Anna From Away (25 page)

He’d felt angry with Anna: he didn’t want to be pushed and pulled, or tangled in a woman’s affairs, not after Rosaire. It bothered him that she wouldn’t get rid of the stuff quick, that it was there in his grandmother’s house, tucked away in his mother’s trunk. It was help she asked for, not advice.

If she were not pretty, if she were small or mean or a bad neighbour, would he turn her in? Probably not. He couldn’t rear up like a minister and tell the woman what to do. She didn’t expect that of him besides, she wouldn’t have had him cut open the bale. He was not high-minded about this drug business, had not paid it much notice except when it was in the news, its lurid causes and effects, but then the local rumours began, people at Sandy Morrison’s old house near the wharf, cars in and out a lot late at night, party noise, tires tearing gravel. Willard going nuts, about them, about his dog, still. But the drugs had seemed to
come at
them here from away, and that was part of the problem: tied into movies and the TV, and those caught up in it didn’t care anymore about their own people, they answered to criminals way off somewhere. It made local men act differently than they might have once. Bootlegging liquor, the profit was here in their own hands, or in later years they bought booze at the Liquor Commission and resold it for double to thirsty men caught short on a Saturday night or Sunday. It all stayed here, the money, such as it was, and nobody pulled guns, they didn’t act like gangsters. God, in the old days, men were working all the time, the money was terrible but they worked like hell. If a man was not working, there was a dangerous hole to fill. But the hard fellas were hard differently now, with the drugs sometimes they just didn’t give a damn about anyone’s life. The stakes went beyond your name, who you were and who you knew, what family you belonged to. But here in what was left of Cape Seal? Hard to imagine what they called a Drug Problem. Even so, he had to wonder. Anna’s bundle didn’t drop out of the sky.Murdock had seen drunkenness all his life, after all, seen it good and seen it crazy, been whacked out himself at times, woken up face down in dirt. But he’d sung with it too, danced under it, drawn out some good talk he would never hear again. It was just what you knew, a man in the country, you got half cut and you let whatever happened happen. But this other stuff they lit up, sniffed up, put into pills, he couldn’t see any good in it.

Before last night, except for a fella he’d traded moonshine to offering him a smoke of marijuana he declined, saying, Whatever it does I’m too old for it, he had never
seen
drugs. Now he’d seen it in her hands, smelled it, heard her talk about it. Upstairs now, under his uncle’s moth-holed suit, shiny in the knees and elbows. That bed she slept in he had slept in many times. Her bare feet padded over the same floor. The white iron bedstead looked more frail than he remembered.

Seeing her suddenly on the shore on a warm afternoon, stepping slowly from rock to rock, searching for objects—that could lift him up, some days.… He had come to like that, having Anna not far away. Now it was like a strange man had moved in with her and it gave him a knotted feeling in his gut. Had Livingstone, damn him, gotten to her somehow?

Her naked in that drawing drifted into his mind more than once, he had to admit. Not just that it was clearly her, unclothed, but that she had done it there in that room where his grandmother used to sit, she had stood there undressed in the window light long enough to make that picture of herself. In an ordinary day. What did she get from such a likeness? A drawing was always for somebody else, wasn’t it? Maybe not. He wondered, as he sometimes had with Rosaire, what it would be like if he could, for even a few moments, see things exactly the way she did, in the atmosphere of her own mind, what brought and kept her here, made her what she was.He was disgusted that he had tightened up in front of her, that the whole affair had shaken him some. He had no cause to be righteous about what these drugs did or why they were liked so, he knew that. Alcohol was not soda pop, if you overdid it you paid a price, long-term or temporary—look at poor Connie, for God’s sake—and the word “high” meant the same thing everywhere, it didn’t matter what got you up there, you were glad for it, whatever worked would do. He understood that, that didn’t trouble him. But with booze, everybody seemed to know the rules. Who was going to die for that? Maybe the spaces it had to fill were bigger than they used to be.

The new thwart fit snug and he fastened it with brass screws. This boat had good lines, she would sit in the water sweetly. A smuggler’s boat, he’d bet money on it, you could haul three or four of those bales in her, and they’d probably got who knew how many ashore before she swamped. They might have lost more than one over the side, washed ashore maybe other places along these waters, people puzzling over them, then wrestling with what they’d found. Some would turn it in, some wouldn’t, if they knew there was money to be had. Hard to blame them, here cash had always been scarce. Nevertheless, he’d never know for sure. You couldn’t connect any of this to MacDermid’s, not this boat either, nothing remained there but what had always been. Maybe just as well for Anna Starling.

Red Murdock flicked his cigarette outside and turned the boat over to start scraping the hull. He’d been about to cast the boat back out to sea, shove it off to sink somewhere. But here it was, he would make it good anyway, respectable, paint it a fresh clean white. Trim the gunnels in blue. Blue was Rosaire’s colour, blue was her eyes. He said her name aloud and all of her appeal seemed to rush his heart, staggering him for a moment, so deeply did he want her.

A
NNA HEARD SWIMMERS
, they seemed further off than the shallow cove behind the point. Their voices and play were comforting, protective. She wouldn’t swim today. She sat down on a large, flat stone at the water’s edge.

The tide had left kelp, cinnamon and dark yellow, like bands of thick, shed skin. Swells, faint shadows on a metallic sea, broke softly and fell back, crackling through the shoreline gravel, small, polite versions of the waves of last week. Civility would do. Calm. The slow rustle and slide of stone.

There was the red boat again, the one she’d noticed yesterday, meandering along the channel, stopping here and there. They weren’t fishing, the two men, and they didn’t seem to be heading in or out, but they did cast a heavy line, pull something up, toss it back. Her binoculars were in the kitchen but she thought that underneath their orange life jackets she could see khaki, and she had never noticed a fisherman here in a life jacket. The red boat rose and fell lazily, like the afternoon, as if the boat were merely part of its motion, a daub of colour against the bluffs of Black Rock Head toward which it now turned, cutting a wake.

Would Livingstone want to know about it? Might be a Mountie boat. Too late? Too bad. She would never tell him, not anything, even if she knew where he was. If that dirty white boat was his, it was nowhere in these waters today.

She fished in her jacket for the cigarettes Red Murdock forgot the other night, two of which she had smoked. She lit a third, certain she wouldn’t crave them again. There was no reason to suppose any link between that boat and herself, between what they might be searching for and what she’d hidden in her house. Had they suspected, they would be on her shore right now, wouldn’t they? But they never even looked her way. She turned the cigarette packet over in her hand, read the stark white-on-black warnings, English one side, French the other, “strokes” and “heart disease,” then ”
des
maladies du coeur.
“ Ailments of the heart. No wonder she’d quit.

The red boat was now just that, someone fishing in the distance perhaps or cruising around. The sun had turned the water blue and friendly. Her shoulders were warmed, her hair. Red Murdock hadn’t been around since they stuffed the bale into that heavy old trunk with “S. MacL.” stencilled on it. Was he wary of her now, afraid to be involved? The sea looked benign, everything—water, cliffs, the low table of Bird Island. Flat calm, levelled. Maybe she was in this alone.

Anna closed the card to Chet without adding another line. She could not sustain a greeting card voice, the neutral cheeriness she’d opened it with. Too tense, restless. She didn’t know what she wanted to write to anyone at home, on the back of a pictorial scene, the cliffs of Cap Rouge, up the west coast where she would love to run off to for an afternoon, if she did not have something at home that begged for her attention.

Behind her, the sand dissolved into the golden summer grass of the point, shivering with wind. In it pieces of antlered driftwood crouched, prehistoric, they startled her sometimes, skeletal, hunkered there like crazy animals. Driftwood could fool you—a duck at the edge of the pond? A heron frozen in the shallows? Some unknown creature poised in the sea oats? She’d done many sketches of them. Not today.

There was her home above the pond, up the small hill, the mountain rising beyond it in a faint, cool haze. She felt differently about it from here: as if she were taking in a piece of the landscape, a faded red house with a steep-pitched roof, one of its white shutters torn away in the storm. Who lives
there?
she might ask, and what does she do? A woman from away, or a certain man on the beach, might answer, She is hiding a few thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana somewhere in her house.

Long swells that Murdock called rollers had arisen, as if some great vessel had passed unseen behind the horizon, the waves spread higher and louder through the stones. Surf had roamed high, scattering stone and wood far back into the rough sand, joining old trees and limbs and trunks, as far as the pond where, bone bare, they tangled in the iron-tinted water. She’d thought an afternoon like this could only ease her mind, weather she loved.

Not quite. She shaded her eyes toward the old wharf a quarter-mile west, just visible jutting out into the strait. The other night she’d heard whooping at a bonfire on the shore below. Kids, teenagers? Faces firelit, moving in and out of the flickering light. Willard’s enemies? Hers? They’ve got the devil in them, Willard had said. But she’d seen no stranger on her shore even though she had often looked for one.

A
NNA OPENED
the closet trunk and teased out a single flower top, like lifting jewellery from a treasure chest, then sealed the bale up again. With the curtains drawn, amused that she could still do it so deftly, she slowly rolled a joint in a small square of tracing paper, twisting it tight in her fingers. She lit it with a kitchen match she struck on the bed frame. Sweet weed, despite the harsh paper, as sweet to the taste as the point’s grass to the eye. Primo. Two deep hits and she tamped it out in a Mason jar lid, spread the curtains wide and sat in the rocker, rocking gently, lulled, smiling. Something pleasantly illicit about being indoors like this on a lovely afternoon. Like sex with hot sun at the window. She should get back into the dog drawing while she had this vision, this piercing, intense recall.Red Murdock’s cat crossed the field below, freezing suddenly as a goldfinch shot from a thistle bud, then resumed its deceptively casual stroll, its grey fur soon diffused in the weeds. That cat would never come to her, she tried to entice it with tidbits in her most coaxing voice, but it would watch her from a distance calmly, unafraid, something or someone else on its mind. She should get a cat, she’d love the company, a warm bundle of fur in her lap. But then, how long was she to remain here? Was that a question that was opening, or closing?

She fixed her eyes on a sailboat cutting past the point, heeled over in the same wind lifting her curtains, pulling in the yells of children at the swimming beach, their exuberance remembered from her childhood, though she played only on the cold edges of the Pacific. Languid in the warm room, she closed her eyes. Stony grass, oh, yes. The Blue-Eyed Elf was upon her, denizen of her own tales, dancing in her mind. Maybe Red Murdock had a version of that sprite, out of some excess of his youth, underneath his reticence. But it wouldn’t be old Blue-Eyes, those ice-blue marbles under his brow, helping her juggle her own, soaring, nostalgic high, stitching past into present. No sense to the sequence of memories, one tumbled into the next, yet each one made crystalline sense, sheer sensuous clarity its own truth, it could put her
there
or
here
in a wink.

Chet. What things had he spoken only to her, never to Alicia Snow? Maybe that his given name, Chester, he hated, it reminded him of a character out of a cartoon or a comedy, a sidekick, a bumpkin? In college he insisted he be called Chet because there his boyhood no longer hung like a shirttail, he was free to clothe himself as he wished, to be hip.
Chet
had the musicians’ cachet—Chet Baker, Chet Atkins, it had that curt, plosive sound that was mildly aggressive and amiable at the same time, like Che or Chico, whereas Chester was more like a piece of furniture in a middle-class den. This he confessed to Anna after they fell in love. He told her he’d grown to fit the name anyway, so where was the harm, the phoniness?

Pot brought him clearly into her mind, but not now with that old affection. She could easily conjure, perhaps too easily she now realized, embarrassing incidents that Chet dismissed with a laugh (I passed out in the Warners’
bedroom?
I hope Brenda was in there!). But maybe that’s what saved him, what allowed him to accept his desires and actions, a kind of delusional irony she was not capable of. His sense of humour when he was drunk or stoned was always heavy with irony, often directed at her and which he barely remembered later on. When she put him down with a remark, he would reply, Touché, Ironista!

Irony, so much a part of their intellectual era, hers and Chet’s, but when it infected a married life, it could become destructive, could absolve the ironist or the ironista of mutual involvement, all give and no take, a contest over who could slip in the last stab before bedtime. They had seen their good grad school friends Paula and Mitch take turns nicking each other with words, like razors, subtlety was not appreciated any longer, their tone with each other got heavier, even seething, Mitch could barely cross a room without an ironic comment. Then Paula had a fling with an older man, a painter and mutual friend whose attraction to her was intense and sexually refreshing, and when Mitch learned of it, he pulled from their walls one winter day the man’s bad paintings and tried to set them on fire in a broken-bricked barbecue in their overgrown yard. But he failed to get a good flame going, and failed too to recall that he had only recently ended a sexual affair himself, not out of morality or remorse but waning interest, a subject that Paula, before acting on her own feelings for the painter, had been tolerantly ironic about. She came home to Mitch standing there in the cold beside a heap of canvases, their scorched abstractions somehow more engaging now, his angry breath visible but looking himself merely weary, an empty matchbook in his hand. Paula didn’t say anything to him that February afternoon, she had no irony available. They split up the following year, loathing each other with a passion nearly equal to their former love, even the good times had been sullied, blackened, revised. Grounds for divorce—excessive irony, then a lack of it? Anna was glad at least that she and Chet, their ironic stances aside, had not descended into acidic war: he had laughed it off, Mitch’s indignant attack on the lover’s artwork, how the man’s penchant for melodrama obliterated his sense of justice, Come on, Mitch, if it was fair for you, it was fair for Paula.