Saltwater Cowboys (24 page)

Angela nodded. She wanted to talk to Olive, to confide in her, but she wasn't sure it was safe — or ever would be.
I don't know who to trust. How many men are involved? Do other men know? Will any of them try to find us once we are gone?

The display stole her attention as the first firework was lit; it squealed as it scratched skyward, climbing over air as if over concrete, hissing and sputtering, crackling loudly as it burst. The crowd sighed as the cool blues and greens tempered summer's heat and the fire dust fell through the sky, sprinkling the air like fresh, cool ocean spray.

J
ack stopped at the intersection. The musky scent of leather and gas was strong as the car idled.
I'll sure miss this car. How in the world did I ever let Angela talk me into giving all of this up?
With all the residents at the lake, Foxville was quiet. There were little flower boxes on many windowsills, filled with seductively draped flowers, bent like upturned wrists in the heat, their petals like beckoning pinkies. Children's bicycles were scattered on front lawns. Round plastic swimming pools were empty, dented, and dirty. Sprinklers were left on to gush in the twilight, one or two lights left on in houses.

He hadn't noticed how quaint and full of charm the town was. He'd been too busy burrowing in garbage bags at the dump for ore. He felt a surge of guilt. He'd missed all of this beauty and noticed it now just as they were leaving.

The grey sports bags were slumped like shells glutted with pearls beside him. He turned onto the wide, crescent-shaped street full of large duplexes, landscaped lawns, and two-car garages. Peter and Wanda's large brown house, with cobbled sidewalk, wooden shutters, and mahogany trim, was at the end of the street, bordered by lush pines.

The flashing red lights startled him. At first he thought the lights were from the fireworks display. He rolled down the window and his stomach lurched. In Peter's driveway was a police car, and Peter was lying handcuffed on the lawn by two RCMP officers. He wasn't struggling, his body limp, resigned, unassertive, a champion usurped by a younger upstart, the biggest, fastest, and best defeated.

Peter sorrowfully met Jack's eyes. A stout RCMP officer shoved him headfirst into the back of the car. He looked out the window and mouthed “
Go now
.
”

Jack nodded slowly and continued along the street. He watched the car in the rear-view mirror as a single tear trickled down his face. The police officer turned off the crimson flashing lights and the car drove away as fireworks banged and illuminated the night sky in the distance brightly.

Jack's hands shook and tumbled over themselves on the wheel. All he could see was red: the police lights, the fireworks, and the beady eyes of a fox caught in the headlight as it burrowed from the bushes and emerged across the road. It was finished scuttling from backyard to backyard, prowling for vegetables to pilfer from gardens. Jack swerved and his car rocked back and forth as the white-tipped tail of the red fox disappeared over the bank at the side of the road.

The stars hung mercilessly low, dripping points of light, fingernails pointing at Jack with wordless accusations:
How dare you steal
. He thought of Father Donnelly in Brighton at the pulpit and shuddered. The black sky resembled a nun's swarthy black dress that did not clothe his guilt but baptized him with shame and fear.

A black truck with its headlights turned off passed him. The driver was hunched forward protectively, the rim of a cowboy hat pushed down over sulky, shifty, eyes. It was one of the cowboys in town for a pickup. Jack honked his horn but the truck sped up quickly and drove away.

What do I do now? What about Malcolm Johnson? Do I tell him?
Jack drove to Johnson's end of town and found him out on his picnic table, drinking beer with a few miners, oblivious to all else.

He got out of the truck and whispered in Malcolm's ear. Malcolm stood up, spluttering. He got in his truck and drove away. Jack knew he would leave, just like that, with no word or explanation to anyone.

He wished he could just leave right now. He got back in his car and drove mindlessly toward his trailer. He pulled into his driveway.
Angela's home,
he thought as he peered at the light in the bedroom window. The street was deserted. He stumbled over the stairs, untreated wood splintered and swollen from the heat, and charged through the door. “Angela?” he yelled. He raced to the bedroom. The mess he had caused was undisturbed: open closets, upturned boxes, a torn mattress, and ripped floorboards. “Angela?” he called out again and dropped the bags full of money at the foot of the bed.

He ran from room to room and grabbed the suitcases Angela had packed, piling them up at the front door
. We never should have left home. We never should have, no place for us here, we should have stayed home, I should have insisted.
Jack's heart pounded and his hands trembled. He smoothed back his hair.
He'll never implicate me, ever. I know that, he'll watch my back. He'll never tell. Like the time we skipped school and the nuns caught us. He took the blame, told them he'd forced me into following him. And he took the paddle for me, he took Sister Moriarty's wicked backhand, repeated her whiny old chants and prayers for forgiveness. My friend, Peter, oh God, Peter, my brother.

The low sound of a vehicle approached. “Angela,” he whispered, and jumped up. The red flashing lights of the police car pierced through the window and travelled the length of the room. Jack sat down and put his head in his hands. He sat slack-jawed, awaiting his fate with some relief. At last, it was over.

The fireworks sounded like a wrecking ball on concrete.

“Too loud, aren't they?” Angela shouted.

Olive nodded as she squirmed to move away from a spider. She was on the ground at the foot of the picnic table, Monique tugging at her breast.

The sky was red as Angela smoothed Lily's hair and rocked her gently. Maggie and Katie jumped and cavorted, exhilarated by the show. Angela felt a sudden sucking in her gut, a tugging at her heart.

“I have to go home. Can you give me a lift?”

“You don't want to stay for the end?” Olive asked.

“No,” she said as she stumbled to her feet, grabbing Katie's hand and hauling her gruffly toward Olive's truck. Maggie trailed behind, bewildered, panting, and protesting. “But Momma, the fireworks aren't finished yet.”

“Angela?” Wanda said as they passed her at a picnic table with Tanya Ann and her son Tyger. She rose, the folds of her white cotton dress falling to the ground, edges soiled and ashy grey with dirt. “Everything alright?”

“Yes, fine, but I've got to go,” Angela said.

Lily started to cry and Maggie crossed her arms while Katie dutifully climbed into Olive's truck. Maggie gulped as she sobbed about missing the fireworks.

“Brandi gets to stay and watch the fire,” she said between hiccups.

“Brandi is with her father. You can blame your father when you see him, ask him why he didn't come back, ask him why he made us wait here for so long, ask him why —”

“Angela!” Olive said and ran her index finger across her neck in a straight, sharp line. “Cut it out, eh?”

Angela sat back, stunned. Her body felt like it was on fire — as if a hundred insects were crawling all over her. When they turned onto the dirt road of the trailer court, the swollen red lights from the police car were spinning quickly.

They pulled up in front of the house and Angela ran toward the front door and the girls tumbled out of the truck. Olive shepherded them next door to her place amidst their wailing and cries for their mother and father.

All the while, the celebratory fireworks, a shower of golden light, cracked and banged, fizzy pockets of silver rolled across the sky. White smoke stains left a bright white trail behind.

J
uly 1, 2012

In the silent blue light of morning, sky full of roiling grey clouds, Angela rose and wiped a tear from her face. A tear that didn't wash away or cleanse, a tear as heavy as stone rolling down her cheeks, pooling like sediment in the swell of her heavy breast.
Stop it, woman
, she thought,
you've got things to do today, he's coming home. After all these years, he's coming home.

There was a party tonight to prepare for. Her mother had been baking all day and would scold Angela if she didn't get the meat ready for the barbecue. She tried to rouse herself but grief had become an anchor that moored her in a glum harbour of lethargy.

This unremarkable summer had been punctuated by rainstorms, brief intervals between lightning bolts a welcome and blessed silence, yet alive with a blue-grey numbness. She'd go and sit by the ocean today in the afterglow of the storm and cry, spend five minutes numb between tears. In these moments she ached so much, all she could do was sit by the ocean. The glorious watery Atlantic blanket, clear blue and foaming at her feet, in the hopes that it could offer relief or sustenance, as if the sheer arrogance of a huge body of water could somehow make her abundance of tears smaller, so the burden of being drenched and full to overflowing with achy, salty, snot-inducing tears, threatened less to drown.

She walked to the ocean almost every day.

This was her life. She lived with her mother. Her children were grown now. Katie, an engineer, worked in Fort McMurray and was married to an Albertan, happily wrangling oil. Angela would hear from her once a week. She had travelled extensively; she'd been to Mozambique, Brazil, Turkey, and Prague. She always sent cards and souvenir magnets for Angela's fridge. The most recent one was from Ireland:
Lovely Day for a Guinness
the magnet read, with a picture of a glass of Guinness on the orange and reddish snout of a toucan.

Maggie had remained unmarried. She had no man yet because she “feared abandonment,” her therapist told her. She was “unable to form attachment bonds,” she told her mother over the phone, mocking herself. She kept herself busy with work. She was a teacher in St. John's and on weekends went to rallies to protect Newfoundland's offshore oil. Angela worried about her, much more than about the other two. She seemed so stiff around people, constantly on guard, afraid to let her emotions show.

Lily, a cook at the Brighton Hunting and Fishing lodge, was petite and cute. She was interested in baking and playing hockey with the boys. She was full of life, eager and earnest. Happy-go-lucky, content with cooking and conversing with the wealthy British professors who came to spend summers in Brighton, always in her flour-stained apron and floral dresses.
Just like her nanny
, Angela thought, and would smile at how her mother's traits were exhibited in her youngest child's character.

Angela managed the hunting and fishing lodge. Dr. Nelson was in the process of opening it when Angela returned from Alberta and had hired her on the spot. All those years ago she had started out as the cleaning woman, and now she was the manager. When Doctor Nelson passed away they'd held a wake at the lodge, and over 1,500 people came from around the province. The premier had sent condolences.

Sheila would be home tonight, back from filming a movie on location in Toronto. She'd come to support Angela.

And Angela's son, almost twenty-five, thin, dark-haired, bright-blue-eyed Jonathan, was a summer guide at the lodge during fishing season. He brought prizes home for her from the fall hunt. “Look what I got?” he had said and held up a red fox by the tail. “We can make this into the prettiest fox stole in all of Newfoundland.”

Angela had smiled. “No, thanks,” she had said and wiped her rough, weathered, dry hands on an old tea-stained apron. Her wrinkled skin sagged in folds around her greying bobbed hair. She wore nothing fancier than old frayed cotton tops scrunched up to her elbows and black slacks with elasticized waistbands. “I'm just fine the way I am, my love, fine all around,” she'd say to her son when he offered her fine things.

Jonathan was almost finished studying in St. John's at Memorial University to become a physics and math teacher. He'd excelled at all of the sciences. Nanny Harrington adored him. She'd welcomed them all back into her home without question that fateful July, full of support for her woebegone daughter, grateful they weren't in jail.

Nanny Harrington's friends who played bingo and cards with her at the Union Hall had gossiped when she'd returned.

“What a scumbag,” they'd said.

“How could he do this to his children?”

But they'd all helped out over the years, brought food for the kids, presents on Christmas, and watched them when Angela cleaned rooms and dishes at the lodge, all of them shocked by what he'd done. They'd expected it from Pete, but never John McCarthy's son. They wondered about Wanda and found out that she'd gone to her mother's in Grand Falls while Peter served out his prison sentence. Wanda had sent a letter to Angela and told her that every month a package came to her mother's place from Calgary with enough money for the month.
Bribe money,
Angela thought, because neither of them had told the police with whom they were working. Wanda offered to send Angela some of the money, but Angela didn't want it. She didn't write back and tore up the letters as soon as they came. She hadn't heard from Wanda in almost twenty years.

The older women in the community had sighed and tutted as they rattled on, old crustaceans clacking about the rise and fall of the saltwater tides and all the lives like pebbles beneath it, swirling along, being pulled back and forth, away and home, this way and that, through the harsh and unexpected ebb and flow of time and life.

Angela rose from the oceanside and stretched her rickety body underneath the noonday sun. Her breath would be short after the long walk back home.

When she returned to her mother's she made a cup of tea. As it steamed before her the old-fashioned wooden grandfather clock ticked and echoed throughout the blue-and-white rowhouse. She opened the curtains and stared at the rusty mine site. Once a hub of activity, it stood quiet, solemn, and fatigued. Its structures resembled the complex interconnections of an excavated ant colony. Its latticework of iron cast shadows on the sandy hill. A black bird soared overhead. The sun burst from behind the clouds. Angela took a sip of hot, milky tea as the steam licked her face. She stared out the open window, one hand on her hip, as the curtain fell in a gentle ripple over her wrist.

Jack was coming up the road toward the row house. Skinnier than ever, skin on his face dry and creased, grizzled with the remnants of a poorly shaved grey beard. His eyes looked mournful and dark. His back was stooped, shoulders bunched up around his ears, the collar of his jean jacket popped up as if it were 1986. His jeans were rolled up above his ankles. He had on the cheapest white sneakers Angela had ever seen.

Every bit the convict
, she thought as her heart lurched with love and fear and disbelief.

How would it feel to touch that face again and smell that skin? Hold those hands and have those hands hold her, cup her waist, stroke her nose, and play with her hair?

He'd stay with them until he got on his feet. That was all Angela's mother Lillian could offer. Angela didn't know what to do; she didn't want to override her mother. It was her house, but she didn't want him to suffer. She'd offer him a job at the lodge, on the sly, when Lillian got used to him in the house. Maybe he could rent a room in someone's house. Maybe they could rent a small house. Angela choked on that last thought and pushed thoughts of a reconciliation out of her mind, even though that was all she'd been doing for the last twenty years or so, dreaming of his touch, his mouth, and his hair. Wanting to be with him again more than she'd ever thought possible.

She was bitten by anger at that woman who twice took him from her, the first time with her body and the second time with her spite. She'd heard from the wives in Foxville that Bobbi had been the one to tell the miner whose cousin, or brother, or uncle was an RCMP officer, and they'd sent an undercover officer to witness what Jack and Peter were up to.

Angela didn't want to darken her mind with thoughts of Peter.

She was ashamed of herself for wanting her husband so badly all these years later. After spending the last half of her life keeping to herself, raising her girls and her newborn son, she'd not so much as given another man a second thought. She should have. She should have gotten over him. She should have let him go. She should have told him to find another place to stay. But when the letter came asking for shelter, temporarily of course, she couldn't say no, and had begged her mother to put him up.

Would they still know each other? She hadn't seen him in two decades, because who'd had the money to go halfway across the country again? Not Angela or her family. A few photos, a few letters, and more recently a few emails — once Angela had figured out how to use the computer — and now here he was, trudging up the driveway about to knock on her door.

This is what being without him feels like
, Angela thought as she opened the door.
And it's all going to change. Again.