Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  “Well, man, that’s cool,” he says, and there’s that American twang again.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Ah. Now that’s a story.” He grins, and Jo waits. There’s work to be done, but Cass will be gone for an hour at least. She pours herself a cup of coffee and leans against the counter behind her, trying her best to look carefree.

  Pink looks around the café as if taking inventory for a second time, his eyes eventually coming back to Jo, who is looking into her cup. He watches Jo watch the small whirlpool of her stirred coffee while he eats his eggs.

  “Why’s your name Pink?” Jo asks at last.

  Pink smiles slightly, mouth turning upwards just at the corners. “My parents called me Elvis. Mum loved ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ apparently. The song came out in January and I was born in May. Anyway, I figured I’d update.”

  Jo looks at Pink blankly. “Floyd,” he says.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “You know. Ummagumma?”

  Jo shakes her head. Is he speaking another language?

  “Pink Floyd. It’s a band. How about Dark Side of the Moon?”

  “Oh. Okay, yeah. Right.” The song “Money” had been all over the radio the summer Jo turned fourteen.

  Pink smiles almost apologetically. “I thought, you know, keep the music theme…” He shrugs his shoulders, and goes back to his coffee. At the window, a fly tries to push through the speckled glass.

  “So…what’s this thing with the wind?” asks Jo. She settles herself on the stool on her side of the counter, resting an elbow on the Arborite, blowing on her coffee, which is no longer hot. The fly buzzes; sunlight warms the room as it slants across the floor.

  “I just—have this thing about the wind, I guess.

  From my earliest memory. It’s always kind of—been with me. So after a while, I decided to let it guide me.”

  Jo opens her mouth, a question forming, but Pink stops her with a finger on her forearm; tanned brown hand, a little dirty, against pale, freckled skin. She thinks of Eamon, and wants to pull away. But she holds still for a heartbeat, two, before refilling both their cups.

  “The first time I remember really hearing the wind I was maybe six. I was in my bed, and it had to be pretty late. I remember lying there, listening to the noises of the house, the way an old house will pop and creak. Sometimes I could hear the crack of the embers in the woodstove in the kitchen. There was a small hole in the stovepipe of that stove that Dad never got around to patching, and I liked to watch the sparks fly by on their way up to the outside. Anyway, the quiet in the house meant my folks were asleep. Only I was awake, my ears straining at every sound, lying still like any movement might set off some chain of events, wake up the monster under the bed, I don’t know. It’s funny how you can remember some things so clearly like that, isn’t it?”

  Jo nods, remembering lying in bed listening to her parents argue. What was it about? How old would she have been? She can remember the feel of the sheets under her fingers, can see, in her mind’s eye, the light poking under her closed bedroom door.

  “And then I heard the wind. It came in through the space where the window was cracked open for the fresh air Mom always said I needed. And it was spring, so it was cool. It came through and it whispered around my ears, you know? And I heard—it sounds corny, but I swear—I heard it call me by name.”

  “Pink?”

  “Elvis.”

  Jo thinks about the wind calling Elvis.

  “Anyway, I was like a sleepwalker, you know, only I was awake. I remember looking down at my blue flannel cowboy pyjamas—I loved those pyjamas—and seeing how the wind was tugging at them. So I walked across my floor, all lit up by the moon, and I opened the door to my bedroom and looked outside. You could feel the house—breathing.”

  Jo realizes she is holding her breath, and she lets it out.

  “The wind told me to go outside, so I did. I walked outside and looked back at the house, the siding all kind of washed in moonlight. I couldn’t see the houses below because we lived on a ridge, with a dirt lane that curved down and around before it met the road, so it felt like you were alone up there, especially if you were only six. Anyway, all around the house were these tall pines, spindly things with branches mostly at the top, and they were swaying like dancers, like they were waltzing, and that’s when I heard the music. I really remember thinking I heard music.”

  “Music?”

  “Probably it was the creaking of the trees and the hiss of the wind, but sometimes I think it was more like that Pied Piper story, you know? Anyway, I looked away from the house and there was our car, a 1960 Chevy station wagon. It had a front grille like a set of teeth and wings like eyebrows over the taillights at the back. My folks had just got it, and they were really proud of it. I always had to wipe my feet before I got in, my hands had to be clean, and I sure wasn’t allowed to play in it. Here I was all excited, like they were, about this shiny new thing and I couldn’t understand why they got to play with it and I didn’t.

  “It was like the wind led me right to the Chev and I touched the handle and pushed my thumb in to unlatch the door. And then I was inside, and I started playing with the pedals, you know? And before I knew it I had my foot jammed down hard on the clutch and the car started rolling and I couldn’t see where it was going because I was too short and since I didn’t know what the pedals did I didn’t think to take my foot off the clutch at all. And then all at once I’m bumping down the road and over the bank and the car doesn’t roll, you know, it just keeps going until it stops in a grove of trees, and I can hear the crunch of metal and I can’t hear the wind anymore, not at all. Just the sound of me breathing and the car making a sort of settling sound, the way the house was.”

  Pink pauses. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

  “Go on.”

  The plate is empty, and so is Pink’s cup. Jo fills it for the third time. He wraps his hands around the cup and looks into it as if seeing something quite different.

  “I wasn’t hurt because I was all tucked down under the dash anyway, and I guess the car wasn’t going very fast, really. I couldn’t get the door open because of the brush on all sides. And I was scared of what Mom and Dad would say, so I didn’t want to go home. So I just— curled up on the seat.

  “I guess I was sound asleep when the fire started. The neighbours thought I had died in it, too, along with my parents, until someone noticed the car was gone, and then noticed the tire marks going down the drive and over the bank. That was the first time with the wind.” He stands up, wiping his mouth on the napkin, draining his coffee.

  “Wait,” says Jo. “Is that really true?”

  “I think so, yeah,” he said. “Things shift in your memory. Sometimes I think your mind puts things together later, to make a good story.”

  Jo raises her eyebrows. Pink shrugs again.

  “But your parents really did die in a fire?”

  “Sometimes I tell people I was raised by wolves.

  Sometimes I say it was the wind.” He grins. “Actually, it was my Aunt Nora and Uncle Stan near Pullman, Washington.”

  The screen door bangs. Cass comes in with Archie, looking flushed. Archie sits down beside Pink, swivelling back and forth on the stool a few times as if settling in. “Got summa that apple?” he asks.

  Cass looks at Jo, who is still looking at Pink.

  “Better go,” Pink says, standing up.

  He holds up a hand, a wave that becomes a peace sign. Long fingers. Jo’s own fingers twitch, but her hands stay by her side. She watches his back as he turns and walks out, screen door banging behind him, colours like a garden against the parking lot. She watches as he steps out on the highway. The first car going east, a blue Valiant with dice hanging from the rearview mirror, slows. Before getting in, he turns and waves again, the wave this time turning into a thumbs-up. Before she can return the wave, he is gone.

  “American kid,” said Archie conversati
onally. “Just another of them kids on the road, I guess. Like that song, what was it? Gone to look for America. Lots of ’em on the highway, like they got no idea where to find it. Or what country to find it in.” He laughs at that with a kind of snort. Jo is still looking out the window at the empty highway. “Forgot to leave a tip, I see.”

  “Forgot to pay, too,” says Cass. “Jo, where’s your head?”

  Cass

  Well, I’ve seen that look before, that’s for damn sure. If you’d asked me in the first place I’d say that girl had boy trouble. Now here she is looking off after that hippie as he heads out the door like she’d follow him anywhere. They never learn. Me, I learned. Don’t ever give your heart away. Find a mutual arrangement that works; it’s the best you can hope for. And don’t get in too deep.

  Got to wonder about Jo. She can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen and she’s not giving anything away, but like I said before, that girl’s got a story. Got parents somewhere, probably wondering where she is. Look at her: good teeth, healthy complexion, freckles and all, good shoes, even. Someone took care of that girl. Not all kids get taken care of, I should know. But kids these days, they only think of themselves, not about who might be pining after them.

  My own mother had ambitions, always figured she was a damn sight better than the place she landed. She named me after Cassandra, a Trojan princess who could tell the future, thanks to this guy Apollo. I read up on this stuff, even though my mother did give me a sketchy version early on. The story goes that Apollo figured he’d get lucky in return for this great gift he gave her, of being able to see things that hadn’t happened yet, but when she told him to take a hike he put a curse on her so that nobody’d believe her. Typical, men thinking mostly about their dicks and pissed off when they don’t get to put them where they want to. Gotta wonder why she never saw that coming.

  Anyway, Mum gave me her version when I was fifteen or so, and I liked the part about Cassandra having the foresight to give some horny bastard the cold shoulder, although it ticks me off if I can’t get anyone to listen to a bit of advice when it counts.

  The name makes sense, though, when you realize that before I was born Mum was an aspiring actress. She was almost four months pregnant when she married my father. He’d told her he was a producer when she met him in a bar on Hastings Street. She bought it, but then, Dad was a salesman. As for her choice of names for her girls, she stuck with the Greek theme all the way through, like it was her nod to classical theatre or something. She gave the next four babies Greek names, too: Acantha, Phoebe, Eleanor, Tess. I can see her, walrus-sized, sitting on the purple couch ticking off possibilities in the baby-name book, turning the pages with the fire-engine-red nail of her index finger.

  Acantha, who came eleven months after me, means thorny, because her entrance into the world—she was a breech birth—“hurt like hell.” She named Phoebe— bright one—in an uncharacteristic moment of optimism. Tess means fourth-born. Eleanor, the last one, means Mercy.

  My father was a Fuller Brush Man, keeping us well stocked in that department if nothing else. We had the top two floors of an old house downtown, the five of us crammed into the two rooms in the attic, with Mum— and Dad, when he was home—sharing the second floor room beside the bathroom. The five of us flushing the toilet over the course of any given night must have made life on the road seem pretty good to Dad.

  On the rare occasions Dad was actually home, we were close. He’d pick me up when he still could—I was a chubby child, still do carry an extra pound or two—saying: “How’s my Cassie today? Didja catch any fish?” which never made sense, living where we did.

  I inherited this place from Dad when he died in ’59, which made Mum spitting mad. Turns out he had something going with the woman who owned the place, and who, having died the year before of some kind of cancer, left it to him. No real surprise, said Mum, but still. She grilled me, thought I knew something about the affair, but I didn’t, and after a while she just stopped speaking to me. I couldn’t say why he’d done it. I don’t know, maybe he thought I’d finally catch a fish out here.

  It was boarded up when I got to it, once the legal stuff had settled out, taxes paid up and all mine, free and clear. Acantha couldn’t believe I didn’t turn around and sell it. When I called it Cass’s Roadside Café, she laughed at me. “Café! It’s a side-of-the-road diner, Cass,” she said. “Face it.” But she hung around that first summer. We drank a lot of wine while we fixed up the place. We laughed a lot. We talked a lot, too, more than we ever talked growing up together, even squashed into that room we shared. But she knew herself: “Cass,” she’d tell me, “don’t count on me. I could be gone tomorrow.”

  Then one day, she was. She’d roll back in from time to time, and she’d never tell me what she’d been doing no matter how many bottles of wine we killed. By then the place was earning me a living, and I liked it. Boyfriends would come and go, hanging around for a while, but I never wanted them to stay, not if it meant sharing the place. I’d have shared it with Cantha, though, if she’d wanted, but she’s a cold wind, that girl, always blowing in a different direction.

  The day she showed up with a baby I hadn’t seen her for two years. At first, I didn’t believe the girl was hers. “She’s called Donalda, after Dad.”

  “What?”

  “Dad. Donald.”

  Mum always called him That Man. Of course I knew his name was Don, but I never actually put the name together with my father, who was just Dad. Seemed like a dumb name for a girl, but it told me that Canth missed him too, which wasn’t such a surprise when I thought about it, her relationship with Mum being what it was. Just the same, I couldn’t remember Canth and Dad spending any time together, not that any of us did all that much. “Wanna hold her?” she asked. The baby in the blanket was scrawny and pale and ugly, with a brush of red hair across her head. I was instantly in love.

  I started taking Donalda—I called her Donnie— more and more. Cantha moved into town, and it was easier for me to have the girl in the restaurant than Cantha ever could in the places she worked, mostly in one bar or another. When Cantha was on night shift Donnie slept over in a nest of blankets on the couch. In the morning I’d sit her on the kitchen floor in the diner with a drawerful of spoons and ladles, and she’d take them all out and put them all in again, over and over. She never banged them on the floor like most kids would. That kid was always quiet; when she made any noise at all, you knew to pay attention.

  The first time Cantha really didn’t show up, instead of just being late, I’d had Donnie—who’d just had her fourth birthday—for almost a week. The girl was a sweetheart and no trouble, but I was pissed off. So I guess I let Canth know how I felt in no uncertain terms when she finally did turn up, when I tried to find out what the hell was going on, where she’d been. I guess I was really yelling, that’s how mad I was.

  “What the fuck do you care,” Cantha screamed back. She looked like hell and way too thin, and she scared me. “Come here, baby,” she said from a crouch, skinny fingers beckoning, and when Donnie ran to her I wanted to take it all back. Leave her, I wanted to say. I don’t mind. I’m sorry. But she was out the door, Donnie on her hip, and into a pickup. I couldn’t see the man driving, except for a handlebar moustache and a ballcap.

  It’s been years, and no sign of Cantha or Donnie. Not that I didn’t try to find out where they’d gone. Bottom line, said Bob when I asked him, is that she’s the guardian. Unless I can prove she’s not being a good mother, that there’s some kind of abuse or neglect, I haven’t got much to say where the law is concerned, and I sure haven’t got any way to find that out. “You ever report them missing?” he asked me, but by then it had been years already, and I never figured they were actually missing, just didn’t want to be found, at least by me. Well, Cantha didn’t anyway. When I think of that little girl sitting on the kitchen floor with a bunch of spoons and bowls spread around her, pretending to cook like her Aunt Cass, it breaks my heart. Now, Do
nnie would be about the same age as Jo. Red hair, too, but Donnie’s was curly where Jo’s is straight, so curly she’d cry when I tried to comb it after the bath. There I go now, feeling sentimental just remembering it.

  Learned my lesson, I guess. I’m not going to be tied down, not me, and I know not to give too much away. Not my heart, anyhow. Might do Jo some good to learn that, but I suppose she’ll find out for herself. Just the same, I’ll try to give her a bit of advice—or my name isn’t Cassandra.

  Ha ha.

  Jo

  The morning’s barely started and yet the day feels full. Cass is in the kitchen making soup and I’m filling the salt and peppers and waiting for the next customer.

  Pink has left me thinking. Thinking about what it’s like to go where the wind takes you, the freedom in that. When I was pregnant, I felt the pull of life from inside me through my feet. I could imagine the reach of roots into the ground, binding us. Afterwards, I was a hollow tree, walking around in just my bark, root system fragile, a tentative grip on earth, hardly anything. Won’t think of home, won’t think of what I’ve lost, not my mother, not the baby. What should be a line of daughters is broken in two places, and here I am, filling Heinz bottles from the giant jug with the plain label that says: Regular Catsup, one gallon. I feel as blank as this label.

  When I was small I had a best friend whose name was Genevieve. She was the youngest in her family, with a much older sister and brother. So she was a late child, and I was an only child. Genevieve was five when her father died of a heart attack at the breakfast table, leaving no insurance. Her mother had to take a secretarial job, and my mother, who didn’t start working until I was in high school, began looking after Genevieve. For a short time, we were like sisters.