Juliet in August (4 page)

Lee is not the only one who is restless, awake.

Several miles to the south of the Torgeson farm, a great horned owl calls in the night. Not with a barn owl's screech, but with a wise and deep
who who whoooo
that carries like a radio signal from the dark bones of the Desert Drive-in movie theater—one of the last of its kind, owned and operated by Willard Shoenfeld. The summer Lee turned fourteen (Astrid had designated the date of Lee's arrival as his birth date), he and a couple of friends rigged up an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys and climbed to the top of the projection screen, newly rebuilt after a twister had blown down the old one. If Willard's late brother, Ed, had caught the trio messing with the brand-new construction, it's hard to say what would have happened, but he didn't. The dog he owned at the time (for a very short time) could be bribed, and while the dog feasted on homegrown beef from Astrid's freezer, Lee and his friends climbed upward and sprayed
WE WERE HERE
in bright orange paint in the top left-hand corner of the screen, like a return address on a giant white envelope. The sun has since faded it, but you can still make out the hint of orange.

A hundred yards south of the movie screen, toward the highway, is the house in which Willard and his sister-in-law, Marian, live—a modest, prefab bungalow constructed in 1960 by Willard and Ed to replace the trailer they'd lived in for so many years, and to provide an incentive for the woman, as yet undiscovered, whom Ed planned to marry. Its original lap siding has been replaced in recent years with beige-colored, no-paint vinyl, purchased from a traveling salesman who sold the exact same siding to half the homeowners in the district and then disappeared. There's an old barn on the property that had once housed the brothers' chick hatchery, and then a hog operation (unpopular with the Juliet town council because of the smell), and then a chainsaw and snowmobile sales and service shop, and, finally, a camel named Antoinette. Since Antoinette, the barn's been empty except for the odds and ends it stores and the shelter it provides for Willard's vehicles, which include a shiny new Silverado crew cab, a twenty-year-old Ford Taurus (driven to town twice a week by Marian), and a Massey Ferguson tractor that doesn't like to start on a cold, blizzardy day when you need it most. There are the remains of an old shed that Willard knows he should tear down, and of course the drive-in ticket booth and concession stand plastered on all sides with its layers of movie-listing flyers and Coca-Cola posters. At night, the white face of the movie screen looms over the sandy lot, a giant relic from a different world. And beyond the fence that is designed to keep out those who don't want to pay, the sandy hills roll northward. On a windy day, the surface of the land rises and grains of sand hit the back of the movie screen like buckshot.

Willard Shoenfeld's current German shepherd dog (this one can't be bribed) has a number of favorite spots in the yard, but tonight he lies among the movie screen's elaborate supports, unconcerned, pricking up his ears with only mild interest when the owl hoots above him, or a coyote yips in the hills, or a small nocturnal animal, a skunk perhaps, rustles in the bushes. These sounds are familiar; they tell him that nothing unusual is happening here. No vehicles stopping where they shouldn't. No kids trying to climb the fence just because it's there, to do damage for the sake of getting away with it.

Inside the house, Willard is awakened, not by anything he hears outside the window, but by Marian in the hall. Through the crack beneath his door he sees a light go on, and then she closes the bathroom door, and opens it again a few minutes later, and the light goes off. He hears her footsteps in the hallway once more and they stop, as they have been stopping every night for the last month, outside his door.

Although Willard was initially perplexed by Marian's lingering every night in the hallway, he now has it figured out. She wants to tell him something, and he's concluded after several weeks of mulling that she's made the decision, finally, to pack up her things and move on. He's been expecting Marian to leave ever since Ed's death nine years ago. It's a wonder, he reasons, that she's stayed this long.

He checks the digital numbers on his bedside clock: 3:00
A.M.
, about the usual time. The minutes pass. The night is as still as a church. He imagines he can hear her breathing. Five minutes. Six. Seven. Seven minutes is the record, but tonight he counts eight and she's still there.
What makes her hesitate?
he wonders. Perhaps he should speak up, put aside his own trepidation about her departure. It might make things easier for her, he thinks, if he were to jump-start the conversation. But he's by nature a quiet person, and so he says nothing.

In the months after Ed's death, Willard fully expected Marian to leave. Why would she want to stay with Ed gone? He supposed that she would move into Juliet, or to Swift Current, or back to Manitoba and her own people, but when she didn't say anything and time passed, Willard thought about it less and less and became merely grateful that she'd decided to stay on for a while longer, although he had never come to believe that she was staying for good.

He assumed people in town talked about the two of them living together in the house, but he decided he didn't care about gossip if Marian wasn't bothered by it. In the long hours of winter, Willard grew to prefer Marian's company to his own, although he had never really lived with just his own company. Ed and Marian had married late in life (or at least late in Ed's life; he had been a good ten years her senior), and before her arrival the two brothers had lived, always, together. Ed, the cantankerous older brother who once joined the Communist Party of Canada and talked at great length to whoever would listen about the benefits of living in Mother Russia, and Willard, the eccentric younger brother who never joined any questionable political movements but who provided plenty to talk about anyway.

Willard's most famous exploit was buying Antoinette the camel so he could sell camel rides to tourists passing through on Highway One. He came up with the idea after he heard the provincial minister of tourism talk about the uniqueness of the Saskatchewan landscape and about how Americans were generally better than Canadians at recognizing potential gold mines in the tourist industry. Willard looked around. He saw sand. He bought a camel from a wild animal park in Alberta and painted a huge sign in the shape of a cactus, saying
SNAKE HILLS CAMEL RIDES: SEE THE DESERT THE WAY GOD MEANT YOU TO
. The sign, which Willard stuck in the ditch by the approach to the drive-in, drove Ed crazy because he was an atheist. It also irritated Ed that, in the spring when the ditch was full of runoff, the cactus appeared to be growing, not in the desert, but in standing water.

When Willard came home with Antoinette, the people of Juliet were well entertained. They said Willard bought the camel because Ed had kicked him out of their double bed when he married Marian. They referred to Marian and Antoinette as the Shoenfeld women. Much of the teasing about the camel was to Willard's face and he took it good-naturedly, as was his character. He had Antoinette for three years and, even though she was as ornery as Ed and didn't work out as a tourist attraction, he became attached to her. He found out that Canadians don't stop for the Canadian version of American trends, assuming (probably correctly) that they won't be as good as the American counterparts. And the Americans, who did stop because they were used to such things, expressed their disappointment by saying, “One camel? You've got just the one?”

Despite the fact that Antoinette was not a roaring financial success, Willard kept her and fed her, and when she appeared to be sick he called the vet, who was not a camel expert but did his best. Ed didn't think Antoinette was worth the vet bill and didn't hide the fact that he hoped she would die on Willard. He hated it when neighbors who had guests from other parts of the country would bring them to see the camel, especially if they had children visiting. Sometimes Willard would give them free camel rides just so he could enjoy Ed's predictable irritation.

One morning after Willard had had Antoinette for three years, he woke up and she was gone. He picked up her tracks north of the drive-in, but immediately lost them again. He thought because she was a camel she'd probably headed for the sand hills, so he borrowed an old horse from Lester Torgeson and spent several days riding through the grasslands and dunes searching for signs of Antoinette. He found the odd track, but nothing more. He couldn't believe she could disappear. The Little Snake Hills, after all, were not as expansive as a desert like the Sahara or the Gobi. Willard got numerous anonymous tips saying things like Antoinette had been spotted masquerading as the rodeo queen in Maple Creek, or Antoinette had fallen in love with a camel in a traveling circus and was now following it from town to town in a lovesick fever. Stupid jokes, but Willard accepted them in good spirit even though he missed his camel.

In a way, Antoinette figured into Ed's death. A good number of years had passed since Antoinette's disappearance, and Willard's cactus sign was still standing in the ditch, annoying Ed. One spring day Willard found Ed in his hip waders, standing in the ditch with a crowbar, and they had a brotherly quarrel. Willard argued that the cactus was a monument to Antoinette and a bit of a local curiosity, a landmark that would be missed if Ed destroyed it, but he knew this was a fight he wasn't going to win, so he went to town for the mail. When Willard came home and saw the sign still up, he knew something was wrong. As he drove alongside the sign, he saw Ed facedown in the ditch. He'd had a heart attack while trying to pry the sign out of the still-frozen mud under the spring runoff.

After Ed was buried, people wondered, like Willard, what Marian would do. She kept to herself as she always had, but sometimes in the summer that followed Ed's death she sold tickets or drinks at the drive-in. Because Willard was liked, people who knew him hoped that a love affair would develop between him and Marian, but it never had. Willard kept the cactus sign and changed the words to read
DESERT DRIVE-IN: SEE THE MOVIES THE WAY GOD MEANT YOU TO
.

One Christmas he'd gotten the idea to decorate the cactus with Christmas lights. He did an elaborate job, stringing the green lights so they followed exactly the contour of the cactus, and using white lights to represent the cactus needles, and he even created a pink cactus flower. Most people in the district began to look forward to the night when Willard hung the lights and illuminated the cactus. It marked the onset of the Christmas season more so than did the decorating of the Christmas tree in the small foyer of the United church. It gave Willard pleasure that people, especially the kids, liked his cactus. After he decorated it, he'd lie in bed at night and imagine a whole ditch full of cacti, but he'd never gotten around to building and decorating more than the one, just like he'd never gotten around to buying more than one camel. And apparently Marian liked the decorated cactus even though it was the immediate cause of her husband's death. She told Willard once, “I do like your Christmas cactus. Much easier to bring into bloom than a real one.”

Those had been a lot of words for Marian. One of the things Willard appreciated about Marian right from the start was her apparent lack of any need to chatter, and her ability to communicate without talking. Her gestures, her expressions, even the attitude in her walk, all made sense to Willard. Within days of her moving into the house, they exchanged their first glance at Ed's expense, which they continued to do over the years for their own pleasure, without Ed having the slightest clue. Ed was their common denominator, and Willard's and Marian's glances implied both tolerance and affection for a man who could summon passion when not much was at stake, but who wouldn't know how to give a compliment to save his life. They both understood Ed, although to this day, they haven't really talked about him.

Willard hears a creak outside his door and realizes that Marian is still there. He sits up and checks the clock: 3:20. She's never before stood there for twenty minutes. But perhaps he's mistaken. Perhaps she slipped back to her bedroom just as the dog barked and he missed the padded footsteps. He decides she isn't there after all, and is about to lie down again when he hears another creak and Marian pushes the door and it swings slowly open. In the moonlight Willard can see her in the doorway. She's like a ghost in her long nightgown. He swallows and prepares himself for what she's sure to say:
I'm sorry, Willard, the time has come . . .
But then she pulls the door closed again without speaking, and Willard hears the footsteps padding back down the hallway.

So she's put it off for one more night. He doesn't know whether to hope she'll keep putting it off, or to wish she would just get it over with. The latter, he concludes. Always best to get things over with. He'll try to bring it up tomorrow at breakfast. Perhaps she's worried about him, about leaving him on his own, and he'll try his best to let her off the hook. He'll be attentive when it's her turn to speak—
yes, Willard, you're right, I feel the need to carry on with my life
—and to look like a man who can accept bad news.

It doesn't occur to Willard that his explanation for Marian's odd behavior is entirely wrong, that he's not understanding the new language she's added to her quiet repertoire. And that, in nine years of living with Willard, of his constant companionship, she has grown to love him. Romantic love is not a topic Willard has spent any time at all on, in spite of being the proprietor of a business that thrives on the anticipation of love in its various forms—silly, young, tragic, dangerous, true, dispassionate. He's seen it all, but never once felt that he was watching a movie that had the remotest thing to do with him. And all that love in the front seats and backseats of cars, or on the hoods of cars on summer nights when it's too hot to sit inside them, or next to cars on blankets in the sand—love for teenagers, Willard believes. Willard has never been in love, not even once. Or at least not that he knows.