by John Benditt
The innkeeper returns and sets the drinks down: two on his side, one on hers. The blue banknote has plenty of room for these drinks and many more, stored invisibly in the long face of the king, his royal eyes sad and knowing behind his glittering lenses in their oval frames.
CHAPTER 6
The first thing he notices in her room under the eaves are two dresses hanging in an open cupboard, both identical to the one she is wearing. They have the same fitted bodice, square opening and three-quarter-length sleeves, all made of the dark red silk that makes her hair and skin seem tawny. He wants to ask her why she has three of these and why they are the only dresses in her tiny room. But he doesn’t ask. These are the mysteries of the woman of the town. And yet if he doesn’t speak, he is no longer frozen in her presence. He holds her down and takes her like an animal.
The boatmaker stays in her room for three days with the curtain drawn over the window. From time to time the innkeeper comes up the stairs with a new bottle. They have moved from glasses and ice to a place where glasses are unnecessary. Neither of them feels at home, yet neither has any doubt that they belong in this room together. They drink from the bottle, fire flaring between them, burning their bodies with the sting of a jellyfish and sealing them in one continuous spasm. Occasionally they ask the innkeeper to bring them a little food.
After a while he moves on from paying with one bill at a time to turning his money over in clumps. When he left Small Island, the money he had seemed to him like a lot. He had worked many jobs to earn it, not drinking and saving. It wasn’t the most money he had ever had. And he knew that even on Small Island there are people to whom his cache would have seemed a small thing. Valter, for instance. Or the doctor, who has been stuffing the bills his patients give him under his mattress for so many years he has trouble getting into bed. Or so the people of Small Island like to say. To the boatmaker it seemed like a lot. Now it’s going fast, like the ice in spring around Small Island, melting first slowly, then fast. One day it’s gone, and the sea opens.
Up in her room he is sometimes her child, other times her father. Sometimes both of them are animals howling in red heat. Regardless of the madness in the little room, the innkeeper always seems to appear with a new bottle at the right moment. The boatmaker slowly understands that the two of them are working together, the woman of the town and the innkeeper. But his understanding remains distant, and the knowledge unimportant. All that matters is what’s happening in this room with its narrow bed and the desk built into the wall under the window.
Sometimes he is rough with her. The boatmaker hasn’t been with many women, and he has never been rough with any them. The woman of Small Island didn’t arouse this feeling in him, which holds desire and anger, affection and loathing, mixed until they are inseparable. Sometimes he wanted the woman on Small Island more, sometimes he wanted her less, but he never wanted to hurt her. This one, he wants to hurt. He wants to break into her, tear her into pieces. Then suddenly he feels tender. The two feelings seem to intensify each other—the desire to hurt and the tenderness. They are poles; an electrical force runs between them as he raises himself above her. His body fills and empties. She is willing to be whatever he wants. It makes him feel powerful, a feeling he is not used to having in the presence of another person. Usually the boatmaker feels his power only when he is alone.
But if she will be whatever he wants, she remains just out of reach, and she wants to keep it that way. She is frightened. She can feel something inside beginning to give way. The winter ice is beginning to chip, break up. When she feels it, she tells herself: Be hard. Be as hard as you can. Don’t let that start. Do whatever it takes to make him pay. That’s the only thing you need to think about: making him pay. She aims to keep the stream of the boatmaker’s banknotes—yellow, blue and buff—flowing to the cashbox in the office under the stairs where the innkeeper sleeps. She will drain his cache and throw him into the road, like a rag she has used to wipe herself with.
That is what she tells herself. But inside where there are no words, she feels things warming, melting. It enrages her. And so she prods him, does things she knows will make him angry. She wants him to be a beast, to be crude, to hurt her, rip her so that she can despise him. More than anything, she wants the confidence she felt when she first saw the boatmaker walk up the road to the inn looking grimy, confused and out of place. But in the red heat of her room, among the crumpled sheets and the sweat, her confidence is harder and harder to find. And so she puts every ounce of her will into draining his cache.
Days later—he’s not sure how many—the boatmaker finds himself at a wooden table sitting across from a large man wearing a broad-brimmed black hat, black coat and trousers stretched tight across his flesh. His face is ruddy and yellowish, the glow of a man who has fed well, drunk well, smoked well. His black clothing is summer weight, elegant despite his bulk. His thick graying sideburns drop down his cheeks and rise to meet on his upper lip. He waits, fingers knitted on his black vest, in no hurry, as he watches the boatmaker try to drink coffee from a white mug.
They are sitting in a large room with two lines of tables, their surfaces darkened by years of spilled food and drink. The sides of the room are open above waist level; awnings outside offer shade. The smell of the sea fills the room.
The boatmaker looks at the light from overhead reflected on the surface of his coffee. It reminds him of the moon on the nights he sailed. He wants to pick up the coffee and drink, but he knows that when he does, his hands, which he is holding together under the table, will shake like an otter’s tail. He curls over his stomach, waiting for the spinning to stop and the burning to subside.
“Sick, eh?” asks the man in the black coat, sipping his coffee: a normal, healthy man after a hearty breakfast. The idea of food makes the boatmaker wish to die. Like a thoughtful walrus, the large man whistles breath through large teeth to cool his coffee. “We’ve all been there. Though perhaps not so far in as you.” He appraises the man across the table while he lets the coffee run down his walrus gullet.
The boatmaker knows he can’t lift the mug with one hand, but he wants coffee so much he doesn’t care. He reaches one hand toward the handle, the other steadying his arm. He begins to raise the cup, all his vital force concentrated on not spilling. The mug shakes and some of the hot liquid dribbles onto the stained table anyway. But he manages to get the mug to his mouth and slurp a little.
More coffee spills as he uses both hands to set the cup down. He feels he’s going to be sick, but he fights that. He may tremble like a maple leaf, he may have to reach for his coffee with both hands, but he will never allow himself to be sick in front of this fat man who looks like a bull walrus sunning itself on a flat rock.
“We’ve all been there. And it’s not a problem. But the thing is, we can’t have fighting on Big Island. The drinking, what you do up to the Mandrake with Elise and Enrik—that’s your business. No one cares about that.”
“Enrik?”
“The innkeeper. Her husband. Don’t tell me you don’t see him up there, scurrying around in his nightshirt. Elise and Enrik seem to go their separate ways. But somehow it turns out they’re always together—and more than it would appear.” The walrus whistles through his teeth onto his steaming coffee.
The boatmaker wants to throw up whatever is in him, which can’t be much. But it’s not what the walrus is telling him that is making him sick. So they are married and working together. It doesn’t matter. Not at all. The boatmaker felt what he felt. She felt it too. He knows that. He reaches with both hands for his mug and manages to get it to his mouth without spilling more than a little pool.
“We don’t care about that. Elise is Elise. She does what she does. Or perhaps I should say: She is what she is.” He sets his coffee down, gives a fat walrus smile, showing tusks. “That’s as may be. No one’s going to change that. But the thing we don’t take to on Big Island is fighting.”
The boatmaker’s face hurts. A purple moon cir
cles one eye, and there is a scythe of dried blood on his cheek. His body is sore, as if he’d been punched and kicked when he was down. What he doesn’t want to admit, even to himself, is that he doesn’t remember much of how he got the marks. The last thing he remembers is being in her room at the Mandrake, thinking his money would soon be gone.
That is all his memory holds before he woke up in a big room above the one where they are sitting: a bare open space with iron-framed beds extending from the walls. On most of the beds, the mattresses were rolled up on metal springs. One or two had the mattresses down flat, their sheets crumpled. When he woke, there was no one else in the room. At first, he thought he was still on Small Island, dreaming. Then he knew he was awake. Slowly the story came back, up to the moment when he knew he had to leave the Mandrake. After that: nothing.
A woman with an apron around her middle approaches their table, supporting the bottom of a coffee pot with a dish towel. “I’ll have some more, thanks. I think our friend still has most of his,” the walrus says. The woman pours coffee into his mug, looks at the boatmaker, turns and walks away.
The few others who were sitting at the tables when the two of them sat down have left. They are alone in the big room open on one side to the bluff and the harbor below, its blue surface etched by the long commercial piers.
The boatmaker lifts the white mug and manages to get some coffee down without spilling. The feeling of being sick is subsiding. He knows that soon he will need to find an outhouse and sit for a long time while everything leaves his body. He sets the mug down with only a slight tremor.
“As I was saying, the one thing we can’t have on Big Island is fighting. And you seem to find a lot of that. Or it finds you. Maybe you should think about leaving and going back to where you’re from—to your people.”
His people, the boatmaker thinks. Who are they? His mother, with her drunken breath and beautiful needlework? His father, in the shack on Gallagher’s Point? His brother, under the rectangle of dark turf? The boatmaker doesn’t know who his people are—or if he has any people at all.
He also doesn’t understand what the walrus is upset about. On Small Island fighting is just fighting. From time to time, every man on Small Island, even Valter and the doctor, gets drunk and gets in a fight or two. It’s nothing special, and no one tells you to leave the island—or mentions any punishment whatsoever. Unless you’ve killed someone.
“I’m not going back,” he says. The two men regard each other, one round and flushed, the other drawn, a sickle of dried blood on his cheek. They lift their mugs. The boatmaker can now pick his up with one hand and convey it to his mouth almost like a normal person.
“That may be,” says the walrus. “I’m not going to lock you up—yet. But I’m warning you: Big Island is a civilized place. We don’t tolerate people behaving like animals here.”
The boatmaker looks in his mug. At the bottom he can barely see the moon on the sea. He picks it up and drains it, pushes himself off the wooden bench and stands. He is not steady on his feet, but he manages to turn and walk away, placing his boots with care. There is no doubt in his mind about where he is going after he stops at the outhouse and sits a good long while.
The woman of the town is where she was when he first saw her. Her drink, translucent and brown, sits in front of her. The smoke from her cigarette is almost invisible. He wonders which of the three dresses she’s wearing. The one she took off the night they went upstairs? Likely not. That one will need mending.
Through the open door, his carpenter’s eyes can make out the stairs in the hall. They were cut from the edge of a walnut tree and were never perfectly square. Their edges ripple and curve, scalloped, no two alike. With time and wear, the grain is showing. The Mandrake is older than almost any building on Small Island.
“You’re back,” she says, smoke streaming from her nostrils. He stands, sweating a cold sweat in spite of the heat. He’s thirsty but everything in him turns away from water and alcohol. He stands with his boots planted as if he were a tree that had sprouted in the road outside the Mandrake and grown there for centuries.
“You’re back, I said.” She speaks loudly, as if to a half-wit.
“Yes.”
“Is that all you have to say?”
“I came back.”
“I can see that for myself.” She takes whiskey and cigarette, sips and smokes to conceal her smile.
“I want to be with you.” He feels as if the words are ripped from him the way seed was ripped from him again and again in the little room up the stairs. It went on that way until each act was done in a realm far beyond pleasure or pain.
“I hear you met Stig,” she says calmly, giving no sign she has heard what he said.
“Stig?”
“The Warden.”
“The Warden?”
She inhales smoke and drink, looks him up and down with contempt. The innkeeper emerges from the doorway in his nightshirt, carrying a tumbler of whiskey. He sets it down in front of his wife, takes the empty and goes away, paying no attention to the boatmaker standing in the road.
The boatmaker notices how the clip holds her hair, which is the color of the drink in her glass. The hair is too thick to be caught completely. Strands push their way out and fall over her ears. From time to time she notices one and pushes it back, where it stays a moment before escaping again.
“I came back to be with you.”
She sips, appraising the boatmaker’s unshaven cheeks, the purple around his eye, the dried blood on his cheek. She wants to feel nothing but contempt. But his condition and directness begin to soften her. She thought she had driven him away for good when his money ran out. But now he is back, standing there bloodied, without pretense. There are no men like this on Big Island. Even the dumbest are smoother than this, better at presenting the face they think she wants to see. This man, who apparently lacks the shrewdness to put on any face at all, is beginning to melt the ice around her heart.
“The Warden takes care of things. Like a sheriff. Or a parson.” She waves her cigarette. She isn’t slurring, but her gestures are bigger than usual. He knows that she never seems drunk, even when she’s been drinking for days.
The need to hold her, pull her to him, is overwhelming. He feels like a man trapped in a burning house, walls and ceiling flaming down and every door and window blocked.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“A sheriff. Or a parson.”
“Yes, he’s the Warden—of this end of the island. There’s another on the other end. Stig may seem like a fool, but believe me, he’s not. And he’s not keen on having you around. I hear there was a lot of fighting. That wasn’t smart. Doesn’t do me a lot of good, now does it? Stig seems to think you should be on your way back to Small Island.”
“No.”
“Stig can be persuasive. And not just with words. He can have you locked up. There are worse things than the Hostel.”
“The Hostel?”
“The place where you slept last night. And the night before.” She snorts to show that he is as low as the dust on her many-buttoned shoes.
The boatmaker feels electricity flow through him, completing the circuit between the desire to protect her and keep her from harm and the need to choke her until her face turns blue, slap her until there’s blood at the corner of her mouth. He stands stock-still, clenching and unclenching his fists.
The woman of the town sees his reaction and is pleased. If she is hard enough, this will turn out fine. She must simply ignore the warming she feels around her heart.
“Stig doesn’t take kindly to residents of Big Island being beaten bloody. It seems you did that to several of our citizens before you were subdued. Of course, you look a little the worse for wear yourself. But Stig isn’t concerned about that. It’s outside his jurisdiction,” she says, drawling the fancy words as she exhales rivers of gray-brown smoke. She sees his face redden under the brown that comes from sailing on open water.
“I
came back to be with you,” he says again with as much emphasis as he can manage. On Small Island, when a woman has been with a man, it usually means she wants him to build her a house. Sometimes she wants to get married, though not always. He knows this woman is married. The woman of Small Island was married, too, and it didn’t matter. He’s pushed that knowledge aside and returned to claim her, to find out whether she wants him to build her a house.
He is deadly serious; she can feel that. Don’t soften, she tells herself. One more hard blow should finish him.
“Do you have any more money?” She looks at him from under her thick unplucked eyebrows.
“Money? It’s money you want?”
“Is that a surprise?” When he says nothing, she adds: “Well, do you have any?”
She lifts her glass and lets the warming, cooling whiskey run into her. She knows she’s done it. The silent little man is crushed. She begins to enjoy herself the way she usually does when she’s with a man. This one gave her a scare, but in the end he was no different from the rest—just less talkative.
The boatmaker knows how much he has left from their nights together: almost nothing. When he was in her room, it didn’t feel as if he was paying for anything. He just let go and his money flowed out of him in a trickle, a stream and then a mighty river. Now the flood is spent. He turns away and heads toward the harbor, back the way he came when he landed and climbed the stairs, first wood and then stone.
The woman of the town watches him walk away. The bald spot on the back of his head is round, the hair around it thick and brown. Monks have their hair cut that way. There is a word for it, but she can’t remember it. They would know on the Mainland. Everything is different there. She remembers, as she often does, the beautiful restaurant she saw on her single visit to the capital. It was so elegant: the champagne flutes reflecting candlelight, the waiters buttoned into their starched shirtfronts, music pouring out over the snow-covered sidewalk. That is where I belong, the woman of the town thinks. Among violins, beautiful dresses, refined manners, heavy silver and leaded crystal. I will find my way there in the end. No clod of earth from Small Island will hold me back. He is gone—and good riddance. If he has the nerve to return after the way I have just humiliated him, I will handle him with ease. She lights a cigarette with a match taken from the box with the pink swan floating on the green diamond and inhales, feeling powerful and well protected.
