Travelling Light (20 page)

Life before the war seemed like something you were looking at through the wrong end of a telescope.

“How are you going to pay me?”

“Will you take a cheque?”

“Sure. You're an officer and a gentlemen, aren't you.”

It was just a car, not even a new car — a new old car. He'd had a notion of taking his wife north for a drive in the country, a swim at the lake. Really. That had been the plan.

Instead of going downtown to the law office he turned left on Sherbrooke Street, headed into Westmount, parked on their quiet little street.

They could leave the little girl with one of Margo's sisters for the afternoon.

Each little flat in the Edwardian terrace had its own front door. As soon as he opened theirs he could hear the electric clock on the kitchen stove and smell the floor wax and furniture polish, and he knew the apartment was empty. The cleaning lady had gone home and Margo had probably taken Barbara to the park or up the hill to her grandparents' house.

He walked through the empty rooms, smoking a cigarette. In the spotless kitchen he tapped his ashes carefully into the sink, then wheeled and walked back out to the living room, where he stood at the front window, staring out at his car. The bulbous grey fenders were the colour of gunmetal, the seats were red, and the soft top was cream, the colour of a woman's healthy skin.

Going into the bedroom, he began lifting shirts and underwear from a drawer and packing them into his old army kit bag.

Back in July, in Maine, Margo had been sitting in a striped canvas beach chair, scribbling on a yellow legal pad. “There!” she said, drawing a brisk underline stroke on the page. “Done.”

“Done what?” He lay on a beach towel, groggy, abstracted by the sun's desirous heat. They were staying with his parents at their cottage on Kennebunk Beach. Southern Maine was crowded with Canadians, for the first time since 1939. They overheard plenty of French in cafés and gas stations and along the beach, and fresh copies of the
Star
and
La Presse
were stocked at the local stores, along with Canadian cigarette brands — Sweet Caps, Player's, Export A.

“A weekly budget. I've written down everything we spend money on. You can check it and tell me if there's anything I've forgotten.” She held out the pad but he didn't take it. “I'm trying to figure out exactly what we need to live on while you're at law school. It comes to forty-three dollars per week if we cut Mrs. Moodie to one day and your father pays your tuition.”

“I am not going to law school, Margo. I've already told you.”

“You haven't said what you're going to do instead.” After a few moments she continued. “You have to do something, Johnny. You can't keep clerking for your father. You're not a clerk. Summer's over in a little while.”

He lay with his eyes shut, wishing he were back in the army and still looking forward to the end of the war. He heard her rummage in her beach bag for a cigarette, scrape a match, light up.

“You're not the man I married. You're like a bloody stranger.”

The flat aroma of tobacco smoke reached his nostrils. He wanted a smoke but he didn't want to sit up, open his eyes, didn't want to look at her.

“I don't know what's gotten into you,” Margo said. “I know you can't be the same as you used to be. I just wish you could be someone more likeable. It's hard to have any respect for you at all.”

“Does your mother respect your father, do you think?”

Once or twice a year, Margo's stern, puritanical old man would disappear on crazy binges. One of the children would be dispatched to New York City to retrieve him from whichever hotel he'd holed up in — the Waldorf, the Plaza, or the Biltmore — and bring him home on the train, whisky-soaked and tremulous. Johnny had twice accompanied Margo on those trips. All the O'Brien girls were fanatically loyal to their father.

“I'm going inside.” Margo stubbed her cigarette in the sand.

“Look, Margo —”

“No, thank you.” Standing up, she grabbed the beach bag and walked off.

He'd stayed on his towel as a fog began rolling in, slowly driving people from the beach. The tide was falling. He could feel a heavy surf thumping the sand. He knew he was alive for no good reason. It was a matter of inches and split seconds, of choosing to take a step this way instead of that way. It wasn't hard to imagine having made different choices, in which case he'd now be parked in one of the soldier cemeteries in Europe.

He rose and walked down to the hard-packed wet sand. When he was a child, he had stood with the cold Atlantic biting at his feet, calling across the waves to his grandmother in Ireland. Ireland was actually a long way to the north. Kennebunk lay along the same latitude as Bayonne, France. He had checked it out in the dog-eared, summer-thumbed atlas at the cottage.

Wading through hissing surf, he shoved his body beyond the first breaker, then dove in and swam strongly out beyond the break. The water was fizzing and chill, but he kept heading offshore.

After swimming for ten or fifteen minutes, he was at the peak of a swell when he heard a metallic clanging: the red buoy marking the mouth of the Kennebunk River navigation channel. He realized he was in some danger of being run over by a vessel making for the river. A skipper at the helm of a fishing boat or a sardine carrier would be unlikely to notice a swimmer.

The tide was pulling offshore and he let himself swim along with it, wishing to get clear from any boat traffic as quickly as possible. At the bottom of a swell he could see nothing except grey-green sea. He had felt a grain of fear then, and swam even harder.

After ten more minutes of powerful swimming, he could feel his head leaking heat. At the top of a swell he looked around and felt another chill of fear: he couldn't see the shore. He started swimming against the pull of tide, hoping that he was heading for the beach and not the river channel. He'd lost his sense of time, his stroke was getting weaker, and he could feel his thoughts slowing and thickening, like a gearbox overfilled with oil.

He forced himself to swim another forty strokes. His right shoulder, dislocated in a Jeep accident, was throbbing. His stroke was losing all efficiency; he wasn't getting the torque his body needed to screw itself through the water. Feeling the drag of his swim trunks, he shucked them. The rising tide beat like a hammer against his head and shoulders.

The bright, bitter taste of gasoline startled him. Swallowing
a mouthful, he sputtered and coughed. Then he saw the lobster boat, fifty yards off, heaving up and down on the swell. There was a figure at the helm, another in front of the red triangle of stern sail. He knew right away that they'd seen him — the boat was circling — but he didn't notice them throwing the life preserver until it plopped near enough for him to reach out and drag it over his head, then wriggle until it was lodged under his arms. It was a drill they'd practised many times in England.

As he was towed through the water, the snarl of exhaust grew louder and the stink of bait and gasoline more intense. He came alongside the boat, slithering against the hull planking, and was hoisted and swung aboard on the block used for hauling traps.

“My God, he's buck naked!”

Someone wrapped a blanket around him, helped him to the shelter of the wheelhouse, and sat him down on an overturned bucket. A little boy was staring at him.

The skipper opened up the throttle and turned his bow into the swell. “What the hell happened to you?” he shouted. “Is anyone else in the water? Where's your boat?”

Johnny shook his head.

“No? You sure?”

He nodded.

“Pour him some coffee outta my Thermos,” the skipper said to the deckhand, who was coiling the lifeline.

The skipper turned back to Johnny. “Where'd you go down? Can you give me a heading?”

Men had died of cold along the Scheldt even before there was snow on the ground. They'd died in their foxholes after four days of Dutch rain. He knew he must catch hold of his senses, which had somehow slipped out of gear, like a burnt-out transmission.

The deckhand was handing him a tin cup of steaming coffee. Johnny was shaking and it was hard to hold the cup, but he made himself sip the hot liquid, burning his lips. Swallowing, he felt it scorching down inside. But he wasn't getting any warmer; he could feel his body still leaking heat.

“I'm very cold,” he said, his voice whispery and weak.

“What?” the skipper shouted.

Johnny tried raising his voice above the hammering engine. “I have to get warm.”

“We'll be on the wharf in ten minutes.” The skipper opened the throttle. “You want a smoke?” As the engine roar increased, the bow lifted out of the water. “Hey, Polly! Give the guy a smoke.”

“He doesn't need a smoke. He needs you to strip down and get under the blanket with him and give him your body heat.”

Johnny saw that the deckhand was a young woman with a white, thin face and dark hair.

“He'll die if you don't, Leo! Go on, I'll take the wheel.”

“No fuckin' way.”

“Then I will.” She began unbuttoning her mackinaw. “I'm going to hang my coat over your head, mister,” she told Johnny.

He couldn't see anything with the jacket draped over his head. It was warm and heavy and stank of wool. But he heard her pulling off rubber boots, unzipping her dungarees.

“Jesus, Polly.”

“Okay, open up, mister. Let me in.”

He held the blanket open and she sat down quickly on his lap, pulling the blanket around them both, then lifting the coat off his head so he could see.

“Leo, he's shivering so bad. He's really cold.”

The skipper was at the wheel, staring straight ahead. She wrapped her arms around Johnny, pressing herself against him. He could hear his teeth chattering uncontrollably. The sound was frightening, but he couldn't stop it.

“Come here, Jackie.” She was reaching out to the little boy, who was staring at them balefully with his thumb in his mouth. “Come inside with Mama, where it's nice and warm. Leo, he could use more coffee.”

The skipper filled the cup and handed it to her. She drew the little boy under the blanket with them; Johnny could feel the boy's feet stepping on his toes. The woman draped her arm around Johnny's neck while she held the tin cup to his lips. “Swallow this, it'll help.”

He could feel the liquid burning down into his core. She hugged him for a long time, and he began to feel the heat radiating from her breasts and her arms. By the time the boat entered the Kennebunk River his head was clearing and the shivering had subsided.

“Look at the seals, Jackie.” The woman pointed to harbour seals basking on a breakwater.

The skipper said, “You sure there's no one else out there, pal?”

“I was alone. I was swimming off the beach.”

“You were heading for the fuckin' Azores when we saw you. Polly, get some clothes on before we tie up.”

“We ought to take him to the hospital maybe.”

“No,” Johnny said. “I'll be all right now.”

“You sure?” She looked at him doubtfully.

“Ask me my name.”

“Huh?”

“Taschereau, Jacques Taschereau. From Montreal. Staying at my parents' cottage, Beach Avenue, Kennebunk Beach. It's Friday, July twenty-first. No, twenty-second. Harry Truman is president and Mackenzie King's prime minister.”

“Yeah?” She seemed amused.

“It's how to tell if a man's losing heat — ask questions. See if he's thinking straight. You can see I'm oriented. I'll be fine.”

“I'm going to cover you up again,” the woman said.

She hung the woollen mackinaw over his head and he listened to her getting dressed, zipping up her dungarees. When she lifted away the jacket, he blinked in the garish light. They were approaching the wharf that the lobstermen used; the skipper cut back the throttle.

“Leo, you got some clothes he can wear?”

Something in her speech was familiar but Johnny couldn't quite place it.

“Look in the seabag.”

She was pulling dungarees and a blue shirt from a canvas duffle when something fell onto the deck with a clunk. She picked it up and he recognized a Colt .45 automatic, the weapon American officers and MPs carried as a sidearm. She dropped the pistol back into the seabag and handed Johnny the clothes. “Here, put these on.”

He felt dizzy as he stood up. The skipper saw it and reached out, steadying him. “Sure you don't want a corpsman, pal?”

“No, no, I'll be fine.” The chambray shirt and dungarees were daubed with crusts of red-lead bottom paint. The shirt had
USN
stencilled on the chest. He began pulling on the clothes.

“Polly, take the truck, drop him off up the beach, then come back for me. I got a few things to take care of on the boat.”

As they approached the dock she stood amidships, dock line in hand. They had hung a couple of auto tires over the side as fenders. The skipper laid up neatly alongside the float, and she jumped off and quickly cleated dock lines fore and aft.

The skipper lifted the little boy over the side, then turned to Johnny. “Need a hand, pal?”

“No, I'm fine.” He reached out and shook hands with the skipper. “Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

As soon as Johnny had stepped onto the dock, Polly threw the lines aboard. He read the name freshly painted on the transom,
Marie Claire,
as the old boat began chugging back out to a mooring.

“Watch out, mister, with your bare feet — there's broken glass. The truck's over here. C'mon, Jackie, let's take this man home.”

“I'm Jacques Taschereau,” he said, extending his hand.

“Yeah, I got that.” Her hand was small and strong. “Polly Beausoleil.”