Bull Head

by John Vigna

  The boy tells the woman about the home he has built over the years, pouring his planting money back into the house during the off-season. The house now finished, he’s bored and needs another project.

  He speaks of his partner, how they met in a planting camp four years ago, how she’s changed since the birth of his son. His voice softens. “He’s a neat little guy. It kills me not to be with him.” They didn’t have sex anymore, and she didn’t look him the eye. Each time he raised the issue, she told him there was nothing wrong, and after a while he decided she wasn’t attracted to him, never had been.

  “You ever hear of the fatal flaw in a relationship?” he says. “The moment you meet someone you fall for, you get a quick glimpse of the true thing that might drive you apart. You ignore it at the time, you don’t even know it to be a flaw, you might even think it’s cute or quirky, and you’re attracted to it. You even think it’s something you can change in them. But it’s there, and over time it grows, digging deeper into your life so that one day you stand across a valley from one another with no way of closing the gap because you can’t, because you know the thing between you can never be forgotten, it’s always been looming there since the beginning.” He leans against the headboard, stares at the ceiling. “She hated being alone. I couldn’t go anywhere, not even into town to pick up the mail, without her wanting to be with me. At first it was flattering. Like I was important to her and she really loved to spend time with me. But after a while I realized she was just afraid, and it had nothing to do with me.”

  After the ecstasy wears off, they smoke a joint and drink more wine from the bottle, pass it back and forth, the sheets twisting around them like rope. She spills some on his stomach, the stain spreads across the sheet beside him. She licks his belly and brushes her face against him, looks into his eyes. “So, what’s my flaw?”

  “You don’t have one.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You’re too damn pretty.” He tickles her fleshy ribs.

  “Quit screwing around.”

  He stops. “Fine. You have trouble following through on things.”

  “Bloody hell. You don’t have to be so harsh.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’re the same, anyways.”

  “No. I’m the opposite. I keep my commitments.”

  “You mean like the one to your girlfriend?” She knows that she’s hurt him because he’s silent and turns away.

  “Fair enough. Almost all of my commitments.”

  “Then we should get along just fine, right?”

  They laugh, roll in the sheets, smear the wine between them, and when he lifts his face to meet hers, he blurts out the thing she wants to say herself but cannot, should not, will not, not after knowing someone for a few days. She kisses him quickly in reply and turns away, stares at the wall until she falls asleep.

  In the morning, on the boat ride back to camp, she sits in the rain with the boy and her dog. “Don’t you dare say that to me again unless you mean it, understand?”

  The boy says it again, and keeps saying it the rest of the spring. He shouts it across the cutblock when they plant together, murmurs it while they brush their teeth. He tells her in sign language, and he says it with little gifts—an empty wine bottle with wildflowers in it; notes scratched by rock into the waxed cardboard of the tree boxes slipped into her lunch bag. He draws hearts on a sandy beach. Carves them into trees at the edge of the cutblock. He tells her before they go to work in separate crew trucks and again when they get home and share a beer and shower together. Each day he tells her he planted every tree for her. She is surprised by his emotional, theatrical displays of affection, resists it by telling herself that he is infatuated with the idea of his own infatuation. He’ll gain his senses and lose interest.

  “There’s so much beauty in a cutblock,” he says one sunny afternoon while they sit on the landing, leaning against flattened tree boxes eating their lunch.

  “It’s a moonscape. There’s nothing here. No birds, no sounds, no trees. Nothing’s alive or growing.”

  “You have to look closer. See the beer can and plastic oil jug with their faded labels? Rusted chainsaw blade. Spray can. Signs of men who worked here for their families. In another month or so, it’ll be covered in a sea of pink and green fireweed. After that, snow so deep you won’t see the stumps, and it will look like a winter meadow; you’ll be able to snowshoe across it. Wouldn’t it be great to build a place on one of these, watch the trees you planted grow up around you?”

  “It’s still a cutblock. Barren and boring.”

  “It brought us together.”

  In late April, when they are breaking camp, the boy runs over a feral cat that crouches beneath his truck. The cat lifts its head, mouth bloodied and broken, and bolts for cover in the bush; the boy climbs out of the truck and sprints after it. Crew bosses bellow reminders about making the barge in time. The woman runs after the boy, leaps logs, ducks beneath furry branches that scratch and pull at her arms, shouts the boy’s name over and over. But it is no use; he’s faster and disappears. She gives up, turns around and cautiously walks across the cutblock, over long, grey logs onto springy piles of slash, using stumps as steps, and heads toward the idling trucks.

  Her crew boss lays on the horn and shouts, “That’s a goddamn dead cat. Let’s go.” The woman searches the tree line for a sign of them.

  Someone shouts. The boy walks out of the bush, cradling the cat in his arms. He traverses the cutblock with ease and offers the cat to the woman. “I found it where your tent used to be.”

  She touches the cat’s head, inspects its face, and senses it will be okay. In the relief of the moment, of learning something new about the boy, she hugs him ferociously. She starts to cry, and he holds her close, kisses the top of her head.

  “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” He takes the cat from her and holds it up to whoops and hollers from the rest of the crew.

  The woman begins to depend on him. They spend the rest of the spring together, her dog and his cat between them; she goes to bed early instead of hanging around the campfire late, smoking pot and drinking. She waits a few weeks and breaks the news to him once she resolves she will keep the child. The boy surprises her with his enthusiasm, his tears of joy; he starts a list of names, brings her chamomile tea in the mornings, massages her feet in the evening. He works every day he can, first and last to bag out.

  On a rare day off together at the Reel Inn, the boy slips out of bed early and crosses the gravel parking lot beneath a lead-coloured sky. The woman heaves into the toilet, grips the bone-bleached bowl to haul herself up to the window where she wraps a blanket around her bare shoulders and peeks through the filthy curtains. The boy stands hunched over the pay phone, smiling into the receiver before hanging up and returning to the room, the smell of rain clinging to his broad shoulders.

  “Did you tell her?” the woman says.

  “My son has the flu. She’s going through a tough time.”

  “What about me?” She feels her anger rise, prickling the skin on her neck.

  “I’m sorry.” He holds her close and gently rocks her. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” He strokes her stomach and is quiet.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything’s happening so fast. I need to slow it down.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “Before I came planting, he promised he’d take care of me when I got old.” The boy flips the curtain aside and stares out the window. “Christ, he’s not even four.”

  “You can’t keep putting this off. It’s eating you alive and making us both miserable.”

  “You don’t have to make me feel worse.”

  “It’s not too late to back out.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  They follow the work, move further north to Meziadin Junction, where the nights are bright as the solstice nears, humming with clouds of black flies and mosquitoes and no-see-ums that crawl thr
ough the mesh screen of their tent. When the boy and the woman tumble off to bed after dinner, they kill mosquitoes by flashlight, bloodied streaks and appendages smeared into the blue nylon of their tent walls, until they can sleep in peace, clinging to one another, the cat and dog sleeping against their heads.

  The woman begins to dream of trees. Densely packed forests. Trees standing alone on a torn-up landscape of broken branches, stumps upturned on their sides, piles of slash as tall as a house. Clusters of trees packed along the riverbanks. Tender seedlings in a mound of rich dirt beside a stump. The soft nettles of a yellow cedar, the scent of a jack pine, the sticky sap of a fir.

  When the boy tells her she spent part of the night hunched inside the tent, pacing back and forth, screefing the sleeping bag, looking for the perfect place to plant the next tree, she has no recollection of it. She does it again and again; the boy and the cat and the dog sleep against the far side of the tent to give her more space. One night, he stops her and encourages her to lie down, tells her he’ll help plant out her trees, takes her shovel and plants a few trees. “See, it’s okay, get some sleep.” He lays her down and notices blood on the sleeping bag, larger spots than from the mosquitoes they’ve killed.

  They rush through the night along dark and dusty logging roads, thud across the rough corrugated surfaces into corners, speed down the smooth straightaways, rocks pebbling the underside of his truck. Insects smash into their headlights and smack off the windshield. The woman cannot sit so she kneels upright on the seat, rolls down the window, and grips the door to steady herself. She closes her eyes and leans her head out the window, the cold air lashes her, a respite from the cramping that tears at her lower back and insides. The wind obliterates the boy’s voice, dust seeps into the cab of the truck; she breathes through her mouth, suffocated with what she knows has gone wrong.

  In the emergency ward the boy holds her hand, caresses her forehead, kisses her. “There will be another one.” His eyes are filled with tears. “I promise.”

  She turns away, leans her cheek against the coolness of the wall. “There’s nothing keeping you here anymore. Except guilt.”

  He clings to her more fiercely and weeps. “We’ll keep trying. I’ll build a house on stilts overlooking a cutblock. We’ll raise him and grow old together and watch the forest grow up around us.”

  “Stop it. You have no idea what you’re saying anymore.”

  During the summer break between contracts, they head south, where the fruit hangs heavy and fragrant in thick orchards and the lake is bathwater warm. They rent a small cabin on the shores of the lake, pre-paying by the week, and settle in.

  The boy sets up a wood shop and spends long hours in the outbuilding. When he’s not with her in the cabin, the woman misses him or feels lonely, she can’t tell which, but she’s glad when he returns, filling the cabin with the scent of cedar dust that falls from his arms.

  One day the boy takes the woman by the hand and leads her blindfolded to the workshop and unties the bandana. “Look.”

  A cedar trunk rests on the ground, smooth as morning lake water, the planks merge into one another as one, a whale carved into the wood on top. “It’s for you.”

  “What is it?”

  He laughs. “A trunk. Made with scraps from the various cut-blocks we’ve worked on together.”

  She runs her hands along the smooth wood, traces the contours of the whale’s body. “No one has ever made something for me.” She kisses him.

  “Open it.”

  The woman lifts the lid. Inside a mood ring sits on the bottom. When she turns around, the boy is bent on one knee.

  He slips the ring on her finger. “Will you grow old together with me? I’ll get you a proper ring, at home.” He holds her hand to look at the ring. “It’s turning purple.”

  “Get up.” She takes the ring off and hands it back to him.

  He stops smiling and lets out a long exhale. “I know it’s not ideal. You deserve better. Much better. And I’ll spend the rest of my life seeing that you get nothing but.”

  The woman covers her face with her hands, turns away, and cries.

  “I’m sorry. I promise, I’ll head home first thing tomorrow morning, get everything straightened out. Just give me a couple of days.”

  She turns to face him. “And then what? We’ll live happily ever after? Jesus.”

  He bends over and unties one of his boots, slips it off, and places it in the trunk. “How far can I go with one boot? Keep this as a reminder of what I’m proposing. I need you like these boots need each other.”

  “I don’t want some trite, dramatic, romantic gesture. I want something real.”

  “Trust me on this.”

  “Three days? No more sneaking around?”

  “Yes.”

  The next morning, he tosses his duffle bag onto the bed of the truck. They hold each other tight in the cool damp air. He climbs inside, starts the ignition, and leans out the window to kiss her.

  She will wait one week before loading up her van and driving southeast to Bull Head, the hum of her bald tires a desperate slow song on the blacktop. She won’t know where to go once she gets to town, doesn’t know the boy’s address. So she’ll drive around town all day, up and down each street looking for his truck, and sleep in her van at night. She won’t know how she’ll confront him, but she senses it will be unpleasant; she feels like a fool for imagining a future with him.

  After a few days of searching, she’ll learn that he took his son fishing, taught him how to read the water and throw a dry fly at the edge of the calm pool, let the eddies move it, wait for the fish to rise along the riffles, and carefully set the hook. She’ll learn that he showed his son how to remove a hook and kiss the fish before releasing it back into the river. Perhaps that’s what they were talking about before they encountered a black bear and her two cubs on the path. The boy snapped his fishing rod on the charging bear, shouted at his son to run to the truck and wait for him. His son sat crying, huddled in the footwell, clutching his knees, rocking back and forth, waiting for his father to return as darkness fell. She’ll learn all this from an article in The Free Press, the ink from her fingertips smeared on her face in black streaks.

  The woman will agonize about introducing herself to the boy’s son and his mother, drive to their house and park nearby, consider what she’ll say while his son practices his casts on bright yellow rubber ducks floating in a plastic wading tub in the front yard. She’ll see his mother pick him up, hold him like a small sack of feed, and carry him to the porch, smooth out his hair, call out to him when he runs behind the house. She’ll see the woman sit on the porch step, lean against the wooden post, and close her eyes against the brightness of the day.

  She’ll return each day, park out of sight and watch the son and his mother together until one day they leave, drive down the gravel road, the dust settling on the treetops. The door will be unlocked.

  The fridge magnets will hold up colourful crayon drawings of a man holding hands with a child in front of a house. A man with a shovel, trees behind him. A cat. Notes for dental appointments long past, a pre-school newsletter, emergency numbers, a reminder to pick up cat litter.

  In the bedroom she’ll find a picture of the boy on the night-stand showing off a fish on a boat. Countless pictures of his son. Wearing a cowboy hat and holster. A naked toddler on his belly, smiling. Sleeping in a bundle of blankets. She’ll open the drawer. A Bible, more photographs, her mood ring tucked away in the back corner. She’ll find a picture of the boy, one she took when they were in a fruit orchard, the lake behind him. He smiles back at her, wide and open.

  She’ll pocket the photo, slip on the ring, and close the drawer. She’ll rent a house in town, down the road from the child and his mother. Eventually, she’ll inherit family money and buy a tract of logged land on a small rise with a view of the church and cemetery and river. Here, she’ll build a modest home. The soil will be rich and black under her nails, stain her fingertips, d
ark and winey, the smell of lodgepole pine always nearby. She’ll give up on trying to scrub it out. Other men will come and go in her life, but embracing them will be like holding charred wood—they will darken her existence with the knowledge that she had once held the one she was meant for.

  She will stand on the snow banks along with the other parents and watch the boy’s son play hockey, stamp her feet to keep them warm, hear the muffled claps of her gloved hands each time the boy’s son makes a good play. She’ll genuflect on the hard wooden kneelers and pray for the boy’s son at his confirmation, the damp of holy water drying on her forehead. She’ll see his mother drop him off at junior high school with a kiss on the cheek, and she’ll see the first time he gets drunk at the town dump, the stench of garbage thick in the air as he throws beer bottles and shouts curses from the tailgate of his father’s truck at the stout, sluggish bears foraging for trash. She’ll follow him as he picks up his date for the high school prom and wait outside the school gym listening to the pounding bass line vibrate off the walls, the early summer evening warm, humming with insects around her. She’ll follow them up the mountainside to a turnoff overlooking the valley where the boy’s son and his date park, sit on the tailgate beneath the stars, sip beer and laugh before they roll out a blanket on the flatbed for the night. His father’s duct-taped fly rod stretched across the gun rack in the rear window.

  The woman will slip in through the back of the church and attend the boy’s son’s wedding, and later, after everyone has left, she’ll grab a fistful of confetti and rice from the ground and save it in a small jar that she will keep on the windowsill above her kitchen sink. She’ll cut out the birth announcements of each of the young couple’s three girls and pin them to her fridge next to the picture of the boy taken in the fruit orchard.