Spit Delaney's Island (3 page)

The temptation was too much to resist. He leaned back and closed his
eyes, pressed the button, and turned the volume up full. Old Number One
came alive again, throbbed through him, swelled to become the whole
world. His hands shifted levers, his foot kicked back from a back-spray of
steam, his fingers itched to yank the whistle-cord. Then, when it blew,
when the old steam whistle cut right through to his core, he could have
died happily.

But he didn't die. Stella was at the window, screaming at him, clawing
at the recorder against his chest. A finger caught at the strap and it went
flying out onto the street. The whistle died abruptly, all sound stopped. Her
face, horrified, glowing red, appeared to be magnified a hundred times.
Other faces, creased and toothless, whiskered, stared through glass. It appeared that the whole street had come running to see him, this maniac.

Stella, blushing, tried to be pleasant, dipped apologies, smiled grimly as
she went around to her side of the car.

If her Lodge should hear of this.

Or her mother.

The chin, tucked back, was ready to quiver. She would cry this time,
and that would be the worst of all. Stella, crying, was unbearable.

But she didn't cry. She was furious. “You stupid stupid man,” she said,
as soon as she'd slammed the door. “You stupid stupid man.”

He got out to rescue his recorder, which had skidded across the sidewalk almost to the feet of the bobbing cripple. When he bent to pick it up,
the little man's eyes met his, dully, for just a moment, then shifted away.

Jon refused to ride home with them. He stuck his nose in the air, swung
his narrow shoulders, and headed down the street with a book shoved into
his armpit. He'd walk the whole way back to the cousin's, he said, before
he'd ride with
them
.

She sat silent and bristling while he drove out past the last grey buildings and the Co-op dairy and the first few stony farms. She scratched
scales of skin off the dry eczema patches that were spreading on her hands.
Then, when they were rushing down between rows of high blooming
fuchsia bushes, she asked him what he thought she was supposed to be
getting out of this trip.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow we go home.”

Spit Delaney had never travelled off the Island more than twice before
in his life, both those times to see a doctor on the mainland about the cast
in his eye. Something told him a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe ought
to have been more than it was. Something told him he'd been cheated.
Cheated in a single summer out of Old Number One, his saved-up overtime money, the tourist's rightfully expected fun, and now out of wife as
well. For the first thing she told him when the plane landed on home territory was this: “Maybe we ought to start thinking about a separation.
This is no marriage at all any more.”

He stopped at the house only long enough to drop them off, then fled
for coast, his ears refusing the sounds of her words.

But it was a wet day, and the beach was almost deserted. A few seagulls
slapped around on the sand, or hovered by tide pools. Trees, already distorted and one-sided from a lifetime of assaults, bent even farther away
from the wind. A row of yellowish seaweed, rolled and tangled with pieces
of bark and chunks of wood, lay like a continuous windrow along the
uneven line of last night's highest tide. Far out on the sand an old couple
walked, leaning on each other, bundled up in toques and Cowichan
sweaters and gum boots. The ocean was first a low lacy line on sand, then
sharp chopped waves like ploughed furrows, then nothing but haze and
mist, a thick blending with uncertain sky.

There was no magic here. No traffic, no transformations. No Kanikiluk in sight. He'd put ninety miles on the camper for nothing. He might
as well have curled up in a corner of the old gas station, amongst the car
parts, or sat in behind the wheel of his tow truck to brood. The world was
out to cheat him wherever he turned.

Still, he walked out, all the way out in the cold wind to the edge of the
sea, and met a naked youth coming up out of waves to greet him.

“Swimming?” Spit said, and frowned. “Don't you tell me it's warm
when you get used to it, boy, I can see by the way you're all shrivelled up
that you're nearly froze.”

The youth denied nothing. He raised both arms to the sky as if expecting to ascend, water streaming from his long hair and beard and his crotch,
forming beads in the hairs, shining on goose-bumped skin. Then he tilted
his head.

“Don't I know you?”

“Not me,” Spit said. “I don't live here.”

“Me neither,” the youth said. “Me and some other guys been camping
around that point over there all summer, I go swimming twice a day.”

Spit put both hands in his pockets, planted his feet apart, and stretched
his long neck. He kept his gaze far out to sea, attempting to bore through
that mist. “I just come down for a look at this here ocean.”

“Sure, man,” the youth said. “I
do
know you. You let me use your can.”

“What? What's that?” Why couldn't the kid just move on? You had to
be alone sometimes, other people only complicated things.

“I was waiting for a ride, to come up here, and I come into your house
to use the can. Hell, man, you gave me a beer and sat me down and told me
your whole life story. When I came out my friend had gone on without me.”

Spit looked at the youth's face. He remembered someone, he remembered the youth on that hot day, but there was nothing in this face that he
recognized. It was as if when he'd stripped off his clothes he'd also stripped
off whatever it was that would make his face different from a thousand
others.

“You know what they found out there, don't you?” the youth said. He
turned to face the ocean with Spit. “Out there they found this crack that
runs all around the ocean floor. Sure, man, they say it's squeezing lava out
like toothpaste all the time. Runs all the way around the outside edge of
this ocean.”

“What?” Spit said. “What are you talking about?”

“Squirting lava up out of the centre of the earth! Pushing the continents
farther and farther apart! Don't that blow your mind?”

“Look,” Spit said. But he lost the thought that had occurred.

“Pushing and pushing. Dividing the waters. Like that what-was-it right
back there at the beginning of things. And there it is, right out there somewhere, a bloody big seam. Spreading and pushing.”

“You can't believe them scientists,” Spit said. “They like to scare you.”

“I thought I recognized you. You pulled two beer out of the fridge,
snapped off the caps, and put them on the table. Use the can, you said, and
when you come out this'll wash the dust from your throat. You must've
kept me there the whole afternoon, talking.”

“Well, nobody's stopping you now. Nobody's forcing you to stay. Go on
up and get dressed.” If all he came up out of that ocean to tell about was a
crack, he might as well go back in.

Which he did, on the run.

Straight back through ankle-foam, into breakers, out into waves. A
black head, bobbing; he could be a seal, watching the shore.

Go looking for your crack, he wanted to shout. Go help push the continents apart. Help split the god-damned world in two.

“There's no reason why we can't do this in a friendly fashion,” Stella said
when he got home. “It's not as if we hate each other. We simply want to
make a convenient arrangement. I phoned a lawyer while you were out.”

She came down the staircase backwards, on her hands and knees,
scrubbing, her rear end swinging to the rhythm of her arm. Stella was
death on dirt, especially when she was upset.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Spit said. “This isn't Hollywood, this is
us
. We
survived all that crap.”

She turned on the bottom step, sat back, and pushed her hair away
from her eyes. “Not quite survived. It just waited until we were off our
guard, until we thought we were home-safe.”

He could puke.

Or hit her.

“But there isn't any home-safe, Spit. And this
is
Hollywood, the world
has shrunk, it's changed, even here.” She tapped the pointed wooden scrub
brush on the step, to show where here was.

Spit fingered the cassette in his pocket. She'd smashed his machine.

He'd have to buy a new one, or go without.

“Lady,” he said, “that flat-assed logger don't know what a close call he
had. If he'd've known he'd be thanking me every day of his life.”

Though he didn't mean it.

Prying him loose from Stella would be like prying off his arm. He'd got
used to her, and couldn't imagine how he'd live without her.

Her mother sat in her flowered armchair and scowled out over her
bulging eyeballs at him as if she were trying to see straight to his centre
and burn what she found. Her mouth chewed on unintelligible sounds.

“This is my bad year,” he said. “First they take away Old Number One,
and now this. The only things that mattered to me. Real things.”

“Real!” The old woman screeched, threw up her hands, and slapped
them down again on her skinny thighs. She laughed, squinted her eyes at
the joke, then blinked them open again, bulged them out, and pursed her
lips. Well, have we got news for you, she seemed to be saying. She could
hardly wait for Stella's answer.

“The only things you can say that about,” Stella said, “are the things
that people can't touch, or wreck. Truth is like that, I imagine, if there is
such a thing.”

The old woman nodded, nodded: That'll show you, that'll put you in
your place. Spit could wring her scrawny neck.

“You!” he said. “What do you know about anything?”

The old woman pulled back, alarmed. Her big eyes filled with tears,
her hands dug into the folds of her dress. The lips moved, muttered,
mumbled things at the window, at the door, at her own pointed knees.
Then suddenly she leaned ahead again, seared a scowl into him. “All a
mirage!” she shrieked, and looked frightened by her own words. She
drew back, swallowed, gathered courage again. “Blink your eyes and it's
gone, or moved!”

Spit and Stella looked at each other. Stella raised an eyebrow. “That's
enough, Mother,” she said. Gently.

“Everybody said we had a good marriage,” he said. “Spit and Stella,
solid as rocks.”

“If you had a good marriage,” the old woman accused, “it was with a
train, not a woman.” And looked away, pointed her chin elsewhere.

Stella leapt up, snorting, and hurried out of the room with her bucket
of soapy water.

Spit felt, he said, like he'd been dragged under the house by a couple of
dogs and fought over. He had to lie down. And, lying down, he had to face
up to what was happening. She came into the bedroom and stood at the
foot at the bed. She puffed up her cheeks like a blowfish and fixed her eyes
on him.

“I told the lawyer there was no fighting involved. I told him it was a
friendly separation. But he said one of us better get out of the house all the
same, live in a motel or something until it's arranged. He said you.”

“Not me,” he said. “I'll stay put, thank you.”

“Then I'll go.” Her face floated back, wavered in his watery vision, then
came ahead again.

“I'd call that desertion,” he said.

“You wouldn't dare.”

And of course he wouldn't. It was no more and no less than what he'd
expect, after everything else, if he thought about it.

All he wanted to do was put his cassette tape into a machine, lie back,
close his eyes, and let the sounds of Old Number One rattle through him.
That was all he wanted. When she'd gone he would drive in to town and
buy a new machine.

“I'll leave the place clean,” she said. “I'll leave food in the fridge when
I go, in a few days. Do you think you can learn how to cook?”

“I don't know,” he said. “How should I know? I don't even believe this
is happening. I can't even think what it's going to be like.”

“You'll get used to it. You've had twenty years of one kind of life, you'll
get used to another.”

Spit put his head back on the pillow. There wasn't a thing he could
reach out and touch and be sure of.

At the foot of his obsolete B/A sign, Spit on his rock watches the hitch-hikers spread out along the roadside like a pack of ragged refugees. Between him and them there is a ditch clogged with dry podded broom and
a wild tangle of honeysuckle and blackberry vines. They perch on their
packs, lean against the telephone pole, lie out flat on the gravel; every one
of them indifferent to the sun, the traffic, to one another. We have all day,
their postures say, we have for ever. If you won't pick us up, someone else
just as good will do it, nobody needs you.

Spit can remember a time when he tried to have a pleading look on his
face whenever he was out on the road. A look that said Please pick me up
I may die if I don't get where I'm going on time. And made obscene gestures at every driver that passed him by. Sometimes hollered insults. These
people, though, don't care enough to look hopeful. It doesn't matter to
them if they get picked up or not, because they think where they're going
isn't the slightest bit different from where they are now. Like bits of dry
leaves, letting the wind blow them whatever way it wants.

The old bearded man notices Spit, raises a hand to his forehead in greeting. His gaze runs up the pole, flickers over the weathered sign, and runs
down again. He gives Spit a grin, a slight shake of his head, turns away.
Old fool, Spit thinks. At your age. And lifts his engineer cap to settle it farther back.