Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  “Changed your mind?”

  I try to speak soft. “Nah. S’from the boys out there.”

  She looks at me, looks out at the lot, at the trucks lined up out there, looks at the pile of money. Then she spits on it.

  I thought she’d be grateful, you know? Thought she’d be happy. She spit on that money, all smoothed out and in a little pile of twenties, tens, fives, ones, and stood up to leave. I couldn’t believe it. Her face all prideful, she stood there for a second looking at nothing while I looked up, mouth hanging open, thinking: what the hell?

  When I looked at the table again, the bills were gone. I looked back up to see the back of her, high heels clicking, head in the air as she tucked the bills into the waistband of her miniskirt.

  The waitress stood behind the coffee counter, arms crossed, watching. Then she just shook her head and turned back to filling the ketchup bottles from the big jug. Made me think of my mother, somehow, and Cass and Myra both, all of ’em rolled into one, the way she shook her head like that and turned away. Like something was so obvious, and I was just too dumb to get it.

  “She was offering—” I said, but she turned, interrupting.

  “I know what she was offering, and I know how low it likely got. But it’s service for payment, you know? It’s commerce. That’s how it works.”

  “Well, she took it, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah, she did. She took it, but she’ll hate you for it. And if she could have, she’d have walked out without it.”

  Beats me how a whore can look you in the eye and offer her services for two dollars and then spit on you if you offer her two hundred for nothing. Beats me where you draw the line when it comes to what’s an insult, what’s respect. Or maybe it’s just that it’s easier to ignore what’s not in your face.

  The guy in the Bulldog yelled something from his cab when I went by, probably wanting to know what went, so I gave him the thumbs up. I didn’t want to talk. Sometimes something happens, you just want to chew on it for a while. The lights in the diner went off. When they did, about a million more stars came out. I had a smoke, watched them for a while, ’til I got dizzy with the number of them all.

  Cass

  “It’s easy to ignore what’s not in your face—for a while—but eventually, it’s gonna come back and bite you,” I told Jo just the other day. “It always does. It’s okay, though,” I relented, because of the way she was looking at me. “Everybody needs to take a breather now and then. Get their bearings.”

  We were making apple pies in the afternoon, the quiet time after lunch. Actually, it was still morning for me; been sleeping in, now that I got help. We had quite a rhythm going: chopping, sugaring, cinnamon, let the mixture stand for a bit, and then start making pie dough. I showed her how to fold the rolled-out crust in half, then a quarter, and then put the corner in the pie pan so the fold is the centre, then you just unfold it. Easy as pie, pardon the pun. By the third pie, she was getting pretty good at it.

  Although she was pretty quiet at first, Jo’s been talking more and more lately. She’s like the tame deer I had one summer, out back of the trailer. At first I scared the daylights out of the thing, but after a few weeks she would eat right out of my hand. I can still feel the gentle tongue; see those big, dark eyes. Figure some hunter got her.

  Anyways, we’re making these pies and Jo says to me: “Do you ever see the future? You know, see something that’s going to happen to you, but hasn’t happened yet?”

  It was an odd question, and I told her so.

  “It’s just that sometimes I can see little things coming, but the big stuff—it just seems so obvious afterwards.”

  I wait, but she goes back to the piecrust. It’s more than she generally says, and I take that as a good sign, don’t try to push her any. As for me, I start thinking about just before Cantha took Donnie away for the last time. Donnie had this dog, a brown mutt she called Smoke and she loved that dog to distraction. Thing is, I’d had this dream that I was running across the highway calling after something I couldn’t see, although in my dream I thought it was that dog of hers. It was so clear; it was like I was there. In the dream there was some sort of vehicle driving away, and I ran after it but I couldn’t catch up.

  So two days later there’s Donnie sitting on the trailer step, the dog and girl just about the same size. She’s counting cars. We’d made up this game that if two blue cars go by it means something good is going to happen, and if three white cars go by it means something bad is going to happen, which is pretty safe because there are a lot more blue cars than there are white cars. I’m in the trailer doing something and she calls out that one blue car has passed, and then after a bit she says “two white, Aunt Cass,” and I’m just turning to open the screen door and make sure she’s okay when I hear “I mean, blue and white,” and then I see a blue and white camper pass and right after it there’s Smoke taking off after it and some little dog that’s barking out the window.

  When the truck hits the dog he flips up in a sort of arc and falls back at the side of the road. Then he rolls, like a loose bag of rocks. And Donnie’s standing up and yelling “Smoke!” and I snatch her up so she doesn’t go running out to him and that’s when a white car, coming from the other direction, runs over the dog for the second time and keeps on going.

  “I’m real sorry about your dog,” the truck driver says after he’s pulled over, picked up the dead dog, and walked back with it across the road, blood all over his shirt. “It just ran right under my tires.”

  I told him to put the dog out back under the tarp by the woodpile, and then to come in. That was how I met Archie.

  Thing is, I thought that was the dream, me running out after the dog. It was later; when Cantha came and took Donnie, and I was running across that empty highway calling “Wait!” that I realized when I stopped in the middle of the road, holding my knees and gasping, that I’d been here before.

  So I told Jo this story as we were folding and unfolding piecrusts and pricking the tops. All the time looking at her and wondering, because she has that red hair, and because I don’t know where she came from. Can’t be, though. You’d think I’d know for sure a thing like that. She’s quiet for the whole thing—a good listener, that one, which is good, because I’m a good talker, no doubt about it—and then she says: “I’m sorry,” and there’s something in the way she says it.

  “Where did you say you grew up?” I ask her.

  “I didn’t say,” she answers, and I know I won’t get anything else out of her.

  “Well, sometimes you just don’t see a thing coming, that’s all,” I say after a moment. It is dead quiet, just the two of us with our hands full of flour and the ticking of the clock on the wall, and then there’s the hum of Harleys and by the time it’s become a roar we’re anticipating the hamburger orders clear as day, the sides of fries, coffee refills, that it will be just too busy in a minute to say much of anything.

  Jo

  I’d like to just leave it all behind. All of it. What’s that word? A respite. A chance to forget everything that happened, to pretend I’m just a girl working in a truck stop diner on a mountain pass in the middle of nowhere. No past, just a future, winding ahead like the roads around here. Can’t see past the next curve, but it doesn’t matter: you can trust that the road is there. Even if the scenery’s dull, even if it’s just miles and miles of trees, well, you can trust that, too, right? There’s a safety in knowing that the forest goes on. Excitement isn’t what I want right now. Just knowing the road’s there for when I want to step back onto it. Without getting run over by a truck.

  It is not easy to ignore what’s not in your face, whatever Cass says while she’s trying to nudge information out of me. It lurks there, in the background, and every so often it comes at me sideways.

  I thought I wanted a rest, a chance to figure out which way to go from here. Give me a sink full of dishes, something that doesn’t involve thinking. Diner therapy: if Cass could package it, she cou
ld retire early and live in style. But I keep thinking about Pink, about the idea of travelling with the wind. No regrets, no secrets, just the road ahead. Who would have predicted that one guy, a couple of fried eggs, and a story would have me thinking this way?

  Get yourself together, Jo. Besides, there’s a pickup truck slowing, about to pull in. Can hardly see it through the rain that’s driving down, a squall out of nowhere. Just can’t predict mountain weather, that’s what Cass says.

  Windwise

  Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and

  mankind the vessel.

  — August Hare (1792–1834)

  The almanac predicts a dry summer, a bad year for forest fires. Buck is sitting at the picnic table at the rest stop as the old grey pickup’s engine cools. His ballcap is on the table; he likes the feel of the air on his head, short of hair as it is. He runs a hand across it, one finger truncated at the first knuckle. He has set down the old roadmap with his father’s marks all over it and picked up the small paperbound almanac along with his Thermos cup, something to read while he sips his tea. Even if he knows what the weather will be, there is always an odd assortment of articles—astronomy, baseball—that he’s not expecting. Behind him, a woodpecker drums a pine, and Buck thinks of the standing dead wood afterwards, how it keeps on giving. A fire isn’t always a bad thing. The one that’s coming to this spot will be quickly contained, although it will burn right up to the highway, right over the old cabin behind him in the woods, before it’s under control.

  The first drops of rain surprise him, and then he’s surprised to have been surprised. He can never quite fathom how he can miss the obvious. But to not feel the approach of water—well, it’s ironic, that’s what it is.

  Buck’s father could feel water. His grandfather could, too, and so by the time Buck’s father took up the practice there was a reputation associated with the Waterfield family. Lots of jokes about the name, of course, an old name that once really did reflect the occupation of the bearer, like Cooper, and Ironmonger. And true to the name, Talus Waterfield could look across a piece of land and know where to walk. He’d take a forked branch from a tree—any tree, didn’t matter if it was apple or willow or what—and start walking that patch, back and forth, back and forth, until that branch fairly pulled out of his upturned palms. There it would bob its end, and Talus would count the dips. Eighty feet…eighty-four, he’d say as the stick made a last small tremor. He never collected his pay— in hay or chickens or whatever in those days—until the well was dug and the water gushing up. He was right every time Buck ever saw him, except the time he went out right after Buck’s mother was buried. Talus said the pull of her was greater than the pull of water, and it must have confused him.

  The first time Talus put the branch in his son’s hand, placing his big hand encouragingly in the small of his boy’s back, Buck was eight years old. “My son,” Talus told the folks he was witching for, and everyone watched as Buck walked, waiting to feel something. At first, all Buck could feel were the eyes of the farmer and his wife watching him, and it made him nervous but not so nervous as knowing his dad was watching him as he stumbled over the uneven ground, sweat pooling in his palms where they held the ends of the forked stick.

  When he tripped, the forked branch spiralled out and landed in the tall grass and stuck there. Buck was afraid to look up from where he sat on his rear on the hard ground in case they were laughing, or worse, that his father would be angry. “That the spot?” Talus asked, and then all at once Buck could feel it, the pull of the water, behind them. At first, he thought his father was tugging on his arm, the pull was so great, but his father was standing a few feet off, hands on his hips, waiting.

  After that, Talus took the boy on all of his trips, saying little, but Buck could feel the pride when his father would send him off under the wide eyes of the landowner. “Always use the stick,” he told Buck. “Folks are happier when they can see the stick bend. Then they think it’s the stick doing the work.” Buck has used willow, apple, walnut, maple, forked sticks and straight sticks. He’s used a coat hanger, and an old car antenna. He’s used a plumb bob as a pendulum, the weight off a fishing lure, a button on a string. He’s used nothing at all, but he’s found that without some tool, just as his father said, folks are less likely to believe him. And anyway, he’s come to like the feel of the branch in his hands, the way the water speaks through the wood, like a radio signal. Music, coming through the wood in his hands.

  They logged miles on back roads, exchanging few words. When they reached the location they’d scan the hill, sight the place, exchange a look and head out, Buck pointing like a hunting dog while his father planted the marker. Once, Buck tried to ask his father why he could feel the pull of the water before the stick did.

  “Just count your blessings, boy,” he said. “Best not to ask too much about them. And best not to talk about them.” Buck thought he meant that by talking about the witching he would jinx it in some way.

  As Buck got older, he began feeling other things besides water. At first, it was okay. When a lady they were witching for discovered her wedding band missing, Buck saw it, fourth cabbage in the row where she had been weeding. And he knew where to look for their mongrel, Pepper, when he got caught in a snare back of the property.

  He knew where a twelve-year-old kid wound up when he went missing from where he was last seen flattening pennies on the railroad tracks. There was family trouble, everyone knew the boy’s father beat him, so some thought he’d maybe hopped a train and lit out. Lots of kids took off that young, it was like that in those days, and there were all kinds riding the rails, some shifty characters. Anything could have happened to him. The Mounties called off the search after a week, but Buck could see him, clear as day, snagged in some branches in the river.

  When he tried to tell Talus, his father told him to shut up. Using more words than would normally come out of his mouth, he said: “You didn’t see anything. You’re just imagining things. Forget about it.”

  But Buck couldn’t make it go away. It got worse: one morning he caught the boy’s reflection in the shaving mirror when he was walking by, bloated as if he’d been under water a long time. “I gotta tell the cops where to find him,” he told Talus, who held him by both shoulders and told him: “You’ll do no such thing.” Then he sent Buck to his room as if he were a small child rather than seventeen years old, Buck too surprised to disobey. There, alone, he saw the kid in the wallpaper pattern, and in the toss of the blanket where he’d thrown it off that morning. He was afraid to close his eyes, afraid to sleep, but of course, sooner or later, he had to. And then he dreamed.

  He did the only thing he could do. He wrote an anonymous letter to the Mounties, put it in the mailbox, and went to the bar. If the regulars were surprised to see him there at first, he became a regular himself quickly enough, and nobody asked his age. Maybe it was the haunted look that made him look older than his years. Whenever he slowed down with the drinking, the boy’s face came back: bloated, mouth opening as if to speak. The image continued even after the boy had been found, mourned, buried, his death declared an accident, and Buck wondered at the meaning of that: was there something more he was supposed to do? For the first few weeks he was drunk most hours of the day, and as long as he was drunk enough, he didn’t see a thing. When he wasn’t, he saw tractor accidents, stillborn babies, undiagnosed illnesses; heard the inner ramblings of the guilty and the plottings of the cruel. Talus came to drag him home a few times, and every time he made his way back, because it was worse at home, sober. Eventually, Talus gave up.

  One day Buck awoke to find himself in a boxcar going west, and it seemed like the farther away he got, the less he was bothered, until he didn’t need to be stumbling drunk, just a little nip now and then by the campfire to keep things smooth.

  At a relief camp near Broad Creek, he got some work on the road crew.

  The summer of ’31 was a dry summer, just like the one predicted in the almana
c for ’77, Buck thinks as he folds up the map and screws the cap on the Thermos. As he remembers, he can feel the dust in his mouth, remembers how he scanned for rain, his water sense numbed. When the fire started just east of where they were working, it spread fast. It wasn’t long before they were pulled from the road crew to help fight the fire. They had no equipment; nobody showed them what to do. They dug trenches—fire guards—hot, dusty grunt work for two bits an hour, but there was food at the end of the day, and no matter what it was, they were ravenous for it. At night they collapsed, exhausted, in canvas tents that stank of mildew, but for a while after supper the guys would sit around and trade jokes. Buck, like his father, never had much to say. After a while they stopped talking to him altogether.

  Lying on his bunk, bone tired, smelling smoke in every pore and waiting for sleep to take him, Buck began to see things: where the fire was crowning, where it leapt the creek, the places it was and the places it was going to be. Places where, if there weren’t guys there beating it back; it was going to go wild. Sometimes he could see lightning strikes in places the fire hadn’t got to yet. And he could see how big it was going to get. See the homesteads it was going to run over, dead cattle roasting, fish cooking in the streams. He saw a small girl not fast enough to outrun the flames, her parents too stubborn to leave until too late.

  The first couple of times Buck told the foreman: wind’s shifting, think maybe twenty miles north, that flank’s the one to concentrate on. He couldn’t keep quiet about what he knew, couldn’t just let the fire eat up everything when he could see how they could stop it, get enough men and shovels, enough water on the spot fires. A couple of weeks before it merged with the second fire, then the third, Buck told the foreman what he saw, although he made it sound like guesswork. But when the three fires had indeed become one—the largest in memory—suspicions arose. It wouldn’t have been the first time relief guys set new spot fires to keep the work going.