This River Awakens (26 page)

‘Summer’s begun,’ I said. ‘It’s about fucking time.’

IV

The truck dripped wet mud into silver puddles. Overhead the sky was clear, on fire with the morning sun. Fisk felt heat stir in the air.

The health inspector, Bill, emerged from behind the house, writing something down on his clipboard. ‘Christ, Hodgson,’ he said, ‘how can you stand it?’

‘Stand what? You going to cite me or something?’

‘No.’ He stretched out the word, pausing to remove his baseball cap and wipe his forehead. ‘Man, summer’s come early and come hard, eh? No,’ he continued, ‘it’s within regs, though a part of me says we got to change those regs.’

‘An official part?’

Bill laughed. ‘Don’t worry. Trying to get things through council’s pure hell. It’ll be years, though if the city rezones us all hell will break loose. Mink farms ain’t popular any more, you know.’

‘Doubt they ever were,’ Fisk said, probing the bandage on his nose.
Walked into a door, Bill, can you believe something so stupid? Cold sober, too. Must be getting old, eh?

They entered the house and Fisk led Bill into the kitchen, where he poured two cups of coffee. The inspector sat down and sipped. ‘Of course, the market’s still strong, eh?’

‘Yep.’

‘And what with all the ruckus about leg-hold traps, farming the animals makes sense. Even so, Hodgson, I don’t envy you. Those aren’t wild animals any more. I don’t know what they are, but the way they look at you gives a man the creeps.’

‘You get used to it.’

‘No thank you.’ Bill looked up at Fisk. ‘Now, about that mound under the pole…’

‘Household garbage.’

‘You swear that’s true, Hodgson?’

‘On my wife’s grave.’

‘All right.’ Bill drained his coffee and rose. ‘There’s a move to restrict burning to Sundays. Probably won’t pass, but I’ll let you know.’

‘Sure thing.’

‘Man, I don’t envy you.’

They walked to the back porch. Bill slipped his pen into his shirt pocket. ‘How come you never drop by the Legion? We’d welcome you, you know. Man, the stories
you’d
tell … I’ve seen your service record, you know.’

Fisk shrugged. ‘What’s the point of telling stories? Especially these days. The only people listening were there themselves. You see the way those hippies act on Remembrance Days? Bloody little shits.’

‘No argument there, Hodgson. Even so, no matter what’s being said these days, some of us know what’s still important. You’re a goddamned hero, Hodgson—’

‘No I’m not. I had the bad luck of being in one nightmare after another, and the good luck of coming through alive.’

‘We think it’s important to keep alive the memories of those who weren’t so lucky.’

Fisk scowled. He didn’t like the way the conversation was going, and the tension and brittle anger behind Bill’s words made him nervous. ‘I remember them, Bill. Believe me. I don’t forget, ever, and I’ll defend those memories for ever, in my own way. Can’t you leave it at that? I don’t mean to be disrespectful—’

‘I’d never think that, Hodgson. Not you. Anyway’ – Bill sighed as he stepped down from the porch – ‘we’d like your company, no strings attached.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

Bill climbed into his truck. Fisk waved once as the man started it up and drove around the maypole, then back down the driveway. He stayed on the porch and watched until the truck rolled out of sight.

‘In my own way,’ he said again.

The cellar was quiet. Bruise’s death looked to have taken the fire out of the others. Fisk flicked on the lamp and activated the cattle prod. Bruise’s body still lay in its cage, starting to smell, but Fisk didn’t mind. He wanted the others to stay … mindful.

‘Moon’s turn, I think. Always following, like some sick puppy. Not too tough, eh? Probably die first time around. Let’s see.’ He inserted the prod. Moon backed to the wall and cowered in the shadows. ‘Can’t escape destiny, son. Take it from me.’

Moon screamed, but didn’t die. Frustrated, Fisk went back upstairs. He masturbated on the sofa, remembering Bruise’s death and coming quickly. Something was wrong. He felt incomplete, dissatisfied. The excitement of torturing Moon seemed pale compared to killing Bruise.

‘I’ll have to kill them, then. You finish torture with murder, right?’ He rose and made his way back to the porch. ‘That’s what that Vichy bastard tried on me. Him and his Arab buddies. Should never have changed their minds. Should never have surrendered when the Yanks showed. Should’ve done me, so I wouldn’t be standing here, remembering, keeping the memories alive.’

People don’t have to know how I cried. How I begged him. Fuck that.
‘The Legion can go to hell. So can the hippies and that’s guaranteed. Vietnam’s done them in, sure as I’m standing here.’
The boys got to die. Moon, then Rat, then Gold. They got to cry and beg for it. I’m sorry, my love, it’s what I was all along. It’s what I came back as. No soul. No heart. How was I supposed to love, Dorry? I loved my friends over there. And they all died. I tried loving you, and you died. I loved Bruise, too. It’s not give and take. Never was. Just take. Stop reminding me. I remember how it was.

The sun took the chill from him. The field wasn’t black any more. Bright green weeds covered it.

‘Summer’s begun. Hallelujah.’

V

Going together.
I’m not sure what I’d imagined that to be like. From what I’d seen of Debbie’s various boyfriends, it had seemed to me mostly made up of tense negotiations, endless misunderstandings and phone calls that lasted hours where hardly anything was said. Every now and then something else happened, a kind of secret language, and with its locked gazes and small smiles it was a language of hidden awareness, as if an invisible tether linked Debbie with her boyfriend of the moment. Of course, with her lately, she was cutting them loose almost every week, and from what I’d overheard hiding by the stairs when she was on the phone, the most repeated phrase of her life was
I’m sorry but I just don’t feel that way any more, so can’t we just be friends, now?

Going together. For Debbie it was a temporary, momentary state punctuated by going somewhere else.

It wasn’t like that at all with Jennifer. The past week I’d seen more of her than I had of my friends. There were things we talked about, and things we didn’t. For the most part we necked, and with that, my world changed. Small things, mostly. Like, I’d never before considered blue jeans to be an object of frustration; and I’d never known how a person could close his eyes and disappear inside a girl’s mouth, not like a cartoon, but in the way the senses closed in and left everything else behind.

I lay on the bed in my room, the window open to the morning’s warm breeze. Somewhere way off a dog barked endlessly, and someone worked a rotor tiller in a garden. The model bomber hanging from the light fixture rocked and swung in wobbling arcs. Downstairs, Mother vacuumed the living room. For the first time, my private thoughts actually contained private things. Not private in the way the secret of the body was, but things all my own – this new way of looking at my own body, and at the bodies of women. I’d even caught myself casting a measuring eye at Mother, trying to see her the way Father would. She’d been standing in the kitchen, lighting one cigarette from another while Father dismantled the lawnmower in the garage. My glance had been short-lived; a wave of horror swept through me as soon as I realised what I’d been thinking.

Better to hide in my room, and in doing this – hiding in my room – I suddenly understood Debbie’s touchiness when it came to her own room. Now, my closed door meant something more than it ever had before. It had come to be the first physical barrier between me and everything else.

My hours at home this last week had passed almost unnoticed. My chores had seemed effortless. Debbie had played her records for me and I’d smiled and nodded, looking hard at her when she wouldn’t notice. She was in summer school because of her grades and was now being followed around by a new herd of boys, all drooling and thick as planks to boot. I think even she was dismayed by how dumb some of them were.

In the driveway, the machine slowly disintegrated as piece by piece it was taken apart. The machine had come from a factory, I’d finally concluded, and had once driven conveyor belts or a press. Now only its innermost bones remained, smeared with grease to keep the rust away. My father took the bigger parts with him to the gas station, where they sat in buckets of gasoline for days before he got around to cleaning them and bringing them back. The parts filled the workbenches in the garage.

Mother spent her days in the kitchen or watching TV in the living room. The twins were in day camp, some kind of extended programme offered by the school. They’d been taken out of classes when we’d moved, and the day camp was designed to help them catch up. It was in Riverview, and there was bussing provided. They hated it, but came home exhausted every night.

At nights Mother read and reread pocket-books. James Bond, by Ian Fleming, and
I, the Jury,
by Mickey Spillane. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and characters like Matt Helm lived in her mind every night. Sly and suave, a match for my Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. I think boredom had driven her back to those books. She didn’t seem inclined to make any friends in the neighbourhood – one of the things that hadn’t changed with our move.

With the weather warm and the trees budding new leaves, I spent most of my days out of the house. I’d meet up with Jennifer on the road beyond my driveway, arrangements we made the time before – we never phoned each other. She hadn’t come for supper after all, running through a list of excuses until I took the hint. Her mother was still in the hospital. A relapse – into what I wasn’t sure. She never mentioned her father, getting evasive and then short-tempered the few times I’d asked about him.

I wasn’t that curious, in truth. Jennifer existed for me like an isolated island, a secret one. It had already occurred to me that my parents wouldn’t approve of her. She smoked, took and sold drugs, didn’t wear a bra, wore miniskirts sometimes and too much makeup. Clearly what Mother’d call
a bad influence.

It would have been pointless to argue. I’d shared a joint and it did nothing for me. The only thing I liked about cigarettes was the taste they gave her mouth, the rich bite of her breath – and I knew that was a perverse thing, which made me like it all the more. But I didn’t plan on starting smoking. The truth was, I had stronger role models than Jennifer. Every heroic character in the books I read each night became my aspiration, and they were all I needed to balance things out.

I listened to the rotor tiller churning up dirt, thinking about the last time Jennifer and I had met. The farmhouse had warmed up – she’d taken off her t-shirt, slipped her hand into my pants while I played with her breasts. We went at it for what seemed like hours. I came so many times my crotch ached and by the end I felt completely used up. After a long while, it suddenly struck me that the whole thing had been incomplete. I wanted to even things out, do more for her, but I didn’t know where to start and she wouldn’t tell me.
‘It’s perfect right now, Owen,’
she’d told me.

Jennifer was visiting her mother today, then selling drugs to the high-schoolers behind the community centre in Riverview. Roland’s day was being spent helping his father plough up a quarter section. Lynk and his family had gone into the city to buy him a new minibike for his birthday.

There’d been too much going on at the Yacht Club the past couple of weeks, even during the weekdays. The parking lot seemed for ever full.

And beyond its ground, deep in the greening wood, the body waited, and waited. I wondered what it looked like now. The memory, while sharp, had slipped into a kind of dream world, where spring’s nasty thaw never ended, where the leaves never sprouted, where the beavers slept on and the crayfish never stopped feeding. A world of the past, and yet I knew it was out there still, a man lost to everyone but us.

In a way that made me feel responsible to him. He’d had a name once, and a life. He’d had dreams, fears, maybe even loves. Now, all that had been wiped away as completely as his own face. A man, a giant, a nobody. We owed him something – I wanted to give him back his face, his name, his history. I wanted to put him back in his rightful place. At the same time, he had come to exist only for us, and that made us more than what we’d been. He’d come to open our eyes, but they hadn’t been opened enough. Not yet. He had more to give us.

Even as I thought those thoughts, I felt uncertain, uneasy. We’d made a pact with a dead man – he could only speak to us with what he had left, and he now existed in each of us and like an infection he spread his silence through us, until we hardly ever spoke about him any more. And yet, I sensed that we all felt the words piling up behind that silence. One day the dam would break, I suspected.

I thought about working on my models, just to kill time. I looked at the ones I’d already completed, trying to work up some enthusiasm, but instead my eyes found the attic’s trapdoor.

The traps in the basement had killed two rats, but that had been all. Father told Mother that there’d probably been only those two, but of course I knew otherwise. There were more in the secret room above me.

You a suck, Owen?

I left my room, went downstairs to find a flashlight, the spare traps and a hammer. The war I’d promised weeks ago was finally going to begin.

*   *   *

I removed the nails in the panel, working slowly, methodically, making enough noise to let them know I was coming. I wanted them hiding while I set the traps.

The panel came away and I moved it to one side. The room beyond was lit by the two windows – as it was still morning most of the light streamed through the window facing the river. I saw no rats. I saw much more.

A desk sat against the half-circle window to my left, all in its own alcove. It was large, the wood dark, and on its dusty surface sat a pen-stand and a kerosene lamp. There was no chair. On the wall opposite me rose bookcases, crowded with books and chewed-up nests of paper.