Freddie nodded, sharp, letting her sense his attention against her: the way he was reading her clothes, her hair, every sign that set her outside this life and made her at fault. “That’s the roping started …” He winked, gave a brief twitch of his head towards the arena where a light-haired man was kneeling and bundling up the feet of a calf with rope, as if he were tying a small cow bouquet. Another man, also light-haired, watched from horseback while the drilling voice of the MC monotoned through a narration.
“And a pretty good time, there, for the MacDonald brothers.”
The calf, left duly secured with the proper knot, rocked and jerked, bawling into the sand, failing to work free.
“Come on now, let’s give them a big hand.”
Somebody whooped from high on the benches and there was a break or two of applause. Freddie swung back to her, serious, testing her defences, “They lost a few points when they caught her …” She waited for some kind of punch line. “But you’ll have noticed that, Juney, I’m sure: being aware of the way that we keep score.” His stare held until she met it, accepted his pointed absence of respect, the dig of something else, a hotter complication in his thought.
“Actually, Freddie, I’d prefer it if you called me June. My name is June.” But most names changed here: Freddie, Juney, Marcy, Fancy: like a roll call of Snow White’s less successful dwarfs. Which could have been charming but wasn’t, even though she had to live amongst them, ought to be glad when they made her sound like a proper neighbour for Jimmy and Billy and Sandie and Lizzie May.
Freddie pressed in another glance, let it search her for too long. “Well, better get back to my wife,” and then fired off the parting smile—I am a working man which is the best type of man there is and I work hard and deserve all that I’ve got and what I’ve got is everything you lack: the right to be here and to be at ease here and the right to fuck.
The dumpy brunette who waited for him over by the hot-dog stall wasn’t really his wife, he only called her that, but they lived together on Williamson land and went to church as a couple and bred Williamson children with blunt regularity—June had seen a teenage pair of them scuffling by the calf pens earlier. Sometimes Freddie went back to driving a truck for extra cash and never said how he spent his nights away, but liked to give the impression they were usually wakeful and in active company. It was hard to tell which he enjoyed more: his public almost-adultery, or his almost-wife’s humiliation.
This had been the first town fact that June had learned: Freddie Williamson wants it known he screws around. Also several other husbands and wives were not legally husband and wife and the Waldrons’ first son had drowned and they wanted another and Mrs. Timms would shoplift, then return what she took by post and Wally Andrews was a torment to his wife, but when he was half drunk she’d feed him dog’s meat and when he was all drunk and passed out she’d kick him until he bled: everyone knew everything by heart. The town maintained a dangerous silence by holding itself to ransom repeatedly.
But there have to be occasional mistakes.
That Juney Morris—I can’t see anyone riding her bare belly.
That Juney Morris.
Anyone she met today would have heard it by now and would hear it again when they thought of her, spoke to her, saw her in the street. It would be her set accompaniment, the permanent whisper of who she really was.
Except that I’m not called Juney. And they have no idea of me.
Which hadn’t stopped them from winding her down into their stories, because this was what they did. They mashed realities in together and then span them out again, altered, to pass the time. There was altogether too much time here, so a person’s eccentricities and sins were trotted out for entertainment, along with their favourite hymn, say, or a soft spot for canned peaches, an ability to mend refrigerators, the odd things they had dreamed of during childhood fevers. She was more secretive than they liked, so they made up gossip to fill out some of her many deficiencies.
They wanted a reason for why she was alone. So they said she’d had some accident, some illness, or she’d lost her first love, or lost one that was true. She wished they were right, but knew that she had no excuses.
“We say the weather does it.”
“What?”
That was Mrs. Parsons, Marjory Parsons—please, why don’t you call her Margie?—June’s employer, but she’d rather be her friend.
“The weather.”
Margie had been trying to explain things again, using the slightly over-articulated voice she reserved for ugly children and the elderly and June. No one had set foot inside the shop for that whole morning—it wasn’t a day when the train came, so there were no tourists and Mrs. Timms didn’t wander by until after lunch. So Margie, huge and oddly soft, as if she’d been filleted, had relaxed into her favourite, didactic mode, letting her eyes half close and folding her sagging arms—something which always made June nervous, in case this time there would finally be more elbows than were normal, more bends than a person with bones could painlessly sustain.
A pause had sunk into place, one that Margie had apparently intended to be expectant.
Well, not that I want to ask you and not that I want you to answer, or need any more of that fine, old James Bridge wisdom, but there is so much time here in every day and we do have to pass it—like kidney stones, or piss …
June cleared her throat, “The weather?”
“The wind—you must have noticed, dear.”
I am not your dear, nor anyone else’s.
Margie had blinked her glossy, bovine eyes. “It only ever stops in the summer, when you need it to clear the bugs. And, of course, all the rest of the time, it picks up every word and stirs what we tell each other around and sets it down where it doesn’t belong exactly. But it gets a good home.” She smiled.
So it hasn’t a thing to do with your own and everyone else’s pathological need to intrude. Well, glad to hear it: really happy we’ve got that clear.
Clicking her tongue, Margie had reached into the breast pocket of her work shirt and had retrieved a dusty cellophane morsel that June knew would turn out to be a fruit candy of some kind, warmed to the temperature of flesh.
“No, that’s OK.”
“Come on, now.” It was advanced, balanced on a palm with roughly the dimensions of an overstuffed paperback. “A face that sour needs a little sweetness.” Nothing unkind about this, only a touch of domestic urgency, as if Margie were asking her to mop up a kitchen spill, or go out and stop the dog from barking. There could be no rogue expressions in Margie’s shop: not sad, not ironic, not irritated past enduring: only smiles, good, genuine smiles, were tolerated. And the strange thing was that June often produced them. Margie’s maternal tone should have grated, did grate in a distant way, but it also seemed to soak June with a pleasant paralysis. When Margie told her what to do, she felt comfortably childlike, lighter, susceptible to the hope that all harms could truly be defeated by the unflinching application of homilies and clichés and simple-minded gestures.
That day, she’d taken the sweet. She always did.
…
June watched the sponsored tractor lurch out and flatten the arena surface, raking back and forth through rolls of self-inflicted dust. The MC informed everybody who cared that the bullriding would start up very soon. Riders in lurid shirts, weirdly pristine hats and protective body braces were already bunched along the fence to the rear of the chutes. There was, as Margie might say, no end to the strange things that people would do to get happy.
June, for example, took Margie’s sweets, because they made her happy and sentimental and because June knew that she’d indulged in very simple-minded gestures of her own.
One gesture, anyway: she set fire to things. Just before she left a place, she would gather up all of the clothes she had been too alone in, or ones that the wrong hands had touched: letters, pictures, diaries, unfortunate ornaments: everything that could remind her of whatever had gone wrong. Something a
lways had gone wrong. And then she would sprinkle the whole collection with lighter fluid or meths and burn her sadnesses away. It saved having to pack.
Landlords would find her gone and their gardens smoky, lawns scorched, once a back window cracked with heat.
When she first met Margie, June had been leaving James Bridge and making her customary preparation. Handfuls of papers had gone on first with a little clean wood—she’d learned that her pyres weren’t self-sustaining, tending to produce a cool, messy blaze, likely to be choked by its own debris. This time she was lucky, a kitchen chair she’d always found depressing had broken up nicely and was providing the heart of her fuel. She fed on a synthetic blouse and watched it wither to a dark, solid mass.
“Clearing out?” Margie had crept round the house and across the lawn without June noticing. Margie was uncannily quiet for someone so large.
“Yes. Soon.” Then June had realised that the question hadn’t intended to ask if she was leaving, only if she was destroying things for which she had no further need. “I mean, yes.” Her eyes must have been noticeably wet, they’d felt wet, but this could have been excused by the smoke which had already lifted in a long, black flag for the length of the block, dirty feathers of paper ash rising inside it unevenly. “Too much smoke. Sorry.” She had squinted slightly by way of an additional admission.
But Margie had stood, had studied her slowly, as if she were eyeing a horse, judging the possible bloodline of June’s unhappiness. Then Margie reached out with the first of many sweets, “For when bitter things happen—we do all have to swallow them, but we can at least sugar them up.”
The moment was ridiculous: June slurring through it, keeping her mind on the fire, aware of the breeze tilting, wheeling to press against her face, and of this stranger with her nonsense and her sweet: a more than plump middle-aged woman in jeans and a flannel shirt. The town was full of them: women who wore tennis shoes and practical, mannish haircuts, who seemed to be lost behind layers of disuse.
June kept her hair long. The dirt and the winds and the alkali water had turned it brittle and she couldn’t comb it any more, could only use a brush to fight the snags and tangles: a full half-hour to yank it into order, tug until her head ached and she was ringed with a litter of broken strands. She wouldn’t give it up, though.
It’s mine, it’s years of me, I made it. You have to keep something with you when you go.
She had felt it ragging out behind her, unwieldy.
Margie had coaxed. “Come on now. I got plenty more.” Margie had smiled. “My name is Margie.” Margie had smiled again, this time making it bigger.
Difficult to hate her, even though June had wanted to. Margie was so plainly a good person, doing a good thing, which nevertheless forced June to drop the stick she’d been using to tend the flames and made her hold her own body tight around the return of a sick pain and then start to cry fully, letting it stifle in. She was too tired to move on again, but she didn’t want to stay.
No one sees my hair the way they should do any more. They don’t touch it, now they maybe never will. They won’t breathe against it. They won’t find me out.
A gust had shoved past her while the threat of the rest of her life had rattled, spat, drew blood in all the customary places.
Then she’d rubbed her face with the back of one hand and used the other to take Margie’s gift, blinking and sniffling, baffled momentarily by the wrapper, and then closing her mouth around the sweet. It was cherry.
“God works in us.”
Their meeting, for Margie, had been just another example of intervention from on high. She had thought she was leaving her house to go and complain about the smoke from a neighbour’s fire and, what did you know, instead, she had been presented with a newcomer in despair. It had been her duty to help, or to help God help. In her opinion, there was no difference between the two.
According to Margie, the whole of the rodeo would be seething with God’s helpful works. Patty Block, strolling with an emptied beer bottle, perhaps meaning to throw it away, was actually taut with God’s intentions, steered towards that nod to Mr. Parker and then delivered into that chat with Bobby Lomax for reasons which were God’s alone. Margie’s God was a tireless handyman, constantly tinkering. You couldn’t tell where or when He might dip in.
But Mr. Parker gets a nod because he almost ran over Patty’s daughter, not paying attention while he reversed, and then blamed the girl for being careless. Mr. Parker and Patty don’t speak, there’s nothing between them but uncivil nods. And Bob Lomax flirts with Patty because he feels sorry for her, although neither of them will take it any further and that won’t be the only bottle that Patty empties this afternoon.
The James Bridge air was doubly unsettled, wicked with sand and the twist of invisible insults inflicted and received, the raw balance of hypocrisies, the jar and slide of halted, permitted, invited, avoided and frustrated sex. A fraction of the grit in your teeth would always be bitter with sex.
And I do want to be wrong about this. I would love God to be here with His every intervention plain. It wouldn’t have to be for me—I’d welcome assistance for anyone, just so that I could see. But there’s nothing to see, there isn’t any sign from Him, because He is either absent or elsewhere.
Margie told her to pray—“God likes to hear strange voices”—and Margie certainly repeatedly prayed herself for healing and guidance and lost valuables and natural disasters and the aid of foreign women with a history of starting fires. “You don’t want to work in the bar—that’s what’s getting you down. And, listen, I need someone helping me out in the shop—and that ought to be you—to pick up the crafts from the reservation—you can drive, can’t you?”
So, every Wednesday morning, I do get to leave here and then, every Wednesday evening, I come right back. I never pass through the reservation and go on. I fetch what I’m meant to, deliver it safely, exactly as Margie expects. I pack dream-catchers up in cellophane to keep them from the dust. I price calumets and beadwork, arrowheads. I watch Mrs. Timms steal the same silver bracelet, week after week. I buy hand-made herbal conditioner and night cream and soap and my hair is still hard and my hands still crack and my face still tightens, I still blacken the flannel each time I wash. I am dried-out and dirtied all the time.
The chute gate shuddered open to an incongruous slide of disco guitars and a bull span out, lunging, the man on its back jerking inexorably down to the left, and a last, wide, hopeless swing of his free arm, then a scrambling fall, an escape run to the fence. The bull cantered to a ploughing stop, flicked its head, the muscle pumping and twitching in its neck, unpleasantly equal to the weight of so much skull.
I’m starting to understand the other women, why they like to wear men’s clothes, keeping a husband close in the glimpses they catch of themselves: they have no other way to reach one. I might as well do the same.
With no one but me to find it, my body is meaningless. There’s no reason for it any more. I walk about and know that I’m holding this heat, my own heat, this turning, this shine of what I am and the sweet skin hidden somewhere and the truth, the softness of truth, the peace of me. And of course no one here sees it—why would I show it to them? I would rather waste it, do waste it, there’s nothing else it will allow. It’s burying itself in beyond what I can touch. Or let anyone touch.
“We have some very fine animals today, I’m sure you’ll agree. Next bull out will be Napalm. That’s Derry MacKay, riding Napalm.”
A dark slab of shoulder shuddered behind the gate. Above, there came a flicker of bright yellow from a shirt, a rising hand in a pale glove.
Trying with Freddie, that finished it. Finished me.
It hadn’t surprised her: sliding to the end of a night at the bar, starting to gather up glasses, and Freddie sitting by himself and easy the way he always would be: easy and meaningless. She’d said what she had to, smiled as she ought, her timing out and no sensation in it, but that made no difference to Freddie—to
o drunk to tell.
But she wasn’t surprised, only cold, a little sick.
I wanted to prove that I still could. I wanted to prove I was alive.
Stumbling along outside, understanding that she would be numb by the time she reached her house. Freddie’s hands already sliding, jabbing, making everything a theft. There was no more permission she could give.
He would have hauled her down before she’d opened her door, he would have liked that, leaning a hard whisky sweat at her back and pushing while she rushed the lock.
It didn’t work.
Then they fell in the hall and she was lying under him, dry as ash, while he tried to force it, while he mumbled baby-talk, tried again, swore. And she wasn’t numb: she could feel every part of the stain of him, his animal weight.
Where I end up, my last resort.
She clawed and scrambled free, her knee catching him, ran with her shoes off, her blouse half undone, the clasp on her skirt broken, locked herself in the bathroom until he’d hammered and yelled and then laughed himself tired, until he’d kicked the front door wide and gone.
That’ll be his story of me now, that I froze, that I ran away. My fault entirely.
The bull slammed out sideways, raised a wall of driven dust, plunged out through it, the yellow shirt above, tick-jerking back and forth easily, quickly, like something trivial. And, ratcheting, the man dropped to the animal’s flank, unseated, hung by his hand, dragged, and then almost appeared to shrug or dance into a twist, a confusion, an unlikely snap of the head.
I can make love. I have love to make.
June saw the rodeo clown leap out and caper the bull away while two men, three, leaped down into the ring and ran to kneel around the man’s body, where it lay very flat and surprisingly straight on the sand, something red across its face. A tiny ambulance bumped in through the far gate.
“We’re going to give them all the time they need, ladies and gentlemen, to do what they have to before they take him off to hospital.”
Indelible Acts Page 11
