How Loveta Got Her Baby (2 page)

At Signal Hill, they'd gone a long way now, all the way up by North Head and they'd turned the corner from town so all you could see was the bare rock, the ocean hundreds of feet below, and the sky. The wind was cooler again. He put his arm around her shoulder.

“I like the moose and the snowflakes knitted on your sweater,” he said.

“They're reindeer,” she said.

His arm was still there but he hadn't pulled her in tight. She leaned towards him.

“Look,” she said, “the snow falls on the reindeer, it falls heavy on their backs, but it doesn't pile up.”

“The heat of their bodies, I bet, melts it,” he said.

A jogger came by out of nowhere with a Walkman on and ran past them. Philip John took his arm off her. Now they could see the waves off Cape Spear and the waves off Fort Amherst.

“Let's go off the path a bit,” he said.

“Let's,” she said.

Loveta's mother finished with the laundry. What about those jeans, she thought, what about those jeans? Maybe that wasn't such a good idea, after all. Say Loveta got a soaker right through, from the wave at Middle Cove. Say she got a chill with those blue jeans soaked right through and then she gets back in the car with the welder boy. Those jeans'll never dry like that, he might say, never ever. Take those jeans off, Loveta. You'll catch your death of cold. He looked like he could say that with a twinkle in his eye. He was that type. Loveta's mother knew right off the first time she saw him, when he got out of that Camaro and walked up to the door. She saw Loveta lift her hips up in the front seat and she saw her wiggle out of the jeans. She peeled them right off, down past her ankles. Put them up there on the heater vents, the boy said, and he started up the car, and all the steam rose out of the jeans and misted up like a fog and covered up the windows on the inside. You couldn't see in and you couldn't see out.

The footing there on the brow of North Head was good. It was scrabbly stone with grit in it, you couldn't slip if you tried.

“Sandstone,” said Philip John.

“Shale and granite and soapstone,” said Loveta.

“Let's sit down there,” he said.

He pointed to where there was a boulder and some grass and some sun and the waves from the open sea clamoured in through a crevice in the rock, below.

Inside the Camaro, Loveta's mother saw the mist on the windows. Those little panties you got on, they're wet too, he said. Loveta lifted up her hips again, and my God she wasn't even shy when she hooked off the panties and then she was bare naked from the waist down. Hang them on the mirror he said, up there. They'll dry in no time, they're so tiny, so flimsy. Like nothing at all. Now a simple skirt could have dried off by itself, or Loveta could have held it up out of the water when the wave came.

Loveta's mother blamed herself now, she blamed herself for what she saw. The boy said, put your right knee out that way, to the door, you'll feel the blow from the heater better with your leg like that. Then Loveta's mother said Jeez to herself and lit up a smoke. She didn't want to watch anymore.

Loveta Grandy and Philip John Savoury climbed down the slope to the big boulder. It was as big as the Camaro, and there was sunshine on the lee side, out of the wind. They sat down on the grass and leaned up against the rock, shoulder to shoulder.

“I've never been out this far before,” she said.

There was nothing on the ocean but birds and more birds and behind them there was nothing but the rock. They looked at each other.

Maybe she didn't want to watch anymore but Loveta's mother couldn't help herself. Loveta was her baby, the last daughter she had. Loveta's mother heard a little click as the welder boy reached under the front seat and released the lever there. Then he pushed back with his feet and the driver's seat slid back so there was more room for him to turn and move around. He reached over and put his hand on Loveta, high up on her leg, up high on the inside of her thigh where the skin is thin and real sensitive. He laid it there casually and Loveta didn't twitch, she didn't move away. In fact she did the opposite. Rain spattered now on the outside of the window. The shadows of the Middle Cove picnic people ran by their car. There's no one can see us now, said the boy. Then he limbered up and shifted out of his seat and tried to get over top of Loveta. Thank God he still had his clothes on. Damn these seats, the boy said, damn these bucket seats. He gave up and sat back down on his own side and he said, Loveta, try this, get up on top. She was so small, it was no problem for her. Especially with the clothes she'd taken off. She was up and over top of the gearshift like she was a pine marten. Then she settled herself down on his lap, the steering wheel in tight behind her. Brazen, Loveta. Now he had his hands on her back.

Loveta's mother went to the front door and looked out. Maybe the Camaro would show up, all of this would stop.

Philip John Savoury felt the grit from the sandstone bite into his shoulders when he turned to look at Loveta Rose Grandy. He loved the way her curls fell. He turned his face a bit towards her and she did the same. They kissed. The first touch of their lips was cold from the wind and they didn't move, they just kept their lips like that and then they backed off.

“We're all alone with the sky,” he said.

“There's ground,” she said.

They kissed again. Their lips hadn't moved far apart, so it was easy.

“Actually there's rocks too,” he said.

“It's wet, winter's coming on,” she said.

They stood up. He brushed the dirt off the back of her jeans.

“You're damp there,” he said.

She looked at her watch.

“It's time to walk back.”

“Okay.”

She took his arm for the climb back up to the path.

The worst fears are the ones you don't know, thought Loveta's mother. She saw the welder boy pull open his jeans under Loveta. He had the button kind. Loveta ground herself down on him hard, like she was careless. You couldn't hear the waves anymore from the Cove, there was a hum in the car. All of a sudden the welder boy said get off, Loveta, get off get off! And she tried to pull herself back up and away but the steering wheel jammed in there fast on her back. She felt what happened, what he did. It was too late for her. What a mess it made when she did get off, when she lifted herself up and the welder boy held his head in his hands. There you go, Loveta, he said, look what you done, look what you done, oh damn these bucket seats.

“I enjoyed the walk,” said Loveta, when they got back down to the Battery and they stood beside the Camaro. He opened the door for her. It was warm inside. They drove back onto Duckworth Street and up Military Road and soon they were stopped outside Loveta's house.

The livingroom curtains moved.

“There's your mother,” he said.

“That's her, she worries way too much,” said Loveta.

“Say hello to her.”

She got out. She blew him a little kiss from the window, so her mother couldn't see.

“Where to next week, Philip John?” she asked.

She leaned back into the car.

“Pouch Cove, the Cape?” he said.

“I don't want to go that far,” she said.

“Middle Cove then, we can watch the waves.”

“Good, I'd like that. Dress warm. Bye.”

She pulled herself back from the car window and the Camaro drove off.

Look at her, said Loveta's mother, look at her, like there's nothing wrong at all.

squid

THOMAS KEEPING
, 12, of Belleoram, knew he was being foolish when, at school, he publicly proclaimed the founding of the “Giant Squid Club,” of which he would be Founding President and Chief Scientific Officer, and he felt doubly foolish when the only other student to sign up was Cyril Savoury, then in his second year in grade two, unable to concentrate at all and with a lazy eye that wandered into orbits never seen before by any of the ophthalmologists in St. John's, a boy who could nevertheless sign his own name over and over and over again in a cursive script of mediaeval precision; Thomas Keeping declared that Cyril Savoury was Goodwill Ambassador for the Giant Squid Club, and every Friday and Saturday night throughout the spring the two lone members would pitch their canvas tent down by the barasway, under the shadow of the rockface Iron Skull, and build a small fire, and wait for the blowing of the whales and the slap of their bodies as they rose, exhausted, nearly drowned, and Cyril and Thomas could see, even at midnight, the scars left by tentacles suction-cupped into blackened flesh, and they could see deep cuts from the beak of the giant squid oozing whale blood into the slithered brine, but that was as close as the Founding President and the Goodwill Ambassador ever came to the giant squid, this circumstantial evidence of submarine battles, of tentacled arms clamped over the jaws of the leviathan, force pulling them both down into depths where the pressure said: let go.

mistaken        
point

HENRY FIANDER HAD
nothing to do with the initial conception of the plan. Sure, he was there in town by birth, and he was there by personal association, but it was still only by the purest chance that he was the one who got lucky. If it hadn't been for that, for that strike of good fortune, then the girl he loved, Eunice Cluett, could have taken off with someone else forever. She could have taken that positive life force everybody knew she had, she could have taken her warmth, her courage, and even those normal sexual desires of hers which at that time were lying dormant, unanswered by an outside agency, and she could have used them all up, consumed them, burned them up like a bonfire with a stranger somewhere else. That could have happened but it didn't, and why? Because Aaron Stoodley was a friend of Henry's, and Aaron Stoodley always had an eye out for better times, and one night, when Aaron was walking through his grandmother's livingroom and she was watching TV, he stopped beside her and looked. It was as simple as that. It was like someone picked up a clock, wound it, and it started to tick. Or like someone rubbed the magic lamp and out came a genie with a smile on his face.

There, on the television, were pictures they were showing from the war in Iraq. People ran around in banged-up streets. They had statues and tablets and huge bowls and god-knows-what in their arms. They held other things that were hard to make out, the way the film jumped up and down, and often they didn't run, they just walked and smiled at the cameraman and held up whatever they had like it was a prize.

“What's all that?” Aaron said to his grandmother.

There were broken buildings in the background, rubbled, destroyed. There were stone columns bent at angles. There were chips of rock and marble and dust and people running here and there and they all wore the same baggy white clothes. There was so much fine dust in the air, it was like they were rushing in and out of fog.

“It's Arabs,” said his grandmother, “Arabs getting by. They're after running off with the old things. Antiques, treasures of all kinds.”

“They stealing it?”

“Stealing? I don't know I'd call it that, they're just getting by the best they can. Look at their teeth, mind you, those Arabs, Aaron, they got the whitest teeth I ever seen, every one.”

His grandmother, who raised him, sat and smoked menthol cigarettes most of the day. She made rugs, mittens, scarfs. She had a pile of wool at her feet and she favoured the colour yellow even though there were some who said, “Priscilla, you make those out of blue, they'd sell faster. Put some blue trim on, anyway.” But she had her own mind and there was a store on Water Street where they stocked all the stuff she made, yellow mittens, yellow sweaters, yellow gloves. If you bent down and buried your nose in those mittens and sweaters, according to Aaron Stoodley, you could smell menthol cigarettes, faint but pure. For him, it was like being transported home again. Those times he worked in town, which were several, down he'd go down to that store just for the olfactory pleasure. He'd bury his head there in the yellow wool till the store personnel came by and they said, “Okay, Aaron Stoodley, that's enough of that, enough of that olfactory pleasure of yours, you get out of here now.”

Aaron loved his grandmother. When she said, “No, those Arabs, I don't think I'd call that stealing,” she didn't know it but Aaron had the moral go-ahead for the plan that percolated through his head.

He sat down and watched the rest of the program and then he put on his coat and walked down to the Legion. He knew Henry Fiander would be there.

“Rack 'em up,” he said as he walked to the pool table. “We are about to become liberators of stone. Baghdadians.”

That was the way Aaron Stoodley talked. He dressed everything up, made it sound finer than it was and Henry never knew, right off, which way to look at what he said.

Midafternoon, the two of them had the whole place to themselves. There was a weak light that came through the front window, on the ocean side, and there was a hanging light over the pool table that cast a blue-green cone of chalk dust, floating in the air, a bit like that dust that rolled by the cameras in Baghdad.

Aaron chalked up his cue right then and delivered a mighty blow to the white ball and there was a wild scattering all over the table. It made a clash, an echoing noise bigger than a bowling alley. Then all was still again.

“It's like a sepulchre in here,” said Aaron, “like something dead. Your turn.”

Henry looked at the table. Despite the smash that Aaron Stoodley had delivered, the cue ball had slid down into an impossible spot in one corner and there was nothing easy to do. It was blocked in by a jumble of four reds, all of them leaning on each other. It was hopeless.

“This is a symbol of my life,” said Henry.

He hit the cue ball and there was more noise and more running around of all the colours on the table. One of the red balls teetered on the edge of a pocket and then, even though the force of gravity said it should fall, it didn't.