Medicine Walk (20 page)

“ ’Spect not,” the kid said.

“Could I sit up a while, Frank?”

“Can you manage it?”

“I figure.”

He helped his father over to the log he’d sat on the night before and then stoked the fire higher. He wrapped the blanket over his father’s shoulders. Every feature of his face seemed to be cascading downward. His father shivered and clutched the blanket tighter around his neck and set his lips together grimly. His eyes were rimmed with red, spooked and frightened. The kid sat on the ground opposite him and waited. He felt as though there was something he was supposed to say but he didn’t know what.

Time was a thing he carried. It took him a long time after Korea to realize that. Between bouts of liquor there were stretches of calm that took him by surprise and lulled him. They never lasted. He’d be clear and working, feeling a rough sort of pleasure in a measure of days, weeks, a month or so sometimes. But he could never really shake a foreboding in his gut. It rankled him, the unease, the slow creep of terror, like being hunted, tracked by some prowling beast invisible to the eye, recognized only by the sense of looming danger at his back. Then, always, time’s dank shadow would fall over him again and sweep him into its chill. It seemed to seep outward from his bones. He lurched along in its thrall, unresisting, all the way back to the bottle once again. He spiralled downward and the measure of his days was the depth of the shadow itself. He wandered. He sought a place that carried no reminders, believing that a place existed that was barren of memory and recollection. But he bore time like sodden baggage.

In the end, he had to come back to Nechako. He realized somehow that coming and going had become the same direction and he slunk back into the valley with a pocketful of wages and no idea what to do. He only knew that nowhere was a place he occupied. It made one place the same as another. So he settled into Parson’s Gap and took whatever jobs he could for as long as he could stand them or until he was fired. There was no word of his mother or Jenks. He’d gone once to the logging camp. It was deserted. There were ghosts of booms on the water, held in the grip of rotting rings they left behind them, buckled some by time and current and placid at their centres so that looking at them from the shore he wondered how much of him or how little was held within
their buoyant murk. Jimmy was there. So was his father and the lingering idea of his mother.

Life became the ins and outs of drunkenness and the forced and miserable dryness of work in order to pay for another binge. He made a name for himself. A hard worker. A jack of all trades. Serious. Deliberate. But unpredictable with a pay stub in his hands. He never made more than he could spend in a week. He became a denizen of flophouses and derelict buildings. He was gregarious in his cups, but prone to sudden bouts of solemnity and a simmering anger that kept people away from him. But when he broke he broke all gleeful and raucous. Then he lived in triumphant abandon and he became a storied drinker, ladies’ man and raconteur: the highs dizzying in his awareness of the fall to follow.

The crash would find him with other early morning drunks and beggars assembled in the bleary dawn on the river flats at a corner they called The Dollar Holler. He’d hear them coming along the curving road that ran down the hill from town and spilled out onto the flat the mill laid claim to. There’d be coarse laughter, hacking tobacco coughs, curses, and the off-key whistling of an old tune no one recalled the words to and the shuffle of weary feet through gravel, dust, frost. They’d emerge from the fog in ragged lines of three or four, sometimes singly or in pairs, and assemble at the corner. It was next to an open lot where there were cast-off truck seats they gathered around and a small copse of trees at the end that was their latrine. They greeted each other wordlessly. One or two of them would share their makings or hand-rolled smokes and someone would start a jug around wrapped in a brown paper bag. They smoked and drank. They spoke in cryptic, guttural sentences and waited.

“Heard Shultz is hirin’.”

“Yeah?”

“Still payin’ fuck all still.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

The light would break across the sky and the neighbourhood of the mill would take on the hues of indigo and ochre until the sun rose beyond the eastern ridge and the world became flares of magenta and pink and orange across the sky. That’s when the trucks arrived. They’d spy them coming a half-mile off. On a good day there was a line of them. On most there were two or three. The men would line both sides of the road, wiping at their mouths and raising a toe of a boot to shine along the back of their trousers and slick hair down with spittle on a palm. The trucks would slow and a face would appear to study them as it cruised by. That’s when they’d yell.

“Got a dollar fer a fella?”

“Gotta lotta back fer a buck!”

They’d holler. The whole lot of them and the trucks would make a slow turn in the street and head back their way and the men would shuffle their feet and run a hand over their faces and wait until a hand shot out the window and a finger was crooked and the man at the wheel would holler back.

“I need two for half a day. You and you. Get in back.”

The lucky pair would run out and hurl themselves into the back of the truck. They’d scramble along the bed and lean against the back of the cab and grin at the rest, strung out along the shoulder of the road, licking at their lips and turning to greet the next truck lumbering their way. Most of them slunk back up the hill into town to the hovels and dim places they called home. It was his only work for a couple of years.

He became a regular at Charlie’s. It was a ritual for drunks to have one place they never abused. One place they marshalled enough will to protect in their savage way so that there was always a place to go, a stool or a table in a corner to occupy where they could nurse a drink in the smoke and din of beer, cheap wine, and whisky. He liked it. It made him feel a part of something, and he’d eke out a tab from the bartender and waiters and pay it out in full whenever he got paid. He took care to honour that. It made him trusted in a way even though they knew a sot when they saw one. But he was reliable in that fashion and he always had a drink and a warm haven when it was needed.

It was a working man’s bar. He could lose himself in the babble of voices, the clack of pool balls, the wafts of music swirling outward from the jukebox, the smell of sweat and dirt, and the electric charge of a fight building until it erupted in a crash of tables and bodies and a spray of blood from fist and mouth and the savage whistle and grunt of men battling until it broke with one on the floor or having been flung through the doors with his coat chucked out after him like punctuation. Then, slowly, peace gathered itself again; the violence was shrugged off and the hubbub returned. He drank it in like a free round. He savoured the manly grunge and preferred Charlie’s over other joints and he was known by the denizens as a drunk who minded his own business but one who bore a sudden temper that brooked no foolishness or intrusion. He could set there. Vanish. Be. It was predictable and ordinary in his murky world and he came to rely on it. So that the day when she appeared took him by surprise.

It was a payday. The joint was filled to capacity and he sat in a corner drinking off what was left of three day’s pay from The Dollar Holler. His back hurt. He’d dug a trench for a quarter-mile through brush and bramble, stone and dirt and gravel. He’d worked without gloves and his hands burned from broken blisters. His legs ached. The din around him was like the feel of coming to after a punch-out. He leaned forward on the table and drank slowly.

The music was the first thing he noticed. The songs on the jukebox were bouncy and bright with fiddles and pedal steel guitar and drums played primarily on the snare and the kick bass. He heard laughter. Then there was the clapping of hands and stomping of feet just slightly off the rhythm. There was a semicircle of men and their women around the jukebox and he stood and looked over. He had to stand on his chair to see. The tables had been pushed back and in the middle of the clearing, a man and a woman gyrated and spun. The man was ungainly, huge and blocky like a gorilla in a red checkered shirt and blue jeans gone to soot and grease, and he danced in unlaced work boots with the tongues flapping. He lurched after her, his hands held out wide as though he sought to capture her, and he grimaced at the effort it took to fix a modicum of grace to the act of dancing. She was magnificent. She was tall, lean. She had long, straight hair that followed her spins like a wave of dark water and when she bent low to follow the beat, her feet were light and she appeared to float through the dance, sprightly and girl-like but with a wildness and an abandon that was all woman, in the thrust of her hips, the jounce of her breasts in the thin cotton shirt and the sinuous trail of her arms. She danced around her partner with her head flung back, laughing, and the crowd hooted and hollered and urged him on.

“Come on, Dingo! Dance!”

“He don’t wanna dance, he wants to rut.”

Every time he got within inches of her, she spun and twirled out of reach, one hand tracing his outstretched palm with the tips of her fingers. The crowd ate it up. When the song ended she hugged him, draped herself over him, and from the corner he could see the glazed joy the man took in that, the huge hands on her back, red at the knuckles and raw from the work, and when he tried to kiss her, she laughed and pushed him away with one finger against his massive chest. The crowd broke. People sat back down like hunters easing back behind a blind. When he took his seat there was a man across from him. He was older but with the squinted, bronzed face of someone used to the elements, a face the wind carved.

“Mind?” the older man asked.

He studied him and the man looked back at him with a calm good humour. “Not if you don’t, I guess.”

“Good. Mind if I buy a round?”

He laughed. “Mister,” he said. “I mind it all a sight less now.”

When the drinks came they clinked glasses and the older man drained half of his and set it on the table and looked at him. “She’s a peach, don’t ya think? The girl. The dancer there.”

“Yeah. She’s a fine one.”

“Injun.”

“Excuse me?” He raised an eyebrow and the man laughed.

“I mean, she’s like you. She’s an Indian.”

“You figure?”

“Oh yeah. My name’s Bunky, by the way.” He reached out a hand and they shook.

“Eldon,” he said. “Fuck’s Bunky mean?”

The older man took off his hat. His hair was frizzled every
which way. “Kid’s name,” he said. “My pa would say I could go through a whole day an’ my hair’d still be bunky, like I just climbed outta the sack. It stuck. I never questioned it.”

“Musta got ya punched out a lot, name like that?”

The older man grinned and sipped at his drink and eyed him over the rim of the glass. “There was them that tried,” he said. “Never was what ya might call a winnin’ bet.”

The music kicked up again. It was a slow country waltz and they stood to watch like all the rest. The woman was languid and loose and swayed while she moved. Her new partner was clumsy and hunched over her like a bear, his feet sliding along the floor without lifting. She let her hair trail and closed her eyes with her face toward the ceiling. He could see the jut and cut of the angles on her face from where the pair of them stood in the corner. It was a proud face, jumbled some by drink, but regal and possessed of sureness and knowing and when she opened her eyes and smiled at her partner he could feel his heart clench. When the song finished she retreated slowly to where she sat with six lumberjacks at a table laden with pitchers of beer. She swayed even when she walked.

“Dang fine,” Bunky muttered. “Dang fine.”

Just then a small man entered the bar. He leaned when he walked, canted at a hard angle to the right as though gravity worked with different properties on him, his feet slapping down like wet fish on a plank. His face was caved from a lack of teeth and the wear of a life lived rough and cantankerous by drink. He glanced around the room with his eyes rolling in his head, wiping at the sheen of sweat on his face and gulping hard.

“Everett Eames,” he said quietly to Bunky.

“Know him, do ya?” Bunky asked.

“Some,” he said. “He used to be a bush worker.”

They watched as Eames straightened and tried to smooth his ragged duffle coat then made his way toward the table where the woman sat with the lumberjacks, all of them with their chairs tucked close to the table as though they couldn’t get near enough to her. When he got to the table all the laughter stopped. They could see Eames talking, gesturing with his hands, pointing to certain of the lumberjacks and trying to laugh. The big one in the red checkered shirt stood suddenly and pointed his finger at him, threatening. The room fell quiet.

“Back the fuck outta here, mooch,” the big one said. “Work for a drink.
We
gotta.”

“Tell him, Dingo,” one of the others said.

“Come on, Dingo,” Eames said. “I got work next week. All’s I need is a fiver. You know me.”

Dingo laughed. “Know you as a fall-down drunk prick,” he said.

The others laughed. The woman was watching with a worried look. “Don’t.” He could read the word on her lips from across the room.

Dingo looked at her. “Please,” she said. “He just needs a drink.”

“You wanna drink, Eames?” Dingo asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good,” Eames said shakily.

Dingo reached back to the table and grabbed one of the pitchers. He took Eames by the collar of his coat and yanked him forward then took hold of his hair and pulled his head back. “Drink then, ya fuckin’ stumblebum!” He started pouring beer into Eames’ face and the drunk sputtered at first and then gulped hungrily at the wash of beer, opening and closing his mouth like a drowning man gasping for air. The room exploded in laughter. Eames was soaked. Dingo grabbed
another pitcher and started to pour, not noticing Bunky moving through the crowd until he stepped out from between two tables and faced him. “That’s enough,” he said sternly.