Beach Reading

by Lorne Elliott

  I craned forward and down, and emitted a long keening sound like a two-hundred-pound bat giving birth to a three-hundred pound porcupine. I distorted my face until I nearly dislocated my jaw.

  When I had finished, I wasn’t much better. The world was an aching bruise, and I was in it.

  So I went to bathe in the ocean, which helped, in the sense that a man thrown off a moving train is helped by a half dose of Children’s Chewable Aspirin. I lay back in the water and wished that it was colder, the better to numb the pain. My face felt puffy and swollen, there were bruises on my lip, nose, and forehead, and my shoulder was scraped, as well as one knee. Both shins were dented and hurting. Also my hip. And neck. And a tooth was loose. I had an ear-ache, too. And a wound on my ankle, which I had twisted. “Oh, oh, oh,” I said.

  But I was slowly evolving from a retching animal into something that resembled a human. I limped ashore and back to the tent. I caught a whiff of my own sick on the sand and nearly vomited again, caught myself, then looked up the beach, where wind was blowing salt spray in from the waves.

  Today was to be my first day of work and I wondered if I could legitimately phone in and tell them that I wouldn’t be able to make it. The nearest telephone was at the park office itself, so showing up there to call in sick might raise some eyebrows, but I could say that I fell off my bike, and that’s why I was so beaten up. They might even take me to the hospital, where they would probably have a cure for hangovers, wouldn’t they?

  I checked to see if I had any money left. Nothing. I had a brief memory of giving the last few bills to the waitress who had served us. If I did call in sick I might get fired, and then I would have no other money coming in, but maybe I could just live off the land here forever.

  I strapped on my watch like I was clamping on handcuffs. It was eight-forty and I had to be at the park office by nine. A different type of pain assailed me when I thought that this was my last few minutes of freedom. I snarled and spat on the ground like the men on the wharf in Charlottetown, then got onto my bike and, sensitive as an exposed nerve, bicycled back across the causeway. Wincing as I bumped onto the gravel in front of the Park Office, I dismounted and leant my bike against the side of the building. I looked at my watch. Five to nine.

  The building was a prefab construction the size of a small town post office, and not yet quite finished or landscaped, set into the low spruce forest which had been cut out to accommodate it. The Department of Failed Trendiness had designed it in a manner which just managed to fall beneath the standard of nice-to-look-at. You got the sense that although it may have looked fine in the planning stage, at the last minute some department mucky-muck had swept in to justify his position, added a line here, a line there, and voila! made it worse. It looked like one of the smaller pavilions I’d seen at Expo 67 from one of the cash-strapped Baltic countries. The gate across the road, like an Eastern European border crossing, didn’t help either.

  I sat in the sun by the corner of the building, and right at nine o’clock I heard a truck approach and saw Rattray roar in the driveway, the tires making a sound on the gravel like a clash cymbal, fanning the embers of my headache. He hopped out angrily and slammed the door, the son of a bitch. I was sitting almost around the corner of the building and he didn’t see me as I watched him check in his side mirror to see if his shave was close enough, his shirt collar buttons bore a high enough gloss, and his jaw was the regulation squareness.

  He turned, saw me and stopped, altered his display of obsessive grooming to appear as if it had been merely the kind of natural tic every sane person indulged in, then came toward me, looking at my face and wondering where he recognized me from. Halfway there he recalled, glared, spat once to get back into character, and marched the rest of the distance to me.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve come to see Mr. Monroe.”

  “What for?”

  “I was told I should.” I was about to say that I was told I should report to him, but that would have given it away. I still had that headache, and it made me want to spread my pain around to him and somehow diffuse it.

  “By who?”

  “I’ll tell him that.”

  “You can tell me anything that you’d tell him.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “It would be better for you if you did…” he started, but just then another truck rolled in the driveway. The sound as it hit the gravel made my head hurt again, but the man inside was older, and smiling at nothing in particular. He was wearing the same uniform as Rattray, but not so ferociously. He stopped the truck and got out. “Hello!” he said to me with a big wave, then to Rattray, “Good morning, Barry.”

  “I caught this guy on the dunes yesterday without a permit,” said Rattray immediately.

  “I see. Well. Wait till we get inside, anyway.” He took out his keys from a briefcase and jumbled through them, while Rattray looked at me as if to say, “you’re in for it now”.

  I don’t know what I could have been in for. Fergie Monroe looked as harmless as cotton, and was fumbling with his keys, which somewhat deflated the tension Rattray was trying to create.

  “Dammit,” said Fergie gently, “I know it’s one of these.” He looked at them more closely, then counted. “Nope. They’re all here.” Then in another voice, as if to himself: “It all comes down to that, though, doesn’t it? Just finding the right key. You got all these plans, what you’re going to do, how you’re going to organize things, and then, no key.. Wait!” He tried one more and the door opened. “And just when I had almost discovered the fundamental problem of the universe,” he said to us.

  Once my eyes had adjusted to the light inside, I found myself in an unfurnished lobby with the drywall in place but the seams still visible, awaiting a few coats of paint. There was a fountain over in the corner next to the bathroom door, a counter out from the back wall, and boxes stacked around. Everything smelled of newly dried plaster, fresh paint and cement dust. There were four doors in the back wall and Monroe went into one of the offices, said, “Come on in,” and when we entered, “Sit down. Please. Now. What’s up?”

  “Like I said,” started Rattray. “I caught him in the dunes without a permit yesterday.”

  “So, why did you bring him here just today?”

  “I didn’t. He was here when I arrived this morning.”

  “When was this?”

  “This morning.”

  “I mean when did you catch him in the dunes.”

  “Yesterday. I let him off with a warning.”

  “I see. Well, of course, there wasn’t much you could do, was there? We haven’t started to issue permits yet.”

  “No, but since we’re about to, I thought I’d get a jump on things.”

  “Took the initiative?”

  “Yessir,” said Rattray. He nearly saluted.

  “Relax, Barry,” said Monroe. “And where exactly was this?”

  “Sector four on the other side of the causeway.”

  “MacAkerns’ land?”

  “Sector four.”

  Monroe sucked his lower lip. “I don’t see a problem,” he said, then turned to me. “What Barry is saying here is that he’s worried that since the dunes are a delicate ecosystem, the more people we can keep off them the better it is for the flora and fauna we’re mandated to preserve.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’m mandated to preserve them too.”

  “Well, that’s nice. Exactly the type of visitor we hope to attract to the park.”

  “Actually,” I said, “It’s more than that. I’m supposed to be starting to work here today.”

  “What?”

  “I’m the guy sent down by Project Ecology.” That was the office that the friend of my mom had organized this job through.

  “Oh!” said Mo
nroe. “That’s great. And yes, it is today, isn’t it? And right on time. Well, well…But, I’m confused. Why didn’t you just tell Barry that yesterday?”

  “Didn’t get a chance to,” I said innocently. I glanced at Rattray and saw that he was looking from me to Monroe quickly, trying to catch up, which was all extremely satisfying to see. Then, when he saw me looking at him, he started to seethe, as if I had somehow betrayed him, which I had, in a way. But I still had that headache.

  “Oh,” said Monroe. “Just a little misunderstanding, then.”

  “Yep.”

  “And how much of life’s trouble can be attributed to those…” he said, then caught himself from going off into the same dreamy generalizations that his problems with the keys had set off. “So. In that case…well…What do we do now?”

  “I made some notes,” I suggested.

  “Oh yeah? Notes are good,” he said. “What do you got?”

  “Well…from where I’m camped…”

  “Wait!” said Rattray, jumping on it. “Camped?”

  “Let him finish, Barry…”

  “You’re not allowed to camp…”

  “Strictly speaking,” said Monroe, “until we’re officially open as a park you can camp wherever you want. As long as you have the landowners’ permission.”

  “That’s OK then,” I said.

  “He was with that MacAkern brat,” said Rattray, like he was giving evidence of a conspiracy.

  “Thank you, Barry,” said Monroe. “You got those crates out back to sort, don’t forget.”

  “Yes. Some of us have real work,” he said and left.

  Monroe waited till he was gone. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Barry…Well, he’s like that.” He looked at me closely. “Christ! You look like shit. Did he..?”

  “What? No. Him? Nope.”

  “I wonder every now and then how fucked-up he really is. Sorry. You probably don’t need to know that. Anyhow, do you want an aspirin?”

  “Yes please,” I said quickly.

  He went out to the lobby, found a safety kit, broke it open and removed a small plastic bottle. “There,” he said, handing it over. “You can keep that.” I took two and chewed them raw so that their pain-killing qualities would not be diluted.

  “Christ, you are in pain.” We went back into his office and sat down. “Now, you were saying?”

  I took out my notebook and read him my list of birds. He nodded and said, “Very good, I guess. Can’t say that I know birds too well myself,” and then he told me that although I would be receiving my paycheck through Parks Canada, my job was mandated by a different agency, Project Ecology, and funded by a Youth Opportunity grant. “Also,” he said, “I’ve just received word that the guy who was supposed to be your supervisor won’t be coming down, just yet, anyway. He had a nervous breakdown (probably bullshit-induced, if he worked with this Department…). Sorry, you don’t need to know that either (but God almighty, it just seems every now and then to be so meaningless, although I guess it’s not…). Sorry again. I’m ranting I see. The point is, you’ll be more or less on your own for the first week or so until they re-assign somebody. And they told me to tell you that your duties are…” He picked up a slip of paper and read from it. “‘…to study, observe and collate environmental information pertaining to the Park and write a report which should be handed in at the job’s termination.’ (Which seems kind of a broad mandate, if you ask me. Still, ours is not to reason why…)”

  Monroe rambled on for a bit, then rallied his attention, leant forward, and in a confidential tone added that the main thing in his experience was to act like you knew what you were doing, make the report look official, and that maybe I should read some of the other reports to see how that was done. He added that I seemed to have something of a clue about the subject, so it shouldn’t be much of a problem, and apart from that, I should just show up on time, look like I’m working, and generally help out. “It should be simple (though God knows it isn’t… And the MacAckerns, God bless ‘em, but why they have to be so difficult is anybody’s guess).” He looked up. “Still, well, that’s not your concern.”

  “Actually, I know them.”

  “Really. From where?”

  “We had a meal together last night.” I didn’t mention going out drinking.

  “Well well. Maybe we could use you as a liaison.”

  “Sure.”

  “In fact. I have a letter for them here. When do you plan to see them next?”

  “Probably tonight.”

  “OK then. Here it is. Save on postage. (Not that I’ll get any thanks for that from the department. Nossir. Spend like a drunken sailor, otherwise they’ll cut back on funding next year, is their logic. It makes no sense whatsoever…) Sorry. You’ll have to excuse my babbling. Bad habit.” He handed me an envelope.

  “What is it?”

  “Another offer on their house and land. Wallace rejected the first one, so I relayed that to the boys upstairs and they instructed me to tell Wallace that this was their final offer, so you might want to pass that along to him as well. Also you might want to tell them that apparently somebody in Ottawa might be getting money from Heritage to preserve their house. I wish I wasn’t in the middle of all this. I like Wallace… Anyhow!” He slapped the desk-top and stood up, looked off in the distance for a minute, then turned suddenly back to me. “Nice to have you aboard!” he said, holding out his hand to shake. “Call me Fergie.” I shook his hand and folded the letter into my vest pocket.

  ***

  Next door to Fergie’s was the office I would be using for the summer, a clean new room with a window in the back wall that looked straight out into spruce undergrowth, dark branches with lichens on the trunks and old man’s beard hanging like rotting cloth from the branches. There was a desk in the middle of the room, empty shelves along one wall, and a stack of boxes containing books and scientific papers in the corner. I looked around and didn’t have a clue what to do next.

  I unpacked the boxes and arranged them onto the shelves, one for flora and another for fauna. Some publications fell between the cracks, or covered aspects of both, and I put those on a third shelf. There was one box which contained fifty copies of the same booklet, Birds, Plants and Animals of Barrisway National Park, a spanking-new volume put together specially for our office to hand out to interested visitors. I sat down behind the desk, flipped though it and noticed right away that although many of the drawings were stiff and childish, some were brilliant. The beach pea for instance, showed just enough of the surroundings where it was most likely to grow to help identify it. But the jellyfish looked as if it was walking across the ocean floor, and the gannets in flight seemed to be mechanically operated. I couldn’t explain it. They were both just ink-lines on paper, but some sketches were drawn by someone who understood the subject’s nature, and the others were lifeless. I looked at the title page: “Text by Andrew Solomon, illustrations by Claire Duschesne and Andrew Solomon.” I immediately concluded that Claire Duschene was responsible for the good drawings, on the grounds that it simply had to be a woman, the life-giver, who wielded that feeling for the natural world and eye for the distinguishing detail which made these sketches flowing, organic and whole.

  Then I remembered that Andrew Solomon was the name of the man who was supposed to be my supervisor, and I looked at the bad drawings more closely to see if I could detect signs of his impending nervous problems. I thought I saw possible lunatic symbolism in the ham-fisted drawing of the beach hopper, which seemed to be struggling up an impossibly steep dune ripple, its path in the sand tortuous and erratic. I took one copy of the book from the stack and put it in my pocket.

  “Stealing stuff?” said Rattray behind me. The bastard had snuck in.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll tell Fergie I’m taking one.”

  “Oh , it’s Fergie now, is it? That’s Mr. Monroe to yo
u, or Chief Warden Monroe.”

  “And what do I call you?” I asked, thinking “Rat-face” perhaps? But he’d been practising.

  “Assistant Chief Warden Rattray is my official title.”

  But I still had the remnants of that headache. “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  And just then Fergie walked in. “Yeah, that’d work too.” He’d heard everything, but he wasn’t a sneaky bastard. “Look, you two, you’re going to have to get along. Now shake hands, and then, for Chrissakes, just stay out of each other’s way.”

  “Fine with me,” I said, holding out my hand.

  “He didn’t mean it literally,” said Rattray.

  “Actually, I did,” said Fergie, “but it doesn’t matter. Barry, this might be a good time to go pick up that crate at the bus station in Charlottetown.”

  Rattray looked at me meaningfully, turned and left.

  I took the booklet out of my pocket. “Can I take one of these?” I asked Fergie.

  “Yeah. Sure. Take a few. The authors will be pleased they’re starting to move.”

  “OK.”

  “They’ll be down here Friday…No. Just one of them will. The other guy….I told you about the nervous breakdown? Yeah? Anyhow. That’s two days from now. No it’s not, either. It’s tomorrow. Fuck! Excuse my French.”