Glory

by Gillian Wigmore

  I made a plan. I had to be clever to get her—and I was, even if my plan was sort of dumb. I just had to be different: I told her I knew where the ancient burial caves were and I would show her, but only if she kept her mouth shut.

  “You shut your own mouth,” she said, but I had her. I saw her eyes spark.

  I took her up the hill behind town, even though I was lying—it was the Kwakwaka’wakw or some other Coastal Nation who put their dead in burial caves, I think—but she hiked up in her army pants and tight black T-shirt, and when she stopped to smoke, I gave her my flannel shirt to keep her warm.

  “What’s your name again?” she asked me, but she was just acting tough. I could do that, too.

  “You tell me.” I walked away. She had to scramble to keep up.

  I wanted it like that with her—she used the same tricks on the clambering, slobbering boys at school. It thrilled me that she was as much a sucker for it as they were.

  There were no caves—just a long, convoluted walk that lasted all afternoon into evening. We took a break for a bottle of wine I’d brought (stolen from my parents’ cellar), and a joint I’d paid too much for outside the Friendship Centre. We covered so much ground in that seduction that there was no going back. I couldn’t believe it worked, but at the same time I felt entitled—I’d planned it and I deserved her. I made her think it was her idea, and that was the best part.

  We made it back to town in time for a party at the gravel pit. I walked out of the bush, out of honour-roll obscurity, into legend: Glory Stuart and me. I saw everyone watching us in the glow of the bonfire—her with her hair a black tongue down her back, me with a hand on her ass. No one could touch me from then on. It made me giant.

  At university I wore the strut I learned from her. I found others like me—small-town boys made men by their stories from back home; men with scholarships guaranteed by good grades despite nonchalance in the lecture hall, a way with words, self-certainty paired with faux humility that worked on profs. It was easier than I thought.

  I came home for summers, worked at the golf course, and then in the bush, both in minor management positions that kept me out of town just enough to build my allure. It was magic, and it was easy, and the best part was Glory: there when I beckoned, waiting for me.

  Ten, fifteen years, though, that’s a long time. She’s always there when I call, but we both know by now that what we started wasn’t her idea. And things are changing for me in the city—taking off. I have a new apartment, a girlfriend. I’ve been thinking about what it’d be like to be married.

  RENEE

  Glory wouldn’t go into the pub. I sat with Todd on the tailgate of the truck and watched Crystal herd her back toward us, bit by bit. The scraps of Glory’s voice were too faint to understand.

  “Wanna smoke?” he said.

  “No. I don’t smoke,” I lied.

  He chuckled. It made me cringe—chuckling. It made me want to pull my turtle head into my turtle shell and hide. He took a drag on a cigarette.

  “I don’t, either.” He pronounced it “eye-thur.” Most people up here said “ee-thur.” “They’re Glory’s. I only smoke them to bug her.”

  “Why do you want to bug her?”

  He paused and actually seemed to consider an answer. “Negative attention is attention, too.” He inhaled. “I want to keep her guessing.”

  “Guessing how many smokes she has left? She can always buy more. Or guessing who took them? She probably knows you did it.”

  He made an impatient noise and swatted at the smoke he’d exhaled.

  I was almost warm enough in Glory’s sweater. I half listened to him, keeping one eye on Crystal and Glory and one eye on the car. It looked like ours. It couldn’t be, but it looked like it. If I walked up close and looked for the walking-fish bumper sticker, I’d know it was ours.

  To distract myself, I said to Todd, “If it’s to get her attention, I don’t think it’s working.”

  Who would have the baby if Danny was at the pub? Probably the Swannells. I imagined him asking them, the look that would pass between them about where I was, who we were, what kind of parents leave their baby with neighbours to go drinking. I felt like a pane of glass, an empty cup. I catalogued the dings and scrapes in the brown paint on the Honda Civic and chewed my nail down to the quick. I knew it was ours. Danny was inside. I needed to see him. I needed him to see me.

  Glory appeared, Crystal trailing her.

  “Look,” she said. “We gotta figure out a way to get on the lake. None of us has a boat. I bet someone in there knows where Smokey’s boat is.” She patted herself down for a cigarette, saw the one hanging from Todd’s mouth, and snatched it out to smoke herself. His eyebrows shot up, but he tried to stay cool. I swallowed my laugh. Crystal put her hand on Glory’s back, but Glory shook it off.

  Crystal threw up her hands in frustration. “Jesus, Glory. There’s no boat. We’re not going out in a storm. How would that help?”

  “We’ll get Smokey’s boat and we’ll do sweeps of the lake, north to south.” Glory sounded sure, but she looked small in the glare of the pub’s neon sign.

  “That’s just stupid,” Crystal said. “You said yourself we can’t do anything. They’ll do that tomorrow when it’s light.”

  “Tomorrow will be too late.” Glory pushed past her, walked up to the wooden doors, and hauled them both open at once.

  Crystal stood at the tailgate for a second, then sighed, and we all trooped in after her.

  CHORUS

  Charles Hardy, Dream Beaver Pub

  I know what they say about me. Don’t bother me none. They can think what they fuckin’ want. It’s between you and your maker what matters. I’m deep down with my maker, so I don’t worry none.

  I come into town and leave town. I left my hometown, my first wife and her whinin’, my kids, all the family I known, and I come west. Did them all a service. Didn’t know my ass from a teakettle when I was young. I come west and I started again. Still young, just thirty. But somethin’ of that shit from before must of stuck because I come out here and I’m still Hardy, still fightin’ to be treated decent, like I do to others. I done all I could to start over. Then, fuck it. I just lived. Took what I earned, spent it how I liked. I know what they say about me, but what in fuck do they know?

  Always askin’ me, where’s Glory? Like I’m gonna know. Where’s Glory? How in fuck should I know? If I could control her, she woulda stayed with me when I asked her to. Said she never wants to get married. She keeps comin’ round all the same, though. Sure we got an understandin’, but that don’t mean anyone else understands our understandin’. I come in from the bush, she shows up, we have a good time, then I leave. I’m jealous and she respects that—seen me come unglued enough not to push it—and people round here, they know that, too. But what they don’t know is I’m a decent man. I’m a decent man with a decent way of bein’ who don’t like to get pushed around.

  That’s why I come unglued: disrespect. That puny motherfucker Todd MacDonald don’t have no respect for nothin’. What kind of man knocks a woman up and fucks off? I mean, I’m no saint, I left my wife and kids, but that was for their own good. This shit is different. Motherfucker left before his kid was even born, left Glory to raise it, but what could she do? Sing it to sleep? She done what I told her and gave it up. I said, I’ll pay for its food and stuff and you just stay out of it. I did them all a favour—paid ol’ Mac Stuart to keep the baby, paid Glory to shut up and sing, paid the whole lot of them to grow up and take responsibility, but a man’s got a fuckin’ limit. Don’t come waltzin’ back into town, sleepin’ with my girl, when you’re a brazen fuckin’ asshole who don’t take responsibility, or you’re gonna get it.

  CRYSTAL

  Inside, it took me a minute to pinpoint Glory in the smoky room. She was already face-to-face with Sandy the bartender. I tugged on Todd’s arm, tried to show him that Hardy was sitting farther down the bar. If Hardy didn’t turn his head, maybe they wouldn’t ac
tually lock eyes, and if they didn’t lock eyes, maybe they wouldn’t kill each other.

  I could feel Renee’s hand on my back. She squinted through the smoke, scanning the already-drunk crowd, picking through the people for her husband, I guessed. She’d said their car was in the lot. Todd shook me off, suddenly, and flung his arm away. His elbow flew back and cracked Renee in the chin.

  “Ouch, Todd! Jesus.” She covered her face.

  I watched a man cross the bar in a stride and a half, glasses and sandy hair. He shoved Todd.

  “Say sorry to my wife.”

  Todd turned to him with his trademark sneer. “Pardon me?”

  “You heard me. Apologize.”

  I had my hands on Renee’s, trying to pull them off her face. The man pushed me aside and took her face in both hands, inspecting it for damage.

  “Are you alright?”

  The way he held her face, so cautious and tender, I had to look away. Thankfully, Bud walked up and grabbed me. The noise and smoke and music and people disappeared and I breathed him in, my face in his chest. I didn’t even care what people would say or think, I only wanted his arms around me forever. If this night would never end. “You’re here,” I said into his chest. “How did you get here?”

  “Danny Chance brought me.” He spoke right in my ear. His moustache tickled my cheek. “You found Glory. How is she?”

  “A mess.”

  I took a step back and looked around. Todd had sidled over to the jukebox. Renee and Danny stood staring at each other. Then, I saw Hardy on his stool down the bar, staring at Todd and the jukebox. That was no good. I peered around, craning to see through the bodies, hoping to catch Glory’s eye, to keep her out of the range of the explosion I knew would follow, but Glory was gone.

  “Oh shit, Bud.” I took his hand and pulled him toward the door.

  RENEE

  In front of the pub, Crystal directed Danny and me to search the parking lot, then to come around the east side of the building and meet them at the beach. She and Bud would take the west side. She gestured at some machinery abandoned below the pub, and the beach. They took off.

  Danny followed me through the maze of bumpers and tailgates—a mess of cars and trucks, a loader, a cattle truck, trailers, all parked in a hurry for beer. He caught me by the cuff. “Wait.”

  The streetlights cast a faint, flickering glow—flashing suddenly then going out, wavering behind the branches of the trees.

  “We shouldn’t stop, Danny. We have to find her.”

  “This is important. I need to just… I just need to say… I want to say you look good.”

  I almost laughed. “Really? That’s what you have to say that’s so important? These aren’t even my clothes.”

  “No, not that. You look like you.” His eyes were all over my face, his brow creased in the middle.

  He looked so young and unsure and I felt strange and unfamiliar to myself, in this cold parking lot in the middle of nowhere. We were so far from what I’d imagined for us. It made my eyes fill. I swallowed. I wanted to ask him everything and I wanted to say nothing, just have everything resolved, his arms around me in our bed at home. Instead I asked, “Where’s Thomas?”

  “With the Swannells.”

  It hit me like a slap. “They don’t love him like I do.”

  Danny gathered me up like a bird who’d hit a window. “No, Ren, no. Not like you do.” He held me in his arms while I cried. I moaned: moans that meant I loved him and I loved our son and I would do anything to start over, to do better, to hold us all together like we were meant to be. He lay his cheek on my hair and whispered to me. I couldn’t hear him, but I could feel it—that this is who he’d been missing, even when we were together—the broken, real me, with no defences, admitting defeat. I let myself be defeated, be gathered up in his arms.

  “Listen,” he said. He stroked my back. He pressed a fingertip into my spine: you.

  CRYSTAL

  Bud pulled me along behind him, past machine tires taller than either of us, past the hulk of a burnt-out trailer, past grass growing up through the engine parts of a popped-hood Volvo, long off the road. I drew even with him when we came out of the abandoned machines and into the street light shadow of the pub. The lake roared below us. Bud had a penlight on his key ring. He shone it under the deck.

  “Glory?”

  “Glory! Where are you?”

  “Bring that light over here.” Her muddy voice.

  I followed Bud under the pub’s deck toward the sound.

  “Bud Shinnerd, get in here and help me. I found Smokey’s boat!”

  “What? I can’t haul a boat out with my hands, Glory,” Bud said.

  “Get that loader in here, then.”

  “What loader?”

  “The one in the parking lot.”

  “I don’t know whose loader that is—you can’t just take someone’s machine. Listen, Glory…” He paused, thinking. “Crystal, wait here.” He said to Glory, “I’ll get my truck.”

  “Jesus,” I said, but I took his penlight and crawled farther under the deck. I held the tiny spotlight on my cousin. Glory was frantic, pushing at the hull of Smokey’s broken boat, and then pulling on its stern.

  I sat next to her. “What do you think you’re gonna do with that?”

  “Something,” she grunted, slipping on the dusty ground. “More than what you’re doing.”

  “What do you want me to do? Help you get that wreck out? Then what? We get it in the lake and it sinks.”

  “It’s okay. It won’t sink. We’ll get it in the water and Bud can get the motor going.”

  “There is no motor.”

  Glory looked up at me with glassy eyes. She was filthy—dirt stuck to the sweat on her forehead and cheeks. “What?”

  “You heard me. Look.” I shone the light on the motor well.

  She made a strangled sound. I realized I’d made a mistake, but it was too late. She fell. I dropped the penlight and scrambled to get to her. Bud’s pickup headlights found us—me, like the Madonna, Glory in my arms, both of us bawling.

  There haven’t been that many times in my life where I couldn’t solve what Glory needed just by being there and doing what she said. Sure, I was always there to pick her up, dust her off, listen to her beak off about whoever’d done her wrong, but this time, the situation was beyond me.

  In the end, a bonfire was the only answer. Bud hauled the boat wreck out from under the deck and down to the beach with his tow chain. Danny lit the thing on fire. Down by the shore, the wind was relentless. Bud squeezed my hand, then pulled me close in a hug. “Your uncle got a quilt like this?” he asked, nodding at the lake.

  I smiled into his chest. “Yeah.” But my smile failed as thoughts of Anton and Tiny came back. I looked at Glory, round-shouldered next to the flames. “Bud, what can we do for those boys?”

  He kissed my head. “Not much. Something, I hope, but I can’t think of anything. You think of something, Dan?”

  Danny shook his head. He shrugged, wrapped his arms around himself, looked out toward the water. Renee stepped nearer him and he slipped his arm around her. Current ran through me where my body touched Bud’s, and I imagined it ran through them, too. It could have been Bud’s touch making me a softie, but I was happy.

  A loud bang sounded behind us. I looked up and saw a man tumble down the pub’s rear stairs and land on his back at the bottom. Framed by the light spilling out of the open door, another man came sauntering after him. A crowd surged behind them. I saw Bud and Danny exchange a look. They started walking up the beach toward the pub.

  At the bottom of the stairs, the swaggering man stretched his arms above his head. Hardy. I could tell by the bulk and stoop of him. He grabbed the fallen man by the shirt, pulled him up, and delivered a nose-breaking punch. Hardy’s victim dropped back down to the ground. Bud took a running step, but stopped when Hardy looked up, rubbing the knuckles of his punching hand. Hardy leaned down and grabbed Todd again—it had to be Tod
d—and hauled him up and punched him. I caught up with Danny and Bud and stood at the edge of the circle that had formed around the fight.

  Todd laughed through blood and mucous.

  “Like that, do you? That why you’re laughing?” Hardy grabbed him again.

  Todd spat.

  Hardy slapped Todd’s mouth, then pulled back for another punch. “You thieving, fucking, son of a bitch.” His fist crunched down.

  Todd lay still for a moment, and then his garbled voice came through: “This would mean more to me if I knew what you were talking about.”

  Hardy kicked him in the ribs and Todd bent in half.

  “You don’t go poaching another man’s property, boy.”

  “That’s rich.” Todd sat up and spat. Blood sprayed across his shirt, black and wet. “Didn’t you murder your family back east or something? You probably got shit in your closet no one knows.” He tried to get up.

  “Shut the fuck up.” Hardy kicked him in the gut. A sick thud. Todd turned foetal. “Think you’re smarter than us, don’t you? Think you know more than me? Glory Stuart’s mine.”

  Surprise showed through the gore on Todd’s face. “Glory? This is about her?”

  “Fuck you.” Hardy slapped his head. “Fucking baby. You’re not a man. Stand up.” Every word was reinforced with a blow.

  Hardy stepped back and Todd started to crawl away. “You’re just a sore loser, Hardy!” He coughed, scrambling to get to his feet. “Fucking cuckold.”

  “Fuck you, city boy.” Hardy grabbed him by the back of the shirt, threw him down on the ground, and kicked him in the head. Glory’s cigarettes spilled out in the dirt around them.