Rosie O'Dell (17 page)

I did as she asked and wrote page after page. There wasn’t much else to do at
night in the bunkhouse except for my two other faithful activities which were
too private to recount to her. And when she replied to my reports she went over
in detail my daily exploits: climbing the geological marvel of the Tablelands
and spotting up on that plateau a herd of imperturbable caribou grazing; guiding
a feisty elderly couple up over Gros Morne Mountain, sunny when we left, brief
wet snow in July at the top, then warm and sunny again, with a mother ptarmigan
leading
her brood of chicks ahead of us as we crossed to come
down; boating through the landlocked fjord of Western Brook Gorge, with its
sheer two-thousand-foot cliffs, disappearing waterfalls, and hanging valleys;
canoeing and kayaking around the shoreline of lovely Bonne Bay where pairs of
magnificent bald eagles anxiously followed our intruding progress; driving up
the coast to the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula to visit L’Anse aux Meadows
and the ruins and artifacts of the only proven landfall of the Vikings in North
America—I’d written that I’d shouted out “Gudrid” there but got no answer—and
she wrote that if I were to try it in St. John’s in September, I might have
better luck. I read that sentence a dozen times.

She said that her constant thought when she wasn’t hammering balls was that one
day she would explore all those beautiful spots too. Three summers ago, she and
her family had been planning to visit the region after their canoe trip to the
Main River on the other side of the peninsula, but that had been forestalled by
her father’s death. She hoped I would perhaps consider acting as her guide for a
couple of weeks there some summer. I wrote back that I would be pleased to, that
I had the same feeling about that idea as I’d had when I’d visited London: all
the beautiful and fascinating things would be so much more so when someone you
really liked could be there to see them with you. I also wrote that we’d have to
visit the places on the Great Northern Peninsula where her Gram Payne O’Dell had
grown up. I’d had a tremendous flood of emotion, I told her, when I’d dropped in
at Gram’s hometown on my way to L’Anse aux Meadows, because it had brought back
a memory of the grief and hope and caring Rosie and I had shared after her
father’s death.

Rosie wrote back that her father had been planning to take Gram and Mom and
Pagan and herself on a driving trip of the Great Northern Peninsula and the
Labrador Straits the next summer, and that as she sat there examining her
blackening tennis toenail, she yearned to take the trip with me. That letter had
some stains on it, as if she’d flicked a few drops of water on the pages while
washing her hands. It was only later in the evening that I realized the stains
might have been teardrops.

The next day, bright and calm and beautiful, I faked a minor muscle pull in my
back to get out of hiking from Trout River gorge through Green Gardens—though it
was a hike I loved—and when everyone was gone I told the housekeeper I was going
for a long easy walk to test my back. Then I hitched a ride to the base of Gros
Morne Mountain and
climbed to the top by myself and gazed out
over the glistening wooded hills and the sparkling arms of the bay, and resolved
from that height to make Rosie O’Dell mine and mine alone once more, and this
time forever.

IN THE NIGHTTIME
,
MY
two activities
that I did not detail in my letters to Rosie were, in this order, measuring my
penis and masturbating. There were six of us boys in the bunkhouse, all fourteen
or fifteen. No girls had joined the summer’s intern program over here. The head
man had lectured us on our good conduct and his expectation that we do nothing
in any of the communities to bring discredit on this brand new national park.
Unless there was a special event, we were generally free in the evenings to roam
around, as long as we got back to the bunkhouse by dark, about nine o’clock.
Despite the boss’s constraints, the other five boys set out earnestly every
evening in search of girls to “get a piece of tail off of.” That quest entailed
walking the roads of Rocky Harbour or hitchhiking to Norris Point or taking the
ferry across to Woody Point. I went with them a couple of times, but those hours
of hanging around juke joints or leaning up against the outside walls of
community centres brushing off blackflies and pretending to ignore the groups of
teenage girls who were whispering and tittering about us made me stay back at
the bunkhouse reading, out of pure tedium at the pursuit. Maybe I would have
persisted if my abiding thoughts about Rosie had not eclipsed all interest in
any other girl.

Many nights, after the girls had evidently managed to break the gender ice, the
boys would chide me on their return about what I was missing. One reported that
he had scored big time that night, another that he hit the jackpot. I noticed,
though, that they were all visiting the bathroom with the same frequency as
before, carrying the girlie magazine one of them kept secreted far under his
mattress, a regular habit that did not signify their sexual satisfaction among
the village maidens. I was the only one who didn’t use the magazine images as a
prop. When they asked me why not, I pointed to the staple in the centrefold’s
navel and told them that I didn’t want to reach the point where I got a hard-on
every time I saw a stapler. They laughed, but my lack of fond attachment to the
magazine in the bathroom was further clear evidence to them that I was somehow
not quite a normal guy.

In fact, I needed no glossy, retouched images of pneumatic nakedness.
I could masturbate quite satisfactorily by thinking of Rosie
stroking my penis outside my clothes. That the stroking was accidental and
unconscious on her part was irrelevant because my imagination easily led from
there to multiple consensual depravities.

A function I had performed every night since her first and only touch last
winter was to lay my pocket measuring tape alongside my erect penis before
climax. It was common scientific knowledge among my male acquaintances that your
cock had to be six inches long. So much was this the case that the description
was sacrosanct, to the point where adjective and noun often became a unity: “You
should give her a taste of your sixinch-cock.” Sometimes the noun itself was
entirely superfluous: “All she needs is a good six inches.”

Ever since that night months ago with Rosie, my need to know how it had felt to
her revolved around how big it felt. When I measured it the next day, I had the
anxiety-producing epiphany that it was five and one half inches long. And that
was a stretch, because I could push the end of the tape into my pelvis all I
wanted—the fact remained that I could not make the tip of my dick reach the
six-inch mark without excruciating pain from the steel edge digging into the
bone. Now, how I expected “Goody Two Shoes” Rosie O’Dell, who at thirteen had
certainly never examined or handled a penis, to spot my crucially missing
half-inch, did not emerge as a subject of analysis in my mind. All I knew was
that I was aware of the terrible truth about my inadequacy. And thus my dismal
condition had persisted unchanged for four months leading up to my fourteenth
birthday and into the two summer months beyond. Then, as the middle of August
approached and my parents arrived for a visit to the park, I discovered that one
miracle of length had occurred.

It revealed itself when my mother first spotted me coming out of headquarters
as they were going in for their park permit. “My heavens, Tom, how tall you’ve
grown,” she said by way of greeting. “Joe, just stand next to him. Look at
that. Tom is getting taller than you.”

“Yeah, with his hiking boots on,” said Dad, seizing me by the hand and shaking
man to man, while Mom vised my head between her palms and kissed my cheek. They
invited me to dinner that night with Mom’s cousin in Winter House Brook and
left, agreeing to pick me up at the bunkhouse at five-thirty.

“I never seen a girl smooching you all summer, so I’m guessing that was your
mother,” said one of my colleagues.

“Too bad, too,” said another. “Because she’s a fox.”

“What?” said another. “She must be pushing forty.”

“Oh, that’s good, coming from a guy who’d screw a pile of rocks if he thought
there was a corpse under it.”

They all looked at me for a scathing comeback. But I was too preoccupied to say
anything. I was thinking that being as tall as Dad meant that, according to his
own height reckoning, I was now “approximately five foot nine and a quarter.” I
was three or four inches taller than Rosie. Life was sweet. Well, bittersweet.
The last time I’d checked, alas, I was still a phallically challenged five and a
half inches.

“Sorry, Tom,” said one of the boys. “That was way over the line.” The others
chimed in with their apologies. I think they thought my preoccupied silence
showed I’d taken offence at their references to my mother.

I was gracious. “That’s okay,” I said gravely. “No sweat. Forget it.”

That night after I got back to the bunkhouse from dinner, I had to go through
my routine and see if it was possible that miracles came in twos: ensure
measuring tape was in pocket; nonchalantly enter bathroom; lock door; out with
tape; pants down; sit on toilet seat; instant erection—Jesus, those were the
days—apply end of tape to pelvis at base of penis; prepare for distress. Not so
fast. What was this peeping out over my thumb? My heart beat faster. A surge of
elation went from the soles of my feet to the scalp on my head. It got so hard
down there it threatened to explode. Even without the metal digging into the
bone, my recalcitrant member was starting to turn, seemingly overnight, into my
pride and joy. It nearly reached the magic mark. Pushing the end of the tape,
not hard but only slightly, into my pelvis I could actually make it reach the
six-inch point. Yes, there was an intelligent designer of the universe and he
was running the damn thing brilliantly.

At last, I was approaching readiness. Not that I expected to put it to use for
years to come. Rosie and I were only fourteen, after all, and there was no way
she’d consent to hanky-panky with anyone, even someone she might love dearly,
until she was much older. I figured seventeen to eighteen years old. That was my
target age. Meanwhile, the feeling that I was all but prepared now, and
certainly would be by then, for any bestial demand or challenge was sweet.

A COUPLE OF WEEKS
before I left Gros
Morne to fly back to St. John’s, Rosie gave me a scare. She wrote that the
coaches wanted her to talk to her parents about sending her to school in Florida
this winter so that she could carry on with her tennis education. A space was
being kept open for her in Sarasota. The coaches seemed to think that, with
optimal training and practice, she could become one of the best female players
in Canada, and perhaps even beyond. Rosie said she had her doubts about all
that, herself. But the idea was tempting for a year just to find out, if nothing
else. What did I think?

I thought that this was a looming calamity. Florida for a whole school year!
Christ, what was the point of even having a nearly six-inch dick anymore? I
replied that I was certain she could excel nationally and internationally if she
put her mind to it. I had that degree of faith in her ability. Therefore, as a
friend who had her best interests at heart, I told her she should do it. Go to
Florida for the winter and train. But writing just as a guy who loved her
dearly, I said, I had to be honest: I hoped she would come back home and go to
school here. This absence from her over the summer had proved how much I wanted
to be with her. I prepared myself for seeing her for a few days before school
started, then maybe at Christmas, and again during the Easter vacation that I
had already planned in my mind for Florida. But I had no idea of the effect of
my frank profession of love on undermining the brilliant tennis career of my
lonely, psychically wounded Rosie.

She wrote back to me detailing her argument with herself: Say she spent a year
busting her ass at the tennis down there day in and day out to the exclusion of
all else, and after that year her future, according to the coaches, still looked
“pretty good.” That would lead to another year, and then another year. And all
for what? To
maybe
be the best in Canada? And then what? With that
status, would she be able to compete professionally at the international level
in a way that satisfied herself? She needed to ask herself that brutally frank
question. Now assuming, as I had kindly said, that she could rise to the very
top in the world professionally—even if that were to come true, would the few
years at the top be worth the years of deprivation to achieve it? Or did she
feel she wanted to play for recreation and satisfaction at a high amateur level
and have other good things in her life? She had decided that she was going to
play hard to win tournaments, but she was also going to darn well enjoy herself
and have a life. She thanked me for helping her open her eyes to reality. She
had turned
down the offer to train in Florida and she was coming
home for the school year.