Cool Water (38 page)

Cowboy

Sometime after midnight Lila hears Kyle's truck on the street in front of the house. It's unmistakable. The truck stops, and a door slams, and Kyle's boots sound on the step. The doorbell.

Lila quickly goes to the door before the bell wakes Rachelle. When she opens it, Kyle teeters on the top step. She can see that he's left the lights on in his truck.

Kyle looks terrible, worse than she does, Lila thinks. She'd like to believe that when Rachelle told him she wasn't going to marry him—she assumes Rachelle was the one who broke it off—Kyle drank himself into this state out of hurt and heartache, but then she remembers the night before, Kyle passed out in the backyard, and a few other times that she was pretty sure he'd been drinking, even though she'd argued with Norval that Kyle was a responsible boy who wouldn't dream of getting behind the wheel of a car with alcohol in his veins. Maybe Norval was right, the wedding had been a mistake from the beginning. She is suddenly so very sick of the soap opera of her daughter's love life.

“You can't drive home in that state,” Lila says. “You just can't.”

Kyle asks if he can see Rachelle, and Lila thinks he is saying something about sorry but she can't make it out, his words are so slurred.

“How could you allow yourself to drive?” Lila says. “You could have killed someone. No one would forgive you for that, Kyle. No one. It would haunt you for the rest of your life.”

He stares at her, as though he just can't process what she's said.

“Get in here,” Lila says.

Kyle steps inside and the smell of alcohol fills the foyer. Kyle struggles to get his boots off without falling, and when he finally does, he starts for the stairs to where the bedrooms are.

“No,” Lila says. “Not that way.”

Kyle stops and looks at her. She points down, to where there's a basement recreation room with a pool table, a pullout couch and a bathroom. “You can talk to Rachelle in the morning. She's going to need you then, Kyle, if that means anything to you at all.”

Kyle obediently turns and stumbles past Lila and goes down the carpeted stairs to the basement. She thinks about leaving his truck lights on all night to teach him a lesson, but then she thinks again about morning and how she and Rachelle will need all the strength they have to get through the day, and Kyle's truck with a dead battery will be just one more impossible detail. She goes outside and switches off the lights, and on her way back up the walk she notices again Norval's lawn. It's a dense, green, beautiful lawn, even if it is overgrown. She's been lobbying for some kind for xeriscaping, which she read about in a garden magazine. This would entail getting rid of the grass entirely and installing in its stead materials that require no watering. And, of course, no mowing. She wonders why this had seemed like a good idea when Norval had so loved his lawn, and the act of mowing. She doesn't understand herself.

She steps back into the house and locks the door, then decides she'd better go downstairs and check on Kyle. She finds him passed out on the pool table, curled into a fetal position like a little boy, although he is far from little. These children, Lila thinks. These foolish, ignorant children. How in the world will she deal with them without Norval? She flicks off the light and climbs heavily up the stairs to the living room, where she sits once again in the armchair and takes up her box of Kleenex, knowing that she must be brave, she must tell Rachelle, she cannot put it off much longer. She turns on the television, which is on Norval's favourite channel, and watches the weather forecasts for the Atlantic provinces and the Far North and Mexico and Russia and the south of France.

For the first time she understands the appeal of the Weather Channel, the lulling monotony of weather. She will let it soothe her for a time, she decides, a short time, and then she will wake Rachelle and lead her—or drag her, if need be—through the door to adulthood.

Your father loved you very much
is how she will begin.

Wreckage

When Vicki hears the plane this time, she is positive she's awake. She hears a hiccup, and another one, and then silence, a long awful silence, and the sound of a crash. Close by. It had to be, or she wouldn't have heard it.

She shakes Blaine, switches on the bedside lamp, shakes him again.

“Blaine,” she says, “I just heard a plane go down. I'm not sure where, but close.”

Blaine stares at her, uncomprehending. His eyelids flutter, then close.

“I'm sure, Blaine,” she says, shaking him awake. “We have to look.”

“Not the damned beans again,” Blaine says, rolling away from her.

“Not beans,” Vicki says, poking him with her foot. “An airplane.”

“You look for it. And turn that light out.”

Vicki slides her bare feet into the easiest things, her worn old plastic flip-flops. She switches off the light and leaves the bedroom, slips through the kitchen and out the door, from one darkness to another, and stands in the yard looking, trying to decide which way to go. She can't believe that this has really happened after all the years of dreaming, that she is really heading out to look for a downed plane and its pilot, passengers if there are any. She has no idea where to turn. The sound had been overhead. Right
inside
her head, in fact, directionless. She scans the horizon, looking for lights or fire. Nothing. She listens. Nothing but silence. She takes a step toward the pasture fence, thinking she will try that way.

But before she is across the yard it all fades—the sound overhead, the crash, the dread. She can feel it fading, becoming less and less real, and in no time at all it's turned into the same pleasant sensation she felt in her old dream about paddling across the lake in a canoe. No droning sound of a falling plane, just the splash of her paddles. She stops. She's aware now of dew in the grass; she can feel it through the plastic straps of her flip-flops. She listens to the sound of a cricket, leaves rustling in the stiff breeze that's come up, an owl somewhere to the east. Not the sounds of mayhem. Perhaps she just doesn't want to go looking, she thinks. She doesn't want to find burning debris, or worse, human remains. But in no time even these thoughts are gone and she's left standing in the yard, feeling foolish.

She returns to the house in a sleepy stupor, shakes the sandals from her feet and crawls back into bed. She rolls up against Blaine's warm back, but he mumbles “too hot” and gently pushes her away. She knows, because Blaine told her, that he poured kerosene on the beans and burned them, and the thought of all those beans reduced to ash makes her want to whisper in his ear:
Thank you, sweetheart.
Which she does before she obediently rolls back to her own side of the bed.

Beneath Vicki and Blaine, in his second night in his own room, Shiloh lies awake, his light shining on the rodeo poster of the bull rider with the purple-and-gold chaps. He imagines the bull rider flying off the bull and landing hard on a hip or a shoulder, can just feel him flying through the air, feel the pain as he hits the dirt. Or maybe he gets hung up in the well as the bull spins, struggling to get his hand free from the bull rope, his life depending on his ability to stay on his feet, his arm practically pulled from its socket, until he's free from the rope, the suicide wrap, then an adrenalin-fuelled dash to the chutes to grab a rail and hoist himself up and out of the bull's way. Dropping down onto his feet again once the bull is heading for the gate, a tip of his hat, now feeling the hurt, on his knees in front of all those people, the breath sucked right out of him, until he's helped to his feet by another pair of cowboys.
Let's make this young cowboy feel a little better
about bein' bucked off,
the announcer says,
show him that
you appreciate his effort.
And the fans applaud.

He, Shiloh Dolson, got bucked off a horse today. His hip hurts where he landed and he's already got a huge black bruise that he won't be showing to his mother, not to anyone. He's proud of that bruise, though. He hopes it lasts for a few days at least, a secret that he alone knows about. He rolls over onto his sore hip just so he can feel the bruise. It's the first time in his life he's been bucked off a horse. He's fallen off a couple of times, soft landings in the dirt, but Blaine never put a kid on a horse that he didn't trust. He wouldn't let the kids, not even Shiloh, ride Buck.

Shiloh's hip hurts too much and he has to roll over again and take his weight off the bruise. He wonders if any other parts of his body will hurt tomorrow. He imagines himself walking up the alley behind Brittney Vass's house wearing chaps—maybe not purple, though—bruised and limping and dragging a bull rope, the cowbell clanging as he walks. Brittney watching him over her backyard fence. But he won't look her way, not even a glance, won't let on that he knows she's there. It's pleasing, this vision of himself. He closes his eyes.

He's almost asleep but the light is bothering him. He can see it through his eyelids. He reaches over to switch it off and sees the bull rider's face.

The face is his, and he's not dreaming.

Ghost

There's just enough light from the moon that Willard thinks he sees Marian put her finger to her lips, and then she crosses the linoleum floor and when she's halfway between the door and his bed he can see that, yes, she does have her finger to her lips and she's whispering,
shhhh,
as though there's someone else besides Willard who might hear.

When Marian lifts Willard's covers, lifts her nightgown,
removes
her nightgown, he couldn't be more astonished. It takes a minute and the warmth of Marian's body for him to realize that she hasn't come to talk, that words aren't, in fact, needed. Marian kneels over him, and Willard isn't sure what to do. He should say something—
Christ, woman, stop
whatever it is that you're doing
—but he doesn't want her to stop, feels all his pent-up love for her rushing to that one mysterious organ. His hands rise and he places them on her white thighs.
Shhhh,
she says again, now lowering herself to meet his naked body—there's that word,
body
, he wonders if he said it out loud, but
shhhh
is the only sound he hears— and he's ready for her—another surprise—and he closes his eyes and surrenders until a shudder passes through him and he moans, he can't help it. He's embarrassed at the guttural sound. The warmth he feels makes him want to talk, makes him want to say things, but there are no words in his head. Only fragments, nine years' worth of words and phrases and truncations. He
has
to say something, for her sake, but what? All they've ever spoken about is business (the drive-in) and household appliances (the dishwasher with its tendency to leak) and who's going to pick up the mail (usually Willard).
Her name,
he thinks,
I could say her name,
and he's about to utter it, or try to, when Marian moves her finger from her lips to his, touches him gently, then lifts herself off him, out of the bed. She picks up her nightgown from where it has fallen and she turns, and her bare feet carry her across the floor, away from him, and she disappears.

Silence. The vapoury stillness of night almost unbearable. Willard wants the dog to bark, a truck to pass, a crack of thunder, anything to bring him back to what is familiar. But why? The last few minutes were perhaps the most pleasurable he's experienced since childhood. He closes his eyes and tries to hang on to the feeling but it fades and then a truck does pass and the dog barks, and he's no longer sure if Marian really came to him or if he spilled his own warmth in a dark dream.

He can't sleep. In fact, he doesn't want to sleep. He lies awake, listening to the dog bark but not registering that
his
dog is barking,
and wonders what is ahead. He tingles with expectation, although he has no idea where this night is going to take him. Perhaps nowhere. He knows that in the darkness the edges of things are blurred—the past and the present, dreams and memory and time. He doesn't try to understand Marian's ghostly visit. One word rolls around in his head, over and over, the word
lovers.

Even as the dog barks and a teenage boy lights the wick of a crude Molotov cocktail, his friends hanging back, not as brave, and throws it as hard as he can toward the dark shadow of the movie screen.

Even as the fire catches in the dry grass, flames licking at the looming wooden structure, the dog barking furiously now, and Marian returns to Willard's doorway and says, “Willard, the dog. I think the kids are out there again.”

The two of them, Willard pulling on a pair of pants and Marian in her nightgown, out the door to be greeted by the sight of fire, a real fire this time. Marian gasps, is ready to run with a bucket of water, but Willard holds her back and says, “Too late. Let it go.” Then, “Don't go, Marian. Don't leave me. I love you.”

Surprising the absolute hell out of himself.

And then he quickly goes back inside to the phone and calls the volunteer fire department to keep the fire from spreading through the grass, it's too late for the movie screen.

And Marian stands in the open doorway as though she's on fire with the flames behind her, watching him, and she says, “I'm not going anywhere, Willard. Where in the world did you get that idea?”

Sand

When Lee was a boy he dreamed of living in the desert, a student of sand, the protege of a Bedouin camel driver, learning from a master how to find his way through endless miles of dunes with no landmarks because the landscape keeps shifting and reinventing itself. Lee would lie in his bed with a flashlight late into the night and look at the soft, hand-coloured photographs in Lester's old books—pictures of smiling nomad wives in front of their tents wearing heavy and elaborate jewellery. The caption under one such photograph informed Lee,
A Bedouin woman wears a large part of
her husband's capital, and as his wealth increases, so will the
number of silver chains supporting coins or charms.
He had no idea what that meant. He didn't know what capital was, unless the word was used as an adjective, as in capital city. He knew all the capital cities of North America.