Monstrous Affections (6 page)

The three steaks, the potato salad, the jar of pickles, the big jug
of milk, two-dozen eggs and near a pound of bacon were all gone.
She went and checked the cupboard next, and sure enough, the case
of Campbell’s Soup was gone too.

Lord, Ernie must’ve thought her dead for sure — in his big panic
to get out, he’d left nothing behind to sustain her alive.

Nothing but the butter and the mustard that was here when
they arrived. Janie thought about making a meal of that — she was
starting to get hungry despite all her pains — but no matter how you
made it, a dinner of butter and mustard just wouldn’t taste right.
Even Mr. Swayze, with all his kitchen smarts, wouldn’t be able to
make much of that.

“Butter and mustard go on food — they ain’t food themselves,”
she said, and the little window by the stove rattled in its frame, like
it agreed with her.

Outside, something cracked — like a tree-stem breaking when
Ernie’d bend it back over his boot. Janie didn’t look to see what it
was, though. The wind would blow hard, and it would break things,
and if you were fool enough to have a boat in open water, it would
drive you to and fro and send waves as big as a house over your bow,
and those waves would swamp you if your boat wasn’t a big one
too. There was no need to look outside again, because whatever it
was that broke, it would just be another bad thing Janie could do
nothing about.

And anyway, Janie was already started through the rest of the
lodge. She was pretty hungry all right — it felt like she hadn’t eaten
in days — and she needed to do something for that.

But the lodge was picked clean of food — there wasn’t even any liquor
on hand, though she managed to find quite a few empties stashed
in the wood-bin.

Janie searched the three bedrooms, looked under the mattresses
and in all the wardrobes. She found her clothes — Ernie hadn’t
taken them with him, at least — and among them was her raincoat
and boots. So after she’d satisfied herself there was nothing to eat
inside, she pulled on her boots and did up her raincoat and went
outside to see what was what on the rest of the island.

The wind was blowing worse by then. She had to lean against the
door to make sure it’d open, and when she managed to get out it was
a good thing she was wearing her yellow slicker and boots, because
she would have been soaked to the skin if she weren’t.

It wasn’t raining. The water was coming up, not down, as it
smashed against the high rocks on the edge of the little island and
funnelled up through their cracks and bends in white fingers of
spray. She squinted down to the dock, but she couldn’t see it for all
the flying water. Ernie’s boat could be tied up there right now, and
she’d never know it.

Janie didn’t go down to check it out, though — she didn’t think
there was anything at that dock, and anyway . . .

She thought she’d figured something better. The lodge was on
the lower of two rises on the island, built on the kind of bare rock
that Ernie said made for bad land, and Janie thought she’d make for
the higher one. At the top of that one, there were a few trees that’d
managed to fight their way out between the boulders, and she knew
that on some of these islands, you could find blueberry patches in
such places.

And Janie did like her blueberries.

So although the rock was slippery most of the way and hard to see
at times on account of the water, and although her arm was hurting
and her rib still ached, Janie managed the climb. She was more than
hungry now. She was
starving
, it felt like she hadn’t eaten in days,
and it was like she could taste those blueberries already.

Janie got her foot into a crack in the rock, and found another
crack higher up with her fingers, and then it was just one more pull,
and she was up —

And over.

“Ow!”

Janie fell on her behind, which didn’t much hurt, but bumped
her bad elbow on the way, which did. She could scarcely believe it,
but the wind didn’t seem to get up here.

She’d gone over a kind of lip of rock at the top, and as she looked
around she saw she was surrounded by rocks about as high as her
neck, with a half-dozen tree-trunks growing up right at the edge. It
was like she was sheltered in the palm of some giant hand, the trees
were its fingers, all pointing upward. “Wonder if there’s blood drops
on the fingertips,” she said to herself, and giggled again.

Then she remembered what she’d come for: the blueberries.

Janie got up off her duff and started looking for them. The
palm of this great big hand was covered in all kinds of greenery,
so it would take some searching. She walked bent over for a little
while, but her leg started to hurt so she got down on her hands and
knees going through the low greenery. For awhile, she wasn’t sure
she was going to find anything — nothing but ferns and tiny little
evergreens barely spawned from their daddies’ seed — but finally, in
a little corner of the palm where maybe the thumb would crick out,
she found a patch of them.

“You-hee!” she howled when she sighted the familiar leaves. She
didn’t get up — just crawled over on hands and knees, like a baby
hurrying across the lawn for his new toy. Saliva fed into her mouth
and her still-sore stomach glowered and muttered impatient.

She grabbed at one of the blueberry plants, turned it over.
Nothing there, so she grabbed at another one. And another after
that. And one more —

And then she howled again.

Because it looked as though someone had been here before her
too. Only they hadn’t picked the blueberries.

They’d stomped them. Taken a pair of boots, and stomped over
every square inch of this little blueberry patch. Janie’s fingers were
blue where she touched the leaves — but when she licked them, there
wasn’t even enough berry there for a sweet.

Jeez, but Ernie’d taken time to do a lot of things for his dead
wife, before he ran away in his boat. Janie felt the hot coming on.

“
Baaa-sterd!
” she yowled, head turned up to the sky. “
Baaa-sterd!
”

She didn’t care who heard it. She didn’t care if she caused an
embarrassment, or broke something valuable, or swore, or just did
something stupid. She didn’t care if Ernie was down at the dock now,
listening to her — she didn’t care if he came back up here right now
to teach her another lesson. If there was a wasp’s nest here, she’d
probably find a shovel and hit it.

“Baaa-
sterd!
” she screamed, and as she did, she felt a gust of wind
come down on her, pouncing like a tree-cat on a mouse. This high up
from the waves, it was a drier wind, but it was cold all the same. She
opened her mouth wide, and faced it this time, and when she yelled
again the wind took it from her and she didn’t mind.

“I’m
hung
-ry!” she hollered. And as the darkness came complete
to the island, the wind hollered it too.

Janie would get spells some days. That’s what Ernie’d call them,
because that’s how they must have seemed to him, like magic witchy
spells that made folks strange. She called them her hots, because
that’s how they’d feel inside. She got hot, from her toe-tips up to
her eyebrows, so hot she itched for things she couldn’t say and did
things she barely knew. One time, she went out and smashed all the
windows in Ernie’s pickup truck with his new axe-handle, then broke
the axe-handle too somehow. Another time, she ran bare-naked out
to the township road, and Ernie had to come after her with a rope
and a stick to goad her back inside. Sometimes during her hots, she
remembered seeing things. Folks dressed in black dancing jigs all
across her roof so hard the ceiling started to wobble; or a lot of birds
flying in a circle around her head and pecking at her sun hat so as
to knock it off; or big old bugs crawling out of the cracks between
the sidewalk stones outside the grocery carrying their grubs under
their wings. Her momma used to think she saw into the spirit world,
but Ernie called them dream-things and said for to pay them no
attention. Like the wasps — let ’em have their sniff, and they’ll leave
soon enough.

When she woke up in the middle of the night, crooked up against
a rock covered in dry white lichen, she thought she might have seen
a dream-thing.

He came up over the same way she had — up over the rock from
where the lodge sat — but he wasn’t dressed for the cold wind. He
wasn’t dressed at all in fact. He was a funny man: bare-naked, not
even shoes and socks on, and even his privates dangled out for all
to see.

“Ain’t you cold?” Janie asked, but the funny man didn’t even look
at her.

Maybe the cold didn’t bother him. He had a lot of hair on him,
looked like blue in the dark. It went all up his back and down his
chest, and the hair on his head and chin was real long, and his beard
came up near to his eyes. And it seemed like there was a fire in those
eyes — Janie didn’t get to look at them directly, but she could see
that everywhere the funny man looked got covered in a flickery
orange light, like it was sitting near the firelight of the funny man’s
eyeballs.

So fired on the inside, furred on the outside, maybe clothes’d just
heat the funny man up too much for his own good. Sometimes Janie
felt that way too, particularly when her hots came on.

The funny man was moving on feet and fingertips the whole
time, and his face kept close to the rock, like he was snuffling it. He
was saying something over and over — Janie thought it sounded like
Yum-tum, yum-tum, yum-tum
, which were no words that she knew. He
crawled over the top of the rock, and face-first down the inside slope
of it. It was a pretty good trick — Janie’d fallen on her behind when
she tried to get over and then she’d had to stand on level ground
and get her bearings. But the funny man didn’t even need to do that.
He just turned around and started moving along the sides of those
rocks, like he was a spider or an inchworm or some sticky-footed
fly. When he’d come to a tree, he’d squeeze behind it if he could fit,
and if he couldn’t just lift his arms over it and sort of jump-like with
his long hairy legs, and keep on yum-tum-ing along the rocks like
nothing had happened. Janie’d put her fist to her mouth and gasped
at that — he was sure a good climber, the funny man was.

And he kept at it, until he’d gone half-the-way around the rock
circle and come up beside Janie where she leaned against it. For a
minute, she thought he was going to crawl over her like she was
another tree, rub his dangly privates all along her middle and then
go on along the rock like he hadn’t rubbed nothing. But the funny
man didn’t. The rock glowed next to her shoulder where he looked at
it, and then his fire-filled eyes moved up to her yellow-clad shoulder
and made it glow, and underneath the sweat oozed out of her skin
like pus from a dirty cut. And then he said yum-tum again, and she
knew it wasn’t words at all. It was the sound his tongue made when
it licked against the rock, tongue-out-yum, tongue-in-tum, right
next to her arm.

Janie pulled away from him a little — she sure didn’t want that
long, knobbly old tongue licking
her
next, any more than she wanted
those privates on her middle — and quick as she did, the funny man
yum-tum-licked the rock where she’d been leaning. A big strip of
lichen came away when he did.

Janie put her hand to her mouth again, and let out a little squeal.
Of course! That’s what the funny man was doing — she followed
the path he’d taken around the rocks, and the whole way she found
a dotted strip as wide as a tongue, like the passing line on the
highway.

“Hey!” she said, turning back to him. “That lichen any good to
eat?”

But the funny man was already gone. Or so Janie recalled as she
sat up in the middle of the night, and looked at the rock beside her.

The funny man must have been a dream-thing, because the
lichen on the rock face hadn’t been touched. He’d just given it a
sniff, and made on his way.

Janie ran her fingers across it — it was rough and dry and flaked
under her thumb, and it was blue like the funny man’s hair. It didn’t
seem much better than mustard and butter, but then Janie didn’t
see any harm in giving it a try either. She leaned close to the rock —
so close she could feel the match-flame heat of her breath bounce
back at her.

“Yum-tum,” she said, and swallowed.

Outside the rock circle, the wind had been roaring and splashing
and rattling things all night. But by the time Janie was done eating,
it stopped making all that racket and went quiet. The lichen meal
didn’t quiet Janie’s stomach any, however. It was twisting and
yelping up at her like a colicky baby. Her aches elsewhere weren’t so
bad, but her belly . . .

Her belly would need quieting.

Janie peeled off some more lichen — just a little, a strip not much
bigger than a postage stamp — and put it on her tongue. It was dry
and tasted like dirt, and seemed like even the wet in her mouth
wouldn’t go near it. She shut her mouth, and made herself swallow,
but the dry lichen gritted up in her throat like she was swallowing
sand. She didn’t let herself cough, though. Just kept swallowing and
swallowing until the last of it was down.

Then she got up, and looked over the rock.

The water was still now, and the sky was clear. There was a tiny
bit of moon up there. It was just a little crescent, like the cut on her
head, like a bite mark, and it didn’t give off very much light. There
were a lot of stars, though, and the dim moon let them shine all
the brighter. Janie could see a long swath of them across the middle
of the sky. Stars had names, each and every one — but Janie didn’t
know any of them.

She cast her eyes down, and looked instead at the rock-face she’d
near licked clean. She was pretty stupid, she guessed — couldn’t even
find something good to eat when her belly needed it. Not but butter
and mustard and dry old lichen from the side of a rock.