Given (23 page)

“What you thinking?” Hooker's voice sounded low and throaty in the dark.

“Nothing,” I said, but too quickly.

The fire sputtered and went out. I could smell smoke.

“I read minds, you know,” he said, striking another match and looking in my direction.

“Then you tell
me
what I'm thinking.” Time to call his bluff.

“A smoky cabin, a full belly, and a flea-filled bed. You're thinking it doesn't get better than that.”

The fire began to crackle and he closed the door to keep more smoke from escaping into the room. “Or maybe you're thinking you wished I'd brought that deer sausage home from the feast because you could use a snack.”

I propped myself up on my side. “Not even close,” I said.

“You're thinking you wished I'd brought onions to fry up with the sausage and that.”

“You're getting cooler.”

“Liver. Deer liver and sausage. That's what you'd like.”

“Cold,” I said.

I waited, but heard nothing except for the spit and hiss of the fire trying to take off. “Well?” I said. Hooker had disappeared into a shadowy corner of the room where he poured water from a plastic bottle into an empty Mason jar. I heard him cleaning his teeth.

“I'm going outside. To go
cheegan.
You can borrow my toothbrush if you don't mind getting my germs
”

It was the second-most romantic proposal I'd received this night. I heard him open the door and step out into the darkness. I didn't ask if he needed help with his belt or with his zipper. Toop sighed, and began licking himself.

“You still dressed?” Hooker said, when he returned, with the stub of a candle burning in a clamshell. “You planning on making a quick getaway, or what?”

“Where would I go?” Toop had settled down again with his head resting on the pillow beside me.

Hooker took the elastic out of his ponytail and let his hair fall loose around his shoulders. He took off his shirt, his belt and his boots. He undid the zipper on his jeans, toying with me, like a cat with the night's meat in his gums.

He placed the candle on a windowsill and crawled under the covers, still wearing his jeans. Toop lay between us, snoring quietly. I tried to suppress a giggle.

“What you laughing about?” Hooker sounded tired.

“At Toop, your bodyguard. He's fallen asleep on the job.” I reached over and petted Toop's sleeping body.

“Believe me, he'd wake up if he had to,” Hooker said.

I watched a pair of moths, the colour of button mushrooms, bounce out of the darkness, drawn to the candle's light. I wanted to touch Hooker, too, but something made me hesitate. “What did your auntie call you?” I said quietly. “When we got to the hall?”

“Stloos. That's the name I was given when I was born. It means Sweet Hands.”

I reached across Toop's body and my hand came to rest on his hook. I pulled my hand away, then, feeling self-conscious, put it back.

“Can you feel anything when I touch your hook?”

“What do you think?” Hooker said.

I thought there was nothing I could do or say that would come out right.

“I can feel you touching me, and it feels good,” Hooker said after a bit.

I woke to the insomniac cry of a seabird, and rose out of my sleep to catch the last light of the gibbous moon before it sunk into the surf breaking on the reefs. Hooker was gone — outside to go
cheegan
or to fetch wood: the reason didn't matter, the bed felt emptier than the world. The sleeping bag had been tugged off me in the night and I pulled it back on, though the room was warm — Hooker had finally got the fire to cooperate before he'd left. A kelp-smelling breeze washed in through an open window facing the sea, and a kind of lazy peacefulness settled over me.

It seemed I had been away from the farm for weeks, that it had been months since I'd driven Vernal to the airport. I closed my eyes again; next time I woke it was to the nosey smell of garlic frying in butter, but when I opened my eyes the room began whirling away from me, as if I were entering a weightless dream.

I cried out, terrified by the sensation of having nothing to hang on to, free falling towards the earth that was moving away from me even faster than I could fall. Hooker came running in from outside and knelt beside me on the mattress. “You probably opened your eyes too fast,” he said when I tried to explain what had happened.

“How can you open your eyes
too fast?”
I asked. Hooker said he would demonstrate; he closed my eyes with his fingers and told me to count to ten. When I got to seven his lips touched mine, and opened slightly, tentatively: not so much a kiss but a hint that he might like to taste more of me.

A soft heat seeped through my skin. I stopped counting, but kept my eyes closed; I didn't want to scare him away, or change the mood in the room. His lips tasted of salt, and of the wind, and I could smell the wildness in him, something elemental, as of fire, storm, and the fluctuant sea.

He took my face in his hands. We were so close it was as if he were breathing for me — I couldn't tell where his breath stopped and mine began. Toop gave a wounded, pay-attention-to-me kind of bark, and Hooker pulled away. I opened my eyes and felt dizzy again, this time for a different reason.

“You taking advantage of me?” I said, smiling with my eyes.

“I hope so.” Hooker kissed Toop, too — who drooled — then wrestled his dog to the ground. “I had an ulterior motive, though,” he said, laughing. “Toop wants breakfast — I thought maybe you could feed him while I finish fixing ours.”

I asked what my reward would be (I would rather have gone back to bed and kissed him all morning long) and he said he might take me to the beach with him, later, to see the wreck of his red pickup before it disappeared in the winter storms. A north wind had got up in the night, which meant it would be a good day for beachcombing, and I could help Toop find the left-footed running shoe he knew was out there somewhere, riding the swells, waiting to be washed onto the shore for him. When Toop heard his name he fetched a shoe from the pile of waterlogged runners stiffening in front of the woodstove, and dropped it in front of me.

A container ship from Japan had broken up in a high sea, Hooker explained, and the runners, after being tossed around by the waves and knocked against the rocks, had washed up along the beach. “Toop finds them for me. All right feet so far. I need a ten-and-a-half left. To go with the right. Same's I need a left hand, come to think of it.”

Hooker passed me a blue enamel pan of warm water to wash in, and a roll of toilet paper to dry myself. I got out of bed, still fully dressed, splashed the sleep from my eyes, and rinsed my face, being careful to avoid the area around my mouth. I wanted the taste of Hooker Moon on my lips for as long as possible.

When I had finished I called Toop, who was standing by his bowl, waiting, and spooned some leftover seal organs mixed with halibut cheeks into his dish. Toop looked at it, then went and stood by the door, his tail between his legs. When Hooker let him out I heard him throwing up in the bushes. “What's the matter, don't like barfaroni?” Hooker asked when he slunk back inside. Hooker looked at me and shook his head, passing me the bag of sandwiches he'd brought home from the feast. “This is the only thing Toop eats. Chicken salad sandwiches.”

“I hope he'll forgive me.” I arranged the sandwiches in Toop's dish, but he stood, looking at it, his ears sticking straight out on either side. Hooker shook his head. “Not like that. I'll show you.”

He took out his hunting knife, bent down, and began slicing. Toop nearly decapitated me with his tail when Hooker stood back to show me his handiwork. “Chicken salad sandwiches with the crusts cut off. You wouldn't think from looking at him he'd be such a picky eater.”

I sat watching Toop eat as sunlight stabbed through the gaps in the weathered planks on the windowless side of the cabin. “I'm making breakfast,” Hooker said. “You like Indian food? Mussels and seaweed and shit like that?”

Hooker, and his way with words. He removed the garlic from the butter then set to work steaming the mussels he had picked off the beds at low tide while I was still dreaming.

“I'll try anything once,” I said, but then had to admit that wasn't true. I had heeded all the warnings about paralytic shellfish poisoning I'd seen posted along coastal beaches, how one bite of a contaminated bivalve could kill you before you had time to spit it out.

“How do you know they're safe?” I asked.

“You worry too much,” he said, shaking his head and laughing at me. “Worry's going to kill a person quicker than anything you eat off the beach.”

On Tranquilandia they had a saying: “Don't worry, at least not until they start shooting. And even then you shouldn't worry. Don't start worrying until they hit you, because then they might catch you.”

“If you're seriously worried,” Hooker said, “touch one to your lips. If your lips start to tingle, that's a warning sign.”

My lips had tingled when Hooker's lips had touched them. I had been fairly certain, falling asleep last night, we weren't meant to be lovers, but this morning after that almost-kiss, I felt there might be a faint hope clause at the end of the tunnel of love. Hope was one thing I'd taught myself it was best to live without, though I'd heard it said there is more hope on Death Row than in any place of similar size in the world. To me, hope had become another phase to grow out of, like wetting the bed, like picking at the skin around your fingernails until you bled.

Hooker set up a table outside so we could watch the ravens eat. We ate with our fingers, sitting on a couple of chunks of wood he used as chopping blocks, dazed by the fiery orange of the mussels, purple inkiness of the seaweed, and the fragrance of alder from the fire. A barge of mist floated through the trees towards the sea, and dragonflies, iridescent blue, darted back and forth as if they were stitching up the air.

I looked up at the sky, flecked with bright ticks of cloud, then down at the stream where a dragonfly landed on top of another, and two pairs of wings became one in a whirring over the red-brown water.

“I can see why you stay here,” I said. “It feels . . . it's like the rest of the world hasn't caught up to this place yet.”

Hooker licked his fingers and looked past my eyes to the beach. “I like it out here because not too much is happening,” he said, after a while. “I've got this personal feeling so many things aren't meant to be happening to us so much of the time. We're not built for it.”

It was true, I thought, that in many ways my life had been much simpler at the Facility. There I'd had only Rainy and Frenchy to feel responsible for, and the rest of eternity to contemplate. Every day had seemed important because each act was, potentially, the last act of our lives. We used to say we lived in the last place on earth a woman could feel safe — a maximum security penitentiary. The only threat to our security was that of our pending execution.

Hooker boiled more water and brewed Labrador Tea. Neither of us felt the need to talk. Once the ravens got used to me they flew down and began tearing at the chunks of sea lion meat Hooker had brought home from the feast. “Ravens find roadkill, they act like eagles,” Hooker said.

After rinsing our dishes in a bucket of sea water we set off across the point — over the beds of blue-violet mussel shells waiting for the tide to come in — that separated Hooker's bay from the white sand beach. Hooker whistled for Toop who had disappeared into the foam covering the sand from the high tide mark to the sea's edge.

I left Hooker and walked through tangled mounds of kelp, across a series of old weathered planks from a ship that had broken up in a storm, out to where the sea met the sand, and jogged through the knee-deep foam, letting my shoes get soaked, the foam stick to my clothes, my face, my hair as the sun played hide-and-seek behind a blustery cloud. I emerged from the foam onto a clean stretch of sand and saw how the sea absorbed all the little streams that trickled down the beach as if they couldn't wait to become part of something bigger, while the ocean went its own way, breaking up on the shore, pulling itself back together, breaking up on the beach again.

I heard Hooker shout, and when I looked up saw him crouch down a small distance from the carcass of a sea lion half-buried in the sand. A conspiracy of ravens hunched over their find, taking the occasional nip out of its flesh, as if they were testing it to see if it tingled on their beaks.

I rubbed my hands together and stamped my feet. The wind off the sea had a chill in it, the first bite of winter. At that moment I saw a solitary raven plummet out of the sky into the foam, and rise up again, his black head white.

The trickster raven dive-bombed his brothers, who were still hopping around the carcass; they flew off leaving him to feast, until the foam on his head began to disappear and they recognized him as one of their own — not a bald eagle, after all — and chased him away. Hooker shouted at me to hold my breath and plug my nose as he moved closer to the sea lion, and the ravens flew up before us, and wheeled back towards the surf.