Given (7 page)

A poet, blind and deaf from birth, wrote that in the odour of men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. He was a romantic, who had probably never spent the night in an airless cabin crossing a treacherous stretch of water with a man to whom he had once been unhappily married. And I thought
this is how it is
:
we fall in love, lighter than air, marry in mid-air, divorce when we hit the pavement.

I remembered a dream I'd had, not long after I got the news I was soon to be executed. I was on a tropical island with Vernal, and I'd been lured from my bed in the middle of the night by air pregnant with the scent of vanilla. I found giant cauldron-like orchids opening in the moonlight and thousands of tiny sphinx moths fluttering from one pod to another. In the morning, when I brought Vernal to look at them, the scent had disappeared, the orchids had closed themselves tight, concealing their mysteries. Vernal had tried to pry open the petals to get a glimpse inside.

In his own way I knew he still loved me and probably always would. I think he loved me in defiance, as if he believed reason had the power to banish everything that had gone passionately wrong between us.

PART TWO

Loneliness is a terrorist, except it has no righteous
cause, no moral foundation, no God. There is no
reasoning with it, none.
— Asha Bandele,
The Prisoner's Wife

T
HE CHICKEN TRUCK WITH ITS FORLORN CARGO
pulled off the ferry ahead of us into the wetting rain. As the truck gathered speed, the air filled with hundreds of small white feathers that stuck to the hearse as we drove
.
“What's easier to load, a truck load of fuckin' chicken feathers or a fuckload of dead babies
?”
The Latrine had been pretty pleased with herself for coming up with that one: dead baby jokes were the order of the day on the Row since most of the women were there because they'd killed one or more of their kids. (Her answer, when she'd finished slashing my pillow in search of contraband: “The babies. You can use a fuckin' pitchfork.”)

I rolled down my window and took a gulp of cool, saturated air. Aside from a lone ferry worker in a yellow rain slicker directing traffic the only way it could go, and a small crowd of bedraggled protesters bearing placards that read “Right to Silencers” and “Say No to Noise,” the place was still asleep. The silencers wanted to purge the island of anything that disturbed the peace, from wild geese to weed eaters, Vernal said. “There's a new cause around here every week. We had one group protesting for a protest-free zone!”

The road followed the coastline and I wanted to take it all in — the rain falling solidly, like cold, wet lead, the purple bloom of the common teasel, the proliferation of foxgloves in the ditches. I asked Vernal to slow down, so the world didn't go by in a blur — something else we'd always argued about, his zeal for speed. Vernal put the rattling hearse in cruise control as two ravens flew up from the ditch where they feasted on the night's casualties. “Look!” he said, pointing to a pair of eagles side by side on a branch at the top of a dead cedar. “I see the same two sitting there every time I drive past. A mated pair like that stays together for life.”

I watched the eagles, thinking back on our conversation of the night before. What Vernal had been trying to say to me was that our marriage had become a life sentence without parole. My execution would have solved our biggest problem from his point-of-view — the need to retain a costly divorce lawyer.

Vernal didn't slow until we approached a sign, one I could barely make out through the rain: “Port of Mystic” and, below that, “Progress Welcome”. Someone had inserted the word NOT.

At first glance it looked like any other sleepy Gulf Island town: on the south side of the main street a post office and a liquor store (both closed), a credit union “Open Thursdays to the Weekend”, and Chubb's Used Body and Parts. “Everyone in this town knows everything about everybody else,” Vernal warned me. “The liquor store employees can tell you what anybody here drinks, as well as how much.” Islanders were a breed apart with a strong impulse to protect the outlaw — whom they perceived as the underdog — and a deep-seated hatred of mainland jurisdiction
.
He paused. “We don't even have a police force on the island — yet.”

Ceese & Son Funerals, “Closed Until Further Notice”, stood on the north side of the street, along with a walk-in medical clinic, a general store called Natural Lee's, the King Koin Laundromat, and a coffee shop, the Snipe. It was meant to have been the Sandpiper, Vernal said, as he pulled in next to a red pickup parked outside. Marg, the owner, had come up with the Snipe in an effort to economize.

A dog locked inside the truck barked at us, his breath steaming the windows. I slipped the rain cape back over my head when Vernal said we should grab a cup of tea — none of the shops opened until after nine. “I'll make us breakfast when we get home,” he said. “You probably won't be surprised to hear it, but I'm still not much of a chef.”

Home. When we get home.
When I'd tried, over the years, to imagine reconciling with Vernal, I'd fantasized about going home to live with him, the way we used to be. I'd make Chicken Quito Ecuador — my old standby — and he'd polish off a bottle of Scotch. I'd have the run of the kitchen, it went without saying. Vernal's idea of a meal had always been a kind of comforting punishment, something you could look forward to for its entertainment value, and enjoy missing at the same time.

He got out and, I noticed, left the keys in the ignition. “Who in their right mind's going to steal a hearse?” Vernal said, when he saw me reach for my duffel bag; prison teaches you not to let anything out of your sight if you want to see it again.

The door to the Snipe was wide open and the rain came at us horizontally, following us inside.

“Leave it open, I'm letting the flies out.” A woman who knew how to make stretch pants work for a living came out from behind the counter, a cigarette in one hand, a bottle of vodka in the other, and lowered herself into a chair. She looked first at Vernal then squinted at me, as if trying to decide whether or not she approved of serving a person she'd never seen before. Vernal said we'd like tea, and Marg looked at him as if life was hard enough. “There is no tea. Every morning's a Smirnoff morning around here.”

Vernal laughed and said coffee would do, and Marg said he'd have to get it himself, she didn't move once she was down. “Tell you the truth, I'm celebrating. I had this cousin, eh? Up the road? She croaked.” Marg was still scrutinizing me. “Couple nights ago. She et something that disagreed with her. I should have tried it years ago. Disagreeing with her, that is.”

The coffee Vernal brought me tasted like tea, almost as bad as what you'd get served at the Facility. Marg complained about Ceese Jr. closing the funeral home right in the middle of what was supposed to be their tourist season. She thought it would discourage tourism.

“No one dies much this time of year, anyway,” said Vernal.

“Not if they do it around here, they don't,” Marg said. She'd had to pay for her cousin's body to be shipped to the mainland, which had cost her an arm and a leg. “You know what they say. Some things are just the way they are, and nobody knows what for.”

Vernal and I were the only patrons, aside from a man who sat in the corner farthest from Marg, next to an artificial Christmas tree, one that appeared to be a permanent fixture. He brought his cup to his lips, blew on it, and then looked over the rim at me. I pretended to be reading the menu on the wall behind him, and wondered if the chickens in the truck that had covered us with feathers were destined to become Today's Special: Chicken Cordon Blues.

My attention shifted back to the man in the corner again as he stood up, pushed his chair in, and reached into his pocket to pay for his coffee. He wore a yellow toothbrush on a chain around his neck, had long blue-black hair falling straight from a headband of red cedar bark, and eyes blacker than the inside of a raven. But it was his scent that attracted me most: even from across the room I could taste him — like the air before a storm, long before there is any visible sign of it.

He had on jeans, a denim jacket, and a pair of boots made out of cobra skin. Another snake had died so he could have a belt to match the boots. At a quick glance I figured the wardrobe was meant to draw your attention away from the fact that he was missing his right hand. He had a hook instead that stuck out below the sleeve of his jacket.

“We weren't close,” Marg continued. I watched the man — who swayed as he walked, as if he'd just got off a boat — push open the door and disappear into the rain. “She always had to be first at everything — getting born, getting married, getting knocked up, having kids. Trust her to kick the bucket first.” Marg said she was looking forward to death. She could use the rest.

Vernal paid for our coffees and told Marg to keep the change. “I can keep anything long's you don't ask me to keep a secret,” Marg said. I heard, and saw, Rainy again in my mind's eye — Rainy in her baby dolls made of a padded quilted material not unlike packing blankets. “A secret ain't a secret unless keeping it hurts.”

We went back out into the weather. Vernal nodded to the man with the hook who sat inside the red pickup with the window rolled down, watching us, smiling. Lips you wanted to lick under a moustache — a big moustache, one I associated with fierceness and a high disregard for the law, unlike the one Vernal was experimenting with — that kept you from ever getting quite close enough. Then the smile faded out and he looked at me with an expression of such stony sadness I half expected a solid tear to drop from his eye and bounce across the hood of the hearse like a marble dancing on a drum.

“Who was that?” I asked, as Vernal grabbed my arm and pulled me to him, so I wouldn't be swallowed by a pothole.

“Hooker Moon,” said Vernal, “Gracie's brother. He's the one they wrote that song about. ‘Bad Moon Rising'?”

There was no doubt more to the story, but he didn't elaborate. We danced our way around the puddles, down the still-deserted street; I could feel the rain trying to take shelter on the inside of my cape. Sandwiched between Ceese Funerals and the medical clinic was a building I hadn't noticed until now, an unlikely, gaudy little shop painted purple with yellow trim, called Down to Earth. There may have been a downturn in death on Kliminawhit, but from the numbers of SOLD tags dangling from the caskets there was still a healthy coffin industry.

“There's a customer born every minute,” read an ad in the window, next to a slightly bigger sign saying, “Open for Pre-Arrangements”. Vernal pointed to an environmentally friendly unit called “The Chrysalis,” woven out of willow twigs that could be “used as extra storage space until needed.”

I keep meaning to take a couple of those home,” Vernal said. “They hadn't invented the idea of cupboards when our place was built, way back when.”

Home. Our place.
We walked arm in arm against the rain as far as Natural Lee's, which had just opened. Vernal emptied his wallet and told me to pick up cereal, a ten pound bag of sugar, some fresh vegetables “to keep the doctor away,” a piece of fish and anything I needed, while he went to pick up his newspapers. I needed deodorant and dental floss, two luxuries they didn't allow on the Row; I suppose you could hang yourself on a few lengths of floss strung together, but I never figured out what they had against deodorant. If you wanted underarm protection (as the guards called it) you had to stand by the door of your cell, naked from the waist up, arms raised above your head, at five to eight every morning. At 8 am a nurse walked down the range with a can of Right Guard and sprayed your pits. I entered the store where a woman with thinning blonde hair and small crushed lines around her mouth glanced up at me, then at the clock, as if she hadn't expected anyone so soon. She told me if I was after anything fresh I would have to come back later — the produce that had arrived on the ferry hadn't made it onto the shelves yet because she was on her own here and she only had two hands.

The “natural” in Lee's appeared to be something of a misnomer. In the Foreign Foods section that shared a shelf with Personal Hygiene Products, I found soya sauce, ketchup, and two tins of China Lily Bean Sprouts. I also found a roll-on Ban whose expiry date had come and gone, and dental floss, and then took a detour through the Back to School supplies area where see-through backpacks were on sale, now regulation in the country I'd come from. Teachers maintained it was one way, at a glance, to see if their students were packing guns or other prohibited weapons. I picked up sugar, and a box of Fruit Loops for Vernal — his idea of having fruit for breakfast. At the fish counter a sign said, “Our fish is fresher than it is in the sea”, but the display case was empty. I unloaded my shopping basket at the checkout counter and then remembered something else I needed. I asked the sales clerk if they sold shoelaces; she nodded her head as she removed a box labelled Canadian Mosquito Terminators — a fly swatter with a dart attached — from a shelf beside the till, and marked them down in price. “All out of them right now,” she said, glancing up at the clock again with a bleak lack of hope. “People keep buying them.”