Spit Delaney's Island

SPIT DELANEY'S ISLAND

Copyright © 1976, 2011 by Jack Hodgins

First published 1976, Macmillan of Canada

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other
reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright Licensing
Agency).

RONSDALE PRESS

3350 West 21st Avenue, Vancouver, B.C.

Canada V6S 1G7

www.ronsdalepress.com

Typesetting: Julie Cochrane, in Granjon 11.5 pt on 15

Cover Design: Cyanotype

Cover Photo: “Scene at Tofino” by Aimin Tang

Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the following for their support of its
publishing program: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the British Columbia Arts Council, and
the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Book Publishing Tax Credit
program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hodgins, Jack, 1938–

Spit Delaney's island: selected stories / Jack Hodgins.—2nd ed.

ISBN epub 978-1-55380-121-4

I. Title.

PS8565.O3S6 2011 C813'.54 C2010-906438-0

for Dianne

Some of these stories first appeared in
Journal of Canadian Fiction
,
Capilano Review
,
Northwest Review
,
Descant
,
Wascana Review
, and
Canadian Fiction Magazine
. “At the Foot of the Hill, Birdie's
School” was read on CBC's “Anthology.”

People driving by don't notice Spit Delaney. His old gas station is nearly
hidden now behind the firs he's let grow up along the road, and he doesn't
bother to whitewash the scalloped row of half-tires someone planted once
instead of fence. And rushing by on the Island highway today, heading
north or south, there's little chance that anyone will notice Spit Delaney
seated on the big rock at the side of his road-end, scratching at his narrow
chest, or hear him muttering to the flat grey highway and to the scrubby
firs and to the useless old ears of his neighbour's dog that he'll be damned
if he can figure out what it is that is happening to him.

Hitch-hikers do notice, however; they can hear his muttering. Walking
past the sheep sorrel and buttercup on the gravel shoulder, they see him
suddenly, they turn alarmed eyes his way. Nodding, half smiling at this
long-necked man with the striped engineer's cap, they move on through
the shade-stripes of trees, their own narrow shadows like knives shaving
the pavement beside them. And all he gives back, all they can take away
with them, is a side-tilted look they have seen a hundred times in family
snapshots, in the eyes of people out at the edge of group photos unsure they
belong. Deference.
Look at the camera, son, this is all being done for you, it
has nothing to do with me.
He does not accept their attention, he admits
only to being a figure on the edge of whatever it is they are really looking
at: his gas station perhaps, or his rusty old tow truck, or his wife piling
suitcases into the trunk of her car. He relocates his cap, farther back on his
head; his Adam's apple slides up his long throat like a bubble in a tube,
then pushes down.

Spit Delaney cannot remember a time when he was not fascinated by
the hitch-hikers. His property is close to a highway junction where they
are often dropped off by the first ride that picked them up back near the
ferry terminal. On these late-summer days, they line up across the front of
his place like a lot of shabby refugees to wait for their second ride. Some
walk past to get right out beyond the others, but most space themselves
along the gravel, motionless, expressionless, collapsed. In pairs or clusters
they drape themselves over their canvas pack-sacks and their sleeping
bags. Some stretch out level on the ground, using their gear as head-rests
with only an arm and an upright thumb to show that they're awake, or
alive. They are heading for the west coast of the Island, he knows, the
Pacific, where they have heard it is still possible to live right down on the
beach under driftwood shelters and go everywhere naked from morning
until night. The clothes they are so eager to shed are patched jeans and
wide braces and shirts made to look like flags and big floppy hats. There
is a skinny boy with a panting St. Bernard tied to his pack with a length
of clothes line; there is a young frizzy-haired couple with a whining baby
they pass back and forth; there is a grizzled old man, a hunched-over man
with a stained-yellow beard, who must be at least in his seventies though
he is dressed the same as the others. Stupid old fool, thinks Spit Delaney,
and grins. Sitting on his rock, at the foot of the old paint-peeled sign saying B/A, he isn't afraid to envy.

There are ninety miles of road, of this road and another, between the
rock at his road-end and the west-coast beaches they are heading for. It
runs grey-silver over hills and along bays and through villages and around
mountains and along river banks, and is alive already with traffic: tourists
set loose from a ferry and racing for campsites, salesmen released from
motels and rushing for appointments. Beginnings are hard, and endings,
but the long grey ribbon that joins them runs smooth and mindless along
the surface of things. In his head Spit Delaney can follow it, can see every
turn, can feel himself coming over the last hill to find the ocean laid out in
the wide blue haze beneath him. The long curving line of sand that separates island from sea and man from whale is alive with the quick flashing
movements of people.

Behind him the trunk lid slams shut. His wife's footsteps crunch down
the gravel towards him. He can tell without looking that she is wearing
the crepe-soled shoes she bought in a fire sale and tried to return the next
day. Spit Delaney's heavy brows sink, as if he is straining to see something
forty miles across the road, deep into brush. He dispatches a wad of throat-phlegm in a clean arc out onto a stalk of dog-daisy, and doesn't bother
watching it slide to the ground.

She stops, a few feet behind. “There's enough in the fridge to last you a
week,” she says.

He ducks his head, to study the wild sweet-pea that twists in the grass
between his boots.

She is going, now.

That is what they have agreed on.

“Sit down when you eat,” she says. “Don't go standing up at the counter,
the way you will.”

The boy with the St. Bernard gets a ride at this moment, a green GMC
pickup. They leap into the back, dog and boy, and scramble up close to the
cab. Then the boy slaps his hand on the roof, signal to start, and settles back
with an arm around the dog's neck, laughing. For a moment his eyes meet
Spit's, the laugh dies; they watch each other until the pickup has gone on
past the other hitch-hikers, on up the road out of sight behind trees.

I am a wifeless man, Spit tells the disappeared youth. This is the day of
our separation. I am a wifeless man.

In his fortieth year Spit Delaney was sure he'd escaped all the pitfalls that
seemed to catch everyone else in their thirties. He was a survivor.

“This here's one bugger you don't catch with his eyes shut,” was his way
of putting it.

And wasn't it obvious? While all his friends were getting sick of the jobs
they'd worked at ever since they quit high school and were starting to hop
around from one new job to another, Spit Delaney was still doing the same
thing he'd been doing for twenty years, the thing he loved: operating Old
Number One steam locomotive in the paper mill, shunting up and down
the tracks, pushing flatcars and boxcars and tankcars off and onto barges.
“Spit and Old Number One, a marriage made in heaven,” people joked.
“Him and that machine was made for each other, a kid and his toy. That
train means more to him than any human could hope to.” Only it wasn't
a joke, it was true, he was glad to admit it. Who else in all that mill got out
of bed at four o'clock in the morning to fire up a head of steam for the
day's work? Who else hung around after the shift was over, cleaning and
polishing? Roy Rogers and Trigger, that's what they were. Spit and Old
Number One. He couldn't name another person whose job was so much
a part of himself, who was so totally committed to what he did for a living.

In the family department, too, he was a survivor. While everyone else's
kids in their teens seemed to be smashing up the old man's car or getting
caught at pot parties or treating their parents like slaves or having quiet
abortions on the mainland, Jon and Cora looked as if they were going to
sail right through their adolescence without a hitch: Cora would rather
watch television and eat chocolate cake than fool around with boys or go
to parties; Jon would rather read a book than do anything else at all. The
two of them looked safe enough. It was a sign that they respected their
father, Spit would say, though he admitted some of the credit had to go to
his wife.

Stella. That was one more thing. All through his thirties it seemed as if
every time he turned around someone else was splitting up. Everybody
except him and Stella. Friends broke up, divorced, couples fell apart and
regrouped into new couples. The day came when Stella Delaney looked at
him out of her flat, nearly colourless eyes and said, “You and me are just
about the only people we know that are still married.” You couldn't count
on the world being the same two weekends in a row. It was a hazard of
their age, boredom was doing it, Stella told him, boredom and the new
morality. People suddenly realizing what they didn't have to put up with.
There was no sense inviting anybody over for Saturday night, she said,
they could be separated by then. But, miraculously, by the time Spit
reached his fortieth year, he and Stella were still married, still together.
However, if they intended to continue with their marriage, she told him,
they'd have to make some new friends. Everyone else their age was newly
single or newly remarried or shacking up with people half their age; what
would they have in common?

The secret of his successful marriage, Spit insisted, was the way it
started. Stella was a long-legged bony-faced woman of twenty-two, already
engaged to some flat-assed logger from Tahsis, when Spit came into the
kitchen at the back of her father's store. She was doing peach preserves for
her first married winter, and admiring the logger's dinky little diamond
ring up on the windowsill in front of her. Her big hands, in the orange
mess of peel and juice and carved-out bruises, reminded him of the hands
of a fisherman gouging out fish guts. The back of her cotton dress dipped
up at the hem, to show the tiny blue veins behind her knees and the pink
patches of skin where she'd pressed one leg to the other. He touched. She
told him “Get lost mister, I got work to do,” and he said “That logger
musta been bushed and desperate is all I can say” but stayed to win her
anyway, and to rush her off to a preacher's house on the day before her
intended wedding. With a start like that, he said, how could anything go
wrong?

It couldn't. He was sure of it. Things that were important to him, things
that were real—his job, his family, his marriage—these things were surely
destined to survive even the treacherous thirties.

But before he had time to congratulate himself, things began to fall
apart. He insisted later that it was all because the stupidest god-damned
question he ever heard just popped into his head all of a sudden. He didn't
look for it, he didn't ask for it, it just came.

He was lying on his back in the sand at Wickanninish Bay, soaking up
sun. He'd driven over with the family to the west coast for the weekend,
had parked the camper up in the trees above the high-tide line. Stella was
lying beside him on her giant towel, reading a magazine, oiled and gleaming like a beached eel. The question just popped into his head, all of a sudden:
Where is the dividing line?

He was so surprised that he answered out loud. “Between what and
what?”

Stella turned a page and folded it back. Most of the new page was taken
up with a photograph of a woman who'd increased her bust measurements in a matter of days and wanted to show Stella how to do the same.

“Wha'd you say?”

“Nothing,” he said, and rolled over onto his side to face away from her.
Between what and what? he asked himself. Maybe he was beginning to
crack up. He'd heard of the things that happened to some men at his age.

Between what is and what isn't.

Spit sat up, cursing.

Stella slid her dark glasses down her nose and peered at him. “What's
the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” he said.
Where is the dividing line?
When the words hit him
again like that he jumped to his feet and shook his head, like a cow shaking off flies.

“Sand fleas?” she said.

“It's nothing,” he said, and stomped around to shake the sand out of the
hair on his legs.

“Too much sun,” she said, and pushed herself up. “We better move up
into shade.”

But when they had settled down by a log, cool in the shade of the windcrippled spruce, she told him it might just be this beach that was spooking
him. “This Indian Lady at Lodge,” she said, “told me her people get uneasy along this beach.” Spit knew Sophie Jim by name, but Stella always referred to her as This Indian Lady at Lodge. It was some kind of triumph,
apparently, when Sophie was finally persuaded to join the Daughters,
their first native. “She said there's a story that some kind of Sea-Wolf
monster used to come whanging up out of the Pacific here to gobble up
people. It came up to sire wolves for the land too, but went back into the
sea to live. She says they're all just a little nervous of this place.”

Spit's brain itched from the slap of the sudden question. He wanted to
go home, but the kids were far out on the sand at the water's edge, and he
could holler at them till he was blue in the face without being heard above
the roar of the waves.

“She said all up and down this coast there are stories. About monsters
that come out and change people into things. To hear her tell it there
must've been a whole lot of traffic back and forth between sea and land.”

“A whole lot of bull,” he said, and put on his shirt. It was cold up here,
and what did he care about a lot of Indian stuff? He knew Indians. When
he was a boy the people up the road adopted a little Indian kid, a girl, and
told it around that nobody,
nobody
was to dare tell her what she was. When
she was ten years old she still hadn't figured out that she wasn't the same
as everybody else, so Spit sat her down on the step and told her. He had to
tell her three times before she believed him and then she started to howl
and cry and throw herself around. But she dried out eventually and went
Indian with a vengeance, to make up for lost time. He couldn't go near her
without having to listen to a whole lot of stuff she'd got soaked up into her
brain from hanging around the Reserve. So he knew all about Wasgo,
Stella couldn't tell him anything new about that guy. He knew about
Kanikiluk too, which was worse. That son of a bitch would think nothing
of stepping out of the ocean and turning a man into a fish or making a
piece of seaweed think it was human. He knew all about the kind of traffic she meant.