The beer in my glass tasted sour.
Slitty-eyed, Reenie was smoking another cigarette, listening to someone discuss her diet. Draining my beer, I slipped over.
“Oh, Dorilda…this is…” Reenie slurred, and the woman stuck out her hand. “Oh, fock.” Reenie laughed, spraying vodka. “Willa—as in them chocolates? Like, you know, Willacrisp?” The woman stared blankly, edging away.
As Reenie dug into the basket of Cheezies on the table, I went and got another beer, then sat down with her. It was too loud to talk. That crazy woman had backed off Hugh, but you could feel all the eyes practically unzipping him.
Between songs I made myself smile at Reenie through the smoky haze.
Suddenly, something about her look egged me on.
“Tell me about this Julie person.” The name rolled from my tongue like a hard little candy, and I blushed.
Reenie scratched her neck and played with an earring, a new one, by the looks of the piercing which was scaly and red.
“Ah, Hughie got it up for that one.” Her eyes darted away, scanning the dance floor. “Tell ya the truth, so did Wayne. Guys, right?” She bit the end off a Cheezie, took another drink, then chewed ice.
“Fucking space cadet, you ask me. An artiste. She had these big…eyes. Kind of a greeny colour, like, ya know? ‘Cept she never looked at you when she talked, she just—”
“So they went out for a while?”
She plunked down her glass, eyeing me. “Fill ’er up!” She laughed raggedly, squinting around. “That what he told you?”
I shrugged, drawing my finger around the rim of my glass till it whirred.
“Oh, they were quite the item a while ago,” she said, almost soberly. “She dealt for him, right?”
I looked at her.
“Before you come along—you and Sonny” she added slowly, like she was going through a grocery list. I really didn’t like this woman.
The band launched into “Love Me Tender.” The beer was warm; saliva pooled in my mouth.
“I thought they were just jazz,” I yelled, swivelling around. The floor was packed now with waltzing—staggering—couples. The disco light added a festive sparkle to their groping.
“You gotta give people what they want.” Reenie snickered into her empty glass.
A lump as big as a walnut filled my throat. I looked at her. “Did they live together?” The words stung.
“Who? Hughie an’…Jooolie?” She scratched under the V of her top. She was one of those smokers who look all bone and nicotine. “For a while,” she said dismissively.
I wasn’t rising to this. Was he crazy for her? The question scalded, but I held it in.
“Tttttt—I wouldn’t worry about it,” she said, almost gently despite that rasp of hers. Teasing, “It’s not like with you. She never had a kid.”
The music died and someone shrieked, “Okay everybody—the Fifty-Fifty!” The woman who’d been talking to Hugh, the one in the skimpy dress, grabbed a mic.
“What happened?” I couldn’t help myself. The image of that childish handwriting, the writing on that serviette, floated up; and suddenly, the photo of the girl, the girl with the ditzy smile. Julie.
“Huh?” Reenie rolled her eyes. “You dunno what’s a Fifty- Fifty? Where you been, girl?”
“No, I mean—” A number was hollered and someone ploughed to the front, parting the cheering crowd. Then the band started up again. I had to shout to make her hear: “—to Julie.” The name almost tasted sickly-sweet. “What happened to her?”
Reenie gazed into her glass, upending it and sliding an ice cube into her palm.
“Took off, I guess.”
“Took off?” That teeny-bopperish phrase—luv u 4-ever—came back.
“Fuck knows.” Reenie slowly stood up. She lit another cigarette, then teetered towards the bar. Returning, she slapped down a fresh pack of Players, a drink and a handful of change, then squeezed her hands into her pockets.
“Lose something?”
She grimaced; even in that bad light her ear looked infected.
“Nah … it’s just … I coulda used that Fifty-Fifty money, y’know?” She paused, and there was silence as she pulled out the earring and stuck it in her purse. Sighing, she fiddled with the fake-looking medallion on its flap.
“I’m leavin’ Wayne. Don’t say nothing.”
I looked at her, confused but not exactly shocked. For the first time it seemed like she was being straight. She even looked like she might cry. Her brows crinkled together, that hardness dissolving.
“It’s okay,” I said stupidly.
“No it isn’t.” Chewing her lip, she sounded almost cheerful.
“Things might change.”
“Doubt it.”
“How come?” I said after a pause jarred by shrieking feedback.
“You don’t wanna know.”
She got up, and next she was on the dance floor doing a shaky version of the Twist with one of her girlfriends, the streaky-haired woman whose husband was passed out beside a VLT.
When Reenie slithered over breathlessly knocking back her drink, I reached out and touched her arm.
“Reenie?” I watched her face. “Did you ever meet her brother—Julie’s, I mean?”
“What?” She sounded thoroughly gooned now and fed up. Pressing her lips together, she grinned and waved to someone by the door. Turning to me, her gaze was like a snake’s. “Look,” she slurred. “She came, she took off. No one knows where to, not even Hughie I bet. You asked him?”
My beer tasted almost like vomit.
Reenie fell back, rocking her chair, and whispered; “Tell you the truth? I wish she’d of stayed. Right around the time she took off, Wayne started.”
“Started what?” I was pushing now, and I knew it.
“Fucking up, okay? Nothing, right?”
20
PLANE SAILING
Everyone got too pissed to drive, except Hugh. We went to someone’s house—a cabin on a hill overlooking Thrumcap. It had a porch like the Clampetts’ and rickety wooden stairs. Out there in the blackness, the light, our light, dotted and dashed; that comforting flare vanishing the instant you glimpsed it, then flashing again just as you looked away.
“Look, Hugh,” I nudged him, pointing it out. My voice was woozy and thick, my throat raw from the smoke.
But Hugh wasn’t interested in the view. Someone was passing a mirror with lines of white on it, which people snorted through a straw. When it reached Hugh, he hedged, glancing at me, then, looking embarrassed, muttered, “What the fuck?”
When my turn came, I passed it quickly to Reenie.
We slept on blankets spread over the floor, a bunch of us, like at a kid’s sleepover: bodies everywhere. Except these ones snored—even Reenie, who whistled through her teeth, I noticed, waking sometime after dawn.
I felt almost normal, though it was like coming to in a battlefield, hard to tell the living from the dead. Wayne lay like a mountain next to Hugh. He had a sheet over him, his wiry chest hair showing and some kind of tattoo, a muddied anchor, above one nipple. Hugh looked smooth and lean lying between us, moving slightly in his sleep, a long, tall boy still sporting a bit of his farmer’s tan from the summer. I slid closer and touched the skin below his collarbone.
He was naked. God, maybe everyone was. I had on my T-shirt from the night before; I could smell it without trying. The rest of my clothes lay in a heap near Hugh’s head. I reached for them—little mouse movements so as not to wake him—and squirmed into them. Hugh moaned and rolled over, taking most of the blanket, and I lay there staring at the rafters and listening to everyone. It was a jury of bullfrogs conducting a Q&A, the noise of their breathing—Hugh’s and Wayne’s, and Reenie’s whistling in and out. Someone else started in, someone who looked oddly familiar. The guy who’d won the
Fifty-Fifty.
Rain drummed the roof. I pictured Sonny in Derek’s basement, the two of them curled up asleep in their sleeping bags, the TV screen buzzing blank. Hugh stirred, sliding his arm around me, and I remembered the dog—oh, God, what had we been thinking, leaving him alone all that time? There’d be wall-to-wall poop by the time we got home. My stomach clenched at the thought, and for no good reason, I felt suddenly hungover. A queasy, leaden feeling, the urge to close my eyes forever and crawl under a rock.
***
We didn’t hear about the accident until a few days later. Sonny had a current events project and brought home a clipping from that Sunday’s paper. His topic was harbour cleanup, the argument for building a sewage treatment plant.
“When’s it due?” My question sent him into a mope. “Look, you need to buckle down. I’ll help, if you let me.”
Pouting, he swept the clipping off the table.
Picking it up, I noticed something on the back—a fuzzy shot of some men in headgear, wearing terse expressions. One of the men looked like Charlie. My God, it could’ve been him. Most of the article was clipped away, except for a couple of paragraphs. Something about a Sea King losing an engine during a routine night flight and ditching in the harbour south of Thrumcap. “Within close range of the light,” it said.
A queasiness crawled through me as Sonny scratched away at his loose-leaf, rubbing a hole with his eraser. “Polution sux,” he pencilled, glancing up at me. “What’s the matter with you?” he said, his sneer melting.
“Nothing. Sonny, could that…I mean, does that look like…? He’s…Look.” I laid down the clipping and he drew his finger over the grainy image as if to rub life into it. “Where’s the rest of the story?” I muttered, my eyes feeling jittery.
The next day Sonny brought home the whole section, which Derek’s mother had saved. The article mentioned that the crew had signalled the nearest radio—the VHF on Thrumcap—and got no response shortly before the emergency landing. A second chopper had come to the rescue, one stationed on a destroyer doing sea trials beyond the harbour approaches. A spokesman for the Coast Guard said no distress call had been registered, and there was nothing personnel on Thrumcap could’ve done besides radio for help. The same person was quoted as saying the light was “under review.”
“Whatever that means.” Hugh’s breath was a coolness on my neck as he peered over my shoulder.
***
After the first snow, I tried reaching Charlie at work; it was safer calling him there. Sonny needed clothes, boots; there was no putting it off. I had it all rehearsed—“He’s just as much yours as mine”—steeling myself as someone picked up.
“Jackson around?” the guy’s voice echoed up and down the hangar. I pictured Charlie setting down an engine part and coming to the phone. After a while, the person came back. “Not here right now,” he said, guardedly, perhaps.
“Okay.” I watched through the window for Hugh.
“Any message?”
“Um ...” My mind raced.
“Hello?”
“Can…can you tell him it’s…nothing urgent; it’s…Willa?”
There was a muffled noise—something nudging the receiver?—then mumbling.
“Charlie’s wife, right?” The voice kept the same, even tone: operation damage control. “I’m afraid he’s at sea. Training, you know. NATO. The bake and shake tour?”
“Oh?”
“Two weeks in the Caribbean, then two in the arctic.” It was meant to be funny; I was supposed to laugh. There was a pause—good-natured—as if the guy had all day. “If it’s urgent we can message him, no prob.”
His son needs boots, I wanted to say. Please tell—
There was the shotgun slam of a door; Hugh outside, locking up.
“By Christmas,” I said quickly, “will they be back?”
“Ah,” the fellow groaned, clicked his tongue. “’Fraid not. This is definitely an IMC.”
IMC? Then I remembered: I’m Missing Christmas.
“Like I say,” the guy went on, as footsteps sounded on the stoop, “we can pass on a message. I’m sure if it’s important—”
“Thanks,” I murmured, cupping the receiver. “It’s okay.”
“Who was that?” Hugh wanted to know, sticking his coat on a peg as I hung up. He looked dizzy to me, not himself. “A fly in the bath,” he quipped, reaching for me. I sank to the table.
“You know, Hugh, I’ve been thinking, maybe it’d be the best thing…”
He gazed down glumly. “You’ve lost me, Tess. Say what?”
“If they did shut it down—the light. Cleaned it up.”
He smirked. “Ttttt.” That sound Sonny made when he thought you were full of it. “Occupational hazard. Snarfing those fumes, I’m telling you. Who needs drugs, right?”
“It’s not funny. You could get checked. I mean, they have tests for this kind of thing, right?”
“Right.” He grimaced. “You’re always right.”
“Hughie.” I never called him that. “This isn’t something to just blow off.”
There was a long, itchy pause. His eyes looked jumpy.
“I’m worried, okay?”
“Ah, Tessie. You’re worried,” he mimicked, blinking. He downed a mug of water, refilled it. “You don’t need to be. I’d know if there was somethin’ wrong, wouldn’t I? It’s a bug. I’ll be fine, just fine. So long as you’re here, right Tess? Lookin’ after me.”
***
That night I dreamt about Charlie; not a shadow or a name, but him. He was on a ship in a roiling turquoise sea, surrounded by other ships and aircraft. There were teams, a blue one versus a green one. Charlie was working feverishly to re-attach something to a helo hovering above the pitching deck like a broken hummingbird. The entire tail section sat on a stack of mattresses like the ones in The Princess and the Pea. The tailless chopper sagged and hiccupped. The crew was cheering; the females covered their mouths in awe. “Come to me, baby!” Charlie kept yelling, coaxing the pilot lower. “Don’t crap out on me now!” Exhaust swirled in his face. The downdraft flattened him as he crawled underneath with his monkey wrench and, deft as a surgeon, re-attached the tail. “Up, up, and away!” another voice bellowed triumphantly, a boy watching somewhere off-camera, from the clouds perhaps.
Or the sea; it must’ve been from the sea. As the helo ascended—everyone cheering and holding onto their Tilley hats and grinning through their Ray-Bans—a yelp erupted from the stern: “Man overboard!”
The chopper buzzed so low it blew off those hats and gouged a crater in the water. Everyone went silent, freezing as the bear trap descended, swinging; skimming turquoise, and hooking its prize. Sonny, I thought, my heart in my throat; I was one of the legion craning over the rails.
But as the boy was swung to safety and deposited on deck, I saw that it wasn’t Sonny at all, but Oscar, the dummy used for practice.
Everything had been a prank.
“Sonny?” I screamed, but no one, not even Charlie, could hear. Already the chopper was a dot in the sky, the crew around me busy firing pink torpedoes and smoke guns at the “enemy.”
***
I was putting Hugh’s laundry away, that’s how I happened to see inside his drawer. Under some sun-dried Jockeys lay a wad of cash and an envelope. They were banded together in a little pile with some pay stubs and receipts for supplies, mostly gasoline.
“What’re you doing, Tess?” He startled me, leaning in the doorway. Rain dripped from his face and hair.
“Nothing.” It was utterly true. He’d never minded me putting his stuff away. Doing little things was how I kept busy, slipping into routines; the domestic division of labour.
“When d’you expect Sonny?” he asked, oddly. Sonny was at school; he’d be home the usual time.
“Same as always.” But my mind had caught on the notion of l
abour, the other kind. The hours it had taken, in my fuzzy, earlier life, to birth my boy. Clenched teeth, ripping pain; a lie, saying you forgot it. Charlie would have no recollection, having been on a tour, in training. Wherever the choppers went, piggybacked on ships, the technicians went. Pilots, navigators, AESOPS—no wonder I regarded his job as a fable—and always the techies, Mr. Fix-its attached to the aircraft. Like sitters assigned to dotty seniors, or lion tamers keeping the beasts from crashing into the audience.
“What’s wrong, Tess?” Hugh came closer, close enough to trace my breast with his finger. Oreo made off with a sock.
Wasting no time, we undressed and Hugh made love to me quickly, relentlessly. For a moment or two it was a bit like being pinned, nailed, to the bed.
“There’s a problem,” he said afterwards. “Not with you. The lighthouse.” The Coast Guard had been in touch again; now the government was nosing in. “Bunch of fucking enviros. Now they say they’re worried. It’s a crock, Willa. Just a goddamn excuse, nothing else.” His eyes slid to my belly, his voice distant.
Covering my stretch marks, I pushed away the thought of moving, instead remembering how I’d felt after Sonny’s birth, how it had opened and sectioned me like an orange. Twisting Hugh’s hair around my finger, I listened for Sonny now, for Oreo’s whine signalling his return.
“Tessie? You with me?” He snapped his fingers, poked my ribs.
“Mercury,” he murmured dismissively. “Some dickhead says it’s in the paint. What a load, eh? Just to get me out.”
“But … Hugh? You said, about moving, ‘Things come up.’”
“Horseshit, I never said any such thing. I’m not leaving, Willa. Why the fuck would I, ’cause of what some dweeb in a suit says? It’s all economics. Think they’d replace me? Not a fucking chance. Think of the people out there, all those guys at sea. How would it look, now, if I just fuckin’ bailed?”
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