Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  ‘Oh, sure you could,’ she said, downcast. ‘We both could.’

  I knew she meant what she was saying, but there was also a challenge in those words, a dare for me to prove what I had said, to prove that what I felt had the power of compulsion. I went over and put my hands on her waist; I could feel a pulse all through her. She looked up, holding my eyes, and I couldn’t do anything else but kiss her.

  There’s a lot of false in everything that people do, particularly when it comes to the dealings between men and women. There’s games played, lies traded, and fantasies given undue weight. But if those things are combined and cooked by the passage of time in just the right way, then a moment will arrive when everything that’s false can get true in a flash, when the truest love can be made out of all that artifice, and once the games and the lies have been tempered into something solid and real, the process keeps on going, and you discover what worlds have changed, which lives have been diminished, which ones raised to glory. We can’t know in advance what we make when we go to making love. If we could, maybe there would be a whole lot less of it made. But chances are, knowing in advance wouldn’t change a thing, because those moments are so strong they can overwhelm most kinds of knowledge. Even knowing all I do now, I doubt I could have resisted the forces that drew Callie and me together.

  We went into my office, and we lay down on the cot, and seeing her naked, I recognized that her sleek brown body was at home here among the growing things, that this was the place for us, surrounded by corn and green leaves and tomatoes bursting with juice, whereas Kiri’s place was in that sad, barren little cabin up on the slope, with the apes howling above and a view of emptiness out the bedroom window. I felt that what Callie and me had was something growing and fresh, and that what I had with Kiri was dry and brittle and almost gone, and though it hurt me to think that, it pleasured me to think it, too. I liked being with a woman who was gentle, who didn’t force me to take what I wanted, one whose cries were soft and full of delight, not tormented and fierce. I liked the easy way she moved with me, the joyful greed with which she drew me in deep. I knew there were going to be trials ahead, but I wasn’t ready to confront them. Kiri would be gone for ten days, and I wanted to relish each and every one.

  There was a good deal of little girl in Callie. One minute she could be tender, all concern and care and thoughtfulness, and the next she might become petulant, stubborn, wilful. That girlish side only came into play in good ways at the beginning—in bed, mostly—and it plumped up my ego to be able to feel paternal toward her, giving me a distant perspective on her that was as loving in its own fashion as the intimate perspective we shared when we lay tangled and sweaty on the cot in my office. And, too, she brought out the boy in me, a part of my character that I’d had to keep under wraps for the duration of my marriage. Love with Callie was a kind of golden fun, serious and committed, untainted with desperation. It wouldn’t always be just fun; I was aware of that, and I was sure we would have our ups and downs. Yet I thought at the core of what we were was that tiger, that emblem of beauty and power, something that could be whirled away in the snow, but would always return to buck us up no matter how painful or difficult the circumstance. However, I had no idea of the difficulties that would arise when Kiri returned from Windbroken.

  One afternoon I came into the house whistling, direct from Callie’s arms, and found Brad sitting in a straight-backed chair by the closed door of the bedroom. His sombre look cut through my cheerful mood, and I asked why he was so low.

  ‘Mama’s home,’ he said.

  That knocked me back a step. I covered my reaction and said, ‘That ain’t nothin’ to be all down in the mouth about, is it?’

  ‘She lost.’ He said this in almost a questioning tone, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

  There was nothing cheerful I could say to that. ‘She all right?’

  ‘Got a cut on her arm is all. But that ain’t what’s bad.’

  ‘She’s grievin’, is she?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Maybe we can nudge her out of it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  I ran my hands along my thighs as if pushing myself into shape, needing the feel of that solidity, because everything I had been anticipating had been thrown out of kilter. It seemed I could feel the weight of Kiri’s despair through the wood of the door. I gave Bradley a distracted pat on the head and went on in. Kiri was sitting on the edge of the bed, bathed in the sunset that came russet through the shade, giving the air the colour of old blood. Except for a bandage around her bicep, she was naked. She didn’t move a muscle, eyes fixed on the floor. I sat beside her as close as I dared, hesitant to touch her; there had been times she’d been so lost in herself that she had lashed out at me when I startled her.

  ‘Kiri,’ I said, and she shivered as if the sound had given her a chill.

  Her face was drawn, cheeks hollowed, lips thinned. ‘I should have died,’ she said in a voice like ashes.

  ‘We knew this time was coming.’

  She remained silent.

  ‘Damn, Kiri,’ I said, feeling more guilt and self-recrimination than I had thought possible. ‘We’ll get through this.’

  ‘I don’t want that,’ she said, the words coming out slow and full of effort. ‘It’s time.’

  ‘Bullshit! You ain’t livin’ up north no more.’

  Her skin was pebbled with the cold. I forced her to lie down and covered her with blankets. Then, knowing the sort of warming she most needed, I stripped and crawled in with her. I held her close and told her I didn’t want to hear any more crap about it being her time, that here in Edgeville just because somebody lost a fight didn’t mean they had to walk out into the Big Nothing and die. And I told her how Brad was relying on her, how we both were, feeling the bad place that the lie I’d been living made inside my chest. I doubt she heard me, or if she did, the words had no weight. Her head lolled to one side, and she stared at the wall, which grew redder and redder with the declining sun. I think she could have willed herself into dying right then, losing had made her so downhearted. I tried to love her, but she resisted that. I guess I was grateful not to have to lie in that way as well, and I just held onto her and talked until it got late, until I fell asleep talking, mumbling in her ear.

  I had thought during the night that my attentions were doing Kiri some good, but if anything, her depression grew deeper. I spent day after day trying to persuade her of her worth, sparing time for little else, and achieved nothing. She would sit cross-legged by the window, staring out over the flats, and from time to time would give voice to savage-sounding chants. I feared for her. There was no way I could find to penetrate the hard shell of misery with which she had surrounded herself. Logic; pleading; anger. None of these tactics had the least effect. Her depression began to communicate to me. I felt heavy in my head, my thoughts were dulled and drooping, and I couldn’t summon the energy for even the lightest work. Despite my concern for Kiri, I missed Callie—I needed her clean sweetness to counteract the despair that was poisoning me. I managed a couple of fleeting conversations with her during the second week after Kiri’s return and told her I’d get out as soon as I could and asked her to take the late shift at the store, because it would be easier for me to get free after work. And finally one night after Kiri had taken to chanting, I slipped out the door and hurried down through the town to Fornoff’s.

  I stood outside in the cold, waiting until the last few customers and then old Fornoff had gone, leaving Callie to close up. Just as she was about to lock the door, I darted inside, giving her a start. She had her hair up and was wearing a blue dress with a small check, and she looked so damn good, with her plush hips flaring from that narrow waist, I wanted to fall down and drown inside her. I tried to give her a hug, but she pushed me away. ‘Where the hell you been?’ she said. ‘I been going crazy!’

  ‘I told you,’ I said. ‘I had to…’

  ‘I thought you was gonna t
ell her ’bout us?’ she shrilled, moving deeper into the store.

  ‘I’m gonna tell her!’ I said, beginning to get angry. ‘But I can’t right now. You know that.’

  She turned her back on me. ‘I don’t mean nothin’ to you. All that sweet talk was just…just talk.’

  ‘Goddammit!’ I spun her around, catching her by the shoulders. ‘You think I been havin’ a wonderful time this last week? I been livin’ in hell up there! I wanna tell her, but I can’t ’long as she’s like she is now.’ It stung me to hear myself talking with such callousness about Kiri, but strong emotion was making me stupid. I gave Callie a shake. ‘You understand that, don’tcha?’

  ‘No, I don’t!’ She pulled away and stalked off toward the storeroom. ‘Even if everything you say’s true, I don’t understand how anyone could be as peculiar as you say she is!’

  ‘She ain’t peculiar, she’s just different!’

  ‘Oh, well!’ She shot me a scornful look. ‘I didn’t know she was different. All I been hearin’ ’til now is how she can’t satisfy you no more.’

  ‘That don’t mean she ain’t good-hearted. And it don’t mean she’s peculiar. You know damn well I never said I didn’t care ’bout her. I always said she was someone I respected, someone I loved. Not like I love you, I admit that. But it’s love all the same. And if I have to kill her so we can get together, then it’s sure as shit gonna kill whatever I feel for you.’ I came toward her. ‘You just don’t understand ’bout Kiri.’

  ‘I don’t wanna understand!’

  ‘Where she comes from it’s so bad, times get hard, they kill the weak ones for food, and when they feel they’re worthless, they’ll take a walk out into nowhere so they won’t be a burden. I know it’s hard to understand what that kinda life does to you. I didn’t understand for a long while myself.’

  Her chin quivered, and she looked away. ‘I’m scared,’ she said after a second. ‘I seen this before up in Windbroken, this exact same thing. ’Cept it was the woman who’s married. But it was the same. The man she loved, not her husband, this boy…When she couldn’t leave her husband ’cause he was took ill, he like to gone crazy.’ Tears leaked from her eyes. ‘Just like I been doin’.’

  I started for her, but she backed into the dimly lit storeroom, holding up a hand to fend me off. ‘You keep away from me,’ she said. ‘I don’t need no more pain than I got right now.’

  ‘Callie,’ I said, feeling helpless.

  ‘Naw, I mean it.’ She kept on backing, beginning to sob. ‘I’m sorry for what I said about her, I truly am. I do feel bad for her. But I just can’t keep on bein’ self-sacrificin’, you hear? I just can’t. If it’s gonna be over, I want it to be over now.’

  It was funny how everything we said and did in that dusty old store, in that unsteady lantern light, with the pot-bellied stove snapping in the background, seemed both ultimately false, like a scene from a bad play, and ultimately true at the same time. How it led us toward the one truth we were, how it commanded us to make every lying thing true. The things I said were things I couldn’t keep from saying, even though some of them rang like tin to my ear.

  ‘Damn, Callie,’ I said, moving after her into the storeroom. ‘You just gotta give it some time. I know it looks bad now, but believe me, it’s gonna work out.’

  She fetched up against the wall next to a stack of bulging sacks of grain; the sacks were each stamped with fancy lettering and the picture of a rooster, and seemed to be leaking their faded colours up to stain the air the grainy brown of the burlap. A barrel full of shovels, blades up, to her right, and coils of rope on pegs above her. She let her head droop to one side as if she didn’t want to see what would happen next.

  ‘You believe me, don’tcha?’ I said, coming up to her, losing the last of my reason in her smell of warmth and vanilla water, pulling her hips against mine.

  ‘I want to,’ she said. ‘God knows, I want to.’

  Her breasts felt like the places where my hands had been formed, her mouth stopped my thirst. Berry lips and black eyes and brown skin all full of juice. I didn’t know her, but I felt she knew me, and sometimes it seems that’s the most of love, believing that the other sees you clear. I hitched up her skirt, muffling her protests with my mouth, and wrangled down the scrap of a thing that covered her heat, and then I lifted her up a bit and pushed inside, pinning her against the rough boards. She was like honey melting over me. I tangled a hand in her hair, yanking back her head and baring her neck. I kissed her throat and loved the simple sounds she made. In the dimness her dazed expression looked saintly and her movements were frantic, her big rear end pounding the planking, one foot hooked behind my knee. ‘Oh, God! I love you, Bob,’ she said. ‘I love you so much.’ The shovel blades were quivering in the barrel, the coils of rope were jiggling; a trowel suspended from a nail started to clank in rhythm with us. It was a cluttered act, bone-rattling and messy. Our teeth clicked together in a kiss, and my palm picked up splinters as I groped for purchase on the wall. But it was pure and urgent and the best thing that had happened to me in a long time. Callie began saying ‘love’ every time I plunged into her as if I were dredging love up from the place it had been hiding. And she said other things, too—gushes of breath that might have been words in a strange windy language, a language whose passion made me feel twice the man I was and goaded me to drive harder into her. Then she was pushing at me, saying ‘Oh, God,’ her tone suddenly gone desperate, her expression no longer dazed, but horrorstruck, saying, ‘Stop it…stop!’ and staring past my shoulder. ‘What is it?’ I asked, trying to gentle her, but she shoved me hard and I slipped out of her. I turned, my cock waving stupidly in the air, and saw Kiri standing at the door in her black duelling clothes, her face stony with anger.

  ‘Kiri,’ I said, trying to stuff myself back into my pants, feeling shame and fear and sorrow all at once.

  She whirled on her heel and stalked toward the door.

  ‘Kiri!’ I stumbled after her, buttoning my pants. ‘Wait!’

  I caught at her shoulder, spinning her half around, and before I could speak another word, she hit me three times, twice in the face, and the last—a blow delivered with the heel of her hand to the chest—taking my wind and sending me onto my back. Something black hovered over me as I lay curled on the floor, fighting to breathe, and when my vision cleared, I saw Kiri’s dark face looming close.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ she asked in a voice empty as ashes.

  I nodded.

  ‘What I’m doing now,’ she said, ‘isn’t because of this. It’s because of who I am. You’re not to blame yourself for what I do. Are you listening?’

  Uncomprehending, I managed to gasp out, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you sure? What I’m going to do isn’t because of you and…the girl,’ She made ‘the girl’ sound like ‘the worm’ or ‘the rat’.

  ‘Wha…’ I gagged, choked.

  ‘But I will not forgive what you’ve done,’ she said, and struck me in the jaw, sending white lights shooting back through my eyes and into my skull. When I regained consciousness, she was gone.

  It took me most of that night to discover that Kiri had left Edgeville, that she’d taken one of Marvin Blank’s horses and ridden out onto the flats. I knew she was gone for good. I would have ridden after her straightaway, but I didn’t want to leave without telling Brad, and he was nowhere to be found. I decided I’d give him a couple of hours, and then I was going, no matter whether he had returned or not. I sat on the bed, with Callie beside me, and we waited, each minute like a glass prison that lasted too long to be measured except by its weight and its silence. Callie had put on her riding clothes, and I’d quit trying to persuade her to stay behind. Her arguments were sound: it was as much her fault as mine, we were in this together, and so forth. I didn’t want to go alone, anyhow. That was the main reason I’d left off arguing with her. The honourable reason, the reason I kept telling myself was the most important one, and maybe the one that had the most chance of
working out to be true, of being the kind of hopeful lie that breeds a passionate truth, was that I needed to be honest with Brad about Callie, about everything that had happened, because that was the only way that any good could come out of it for him, for Callie and me. Having her along was part of that honesty. To be considering all this at the time may appear self-absorbed, but I have always been a pragmatic soul, and though I cared about Kiri, I didn’t expect to see her again; I knew that whenever she made a decision, she decided it to death, and by giving thought to Brad and Callie, I was hoping to salvage something of the mess I’d made. It might be that I didn’t deserve anything good, but we were foolish people, not evil, and our lives were hard enough without demanding perfection of either ourselves or one another. Living on the Edge, you learned to make the best of things and not waste too much time in recriminations, and you left the indulgence of self-pity to those who could afford the luxury of being assholes.

  Brad came home about an hour after first light, dishevelled and sleepy-looking, his hair all stuck up in back. He stared at me, at my bruises, at Callie, and asked where his mama was.

  ‘Let’s go find her,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you what happened on the way.’

  He backed away from me, his pale face tightening just like Kiri’s might have. ‘Where’s she gone?’

  ‘Listen to me, son,’ I said. ‘There’ll be time later for you to get all over my butt if you want. But right now findin’ your mama’s what’s important. I waited for you ’cause I knew you’d want to help. So let’s just go now.’

  Callie eased back behind me as if Brad were hurting her with his stare.

  ‘She’s rode out,’ he said. ‘That it?’

  I said, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What’d you do?’

  ‘Bradley,’ I said. ‘Ten seconds more, and I’m gone.’

  He peered at Callie and me fiercely, trying to see the rotten thing we’d done. ‘Hell, I reckon I don’t need no explanation,’ he said.

  I could write volumes about the first days of our ride; nothing much happened during them, but their emptiness was so profound that emptiness itself became intricate and topical, and the bleakness of the land, the frozen hardpan with its patches of dead nettles and silverweed, the mesas rising in the distance like black arks, became a commentary on our own bleakness. The mountains faded into smoky blue phantoms on the horizon, the sky was alternately bleached and clouded grey. Now and then I’d glance at Callie on my left, Brad on my right. With their dark hair flying in the wind and their grave expressions, they might have been family, and yet they never spoke a word to the other, just maintained a remorseless concentration on the way ahead. By day we followed Kiri’s sign, taking some hope from the fact that she wasn’t trying to cover her tracks. Nights, we camped in the lee of boulders or a low hill, with wind ghosting from the dark side of forever, and our cooking fire the only light. Snow fell sometimes, and although most of it would melt by the time the sun was full up, what had collected in the hoofprints of the horses would last a while longer, and so in the mornings we would see a ghostly trail of white crescents leading back in the direction of home.