The Shore Girl (14 page)

“Helloooo. It's Jake.”

I said this just loud enough so they'd hear my voice over my truck's noisy idle. I thought they must be huddled in the van, and I wanted them to know it was only me. I wanted them to hope it was me; that they'd been counting on it.

“Helloooo. It's Harmony.”

I jerked my head backward, causing such pain down my left side it actually heated my fingertips. She'd come up from behind me on the riverside, not helpless at all.

“Sorry. Didn't mean to startle you.” She was wrapped in her striped blanket, a halo of snowflakes on top of her head, white chunks clinging to her eyelashes. Her breath formed wispy puffs in the air between us.

“No, no, that's all right.” I tried to get my breath back by counting silently through the pain. “Thought you were in the van.”

“Rebee's inside. I was going stir crazy. Came out to look for the moon.”

It was nearly a whiteout. No moon up there.

“Brought you some blankets and stuff. Hot chocolate for Rebee.”

“You're a regular Santa Claus. Want to walk with me?”

She was in sandals, bare toes. No coat under that blanket I'd bet. She was not breathing bourbon, so I couldn't guess what stopped her from freezing. I looked past her to her tracks coming up from the river. She'd left a deep wet puddle with each step, like miniature swimming pools.

“Harmony, on my scale for worst walking weather, this is a nine. If it starts to hail golf balls, I'll bump it to ten. There's Scotch in the truck. Want to sit in the cab and warm up?”

“I'm not cold.” She shook her head to remove some of the snow. She was not exactly needy. “But I'll go for the Scotch.” She slogged her way to the other side of the truck. I looked over to the van for signs of Rebee, didn't find any, so we got in the truck and I threw the stuff I'd brought into the back seat, the thermos under my seat.

“It's like a sauna in here,” she said, closing the door quietly. I opened the window a crack and turned down the heat, then passed her the bottle. She closed her eyes and took a long swig.

I fiddled with the radio, found a station with easy music, and turned the volume way down. The clock read
9
:
40
.

“They say it's a friggin' record. This snow in August.
1922
might have come close.”

“Can we take a drive?”

She rubbed her blanket in a circle on her fogged side window, creating a hole to the outside the size of a face. The piling snow pressed down. I turned the wipers on and cleared the front window.

“Sure. I thought maybe you and Rebee might like to get out of here tonight. Stay at a hotel maybe. Wait it out.”

“Just a drive would be good.” She took a second long swig.

On my scale of worst drive-for-no-reason weather, this got a ten. She probably had no money. “I can pick up the room tab. Maybe we can get something to eat before I drop you girls off.”

She stared straight ahead, as though we were already on the road and her view kept changing.

“No strings,” I said. She didn't reply. I was not going to push it. “Okay. Want me to get Rebee? I brought her some hot chocolate.”

“You said that already. We'll leave her in the van.”

She must have known I was staring at her, but she wouldn't look at me. I knew nothing about kids, but I did remember those winter nights where the adults got lost and you couldn't find them anywhere. I didn't want to leave Rebee alone in the van.

“She'll be fine, Jake. She's sleeping,” Harmony said without turning to face me.

“But what if she wakes and finds you gone? What if she's cold?”

“You worry about all the wrong stuff. Want to go for a drive or not?”

I turned the wipers to high and checked the van once more. The west wind was driving the snow at a sharp angle, leaving the back van window clear. No sign of her.

I backed away slowly, sliding in the slush, having a hard time getting the truck turned around, a harder time still getting up the steep incline to the main road.

“Which way?”

“Just away.”

I turned right, the direction I just came from. There was no one else on the two-lane road so I drove down the centre. We didn't speak for several kilometres, just stared through the ribbon of white my headlights made, taking turns with the bottle. Harmony's blanket crumpled around her like a Kleenex, her hair plastered to her forehead, clinging to her sweater. She took her sandals off and placed them on top of the dash vent. I turned up the heat again.

“I hired a detective.”

“A detective? For what?”

“To find my brother.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Elroy
PI
.”

“What will you do if you find him?”

“Don't know. Haven't got that far.”

“You must care about him a lot, to go to all that bother.” “Kinda dumb, eh? When I was in Kenya this last time, nine months almost, I didn't think about him once. Now that he's gone, I can't stop.”

I'd been thinking about what a sorry brother I've made, but I didn't say this out loud. I'd been thinking, too, about the lives of Harmony and Rebee and wondered just then if the kid had bad dreams. I thought to myself how much thinking a person gets into when he can't work. “How about you?” I asked her. “Anybody out looking for you?”

“Oh, I doubt that. Was he a good brother?”

“Not particularly. No brothers, uncles, fathers of your own? Husband, maybe?”

“Why is it that when a man wants to find out about a woman, he asks about her men?”

Why was it she wouldn't answer even one question?

She turned her body, leaning against her door, and stretched her legs so her feet rested on my lap. Her toes were tinged with blue and I covered them with my hand. She was smiling at me, lip slightly curled. I tried to keep my eyes on the road.

“Maybe you just can't stand the fact that he didn't say goodbye,” she said.

Maybe. Maybe I was just mad he ended what we had without my say. It was hard to concentrate with this woman laid out before me.

We passed a car in the ditch, angled sideways, back end sticking up, and I slowed down and inched alongside, checking for bodies. Harmony ignored the vehicle, didn't feign the slightest interest, and when I saw it was empty, we picked up speed again and kept going.

“You live around here, right? Or your brother does. Can I see your place?”

When we drove through the gate she looked from the sludge-filled swamp to the outhouse to the sagging trailer. Since Rita, I hadn't brought another woman here. The place almost looked decent in its blanket of white. It had nearly stopped snowing, just leftover circles of flakes, the air so clear and new it sparkled. Harmony didn't say a word. Before I was even out of the cab, she headed to the trailer. By the time I got inside, she was leaning against the sink, looking out the small window.

“Home sweet home,” I said loudly. The power was out again. I lit the candle from the knife drawer and put it on the table. “Just spin around once and you'll have had the grand tour. Not much, I know. Now you've seen it, wanna go?”

“We just got here. I need a drink.” She smiled.

I went and got the bottle from the truck. When I got back, she was sitting at the table, wrapped in her blanket. I rummaged through the cupboard, found two glasses and poured us each a drink.

“Is this Matt?” She reached for the yellowed picture and held it against the flickering candle.

I nodded.

“Who is the woman?”

“Don't know. Found the picture in his drawer.”

“She's radiant.”

“Matt liked to pay for his women. Pay 'em and leave 'em.” “Not with this woman. Look at her. Look at your brother with her.”

She handed me the picture and I studied him closely again. This picture looked nothing like Matt, though it reminded me of the man I saw him to be. After my dad left for good, Matt used to come home to visit mother and me.

I can't remember my mother's face. White lace-up shoes. A checkered cotton dress. Mostly, it's her voice I remember, husky sounding, like she always had a sore throat. Matt would show up for breakfast on Saturday mornings, sit at his usual spot in our crowded kitchen, and my mother would bring us each two soft-boiled eggs in tiny yellow cups. “Each day your bones need two,” she'd tell me in her gravelly voice, as though strong bones were what a boy most needed. Then she'd leave our table and disappear. For hours, for days. Matt never said too much during his visits. Didn't fix stuff or give us money. But he kept coming back, regular as a paycheque, and for that I was grateful. When our mother died, just before Rita showed up, I'd drag my seventeen-year-old weary body to Matt's trailer on Saturday mornings, and he'd feed me soft-boiled eggs.

“You hold onto this, Jake,” Harmony said, her finger touching mine as she pointed to the picture in my hand. “Don't let this go.”

We drank Scotch in the semi-dark, Matt and his woman taking up the space between us. When Harmony told me she felt cold, I started to stand, to find her a dry blanket, and she stood too, and we bumped into each other in the cramped little space. She was shivering hard and I wrapped me around her as best I could. I wanted her, badly in fact, but I wanted to get it right more. I felt I could do this, whatever it was. This tenderness or softening or cautious unravelling. She buried her face to my neck, held my ribs in place. She smelled like the river, wet earth. My fingers caught in her hair. We pressed against each other until my knees felt weak.

“I need to go home,” she said finally, untangling from me, looking up with huge eyes.

I thought she was telling me she needed to go home. Home to her people. To doors that opened for friends and neighbours.

“I'll take you anywhere you want to go. The truck's all gassed up. We'll have the road to ourselves. We can drive all night.”

But she shook her head as though I was confused. “Just get me back to Rebee. She'll be frantic.”

I instantly felt my stomach roll. “Of course we'll get Rebee. You said she'd be sleeping.”

“She doesn't sleep for shit, Jake.” Her voice had hardened again, those traces of softness all gone. “Just put me back where you found me, okay?”

We drove slowly back to the campground, plowing through the sludge. Harmony sat on her side of the cab, me on mine.

“Can you find my place again, now that you've been there? It's twenty-seven kilometres from the campground to the trailer.”

She didn't answer me, so I repeated, “Twenty-seven kilometres due east. You can clock it on your odometer.”

“I'm a good mother,” she whispered.

I pulled her towards me and wrapped one arm around her and she curled into my shoulder. We didn't speak again. When I slid the truck to a stop, shadows flickered inside the van, Rebee's candle or lantern, maybe. I wanted to open the door for Harmony, but she got out too fast. We met just as her hand started to turn the rusted handle of the van's back door. I kissed her on the cheek like we were seventeen and her father was waiting on the other side. But it was Rebee who waited. Her almond eyes locked onto mine from behind the frosty window, then disappeared.

I went to the truck and pulled out the thermos, but when I came back to the van, Harmony was already inside. I knocked on the door, and knocked again. Finally, there was nothing left for me to do but go. Rebee's rosehips jumped when I slammed the truck door. They still dangled from my mirror, dark and withered now, like a string of tired eyes. They had that trapped-inside-the-nightmare look, like Rebee. Tonight I was the cause of her bad dreams, but I had the feeling it happened a lot for her. My tires hurled dirty chunks of snow muck as they ground out and away. At the halfway point between the girls' home and mine, I stopped the truck and stepped down, leaving the door open and the engine running. I limped stiffly down the middle of the highway, splashing slop, the hot chocolate thermos pressed to my chest. The pumpjack was out there, anchored to a field, but I couldn't see that far, just the sheepish remains of a blustering storm, the bearded fence lines and toppling white wheat. I marched on, unscrewing the thermos top and pouring slowly. Brown liquid trickled to the ground and melted into a steaming row of
splunks
where the highway's centre line should have been. Then I shook out the last drop and hurled that thermos into the night with everything my good arm would give.

* * *

I woke up already hung over, knotted and fluey. The dream leaked out of me and into the trailer's stillness. It was the dream where I'm a little kid and my father drives me into the backwoods. He parks the truck at the locked gate and we walk along a thistled fence line to the place where the land drops. He lifts me over the barb wire first and then hurdles himself over effortlessly. I follow him straight into the deafening noise until I let his hand slip from mine, cover my ears and stumble and slip, dropping farther and farther behind. He's ahead now, standing at the base of the towering pumpjack. The giant black paw screeches and swoops straight towards him. I think it's going to pluck him from the earth and carry him upwards. Over and over, the angry paw swings. My father waves to come join him but my feet won't move. The pumpjack screams so loud I can't hear his words. In the dream, I turn and run along the endless row of thistles until the noise is just a faint rumble, and my father has disappeared. I wake up each time all prickling and breathless, then I lie in bed and go over that day until I can't stand thinking about it anymore. The way I remember it, I stayed planted near the fence. My father came to me finally and led me by the hand to the truck. He wiped the snot from my nose with a hankie from his pocket. Gave me a stick of gum. Strapped on my seatbelt.

He might have been whistling, but his eyes gave him away. They told how he felt about the sissy boy beside him, afraid of a little oil.