Saltwater Cowboys (8 page)

“At the motel across the highway,” Jack answered.

“I got plenty of room on my ranch if you'd like —”

“That's nice of you, I'd be —”

Angela kicked him underneath the table. “We've already paid for our room,” she announced brightly.

“She sounds like she's straight from Ireland. She your good-luck charm?” Rob said and laughed. “Listen, my sister's singing country and western tonight at the bar motel. Why don't you join Mike and me for a beer, that is, if your lovely wife don't mind?” the big cowboy asked and winked at Angela.

“Oh, for the love of Christ, do what you want. It'll give me a chance to put the kids to sleep.”

The cowboy let out a long slow whistle. “She's got a sharp tongue, that woman,” big cowboy said and grinned. “We like them wild out here in the west.”

Angela stabbed at her plate and shovelled food into her mouth, forced it down her throat through clenched cheeks.
Leave it to Jack to go out with the boys his first night in the province
, she thought.
I want him to stay with me. He'll only get in trouble with this crew, and the children, they need him right now. I need him right now
.

Jack walked the few feet from his motel room to the bar on rubbery legs. The nerve in his groin throbbed, the pain gnashed away at his hamstring all the way to his knee. His hair, wet from a quick shower, had frozen into thin, icy spears. Eager for a drink, he felt a quick stab of guilt for leaving the girls with Angela. But she'd insisted he go, blow off some steam she'd said, and assured him she'd be quite comfortable watching an episode of
Coronation Street
if she could find one. He knew she didn't want him to go. Not really. She'd have preferred it if he'd cuddled up with her and the kids. But he knew she'd let him take a break. A break he really did need.

He pulled open the bar door. A pile of dirty slush raked along as he stepped inside. Mike and Rob nodded, Rob's arm on the back of a chair, motioning for Jack to join them.

“Some cold,” Jack said.

“Devil of a winter,” Rob said.

Rob ordered beers and they each savoured their bottle of brew.

“Which team you go for?” Mike asked.

“Flames. Oilers a close second,” Jack said and winked.

“My kind of fan,” Rob said.

They raised their bottles and laughed. After a few rounds the volume on the hockey game was turned down. A lithe brunette backed up by guitar and drums sidled up to the microphone. She belted out a few twangy country standards. After her set, she strutted around the room. She accepted hugs from the crowd and allowed wheedling men to pour her drinks.

“Had to meet and greet,” she said and pulled up a chair next to Jack.

“No problem, sissie,” Rob said and plunked a beer in front of her chair.

She was chewing cinnamon gum and the smell was sweet and woodsy. Jack inhaled. Her hair was thick, brown, and curly. Her black leather pants looked as if they had been branded on with an iron. Her rump was tight and heart-shaped. Jack tried not to look into her drowsy brown eyes.

“Another?” Rob asked.

Jack nodded, gave him the thumbs-up, and raised his bottle to clink it with Renee's.

She told the filthiest jokes Jack had ever heard anyone — man or woman — utter. Jack couldn't help but laugh.

“You're filthy, love,” he said.

“Dirtier than dirt,” she said and winked.

Jack laughed again and his legs relaxed. The nerve in his leg stopped banging against muscle and bone.

Six hours later Jack stumbled back to the motel room. He stank of Irish whiskey and beer. He fumbled with the door and dropped the keys. Between his legs he saw a figure moving toward him. A few feet away in a hip-length fur coat stood Renee.

“Hiya,” she said and licked her full red lips.

Jack looked at his hands. “Dropped my keys,” he whispered and jingled them good-naturedly. “Found them!”

“Would you like to have another drink with me?”

He stared at her silently.

“My room is just around the corner, the other side of the motel.” She hitched her thumb to the left. “They give me a room whenever I'm out here performing. Free mini-bar.”

He stared at her silently.

“Sure is warm in this coat,” she said and opened the sable fur to reveal a tight-fitting, sequin-encrusted red satin top.

“Missus,” he said weakly.

“
Renee.”

“Renee,” he repeated politely, “I'm married, my wife is inside, so are my children —”

“We can have a good time, though.”

He again just stared at her.

“Sure as hell hot in this big old coat,” she said and removed the red polyester kerchief around her neck. “You sure,” she drawled, “you won't have a drink with me?”

“I can't, good night,” he said and wriggled in through the small space in the door, trying not to let too much light or cold get in at his family, sound asleep, vulnerable in their beds. Angela encircled Lily protectively. Remnants of a bedsheet tent hung from the headboard. Maggie and Katie's arms dangled over the sides, fingers curled delicately, wide-open like little petals on nocturnal flowers.

He tiptoed over to the bed and stubbed his toe on the wheels of the cheap metal bed frame. He sucked back a howl and clamped one hand over his toe, the other over his lips. He pulled back the covers and slid in next to Angela.

“You stink,” Angela hissed in the dark, “like whiskey and cigarettes.” She threw her arm over her side and pushed him away. “You'll be tired tomorrow during the last leg of the trip, and if you yell at my babies, so help me Jesus, I'll —”

“My love, I'm —”

“Shh! You'll wake the girls.”

“Sorry —”

“At least you didn't go for a drink with that woman outside the door.”

Jack's stomach bottomed out. “Oh, my love, I'm —”

“I found it amusing, listening to see how far she'd go. I knew she wouldn't get very far.”

“My love, I'm —”

“Go to sleep.”

He curled into her and held her as she fell asleep. He lay awake for hours.
Everyone in Brighton knew I was married
, he thought.
No one would have dared to do what she did
. It was tempting, though. This temptation shamed him. He felt dirty. He felt like a cheat. Even though he hadn't done anything, the thought that he could have — if he had wanted to — scared and confused him.

He missed home more than ever at that moment. He missed the stability and predictability of it all as he lay beside Angela, the wind and snow sloshing against the window, his head thick with drink.

The next morning Jack's throat was cracked and dry and the veins in his head throbbed, his blood sluggish. The girls were watching Mr. Dressup draw animals on coloured craft paper. Angela sat at the little desk, wrapped in a white towel, and drummed her fingers on the thin slab of panel board that served as a desktop. She cleared her throat loudly. “Good morning, Mr. McCarthy, ready to join the land of the living?”

Jack moaned, rolled over, and covered his head with two thick white pillows. “Jesus, Angela, do they have to watch TV this early?”

“Yes,” she answered icily, “they're children. If you get to go out at night and
play
, you can't expect them not to. We're going to have them in the car for the next twelve hours so they deserve a bit of fun beforehand. Let's show Daddy how to have fun!” she said and they piled on Jack and smacked him with pillows.

Jack cupped his throbbing head in his hands and shot Angela a stern look. She saucily smiled back at him. “I'll get you back,” he mouthed.

“We'll see,” she mouthed back.

He got up quickly and pinned her underneath him. The children fell from his back and torso like ripe apples from a sinewy branch, screaming and laughing.

“Maggie, go get Daddy some ice from the bucket, please,” Jack asked sweetly.

“No! Don't do it,” Angela said pleadingly.

Maggie jumped off the bed, ran to the ice bucket on the table, and pulled out two small half-melted cubes. She scurried back over to the bed and presented them proudly to her father. He winked at her and dangled them above Angela's face. She protested and wriggled but he lowered the cubes and she shrieked. He popped them in his mouth and kissed her neck and face. She screamed again and he growled at her.

Lily started to cry. They stopped and looked at each other in surprise. “Rirry,” Jack mumbled, his mouth full of ice, and slid off his wife. She got up and wrapped Lily in the white bed sheet as Jack gave her a big bear hug.

Jack slowly pulled out from the motel parking lot. Renee stood in a motel room doorway in her red negligee, kissing the small cowboy. “Isn't that your friend Mike? Oh, and your friend, what was her name?” Angela said and waved goodbye to Mike and Renee.

“What the Jesus —” he asked as Angela mussed up her hair and crossed her eyes.

“Waving to her.”

“You're crazy.”

Angela bucked her teeth and waved like an oaf.

Renee's pixie nose wrinkled as she stared at Angela.

“Oh for the love of, stop it, Mike's looking,” Jack said and waved meekly. He rolled slowly out of the icy parking lot and gunned the motor, to little avail, speed being impossible on an iced northern salt-and-gravel-peppered road. He looked back apologetically through the rear-view mirror as Mike and Renee stared quietly at the advancing car.

“They'll think we're some strange.”

“I don't care,” Angela sneered stubbornly, tucked her feet up in the car seat, and reached over to turn up the radio and the heat.

As they drove through town toward the highway, CBC Alberta played a local country and western band: rough country with affected southern twang accents. Angela liked it; it suited this place as they moved from the foothills deeper into the grasslands and parklands. An area filled with aspen, poplar, and some sparse grassy areas. Rabbit tracks along the side of a low foothill were thwarted by wolf paws. A grey patch of fur stuck to a bush. Scant roadside stops save for a few gas stations with tiny coffee shops selling lukewarm coffee and plain doughnuts. Sudden rugged sounds in the music, with lonely open acoustic solos,
Not at all like our upbeat lilting Irish folk
, Angela thought. This music was haunting, morose, and achy. Aching for what, she hadn't a clue. Connection? Others?

It was the solitude up there that was overwhelming, with only the wild wolves and foxes on the side of the road, ptarmigans and crows zigzagging across the highway, animals that looked slightly mad themselves, alone or in packs. She'd never felt this deep sense of solitude in Newfoundland, although she should have on that cold little island, separate from Canada, in the icy Atlantic all by itself.

On the mainland, in one of the richest provinces, sandwiched between two other provinces, one mountainous, the other grassy, filled with valuable wheat, and a population twice as large as Newfoundland, she'd never felt more alone.

They stopped for lunch just north of Calgary. The Rocky Mountains in the distance were beautiful, peaks as white as meringue.
That's some rock
, Angela thought. Lulled by the motion of the car, she drifted off. She slept for most of the drive and when she woke up they were in Fort McMurray. As they drove through they saw a blue Chevy parked outside a service station with a bumper sticker that read
Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark.

“What's that for?” Angela asked.

“Albertans don't like the Liberal government's energy program. Oil revenues have been subsidizing the Maritimes,” Jack said.

“Mulroney is getting rid of it, though, isn't he?”

“Supposed to,” Jack said.

They drove in silence through the town with many signs out advertising homes for sale.

“Everyone's leaving this town too,” Angela said.

“Seems the haves are in the same boat — sinking ship more like it — as the have-nots,” Jack said and snickered.

They found a motel on the outskirts. It was an unkempt aluminum-covered square shack, with ten motel rooms stretched out in an L-shape to the left of the office. He parked beside the office. The door chimes fluttered when he opened the door. Light brown and white panel board covered the walls; green vinyl chairs lined the lobby. It smelled of smoke. The carpeted floor was damp under his winter boots.

He touched the tabletop bell. It let out a smothered clack. A young man came out from behind the counter, his blue eyes bright and shiny, brown hair limp over his hairy eyebrows. He grinned crookedly.

“Room for five, please.”

“Heading up to Foxville to work at the new mine?”

Jack nodded.

“We've seen a lot of people come through in the last little while. A new boomtown, eh?”

“Yes. Can't say we know quite what to expect.”

“It'll be fine. A lot of us Albertans have gone up there. You've got nothing to worry about. You're from down east, eh?”

Jack nodded and smiled shyly.

“A lot of people come up lately from the east coast. Never met a friendlier bunch. The name's Pat, by the way.”

Pat punched in the credit card number. The transaction failed. Pat apologized and tried again. Jack shuffled his feet and placed his hands on the counter. Pat tried for a third time, and it failed again.

We've gone over our credit limit already?
Jack thought.
This is all I have.
He began to perspire. Pat called the help line and the voice over the phone told him the card had reached its limit.

Jack didn't know what to do. He'd call his father. He'd call Pete. He'd crawl back into the car without waking Angela, drive all night until they get to Foxville, then he'd borrow money from Pete, or his father. He didn't know how he'd feed the children supper, or breakfast in the morning, either.