Monkey Beach (42 page)

“You’re not going to eat that, are you?” he said. “Do you know what’s in there? Do you realize what it’s made of?”

“Then you don’t want any?”

“Ugh.”

“More for me,” I said.

I offered him half the tin when it was warm. He
stared at it, nibbled a corner, then dug his fingers right in and wolfed it down. Two days of nothing but marshmallows, berries and cold coffee were enough to make anything taste good, he said. Tomorrow we could get some crabs or a fish, some halibut maybe. There were jigging lines in the boat. We could be eating like kings if he hadn’t farted around for so long, but I knew better than to say it out loud. Jimmy was mad enough as it was.

We were getting ready for bed when we heard a stick crack somewhere in the darkness under the trees. We stopped unrolling the blankets and looked at each other.

“Did you hear that?” Jimmy stage-whispered.

“Probably just a bear or a—”

“Just a bear. Oh. Is that all?” Jimmy said. “I feel better now.”

“Relax. They’re more afraid of—”

“Shh.”

“If it’s a bear,” I said, “We should let it know we’re here. Helloooo! I’m Lisa and this is my brother, Jimmy! He’d really appreciate it if you left—”

Jimmy grabbed me and clamped a hand over my mouth. “Shh.”

I bit his hand and he howled. If any bears were around, they would have taken off running. I didn’t really think there were any though, and when we went to find berries the next morning, the patches were picked over and I couldn’t see any bear shit anywhere; since it was near the end of the summer, they were probably all salmon fishing right now.

Jimmy hopped around like I’d poured boiling oil
over his hand. I put my hands on my hips. “You big baby. I didn’t even break the skin.”

He showed me his hand, momentarily speechless. There was a bright red mark where my teeth had been.

“Well, that’s what you get for being mean,” I said.

“That’s rich, coming from you.” He turned his back to me and lay down. I was down to my last two cigarettes. He turned back and held his hand out. I took mine, then his and handed it to him.

After a while, he said “What was Vancouver like?”

“Sad,” I said. “But I was pretty bummed.”

He tilted his head. “I never understood why you missed them so much. Mick was a nut and Ma-ma-oo was a cold fish.”

I punched his arm. “How can you say that?”

“It’s true! Mick was always doing something crazy and I never saw her crack a smile.”

“You didn’t know them. You were too young. I don’t know what you see in Karaoke. Have you ever seen her fight?”

He grinned. “Yeah. Wicked, huh?”

“Men,” I said, mildly disgusted. There are limits to what you want to know about your brother.

“She’s smart, too. She knows all about the stars. See that, right there? That’s Cassiopeia. And that’s Ursa Major, and over there, that’s Ursa Minor and the North Star.”

“Karaoke knows astronomy?” Disbelief did not even begin to cover what I felt.

His grin faded. “I don’t know. We never talked about it.”

I sighed. “Now I’m jealous of you all over again.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve got the perfect life.”

“No, I mean it. You’re in love. I’ve never been in love. Sure, it bites at the moment, but give it a few years and you’ll be laughing about this.”

“What about you and Frank?”

“We’re just friends.”

“Come on—”

“And if you marry her, we’ll be in-laws.”

“Well,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about that now.”

I lay back against my blanket. I thought he was asleep but he said, very quietly. “I used to think you were weak. I mean, everyone has people die on them and they don’t … give up. But all it took was my shoulder and I quit.”

I didn’t look at him. I kept staring straight up at the stars. “It was your dream. I think it’s harder when they go.”

“I dunno. Everyone tried so hard. Do you know how much money they spent on me?”

“Did you actually add it up?”

He sighed. “Yeah. Do you have any more smokes?”

“Sorry. Those were my last ones.”

“That’s okay.” He shifted, putting the life jacket under his neck. “I was kind of relieved when it happened. It was like an out. I kept thinking, what if I fuck this up? I used to have nightmares where I was halfway through the pool and everyone was passing me and I kept getting slower and slower.”

“Huh. All this time I thought you were having fun.”

“I was. In the beginning. Then it stopped being fun and started being about not fucking up.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

“Like who?”

“Mom. Dad. Anyone.”

“Nope.”

“Well,” I said. “You’re talking to the queen of fuckups and you’d have to do a lot more to take my crown away.”

He reached over and kept giving me nudges until I looked at him. “You weren’t that bad.”

“You weren’t the one that ran away.”

“You’re back now. You’re dealing with things. I didn’t understand what it was like to lose something. Now that I do, I think you’re doing fine. I mean, Karaoke didn’t die on me. She just dumped me and I flipped. I don’t know what I’d do if someone actually died on me.”

I laughed. “You call that flipping? That was a little spaz.”

“Yeah, well …”

We drifted off in a comfortable silence.

We had visitors in the morning, two sea otters rummaging through the empty Spam tin. Jimmy opened one eye, then both, then hollered. The otters scampered down the beach and dived into the water, poking their heads up to watch us from a safe distance.

“Why don’t you be useful and get us some crabs,” I said.

“You want crabs, you get them.”

“Fine. You can work on the motor.”

He whipped his blankets off, shook them out with more energy than necessary and tidied up before he said, “Where are the crab pots?”

“Just run after them with a net. Or do some fishing. I don’t care what you bring me as long as it’s dead and cooked.”

Jimmy heaved a great, put-upon sigh. He rolled up his pants and waded gingerly into the water. He took off his shirt and splashed himself, then scrubbed his face. I rolled off the sand, my back aching from sleeping at an awkward angle. I wanted to go home and have a nice hot soak in the tub. While eating a big slice of apple pie and ice cream. Instead, Jimmy triumphantly produced two smallish crabs. We stared at them.

“Well?” Jimmy said. “Now what?”

“Start a fire,” I said.

“How?”

I thought he was just being lazy, but he really had no idea how to make a fire. I went through the basics, and he enthusiastically built one capable of keeping an entire village warm. I vaguely remembered that we could roast the crabs in a pit, but I suggested that we barbecue them instead. Jimmy squeamishly killed them, then skewered them with the marshmallow sticks. They were slightly singed, but still better than Spam.

I put the motor back together before sunset. Jimmy wanted to hop right in and take off. I said we could go only if he developed infrared vision in the next five minutes, because if we left now, we might as well kiss our asses goodbye.

“I don’t care,” Jimmy said.

“I like breathing,” I said. “And I want to keep doing it. You want to go kill yourself, go ahead. I’m not stopping you.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Jimmy said for the hundredth time.

I lay awake with the stars revolving overhead, the fire dying and Jimmy snoring beside me. The moon, a sliver of white light, rose a hand above the horizon, then, tired, fell back. The purple blackness overhead faded into grey, the grey into pale blue; this was followed quickly by pastel reds and oranges, and finally, yellow rays streamed through the trees as the sun climbed. The water was a muddy green from the spawning clams. Sea otters chittered as they spun, playing in the kelp. At the end of the beach, I saw what I mistook at first for a large grey dog but realized was a wolf. It padded to the edge of the water, sniffed, swung its head to examine Jimmy and I, then loped back into the trees.

That morning, Jimmy woke with a groan. He sat up, and when he saw me grinning at him, he grumbled, “Sasquatches didn’t carry you away in the night. I’m disappointed.”

“Maybe they smelled your cooking,” I said.

“My cooking? Point that finger at yourself, Spam Queen.”

His sarcastic cheeriness lapsed back into grumpiness, and he began answering me in an unhappy monotone again as we pushed off and left Monkey Beach. I tried to point out the things Ma-ma-oo had pointed out to me, but he said we could skip the tour.

A pod of killer whales lived in the Douglas Channel at one time. They stayed there all year long. People thought of them as another family who lived in the area. I’m sure they had names for them. Sometime around the turn of the last century, however, some
whalers came and killed them all. Once in a while, a stray whale or two will still come poking around up the channel, turn around and leave.

On the way home, Jimmy saw the spout. He told me to shut the motor off, but I was afraid that if I did, we wouldn’t be able to get it going again. Then I saw the dorsal fins.

“Orcas,” Jimmy said.

They were coming straight towards us. I froze. They were so big. They slid alongside our boat, ignoring it, sleek black bodies with white spots shining in the water like glow-in-the-dark stars. One slid by the boat, its fin coming up to my waist as it broke surface and lifted the boat slightly, tilting it so that we rocked. It was longer than our boat, longer and almost as wide. Jimmy kicked off his shoes and jumped in.

“Are you crazy!” I shouted. “Jimmy!”

I thought they would eat him but they moved by him like they didn’t see him. They passed us and Jimmy hit the surface of the water, trying to get their attention. He dived. When he came up, he shouted, “Come in! Come see this! You’ve got to come see this!”

I said, “Get back in the boat, Jimmy.”

He wouldn’t get in until the whales had passed, and then he wanted to follow them. He sat with his teeth chattering and his clothes dripping over everything. I wouldn’t let him have the motor. The whales left the channel.

“You should have come in,” Jimmy said. “You don’t know what you missed.”

I hold him there in my memory, smiling, excited, telling me how they moved like submarines, and how
the water looked so much more magical when they were swimming in it.

I jumped when I heard a heavy crash coming from Jimmy’s room. I went over to investigate and found him packing his trophies and medals into file boxes.

“What’cha doing?” I said.

“Clearing out the trash,” Jimmy said.

Dad had beat me to the room and was trying to take the boxes from Jimmy. “You’re going to throw them away? Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I’m moving on.”

“Why don’t you just put them away? Here, I’ll help you put them in the attic.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You have to keep something to bore your grandkids with.”

I was anxious for him to move on too, and hoped his next step would involve letting go of his noisy crows.

“If you aren’t swimming any more,” I groused over coffee, “you don’t need their luck, do you? Why do you keep encouraging those stupid things?”

“Did you know that crows have the biggest brains for their body size of all the birds around?” As I watched him over the rim of my coffee cup, I carefully said nothing as he rambled on about the virtues of the biggest brained member of the Corvidae family. Instead, I pictured him with kids, and imagined that he would probably get beat up by other parents for bragging about his offspring.

“I’m going to set up a research centre to study them,” Jimmy said.

I chuckled. “Yeah, right.”

He started to pace. “I’ve already decided, this is what I want to do. I have a new direction. When my arm snapped, I thought that was my whole life ending, but it’s just starting. Do you know how free I feel? I feel like everything’s just opened up. Everything. The sky’s the limit!”

I smiled uneasily. “Good.”

“I wasted hours—no, days, days—in that pool going back and forth and back and forth. You have no idea how much time I put into that part of my life. It was like I was possessed.”

“I remember.”

“You don’t know what it was like. No one who hasn’t done it knows what it’s like. I’m better off without it. You know it, I know it. I’m having fun now. I couldn’t have fun before. Everything was so serious.” He enthusiastically slapped my shoulder. “Now I’m letting loose!”

Ah, sweet denial, I thought.