his ear.

  Everett looked for his own name and he found it near the middle of the journal, where she said that she worried about him, about his lack of friends, and wondered if she was maybe too entangled with him. She said, “Everett looks at me oddly sometimes and I tell his father to do things with him, play hockey, or box or wrestle, but Everett’s not interested. He lies on the bed and watches me get ready for work and asks about the nurses and the doctors and we gossip and laugh. I love him.” She wrote that Fish made her feel sadness. It wasn’t Fish’s fault, but he was one too many. She had three too many, maybe all of them were too many, because if she didn’t have any of them, she would be free to run. She said Lizzy was not a worry, but Everett was.

  He liked that he was a worry. He thought that if he had known he was a worry, he would have worried her even more so that she would have been obligated to stay. She had loved him. This was a revelation, something that he might have sensed but never truly understood; these words written down, the sentiments both amazed and depressed him. He did not understand how she could choose to leave if she loved him. He remembered his mother hugging him a few days before she left, as if she had known already that she was leaving. She had held him and he had been keenly aware of her body and her smell and the sound of her voice.

  He wondered who “the man” had been and how it was that his mother would let a stranger touch her. She had blown smoke in the man’s ear. His mother adored her cigarettes. She would light one and hold it aloft, and then open her mouth and draw and squint, and sometimes she laughed her big laugh. Everett liked to be across from her then because he could look deep into her mouth and experience a shiver of intimacy. The man was not the Doctor, whose hands were fine and hairy and whose fingers were narrow. It might have been the surgeon from the hospital where his mother worked in Calgary. A Doctor Thu. A man she had talked about often. Or someone Everett had never met. At this moment his mother was with people he would never meet.

  Or she was dead. His mother was dead. Though his father said she had written, Everett had never seen the letter and he imagined now that he might have been lying. To make him feel better. Harris said that she would come back. They had been sitting at the edge of the pond. Some mothers were like that, Harris said. They flew away with one kind of message clutched in their claws and returned with a different message. Not better, just different. But they always returned. Harris looked at Everett. “How old are you?” he asked.

  According to his father, Harris was ineffectual, crippled physically and emotionally, and he was a cuckold. Everett remembered this when the man asked his age. There was little comfort in Harris’s words. And with Everett’s response, Harris nodded. He ducked his small chin and asked if he should read to Everett. In the last while, he had been reading Gulliver’s Travels to anyone who wanted to listen. Usually in the late afternoon, by the pond, when everyone was tired and stretched out on the sand, Harris would read and laugh and then cast his gaze about, seeming to expect others to laugh as well, and sometimes they did, but not as enthusiastically as Harris.

  Everett said that he was going for a bike ride, and he picked up his towel and walked back to the camp. He wanted to go up to the cabin to visit Raymond’s brother Nelson again. He had already been at the cabin, Nelson had invited him, and when he got there they had played chess and then they’d driven to the dump where Nelson taught him how to shoot a gun. Later, they had shared a beer, and Nelson had asked if Everett wanted to smoke a joint. He didn’t. Nelson smoked and talked and at one point he said that these were the confessions of a resolute sinner. He had not stopped talking, and Everett felt like they were equals, that Nelson saw him as someone worth sharing things with.

  And so he set out now, down the highway and then onto the long road towards Bare Point, thick bush on either side and in the bush his mother’s body. She’d picked up a hitchhiker and been strangled and dumped in the bush. A bird called and it was his mother’s voice. He pedalled faster, panicked now, breathless, up the narrow road to Raymond and Nelson’s cabin, where he found Nelson before a small fire near the swing, roasting wieners. Nelson showed no surprise when Everett appeared. He said he was alone, Raymond was out on the lake with his boat. “Hungry?” Nelson said.

  Everett laid his bike on the ground and stood beside Nelson and watched him eat and then took a wiener himself and roasted it and ate it plain, chewing slowly. He said that he’d been bored at the Retreat and he hoped Nelson didn’t mind him coming to visit. He said that his mother had left, and ever since then the Retreat seemed different. His father was different. He was always alone and it made Everett sad, and so he tried to stay away from him. Lizzy had changed too. “She’s quiet and keeps to herself,” he said. “And she thinks about your brother a lot.” He said that the only one who hadn’t changed was his smallest brother, Fish, at least as far as he could notice.

  Nelson went inside and came back with a bottle of whisky and two glasses and poured the whisky into the glasses and handed one to Everett, who drank, a little fearful but curious about something he’d never tasted before. He shuddered, hating it, but he drank again. The whisky sat in his throat and chest and then all sad thoughts gradually floated away and disappeared.

  They sat by the fire on lawn chairs patched with bicycle tubes and Nelson told Everett how he had shot a skunk the night before, down by the well, shot him right through the head and buried the little thing out in the bush so the rotten smell wouldn’t drift up to the cabin. “Got him before he could spray.” He said that he used to shoot birds in Lesser, down by the river, him and Lawrence Neufeld. “We’d lie and wait and the idea was to take off the head without damaging the body. I was good. Larry called me a fucking potshot, which I was, and we’d laugh and shoot some more. Larry’s in Bible school somewhere. B.C., I think. For a time in my life, six months maybe, I was going to be a preacher. I got baptized. Had a girlfriend, Dorothy Stoez, who wanted to be a preacher’s wife. You know? In grade seven, Mr. Arndt took us to see a dead body, a young boy maybe nineteen or twenty who had fallen from a radio tower. Three hundred feet and all he had was a slight bruise on his forehead. We traipsed by the coffin and went up on tiptoes and looked in and then we went back to class. I don’t know what the point was, though I remember the assignment. Write a poem. About anything. So I wrote about Grandma Seymour. She’s still alive. Has a house on the reserve and lives with Reenie and company. She’ll live forever. Goddamn invincible. The poem was about her dying. Huh. Funny, that.”

  He paused, lit a cigarette. He said that when he came back here, to Kenora, he saw that his grandmother hadn’t changed at all. She was still his grandma, though not the same with him. Like he’d gone away and been someone else for ten years and then he’d reappeared but she didn’t know him any more. You know?

  He said that at Everett’s age he had been a pretty good viola player, was in the community orchestra out in Steinbach and played in church Sunday mornings and all the women swooned, especially Mrs. Pauls, who always wore
something different with her dangly earrings and high heels. “I loved imagining what she’d wear next. Then, I went to a music competition in Winnipeg and I was smoked. Little fish arrives in big pond. I didn’t play much after that.”

  Everett could feel the warmth of the whisky in his head and chest. Nelson’s voice was soft, his eyes were dark. His life seemed so much larger than his own, and everything seemed to come easily to him.

  Nelson leaned forward and said in a confidential tone, “In school, I took German for five years. Mr. Goertzen beating me about the ears, trying to augment my vocabulary as I struggled with insane passages. Ich. Weird. Me speaking German. Na, sie sieht immer noch ein bisschen blass aus. ‘My, she’s still looking a little pale.’ ” He paused, then said, “Looking pale. I was very pale. So pale, I didn’t know who I was. This is what I learned.”

  He sat back. “By the way, your sister left a dress here some time ago. Red.”

  Everett said that that might be his mother’s dress.

  Nelson motioned inside. “Go ahead. You’ll probably want to take it back when you leave.”

  Everett stood and stumbled slightly. Nelson chuckled. Everett moved into the house and found the dress in a plastic bag beside the mattress. He picked it up and smelled it. Cigarette smoke and a hint of Lizzy, but mostly his mother. He breathed in deeply, then put the dress back in the bag and carried it outside. Nelson was standing, urinating in the bush. He looked over his shoulder and called out, “Find it then?”