Annabel (8 page)

“There’re lots of things Dad hasn’t seen, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. He’s never seen a giraffe. He’s never seen a hippopotamus. He’s never seen Bobby Orr in person. He’s never seen the Entire State Building.”

“Empire.”

“Has he?”

“It’s the Empire State Building, Wayne.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Could we get me a bathing suit like Elizaveta Kirilovna’s and not tell Dad?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Does that mean maybe?”

“I don’t think so, Wayne.”

“Even if I really, really, really, really want one and don’t mention it to him at all and he never finds out and I use my own money?”

“I don’t know if I can be complicit in a thing like that, Wayne.”

“What’s complicit?”

Jacinta put the lid back on the jar of Skippy peanut butter. “Complicit is when you agree to something in secret and hide it from another person.”

“Is it always bad?”

“It could be, if you hide something important from someone you love.”

“But it could be good too?”

“It could be something you do to save your life.”

“Could it be in between?”

“This is giving me a headache, Wayne.”

“Could it be when you hide something important from someone you love to sort of save your life in a way?”

“Wayne.”

“Because I really, really, really, really, really, really —”

“Stop it.”

“— want a bathing suit like Elizaveta Kirilovna’s. More than anything else in the world.”

“I’ve got something” — Treadway stood in the kitchen doorway draining his cup — “you might like to see.”

“What, Dad?”

Treadway put his cup in the sink and went mysteriously out of the room. “If you want to come, come.”

“But what is it?”

But Treadway would not tell. He had a way of enticing Wayne out of the house, into the woods, with unexplained beckonings. One time it was to fish smelt on the ice at Bear Island. Another time it was to see his cousin Lockyer tar the joints in a dory. Wayne knew that whatever it was this time would be outdoors, hot and windy. He knew it would take a long time. He knew that before it was over he would be wishing he had not come. Still, there was something irresistible about the way Treadway started on a mission. There was, along with the mystery of it, an intangible promise that Treadway would love and approve of Wayne if he came. By the end of most such outings, that promise had turned into disappointment. Maybe this time it would be different.

“Dad, where are we going?”

Treadway drove the truck past the Hudson’s Bay store, which was the westernmost building in the settlement, and into the woods to where began the road everyone called the trans-Labrador highway, though it was only half built and was, for the most part, a one-way dirt track. Dust rose, and no matter how tightly Wayne rolled his window, dust got into the truck, past his shut lips and eyes and into his tears and his teeth. He hated it.

“Are we going to the Penashues’ tent?”

The Innu had tents in the bush all along this road. They had used the route long before anyone thought of starting a road. Treadway was not the one who had brought Wayne to the Penashues’ tent. Jacinta and Joan Martin had walked there with him to drink tea with Lucy Penashue. The women had given Wayne black tea boiled on a tin stove and bread that Lucy had kneaded and lain on the stove and torn.

“No.” The truck lurched.

Wayne wanted a glass of water but did not tell his father he was thirsty. “Did you bring any fly-dope, Dad?” He touched behind an ear and his finger was covered in blood crust.

“DEET.”

Wayne got the DEET out of the glove compartment and rubbed some behind his ears, on his neck, around his hairline, and into his hair. He hated its stink.

“Want some, Dad?”

“We’re here now.”

The truck swerved into a huge cul-de-sac, a place in the road where men with backhoes were digging dirt out of the side of a hill and heaping it along the road for the grader. This road had to be rebuilt after every winter. One day, said the politicians in Newfoundland, it would cross Labrador into Quebec with two full lanes, and even farther ahead in their crystal balls they saw it paved, so no one would have to spend the summer rebuilding it again. But now flies and heat and dust made the men sweaty and filthy. They sat high in their machines and swigged water out of plastic bottles, and they ate bologna-and-mustard sandwiches that had earth handprints on the bread. It was noon, and the men were happy to see a kid, and they joked with Treadway about putting the kid on the job. Treadway was a man who, though silent in his town, laughed and joked with the road builders and with any men in a group. He was a man who was made to be part of a team working hard with dogs on the ice or machines in the dirt. An easiness came over him. He did not have to think about what to say. It was not one man talking here, but the pack. What one man said could easily have been said by another. They threw their voices back and forth in the sun like baseball players fooling around with the ball. Summers were short in Labrador, and there were not many days a man could fool around with his friends in his shirtsleeves and feel sweat all over his body.

“Hey,” said Clement Brake, “Treadway. Is the kid ready?”

Treadway nodded and sat on a clump of lambkill and took a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum out of his pocket and offered a stick to Wayne.

“Ready for what, Dad?”

“Sit down, son. That synchronized swimming you’re so fond of? Wait till you see this.”

Wayne sat beside his dad. The men got their backhoes in gear. They lurched out of their hollows and moved to the centre of the packed dirt.

“Hey,” shouted Clement Brake to Otis Watts, “Mister Music, please!”

“Right on,” yelled Otis, and he put Creedence Clearwater Revival on bust up in the cab. The backhoes lined up.

“What are they doing, Dad?”

Treadway chewed his gum. “Pay attention, son.” The backhoes lifted their arms. They tilted their shovels to the right, then to the left. They lowered their arms and raised them again. Wayne realized this was supposed to be in time to the music. The music was ahead of them, but that did not stop them. Half a beat behind the music the backhoes turned full circle, backed up, and lifted their arms up and down maniacally. Treadway chewed with his mouth open and stared appreciatively at the men. Wayne saw that he was half smiling in a way he had never seen his dad smile. His dad looked at him. Wayne realized he was supposed to smile back and he tried, but it was torture. He had grit in his eyes and he hated the backhoes. The song ended seconds before the machines stopped. Wayne saw the men’s teeth in their brown faces through the glass of each cab. They were so proud they couldn’t speak. Treadway waved at Otis, who had taken the lead. It was a high-five kind of wave, the kind Wayne never knew was coming.

“Well, son? Did you like it?”

Wayne knew he had to say “yeah” but he could not say it. He watched the crinkles around his dad’s eyes go away. His dad was chewing a toothpick now.

“You didn’t like it.”

Wayne could not protest this.

“The boys have been practising it all week. They’re pretty good too. I thought you’d like that. I got them to put on a special performance just for us.” He leant forward. “Go up and tell Otis you liked it.”

“Dad.”

“Just say you thought the boys did a good job. Come on.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Just come with me, then, while I say it.” Treadway pulled Wayne up by an elbow. Wayne followed him to Otis’s rig.

“Well, Otis, my son didn’t want to tell you this himself, but you know what he told me?”

“Dad.”

“He told me you’ve done an excellent choreographing job on that backhoe ballet.”

Otis threw down a banana and Wayne tried to catch it but it fell in the dirt. It had been bruised and now it was dusty too. Wayne picked it up and held it all the way back home. When he got home, he put it on the kitchen table and went to his room and waited until he heard his dad click the back door, then he slid the Eaton’s catalogue from under his bed and found the bathing suits. There were only two pages, and Wayne had circled the best suit of all. The others were plain: raspberry with a cream stripe, green with a yellow gusset, a lot of blue. Wayne had circled a flame orange suit with a necklace of oval sequins the colour of the eyes in a peacock feather: emerald and copper sulphate. The suit was twenty-six dollars, and he had saved up nineteen.

8

Wally Michelin

J
ACINTA DID NOT LISTEN TO
commercial stations or to talk shows where people called in about the politics of the day, the state of potholes, or ailments of their houseplants. She kept it tuned to a station that played Chopin and Tchaikovsky and Schubert.

“I know it’s not real company,” she told Wayne, “but the radio is something. It’s a comforting voice that lets you know you’re not entirely alone in the world. I need that.”

All children, she thought as she watched him, could be either girl or boy, their cheeks flushed, their hair damp tendrils. Wayne looked at her so trustingly she badly wanted to sit beside him, to look at him and honestly explain everything that had happened to him from birth. At nine, she thought, a child has a capacity for truth. By age ten the child has lengthened and opened out from babyhood, from childishness, and there is a directness there that adults don’t have. You could look in Wayne’s eyes and say anything true, no matter how difficult, and those eyes would meet yours and they would take it in with a scientific beauty that was like Schubert’s music.

Treadway had said he liked classical music when he and Jacinta were first married. And he had. He had felt that the radio graced the rooms in his house. He had liked the way music floated from one room to another through an open door. But Jacinta had it on all the time, and Treadway longed for silence as well. And in his house there was no silence. There was always that radio. Now he thought of it as an incessant banging on pianos and operatic foolishness, and it irritated him. But he did not ask her to turn it off. Treadway had his outside world, his magnificent wilderness, and he could go out in it any time it pleased him, and he also had restraint.

Because Treadway was not a man who could reach out to his wife, and because Jacinta had her own inner world, her memories of the city, and her tormented wish for a world in which her child did not have to be confined to something smaller than who he was, the two of them grew separate throughout Wayne’s childhood. Each grew more silent outwardly and more self-sufficient, but lonesome inwardly. From the outside they looked the way many middle-aged couples do. Both were models of sensible good behaviour. Treadway was considered such a good husband that many of Jacinta’s friends wished they had married someone like him instead of being fooled by wit, grace, passion, or a handsome face. Their own husbands did not bring in as much wood as Treadway did before he went away on his trapline. They did not come back home as early or as faithfully. They did not work so carefully on their skins and furs as he did, and therefore their work did not bring in as much money, and the money it did bring, they did not spend as honourably on their household needs, but bought cigarettes and brandy and beer. That their own husbands talked to them, and took them dancing, and were intimate with them in fun-loving and coded ways known only between the members of each couple was something the other women took for granted. They did not realize that Treadway and Jacinta had moved away from each other, though outwardly each held the golden thread that looked like a marriage.

For her part, Jacinta thought her loneliness her own fault. If she had been a wife who had not been brought up outside Labrador, she thought, perhaps she would have been more content to live in isolation under her own roof. So she suppressed her loneliness, and it resided in her heart along with the suppressed certainty she felt that, while Wayne was being brought up as a young boy, part of him was as feminine as she was. On days when Wayne was home sick from school, she played word games with him, and they sang and drew pictures of funny, random things together: trousers with spots, flying umbrellas, circus dogs they had read about in books, the pyramids of fruit Jacinta remembered in the shop windows of her childhood.

“Can we get Thomasina’s tin out?” Wayne asked when they had made pages of drawings. “I want to look at the bridges.”

Thomasina had sent a card showing a drawing of the old London Bridge. “They didn’t plan this one at all,” she wrote. “They just kept adding on a new section when they got around to it. It was so heavy the river had to fight to get around the pillars. It pushed through the arches so fast people crashed into the bridge in their boats.”

Many of the bridges on Thomasina’s postcards were incomplete. They had been destroyed by centuries or had vanished altogether and existed now only in the frail form of drawings on the postcards. Jacinta liked this. The fragments reassured her. Her own life felt full of incomplete pieces. She remembered the Bible story where Christ gathered fragments of crusts, small pieces of fish, and somehow made them whole again, enough to feed thousands. She liked thinking about the fragments more than she liked the story of the eventual miracle. There was something sacred about the fragments, about hunger, about unfinished bridges or bridges that had crumbled. She did not like the postcard that showed a Stone Age bridge in Somerset in England, where Neolithic men had dragged massive slabs onto boulders that still stood. There was something brutal about their permanence that made her feel afraid, and she wished Thomasina had not sent that card.

“Where’s the one from Turkey?” Jacinta loved that the broken Turkish arch was the oldest stone arch left standing in the world.

But the bridge Wayne loved was Italian. It was Florence’s Ponte Vecchio. “I didn’t know a bridge could have buildings on it, and shops full of gold.” He loved how there were people in the buildings right on the bridge, with light in the windows that reflected on the water. He had not known you could live on a bridge, but Thomasina wrote that you could.

“I want to live on a bridge like that,” Wayne told his mother. “I want to hang a fishing line out the window and catch a fish.”

“There was music on the Ponte Vecchio,” Thomasina had written. “I gave the violin player some coins and he played something he said he had composed.”

Jacinta sat in Treadway’s armchair with Wayne and they read to each other from copies of A. A. Milne and Lewis Carroll that Jacinta had brought to Labrador in the last corner of her trunk. To Jacinta all of this felt like what it must mean to have a daughter, but she kept this feeling pooled within herself, and she did not know what would cause the most harm: to let that pool become a free-flowing stream or to starve it of water gradually, so that one day it might dry completely.

In grade five Wayne became silent until spoken to because that was the way he learned to act with his father. His teachers relied on him to pull the string that displayed the world map, and to clean the filter on the tank that held the neon fish and fire newts. They did not know he did not like cleaning the filter, and if they knew he read novels inside his open math book they said nothing, because he did his homework and managed to get seventies on his tests. They did not know he adored a girl in the first row named Wally Michelin and would have done anything in this world to be her friend.

Wally Michelin had been born on the third of June, which was why her mother had named her after Wallis Simpson, whom Edward VIII had married on that date after renouncing his throne. Wally Michelin had announced this in kindergarten, when the teacher, Miss Davey, asked her where she got her name, and she had said it proudly, her hair black and her face the colour of cream with freckles all over it, and high walking boots on her like something out of an American catalogue. Wally Michelin had stomped through kindergarten and grades one and two with a certainty Wayne found fascinating. The day she got Coke-bottle glasses with black rims, such glasses immediately became a cool thing, not a thing to be laughed at. When she broke her arm falling off the slide in the playground, she had more signatures on her cast than anyone in Croydon Harbour had seen on a cast before. Her father had taken her on a trip to Quebec, and every time they stopped for pie all the waitresses and truckers signed it, and one of the signatures was in rainbow ink. Wally was the first one in the class to get mumps, chicken pox, and measles, and the only one to get whooping cough, which could kill you. She had a first cousin who lived in Boston, and her bologna sandwiches were always Maple Leaf brand. She was the champion marble player of Croydon Harbour Elementary and had an oversized green dragon and a rare black orange flare. Wayne was in love with her from the moment he heard her crumbly voice. So in love he wished he could become her. If there was a way he could make himself into a ghost without a body — a shadow — or transparent like the lures his father used to catch Arctic char, he would have done it. He would have transformed into his father’s lure, slipped under Wally Michelin’s divinely freckled skin, and lived inside her, looking through her eyes.

There was nothing pretty about Wally Michelin, but nobody noticed this for a long time. To Wayne it was apparent that nothing could make Wally doubt her own self, not even the advent of Donna Palliser.

Donna Palliser came to the school in the middle of grade five. She took one look around her and decided who had to be taken out and who could stay. She had a slow way of turning her head and giving a poisonous look to anyone she was taking out. Sometimes the look alone took the person out and that person retreated to the background, and sometimes Donna Palliser had to take action, which she did in the playground when none of the teachers was looking. She did not have a strong body; she bullied mentally, not physically, and the first and most important person she wanted to take down was Wally Michelin, who had been queen before Donna got there, and whom Donna could see was the kind of queen who ruled by natural nobility and not by cunning or cruelty or clever resolve. Wally was easy to take down because she did not care if she was queen or not. Wally was not going to move. The other girls would move. The other girls would swear allegiance to the new queen, and there would be a ranking order, and no one would care about Wally’s green dragon or orange flare, which they had genuinely admired. They would care about Hush Puppies crepe-soled Mary Jane shoes instead, and angora boleros, and having a ballpoint pen with pink ink, and Sweet Honesty perfume ordered from the Avon catalogue.

When Donna had been in town one month, she had a housewarming party and gave out invitations from the Details and Designs Emporium in Goose Bay. She gave invitations to everyone when Miss Davey was looking, but at recess time she told certain girls that they were not invited. All the boys were invited, but she was uninviting certain girls. She uninvited Gracie Watts, who wore the same wool sweater every day, and she uninvited Agatha and Marina Groves, the red-headed twins who were too fat to get through the door on the school bus and had to be brought to school in their father’s truck, and she uninvited Wally Michelin, telling her that her mother said she could invite only eighteen people and Wally was number nineteen.

Wayne did not even put his invitation in his bookbag. It was pink with
YOU ARE INVITED
embossed on the front, and it had scalloped edges. He slid it into his desk, and when the bell rang, he threw it in the garbage.

The party was in three days, and by the second day the girls in the class had reconciled themselves to the idea that it was all right that they had been invited and Gracie, the Groves twins, and Wally had not. They told each other, and themselves, that Gracie, the twins, and Wally did not care, and that anyone who cared had been invited, so it was all right. The whole class talked about Donna Palliser’s party, even the boys, because she told them her parents would not be in the rec room where the party was. The parents would be upstairs and were leaving Donna in charge, and there was going to be punch, which Donna said would have some real champagne in it from the back of her parents’ liquor cabinet.

Wayne had no intention of going to that party, but on the evening itself Treadway took him to the Hudson’s Bay store to get mousetraps. They were standing by the shelf discovering there was only one real mousetrap left when Roland Shiwack came up the aisle with his son Brent and picked up some number-two sandpaper and a couple of cans of WD-40.

“Hey, Treadway, how are things?”

“Dad.” Brent was in a hurry to get to the party and drink the punch.

“Pretty good.” Treadway looked disgustedly at the sticky mousetraps that were in plentiful supply. The mouse would stick to such a trap for twenty seconds and then you would never catch that mouse again.

“You got mice.”

“I don’t have mice. I’d like to make sure I don’t have them in the future, and I don’t want to have to get a cat.”

Treadway disliked cats. He disliked himself for implying to Roland that he might get one. He disliked Roland. The reason he disliked Roland was that Roland was a Knight of Columbus, and every time he saw Treadway he gave Treadway the secret sign, which Treadway knew but pretended he did not know. Graham Montague, who was not Catholic either, had showed it to him one night after a few beers, having learned it from God knows what traitor, but Treadway was damned if he was going to let Roland Shiwack know that. It irked him that Roland did it every time, that he never let up, that Roland had some kind of childish obsession.

“You can have one of our cats,” Roland said heartily. He was a pleasant, friendly man who had no idea Treadway felt the way he did. “Melba’s got a dozen of them in the basement. Our cat had kittens again.”

“Dad,” Brent said. “I’m gonna be late.”

“He’s going to a party,” Roland told Treadway.

“I see.”

“Wayne must be going to the same one. Over at Pallisers.”

“Yes, he is.”

“No, I’m not, Dad.”

Treadway ignored his son. “It’s probably time, then, to go home and get ready.” And he turned away from the Shiwacks.