by Claire Tacon
With Charla gone, the boys warmed up to me, kept bringing me over to the bar and buying me beer, teasing me about falling so much on the hill. One of them, I forget which one, asked me to dance when Fly Like an Eagle came on. It wasn’t really a fast song, it wasn’t really a slow song and we spun in a slow circle and gyrated a bit. By the end, he had his hands on my hips and was grinding me into his crotch, slurring along to Steve Miller. Bernie stayed perched on the barstool, plowing his way through pints of Moosehead. It was only quarter to eleven but I was already feeling pretty flushed. After the song ended I squirmed away and went to sit with him.
“Having a good time?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I was. I was having a great time.
I leaned my head on his shoulder and he pulled my hair back from my face. “Just tell me when you want to get going.”
We sat like that for a while, the rest of the bar sliding in and out of my vision, like the slow turns of a giant kaleidoscope.
Then Chuck came over and pretended to do a double take. “You sure look different without your snowsuit, Ellie.”
Bernie asked him where Charla was.
We could see her across the room, sitting on some Acadia jock’s lap.
“You want to dance?” Chuck asked.
Bernie set down his pint glass. “We’re heading out.”
It wasn’t until I stood up that the full force of my inebriation hit. I stumbled over to the washroom and pushed open the door, then puked into the first cubicle. I missed the bowl a bit, so I had to go to the next one to pee. I rinsed my mouth over the sink and dried my face, rubbing with the coarse paper towel until it turned beetroot.
Looking at myself in the fluorescent lighting, my skin’s olive tinge bleached out, I saw that I’d grown curvier around the hips. My jeans were tighter than I’d imagined and my tank top rose above them, showing off a flat, light brown stomach. I could see that yes, one day, some guy would want me.
As I looked at my shirt, I realized that the cotton was thinner than I remembered. You could make out the fleshy maroon of my areolas, two quarter-sized mounds.
Three girls, university students, burst in. As they walked into the stalls, carefully avoiding the one I’d soiled, they looked over at me and giggled. The taller one muttered something under her breath. She didn’t have to repeat it; I knew from the contempt on her face what she was thinking. Townie.
Bernie calls at six in the morning, before any of us are awake, and offers to fix the car. The McInnes autoshop is in Canning, a few minutes’ drive from the house. I’m not sure I want to take him up on the offer, but when I haul myself out to look at the car, it’s worse than I thought—the bumper’s on a distinct diagonal, the left corner crumpled.
My mother catches me inspecting the damage. Still in her nightgown, she squints at the vehicle, her breasts propped up by crossed arms. She exhales through the gap in her front teeth and the whistle sends me straight back to seventeen, embarrassed and waiting to be grounded.
“I got rear-ended.”
She arches her left eyebrow, expecting me to flesh out the details. “Did you get the license plate?”
“It was dark.” Everything about last night feels preposterous now.
“You let them get away?”
Facing the heat of my mother’s disapproval, the truth peels away, easy as paint. “It was just at the stop sign on the corner. They sped off in a truck.”
“A blue truck?”
She stares at me, dumbfounded, as if she can’t believe she raised a daughter with such a lack of street smarts. “You should have called George.” George is the RCMP officer who lives a few houses away. “What if the kids had been in the car?”
“I’ll bring it down to the garage after breakfast. Give me a chance to ask Jason about the team.”
“Were they young?” my mother persists. “There’s the Penley teens two roads over. They’ve got a truck. Licence BYJ 649, like the lotto. Comes over the scanner all the time. Drag racing.” She launches a series of tut-tutts. “I think we should still call George and file a report.”
“We don’t need to get him involved.” I climb into the driver’s seat, desperate to diffuse this. The sooner I drive over to Canning, the less time I have to dig myself in deeper.
“It’s a hit and run.”
“It’s a fender bender.”
I drown my mother’s protests with the car engine.
Jason strolls out to meet the car, wiping his hands on blue twill pants. His girth has doubled since I’ve last seen him—his gut a lip of stretched cotton over his belt. He looks me up and down when I get out of the car and crushes me into a hug, as if he can’t quite believe I’ve reappeared. “Eileen Lucan. Been a dog’s age.” Jason’s still got the kind of face that gets you acquitted of murder when you’re guilty as sin—big eyes, double dimples and a fist-sized cowlick.
Bernie wanders over, the straight man to his brother’s imp.
“You been in town a week?” Jason asks.
“Just over.”
“Already in a scrap.” He chuckles, looking back and forth between his brother and me. “Just got word that you were hit by a drunk driver last night.”
Bernie’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
“Your mom put the call in. Any minute now, George’ll be knocking on the Penleys’ door.”
“Does everyone out here have a police scanner?”
“In my business, it’s market research.” He laughs again, the dimples in his cheeks deep as pencil gouges. “Won’t do the little shits any harm, having a chat with the law.”
Bernie shifts from foot to foot, waiting for a chance to jump into the banter. Jason notices his brother’s twitchiness.“Thought you were heading over to the farm.”
Bernie nods and takes a few steps towards the truck. He pauses and fiddles with his keychain, dangling it on the knuckle of his index finger. “Feel like checking out the old place with me, Ellie?”
I shrug, not really wanting to draw out the process, but not wanting to seem ungrateful.
“Jason,” Bernie lays on his older brother voice. “You don’t mind banging that old tin into place, do you?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Jason cups his hands like a catcher’s mitt and I toss him the keys.
Bernie’s truck is raised up on oversized tires and it takes a moment for me to judge where to grab on and hoist myself in. It’s like riding a bus, the seats high as the other cars’ hoods. If he hadn’t braked when he did, the car would have been a write-off.
“Your brother got children now too?” I can’t quite picture Bernie’s kid brother hitched and breeding.
“He’s got a daughter, but he and the mom split. Shacked up with someone else in Berwick. Jason sees her every couple of weekends.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“My niece is cute and all but the mom’s crazy. Remember Shelley V.? It’s her cousin.”
Shelley was hard to forget. When she caught her junior high sweetheart cheating, she threatened to castrate him with an exacto knife. By grade twelve she had the name of a classmate’s uncle tattooed on her left hip.
“I heard you married some professor out in Toronto.”
“Who’d you hear it from?”
“News travels. I used to see your mom at the co-op sometimes.”
This is the moment when I should apologize for not keeping in touch. Instead I roll my window down and hang my arm out. “How are your folks?”
Bernie grins, as if no time has passed and he’s surprised at the banality of my question.
The farm’s visible from the bridge over the 101, but it’s a long drive through the field access road to reach the buildings. A trail of dust follows the truck and obscures the objects in the side mirror. They’re growing corn to the left and alfalfa to the right. Bernie barely keeps his hands on the wheel as he gestures to the bordering acreage they’ve purchased. The whole op’s expanded—there’s a second barn and an addition to the original, along with a covered manu
re shed. The only item untouched is the old shack where his grandfather used to live. We used to play in it as kids, but the place terrified me. It was full of weird bits of scrap metal and old-time vanilla extract bottles, remnants of his tinkering and alcoholism. It’s just as depressing in its decay—the tarpaper roof peeling and the whitewash grey as old Y fronts.
“Keep meaning to tear that down,” Bernie says.
I look away, not wanting to embarrass him. “Remember when you invited me over to help out with the chickens?”
“Sure.”
It was back in grade nine or ten, when Bernie took me to help with the thanksgiving slaughter. The farm hadn’t been such a big operation then, and most of the birds still met their maker with the twist of a neck, instead of the electric wands they use now.
“You know I’m studying poultry farms?”
“Oh yeah?”
“Just the manure.” I try to describe it as non-technically as possible. “I’m researching the different levels of nitrogen absorption between slurry and litter and its application with no-till farming.”
Bernie shakes his head. “You need a degree to spread shit on a field?”
In the chicken coop, Bernie plows straight through the crowd of birds to reach the feeding troughs. He’s wearing his big Wellingtons but I’m in suede sneakers and the chickens are attracted to the plum colour. As soon as I lift one foot off the ground, the birds swarm under, jumping and clucking over the laces.
Bernie catches me like that, with one foot up and just starts howling. I manage to find a foothold and try to hover my feet an inch off the floor in a kind of slide-walk. Straw and excrement collects all along the front of my sneakers. I end up kicking a chicken’s rear. Bernie doubles over laughing as I stand there flustered.
“Just don’t move,” he says and lumbers over. He hoists me on his back in a fireman’s hold and carries me across the room, planting me down next to the sliding doors. “Thought you had experience on chicken farms.”
He walks the perimeter of the barn, making sure the automated feeder is working. There must be thousands of chickens in here and you can’t see floor space because they take up the whole area. It looks like a roiling mass of popcorn, white bundles popping up around the room. I discreetly wipe the shit off my shoes using the door frame as a scraper.
Looking at Bernie across the barn, he doesn’t look so different from himself at seventeen or eighteen. His hair’s grown out a bit and the ends curl off in loose corkscrews but he’s got the same ropey beanpole physique. Mostly he seems more relaxed, like he’s given himself permission to take up space. He notices me looking at him and waves. “Almost done.” He’s found a dead bird by the wall.
Bernie loops back around, the dead chicken rigid in his hand, and unlatches the door to the original barn, where we find the turkeys. Only half of the pens are full, the rest of the birds are grazing in the attached corral. “You study turkey shit too or just chickens?”
“Just chickens.”
“And here I thought you were a big city girl now.”
When we step into the light again, an old Dodge K-car has come down the drive. The dust hangs in the air like a jet stream.
“Dad’s here,” Bernie says. “Come on and say hi.”
I check my watch. Quarter to twelve—the boys should be making lunch by now.
The sun is behind him as Bernie’s dad walks towards us. I can’t make out his features, just the general slope of his silhouette. Bernie’s jumping next to me, flagging his Dad down, and I’m beginning to feel like some prize fish that he’s caught and can’t wait to show off.
When his dad reaches us, Bernie shifts from side to side. “Look who we’ve got here.”
His father hasn’t aged much either. He’s always been a smaller man, with ash-brown hair and quick, ferrety eyes. The lines in his face have deepened, stained a dark nicotine. The skin around his mouth is puckered from smoking. He doesn’t say anything at first, so I hold out my hand, recoiling from the unexpected high pitch of my voice. I sound like I’m fifteen.
“I heard from Jason you were in town,” he says, kicking at the ground and studying his fingers. “You been in to see the chickens?”
“How have you been, Mr. McInnes?”
“You can just call me Clarence now, I guess.” He pulls out a pack of smokes from his back pocket and hands one over to Bernie. “Don’t suppose you want one?”
I shake my head.
Clarence McInnes has always been a man of few words. When I’d visit after school he’d usually be out on the roads or working in the barn. The few times he was home, he’d sit quiet in the living room with a TV tray in front of him as his wife, Irene, served him coffee. Wheel of Fortune was always on the television. Irene encouraged him to watch it—she’d comment on the contestants, point out Vanna White’s dresses and guess wildly at the puzzles. He just sat there, kind of beat looking, like it didn’t matter to him if the TV were on at all.
“Been a problem up at the Brooks’,” he says between puffs. “One of the inspectors has been around looking at the drugs.” He spits on the ground as he says this. “Told them you’d go by later.” Clarence takes a final drag from his cigarette, puts out the butt against his boot heel and flicks it away. He claps his hands against his thighs and asks Bernie if he’s finally ready to get to work.
“Already been through,” Bernie says. He gestures to the clump of feathers by the barn door. “I’ll incinerate it later.”
“Thought you were going to give me a hand today.”
“I’m in the shop today.”
“Fixing cars with dented bumpers?” If I’m the prize catch, Clarence’s ready to toss me back into the lake.
“We should probably head back. I’m supposed to find my son a soccer league today.”
“You signing him up for peewee?” Bernie asks.
“No, the other one. He’s in the under-fourteen.”
“Max is in that.”
His dad coughs to interrupt. “Linda’s been ringing our place for you, Bernie. Wants you to call her at the store.” He reaches into his overalls pocket and pulls out a cellphone.
Clarence faces me as Bernie dials. “You met Linda yet?”
“Last night. She seems like a very nice woman.”
“You got that right.” He doesn’t make further effort at conversation until Bernie flips the phone off. “Come over later and give me a hand anyway.”
“Nice to see you, Clarence.”
He tips his cap by way of goodbye and rambles off to the barn.
Bernie and I get in the truck without saying anything. He checks the rear-view mirror, as though he’s afraid someone’s in the pickup listening in. “You know how rumours are around here. He thinks you’ve become some kind of inspector. We’ve been getting a lot of grief from inspectors.”
“I’m a soil scientist.”
“That sounds an awful lot like inspector to someone like Dad.”
The manic spark’s gone out of Bernie. We drive back through New Minas so he can stop into the Superstore to visit Linda. New Minas has always been a squat town—commercial gristle between Wolfville and Kentville’s heritage homes—and the arrival of big box stores has only entrenched this. It’s a bleak view of the store’s loading dock as I wait for Bernie’s return, the dumpster piled high with plastic wrap and expired produce.
My mother always thought Bernie was sweet on me but I think she just wanted me to get sweet on him. He spent enough time at our place that she’d come to see him as the son she’d never had. Mom had always wanted a whole passel of kids, but Dad got testicular cancer shortly after they’d had me and that was that. Financially, it was probably easier that way—just one kid to support through the relapse and after he died. Siblings would have been company for her, though. One of us would have stuck around and raised a family within driving distance.
It wasn’t Bernie I was interested in. After that March break ski trip, I was allowed into new circles that included Chuck
and his friends. Chuck had this great shag cut and dirty blond hair and was muscled from working on the farm. Bernie was Bernie, lanky and curly-haired, sweet and awkward.
We all went to a kegger in the bush one night in late June, up at Three Pools. Bernie’d gone home early to look after some business with his folks. He didn’t want to leave me there, but I’d brought my sleeping bag and figured I’d camp out. The weed and Miller Lite made me brave and when some people decided to go skinny-dipping, I figured, what the hell. I peeled out of my clothes and slipped in near the side, where I didn’t think so many people would see. Chuck swam over next to me and pushed my head under the water. I swatted him off but he grabbed my hand and held it in his. He slid his thumb up and down my palm and asked if I wanted to go to the top pool.
We were the only ones up there and he didn’t waste any time. I hadn’t really kissed anyone before and it took some time to get used to, especially since I was trying to tread water at the same time. The second time I kicked his shin, he manoeuvred me over to a rock and leaned me back against it. I was glad to be drunk, hoping it meant he wouldn’t notice how awkward it was.
After a while, Chuck reached below the water and started pushing his fingers up and inside me. He kept bobbing his cock against my thigh as he did it. In the dark, in the water, it felt like Jacques Cousteau gone wrong—his fingers like lobster pincers inside me, the eel on my leg. None of it really turned me on, but I thought this was what sex must be like. I didn’t say no. I wasn’t saving it for anything.
