The first headstone I came across was carved in the shape of an eagle and covered in moss. It was already half-eaten through by bugs and looked ready to collapse. I looked down and realized that I was standing on the grave. I jumped back. The silence was the solemn silence of churches, hushed. Only the rain dripping off the trees broke the stillness. I wandered through the graveyard, hunting headstones.
As the afternoon wore on, I began to wish I’d put on a coat. Shivering and wet, I knew Mom was going to keep me inside if I went back to the house, and that would be the end of exploring. I snuck down along the beach, crept past the clearing in front of the house and headed for the spring. There was sand on the upper part of the shore, where the trees met the beach. Near the spring I saw wolf footprints on the track of deer footprints. Excited, I went hunting through the bushes for the wolf and came across some decrepit houses. The roofs had fallen in, the doors were leaning drunkenly against their frames or were flat on the ground. Some of the rooms still had old cups and dishes in them, half-hidden in dead leaves and moss.
When I heard Mick’s speedboat coming in, I walked back to the house. Mom never lit into me as badly when Mick was there. I steeled myself for the big lecture, but when I got inside, she didn’t even turn to look at me. She was frying corned beef. Mick was sneaking up on her, and I stepped back onto the porch so I wouldn’t ruin the surprise. He came up behind her, encircled her waist with his arms and gave her a gentle kiss on the neck. She pulled his arms off, slowly, then pushed him away, eyes downcast.
I stayed in the shadows of the porch as Mick retreated into the front room. She continued frying as if nothing had happened. I backed slowly down the steps, careful to go on the edges, where the steps creaked the least.
Time passed, I don’t know how much, everything blurred and slid together, and I shook and felt like I was going to throw up.
“Hey, short stuff,” Mick said as he walked along the beach. “We’re waiting for you. Dinner’s getting cold.”
I walked past him, saying nothing. I stopped in the doorway and waited. Mom handed me a plate.
“If you get a cold,” she said, “I’m not going to feel sorry for you.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Just go change, Lisa.”
Dinner that night was quiet. Uncle Geordie started coughing. Aunt Edith was knitting
“You in the doghouse too?” Mick whispered when Mom went into the kitchen.
Uncle Geordie was going back early to Kitamaat in the speedboat to see about an engine part. I told Mom I was sick and wanted to go with him back to the village. She frowned at me, placed her hand against my forehead and agreed with me, telling me how it was my own fault for running around in the cold without a coat.
Later, Aunt Edith told me about the accident they had on the way back from Kemano. They were towing the punt. Since it was empty, it was rolling in the waves. She was watching it, so when a wave hit it the wrong way and it slid under the water, she called out a warning. The troller tilted, stern pulled down, as the punt sank. Mom tried to work the knot free, but it had tightened as the punt pulled at it. Mick slid beside Aunt Edith, brought out his knife and cut them free, but Mom said that during those few seconds that she was thinking they were goners, she saw porpoises playing around the punt and knew they were going to be all right. But for a moment, she said, the porpoises looked like people, and she screamed.
The greengage tree was covered with a fishing net. The greengages were almost ripe, so Dad had put the net on to keep the crows from raiding our tree. Crows are clever, though, and find the holes or simply go under the net. I don’t like ripe greengages, anyway. I like them tart and green, hard enough to scrape the roof of my mouth.
White feathers tumbled down from the half-eaten chickens caught near the top of the tree, where the hawks had dropped them. The chickens were still alive. They flapped wings, kicked feet, struggled against the net. Their heads had fallen to the ground like ripe fruit. Their beaks opened and closed soundlessly, and their eyes blinked rapidly, puzzled and frightened.
I can’t find my cigarettes. I’ve ripped my room apart and nothing. I had a full carton. I couldn’t have gone through it so fast. I had a full pack right there in the bottom of my purse. I have more, I know I have more. I can’t have just three cigarettes to my name. Damn. I’m going to have to make a trip into town. I light the first one. Eyes are closing again. I collapse into my bed. Never fall asleep with a cigarette in your mouth. No, no, no. I regretfully stub it out, saving the rest of it for later. Funny how you never appreciate a cigarette fully until you know it’s one of your last.
Morbid thoughts. Try to avoid morbid thoughts. Staring at my ceiling. Flat expanse of white. Easy to space out. Tired. My clock says 2:47 a.m. Rain blowing against my window. More than a half-kilo metre under the surface, the ocean is perpetually dark, and even artificial light is obscured by the blizzard of falling particles from decaying animals and plants. They fall like snow against the unending darkness. At a depth of one kilometre, the temperature is only a few degrees above freezing. Less than one hundredth of a per cent of the deep sea has been glimpsed; astronauts have flown 384,000 kilometres to walk on the moon, but no one has actually set foot on the deepest ocean floor.
The crows are squawking in the greengage tree. Ma-ma-oo told Jimmy that feeding crows brought you good luck, so he tried it before a swim meet. It was the first time he won. He also likes to leave them things to steal. Before he went out fishing on the Queen of the North, he left an old run-down pocket watch on our porch. It was snatched up by one of his favourites, Spotty, who looks like she’s been splashed by bleach. Spotty pecked at it for a long time before bringing it to the road and leaving it there.
“Watch this,” Jimmy said to me. “She’s going to haul it up in the air, then drop it until it busts open. They do that with clams too.”
Spotty did no such thing. She waited patiently by the side of the road, preening in the early-morning sunlight and occasionally screeching. Jimmy tried not to look disappointed. I was about to go inside when a car drove by, missing the pocket watch completely. Spotty hopped over and moved it two feet to the left, so that when the next car came along, it ran right over the watch. Jimmy and I looked at each other, then back at Spotty, who picked at the exposed innards of the pocket watch. She gathered up some of the pieces and flew away.
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” I said, “I’d never have believed it.”
Jimmy looked so pleased, you’d have thought Spotty had joined Mensa.
Some swimmers spat in their goggles, some shaved their bodies, but Jimmy used to feed the crows. Every morning, early, he’d be on the back porch. He would wait a moment before he began to rock in his chair. The porch would creak like an old ship. The crows were attracted to the creaking, they knew it meant food. He’d break the bread into small pieces while the crows settled into place, squawking, flapping and pecking each other. The crows covered our porch in a shifting black mass. He’d toss the bread languidly, as if he were a king granting favours. The crows are so used to this ritual that they keep coming back to the porch, arguing over the best place to wait.
For our first sex-education class, the girls and boys were split up and sent to different rooms. Tab picked a spot at the back, and we wrote notes back and forth while our teacher explained the mysteries of a uterus. As she moved on to menstruation, she passed around some pads and tampons for us to look at. She said that our bodies would start to go through many changes, and that we would become women. “If you see blood on your panties, don’t be afraid to tell your teacher or your parents. Let them know, and they will help you get the right equipment.”
She started to explain birth control. Whenever she said “sex,” a wave of nervous giggles washed through the class. She started to say “intercourse” instead, but we all knew what she meant, and the giggles continued.
I couldn’t really imagine having sex with a boy. From the look on Tab’s face, I could tell s
he felt the same way. According to every True Story I’d ever read, sex led to misfortune. Girls in our class had become very silly, standing around the playground and whispering about this boy or that. I was glad I didn’t have to be a part of it.
After school, we went to Tab’s house and snuck into her room. It was hard to concentrate on playing cards, because Aunt Trudy had her stereo blasting. Tab could ignore the blaring Creedence Clearwater Revival and Aunt Trudy’s sing-along drinking buddies, but I played with one hand against my ear. When we went upstairs to get chips, Aunt Trudy invited us to sit with her. Josh had his arm around Trudy’s shoulders and was rambling on about his fishing season. The other two men were singing and waving their beer cans to the beat of the music. When we didn’t join them, she called us stuck-up snobs and asked Tab over and over if she thought she was better than her mother. The cigarette smoke made the ceiling a blue haze, and the yeasty smell of beer on everyone’s breath combined with the noise to make me sick. Aunt Trudy started asking Tab if she was fucking around, who she was fucking around with and if she thought she could get away with it.
“Don’t think I don’t know,” she said. “I’m on to you. I know what you’re doing. You can’t get anything past me, girly-girl.”
Tab just looked at her mother. My eyes bugged out. I expected Tab to break down and cry. The longer Aunt Trudy went on, the madder I got. Tab stomped on my foot each time I was about to open my mouth, but I finally spoke up.
“You’re being really mean,” I said. Tab kicked my ankle under the table, but I kept going. “She doesn’t even like boys.”
Aunt Trudy’s glazed eyes switched from Tab to me. She blinked, and stared at me as if I’d just appeared. “Miss High-and-Mighty, aren’t we? Miss High-and-Mighty.”
“Let’s go,” I said to Tab.
“You think you’re so good. You think you’re so special. Don’t you? Don’t you have a special friend, girly-girl?”
“Mom,” Tab said. “Stop it.”
“Shut up, you whore,” Aunt Trudy said to Tab.
I stood up. “Shut up, you drunk.”
Tab gave an exasperated sigh. “Lisa …”
I couldn’t believe she was taking her side. “She can’t talk to you like that.”
“You think I’m a drunk,” Aunt Trudy said. “I’m not half the drunk your precious uncle Mick was.”
I stood in Aunt Trudy’s kitchen and couldn’t make my mouth work. Aunt Trudy grinned. “All dried up now, is he? All sober and clean. Oh, he was a horny dog when he was a drunk.”
“He was not!”
“Mom, we’ve got homework,” Tab said. “Come on, Lisa.”
“Panting after your mother.”
“You’re a liar!”
Aunt Trudy laughed, which woke up Josh, who’d passed out on his chair. He blinked at us, then asked Aunt Trudy for a beer.
“Fridge’s right there,” Aunt Trudy said.
“Some fucking host you are,” he said.
While they were arguing, Tab tugged on my sleeve. When we were back in her room, she told me to ignore her mom.
“How can you let her talk to you like that?” I said, still furious.
“She’s just drunk. She won’t remember a thing tomorrow,” she said.
I sat on her bed and hugged a pillow. “I can’t believe she says things like that. What a liar.”
Tab gave me a pitying look. “Why do you listen to her?”
The next day, I went back over to Tab’s house.
“Come in, come in.” A shakily sober Aunt Trudy led me into the kitchen and offered me juice, then laughed and said she’d just sent Tab to the store to get some. “You can have coffee or water. I don’t think you drink coffee yet, do you?”
I shook my head. I watched her for any hidden resentment, any clue that she was still mad at me for calling her a drunk, but she seemed genuinely glad to see me. She cupped her mug of coffee, squinting when the sun poked through the clouds and lit the kitchen.
“How’re your mom and dad these days?” she said.
“Okay,” I said, racking my brains for a clever way to bring up Uncle Mick that would make her tell the truth.
“What grade are you in now?”
“Five.”
“Five! Oh.” She laughed again and hit her own head. “Same as my Tab. Don’t have a brain till I’ve had my coffee.”
“Aunt Trudy?” I gave up. I wanted to know too badly to be clever.
“Hmm?”
“Did Mick and my mother have an affair?”
She almost dropped her cup, then spent a long time pretending to mop up coffee that hadn’t spilled. “What? What?”
“Did they?”
“Who on earth have you been talking to?”
Until that moment, I hadn’t really believed that she couldn’t remember the night before. “People.”
“People?” She adjusted her bathrobe, ran a hand through her hair. “People, hey?” Her eyes narrowed. “Erica people?”
I didn’t answer. For a moment, I was going to tell her that she’d told me herself, but knowing Aunt Trudy’s dislike of anything involving her sister Kate, Erica’s mother, I just watched her.
“Thought so,” Aunt Trudy said. “You don’t listen to anything that little witch says. Your mom and Mick went on a few dates, but he left before they … um, before they … did anything. She was brokenhearted, your dad was there to comfort her, and they fell in love. What did Erica say to you?”
“She just hinted.” Which was, more or less, the truth.
“Jealous, I bet.” She raised her eyebrows significantly. “Just like her mother.”
What Erica could possibly be jealous of escaped me. She had everything.
“Here,” Aunt Trudy said. She pushed herself out of the chair and patted my shoulder. “I think there might be a cookie or two left in my cupboards.”
When Tab came back, she found us sitting at the kitchen table. She paused, startled. Aunt Trudy called Tab a dear and made us a Kraft pizza. Tab watched me. Aunt Trudy said her tummy was upset, probably because of a darn flu bug. When her mother wasn’t looking, Tab rolled her eyes upward.
A sea otter dives. Long streams of sunlight wash through kelp trees, undulating like lazy belly dancers. A purple sea urchin creeps towards a kelp trunk. The otter dips, snatches up the urchin, carries it to the surface, where the sound of the waves breaking on the nearby shore is a bitter grumble. Devouring the urchin’s soft underbelly in neat nibbles, the otter twirls in the surf, then dives again. The urchin’s shell parachutes to the ocean bottom, landing in the dark, drifting hair of a corpse.
The little man woke me near dawn, his eyes glittering and black. The Winnie the Pooh stories end with Christopher Robin saying he’s too old to play with Pooh Bear. Little Jackie Piper leaves Puff the Magic Dragon. Childhood ends and you grow up and all your imaginary friends disappear. I’d convinced myself that the little man was a dream brought on by eating dinner too late—Mom had told me she always dreamed of earthquakes if she ate too much lasagna. Sometimes he came dressed like a leprechaun, but that night he had on his strange cedar tunic with little amulets dangling around his neck and waist. His hair was standing up like a troll doll’s, a wild, electric red. He did a tap dance on my dresser. Then he slipped, fell into my laundry basket and pulled my sweaters and T-shirts over his head. The basket tipped over and rolled beneath my window. I watched it warily, my chest aching so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.
“You little bastard,” I whispered.
He popped into the air behind me. I didn’t know he was there until he touched my shoulder with a cold, wet hand. When I spun around to smack him, he stared at me with wide, sad eyes. Even after he disappeared, I could feel where his hand had touched me, and I knew he’d been trying to comfort me.
I put my head in my hands, nursing a headache on the front steps. Mick came and plopped himself down beside me. “Hey, how’s my favourite monster?”
“Okay,” I said.
&nbs
p; “Yeah? You’ve been pretty quiet lately.”
I shrugged. “I’m thinking.”
“Your mom says some things are simple, and thinking just make them complicated.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, life. Apparently we’re here to have babies and everything else is just icing on the cake.”
“Are you going to have babies?”
“If I can find someone who’ll put up with me.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Someday. Tomorrow. Three years from now. Who knows?”
It wasn’t the answer I wanted. I sat up, pulling myself right beside him. “Can I come with you?”
He ruffled my hair. “You know you can’t.”
“It’s not fair.”
“You can come check the net with me.”
I pressed my temples together. “I got a headache.” He laughed. “I do. I had awful dreams last night.”
He kissed the top of my head and stood, stretching. “I don’t feel like checking the net either. Been skunked for the last few days anyway.” He saluted me. “But duty calls, I’m off.”
I waved, then turned away and went inside to have breakfast. My eyes were gritty. It felt like I hadn’t slept for weeks. Dad’s car pulled into the driveway and he emerged carrying a waist-high shrub. I watched through the kitchen window as Mom stomped across the lawn and put her hands on her head and pulled at her hair as Dad placed his new greenery in front of the rose trellis.
My cereal had no taste. I couldn’t eat. The dream still crowded around me. Jimmy watched TV in the living room and the cheerful pops and endless, bubbly music of his cartoon show faded for a moment. Sunlight broke through the clouds, brightening up the kitchen so much that I felt dizzy, like I was falling. I jerked upright, disoriented, staring into my Rice Krispies.
Monkey Beach Page 11
