Shelter

by Frances Greenslade

  We got our first ride quickly, from Jenny’s friend, Ron.

  “I’m not really going anywhere,” he said. “But I’ll take you out of town.” When his Ted Nugent 8-track looped around to start over again, he said, “How about here?”

  We walked as the sun went down. Cars swerved carefully around us when they saw our outstretched arms, and kept on going. The evening was mild, good for walking, but our gear was heavy.

  “I’ve got to rest,” Jenny said, and she dropped her pack and sleeping bag to the ground. She sat down on top of it. I put my pack down beside her and sat, too. We leaned back-to-back against each other and listened to insects trill from the roadsides.

  Each time we saw a car approaching, Jenny jumped up and stood with her thumb out.

  The car that finally slowed was a newer white Pinto. A middle-aged, ordinary-looking man with short hair and a sea-green leisure suit was driving. He smiled and said we were in luck—he could take us as far as we wanted; he was going all the way to Vancouver. It looked like a good ride to me. We threw our gear in the back and Jenny scurried in beside it.

  That meant I had the front. But when I went to get in, the man’s hand was there, palm up, where I was supposed to sit. My left foot was already in the car. For a moment I was confused, but only for a moment, because when our eyes met, I saw the grin, the steady stare, and I knew.

  “Jenny,” I said evenly. “Get out of the car.”

  “What?” she began, but I had already reached over her and yanked my pack out onto the gravel. She tumbled out after it, dragging her backpack. I slammed the door so hard the little Pinto shook before it buzzed off down the highway.

  “You fucking scumbag!” I screamed after him as he pulled away.

  “Maggie!” Jenny stared at me like I’d lost my mind.

  My legs gave way and I sat down on my pack again. My hands were shaking, so I squeezed them between my knees.

  Jenny just stared at me, opening her mouth to speak, then stopping, till she finally said, “Why did you do that?”

  The look on her face was so ridiculous that I started to laugh. “I’ll tell you why I did that!” I said. “I didn’t like his stinking looks!”

  After I’d told her what had happened, she said, “Oh Maggie. This was a bad idea. We’re girls. Hitchhiking is dangerous for girls. I mean, I know you act like a boy, but—newsflash—you’re a girl. Sorry. You did get your period, remember?” She put her arm around my shoulders and pulled me to her. “Maggie-girl, let’s just sleep here somewhere.” And for once I was happy to let her act like my big sister.

  Down a little grass track below the highway we found a trail that in our pale flashlight beam seemed to head into a field and peter off to nowhere. We spread out our tent in the long dry grass beside it, laid our sleeping bags on top and pulled the corners of the tent up so they covered our feet. Across the meadow, we could see the orange-lit windows of a cabin. Once in a while we heard traffic slide past on the highway above us. We’d positioned our heads beside a mound of earth for a little wind protection and put the packs on either side of us.

  “Remember Mom used to say you should never sleep on a path because ghosts will walk over you and keep you awake all night?” Jenny said.

  “We aren’t on a path.”

  “Well, we’re very close to one. What if there were three ghosts walking side by side? Or what if a phantom wagon came through here?”

  I closed my eyes on the stars and settled deeper into the sleeping bag on the hard ground. A truck geared down on the road. I thought about Chiwid, digging a bed in the earth, settling in, letting the snow drift over her so that she seemed part of the land. I was so tired, but every time I started to slip into sleep, I felt the pressure of feet trying to get by—soft moccasins, the bony hooves of deer, stiff leather boots and paws.

  I woke to find it had turned cold and that a heavy dew had settled over everything, including our sleeping bags. I tried to pull the tent further over us, but it was wet, too. My feet were cold and my nose was like ice. I drifted back into sleep, woke to check the sky for signs of morning. When dark finally began to turn milky silver I saw a grey mist hanging over the field. I closed my eyes and when I opened them next, a ragged coyote stepped calmly out of the mist. He sat on the path and watched me. Then he ambled off, disappearing into grey.

  As soon as the sun burned through the fog, it was too hot to sleep. I kicked off my sleeping bag, covered my face with my hands to keep the sun off and tried to fall asleep again. But I could hear ranchers out starting engines and rattling around. I sat up. My eyelids felt like sandpaper. Below us, a truck slowly wound its way through the pasture. It might be coming this way. I shook Jenny’s shoulder and she yawned and stretched.

  “I had such nice dreams,” she said.

  Breakfast was bread, cheese sliced thin with my jackknife and an apple each, washed down with swigs of already-stale water from a plastic canteen.

  Jenny balanced her diary on one knee and scribbled in it as she ate. “Want to hear my poem?” she asked as I was re-wrapping the cheese.

  “All right.”

  She cleared her throat. “Here we are on the freedom road, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. We’re carrying a heavy load, but we’re going to fly.”

  “Huh. Not bad. It even kind of rhymes.”

  “Kind of? It does rhyme. That’s why I changed ‘road to freedom’ to ‘freedom road.’ I couldn’t think of a word to rhyme with freedom.”

  Jenny closed her diary and tucked it back into her pack.

  “Not the greatest camping spot,” she said.

  “This was just a practice run. Next time we’ll find something better.”

  “Like a campground?” she said. “I’d at least like to swim.”

  A cowboy from Quesnel gave us a ride back to Williams Lake, the sun burning in through the windshield. Nestled in the hills, I saw a deserted log cabin chinked with white plaster between the squared, weathered grey logs. There were deserted cabins like that all over the Chilcotin. They were solid, cured by the sun and wind. I didn’t see why we couldn’t move into one, fix up the roof, put glass in the windows and live off the land, me, Jenny, Mom and Cinnamon.

  [ EIGHTEEN ]

  “I WONDER IF I COULD live like Chiwid does.”

  Vern didn’t say anything.

  “You know Chiwid, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I do.” I could tell he was thinking. “You couldn’t do it,” he said. “I just mean, I couldn’t do it either. People say she’s left her body. She’s a spirit now. What happened to her, it was too much. She survived but she’s free of her body. Do you get it?”

  “I think so.”

  “She’s a spirit walking around in a human body. But she doesn’t really need the body. That’s how she survives. Out in the winter, twenty below, and no fire. Some people say she’s an animal spirit. My aunty heard this screaming one night. They were camped near Eagle Lake and they heard this crazy howling in the hills above camp, kind of like a cougar, but scarier. They all got their guns ready. Aunty said the next day they went up there and they found Chiwid and her little camp. Chiwid was smiling. She’s always like that.”

  We stretched out on the sun-warm boards. Aspen leaves like plump green hearts shivered in the summer breeze. I closed my eyes and could still see the dappled pattern of sun and leaf and blood against my eyelids. Beside me, Vern’s skin had a familiar, clean smell—soap and sun. I breathed it in. I opened my eyes. He’d crossed his warm brown arms over his white T-shirt. A small indentation at the top of his ribs dipped and rose with his breathing.

  “So you’re going to leave,” he said.

  “That’s the plan.”

  He took my hand and held it to his chest and his heart padded against my palm as if I could catch his heartbeat.

  “Mom was good at finding lost things,” I said. “Funny, eh? Jenny lost her Barbie doll once when we were out camping. She was only wearing her bathing suit.”

  “Jen
ny?”

  “No, Barbie.”

  “So she was worried she might catch her death?”

  “She really was. She was just young. I don’t remember how old, maybe eight or nine. Mom said, ‘Start at the beginning. Retrace your steps. Tell me everything you did with her.’ And while Mom closed her eyes and listened, Jenny went through it step by step. ‘I got her out of the tent after breakfast. She climbed a mountain and rescued Stick Man, who broke his leg because his horse got spooked by a bear and bucked him off. Then we had lunch. Then she married Stick Man. She went swimming in the creek, then she was sunbathing.’ ”

  “Barbie?” Vern said.

  “Yeah. And Mom said, ‘That’s where you’ll find her’ and sure enough, there she was, sunbathing in the mud by the creek. Under the stars.”

  “So you’re going to retrace your steps,” said Vern.

  “That’s the plan.”

  It didn’t take long for Jenny to meet another boy. His name was John. This one was different from the others. I liked him, and that made me nervous. He played three instruments, drums, piano and saxophone, not only in the school band, but also in the country and cover bands that played at weddings and community dances. Jenny said he stayed up all night composing his own songs. He had unsettling blue eyes and a gaze like an X-ray. When he looked at me, I squirmed.

  Also, Jenny had started to worry about what would happen to Bea without us. I sensed my plan unravelling. As she was getting ready to go out with John one evening, Jenny said, “You should get out yourself more, Bea. Why don’t you ever go to the Elks Hall?” She blew delicately on her freshly painted nails.

  “What would I go to the Elks Hall for?” Bea said.

  “I don’t know. Dancing? Maybe for fun? Do you even know that word, Bea? Fun is not washing dishes, not doing laundry, not even watching TV—well, except for Get Smart.”

  Bea laughed and waved Jenny away with one hand and wiped her weepy eye with the other. “I don’t like drinking and those smoky places bother my eyes. And dancing with some smelly drunk is not fun to me.”

  Jenny smiled, her nail polish wand poised for the second coat. “Okay. I can see that. But what is fun to you? You’re not so old. You’ve still got lots of time. Who wants to waste away in this little house in Nowheres-ville, B.C.?”

  “Shh, Jenny!” Bea said, as if her boring life was a well-kept secret and someone listening might be offended.

  “So what is your idea of fun?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “See, it’s been so long since you’ve had any, you forget what it is.”

  “Well,” she said hesitantly, “I do like to bowl.”

  Jenny threw her hands up dramatically. “You like to bowl? You like to bowl?” Jenny looked at me, where I sat silently, impatiently, leafing through a National Geographic. “Bea likes to bowl. For heaven’s sakes, Bea—that’s so simple. You can bowl right here in Williams Lake. I thought you were going to say you liked going to art galleries or something and we’d have to ship you off to Paris or New York.”

  Bea took off her glasses and rubbed her eye harder, laughing.

  “What else is fun to you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I thought once I’d like to go on a cruise.”

  “That can be done,” Jenny said. “Do you have any money?”

  “That’s not a polite question. But since you ask, I have enough to get by. But who would I go with?”

  “You don’t need to go with anybody. That’s why you go on a cruise—to meet eligible men.”

  “It’s no fun going alone,” Bea said.

  “You live alone. I’d say going on a cruise alone is a heck of a lot more fun than being here alone.”

  “I don’t live alone.” Bea looked at Jenny strangely.

  I shot Jenny a murderous stare, silently pleading, shut-up, shut-up, shut-up.

  Jenny looked at me with stupid alarmed bird eyes, her mouth clamped shut. “I meant, you’re alone, like not with a husband or anything.”

  Bea nodded at that and it was okay again. “I would like to swim in the Caribbean Sea. I’ve seen photographs of that white sand and turquoise water. They say it’s like bath water. I read about that in the National Geographic. Have you seen that, Margaret?”

  I looked up, startled, because she never included me in their conversations.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “That would be something. You can put on those scuba diving outfits and get right down under the water.”

  It was more enthusiasm than she’d shown for anything, ever, around us.

  “They’ve got fish, all kinds of colours, really different from what’s around here.” Bea waved her arm in the general direction of the kitchen.

  Through the heat of August, Jenny and John went for long walks down to Scout Island and around the lake. He wore no shirt. His jeans hung loosely around his hip bones and his chest was lean and tanned. When it cooled off in the evening, he put on his flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the buttons undone. I suppose I had a crush on him. One night he sat on the front step with me while Jenny was inside getting dressed.

  “Hear those crickets?” he asked. “When I’m old, I’ll dream about that sound every winter. I’ll want just one more summer, so I can hear them again. Winter makes you old. I want to live in a place where I can walk around all year with no shirt on, feeling the wind on my skin.”

  Talk of wind on his skin made me shiver. He was sitting so close, I could feel the heat from his body.

  “Would you like that?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Where would you live where you could be what you really are?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, there must be a place where Maggie Dillon would be so comfortable in her skin she wouldn’t care what anybody else said or what clothes she wore.”

  “There would be crickets,” I blurted.

  He laughed. “I like that. I want crickets, too. I wonder if there are crickets in Mexico.”

  Jenny came out. When she looked at John her face softened. He smiled. There was something between them that made me jealous. It made me think that as long as John was in Williams Lake, I would not get Jenny to leave.

  [ NINETEEN ]

  BY SEPTEMBER, JOHN was gone. He’d taken his saxophone and the clothes on his back. That was the story around town. I heard it from Bob in the gas station when John’s parents had pulled away after stopping to fill their tank. People said it with a touch of wonder and admiration.

  He didn’t tell Jenny he was leaving, but he mailed her a thick letter. I wanted so badly to read it, but after she’d read it through, she took it out to the backyard and set it on fire. I watched her.

  “He asked me to burn it,” she told me. She didn’t cry and at first she seemed proud that she’d been the one he singled out. He entrusted her with the secret of where he’d gone and why. School had started again and she rose to the sacrifice her loyalty required. But after school, she started closing herself in the bedroom with the window open, smoking cigarette after cigarette.

  Bea could smell the smoke, of course, but she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t risk upsetting Jenny, who could do nothing wrong in her eyes, or so I thought.

  Some days, Jenny asked me to phone Frank’s Chicken and Pizza to tell them she wouldn’t be able to come to work. They were tolerant with her—everybody liked Jenny—but I worried she would lose her job.

  One night, I heard Bea call, “Who used all the hot water?” I had my homework spread out on the dining-room table, and she came to the doorway of the kitchen and glowered at me.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said.

  Half an hour later, Jenny emerged from the bathroom, steaming and red like a boiled tomato. She slammed the bedroom door behind her. She was in a mood. These moods had become frequent.

  I heard a strange thumping sound. I put down my pen and went to the door to listen. What was she doing in there? I opened the door a crack. Jenny was in
a T-shirt and underwear, doing jumping jacks. Her breasts bounced with each jump.

  “Close the door,” she said.

  I did. The sound continued.

  I went back to my homework. I pictured John stripping off her T-shirt. I pictured him pulling her against his bare chest. He said, “Maggie Dillon, where would you live where you could walk around all year with no shirt on?”

  I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. The jumping had stopped.

  “Jenny?” I said, opening the door carefully.

  She was on the bed with a black look on her face, holding a bottle of cod liver oil. “Have you ever tasted this stuff?”

  “Why are you drinking cod liver oil?”

  “You don’t drink it. You are so dense sometimes, Maggie. Other times, you’re quite bright. But I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet. We do share a room.”

  “It’s about John, isn’t it?” Suddenly I knew. “You’re going to run away to be with him, aren’t you?”

  “Have you been watching soap operas with Bea? I’m not ‘running away’ with John, as you put it. Or any other way you want to say it. Don’t worry, I’m stuck here. Really stuck. Fuck it,” she said to the cod liver oil, and she reached for her smokes and lit one up.

  “Don’t you care if Bea finds out?”

  “Finds out what? That I’m pregnant?”

  “What? Jenny, what? Jenny, no.”

  She laughed. She laughed until she cried. Then she threw up in our little tin garbage pail.

  [ TWENTY ]

  “ARE YOU GOING to tell him?”

  “Who?”

  “John.”

  “No.”

  “I think he’d want to know.”

  “What would you know about it, Maggie? You are so naive, you don’t even know how naive you are. Anyway, what would I do, write to him at P.O. Box Wherever the Hell You Are?”

  Jenny didn’t intend to tell Bea, either. I don’t know what her plan was, but it didn’t include throwing herself on Bea’s mercy. That was my idea.

  I was convinced Bea would do anything for Jenny. I told Jenny how it would go.