Every Little Thing (9 page)

“I counted zero, but she got up to a dozen before we hit the highway.”

Lee flung his head back and hacked out a laugh. Allie changed the topic. “Lee and I have an arrangement. He sells my photos at his table on Saturdays and Sundays, and we split the profits at the end of the month.”

Lee was nodding along. He nodded a lot. He was staring at Cohen, and his eyelids were a crusty and sore-ish shade of red: he had vulture eyes and they were picking Cohen apart. She had a hand on Lee's shoulder, the other hand arranging photos on Lee's table, taking so many at a time from a box at her feet.

Cohen, taken off guard by the way Lee was visually dissecting him, turned to Allie for an escape route, “Do you want me to grab the rest of the photos out of the trunk?” Allie shot him a look, widened eyes, and shook her head, once, quickly, while Lee wasn't looking. Cohen took the cue to play stupid.

“No, this is all the photos. And listen,Lee, you don't mind if this Cohen fellah joins us for lunch, do you? Because I can leave him in the car while you and me eat if you want?”He loved how Allie could be around people. Her humour and compassion never separate from each other.

“We'll make that call at lunch,” Lee told her. “He's not too chatty or anything, is he?”He looked at Cohen, nodding again, “I swear I literally stuffed a sock in her last boyfriend's mouth once, to shut him up. A dirty sock too, right off my foot.” He laughed and tapped at his right boot. A sprinkle of dust fell to the ground. His shoelaces untied. “Kidding, of course. But her last boyfriend was so boring I had to call an ambulance one time; I told them to come quickly because I was being bored to death.” He paused, waiting for them to laugh at him. He was that type. “Jesus! I mean, who dominates lunchtime conversation with the details of some chemistry thesis he's writing?” He waved a hand through the air and Allie laughed, almost embarrassed for having exposed him to her ex. “You don't talk science, do you, Colin?”

He didn't know if that was a joke or if he was being asked, and he didn't know if he should correct him about the name.
Cohen, not Colin
. “No. Not as a rule. Or at length. And I'd use layman's terms and not be boring about it—”

Lee looked at Allie with faked shock, “Did he just call me a lay person!”

“No, I meant if—”

“He's joking,Cohen.”

Laughing, “Tell him to work on his sense of humour and he can join us for lunch. Now go on, get, you're blocking off my table!”

“Okay, we'll get, but make sure you sell at least one of my photos, so I can buy some lunch, hey?”

“Ah, go on, your boyfriend is buying lunch for us. Isn't that right, Colin?”

“Cohen.”

“Wha?”

“Never mind.”

“Just kidding, kid. Lunch is on me. Any days you two come out and visit my lonely ass.”He nodded a lot as he said it. Always nodding as if someone was constantly asking him
yes or no
and he hated to disagree.

“So what is it you do, Colin? You're not a
boring-job-for-the-good- paycheque
kind of guy, are you?”

“He's a birder, like you! He works at a bird…museum. You're like, best friends, and you don't even know it yet! Cohen wrote a masters' thesis about seabird conservation.”Allie turned to Cohen then. “And Lee here has protested against the gillnets set out for fish. Because they kill deep-diving seabirds.” She turned back to Cohen, in case he didn't understand. “The birds dive deep for fish,” she enmeshed her hands together, “and then get caught up in the nets and drown. They never come back up for another breath of air.”

“Good man,” Cohen said.

“I don't know about that.” Arms crossed, looking down, shaking his head diagonally. “No one listens to me bitching. And the frustrating part is no one should have to protect a supposedly
protected area
like Bird Rock. Anyway, like I said, go on, get, you're blocking off my table.”He waved his hand around to insinuate a mob of people were trying to get a look at his goods. The street was empty. Entirely empty. Tumbleweeds in Western movies empty.

“C'mon, Cohen.” She tugged at his arm. He went soft whenever she touched him. He felt pathetic about that. Like she could sense that inner trembling. He bent to tie a shoelace as Allie stepped into her car.

With Allie out of earshot, he said to Lee, “We're not actually together together,Allie and me.”

“Wha?”

“You keep calling me her boyfriend. A little awkward.”

Lee raised an eyebrow. Just one. His eyes were the colour of blue Bic pens. “I think she's waiting for you, kid.” And when Cohen turned around to walk away,Lee said, “You mean to tell me you'd say no to a girl like that?” He nodded to Allie in the car, buckling in.

“Well, no, just that we're not, like...we've only just met—”

“What are you, five years old or something? Do yourself a favour and win her over, Colin. It can't be that hard. Like I said, her last boyfriend was a dimwit, dull as beige. And her bright as yellow. She clearly doesn't expect much from a guy. And that dipshit boyfriend she had left her when trying to console her about her mother's cancer got old and boring. Like a proper dickhead would. Now go on, kid, she's had the car running for two minutes now. I'm choking on her exhaust here, and you're blocking off my table. Go!”

“My name's Cohen, by the way. Not Colin.”

“Whatever. You know who I'm talking to, don't you?”

He picked a knife back up off the table and started whittling a fresh block of wood into another lighthouse.

COHEN GOT IN the car, and she apologized.

“People around here sort of buy things off Lee, like his little carvings he does, to help him out. He's tried stained glass too. He doesn't
need
need the money, but he sort of does. Half the time, people don't display what they buy off of him. In their houses, I mean. He pretends not to notice when he visits them.”

She was talking with her head down, afraid Lee was a lip-reader. “I pretty much
give
Lee a bunch of photos to sell every month. There's a lot of sales to tourists in the summer, and he needs the money more than I do. But the rest of those photos in the trunk are for The Craft Shoppe.”

She lifted her head back up, looked at Lee, and put it back down, fastening her seatbelt. “Anyway, if Lee offers to buy lunch,” she said, rooting a hand around in her jeans pocket, “tell him it's on you.” She stuck a twenty and a ten-dollar bill in his hand. “That's for my and Lee's lunch. He'd never let me pay, but he'll take your money no problem.” She laughed about that, staring back at Lee in the rear-view mirror as she drove towards The Craft Shoppe.

“He's an interesting guy. Sweet and witty. He, ah…He was also a prisoner of war. For
years
. In the Philippines. Can you imagine?
Years.
Starving and wasting away like a stray cat. Malaria and everything. Watching your friends die or be killed. Besides all that, when it was over, and he came home from the war, he couldn't find his parents. His father's job had him moving around a lot by necessity. He says he figures they assumed he died, but I assume they were never that close. That there was some tension there. A story I'll never know. I mean, sure, it wasn't like these days where you can find people online, but still. You'd try hard enough, and you'd find them, wouldn't you? No one loses their
son
. After the war, Lee ended up here, in Grayton of all places, even though he's from The States.”

She'd finished her story and looked at him like he should be impressed by it. A slow nod, pressing her chin into her chest. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes. He looked out his window, following the sagging U of power lines between telephone poles as Allie drove down the street. She was so intent on the road when she drove, so alert and paranoid, that he wanted to yell
boo
.

“There's a fantastic hike up by Bird Rock. Wanna do that, once I drop these photos off? Before lunch?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“There's petrels and razorbills out there. And those cute little dovekies. And I saw a cormorant out there once too.”

“Must have been a double-crested—”

“Aren't you impressed?”

He looked at her, waiting for an explanation.

“I mean, aren't you impressed that I like birds so much?”

His face folded into sarcastic grin. “Cormorants, hey?Why are women so impressed by big birds?”

“Grow up,” she said, and she hit him. “But. Did you know there's actually a bird called a blue-footed
Booby
? I mean,
booby
, c'mon, right?”

“Actually, there's three boobys, in the genus
Sula
, and the term,
booby
, is innocent. It means clumsy, in Portuguese or something, because boobys look clumsy on land.”

“Who the
fuck
knows something like that?”

“Now who's immature?”

It was a forty-five-minute walk out to Bird Rock from the parking lot, but Allie said she knew a shortcut through the woods. Five minutes into her shortcut, the spaces between the trees were getting closer and closer until they had to sidestep through crusty and closely spaced spruce. The pokes from serrated sticks weren't far off jabs from knives. Sometimes they'd have to duck under immoveable branches. They played limbo under one branch, and Allie won.

Every couple of steps, he'd turn around and see her taking a picture of something. Sometimes him when he wasn't looking. The snaps of her shutter. He liked the way she'd point the camera at something like it was the only thing on earth. And the way she'd pace around a thing, trying to find the right composition and light. Her tongue sometimes bit between teeth. At one point, he turned around and she was knelt into a patch of bright pink wildflowers, her camera in them like a bee. Without turning to face him, she shouted out an inquisitive, “Are these ones rare or anything?” not looking at him as she snapped the picture.

“Bird's eye primrose. Not common, not uncommon.”

“What kind of answer is that,” she said, turning to face him as she launched herself up from her kneeling.

The army of branches had already hitched Cohen's shirt twice, as warning, before a third one took action and cut the back of his neck deeply enough that Allie winced when he showed her and asked her how bad it was. No words, just a wince, and she offered him some tissues from her purse.

“Are you
sure
about this detour? I mean, maybe we should turn around. Unless...you have a machete in your bag and want to clear the way.”He put a hand up,
Look at all these trees
. He turned around and Allie was right there; she brought her lips to his. Put a hand on his face to make the kiss count.

She pressed her body into him, leaned hard, so he'd know to lay down on the ground, and she crawled on top of him. There were tufts of lichens crunching under his head; twigs like dull forks in his ass and elbows, and she was wrestling his pants off, impatient with his belt. She left his shirt on, and scooped a hand up her skirt to shed her underwear.

Her skirt curtained over his knees and belly, rising and falling, up and down. And then she took it all off: all of her bare there in front of him. His hands on her hips. She fell forward, planted her hands on the forest floor; her hair dangling over him like a tunnel blocking out everything but her face. That smell of cinnamon or cloves: the first time he'd been close enough to notice it. She reached down and put one hand to use on her clit, finished first, everything tightening, that infinite exhale, as her hand, under his armpit, grabbed a fistful of dirt. She laughed, as she rolled over, like there was something funny about it. She knelt beside him, naked still, and did something fast with her hands, something practiced and to the point, that finished him off in a minute.

There was nothing awkward about it as they dressed, and she was surprisingly nonchalant about being naked in broad daylight: the shadows of tree branches flickering over her body like TV static. She stepped into her orange panties; let the elastic snap hard as she took her thumbs away. He had his arms wrapped around her before she'd gotten her bra back on, for a waltzing, swaying bear hug. He ran a finger up her spine, ran it back down. The bumps and ridges of her backbone drumming through him.

She laid her head sideways onto his shoulder. Whispered, “What?”

“You're...I mean. That was...I—”

“Shh!”

“That last bit. What was—”

She was smiling when she broke free and tossed him his shorts. “Let's not talk about it.”

They hiked back to the trail and walked out to Bird Rock with their arms slung around each other like they'd been together for years.

FILLING
SPACES

THREE MONTHS IN that jail and Allie hadn't visited. Called. Sent a letter. There was supposed to be that much. A phone call, after the trial: her on the other end fidgeting with the phone cord. Sorry as hell and blubbering with remorse. A good person would have set the record straight with the police that night, and every night, that kept him awake.

The judge had sentenced him to six months, and he wondered, as the gavel cracked down, if six months in prison meant 180 days or 183. And if he'd get out two days early because February was part of his sentence, and February only has twenty-eight days. Being sentenced that day in court, hearing
guilty
, sitting on that stone-hard stool, had felt like standing in freeway traffic and seeing a transport truck barreling towards him. Except the truck never hit him, and that unique split second of panic lasted longer than a split second. Longer than a day.

They weren't allowed pens in their cells, but a calendar was fine. He'd scratch the days off the glossy pages with a cracked bit of cement, small as a penny, he'd found in the corner of his cell. It was a satisfying midnight ritual that gave some small purpose to his day. Then he'd go stare, out that tiny window, at that tiny pond, waiting to be tired. And by the time he was tired, he was more hungry than he was tired, and robbed of another night's sleep on account of the aching hunger. Rocking back and forth, tossing and turning, worried about mortgage payments now that he was out of a job. His RRSPs could only get him through a year.