“Plug your ears, Normie,” said the girl beside him.
“Oh, no!” Normie cried and slapped his hands over his ears.
“They made a suicide pact. Each one would aim their rifle at the other’s neck and when they counted to ten, they’d shoot the other dead. They could barely stand up. They stood only about five feet apart, swaying and leaning. They took aim and started to count. At four, Henry said, ‘Wait, wait, I got my safety on.’ So they started over.
“They got to three and Louis said, ‘Wait. Are we shooting at ten, or just after?’
“ ‘What’s the difference?’ Henry said.
“ ‘Big difference,’ said Louis. ‘One of us is dead, the other one’s still standing there holding his gun like a dick.’
“ ‘Okay, we shoot at ten. Right at ten. Say it, then POW.’
“ ‘Say it, then pow?’
“ ‘Yeah, say ten, then shoot.’
“ ‘Ten then pow.”
“ ‘Ten then pow. Right. Got it?’
“They started counting again. This time there were no mistakes, except at the last second, Louis lost his nerve and knocked the barrel of his brother’s gun away. His own went off. He shot Henry dead. Henry’s bullet hit Louis in the left shin. Louis passed out. In the morning, he woke up and found his brother still dead. He put him in the bed and covered him up, then he set that cabin on fire, burned it to the ground.”
Everyone in the Beaumont was quiet. “Holy shit,” I said. “Is this a true story?”
“Can I unplug my ears?” Normie sang out. The girl took his hands and lifted them away from his head.
“It’s true,” said Sharman, and everyone nodded.
“Louis took off deep into the bush and lived as a hermit for a while. Then one winter someone came across a camp he’d made and found him hanging from a tree, frozen solid. But he haunts the bush out here. You can hear moaning and whisky bottles rattling and smell the fire sometimes. And when the northern lights are out, you can hear music, that Spanish angel music that Henry played on his guitar.”
“I know what happened to the girl,” the oldest girl spoke. “My aunt was married to her cousin. She said Etoile hitchhiked all the way down the coast to Mexico. She ended up in a town as far south as you can go and still be in Mexico. A family of Germans took pity on her and took her in. Their daughter had just died in childbirth and so they gave the baby to Etoile to raise. Eventually, she became just like a mother to that child.”
Twilight had fallen and the air had turned cold. “I’m hungry,” said Vern.
“Come back later tonight,” said Lawrence. “We might hear the ghost.”
For supper Jolene had made roast beef and scalloped potatoes and peas. She put the food on the table using dishcloths to keep from burning her hands. I watched her, and when she caught me staring, she smiled at me. Jolene talked, mostly to Uncle Leslie, about people they knew. Then she turned to Vern. “So how did you two, a boy and a girl, become friends?”
“You really gotta ask?” said Jim, leering. “I mean I can put two and two together and get four, even if you can’t. A teenage boy, a pretty girl …”
I flushed red and hated Jim.
“It’s not like that,” Vern said sharply. “We’re friends for the same reasons any two people are friends.”
“Oh, well,” Jim began.
“Leslie says you come from Duchess Creek,” Jolene said to me, before Jim could say more.
I nodded.
“I have friends in Duchess Creek.” Jolene began to tell a story of some people and the dog they had that had to be put down.
“They don’t want to hear that,” said Jim.
“Yes we do,” said Vern.
“Can’t you shut up?” Jolene said to Jim. “This is my son and my house. Why don’t you go get drunk somewhere else?”
“Oh, so now it’s your house.”
“I’m going to have to get going soon,” said Uncle Leslie. “It’s getting dark.”
“You going to turn into a pumpkin?” Jolene went to the kitchen and got a beer out of the fridge, then sat at the table sipping it, her plate of food untouched. While we ate the chocolate cake she’d made for dessert, she opened another beer and smoked two cigarettes, pressing the butts into her cold scalloped potatoes.
After supper we sat outside and more people gathered. Vern and I threw a Frisbee for the dog.
“Where are those kids sleeping tonight?” Uncle Leslie asked Jolene.
“Vern can be a gentleman and give Maggie his room,” Jolene said. “He can sleep on the couch.”
“No,” Uncle Leslie said, and I could see he was mad. “He won’t get any sleep there and you know it.”
Jolene looked angry, too. “Well, we can set up the cot in my room.”
“Put the cot in with Vern,” Uncle Leslie said. “Is that okay with you, Maggie?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I said quickly.
“They’re fourteen,” Jolene began.
“It’s okay,” Vern interrupted. “We can put the cot in there. It’s no big deal.”
“There’s a man who knows what he wants,” said Jim.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Uncle Leslie. It was the first time I’d ever heard him swear.
“All right,” Jolene said and she closed her eyes and took a long drink of her beer.
“Hey,” Vern said, taking me by the arm. “Let’s go see the ghost.”
We walked with Sharman and Lawrence and little Normie back to the edge of the bush.
“Jim’s a fucking asshole,” Sharman said. “I wouldn’t let anybody treat my mother that way.”
Vern looked at the ground and didn’t say anything.
“Don’t go any closer,” Lawrence said. “This is close enough. Now we just have to wait.”
A light breeze was blowing and we watched the trees as the evening turned deeper blue.
“He’s a freeloader, too,” Sharman continued. “Mr. Big White Guy. Smashed up his tow truck on a drunk one night and now he lives off a little Indian woman’s welfare cheques in her house on the reserve. If you were bigger I guess you’d paste him, eh?”
“Yeah,” said Vern. Then, “But she likes him. I don’t get why she likes him.”
“Shh. Hear that?” Lawrence cocked his head.
Something was rustling, moving through the trees. Not far away, an owl hooted.
“Means a death is coming soon,” Lawrence whispered.
We stood perfectly still and listened.
“Look!” Lawrence whispered suddenly. Through the trees we could see something white moving.
“Let’s go back,” Normie said.
“Shh, you’ll scare him off.”
The white disappeared and we sat and waited till the night dew made the ground damp.
When we got back, Uncle Leslie had gone. Vern’s mother was sitting on the kitchen counter holding two halves of a broken plate. Her face was loose, her features like a blurred photograph. Jim had been saying something, but stopped when we came in and said instead, “You can take it or leave it, but I see the big picture.”
“The big picture,” Jolene mocked, then she burst out laughing. “Come and see your old mother, son!”
“You’re not old,” Vern said.
“You’re such a good boy. You know just the right things to say.”
I said goodnight and slipped away to Vern’s room just as Jolene said, “You’ll always be my son. You know I love you, my son. Leslie thinks he knows better because he’s my big brother but you belong with your mother.”
“Boys don’t want to hear that,” Jim said.
“It’s okay whatever she says,” said Vern.
Jim laughed hard at that. I could still hear him when I closed the door. The room was crowded with boxes of clothes, an ironing board, a drying rack, shelves of fabric and an old sewing machine. The blankets had been turned back on the bed. Moonlight flooded the room and I sat on the bed watching it cast silver light on the homemade quilt. Who mad
e this quilt? Who took the time to cut these floral pieces and set them in this pattern, four narrow strips surrounding a square? The back was soft flannel. I held it to my nose. Some dim memory fought its way to the surface, something from when I was little and my mother gave me her mother’s quilt for my bed in Duchess Creek.
I climbed between the sheets with my flannel shirt still on and lay there, listening to the din in the kitchen. A few minutes later, Vern came in.
He undressed and got into the cot in the dark. We could hear the voices rising in the kitchen, then harsh bursts of laughter.
“Do you like my mom?” Vern asked through the darkness.
“She’s pretty. And she’s nice.”
“I’m going to paste that jerk, Jim. She’d be way nicer if he wasn’t around. Uncle Leslie can’t stand him.”
We heard a thud in the kitchen and shouts. Outside a band of coyotes took up barking at the moon.
“Do you believe about the ghost?” Vern asked.
“Do you?”
“Maybe. But there’s more than just that kind of ghost. Spirits. Good ones. You might not see them, but they’re there.”
“Like angels?”
“Same thing,” Vern said. “We’ve all got one on each shoulder.”
“Really?”
“Sure. Maybe an animal spirit or maybe an old one who died a long time ago.”
More thudding came from the kitchen and the voices grew louder, shouting. There was no more laughter. My heart was racing.
“Do you hear that?” Vern asked.
“Yeah.”
“No, not the yelling. Listen. Outside. Drums.”
As soon as he said it, I heard the drumming, like a heartbeat carried on the spring night. I shivered. I could feel the beat in my chest slow to match it. From the kitchen came the smashing of glass. Vern put on his pants in the moonlight and went out.
I listened, but the only thing I could follow was the drums. After a few minutes he came back and got into bed.
“She sometimes throws things when she gets mad,” he said. Then he giggled. “My mom’s small but she can throw a scare into that asshole when she gets going.”
In the morning there was no broken glass anywhere and Jolene made us bacon and eggs and toast with homemade blackberry jam for breakfast.
[ SEVENTEEN ]
MONTHS PASSED AND still no word came from Mom. I was ashamed of her silence, what it meant. Jenny and I walked down to the lake, and swam with all the other kids and their families. When Lila and Tracy showed up, they all smeared themselves with Hawaiian Tropic coconut oil and smoked menthol cigarettes, practising their elegant exhales. I munched Freezies. We said nothing about her.
The stampede came to town. Teepees and tents and trailers moved in and all day dust billowed, bands played, and the announcer’s voice drummed up the crowd, rising and falling over the loudspeakers. I could smell the pungent odour of horses and cattle manure coming in the bedroom window. At night music and shouts sailed out over the town from Squaw Hall, the open-air dance hall on the stampede grounds. At the end of the street where the Edwards’ house was, I sat in the grass and looked down at the lights strung above the hall and heard the crash of beer bottles being thrown over the walls. One night when a band called the Saddle-ites was playing, Jenny and her friends decided to go dancing. They were all underage but no one asked questions.
Later, they snuck back in the house shaken but giddy.
“I can’t believe that guy grabbed my ass,” Tracy kept saying. “Next time I’m gonna get juiced before we go in there.”
“No way José,” said Lila. “You won’t catch me going back there. Sickos grabbing your tits. I was ready to paste somebody.”
“It was mental, Mag,” Jenny said. “People fighting and throwing beer bottles, broken glass and beer all over the dance floor. And the band just kept playing.”
I hiked the river valley with Vern, past the hoodoos and cliffs, then Vern went west to Nistsun for a while and I stayed, pumping gas for tourists on the highway. I went to rummage sales on the weekend and bought an old canvas tent that I set up in the backyard. Jenny and her friends hot-knifed hash in Beatrice’s kitchen late at night with the windows open, crickets chirping and the summer breeze carrying away the smell. They giggled and made elaborate, salty snacks, BLTs and tuna melts, and I came into the kitchen at one in the morning, drawn by the aroma while Bea slept.
How could Mom not come? How could she not send word? I sometimes thought of Vern’s mother and her sewing room. Once, Jolene was that mother who dreamed up patterns out of colourful bits of cloth and bent over her sewing machine to make quilts for the people she loved. Who was she now? Girlfriend to an asshole whom she almost seemed to hate. Maybe our mother had become someone known only as Irene, a pretty redhead with muscled thighs and work-strong hands.
Beatrice was worse than useless. She no longer threw her glasses across the room in frustration; Ted’s death had freed her and she seemed almost happy. But she continued to fry sausages and boil potatoes, check the mailbox, refrain from comment—loudly. Comment was called for now, but now she failed to make it. I blamed her for not doing something to find our mother. I hated her for her silence. I could see she was embarrassed for us. I hated her for that. All around us piled up this impenetrable silence about the thing most important of all.
Sometimes I wanted to accost some stranger and demand, “Where is my mother?” Or a teacher or a policeman. “Do you know where my mother is? Can you help me find her?” Why did I stay silent?
When Vern came back, I told him I had a plan to find my mother. I made him swear not to tell anyone, not even Uncle Leslie.
We were on our backs in the tree fort, watching the aspen leaves flapping back to front like hands waving against the turquoise of the sky.
“When will you leave?” he asked.
“I have to convince Jenny first.”
I was waiting for the right moment to tell her. I found it a week later when she finally broke up with Brian. I don’t know why it took her so long—the guy was dumber than a bag of hammers. But Jenny had a soft spot for sad sacks and Brian was that in spades. Nothing he did turned out right: he drank too much, his father was mean, he smashed up his car, he lost his job (several times), there was talk that he had even fathered a child by a girl down near Lillooet and she was demanding money from him. Jenny rose to that kind of tragic story; she wanted to be his saviour. He did thoughtless things. He left her stranded at parties while he took off drunk in somebody else’s car. He flirted with other girls. Still, Jenny had some notion of loyalty that couldn’t be fazed by such minor transgressions.
But one cooking-hot Saturday night I was sitting outside on the front step when Jenny came marching up the sidewalk, strands of sweaty hair plastered to her face and neck, the bottoms of her white jeans and her runners coated in dust, and her face flushed bright red.
“What’s up?” I said.
She looked at me. I knew this look. Her eyes were on fire. I could see the anger sparking off her.
“I can’t speak right now,” she said, and she went inside. Sometime later I found her on her bed, a pillow held tight in her arms as she stared up at the ceiling. She was listening to Supertramp on her record player. Crime of the Century was Jenny’s favourite album. Usually she listened repeatedly to “Dreamer,” but tonight it was “Bloody Well Right.”
When the song finished, she put it on again. I stretched out on my own bed and listened with her.
After a while she spoke. “You know, when people are drunk they do stupid things. I don’t like it, but I can understand it. Brian’s done a lot of stupid things. But he crossed the evil line tonight.”
I waited a bit. “What did he do?”
“Oh, Maggie, you don’t even want to know. It’ll bother you even more than it does me, knowing how you feel about cats.”
“Cats?”
“I know. I don’t even like cats all that much, but there’s no excuse for what he di
d. Just being cruel for no reason.”
“Don’t tell me,” I said.
“I won’t. But I begged him not to do it, all of them, but him especially, I begged him. And right then I realized that he doesn’t care what I think. He really doesn’t. He’s just a selfish, stupid, conceited idiot. A great big evil asshole.”
I had to let her think she was the first to notice his true nature, so I bit my tongue. But I saw my opening.
“We should leave here. We need to look for Mom,” I said.
“She’s the mother. That’s what you said. She should look for us.”
“I know I said that, but maybe I was wrong. We can’t just stay here and wait forever. I have a plan.”
“You have a plan?” Jenny said. “And in this plan, what do I have to do?”
“You drive,” I said.
“One slight problem. You know I don’t have my driver’s licence, right?”
“You can get your beginner’s now. By your next birthday, we’ll be legal.”
“There’s the small matter of a car.”
“I’ll get the car. That’ll be my job. I’ve already got most of the camping equipment we’ll need.”
“Hell of a plan.”
“Shut up. I don’t see you coming up with anything better.”
Jenny’s face clouded and her lip began to quiver. I felt bad so I said, “How about we go on a test run? Next weekend.”
“With whose car?”
“Not with a car. We’ll hitch. We’ll just head out. Like Chiwid. Hit the Freedom Road.”
Jenny smiled. “Sometimes I like you.”
We left after work late one afternoon. I met Jenny at Frank’s Chicken and Pizza. She was dressed in her wide-legged white Wranglers and a peach top that laced at the front.
“For Christ’s sake, Jenny. Nobody hitchhikes looking like that.”
“I wanted to look presentable,” she said.
“Take this,” I said, and helped her heft her pack onto her back.
“Are you kidding, Maggie? This thing weighs a ton.”
Shelter Page 14
