Given (15 page)

Vernal put off returning to work until the last week of October, when he had to make his first appearance for Deacon Maplethorpe. He arranged to take the ferry to the mainland and fly home a week later.

The current slogan at the Christian vegetable stand read, “I Brake For Jesus”, and reminded Vernal that the hearse's brake shoes needed adjusting, and he asked me to book an appointment at Chubb's. When we reached the ferry landing I let Vernal out, blew him a kiss goodbye, and drove back to town where I stopped by the Snipe to grab a coffee before going shopping.

“What's the difference between erotic sex and kinky sex?” asked Marg, before I'd taken a seat.

“Erotic sex you use a feather, kinky sex you use the whole chicken,” she said, when I told her I didn't know. I glanced over at the board. Today's Special was Philosophical Chicken.

“Basically it's your chicken curry with your hardboiled eggs in it,” Marg explained, as a couple of sorry-looking tourists bundled in out of the rain.

“They must have Christmas here, at least,” I heard the woman say, looking mournfully at the permanent-fixture tree.

“It's supposed to make you ask, which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Marg said; I eyed the couple dressed identically in yellow slickers with yellow gumboots and hats to match. The woman carried a child bundled up in a bright blue tarp.

“It makes you think, don't it?” Marg answered.

The woman looked at Marg and asked if she was open. I could hear the frustration in her voice. Marg jerked her head towards the sign in the window but the woman said she had learned on this island that “Open” could mean anything. Marg, who always brightened at the prospect of new victims, said this was as close to being open as she was ever going to get. The man took off his rain hat and shook his head, spraying a halo of water. “We finally got that rain,” Marg added.

The two huddled together as far away from the door (open, as always, to let the flies out) as they could, looking as if they expected to be served. I overheard the man say no one had ever heard of the word
mañana
on this island, “because people here don't understand that kind of urgency.” The child began to fuss.

“A baby, eh?” said Marg, as the woman got out a bottle to make formula.

“He's almost three and he's still on the bottle,” the woman said.

“Who isn't?” Marg replied. “Every guy on this island's weaned himself off his wife's tit onto the bottle.” I took a sip of my coffee that tasted like tea. Marg asked if we knew why Jesus crossed the road, and the man in the yellow slicker said, “to get to the other god damned side where it wasn't god damned raining?”

His wife nudged him. “Take it easy,” she said.

Anyone who knew Marg would have answered her question with a simple “I don't know”, even if they did. It was just easier.

“He was nailed to a chicken,” Marg said.

The couple looked more despondent by the minute. The man asked Marg for the directions to the town where “that movie” had been shot. His wife said he hoped to photograph native islanders in their natural habitat.

Before Marg could think of a reply, I told them they should stay on the Bend, the only road you could take, that it was a half hour drive, unless you got lost. The man said, “what do you have to do to get a drink around here
?”
and his wife told him to take it easy, again, that as he could see nothing was exactly speedo. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”

“Any chance of getting a hot drink, something to warm us up?” she asked Marg, trying to sound as if it made no difference to her one way or the other.

“I got vodka,” said Marg. “You want something stronger, you get it up at the Brew.” She waved her hand at the window in what could have been any direction. “The church on the left as you're leaving town?” She looked at her watch. “You'd better haul ass up there though. They close at noon — for an hour. Most everything around here does.”

The couple discussed what to do and decided they'd stay and have regular coffee and a couple of the muffins, solid as doorknobs, that sat on the counter besides the TIPS jar, and a note saying “Help Put Talene Thru Collage.”

“They'll have to be to go,” Marg said. “We close over the lunch hour, same's everybody else.” She paused when she saw the blank looks. “For
lunch
,” she added, shaking her head, as if to say some people had to have
everything
spelled out for them.

Dis here little pig jet ta market,

Dis here little pig be layin back in da cut,

Dis here little pig had roasted beef,

Dis here little pig had jack shit,

Dis here little pig said, “Yo! Yo!

Ah can't find ma muhfo way home!

I had hesitated before the meat counter at Natural Lee's when I heard Rainy reciting her favourite nursery rhyme. I stepped back and she appeared, standing between me and an overkill of chicken. Her whole body, surrounded by a fine red mist, had collapsed, like her veins. She looked like a ghost whose body had been sucked inside out. Her head had become horribly misshapen, and she had six fat syringes jammed into her neck, as if to keep her brain connected to the rest of her body. She had pierced her eyebrows with so many silver rings she looked like a walking shower curtain rod. Her once brown skin was now the colour of burnt toast, and she was crying, thick brown tears that stank of vinegar as they trickled out of her eyeballs. Blood oozed from her neck where the needles pierced her skin.

When she turned to face me her eyes remained fixed in their sockets, the way a doll's eyes do, then Frenchy materialized next to her. She had an elongated neck, and her wiry black hair, which she'd been proud of because it blunted the matron's scissors each time they forced her to get a haircut, had been burned off. Frenchy's birthmark, floating like a cumulus cloud across her cheek, (she called it her “ugly spot”) had been charred until it had become almost the same colour as the rest of her skin. If you looked hard enough you could still see the shadow of it, the way you sometimes glimpsed the new moon holding the old moon in her arms.

A boy — hard to tell his age because of the hood of blood covering his face — had his arms cinched around her leg; wherever Frenchy walked she dragged him behind her. He was covered, from head to toe, in blood, and a feeding frenzy of flies.
This be the HE
Frenchy said, picking a bag of Fritos from a display, and tucking it under her shirt. When she spoke her bottom lip spilled down over her chin exposing her gums, teeth, and her tongue that she could no longer control.

I decided not to buy chicken after all and wheeled my buggy into a ransacked SALE aisle. Frenchy hobbled beside me, talking non-stop as if we were two old mothers whose lives had taken different directions, coming together over the last of the year's school supplies and Halloween novelty items, and the difficulties we had both faced raising children.

This how it be when your kids die first,
Frenchy said.
When it your turn they come back and hang widju.

I pushed my buggy towards the produce section, trying to guess what else Frenchy might filch — possibly the
Ghostbusters
lunch kit, dented on one side, or the box of Crayolas that had been opened and returned, for Rainy, who liked to draw. The damaged boy trailed after her, wanting everything he saw and striking himself in the face each time Frenchy told him
no
. Getting your dead kid back to raise for the whole of eternity, Frenchy said, was the worst part about being dead; the best part was you never had to be in a hurry. You could take your time getting anywhere because you'd already reached your goal. Being dead meant you got to enjoy the things you'd never had time for while you were too busy living your life.

PART FOUR

That's what ghosts are . . . spirits living inside you. Your
eye is like a movie projector, shining them out.
— Darcey Steinke,
Jesus Saves

L
IVING WITH
R
AINY AND
F
RENCHY ON THE
R
OW
had been, in comparison, easy: we had separate cells so we weren't on top of one another, and we didn't have to share a bathroom. Now Rainy had become afraid of the dark, and insisted the lamp be left on beside my bed at night, as if light were enough to ward off loneliness.
Dark creep me out,
she said,
make my head stand on end.

Frenchy, on the other hand, with her see-in-the-dark eyes, shrank from any kind of light. When I tried to compromise by switching off my bedside lamp and lighting a candle instead, Frenchy said the sound of the flame hurt her ears, and drew away from me into one of the room's dark corners. She could barely tolerate daylight. During the days she took to wearing my aviator shades that she had coloured over with a black Crayola to further prevent any vestiges of light from seeping in, but if she woke in the night and blew out the candle beside my bed Rainy would wake, too, and start shrieking. (Back on the Row Frenchy used to call Rainy a human tuning fork. When she struck a high note hard enough, she could break bulletproof glass.)

Their presence, every minute of the night and day at the farm, was yet another test — a daily reminder of what Vernal had said when he decided to tell me he'd had a vasectomy. He couldn't bear the idea of having children because all they would ever be able to fulfill in him would be his worst fears. He said that with Brutus and me in the house his life had started to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat, and he couldn't make room for anyone more. After a while I felt him begin to push the rest of the world out — first his friends, then his family, then everyone he'd ever loved, and finally, even me. “There's only room in the lifeboat of your life for one person,” he told me. “You have to choose yourself.”

I discovered later that Vernal had stolen this from a novel he'd been reading, the way he got most of his feelings, secondhand, through characters in books, but this was Vernal's power — to save himself — and also one of our irreconcilable differences. (After I gave birth, Angel had called forth my own capacity to love: that was
his
power. I would no longer choose myself, to save myself, that is. I went down and the sea swallowed me. But each time I came up for air I saw Angel waving to me from the shore. It was the sight of him, even as he grew more distant every day, that kept me from ever letting go, from all-the-way drowning.)

Rainy named my room the Apocalypse Now Suite, after the staccato beat of the ceiling fan that sounded like a helicopter coming down from the skies. She spent much of her time slipping between the wall and my dresser to try and do her hair on the other side of the mirror.
When you dead,
she said,
don't matter what side of the mirror you lookin on. Both be the same shade of nuttin.

Even without a reflection Rainy managed to style her hair in whatever shape took her fancy — her favourite being a helicopter with moving rotors. With her dead twins a red mist swirling around her I expected to see her rise, like a medevac chopper along the edge of the South China Sea, scooping up Frenchy where she sat beside her boy on the banks of the Perfume River trying to breathe life back into him.

What you doing?
Frenchy would ask.

My hair?
Rainy would say.

But Frenchy and Rainy had, in most ways, stopped paying attention to the way they looked, and especially to matters of personal hygiene. Even from a distance I could smell on them the odour of death. Only people who have never smelled death, in the flesh, would say it smells sweet.

Rainy admitted she'd been the one who'd switched the radio to
God Listens
every time I'd left the room. She'd taken the mirror in the bathroom down, too, hoping to find herself on the other side, and then hadn't been able to remember how to put it back up again.