Johnny is searching out the sense of this. “You shoot him while he’s pissing,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Huh. You’ve done this?”
“No. Just seen it.”
They sit for a while longer. Johnny thinks maybe he dozes because when he opens his eyes Michael is stroking his bow, sliding his hairy hands over the cord and wheels and risers. Johnny sees it as a dirty instrument, hard and dangerous. Michael obviously adores the weapon. He polishes the shaft, fits an arrow in the rest. Draws. If Michael turned slightly, he could pass the arrow through Johnny’s chest. A bizarre thought, Johnny thinks, but he waits and watches, breathing slowly. He has to pee. Michael finally stores the bow back in its black kit and Johnny opens his eyes and yawns.
They eat salami sandwiches as they bump and jolt to the next site. Arriving, they scatter donuts and Frosted Flakes. It is late afternoon by the time they retrieve the car and load up the ATV. Driving later, the wind filling his eyes, Michael calls out to Johnny, “How’s the baby? Loraine, I mean.”
“Okay,” Johnny says. He’d forgotten her the last few hours. Forgotten, too, Melody, and the trip south he will be taking. He looks over at Michael who is pulling on an Orange Crush. When he lowers the can to his thigh, his upper lip has an orange rim that makes him look comical, more approachable. “Babies,” Johnny says, and then he asks, “You ever wanted one?”
“How do you know I haven’t got one?” Michael laughs. “Or more?”
Johnny laughs, waiting, but that’s all the other man offers.
“I’ve been thinking about things,” Johnny says. “About this war that goes on inside of everyone.”
“Does it?” Michael asks.
“Yeah, take Lesser for instance. You’ve lived there a year now and do you have any better idea than me, who is evil and who is good?”
“Everyone,” Michael says. “It’s a curious place, Lesser. There’s this above-the-surface cordiality and kindness, like life is fine and good and clean, and evil is something others suffer from. I don’t believe in evil, by the way, not in the Judeo-Christian sense. If there is such a thing, it constantly changes, I mean it evolves, in the same way our brains evolve. Neanderthals, who did not write Elizabethan sonnets, were also probably incapable of ingenious methods of torture.”
Johnny is trying to work his head around the bullshit. He fans a hand at the air. “Whoa, there. You’re saying this massacre, these beheadings taking place in Africa right now, are not evil?”
“Forget that,” Michael says. “That’s out there. What about Johnny Fehr? Is he bad?”
Johnny ponders. Nods his head. “Sure,” he says. “Sometimes.”
“Which means you’re always looking for salvation.”
“Yes.”
“There’s this theory which I find quite possible. Claims that Jesus was gay. You know, homosexual.”
“Ahhh, piss off.”
“No, seriously. I mean, why didn’t the man have any women? Think of it, twelve disciples, all men. Thing is, this theory states—and this is based on good research—Jesus and Judas were lovers. And if you accept that, how much greater the betrayal?”
Johnny’s smiling and cracking at his knuckles. “You’re unbelievable.”
“You people don’t admit to other possibilities. Narrow little views of salvation. What if I were to say that seeking out redemption in itself is evil; this idea that the world revolves around me. You know, my salvation, my soul, my wish to live forever.”
Johnny says, and believes this very strongly, “No, I don’t want to live forever. It would tire me out. I fear death, yes, but I’d rather burn brightly. What I’m doing, when I dig around in these ideas of salvation, is thinking of myself, of course. But why not? You don’t think about yourself?”
Michael doesn’t answer directly. He says, “Nobody is free to become a Christian: one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity—one has to be sick enough for it.”
Johnny chuckles. He doesn’t quite grasp what Michael’s getting at but he does feel, at his centre, this idea of sickness. He wants to say yes, but instead he laughs. Michael, encouraged by Johnny’s response, taps at the steering wheel with the tips of his thick fingers and growls, “The rancour of the sick.”
But Johnny is no longer chuckling. A thought has come to him like an offering from above; a brief pleasant memory of Loraine slipping into his arms in the middle of a cold December night and laying her wet mouth on his chest and telling him that he was good. Good. Johnny’s body trills.
He stops listening to Michael and Michael, sensing this, becomes reflective and quiet. It is dark when they arrive back in Lesser. After the Fairlane rattles down the driveway and back onto the gravel road, Johnny stands in the middle of the yard and looks up at the sky. There’s a bit of a wind coming in off the neighbour’s field, bringing with it the smell of rain. Johnny listens to the wind. He closes his eyes, then opens them again. He stares up into the sky and waits.
Melody phones Johnny at work on Monday morning and says, “I’ve got an appointment for tomorrow night at eight. That means I could leave after school and be back at Carrie’s house by just after midnight. It’s up to you now.” She pauses. Up to this point her voice has been matter-of-fact, almost too aggressive, but now she says, with a breathiness that reminds Johnny of her pudgy lips, “So?”
“Yes,” Johnny says. As he speaks he experiences a dizziness that forces him to sift through his brain for a balance. Melody’s voice rights him.
“It would be best to pick me up away from school. I’ll be at the Tot-Lot on the south end of town. ’Bout four o’clock, okay?”
Johnny, after hanging up, is grateful for Melody’s precautions. He himself, in his haste to get this done, would simply have risked picking her up at school. She’s intelligent, this one, Johnny thinks. Almost too.
The next day, he finds her where she says she’d be. Crawling up in his Olds, Johnny sees her first. She’s straddling a swing, rocking it side to side and kicking at the sand. She’s wearing jeans and a thick green sweater and big black boots. An overnight bag squats at her feet. The park is empty save for two other kids. They’re about eight or nine, wrapped up in a game by the climbing structure. Johnny, not wanting to attract attention, waits till Melody sees him, and when she does she’s off the swing and clutching her bag and walking towards him. She almost runs; not quite.
Johnny leans back and watches. Her youth is a perfect disguise for what she’s about to embark on. Melody settles into the smoothness of the car; she sighs and slides low.
The leather seat squeaks.
“Don’t worry,” Johnny says, “the windows are tinted.” He drives up the 75 through Morris and keeps going directly to the border. The fields are brimming with water and in some of these lakes there are geese and ducks foraging, or resting, or swimming in circles. It’s a cool day, there’s a possibility of rain. Johnny has the heat on, Melody’s feet are tucked underneath her. The darkness of the swift clouds, the hum of the engine, the wheel in his palms, Melody beside him, all of this evokes in Johnny a sense of both comfort and approaching loss.
Just beyond Morris, Melody pulls out a joint and asks, “This okay?”
“Shit, Melody,” Johnny says, “we’re crossing an international border and you’re carrying dope.”
“It’s my last,” Melody says. “Should I toss it?” She’s sly, because even as she says this, she lights up and adds, “It’ll help me be brave.”
Johnny watches the road and sniffs the air. His palms tingle.
“Here,” Melody pokes the joint at his face.
“Aw, girl. You’re corrupting me.” He takes it, another tiny step down these stairs he’s descending, and pulls twice, hard. He holds his breath, exhales into the glass of the windshield and says, his voice shifting to a whine, “You won’t tell?”
“Uh-uh.” Melody cozies herself into the seat. The two of them pass the joint back and forth like a popsicle two children must share. Johnny
is surprised by the wetness at the tip, as if Melody’s mouth were full of water, or she’d gathered her lips and kissed it. Loraine gives wet kisses. Even the simple goodbye ones.
“Do your folks know who you are?” Johnny asks.
“Huh? Waddya mean?”
“Like, do you hide everything from them?”
Melody’s voice is low, hard to hear. “That’s how we do it in our family. Keep our secrets. Don’t make trouble. Like my mom at the supper table will say to my sister and me, ‘There was this man I used to love, and then I met your father.’ And my father, well, he’ll sit there and say, ‘No one is sinless.’”
“Do you like your father?”
“Does any teenage girl like her father?”
“A lot do, I would think. Yes. Lots.” Johnny sees that Melody is, above all, unhappy.
“I feel sorry for him,” she says. “Everyone thinks my mother is all beaten up and stuff like that, like under his thumb. No way. She’s king-shit. At home. It’s just around the town, in church, etc., etc., that she puts on this oh-I’m-so-pathetic look.”
“You hate her then?”
“Do I?” Melody giggles.
Johnny smiles. Grunts with sudden contentment.
The border arrives quickly. Johnny opens the window to clear the odour, his head. He concentrates on this red flashing light beyond the windshield. He’s got it then, snap, it’s gone.
“Where’d you get that shit?” Johnny asks. He’s swinging now.
Melody answers but Johnny doesn’t attend. Her voice is a mosquito trying to land in his ear. He swats it away, readying himself for the border. “I hope it’s busy,” he mutters.
It isn’t. The officer leaning into the window is older, trained to sniff out lies and fear. Johnny, close to the man’s mouth, sees sharp teeth. Johnny jabbers, “My daughter and I are going to Fargo for a day. Do some shopping.”
“It’s evening,” the man says.
“Yes?” Johnny waits, not quite getting it.
“You gonna stay overnight?”
“Sure, officer, yes.”
The man leans in further, nostrils moving. “How old is your daughter?”
“Sixteen.”
“Anything in the trunk? Firearms? Alcohol? Tobacco?”
“No sir.”
“Fine.” The teeth disappear and all Johnny can see now is a pudgy hand waving him on. He coaxes the Olds forward and regains the highway. “Let’s not do that again,” he says.
Melody asks for a cigarette. Her hands are shaking as she lights it.
“My father hated Americans,” Johnny says. “No real reason, just found them contrary and pushy. He refused to cross the border.”
Melody doesn’t answer. She’s staring out her window. She lights a second cigarette.
“You blaming anyone for this?” Johnny asks finally. Melody’s abrupt silence worries him.
She doesn’t answer. She concentrates on her cigarette, finishes, and flips her butt out the window. There’s a gasp and a sucking noise as the glass slides down and up.
“No,” she says finally. “No one.” She hesitates and then adds, “It’s just a fact. Nobody to blame.”
“I drove Chris to school today,” Johnny says. “He told me you’d stopped talking to him.”
“What’s to say?”
“Okay,” Johnny answers.
It is only later, about an hour from Fargo, when they’ve stopped for a bathroom break and they’re sitting at a counter drinking coffee and a Coke, that Melody appears to exhale the breath she’s been holding for the last hour. She says, “Chris wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t know what to say. I remember, it was months ago, when we were just getting to know each other, and I was gaga. He’s so fine, I thought. But I don’t need fine right now. You see?”
Johnny nods. It is odd to be labelled in this backhanded way. What does Melody see in him, he wonders.
They both smoke then. These shared times with cigarettes have become both intimate and illicit, a devoted few moments making them equals, both deftly touching their ash into a common dish, the tips glowing, the smoke they exhale mingling and drifting upward: the love they feel for this thin cylinder. Better than drugs, Johnny thinks.
Melody laughs, her first real sign of spunk in a while. She says, “Yesterday I was sitting in my room and this wasp came out of nowhere. Buzzed around like it was lost. Circled my head, landed on my window, went bang bang against the glass. Should’ve still been hibernating, I figure, if that’s what wasps do, but somehow it got out of the hive and ended up in my room.” She stops. Puts her finger against her nose.
Johnny reaches out and touches her head. Runs his hand down her hair and then pats her back.
Johnny doesn’t know much about abortion. He has heard murmurings of a suction hose, like a miniature vacuum, yanking the fetus from the uterus wall. There is a pill you can take, he thinks, that aborts the baby. Scraping? He’s not sure. He’s never been terribly adamant one way or the other about abortion. He’s not big into rights and issues, though he does figure a woman’s got a right.
Johnny huddles in the waiting room of the clinic and reflects on the situation. Melody has already been ushered through the swinging door, on the arm of a crisp small black nurse with large calves. “My name’s Laverna,” she said, and offered Melody her hand. Johnny was ignored. He was a pariah of sorts, a dirty-deed man; necessary but filthy.
He wonders what they do with the fetuses. What they look like. If he feels any guilt, it has to do with the perception of other people. The people of Lesser. Inevitably, this escapade over the border will come to light and when it does both Melody and Johnny will suffer. Johnny especially, but that doesn’t concern him. There’s a fierce need in him to snub the zealots. In obvious ways the people of Lesser could ruin him, but he gives this little thought. He’s still buzzing. Listening for the voice of Melody. Wondering if she’ll cry out. He thinks he would have made an excellent soldier. Simply for the rush, the sense that death is close by, nipping behind him, not much to lose.
He steps outside and stands on the sidewalk and smokes. The clinic is located in a residential area, on the main floor of an older two-storey house with a wide outdoor porch. Everything about it is comforting. Like those hospices for AIDS patients Johnny saw on a documentary one night: cozy rooms in a homey atmosphere. Like coming home to Mom’s to die—or lose your baby. Perhaps we need to lie to ourselves, hide our garbage, our deaths, our sicknesses, Johnny surmises. He dislikes the falseness of it yet allows that he too finds solace in the belly of the building he has just exited.
In the car, driving through the middle of Grand Forks, Johnny had handed Melody the money. Five bills. Hundreds. A thin sheaf that she quickly pocketed, sliding her hand into the narrowness of her jeans pocket, lifting a hip with a slight pelvic thrust that Johnny registered in the recesses of his mind, the sexual synapses back there lying dormant, repressed, activating and making his tongue burn. She didn’t say thank you. Didn’t respond. Just took his money.
Across the street from the abortion clinic is a little restaurant with a patio bar. Johnny crosses over and picks a spot where he can observe the entrance of the clinic. He checks his watch. It’s been almost two hours.
He is served by a young girl who looks slightly older than Melody. In many ways she is very much like Melody. She chatters to Johnny, about the menu, where he’s from—she knows he’s Canadian by the accent.
“Don’t get many of you down here these days. The exchange rate’s lousy,” she says. “You here on business?”
“Yup,” Johnny answers. “Feed. Grain.” He orders Sangria and sips slowly, sucking on the ice. He smokes Camels and savours their bite.
Then Melody appears, stepping gingerly out onto the cobbled sidewalk, reaching down a toe off the sill as if testing the water in a swimming pool. She stands in the evening shade of a huge elm, her arms hugging her purse, her head shifting slowly, hunting down Johnny. He stands and waves. Calls her over. She se
es him and lifts her hand. Drops it. She walks towards him and Johnny assumes that she is a little dismayed, moved by the simplicity of the act she has had performed on her. If he were a woman, he would stand and hold her. But as it is he takes her elbow, helps her sit and says, “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She laughs weakly. Asks for a cigarette. She avoids him. Eyes everywhere but on his. “I’m hungry,” she says. Her face is pale.
“Wanna eat here?” Johnny asks. “Someplace else?”
Melody gives a mock shudder. “Not across from there,” she says and throws a hand carelessly backwards over her shoulder, at the place she’s just left. After Johnny pays for his barely touched drink, they drive out past strip malls and gas bars and pull in at a Pizza Hut where Melody bows before a large Pepperoni and a jug of Pepsi.
After she’s eaten her mood becomes euphoric. Hands flit like little angel wings at her shoulders. She chatters, allowing him now to see her black pupils, round islands surrounded by blue.
“The doctor was a woman,” she says. “She was nice. Her hands were warm. Her gloves, I should say. She gave me a local, froze me down there. It’s tickling right now, kinda like the dentist and getting your feeling back in your gums. Anyways, it didn’t hurt. The doctor explained exactly what she was doing. ‘I’m going to use this instrument here,’ she said, ‘It’s called a vacurette.’ And she showed me this tiny piece of white plastic like a miniature vacuum nozzle, the kind you use for hard-to-get places, you know?”
Johnny nods. It is strange to have these intimacies explained to him. She’s just blabbing. In fact, the Pizza Hut waitress with her little eyebrow ring would do just as fine.
Melody natters, “Anyway, I didn’t feel it. ‘We have to dilate you slightly,’ the doctor says. ‘Dilate?’ I ask. ‘Open you up,’ she answers, and all I could think of was going fishing with my father and prying open the fish’s mouth to find the hook. Still, it didn’t hurt. The oddest thing though was feeling it wasn’t me. Kinda like it was someone else lying there, not Melody Krahn. That was creepy.”
A Year of Lesser Page 17
