Chapter Three

TUESDAY
TUESDAY

Tuesday morning, Darla made it to her office, shut the door and nursed a head-splitting case of the dooms. She’d never before failed to get a hangover into the office on Monday, never had she taken advantage of the boss’s absence to give herself a break. To do so had certainly not crossed her mind Saturday evening when Whatsisname, Clarence, had called to report he’d dropped ‘The Big Guy’ up at the lake – “By Himself! Only One Bag!” – and they, apparently, were expected to wait on further instructions – Chain of command thing, Clarence’d wait to hear from her hearing from The Big Guy. Darla had fully expected to be up front and spit-polished, headphone and laptop at the ready, when George signalled in from the outback Monday morning. She’d had no intention of funking her duty, failing to appear at her post, that was job suicide these days; cries of treason at your back and you’re hanging from a fence before the coffee’s brewed.

But, as the winning goalie, Darla’d paraded her girls from tailgate to tailgate after their Sunday league final; beer and buffalo wings were normal, it had likely been the B52s. So, Tuesday, as the guilt ridden loser, Darla had to take back control of her systems from that fascist fuck in Personnel, who she knew damned well answered yessir nosir to Security. She swallowed codeine with a big cappuchino, and settled in to sweat on George’s couch with her back to the scotch. When the phone rang she was thinking of donating her body to science, if there was anything left when they found her.

By Tuesday morning Katherine was rubbed raw. Sam said he had to be up to Manooth by noon. Did she want to come? He’d told her Sunday night his pickup was up there sitting on a hoist, nothing wrong with her, had a nice new tailpipe and a lick of grease, but the fucking hoist was stuck, been stuck since Friday, couldn’t get her down. “Probably have to take a crowbar to the situation, one way or another, fuckers’re either stupid or malicious. If we get her down, you can drive yourself back. Don’t know how long.”

Of course she wanted to go, she was hungry for landscape, but with this whisker-burnt and bludgeoned crotch she knew she’d be walking bow-legged and she wasn’t into hanging around some grease-pit with a bunch of smirking rednecks. So, if he didn’t mind, he could go sort it out and then they could do the retrieval thing tomorrow, because she was going to take a long bath, and would he pick up a carton of her smokes and some diet gingerale and get some more Jack and…

Handing him her keys, she wondered for a cold moment if she was crazy to trust this man whose body was almost all she knew of him. He’d been silent mostly when she talked, grunting approval or laughter with a toss of his head. Answers to her questions came slowly, some not at all, guarded with an ambiguity that left her uncertain if he was a bit dim, or lying. He did tell her he’d built this place out of a boat shed, circling a hand at the walls around them, all by himself, apparently. But questions of cost, of the affordability of what she recognized as expensive, even lavish materials, he dismissed with a shrug and said it was the labour made the difference.

She hesitated. She stared at the keys in his hand still suspended between them until his plaid flannel shirt and blue denims melted and churned, till the edges of her eyes rounded the room and grew in the light. She saw a hen on a nest, stared it into a peacock, then let Sam slide back into sight. “And you might as well get a couple big bottles of a decent white, reasonable, but French and a… What? Can’t you… Oh. Never mind, I’ll give you some money. Where’s my bag? Find my bag!”

Soaking in Sam’s tub, with the window at her elbow affording a long rising view of white birch and silver poplar naked but for a few tags of yellow leaf, backed by rusted cedars and over-topped by blue-black spruce, with far off above all else, a monstrous twisted pine holding a Group of Seven pose that made her grin every time she looked at it, Katherine fell in love, realized she was in neck deep, and she wasn’t thinking about the water level which needed a constant trickle to match the drain.

But by four o’clock she’d rechecked twice for possibles amongst the stack of beer empties, having squeezed rye and bourbon dregs into her first cups of coffee and an airline vodka into a later cup of tea. She had six cigarettes left and Sam had her car. If he doesn’t get his tight little Indian ass back soon, all this good sex is gonna feel like rape. She swallowed some codeine with a bit of boiled water, stuffed the firebox with old elm and heavy maple, furled herself in the eiderdown quilt from Sam’s bed and clutching her make-up bag, settled to the long table to make use of her time and get a little painting done.

Once he’d settled business with Darla, convincing her it wasn’t Alzheimer’s and that he trusted her to mind the shop until he decided on his next move, George spent a happy afternoon setting up proper camp; priming the pump, fiddling cocks and banging on pipes till water flowed, shaking down the stove pipes, pruning his way to the privy and back. So, it was sun-down when he sat himself to the telephone with coffee and a highball to ring up Bea, “I was down yesterday.”

“I heard.”

“D’you mind?”

“It’s not for me to…  No. I don’t mind.”

“Good. I’ve taken a liberty.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I want to save you the trip down to get your mother. I’ve ordered the car to pick her up on Saturday. How’s that? And Darla, she’s my secretary, she’ll call and arrange the time once she knows you’ve spoken to her. Your mother. And Darla… you have to meet her, she’s marvelous. Or did you, at the reception? No? Well, you will. She has very kindly offered to accompany Tillie. D’ you mind? Your mother, I mean, she did introduce herself over the biscuits the other night. Anyway, Darla thought Clarence, the driver, he’s not much of a talker, might seem a bit spooky to an elderly woman trapped in the backseat of a moving car, and she wouldn’t mind, Darla wouldn’t, coming along for the ride. Rather generous I thought. She says she owes me one, something about not making it in yesterday, most unlike her, sounded a bit shaky. While the cat’s away, eh? Anyway, what d’ you think? Okay? __Beatrice? __Hello?”

Her chest felt light, suddenly her belly felt airy and weightless, her back seemed to arch of itself, she felt strong and well-defended, but habit took her and Bea fell to worrying, “This Darla, I don’t know…” Is she young? “Mother’s so… odd, lately, and a strange car, well, that might…” Send her right round the bend, she’ll think I sold her to the Home! “She’s not always herself these days. You might not have noticed, but she gets a little… absent, and it’s sometimes all I can do to…” Manage not to strangle her, “…to cope. I do wish you’d thought to ask first.” Bea winced from her own words. Why can’t you just be grateful? He’ll hang up now and that’s the last you’ll hear from him.

“I am sorry, Bea. I apologize once again. Unthinking and selfish of me, but I so much want to do something for you, make up for that godawful reception, for busting up your dock. I feel like I’ve brought you nothing but trouble and I wanted to repay you for a wonderful evening on Sunday. You looked so unhappy at the thought of the drive down and back in Saturday traffic, it seemed like the perfect answer. It’s no big deal, Bea, it doesn’t have to happen if you think it’s too much for your mother, but it is just a friend offering a ride. She can think it’s a taxi ride, without Darla, if you like, though Darla’s quite good company. She’s a marvel with older people.”

Obviously, she’s younger than older people. I wouldn’t have to take the car on the road. It should be Katherine’s place to do these things! Why me? “A marvel, eh? Well, maybe Mother would like it. A car with a real chauffeur, it’d just about suit the size of her ego these days. She ends up thinking she’s the Queen, maybe she’ll behave.”

“Good! Then you don’t mind, I’m so glad. I’ve still to think up something for the Rosses. Music, he said.”

Wearing sex on his sleeve, Martin huddled in a plastic booth in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Bannock, flipping through the leaves of juke titles in the chrome box fixed to the plastic wall. Country he’d mostly never heard of, except for some of Dolly’s tunes and Johnny Cash’s ‘Boy Named Sue’, which nobody on the planet could’ve missed the year middle-america invented irony, which was, of course, the whole blatant symbolic and significant core of the present moment considering that his entire personal system of gender identification had gone up the spout. Yesterday he’d still been… Well, he had been! To this breathless, heart-hollowing shock of desire, only yesterday he’d been a stranger, a virgin to love!

He’d begun nagging before noon about bus schedules, sitting at Pauls’ mother’s kitchen table swallowing bitter coffee through a thundering headache and a very dim memory of the Arlen Hotel, desperate to be gone, to flee the mortifying awkwardness of having wakened in a strange bed, in a strange house, in a strange town. Dumped among strangers by that dick-driven bitch! She’d tossed his bag into the back of Brad’s car before disappearing into the night with her Indian, but Martin’s emergency vodka was still tucked under the spare in her trunk, and he’d known without question, having wakened to walls of bible text and the howl of a tv preacher, that there wasn’t a drink to be had in this house. When told he’d missed the only bus of the day, he’d flushed with fear of a snapping nerve, an involuntary violence that would hurl his coffee mug at a plaster blessing, a needlepoint homily, and he’d watched himself balance his slopping mug at the table’s edge, daring it to fall. But before it could come to destruction, Paul’s mother had announced that she was driving down to visit a sister, to shop and stay over, and when she’d finally gone out the door for the third time with enough keys, Martin’s burden of anxiety, that fear of incurring maternal censure that a good boy caught kicking his mother’s corgis becomes trained to, when that burden lifted like a blown cloud, he went all gracious with relief, “Well hey, suppose we might as well turn it into a silk purse, eh? Must be something to do in this godforsaken hole. What’s to see in beautiful Bannock?” He’d rescued his mug, drunk up, and the day’d gone well enough then.

His body feeling oddly long, endless and watery, Martin slid his butt on the rim of the naugahyde bench to stretch his legs far under the plastic table to trap Paul’s sneakers between his boots. Jerking his feet back under the bench to free them, Paul’s head rocked forward over the table, which gave him the chance to say hard and flat, “Not here,” and rocking back, he turned away to swing his legs up on the bench and prop his back against the wall. Two girls in the back booth adding fries to their hips, two boys watching over their coke glasses, making noises with their straws, knees pumping with hormones, old Hing on a stool at the counter, newspaper spread, a cup of his best boiled coffee to hand, Stuart the Moody Loner pressed to the glass in the window booth, waiting for the bus to stop, for the wife to come back__  nobody’d noticed, Paul breathed again. He wanted to moan, but that’d just attract attention. Oh, Christ, get me out of this, one blow-job and I’ve created a monster. You knew this’d happen. You knew it the moment you laid eyes on him. I did. So, why… Fuck the why! I was horny. Yah. Asshole.

Of course there hadn’t been anything to do in beautiful Bannock except walk to the liquor store for a bottle of something to match the hairy pork Paul had dug from the freezer. Over the hill and down the street and there was pretty much the town, smelling of diesel farted from logging trucks and of pot pourri leaked from a dozen shops like a small craft warning. Gaping at yet another window display of knitted loons and wooden teapots, Martin had sketched a shudder, “There really enough tourists to buy all this crap?”

“Yah, eventually. What happens is, they wander around and look at it, but they’re not so stupid they haven’t seen it in the malls back home for half the price. So, it’s the locals buy it, people like my mother, ‘cause they don’t know any better and they get it home and the wheels fall off, or it doesn’t hold water and the dog won’t stop barking at it. So, they have a yard sale, or give it to the poor people, who have more sense than to buy it in the first place and have their own yard sales, and then everybody gets all smug and superior when some tourist pays two bucks for it for the cottage. Tourists think they’re ‘antiquing’, screwing the locals; locals think they’re ‘destination marketing’, screwing the tourists. It’s your global economy thing, not just made in Japan, global crap, big business.”

If not here, then WHERE? Screaming from the tenderness of blood-flushed skin, Martin was close to hysteria with confusion. I’m an animal, a disgusting animal, I want to rut and bite and sweat juice and lick it and… oh god!!! His knees beat together under the table, his hands clenched his wrists to hold his belly in his lap, his mouth pursed and he tried not to rock.

It wasn’t the first time. Once, at fifteen, Martin had found himself parked up a dead-end road with a man he’d thought just generous and kind. Being driven home from an evening of unexpected Shakespeare, Troilus in a g-string, a hand suddenly resting on the crease of his houndstooth summer wools, he had thought, Oh! and when the man asked where, he had said the next left, left again, it doesn’t go anywhere. Neither did the rest of it. When the man asked if he kissed, Martin realized he’d never imagined that and said no. When the man asked if Martin minded as his head went down to his lap, he realized he hadn’t imagined that either. He said no. He had wanted to suppose it was his unpreparedness, his lack of imagination, that kept him from rising to the occasion, god knew his own hand never suffered rejection, but he suspected, as he looked down on a bald spot in the moonlight, that age had something to do with it and when that thought jumped on the thick waves of his friend Pete’s hair, he had backed away in a fluster before anything could come of it and said he guessed he was tired and maybe it was best to get home. He had examined himself in the bathroom mirror, as he’d read heroines did, found no evidence and went to bed figuring the future would take care of itself. Well, it hadn’t until now, last night, this morning when he had wakened with a lusting heat that rolled him onto a sleeping Paul demanding saliva and sweat and sperm in a frenzy of making up lost time. Lost time? Damned near half my life I’ve missed this! And other people know? How many people know? Martin ran his hand up his nape, shook his hair, and questioned the guest list, “How many of us are there?”

Paul’s eyes were shut in prayer. Oh, Lord, why did I get the virgin? It’s a dream, just a dream, let it be a dream. It’s not a dream. Please let the white slavers take him. Or me. Better me. I could use the rest on a slow boat to China. Yoo hoo, slavers! Take me, take me, get me out of here. Speed he’s going, he’ll be in full drag by Thursday, and planning a church wedding by the weekend. Please make him go away. I’ll put money in the plate next Sunday, I promise. Don’t wheedle.

That Zeke thing that happened, Martin’s lips pursed in remembered disapproval, that… that masher business in the diner, in Peterborough, that wasn’t love, or anything, that was assault, this’s the real thing. Je__zuz, YAH! This is love! This must be love! I’m in love! I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love with a wonderful__GUY! I’m a new person. It’s true, it does change you. I feel like a bride. Oh!!! Martin squirmed and sweated onto the naugahyde. That business in the diner, that was a hate crime.

This is not flattering. Paul peeked through his eyelashes. Well… No, it’s not! I can do without this in the home town, y’ know, especially not with Snow White in  bikini briefs. You kissed the frog, Polliwog. I blew the frog. He opened his eyes, “Listen, Martin, what about Katherine? How soon d’ you two have to get back to the city? You should call her at Sam’s, they’ll have to come up for air sometime. I can find a way to get you out there, maybe Brad’s available and he and I could drive you out and drop you off for the ride back with Katherine. Yah? Good plan? I’ll phone us a Brad and we’ll get you on your way home. He’ll have to get back to the yard with the truck before the day’s out, I’ll call Cashway.  What d’ you say?” Paul had slipped from the booth and held to the end of the table with his thumbs.

“Look, I know it’s been hell for you, dumped on strangers, abandoned by a dangerous woman who wears you like a handbag, sneered at by a self-righteous Indian who’s about as likely to be a Kelly as a Cree, and now I’ve gone and spoiled what could’ve been… well, maybe… I don’t know, you and me, friends, maybe. But I wronged you. I had no right, I had no reason and I… uh… can’t apologize enough and I promise that it’ll never happen again.”

His bottom lip between teeth, Martin stared up at Paul, his eyes growing round and shiny with forgiveness, “It’s okay, darling, you’re just afraid of committment.”

“Je_zuz! To Emergency, yah. It’s a very small town, Marty, they won’t take to anything they don’t have to. I’d as soon not get my nuts cut.”

“Are you trying to deny what we have?” Ironic, in control, Martin’s lust so drenched Paul’s words in honey that their obvious intention melted on the tongue, and he thought it sweet of his new love to tease with such imagination.

“Oh, JEEZUZ!” Blowing through clenched teeth, Paul rocked on his thumbs and fought for kindness. “Listen, I can’t do this. I’ve just run home from my life, I’m living in my mother’s house again, I might as well be sixteen again, except I don’t have the ass for it, I can’t do this. I’m sorry I got you into this, but you’re just gonna have to go work it out… however, wherever… You’ve got friends, eh? Katherine’s your friend, you got the city, the city’s good, a good place to be, everthing’s there, you name it, somebody’s doin’ it. Enh, you want to be sensitive, do a Proust thing, pick a nice place and go sit around with a pad and pencil. If you want the pretty ones, learn to draw. If you want the rough stuff, just keep staring at crotches like you’re doing now and you can count on gettin’ something rammed in your mouth. We gotta go now, call Sam’s place, find Brad. Right? Get you safe home.”

“I want to lick the…”

“SHUT, the fuck up!” Hissing with exasperation, spinning  from the table, Paul scrabbled enough change from his pockets for two cups of coffee and stretched to stack it on the lip of the closed cash drawer, knowing Hing saw all, and headed for the door with a wide come-on sweep of his arm.

Katya and Bena got to Maude’s for coffee about four and settled familiarly to the table. “If you’ve figured out that my sister is nuts,” Maude got right to the point as she filled the kettle from the tap, “You get the free rug-steaming and the encyclopedias. She’s a dead serious manic Leo with a moon up her skirt and stars in her belfry. Grade A, extra large, free-range, brown-shelled ego. I’ve known her from birth, hers. I rest my case. Any defence? Who’s writing this down? Who’s… oh, me. Well, I’m doing coffee. So, Katya, you’re manager, you manage. You got paper? Oh, Lord! Well, forget it, we’ll remember.” Maude fought efficiently with the coffee things and eyeballed the other two over her shoulder. “So, what d’ you say? Do we let her get away with this?”

Bena approved of this bare, white-enamalled kitchen for its absence of any evidence of competence or craft to interfere with the facts. “The Princess, yes,” Bena sketched a curtsy with her cigarette held in amber and gold, “Can we teach to her the duty of a princess?” Pencilled brows disappeared into a felt cloche.

“And that would be…?” Katya stooped to play it straight, “__Bena? What’s a princess’s duty, what’s the form? Beauty? Lovely skin, at least. Nice clothes. What else?”

“Acchh! My Katya, such a Lutheran you are, this form and function, such a silly idea. A princess is to be nice. That is her function. Her form, it is easy, it does not matter, squat is as good as skinny if she is rich with money and blood. Blood only? Beauty does not hurt. But nice, always nice, that is not so easy. Your sister, my Maude, I think she has not had good teaching.”  “Havergal and hats, as I’ve always said. It annoys the hell out of her.” Clattering mugs and spoons to the table, Maude poked Katya with the creamer and pointed at the fridge before turning back to pour from her steaming kettle, “No, you’re right. All I’ve ever done is annoy the hell out of her. And she went off to school to get superior and she got a degree in it, knowing how to send things back. And that’s it, really. She’s got superior pretty much turned into an art form. Performance art, eh? Grand Damery. Trouble is, she gets on her horse, rounds up the villagers, and then she doesn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground about what to do next. You’ve seen what can happen. Oh, dear…” A hand to her breast, Maude plunked the coffee pot down, “This symphony thing is just another crazy stunt, isn’t it? We’re not going to let her make us do this, are we? __Are we? __Ladies? __Don’t everyone speak at once. I have a weak heart here.”

Katya had found the sugar in the cupboard and carried it with the milk to the table, “I don’t think I mind that she’s as offensive as she is. She doesn’t for a minute think she’s offensive, she just thinks she’s right and everybody else’s too stupid to have figured it out like she has. She has no idea that other people restrain the impulse to pillage. The question being, if I’m not mistaking you two, isn’t whether she can control us, but whether we want to control her. Yes? Am I managing?”

Picking up the coffee pot, she poured three mugs full and cast an appraising eye at Maude, “You are all right, aren’t you? Do you really have a problem you’re not telling us about? We’re certainly not getting into any skipping contest if you’re too short-winded. We can’t have anybody dropping dead, your sister’s got a bad enough reputation already, there’d be an investigation. Can you imagine Bena in a witness box? We’d all hang.”

“Oh, no, no, I’m okay.” Maude patted her breastbone and fluttered her hand as a fan, “I have to confess, my sister scares the hell out of me, her enthusiasms are dangerous, you’ve seen how far she’ll go, she can bring the house down around our ears and I’d hate to see anybody get hurt.”

“Aacchh, what is there to hurt, anymore. This country has so much beaten itself with a stick for being provincial, it should be hiding in a safe-house. Perhaps our Princess might think about very large hats, they make a focus.”

“For a sniper, sure, Bena. I can’t say I haven’t wanted her dead, but not nearly as often as she thinks I have. But look, you two, you’ve seen her in action doing her knife act… She’s nuts! She really is. She really did that, and she’ll do it again. She’ll con a whole new cast, rewrite the script, change location, do her stunt, and blow up the ammunition dump on her way out the door. She’s got a short, very obsessive attention span. I suppose I might’ve slapped her too hard when she finally got born. She was feet-first, you know, and I swear she had them planted either side of Mother’s womb. She’s trouble, she’s an embarassment of energies, but things do happen, things get done. I just think we’re in danger of a big mess here, if she’s at the top of the heap and in control of the money, and she’s going to be, isn’t she? if she’s the one who scares it up first.”

“How much do we need?”

“Good question. You’re the manager, how much do we need?”

“How would I know? This’s going to take a lot of work, you know, research and…”

“Witold tells me that he must have fifty thousand dollars. He will take twenty. I have told him. I have friends, I have asked. And the others, they will have twenty to share, and it is divided by their services, which means the number of rehearsals and concerts. I am told this in good faith.”

Maude winked at Katya, “There’s your research. What else did you ask, Bena? How’s your coffee?”

“It is delicious, very european. Did my Katya not bring little tarts? I saw bags.”

“Oh, god yes! In my string bag, not tarts, some pulla. Put your oven on, Maude. How did I manage to forget that? Where’s my bag? I’m losing control, I’m having a break-down, my memory, it’s Alz…”

“To what temperature will the oven go, my Katya, and where is your bag? There, at your feet. You must stop this flip-flopping, you are sure of what you know and unsure of what you do not know, it is all the same thing, what you do not know you will find out. You are old when you think that anything you don’t know is something you have forgotten. Do we need a tin dish to put these wonderful european widow with a house-of-her-own buns on?”

“Here, I’ve got this,” Maude produced her crumby baking pan from the oven and accepted a half dozen sticky coils of bun from Katya, “So, what else did you ask, Bena?” She slid the pan into the oven, licked  her fingers and plunked herself at the table, “Who’re you consulting anyway, Issac Stern?”

Unimpressed by a startled, bridling Bena, Katya rolled her eyes, “Oh, sure. I would’ve thought he was dead by now. But then I’ve forgotten whether he is or not. Which means, if I’m not old, it hasn’t happened yet. Is that how it works, Bena? If I don’t think I’m old, he doesn’t die. Unless he actually has, and you’ve forgotten.”

“All right, already. Doesn’t matter if she’s talking to Guy Lombardo. She’s talking forty thousand so far, and I want to know how much farther. I don’t care if it’s psychic, or old love letters, I want to know what it’s going to cost us and where we find the money before my sister does. She’ll go to George for it at some point, we could be eaten alive. We can’t count on his resistance, after this spanking thing, he’s too much a gentleman not to pay for his pleasure. She’ll see to that, Lizzie will.”

“She won’t go begging just like that, will she? I’d say she’s too proud.” Katya twiddled her spoon, “Then again, she is nuts, as you say.”

“Aacchh, my George, my poor George,” Fingering a tiny veil on the face of her cloche, Bena shook her head for a long sad moment, “She will use him and she will hurt him. We will not. We will be kind to Mister George Preston, very kind. And we will use him first. My Maude, he is your brother-in-law, he is your friend, I think, and he is what you say, a gentleman. You must speak to him now.”

“He’s up at the lake. I have that number. I’ll phone.” With a lurch from the table, Maude hustled through the swing door to the telephone stand, wrestled a beaten notebook from the drawer, hunted a number, “Help yourselves to more coffee! You watching your buns, Katya?” Dialed and waited. “No George!” She wagged her head as she sat back at the kitchen table, “We could lose this one.”

“Where is this lake?”

“Muskoka.”

“That is north?”

“Unhuh.”

“The road? There is a road?”

“Oh, yes, there’s a big road.”

“A car. We will need a car. And a map. Yes. You will come, Maude? Katya, I’m not sure it is so necessary that you must come.”

“What! Where d’ you think you’re going to find a car? You don’t even drive. And why shouldn’t I come, go? It’s the money I’m supposed to be managing, after all. You don’t get the road trips just to go see your boyfriend, y’ know. D’ you drive, Maude?”

“I’ve still my licence, just in case, but I haven’t had a car, haven’t driven since I came here. I’m not sure I’d trust me.”

“Ziski. He will drive us. He will tell us what more it will cost to make this orchestra and he will meet Mister George. Charm! They will adore each other and we will have your sister surrounded.”

Sam got back about seven with an extra-large, double-cheese and bacon pizza, a box of beer and a jug of raw red, no French white, no gingerale and, apparently, no cigarettes, until he saw a murderous look and understood that she didn’t take to teasing, “Couldn’t manage it all at once, smokes’re out in the truck.”

“The truck! Where the fuck’s my car? You…”

“Truck needed a run, didn’t she? Had to make sure those assholes hadn’t been messin’ with her,” Sam tossed Katherine’s keys to the table, “Your car’s okay. Like you said, we’ll get her tomorrow. She’s all locked up. Those boys’re too stupid to get into her without bustin’ glass.” Catching the flicker of fear before it turned to rage, he raised and showed a palm to hold her for a moment, “Just teasin’, they won’t touch her,” He grinned and let go a snort, “Told ‘em it’s stolen, scared the shit out of ‘em. Got her tucked up all safe, nobody’ll go near her till I say so.”

Katherine found that all she could do was stare at him. I’m trapped in a bad movie, a really bad movie, and we’re all gonna die in a hail of bullets, Bonnie and Cochise bite the big one. Okay, stay cool, no sense in spooking him. What would Clint do in a situation like this? “Where’s the bourbon?”

He had intended to say the store didn’t have any, but he could see now she wasn’t likely to let that go by, “I lost some money.”

She eyed the denim hung tight from his hipbones, “What, it fell out of those pockets?”

“Pool. I went in the Arlen for a game, and I got suckered. That fish Donovan’s been takin’ lessons. Little pus ball gave me one for ten and took me one for fifty.”

“You lost that money playing pool?”

“I said it.”

“You are some hustler. A real pool hall Indian, eh? Jesus!” She was disgusted, but she couldn’t help that the sullen hostility, the raised chin, the tensed muscles were making her nipples hard and her eye strayed back to tight denim, “Well, open that, then.” And when he did, she went down to it for a couple of minutes. Then standing abruptly, she grabbed up the wine, twisted the cap with a practiced wrist and went hunting glasses in the dish rack, “Might as well get rid of my stomach lining first, give the bacon grease something to stick to.”

Sam got the stove good and hot, Katherine dropped the quilt, and between slabs of dripping pizza and tumblers of red wine, they groped and bit and licked and guzzled; lust carrying them on through half the beer before the ringing telephone provided a welcome break for screaming skin.

“Aren’t we being a little precious with the unlisted telephone, Sambo?” Paul’s voice came through loud and irritated, “I had to wait for the young Brad to get his ass home from work, take a shower and down a couple brew before he could manage to pick up the phone to give me your goddamned number. There really that many guys after your balls?”

“It’s all the women after my cock, y’ little runt. What d’you want? I got man things to do here.”

“What, fart? We’re comin’ out. Brad’s driving. We’re gonna drop Martin off so he can get back to Toronto with Katherine. He has to go back, he can’t stay here. Please, Sammy! You hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Since when do I owe you?”

“Sam, Sam, Sam. You’ve always owed me. That’s what friends are for. Who showed you how to trap minnows? Who taught you to make popcorn, eh? Have a little gratitude.”

“I’ll gratitude ya one in the side of the head you show up here with that silly faggot. Not now, man! I got hot things on the stove here. Y’ know?”

“How about later? Couple hours? We give you a couple hours, we go have a beer, you get your cookin’ done, eat ‘er up, and we’ll come by for coffee. I got a bottle of Jack. I know she likes it. You want a bottle of Jack? Say yes, Sammy, please say yes.”

“Where the fuck am I gonna put him? I don’t want him near me. Anyway, what’s wrong you don’t want him? He spring a leak, or somethin’?”

“He’s in love with me, Sam. He wants my babies.”

“Just like that, eh? Jesus, you guys are queer. What’d you do to him? You can’t be that good, yer dick’s too small.”

“Fuck off, Geronimo, you’re only big ‘cause there’s no blood in your brain. Thing is, I fucked me a chick, Sam. Just like you said, y’ bust ‘em, y’ buy ‘em. I can already smell the diaper pail. Well, the fag version, anyway, cat box. I’m serious, this one hears wedding bells when he comes. I don’t need this. I can’t take this right now, he has to go. He’s drinking tea with my mother, Sam. She likes him. Please!”

“Midnight. You can show up midnight. Not one fuckin’ minute before twelve. Got me? And bring the bottle, don’t forget the bottle, or I’ll make y’ kiss the bride.”

There wasn’t much of a welcome at Sam’s table. A kerosene lamp with a dirty chimney leaked a trap of amber light and the air, ripe in the heat of the stove, felt ready to split. Martin wasn’t speaking to Katherine and tidied an ashtray instead. She wants to fuck Hiawatha, fine, but she can suck wind if she thinks she’s getting rid of me, I’ve got sex of my own. And he tried to stroke Paul’s dodging leg with a foot.

Sam snorted and rolled back into boredom, a leg over a chair arm, one fist on the table. Cop a feel of this, y’ little fag. Dump this on me, Magarry, and you owe me for life. You start talkin’ feelings, I’m outta here.

Katherine caught Sam’s glare and rolled her eyes. I don’t need this! I’ve got plans. I’m keeping this carpenter. I’ve got things to do here. I don’t need this, Martin.

Brad saw it all from the edge of his eyes and began to curl against a coming explosion.

Poising an index finger at the tip of his nose while he contemplated Sam’s sprawl at the head of the table, Paul sought an opening through which he might drag the conversation backwards without getting clawed. Fucking fifth wheel, just Brad and I might’ve gotten it off here. Oh sure. Hey, y’ never know, the two of us could’ve dropped in, shivareed the love birds, got drunk and horny. Smell of raunch in this place, I could’ve been into his pants. Yah, well, should’ve dumped Martin in a ditch, then, eh? Nobody’s having any fun here, you’d better think of something. He pointed the finger, “You know, Sammy, you look entirely too comfortable for my peace of mind. It feels like…”

“Piss off, Magarry!” Sam swung to the floor, was up and out the door, into his truck and gone before his numbing venom released four throats.

“Jeezuz!”

“Christ.”

“On a cracker.”

“What’s his problem?”

Nobody said it, but three pairs of eyes accused Martin of idiocy.

“What? So? Who’s he think he is? Obviously a homophobe. Eh, Paul?”

“I don’t think that’s his problem, Marty.”

“You little shit-head!” Katherine’s swinging arm missed his head and flipped an empty beer bottle to the floor, “You just lost me a house!”

“What? This… Shed?” Martin scrambled for the bottle, peeved it hadn’t shattered, “A bit of a step in the down direction, isn’t it?”

“Not this, you asshole, mine ! I want him to build me a house and now you’ve fucked it up.”

“Oh, now we’re going to live here, are we? Goodbye city life, Green Acres here she comes, eh? Buying yourself a little local… What? Colour, isn’t quite right. Is it, Kate?”

“I don’t need this shit, Martin. This is for me. I want something for me, here, and I don’t need to hear you getting jealous about it.”

“Jealous!” Martin flushed and choked air, “Oh, fuck.” He gathered a lungful, “You, you, you, it’s always about you, isn’t it? It’s about you and Art, about you and David, and now it’s you and Chingasc…..”

“I don’t think so,” Her voice cracked ice, “I think it’s about you, Marty. He doesn’t like you.”

When Sam had put down the phone and told her what was up, she’d actually been happy to hear that Martin had finally fallen out of the closet, not surprised it was Paul. Why not? He’s queer. But now she was furious and a swallow of bourbon didn’t warm her at all. So what if I brought him? I’ve got other things to do. “Why can’t you just stay…” Wagging a hand at Paul, “…stay in town, or someplace, and just… Do it?” She glared at Brad, “What’d you bring them here for? Why’s it have to be my problem? Sam’s so pissed-off, I’ll never see him again.” Hunched, elbows on knees, lips a tight line, she breathed fury at the tabletop, then throwing herself upright and blowing her breath, “Fucking faggots!” She snatched the bourbon and refilled her glass.

“Ohh, yah.” Paul figured he could see why David had left her. Her  problem? Martin is  her problem. She brings him up here and now she wants to dump him for Sam, so he’s my problem, and it’s Brad’s fault he’s here. Jesus! Eat cake, woman.

Brad stared hard at the hands in his lap. His eyes stung and he didn’t want them to water. They’re good hands. Why’s it such a big deal? She really hurts. Why’s it matter? He cleaned his nails with his picking finger waiting for the hurt to pass.

“Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little head, he’ll be back,” Martin was too unforgiving to care about danger, “Now he’s had a taste of white bitch, he won’t be able to resist. Worse than firewater to ‘em, can’t get enough.” His eyes were wide in a withering glare when she threw her drink at him.

For his part, Sam was air-guitaring the steering wheel to Cockburn’s Tokyo  cranked on the deck as he slid gravel corners up to the Arlen. “Oh Tokyoho… oh I never can sleep… da da… Did y’ have to show me that accident scene? …ba da da… Fuckin’ Magarry, he knows I hate that fag crap, that dink Martin rubbin’ on him like dizzy gash. And fuckin’ Fell tryin’ to look cool, little prick’s never been south of Peterborough.” Sam needed to whack some balls with a stick.

Martin’s scream of pain having frozen Katherine in shock, Paul shook his head with resigned disgust, dug a ratty blue bandana from his pocket to poke between the palms pressed over Martin’s eyes, and gave Brad permission to leave with a lift of his chin and a roll of eyes to the door. When Brad didn’t stir his stunned gaze from Martin’s dripping face, Paul repeated his gestures and added, “You go. I’ll deal with it.” Brad’s eyes went back to his hands.

What disgusted Paul was his own resigned willingness to stay and put up with whatever came next. I don’t care if they kill each other, I don’t even know these people! He’s not my boyfriend, they’re not my friends, I’ve met them twice, I don’t even like them, for chrissake! So, why do you have to deal with it? ‘Cause I’m not taking him back. So, go. I can’t. You want to watch the fight. I don’t. You do. Somebody’s gotta keep them from killing each other. “Listen, people…”

“Martin, Jesus, I’m sorry,” Her eyes were squeezed tight with the pain of her own behaviour. You just threw your drink in his face! He won’t shut up. “But you fucking asked for it,”  So, he fucking deserved it. “You’ve got a mean mouth, Marty.” He called you a white bitch, and you just proved it. I want Sam. I want his nose. I want his hammer. Bonus for the body. She opened her eyes and growled in Brad’s direction, “Where’s he gone?”

“The Arlen, most likely. He’ll make last call.” He picked at a nail and didn’t look up.

“You’re driving me,” She snatched her keys from the table, “There a bus go out of here somewhere tomorrow?”

“Edge of town,” He looked at her from the top of his eyes, “Which way?”

“South,” She stared hard at Martin. “Toronto, one way.”

“Down from Pembroke, hits Bannock about noon, I think. Don’t know when it makes Toronto, never done it. Could be express, could be a milk run.”

“Okay,” She propped her bag at her hip and started collecting herself, cigarettes, lighter, empty cigar box, “You’re taking me to find Sam,” dangled her keys, “I’m going to get my car, follow him back if I have to, and first thing tomorrow, Martin, I’m taking you to the bus. Okay?” She switched her stare to Paul, “You come with us. Straighten it out with Sam.” She tipped her head at Brad, “He can drive you back into town after.”

Paul stared back. Oh, fine, long as we know who’s running this show. Designated driver, designated fixer, no hidden agenda, that’s for sure. “We just going to leave Martin here?” Say yes. Poor bastard. Paul found a sympathetic smile and gave it to Martin, “You be all right?” You treacherous slime, Magarry, you were going to stay for the fight. Remember? Looks like it’s over.

“There’re plenty of blankets, he can sleep over there,” Pointing through the shadows, “There’s a daybed thing,” Her eye lit again on Martin and a tick of guilt pulled a corner of her mouth. She lowered her face and aimed it straight at him, “If it’s really so important to you, we’ll pick him up again in the morning and you can kiss him goodbye all the way to the bus. Okay?” She stood from the table and shouldered her bag, “When we get back, you keep your mouth shut and your head down. Bury it. I don’t want Sam to even know you’re here. Not a word.”

WEDNESDAY

David Bailey woke from a night’s deep dreaming in a sweat of loose fear. Poking for meaning, he gathered the ends of thought in one hand and counted heartbeats before opening his eyes. No one came with coffee and cigarettes. Get up, or die, David. Oh good, life without drugs and me with a full bladder. Get up or swim. Not a day for getting up naked, good thing I slept in my clothes.

Sitting on the toilet, he tried to think of ways to avoid moving any further. I could have a dose of cancer. Just read for the day. Drink coffee and wear smelly clothes. Stick Vicks up my nose and drink hot lemon. Dry toast. A little jam. Poached egg maybe. It’s not a cold. No. It must be worse. Wash. If I don’t, I must really be sick. I’ll brush my teeth.

Rinsing his mouth from the tap, he splashed his face, rubbed his hair and found himself running a comb through it. Well, I suppose a little pot of coffee won’t do any harm, cheer me up. Might not be many more coffees, if this is really it. His left arm twisted back to let his fingers explore the tip of the blade as he leaned through the doorway to the kitchenette to punch grind and perc on the loaded machine. It doesn’t feel right. Is that a lump? His arm ached. Oh god, it’s spreading! Struck down in his prime. Is this my prime? Gone from guilt, they’ll say. But they’ll be wrong. I don’t suppose exasperation’s a great reason for leaving the wife, though a guy in a bar’d understand, a real bar with tables. But what would the guys in a group have to say about her shrinking my sweaters? Oh sure, chauvinist shit, man. What d’ you expect? But she wears them till they get tits and when I say so, she dumps ‘em in hot water. Hey man, y’ lock her in the traditional role, man, and then put her down for doin’ her thing, man. We as a group think…

Focusing hard on the bridge of his nose in the mirror, David knew he could drink enough beer with the guy in the bar to remember the times that girls made them hurt; the nicks and cuts and rope burns they got playing with them, the gangrene and blown pistons they got fighting for them, the empty holes they got when they were gone. Rueful, would be the word, grin and wince memories of all the times they took their hands out of their pockets and got their knuckles rapped anyway. His arm, still pressed to his back, was asleep to the elbow.

David had left Katherine, swanned off to a budgie-box of a bed-sitter halfway up a redbrick stack, because she told him to, more or less. For the first years of their relationship__ was it two years, three? he no longer remembered, perhaps it had been only months__ they had been so wrapped in lust and exhaustion, in the ignorant bliss of mutual discovery, that the little irritations of personal habit had mostly passed as amusing lapses into self-indulgence and they had pegged along negotiating truces to minor disagreements. But one problem had rankled from the first. Out of bed in the morning, she would crank on the chattering voices of talk radio and David’s heart would leap in shock. He had tried to explain to her his need when first waking to hear himself think, to hear his own voices and reacquaint himself with what he’d understood before falling into sleep and, perhaps with luck or concentration, to tease out some new thought that had surfaced in the night. He hadn’t been sure that she understood, or believed him, seeming to think his refusal to listen to be a criticism of her intelligent concern, but she had agreed to control the volume and he’d learned to hide in the bathroom with coffee and cigarettes until he could face conversation. The compromise had worked for a while, but it couldn’t survive her increasing demands for his attention as she came to believe that the career she had chosen for herself with its promises of excitement had trapped her. There was no stardom, only an agreeable income, and she had gradually soured with boredom. She wanted an audience and he apparently worked too much, didn’t know how to smell the roses, she said, how to kick back and let it go. Which wasn’t true, he knew how to sit, he just wasn’t always ready for cocktails and discussions of life. She’d expected his attention, and if she wasn’t going to get it__ Scram! And when he finally said okay, she knew that it had to be another woman. It wasn’t. It was the radio.

His fingers felt numb, cold, dead in their twisted grip of his shoulder blade. He tried for a soulful look in the mirror and thought his cheekbones more prominent than they’d been yesterday. It’s the Big One. I’m too young. Give you six months. Three days if you work it into a sweat. When did you eat last? Besides the peanut butter and toast. Skin’s too dry. I should eat salad. What day is it, anyway? Wednesday. The date, what’s the date? The beginning of the end of my life is… Massaging blood back down his arm, he stepped into the kitchenette and examined the calendar thumbtacked to the wall. There, Wednesday, the eleventh. Wouldn’t you know, the eleventh hour of what’s left of my pathetic life. Next Sunday’s circled. Why’s it circled? The twelfth hour! The day of my death. Yah, sure. Why is it circled? Amusement shrank to despair. Fuck, what have I forgotten now? Nothing, I can’t remember anything. Why is it circled? I don’t know! Relax, forget it, let it go, you’re alive, do your exercises.

Facing the counter, David planted his feet and bent his knees; swivelling from the hips he rinsed a mug in the sink, filled it from the still brewing pot, added milk from the refrigerator and sugar from the cupboard above the stove. He downed the coffee in a few long swallows and repeated the exercise. He jogged four steps to the foot of the unfolded couch and dug a pack of cigarettes out of the bedsheets, but couldn’t find his lighter.

A pewter tankard on top of the television held dead ballpoints, plastic swizzle sticks and at the bottom a crumpled book of emergency matches. The tankard’s base was glass and as his fingers tweezed for the matchbook, he thought he’d be happy to shut his eyes, take the king’s shilling, shoulder a musket and go off to conquer the world. Surely blind chance had seemed more hopeful when there was still some new world left? Now geography’s dead, the only frontier’s in your mind. In the potholes of your mind. I need out of here, I’m starting to sing-song. Get clean. I suppose you can’t smoke on the space shuttle.

Ambling back into the bathroom, he lit his smoke, braced his rump against the basin cabinet and peeled away his socks, watching the thick-ribbed wool heavy with three days’ wear plop to lie like puppies on the floor. I should have a dog. Not here, you shouldn’t. No. I should have a dog somewhere it’s good to have a dog. I should go somewhere. And get a dog? Well. No, just go… bugger off to Banbury Cross, to Banbury Cross, riding on a pony… no, that’s Yankee Doodle, Macaroni the pony… you ride the cockhorse to Banbury… Who cares? Just move it.

Shucking the grey sweatpants from his hips, he noticed he’d never once thought of having a dog all the time he’d been with Katherine. Maybe a dog would’ve made the difference. Oh yah! A golden lab in diapers. Happy families! Stop singing. She wouldn’t put up with a dog any more than a kid. She’s no idea how self-absorbed she is. Unhooking a finger from the sweatpants crunched at his thighs, he slid it down the length of his penis. Ride a cockhorse to… Enough! He slapped his own hand. Get out of town. Go to the country. I hate the country.

The summer David was twelve and broke his uncle Jim’s wagon tongue, he had increased his own chest expansion by two inches bellowing obscenities drowned in the racketing clang and clatter of the haybaler and the loading elevator, both machines pitching sweaty green bombs at his head. Jim sat on the tractor while David scrambled to build load after bucking load a perfect seven bales high. Jim lounged in the breeze dropping bale on bale at the elevator’s lip while David dodged and dragged, screaming in the frightening heat of the mow swelling to the roof. Jim told him he was lazy, didn’t have the guts to finish a job. Jim was standing in the stable resting a hand on the manure bucket where it hung by chains from the overhead track, the other hand in his overalls scratching at his crotch when he said it. David’s rubber boots were ankle deep in the gutterful of bull piss, his hands dripped on the five-tined fork when he drove it into the treacly mattress of straw and dung. He wrenched and tore and levered up a steaming slab of shit bigger than himself and raised it arcing from his shoulders in a caber toss that landed in the bucket and missed his uncle’s face.

Parking his cigarette against the cold tap, David bent, pushed and stepped out of his sweatpants, tugged his teeshirt over his head to join the heap and straightened, turned and stared into the mirror, navel to nipples to eyes. Two eyes, two ears, two arms – he stepped back from the basin – two balls, two legs, two feet down there, one cock, one bellybutton, one chest hair, one mouth, one nose. Bifocal senses, two to hear and see and grab it, one to smell and taste and fuck it. Oh yah, one asshole. To report it. And look what they’ve done to the brain, Ma. I used to be of one mind and now the right side thinks it knows what the left side’s doing. He felt a thickening of the air on his shoulders, but he shrugged it back and shook his head, finished his smoke, flipped it into the toilet and started the water into the tub. Perhaps a rush of blood, perhaps the colours of the shampoo bottle did it, for suddenly David remembered green wooden chairs and red bloody marys and why his calendar was circled.

It must have been a Sunday, his mother-in-law, Bea, committed her charitable mercies and drew her accounts after church, sharing the blame, “We hold ours late in the year, for ourselves, really, though we do take outsiders, but not like the Baptists, just after the tourists, you know. Once the cooler weather sets in people appreciate a big meal more. We don’t do the tables all in rows the way we used to. It’s more work for us, but then you young people seem to want to keep to yourselves these days, don’t you?” David had reached for his wallet and bowed submissively while she tore off two tickets. “I’ll keep these here in a safe place, shall I? Not that it matters, I can certainly say that you paid for them, but this way we’ll be sure.” Bea had raised her voice to a whisper as she left her lawn, “You never know, David, we can never tell just how many more of these things we’ll be around for, you’ll feel better for being there. We all will. Katherine, you’ll burn in those shorts. Don’t you have anything else?” David had fallen into a green chair and gulped a red drink and rolled his blue eyes at Katherine who’d said with her face in a book, “You see what I’ve been up against all my life?” She didn’t move the book. “I certainly see where you get it from,” he’d said.

The Fowl Supper. Of course! He slapped his head, yanked off the tub faucet, yanked it back on and sat down on the rim to sort his memory. I can’t go there, see all those people. Here’s the church – he knitted his fingers – here’s the steeple – up went two fingers – open the doors – thumbs splayed, hands twisted – and here’re all those fucking people! Yak yakkety yak that’s him there, yak yak left her you know, yakkety yak never amounted to a hill of beans, poor girl yak yak, looks like a drinker. I hear… Unhh! He winced as a knuckle cracked. Arthritis for sure, my hands are really shot. Useless. Pecker’ll probably go next. Yak yak, we hear he can’t get it up anymore, turned green as a pickle and…

Did Katherine forget? Nobody said a word about it Friday, now I think of it, and Bea doesn’t forget things like that. Gotta be a reason. They cancel it? Not fucking likely, it’s sacred. They don’t want me. Could be. Suppose she forgot to remind Katherine, too? She won’t want Strawbridge to know we’re busted up. Faux pas, Bea! Those Lettie sisters’d never let her hear the end of it. I could turn up on my own and stand ‘em right on their ears. Hah, better yet, I should call up Magarry and take him along, put their collective nose out of joint. Well, forget it, you can’t go even if you wanted to, you’re out of the family, out of the loop. And I don’t care. Though Tillie’s always fun. And the food’s great. It’s over, Davey, you’re out, you’ll have to find new things to do. Yah, sure. I just want to sit in the tub anyway. Maybe drown. Wash yourself.

Looking for courage in the mirror, David saw instead the smears and toothpaste splatters on the glass, a net of fine broken vessels under his left breast, hair behind the taps, rubble. He soldiered on only to stall, one foot in the tub, trying to breathe, his heart shrinking. He put a hand to it and felt nothing. Oh yes, there it was, always lower than expected. He made sure of a dry towel on the rack and lowered himself, arched his knees, and lying back dipped his chest beneath the water, gently rocking his shoulders pressed into the curve, encouraging the lapping heat onto his lungs and heart. He considered playing submarine with the shampoo bottle, and the melancholy settled on him.

You don’t have to do these things anymore, David. Remember? Why would you go to all the trouble of leaving and then turn around and slink back when… Not slink! So, what? Skip? Swagger? Slide maybe. Take a base. Abase, like you said, on your belly. Okay, slink. So I won’t do it, I’ll stay here. Floating back till the water lapped into his ears, he listened to the pressure changes.

He had been in a field, backing Jim’s tractor onto that last load of hay just as the wind came up fat with rain from the southwest. He could picture Jim moving fast on the stubble, shutting down the baler, raising the tines for a home run up the road, being again first off the land with his mows full. Jim, who never could get the wife in the family way. He snapped Jim’s wagon tongue in one long nasty splinter, the load sat, the rain came, the bales sucked water and smoked. Jim burned the air purple and whipped tears, but what David couldn’t remember was whether he’d known to turn sharp, or whether it was a happy coincidence.

He hunkered up to kneel in the tub, dunked his head and began to shampoo. How? How’re you gonna get up to Strawbridge? Call her and find out if she’s going. No. You don’t even know it’s happening. Call Bea. Yah, sure, Bea’d probably just as soon do without me. Call Tillie, if you’re being dumped, at least she’ll do it gently. I guess. Call her. I will. Now get your ass out of here and get to work.

“Katya? It’s Maude. I got George on the phone this morning, said I’m driving up tomorrow. Am I? Are we? Did Bena get Ziski? Have you talked to her? Are we going?” Excited, Maude worried. Was she anxious, or eager? Anxious’s blood pressure, eager’s just fun. Take your pills and think about it later, “I didn’t say us, though, I thought it best not to spook him. Said I needed some up-country air to blow the stink off me and I’d bring lunch. He didn’t say a word about Elizabeth, so she hasn’t gotten to him yet. We have to move on this, Katya, we’ve already wasted a day. He says he’ll meet me at the marina at noon. Has Bena arranged us a ride, or not? I’ll ante-up for a car, if we have to. Either we get the jump on my sister, or I might as well go back to bed for the rest of my life.”

“Ziski just dropped Bena off here. He doesn’t have a phone, or they’ve cut him off, or something, so she had to trek away up there again. He drove her back. And yes, he’s on for tomorrow, any time’s good for him. Bena’s game, god knows, meddlesome harpy that she is. Ziski says his car is of the most comfortable and we will have a most wonderful ride. We will look at the lovely countryside and sing its songs, he says.”

“Strip malls and whining, last time I was up that way. You sure we’ll all fit in that little car of his? An awful lot of personality in one vehicle, I think. Somehow I feel like we should be driving one of those bomb shaped Studebaker’s they had when we were girls. Do we have a timetable for this odyssey?”

“Well, if we leave by ten, we can be there by noon, I’d think. Can’t we? You should know. Hold on… Bena! Ten tomorrow morning? She says yes, she’ll come here. Ziski’s to phone her tonight… Phone her?” Maude rattled her head, “Maybe he just doesn’t answer. He should get one of those call displays, they’re good if you’re paranoid. Anyway, he’s going to phone Bena to find out when. He knows where this is, if you come by here, Maude, he could pick us all up at once. Four of us…  You sure the boat‘ll be big enough?”

“Oh, George’ll bring the cruiser out for me, that’s tradition. It’s tidy for space, but you don’t sit at that speed, and it’ll certainly hold us, if it held forty cases of rye. Speaking of which, we should take a cocktail and I did say I’d bring lunch. Can you manage? Nothing fancy, sandwiches, egg, tuna, George doesn’t care what he eats.”

“Well, that takes the pressure off the Beef Welly and the Baked Alaska, anyway. Would he actually mind if it’s edible?”

“Sorry. I apologize. Whatever you do will be delicious, I know that, and I’ll be far more grateful than I ever seem able to express. Not in the habit, I suppose. Well, I’ll slip out this afternoon and get us a couple of nice bottles of wine to go along with… ? …red? white? I’ll get some of each then, will I? Sure.”

Katherine made Martin stay in the passenger seat of the car, separated from Paul in the back, until the bus looked ready to leave. Despite her promise, she wasn’t allowing anything disgusting to go on in the mall parking lot, not if she was going to live around here, and she turned a hard look on Martin every time his hand snuck between the seats to grope for any part of Paul. When finally it was time, she hustled an awkward embrace, thrust Martin’s bag into his hands and steered him with shoulder pats onto the bottom step. She stood with Paul, who thanked her for running interference, and waved till the bus reached the edge of the lot. Preoccupied and mostly silent, she followed his directions into the centre of town to his mother’s house.

The day before, alone in the bath, slipping soapy hands over herself, her gaze out the window beside the tub fixed on the wild bush that rolled like green surf lapping high up breast-shaped hills and deep down narrow valleys, she had felt a flowing of softness she’d seldom known before. She’d decided, when the tub had cooled and she’d thought to worry about pruning skin, that she was going for it all.

With inattentive courtesy she remembered to ask Paul for a phone number, to keep in touch, “Oh, and by the way,” She centred a look of benevolent gratitude in the frame of her open window, “Thank you for finding Sam for me.” Changing gears, neglecting to wave, she headed downtown for a circuit of realtors, and without patience for detail, avuncular concern, or nosy advice, she soon collected a fat file of property lists, did a quick shop and headed back out to Sam’s.

Between one client, a too pretty twenty year old redhead who was never not going to follow the stupid path, and another__ Who is  next? David switched files and flipped the cover on his next social beneficiary__ Oh fuck! It was the old guy who always managed to make him feel like a bit of a shit, who smiled and called the new social welfare the Open Workhouse, who looked like he actually had a life and certainly knew how to sound grateful. David felt lonesomeness wash down through him. He blew out his lips and thought he really wanted somebody to like him. Did Tillie, still? Did Bea, ever? Or did they just for Katherine’s sake? His friend Jane wanted him for career partnership, a social licensing that he suspected didn’t anticipate budgeting for a lot of liking time. My mother’s dead. Father. Nobody has to like me anymore. Paul likes me. Yah? Yah. I think so. The sex thing’s just a routine he knows’ll make me laugh. Besides, so what, even if he does mean it, I can’t take a compliment? You are desperate. Fuck off! Point is, I always liked him and he always liked me, right when we met. Poor bugger’s probably feeling like Friday night was his fault. Like everybody else, I bet, except for Dragonlady. Poor Bea’ll be dying of mortification, if she hasn’t already killed herself. I really should phone her. You want to phone her? Jesus, no! I’m starting to lose it. Phone Paul.

Reception having already called to say the old guy was in the waitingroom, early as always, David noted the time, figuring ten minutes wouldn’t kill that kind of patience, flipped a directory and punched up the AGO. It took cunning to get as far as the duty office, but the frost in the voice saying Paul Magarry was no longer on staff, meant he wasn’t going to get more without a fight.  When a supervisor sneered, “I’m sorry, sir, the AGO does not divulge personal numbers. If you’re looking for Mister Magarry, perhaps you should go back to that funny bar again, Sir,” David felt justified flashing his license to invade. He preferred not to know every detail of his clients’ lives and anyway was mostly confined these days to chasing them from pillar to post, making demands they couldn’t refuse, but hey, when you’ve got the authority, anyone could be your client, and sometimes it’s a crisis, “… and you will give me his home number, please, and any others you might have. Any addresses, as well, for our own purposes, any contacts and their personal information, everything you have. Thank you, I’ll hold.” When he got what he needed, he got an answering machine and the best he could do was leave name and numbers and wait for the end of the day. He sent for the old guy, opened his file, and looked for a new hoop.

Tidying the kitchen after Maude’s phone call, George found himself waltzing his feather tic around the room and realized he was pumping with energy. He liked this camping out like a schoolboy. He liked his sister-in-law and he liked the idea of a picnic. He knew he was being manic, but he liked that too. Why not? In fact, I love it! I’ve been lower than a snake’s belly, and now I’m not. Let’s have a party. Okay. Call Beatrice. Why not? And why not the Rosses? Why not? I dare you. Double-dog dare. You’re on, Georgie! Forgetting the weight of the old bakelight phone, he almost clubbed himself silly when he grabbed up the receiver.

“Beatrice, hello!” He felt himself grinning like a fool, heard himself repeating how-are-yous, and tried to calm down and make sense, “You know my sister-in-law, Maude. Of course you do, though maybe you’d rather you didn’t. Anyway, she’s driving up for lunch tomorrow. Can you imagine that? All this way for lunch? And  she’s going to bring it, which isn’t her at all. Sounds very festive. So, I was thinking…” Whoa! His thought jumped sideways. Maude doesn’t have a car, she… Oh Christ no, not Elizabeth! It can’t be, Maude wouldn’t. She wouldn’t! Unless Elizabeth’s gone off the deep end about what happened. She went off the deep end Friday night. Ahh, shit. Goddammit! “So, …uum… I was thinking…” Changing tack, he didn’t even try to keep the disappointment from his voice, “I guess it means I’m not going to get the chance to run down river tomorrow after all. I’m sorry this’s come up, but hey, my sister-in-law. Family, eh? I’m a little worried about what she’s coming all this way for. Hope it’s not some kind of bad news, sickness, you know, or something like that. Can I call you later, when I know, after she’s gone? You’ll be in? Do you mind? You’re sure? Okay. Until then. Goodbye, Beatrice.”

George put down the receiver and found the scotch. I can’t imagine Elizabeth telling Maude what I did. Yes you can. I have to stop living in fantasy land. She’s throwing a divorce lawyer at me. Maude wouldn’t help do that, she’s always been on my side. You’ve never slapped her sister’s ass before. I need to think. I have to stop answering the phone. Leave it off the hook and go split some kindling. When he came in to load the box beside the stove and a peevish voice was telling him to please hang-up, he wrapped the phone in his bed pillow, flipped its cord over the countertop, and crammed the whole thing into the empty flour bin.

By noon, Elizabeth had discovered that there was no funding, no money to be had from any responsible agency of government, unless her orchestra was fully professional, existed in a major regional capital, and had proven itself with a minimum of twenty-five years of internationally recognized success and a healthy endowment. It would help, too, if the national broadcaster was making a tidy profit from a few recordings. Otherwise, she might plead in triplicate to one or two bureaucracies responsible for laundering gambling money, whose real job was to nickel and dime to death the myriad stop-gap responses to a hung and gutted cultural policy, agencies who might, if pressed beneath the weight of a superfluity of information, just might authorize an expenditure, duly supervised, for… oh, perhaps a nice brochure, or a bulk purchase of twelve gross of music stand lamp bulbs from a Schedule B designated supplier, provided that… etc.

Beginning her search, Elizabeth had been insulted to think that so many people had already heard of her recent depredations in the visual arts, that these fair-weather contacts were stonewalling, reviewing her membership, whispering in the halls. It took Old Monteith himself, who’d been Lieutenant-Governor so long ago already he only remembered the hat through the whisky haze, to convince her that there really wasn’t any money on offer from the public purse, “Nothin’ to do with your little sketch, Betty. The bully boys’ve got hold of the wheel for a while and there’s not gonna be any more of that sissy stuff while they’re drivin’. Wasn’t your doin’, m’ dear.” Without considering where her own vote had gone, Elizabeth shuddered from the barbarism and raised her standard, “George!”

When he failed to answer the phone at the lake, she was at first relieved, having remembered mid-ring that they hadn’t spoken since he… well, since he… relieved that her sudden hot confusion could go unnoticed by any…

“Madam, lunch.”

“Not now, Quaid!”

…body who mattered. She chose to believe he’d returned, of course he had, chastened, to the city, and was even now at his desk. She phoned. Darla was able to convince her otherwise only by admitting that Mister Preston had called Tuesday morning from the lake.

“Oh!” More hot confusion, “Ordering the car?” Of course he’s on his way, how foolish, he needs… I hadn’t thought…

“Yes, he…” Oh shit! Ambushed! The bitch winged me. I’m getting past it.

“For today, then.” He has to be back today since he wasn’t back yester… Oh, dear.

“No, Ma’am.” Losing ground with every word, Darla, old scout, your front-line days are over, best just pack your old kit bag and take early retirement.

“When, then?” You tight-lipped, tight-assed, stenographing lesbian, “For what day did Mister Preston request the car?”

“Saturday!” Saved! Rescued by a tactical error. “Mister Preston requested the car for Saturday.” Ha! Skinny bitch, you asked the wrong question.

“Saturday! I want him before Saturday! I need him before Saturday!”

“Perhaps you should phone up to the…”

“I have telephoned to the lake, thank you, Mizz Samson!”

Darla gathered some things, left the office early and got drunk at the Legion, talking to some girlfriends about setting up a Bed and Breakfast cum Paintball resort up in the Kawarthas.

Elizabeth set her service on constant redial to the lake, and instructed Missus Quaid to tell Mister Preston, when he answered, that it was absolutely imperative that she speak to him.

“Okay.”

“Tell him that I wish to speak to him this evening.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll be out to appointments all day.” And she went to Holt’s to have a look at skirts in a presidential line.

When Katherine got back from town to find Sam still rolled up in bed, she poured him a coffee and tossed him his truck keys, “So, show me the sights. Not that,  put some pants on it for a minute. I want to go see where I am.” She pulled the cork on some wine, and told Sam there was a box of beer in her backseat, which he slid under a tarp in the bed of the truck. He noticed the stack of realtors’ papers and photocopies slithering on the seat between them, recognized the meaning, and said nothing, overcome with relief that his roof would still be his own. He punched Neil Young into the old deck balanced on the dash and drove them around country she hadn’t known existed, where the gravel roads, never straight, felt like secrets, where every hill hid another. He slithered and gunned the car over loose rocks and grassed ruts, through deep treed tunnels, across bogs that licked over roads without hydro or telephone lines, without map lines; roads once cut to the empty farms, the abandoned mines, the rotting bush camps, and then forgotten.

“Lot of it’s been let go if there’s nobody local on it. Unless you need some gravel into the huntin’ camp and the wife’s brother’s on the township truck,” Sam said when they hit a smooth packed stretch, “Six steel culverts under this here, just so the Green boys can come shoot themselves some venison when they like. Any money wants to hide up here, pretty much has to build it’s own roads. There’s some, not much, mostly ‘round the lakes. It’s camp country, really, still pretty cheap, too many flies and too many miles from Dudesville. Money’s still over west. I’ll show you something different, though.”

He goosed the truck up a long rough lane till they landed in a weed-grown yard between a sprawling wreck of a house and a tidy little horsebarn. Barking hello, a fat basset barreled from under a pair of enormous alsatians to throw himself at Sam’s ankles. A heavy face haloed in white curls loomed high in the open top of a dutch-door in the side of the barn. A deep voice silenced the hound with a word and said, “I’m busy.” Sam reached under the tarp in the truckbed, pulled out and wagged both his hands holding clusters of beers, said, “Sure, Bay,” walked to the door, stretched and pecked the side of her head, “What’re you busy at?” She made a disgusted face, though her eyes shone, and raised a manure fork in a big fist, “Drinking tea with the Queen. What’s it look like?”

Bay Barell had been sitting at her kitchen table, laying a black jack on a red queen, when she stared out to judge the sun through glass as safely grimed as smoked lens and thought she’d better get the stable mucked out before the day was done. Black ten. Swallowing a last cold draught of sweet black coffee, she’d set the mug to anchor the rest of the deck, crushed her cigarette into an overflowing ashtray atop a covered butter dish and stretched to poke a thick finger amongst the nearest confusion of old mail and gloves and tobacco tins, finding a packet of cat treats she held in her fist, till she rooted up a hard toffee to slip into her mouth. A forgotten stem of grapes had surfaced in the search, she examined it with interest, thought they’d soon be good enough raisins for a batch of scones and tossed them back on the heap to finish drying. Lurching to her feet with a shove on the chair and a push on the round rim of the table she held to with her thumbs, her legs trembled with tension until her weight came to bear and subsided into a rocking balance. She eyed the patience deck, only one housed, and left it lie. The columned cards, black, red, black, red, looked like an incantation to order in the rubble of the room.

She’d shuffled across corduroyed floorboards on a foot-wide path, gritty and littered with dirty straw and staked to either edge with a grimy larder of soup cans and bean cans, cans of beer and cans of nails, cans of oil, virgin olive, neatsfoot and WD30, cans without labels, rusty cans and swollen cans, bottles of whisky and bottles of rum, jars of jam, bottles of port and bottles of ale, a half-dozen jars of mayonnaise, sticky bottles of marmalade, mint sauce, fish sauce and sweet liqueurs. She’d tugged a grubby blue flannel shirt from a heap on the back of a chair that hadn’t seen light for…? Well, somebody must have sat there once, surely. You couldn’t get at the other two, she thought there should be two, maybe there were three, buried under jackets and junk mail and harness and sweaters and muzzles and papers and leashes and socks, behind stacks of books and sacks of dogfood, sacks of catfood, heaps of sacks and piles of boxes and boxes of cider in cans. She’d reached four blackening carrots from a bag at her feet, poked them into a pocket of her khaki shorts, flailed into the flannel, hauled up a sock on a sandaled foot and shuffled to the door.

Jerking out the old work glove that wedged the door to the jamb, she’d passed through to the summer kitchen, catching the door again with a practiced flip of the glove and a tug on the rusted-out knob. The pair of shepherds, the dog huge and handsome, his bitch of a sister worried and wolfish, attended underfoot by the bologna roll of grizzled old basset, had wagged, muttered, arfed and bowed. Her hand half down a paper sack of milkbones, she’d changed her mind and rummaged instead into the warming shelf of a dead cook stove, pulling from behind a ratty black squirrel mounted on a stick, a butcher’s package of over-ripe pig feet and handed them round. The dogs had carried off the high, rank smell of rotting hocks and she’d tossed the styrofoam tray onto a fly-blown stack atop the kennel boxes and headed out the dog-yard gate. The basset, a border collie on his mother’s side, managed to double his stake when the big shepherd looked up to watch the woman cross to the horsebarn.

Standing straight, Bay could be six-three, so the horse-sized doors of the loafing barn appeared in scale as she drew the bolt and turned the patent handle latch. A tall buckskin colt backstepped, lips whickering, head tossing his pleasure back to his mother out in the yard. The mare raised her head from a study of yesterday’s hay and nodded hello. A small, tidy cat wove her affection back and forth between nervous forelegs, keeping an eye on Bay, who ran a hand down the gelding’s nose and an eye over his grey-gold sealskin hide. Leading with the carrots, she’d shut the horses out of the barn, spoken to the cat about the mice in the oat box and was hunting her fork in the stable when the roar of an engine and the hound announced company.

Watching the woman climb from the truck, her careful leverage on door and frame, the slide not a jump from the seat, Bay waited to see what Sam had brought this time. She moves a bit tender, a long time to find gravel,  maybe she’s tight. Good boots. Good grief! She’s no spring chicken, that’s for sure. What kind of trouble have you found yourself this time, Salmon?

Introducing Katherine to Bay, Sam gave his excuse, “She’s lookin’ for a place. Wants to live up here. Thought you might talk sense to her.”

“How d’ y’ do.” Would you look at that walk. She’s been ridden bow-legged. Bay had a moment’s pining for the old days before she’d wrecked her back. I’d ‘ve had her on a horse and into a ditch and Sam in the sack myself so fast those boots wouldn’t touch stirrups.

“I just love it up here. You’ve got the sexiest landscape,” Eyes shining, arms waving with fingers spread to the edge of the frame, Katherine meant what she said, “I grew up in Muskoka, lots of water, but nothing like these hills. This’s real backwoods. Really raunchy, I love it!”

Squealing sarcasm, I love it! I love it! Muskoka? How grand of you. Backwoods, eh? Bay’s thought turned to Sam, I need to sit for this one, Salmon, she misses a fence in my house, you’re barred. Stabbing her fork into the mattress of straw, she reached for the latch, “This is going to take more than a minute. We’ll go into the house, then.” The basset lay on his back at Sam’s feet, begging a scratch as Bay passed to the gate, “You’re a slut,” she said, to no one in particular.

The big dogs crowded without aggression, but their size and unblinking attention slowed progress through the kennel and summer kitchen to the door. Almost convinced she’d just been called a slut by this giant__ What? Turtle, that’s what she looks like, a great big ugly redneck turtle bitch!__ Katherine’s nose snapped shut at a whiff of spoiled meat. Eyes squinting in the gloom, her pupils grew wide to see a threatening avalanche of filthy pack-ratted rubbish, her lips pinched tight to sip shallow air and her fear panicked for a thought. Something’s died in here. I’ll get polio. What do these dogs eat? Why’d he bring me here? Ohmygod, I’m gonna throw up. No! She looked hard at the woman’s dirty big hand flipping the glove and took hold. Pointing to the rusted-out doorknob she elbowed Sam’s ribs as she passed in, “You’re a carpenter. Why don’t you fix that for her?”

Sam ignored her because that was the kind of thing women said. Workin’ a tag team, goin’ for your balls. Bay ignored her because the glove worked just fine, thank you, worn into a tighter fit than the latch ever was, and she only barely smirked as she rolled her eyes at Sam and asked if he was opening those beers, or would somebody rather a glass of wine? Then swallowing her annoyance, “Certainly. Red, or white?” she stooped to tug a bottle rattling from a paper sack buried under the table, lifted a bunch of black bananas stuck to a bag spilling chocolate rosebuds to get at a corkscrew and lumbered into the pantry in faint hope of finding the woman a clean glass.

“You’ve got a black ten on a black jack here, B…”

“You touch those cards, I’ll shoot you, Salmon. Go sit down,” A big-mouthed goblet next the sink showed a few finger marks that would come off with a polish of flannel shirt and the crust of red in the bottom wouldn’t matter once it got some wine into it, “Go on into the den. You might have to clear the couch a bit,”  Bay huffed a breath into the glass, rubbed and hollered, “Leave that stove alone!”

Katherine’s eyes were so wide her mouth wouldn’t work, her response to Bay having been little more than a red grunt, for she’d never in her life seen such a sight. Appalling as it was, the mess of the summer kitchen wasn’t an unknown, for she’d been in more than one old hippie hutch in her time, and her own back shed in the city had once earned her a threat from an insurance agent. People did live with that, but this… this… the glove in the door hadn’t kept this out.

“I’d clean, but I can’t find the vacuum.” They stood, drinks and cigarettes in hand, in the front parlour, Bay letting the woman look because she’d asked. Despite an overwhelming cram of tables and chairs and sofas and benches and whatnots, it was a pleasing room with a deep bay of windows opposite a tall fireplace set in a wall of dark cupboards and shelves piled with books and curios. A thick nap of grey dust lay on every surface and like fishnets, tossed stockings, Isadora’s chiffon, brown cobwebs hammocked across corners, draped windows and pictures and swagged down the walls. “Haven’t seen it for years, but it’s here somewhere.” Strangers often shied at sight of the kitchen and never came back, the few who wanted to see more of the house usually gave Bay good reason not to invite their return.

Bay watched the woman look about, watched the brow that was raised in a certain amused contempt widen then narrow, startled and suspicious, as her stare picked out marquetry, tapestry, carved mahogany, ormolu and ebony amongst the junk of piled books and papers, overflowing ashtrays and filthy glasses. Bay saw the glint of covetousness and the hand that failed to keep itself from grabbing up a bowl of crystal chased with silver, the brush at dust and tipping out of mouse dirt.

“You don’t use this? You should use this, it’s a beautiful thing. I wouldn’t hide it in a… heap of… stuff. You don’t use it?” Her desire darting from bowl to split velvet chairback to bronze lion paw, Katherine’s eyes skimmed Bay’s hoping for signs of uncaring stupidity, or at least a grand generosity that would let her have the bowl, let her at this room. At this house! Stupid’s better, a couple of bucks for dirty junk. If she gives it, I’ll have to be nice back.

Keeping her own brow free of contempt, Bay swallowed her anger with a mouthful of beer and lit another cigarette from her stub until the woman finally put the bowl back down with a tidying, dismissive poke at the rim. Bay expected greed to have the intelligence to disguise itself, she saw no breeding to speak of, “We’ve left Sam to himself, he’ll be bored. Shall we?” With a tip of her head toward the door for ceremony, she herded Katherine back across the wide hall to the den and a perilous seat in the centre of a lumpy couch piled both ends with yellowed newspapers and mashed cartons.

From her chair of state, a ponderous oak Morris with room for a picnic, Bay delivered conversation largely predicated upon CBC programming, city newspapers and anything to do with horses, her critical pitch coloured with the snobberies of a conscious intelligence, a richly embroidered heritage and a long addiction to tales of English crime. She fancied herself a raconteur and polished her stories with a desire to entertain that prevented interruption of the newest telling, “…and he’s still training! Man beats his horses, I know it. Jockey Club won’t turf him, he must know something. Bastard wins races though. Did I ever tell you about the Cup race that…” and “…it’s all about oil, oil and armaments. Did you know that Krupp…” and “…all of those ‘best friends’ who popped out of the woodwork when Margaret died? Christ! Who d’ you think took her that last bottle of scotch? Umhum. Did I ever tell you…”

Sam drank beer, smoked joints and asked silly enough questions to spur her at fences. Katherine made one attempt to speak and was told not to be silly, that wasn’t the way at was at all, so she lowered her mask and confined herself to the bottle of wine Bay had brushed aside rubbish to set before her. I could certainly do a better job on this place if it was mine. What a godawful waste! She’s somebody to know, though, so keep smiling, act interested.

When Bay finished her set, she was pleased with her performance, but she thought of the stable, “Won’t be mucked out by spring, you two sit around talking. Nice to have met you. Go home now.” Sam had trouble getting his head off the back of the chair, his hands pawing his pockets to know where he was. Katherine had polished herself with the wine to an edge that was fated to cut a wide swath through whatever pathetic pretensions passed for local colour. One queen per valley. No competition. Bay let the dogs bark goodbye, watching the woman bang her truck door on a dangling lap belt all the while Sam crawled himself in, found the ignition and rolled them out of the yard.

“I want that,” Katherine said, “I want that woman’s life. Pull over here.” And they had undignified, but explosive sex on the seat of the truck.

Martin knew, when the bus finally wheezed into the downtown depot, that he’d seen every one-horse armpit in the province. Didn’t need the white trash in the back seat with her tits out for her screaming brat to prove it was a milkrun. Fuck, fuck, fuck, his heels cracked concrete the five blocks to his building. Them, them, them, it’s always whatever fucking women want! Think they can get away with fucking murder just ‘cause they’ve got holes. Well, so do I. He missed a stride in a flush of new embarassment, released the pressure to his buttocks and sashyed on to his apartment door.

When he picked up his phone to check calls, a violent shudder made him miss the message code. Christ! I need a bath. I need a shower and a shampoo and a bath and these clothes are going straight down the incinerator. He repunched his way through to hear there were no new messages, nobody’d called, not even the office, nobody’d missed him, nobody cared, and he exploded in snot and tears. He cried as he stripped before the bathroom mirror, watching his face, his chest, his whole body swell with pain and redden with fury, till it disappeared in the rising steam of hot running water meeting thoughts of cold revenge.

David stripped to his shorts when he got home, gave himself a beer and a half hour to wait for the call, gave himself another beer and dialed Paul’s number.

“Hello? No. No, I’m sorry, Paul’s no longer here. This is Terry. Hmm? Did you? Oh, sorry, I just flew in this minute, haven’t had a chance at my calls. I always get a little martini together before I push the button. David, is it? Did you know him well? You certainly have a lovely telephone voice. I’m sure I remember Paul telling me all about you. Are you tall? Oh, yes, you’re that  David. Well, you know what he’s like then, don’t you? The silly tit went all bolshi and quit his job and went back to Bannock. To his mother’s! Can you believe that? Total regression. What? Oh, guilt, obviously. From the little he said about Friday night, I’m not surprised. He’s a mess, poor boy had to take a bus ! I’m so sorry. He is a pet, isn’t he? It all seems so empty now. You wouldn’t be interested in sharing an apartment, would you? Your own room, of course. I’m not that kind of person. Paul would tell you that. You could call him up there in Bannock, apparently they do have the telephone. I’m sure I have his mother in the Rolodex, and he can tell you that I’m a very easy room… Oh, you have it. Well, that’s nice. You wouldn’t like to drop by for a drink and take a…? No. Well, qué sera. Tell the Polliwog I miss his wiggley tail. Byee!”

Minutes of the last Institute meeting were read, and once an amendment to the effect that it had been Velma Lettie’s suggestion to leave rosemary out of the fowl stuffing at the next church supper, and she’d  meant all of the next church suppers__ it stuck in people’s dentures and, well it wasn’t really a necessary thing, just sage would be nice, there’s  something a bit… gypsy, about rosemary__ once that was seconded in, the whole was quickly accepted without protest.

Helen McLean, Secretary/Treasurer, and therefore the one responsible for Velma’s urge to revisionism, whose front parlour housed this meeting, whose Royal Albert roses lay waiting for light refreshments on the diningroom table, softly read out the Auxiliary’s bank balance to date and prayed for no comment.

A letter of need from ‘Our Mission Overseas’ was read, and the bounty of a future bakesale voted in response. The never-ending quest for Maxine Aicheson’s good blue casserole dish was opened and closed with bored denials and the business of the Fowl Supper, the reason for the meeting, was taken in hand.

To these women the church kitchen was as familiar as their own and years of habit and sensibly delegated responsibility had devised a hierarchy of production from roasters to scullions that stood them in good stead and could feed any multitude a good plain banquet. Farm and village wives, widows and maidens, they provided what they had: turkeys, hens and cranberry sauce, carrots, corn, potatoes and peas, turnips, snap beans, yellow and green, tomatoes sliced, wedged and aspic-ed, cabbage salads, jellied salads and cucumbers pickled in a dozen recipes, buns, rolls, breads white and brown, apple pies, berry pies, cream pies and lemon meringues, cakes full of eggs and squares full of who-knows-what. The Reverend’s Anna provided the ice cream; it came from the dairy and never was billed.

The system was a shared effort with an instinctive sense of values. Good cooks cooked, indifferent cooks served, and everyone was supposed to help with the dishes. Bring more than needed, take home the leftovers with a bit of fair trading, an admirable system that had worked for generations. There was, of course, a certain amount of bickering. “Just vanilla, Anna, everyone likes that and it flatters the pie crusts that come out a little too dark.” Velma was heard with a silent wince; Helen invariably singed her pies, besides, the dairy always included chocolate for the children. “Vera and I will bring our icicles, a grand batch this year, if I say it who shouldn’t. And Vera’s toll-house cookies.” Another round of winces for the notorious blue pickles and for the dull cookies, bought and disguised in a wax-papered tin. “All agreed? Nothing else? Adjourned?” And without waiting for response, Velma heaved her bosom at the air and announced, “I spy with my little eye…” The sharp intake of the hostess’s breath spoke for all. “I spy with my little eye…” Rolling her head with the drama, Velma paused, raised a knuckle to a cough at her lips, “…something that is… Well, brown! Unfortunately.” Spoken on a falling breath.

It was a fourth year and Velma felt the want of executive position, one President, one Vice and a Secretary/Treasurer being the limit of hierarchy. Most of the women, Vera excepted__ the Presidency had been suggested once, but Velma’s manner of refusal on her sister’s behalf had driven the nominator into the United Church__ most of the women had held one or another of the offices, irregularly, at need, to their abilities, over the years, but Velma needed office and revolved through each of the three in a regular rotation, then, like crops, lay fallow once in four years to give the earth a chance to catch its breath.

Her fallow year was a self-imposed penance for the sins of pride and envy and greed and avarice and… all the active sins but one, and it was sorely felt. Velma out of office suffered in opposition and was quick to revolt, rebellion, war; it was felt to be safer to give her her head when it came to Entertainment. “Yes, brown, I’m afraid, though I’d like to be able to say it’s gleaming, what I spy with my little eye is brown.” It was an unhappy judgement rendered with a comfortable sigh as Velma stared expectantly about at the other women variously swallowed into, or perched about the furniture.

At home, of course, Velma tortured her sister and was tortured in return. Velma played Father, the cold and autocratic Albert. Vera played Mother, Annie, with the victim’s faultless blade. No matter the weight of Velma’s ordered contempt, Vera would step and fetch it with alarming patience. Albert had ignored them because they were girls and Annie had dressed them identically to double his sight of them.

When they were out afoot, or rolling in the Rambler through the village streets, the Girls played ‘License Plates’, matching the numbers seen in unexpected driveways with the registered owner’s proper address, the wife’s maiden name, the number of kiddies, all noted in Vera’s pencil-licked script in a series of Hilroy exercise books. They did nothing with the license numbers, no spinning of a mathematical cosmos, no necromancy or beastly numerology, not even vague little notes under windshield wipers; it was enough that the village suspected the game.

‘I spy’ was Velma’s favourite in other women’s parlours and Vera was easily best at guessing. Vera knew it was the spun-copper bowl in the middle of the oval of polished cherry with the more-or-less Ffyfe pedestal that served as a… Well, not big enough, really, for tea, but she didn’t think it was a cocktail table – from what she understood they were quite large and very low – as low as the lives of people with cocktail tables could be expected to be, according to Velma – so it wasn’t a cocktail table, though Velma swore there was drinking in this house – so perhaps… Vera decided it would probably hold an ashtray if necessary. Anyway, it was the copper bowl that Vera knew that Velma had her eye on, because it was tarnished, muddy really, in an untidy smear around the rim, and Velma had standards.

Vera wondered whether Helen McLean knew that Velma knew that the bowl had been a gift from Doctor Gelly; knew, indeed, that Velma made a collection of widows accepting gifts from men, and decided that of course Helen suspected it, and that was very likely worse.

Quite naturally, Vera couldn’t leap right in and answer to her sister’s game with the copper bowl. Velma called it smart-alecky when Vera answered without hesitation. “No one likes a smart-aleck, Vera, you don’t want to be one of those people with their brains coming out of their ears, like the Standeven boys, do you? Of course not, and it looks like favouritism, too. Wait until the others have had a chance to play, and then if it looks too hard for them and they give up, you can jump in, but don’t make a spectacle of yourself.” So Vera waited.

Hands folded in her lap, Bea McAlpine sat on a kitchen chair brought in to the parlour door. The chair was a wooden pressed-back, one of seven-plus-armchair, that Bea knew Helen said were inherited, though no one could decide whether that was pride or excuse. Helen McLean, neé Hoy, was so impassive of expression that some suspected the blood of the tribes; there was something of a streak in the Hoys and they tended to heaviness, big-boned, they called it.

Well, Bea wasn’t big enough boned to be comfortable in their darned pressed-back chairs, that’s for sure, her feet couldn’t touch the floor unless she propped her panty-girdle against the hard edge of the seat, which would certainly send the chair skittering back into the hall, so her shoulders were being printed with a fretted scroll and her suede pumps hung in the air.

Lord! Was she glad it wasn’t her year to be Secretary/Treasurer, the only job she allowed herself to be invited into. Keeping the record straight when Velma was in opposition could be more than your life was worth; Velma as President knew you were on her side, Velma out knew you weren’t. Poor Helen. And in her own house, too. Double jeopardy. Hung for the sheep and  the lamb. The horror is, Velma thinks we all like this game – Bea’s armholes were chafing – she believes protest is a lack of moral fibre. She believes herself. She has only to look at Vera and see that she copies well. With one true believer how could she not have twenty? A hundred? All. She’s never actually seen Vera, just a reflection. And Vera’s funny, in a stupid, stubborn way. Mulish. The thing about Vera is that she’s never believed Velma for a minute.

Just look at her__ Bea looked at Vera without moving her head__ still and taut as a mantis with a fly in her eye, she knew it was going to be that copper bowl before her sister opened her mouth. She doesn’t miss a thing, probably picked on the bowl herself and sent the thought to Velma. It’s a nice bowl, too, though I don’t know what you’d put in it. Helen might’ve had enough sense to hide the thing, if I know where it came from, sure as shootin’ Velma does. If men are giving presents, we all know how they’re paid for! Poor old Helen’s just not on her toes. I owe her this one, she’s saved me from opening the door to the Girls in my old bathrobe too many times with a fast phone call, “Would it be that lovely copper bowl, Velma Lettie?”

It was a dangerous game. Bea was almost certain that the Girls had gone visiting up to Tier on Sunday after church and couldn’t possibly have returned early enough to have spied her crossing the lawn to the manse in the company of George Preston, and the return to George’s boat at the end of her crumpled dock after their evening of rum punch and cards had been carefully conducted along the darkness of the riverbank, and she, herself, had avoided George’s shopping trip Monday by hiding out in Orillia. Still, there was no proof Velma couldn’t nose a cold trail.

It was a dangerous game and Bea had to clear a nervous cough before going all the way, “I have to tell you, Helen, I’m ashamed of myself. I couldn’t resist when I came in, I had to pick that bowl up for a look, it’s such a lovely thing, and Velma’s quite right, I’ve gone and made a mess of it. Must have had something on my hands.” Bea offered her palms as proof of the lie, “Butter! Of course, I set out the scones, didn’t I, Helen? Yes. And they’re rich. You still use butter for your fat, don’t you, Helen? I don’t…” She had to steer off quickly, the Letties having been the first to substitute margarine on the excuse that if Velma couldn’t taste the difference, then who on earth, etcetera.

“Yes, Beatrice, that brown  bowl.” Not pleased with the answer, at least one wrong guess and a good deal of hesitation were expected as part of the game, Velma’s mouth had gone hard at the word butter.

Bea was forced to sacrifice, “I don’t dare, myself. Why, I’d be as big as a house if I used butter.”

“Yes, Beatrice, you’ve always been one to put it on,” passing a thumb up her own spare breast, Velma condescended, “but you are good with a jellied salad. As everyone should be. And your mother, of course, with her squares…? Saturday? Yes. And Katherine…? No. Ah, well,”  Rolling her eyes around the assembly, accepting homage, Velma cleared her throat with satisfaction and passed on the game, “Very well, it’s your turn to spy, Beatrice. That blue china cat’s an unusual thing. Did you have that done to your hair in town, then? Sit up straight, Vera.”

Dumped in the yard after stuffing Martin onto the bus, Katherine saying she’d call and spinning his mother’s gravel in her rush back to Sam, Paul’s relief had turned sour. Thanks for finding Sam for her? How terribly gracious of her. Not, ‘thanks for your noble sacrifice’, not ‘thanks for losing your job and blowing up your future’! Oh no, not even ‘thanks for baby-sitting my rejected friend Martin and keeping him from eating out my throat when I threw a drink in his face and made him go home’. Oh, no, it’s thanks for giving her big red Sambo. You’re welcome, Missy. I saw him in the shop and just knew you had to have him. Local craft, apparently. I’d’ve unwrapped him for you, if I’d had the chance.

He’d gone back to Sam’s from the Arlen. Katherine had objected, Sam had smirked and Brad had looked impassive, but Paul had insisted. He still wasn’t sure why. The street had been empty, the Arlen unlit, Sam’s truck alone in the lot when they’d pulled into Manooth. Brad had yanked open a battered tin door in the side of the hotel and led them in darkness past rancid grills and ovens, through saloon doors and a maze of tables just visible by streetlamp, to a pine door and the yellow light of the bar.

Joe Snow was smearing a tabletop with a bar rag, he nodded at Brad, then studied an ashtray for butts before knocking it into a can and giving it a wipe. Sam sat perched on a siderail of the pool table, a beer clutched in his thighs, his chin on one shoulder to watch his own hand behind guide a cue in idle shots on the end pocket, the white ball churning back from the fall to go again.

“That all you get for last call?” Brad eyed the bottle in Sam’s crotch.

“Uum, yah, Lois wanted to lock. I said I’d be out before Joe. It’s all she’d give me. What’d you do, drink me dry and come lookin’ for more? Y’ got a lotta fuckin’ nerve.”

“There’s still some bourbon left, if…” Damn! I should’ve told that little fuck to keep his hands off the bottle. Pushing up beside Brad, Katherine flashed Sam her most seductive, top of the eyes, don’t be brutal but take me look, “I made them bring me. I had to find you. Martin’s leaving. He always causes trouble. I’m putting him on the bus in the morning. I need you to get my car, I’ll follow you to your place. These guys are going back into town,” Laying a hand on Brad’s wrist, nipping her lower lip, “Thank you for the ride.” She turned her look on Paul, her mouth drooped with woeful courage and her eyes said she could take it from here, thank you. Paul drew her gaze with a look to Sam, who saw the frowning mouth and hungry eyes, who turned with a glance that caught both Paul and Brad on its way back to the cue ball.        “Help yourself, there’s a box under the bar sink Lois doesn’t know about,” Sam raised his voice across the room, “Eh, Joe? Joe gets a beer for every hour I don’t have to listen to his goddamned bear story. Don’t you, Joe? He busts a couple cases a week that way, it’s those rotted-out steps to the cellar. Dangerous, eh, Joe? You could break a leg, sue the bitch. Lois makes him clean this dump to pay for what she thinks he breaks, but he’s just not goin’ home, Missus Joe won’t let him have beer in the house. Chew off the other ear, wouldn’t she, Joe? They buy some beers off ya?”

That had probably been about the time, Paul considered as he picked a wind-fallen limb from his mother’s lawn, that he’d decided he wasn’t about to be dismissed like some busboy with the water pitcher, that he wasn’t going to take the nickle and get on his bike just because she said so, that he was going to do his duty as a friend and go back to Sam’s. That had certainly been the moment when he’d emptied his pocket into Joe Snow’s hand for a round of beers.

So what in hell am I gonna do now? I’ve got cigarette and coffee money left for about a week, and there isn’t a job in this town anybody’d give me. I’ll be trapped in this house forever and turn into Boo Radley and haunt the porch at the dark of the moon. There isn’t any porch. Exactly. This’s all been a terrible mistake, I shouldn’t have left, I shouldn’t’ve quit, I shouldn’t’ve opened my big mouth to Elizabeth Preston for the honour of art and that ungrateful, drink-slinging bitch who just dumped me so she could get back to her screwing.

Sam had held out for a round from each of them and bought one himself with, “Mark me up for four, eh, Joe. Get y’ Tuesday. You still got plenty till sun-up, the Missus’ll have the stove lit and you can go home.” The thing was, they’d been fast beers, too fast, for despite the laid-back set of his shoulders as he circled the table swooping at balls, Sam’s need to hold the stick in his hands was skunked by his desire to get laid. Some more. Fuck, she’s hot!

Katherine, of course, matched him swallow for swallow, taking a good deal of neck. Brad kept his beers out of sight, appeasing the Road God with the last inch in each bottle. Paul had just gotten plastered. If he was going to force himself into this situation and demand to go back to Sam’s for the sake of a kindness to Martin, a move she would resent for his very presence, and which Sam would condemn as a weakness, even if he was doing it for the sake of annoying the hell out of her just because he didn’t think her sense of entitlement justified his own easy dismissal, and even if he did really want another crack at Martin’s ass because god only knew when he’d have another chance, Paul had needed to be pissed.

There was a trick to finding a working plug socket in his mother’s kitchenful of gadgets, locate the toaster and switch plugs. Paul sorted a clutch of appliance cords and put on the kettle for tea. Maybe Sammy’ll give me a job, he’ll need an extra pair of hands if he takes her on and she’s for real about building her own place. Brad can’t help him in the week. I can carry stuff, hold stuff. Hell, we could be a real team, me barkin’ up the suckers, doin’ the up-front part to keep him out of people’s faces, and him doin’ the carpentry. Could happen, y’ never know. Oh sure, you’re in Bannock, remember? You’re not in multiculture land, now, JimBob. Team an Injun up with a queer and you’ll have a real goin’ concern, big time, for sure. Sam’s right, you have to play the church or the boy clubs if you want to do business in Bannock. Get on the team. Buy insurance. Study the bible. Sponser the team. Breed. Buy more insurance. Feed to each other, keep the ball and the game can go on and on. Oh, quit your whining, you both belong here, they’d have taken to you if you’d ever taken to them. Face it, Magarry, the only thing you liked about teams was the locker room, and the only thing Sam liked was pretending they were a posse. You’re loners. Moody loners. Not yet, but it can happen, so quit with the victim shit. You’ve played with two boys’ clubs in the past twelve hours, you can hardly say you’re out of the game. One of them was actually a very mature man’s club. All right already! It must be the fresh air.

Katherine’s impatience finally had driven them from the Arlen. She’d known she was fast reaching the slide zone between sex and the unconcious, she wanted this day to go away now, to sleep it off until she was ready for her next move, so if she didn’t get laid in the next hour… “Let’s move it. Where’s my car?”

“Over the road and up the end there,” Sam tipped his head in the direction of the street, racked his cue, upended a last swallow, “We’re doin’ this in the dark, so we walk it, you an’ me. Haul ass.” On his way to the door he scowled at Brad, “Wait, till I’m back to the truck,” and holding the door for Katherine to pass, he scowled at Paul, “Fuck, you’re a sloppy drunk, Magarry.”

Whew! I am so drunk and horny, I could suck six cocks all at once and not come up for air until I’d swallowed it all. Whew! Don’t lose it now, Polliwog, sit up straight and breathe from your belly. Remember you want to… “Wait! Sammy, me too, I’m coming!”

With a smirk, “Don’t get it on ya,” Sam let the door swing and said, “I’ll be back.” before it slammed shut.

You bring it back and I’ll take it to the nuts, either end. Paul swung around for a look at Brad’s crotch. Both ends at once. Whew! I am a pig. Haven’t been this kind of horny for a long, long time, a long time. That faggy little virgin queen’s done it to me, I’m a horn dog all over again. Wide open! I want cock. I wanta fuck it, I wanta suck it, stick it and lick it, make me do it, sit on my face and let me kiss it and clean it, oh, just fuck me! He moved so fast his mouth was inside Brad’s fly licking skin before Brad managed to set his beer on the end of the bar and rest his hands on his hips. Not pushed away, Paul slipped one hand in and pulled a heavy cock out into his mouth to give suck, the other hand fumbled for his own. Brad stiffened. Paul breathed, “Fuck me hard,” and slammed the big cock again and again to the back of his throat. Give it to me! Let me have it. Fuck my face! Come in me, please, come in me! Oh, let me taste it, let me have it, fuck me! Y’ wanta fuck my pussy? Fuck my ass? I’ll be your cunt. You fuck it, you fuck my cunt? Come up my pussy? Blow your load way up inside me? Oh, come in me! “Let me have it…” Whaaa! Clapping a hand to Paul’s head, Brad blew to the sound of Joe Snow’s boots on the basement stairs, had himself re-zipped and his beer in hand before Paul could stop swallowing and grab a deep breath. He’d been still on his knees when Joe came round the end of the bar, and he’d shocked himself with a fleeting consideration before struggling to his feet, “I was sure it was a contact lens. Just a bit of beer glass.”

Once he had tea made, Paul spent the afternoon replenishing the pot and avoiding his mother, dodging from room to room, ducking her questions about who that Martin was and why was he here? And who was that hard looking woman, it was a woman, was it? who dropped him off, and where was she from? And where had he been last night, did he think he could just treat this house like some kind of hotel and when did he figure on getting back to his job, which didn’t seem to her to be too awful if he could just take time off when he felt like it, was he sure he wasn’t going to be in trouble? and why would he want to wear pants that looked like that? the knees all bagged out and filthy.

Paul had swiped at his knees to keep his head down as the wave of adrenaline had soured into his belly in the after-shock of having gone too far. How to get yourself into serious trouble, boy, you can’t lose it like that and live, not in this neighbourhood. He didn’t stop me. He mightn’t’ve thought it possible, you might bite it off. What’s he know? Sam’s always on about teeth. Yah, yah, what’re you going to say now? “You want to do that again? No! Sorry, sorry, that’s not what I meant to say. Listen, sorry, I don’t care what she wants, I’m going back to Sam’s. She can make Martin go home, if he wants to let her, but she doesn’t have to be so goddamned mean about it, and she’s not making you and me go home just ‘cause she’s done with us and we’re in her road now. Oh, no, I don’t think so.” Paul had steadied his gaze at last on Brad’s eyes, barely voicing the question, “Y’ all right?” He saw wariness relax and a tiny nod, and grinned with relief, “You do have to go home, though, ‘cause if you’re not here when Sam comes back, he has to take me. He won’t dump me, not here, anyway, I can trust him for that. He won’t like it, but I can work him.”

Brad couldn’t help the smile, “You are one shit stirrin’ son of a bitch, Magarry.”

“All your fault, Fell, you’re the one forced me. Wasn’t my idea.”

Brad’d grinned and snorted, “What? You callin’ rape, now?”

“Oh, yah, you made me do it. And, you forced me to talk to those two on Sunday night, and that’s why we’re standing around this hole in the wall waitin’ for Geronimo to saddle-up his white woman and ride on back to the tepee. You’re going home before you cause me any more trouble and I’m ridin’ out with the Indian. I’m used to him thinkin’ he can tell me what to do, but that one, she’s got another think comin’. So scram.” Paul had dropped his eyes to Brad’s crotch and pouted, “Unless…?”

Eventually, hunger drew him to the dinner table where he sparred with his mother over pot roast and tea in an old familiar teasing battle that Paul couldn’t win, because she was his mother. She served up a bakery butter tart and retreated to her corner with the last cup of tea. When the phones rang, she answered the one by her rocker and said, “Yes, he is,” smiling at his head-shaking glare over the dining table. Partly relenting, she asked if she could say who’s calling, and pushed the handset at him as she strove for footing, “Says it’s David Bailey. Why don’t you sit here? I’ll make more tea.” Paul mouthed the words ‘Oh shit!’ as she turned into the kitchen and earned himself a glare from the eyes in the back of her head.

What in hell’s he calling me for? Does he know Katherine’s up here? How’d he… “How’d you find me? Where’d you get this number?”

“You forget who I work for. Vee haf vays, eh?” A flicker of guilt, and David thought that even Paul didn’t need to know the reach of the ministry’s arm. He’d never been to a proctologist, but he knew what it meant, “I got your friend Terry’s number from the Gallery, he said you were up there and I was kinda worried you might be feeling bad about Friday night, so I thought I’d give a holler. You all right? They said you quit.”

Do I tell him where she is? Does he care? “You’re surprised?”

“Well, I suppose not really. You did kinda bust your paddle on the Dragonlady’s back the other night, but you should’ve waited till they fired you, Paul, you’ve screwed yourself for UI. Takes a while for them to drag you through the dirt, but you’d get something out of it.”

“What’s a little dirt? You think Dragonlady wouldn’t rip out my heart and grind that in the dirt, if she could get at me? So I’ve screwed myself. Huh, I should be so lucky.” A door of the cupboards which hung low above the island work-counter, all that separated kitchen from diningroom, Paul from his mother, their vitals exposed, smacked shut by his ear. “Well, yah, maybe I do care. I’m sure lookin’ at one black hole of a future here. You have no idea.” Straining cords, Paul managed what distance he could.

“I take it the black hole’s your mother’s house. Just you and her?”

“Umhum.”

“I take it she can hear you.”

“Umhum. Always. Doesn’t even have to listen. It’s your seventh daughter of a seventh daughter thing, tuned right into the ether, she would’ve been torched a few years back. Might be yet, there’s a taste for amateur theatre up here, a little auto da fé could draw a crowd.”

“That bad, eh?  What’d you go back there for?”

“For the sex, seemingly,” Paul whimpered, “Oh god, I’m in trouble, David, I shouldn’t have done what I did.”

“What, quit?”

“No! Mouthed off to Elizabeth Preston for puttin’ the screws to your wife. Who is, by the way, speaking of screws, and I still don’t know why, but she turned up at the Arlen Sunday night with that flaming little queen, Martin, who is a whole other story, let me tell you. Anyway, she’s shacked up out the highway with my old friend Sam,” Paul held his breath for a moment of silence and decided he’d made it bad enough without mentioning Katherine’s plan, “Sorry, guy, I had to say it, I really can’t take not being told these things when they happen. Saves a lot of grief.”

David drew a long, tight breath to the bottom of his lungs and remembered first hurts, “You, you yourself, you can’t take not being told. Is that it? That’s your apology, is it? Why am I even talking to you? What happened to don’t ask, don’t tell? You and your goddamned gestalt. Okay. Okay. Fine. I suppose I should’ve rehearsed this, it was bound to happen, not your fault. So, she is, is she? Well, good luck to her. I guess. What can I say? I left her. I haven’t got a leg to stand on.”

“And I haven’t got a pot to piss in and I really don’t care either,” Breathless and dizzy from escaping the attachment of blame, Paul tumbled further into relief, “Because I’m still amazed that I put up with all that bullshit as long as I did. I’ll hand in any fifty IQ points they ask for, if I never have to hear the words ‘world class’ ever again. I’d rather sit on the couch and be simple. That’s what I’m gonna do, I’ll be simple. They must have a club. And I’ll be so simple, I won’t even join it.”

“Who’s club, what the hell’re you…?”

“The simple! Why shouldn’t they have a club? You got something against them? They don’t fit into the ministry’s paradigm anymore? Into the streets they drove the fifty thousand, the socially lame disposables in a take-out culture. Extras resting on sidewalk grates.”

“Jesus, Paul, back off, take a breath, you couldn’t be simple if you tried. You know as well as I do, we do what we’re told, and as long as these self-righteous golfers are in power the money’s gonna stay tight. The economy’s…”

“The economy is that a cardboard coffin’s a fuck of a lot cheaper than a roof and a meal. Money’s always tight, David, you’ve been working for them ‘way too long. You guys’ve brought back the workhouse, but it hasn’t got a roof.”

“Yah, well, I hear a lot of that at work. So listen, if there’s anything I can do to help you get off the…”

“Help me get off? Oh David, I wish. Help me, help me, marry me up and take me away from all this!”

“Jesus, you can be a pain in the ass, Paul. Well, you know what? I just happened to remember this morning that there’s a do up in Strawbridge this Sunday, a Fowl Supper at the church Katherine’s mother goes to. It’s the real old-fashioned shindy with gravy and pickles and home-made pies like you wouldn’t believe. And Tillie’s always up for it, her grandmother, you met her, she’s good for a couple cocktails beforehand. It’d be dry bones if Bea was on her own. I guess Katherine must’ve forgotten about it. Won’t be thinkin’ about it now, for sure. Anyway, what d’ you think? Sounds like hickorama, but it’s really not. Want to go?”

“You out of your mind? I wasted my pubescence in a church basement and…”

“Not a basement, they’ve got a hall. We’re talking stone-built Anglicans, not stone-faced Baptists, and everybody wastes pubescence, Paul, between diaper sizes it’s the only chance you get to really blow your wad. Honest to god, it’s the best food, like Christmas dinner used to be before they discovered salsa. Hell, before they discovered garlic. They actually do jello mold things with stuff in ‘em, shaved carrots, celery. Bea does a green one that’s really weird, but it tastes great, like green cheese aspic, or something, not like it sounds, really.” Hearing his own plaintive voice, David dropped an octave and changed course, “How the hell’d she get up there? She talk to you? I haven’t seen, or heard a word from any of them since they left you and me standing in the parking lot. I suppose she took Marty home with her, he needed somebody’s help, but I don’t know if Bea stayed. Likely not, she’d take Tillie back and stay at her place. Did you see her? Katherine?”

“Not till Sunday night when they came waltzing into the Arlen like high noon with a fistful of dollars lookin’ to dance with the cowboys. I couldn’t see why they’d be after me, wasn’t me cut the rope, but she said she just decided to say fuck it all and go on a tour far from the madding crowd, and somebody’d told her Manooth was basic backwoods with a bar, so up she came. Pure coincidence.”

“Yah, sure.”

“That’s what I said, too. She’s dangerous.”

“Oh, she’s dangerous, all right. Things happen to her. She makes them happen.”

“She’s got a way about her, I noticed that.”

“Huh!” a wry snort from David, “Her way, or the highway.” She doesn’t mean to be a bitch, but…”

“Hey, you don’t know what she did to poor Marty. She’s a bitch, David. And right now, when I need Sam to give me a job, she’s got him so cunt-struck he can’t find the door.”

“You know, I’d just as soon not hear…”

“Yah, sorry. But, hey, you know, that Martin’s a real jerkoff. Jesus! If he was ever in the closet, he’s out now. Wants to marry me. I’m not kidding.”

“Marry you? What’d you do, get pregnant?”

“Very funny, chauvanist pig. He was here, I was horny, big deal. Wrong. Late virginity. Whee! Out of the closet and into the aisle in a twenty foot train with a bouquet of sweethearts. Haven’t had that happen since highschool, made my skin crawl then, makes my skin crawl now. Thank god she put the run on him, stuffed him on the bus this morning. I’m surprised he hasn’t called you already, she was sure he’d be back climbing your leg and telling you what a two-faced bitch she is. He’s just itchin’ to get back at her for dumpin’ him for Sam. He owes her a drink.”

“What’d she do to him?”

“Threw her drink at him.”

“Ah, shit. What for?”

“He was ridin’ her about bein’ after Sam’s ass.”

“Okay, so who the hell’s Sam? Not that I want to know, but…”

“Oh, Sammy’s a local stud, always has been. He’s Indian, maybe, could be Irish, we don’t know, the truth’s lost in the mists of time and Father Ambrose’s whisky brain, but he’s been playin’ Geronimo since we were all old enough to poke a stick, so nobody argues anymore. He’s a hunk, if you like the rough-trade look. I’ve always had a weakness for it myself. He builds stuff, he’s a good carpenter when he feels like it, but he’s always been a bit full of himself, and he can be a mean bastard, so he’s not exactly overwhelmed with work.”

“It’s never the guy on the Redimix truck, is it? Fat guy in overalls. It’s always the carpenter.”

“Seems like. I think it’s the belt. Tools hangin’ to the knee, all those pouches with hard things stickin’ out of them, I understand the attraction. First time I ever heard Carly Simon do You’re So Vain , I figured she’d just done a carpenter, but it’s always kinda like young girls and horses, eh, first flush is hot and then all that attention to grooming… Outta here! And Sam’s such an ignorant swine, I don’t expect this’ll last out the week, he’s just not your new-man kinda guy, politically, or otherwise, there’s nothing correct about him.”

“She’ll use you and abuse you, Sammy, you know that. Don’t you?” The pickup had careened down from the heights of Manooth, chased from a roaring start and randomly fired upon with bursts of hostility from Katherine who followed behind.

Sam had wrenched the wheel in a fishtail slide down a tight ess of gravel to a narrow bridge. He slowed to hold it in his lights, “Woman’s a goddamned tailgater. What the fuck you talkin’ about, Magarry?”

“She’s usin’ you to get laid, isn’t she?”

Sam had snorted disgust, “I think I know who’s usin’ who for a fuck, Magarry.”

“Yah, sure, okay. Stu-udmuffin. She’s got plans for you, Sammy my son, she is gonna live up here.”

“Not with this Indian.”

“Well, Martin bought himself a drink with that suggestion, but she says she wants her own place. She says.  But it’s you she’s following home, Sam.”

“No fuckin’ way some broad’s movin’ in on me. I’m tellin’ you that, Magarry. No way!”

“Actually, I think she thinks you’re gonna build it for her.”

“She got money? I’ll do’er for money, but I’m not bossin’ some barn-raisin’ with a buncha bush hippies. Done that, brown rice and home-brewed dog piss, y’ gotta be starvin’.  You think she’s got the money?”

“I guess you’ll have to find out, won’t you? While you’re usin’ her.”

“I could use the work.”

“Oh, she’ll work you, Sambo. You saw the look.”

“Y’ didn’t see me jump to it, did ya?”

“Soon enough, Bowser, soon enough,” Paul had settled out of range into the corner of the truckcab and grinned to himself. Brad was right, you had to make do around here. Sam’d give him the gears over Martin, but he’d get his own shots in first, “You downed four beers in the time it took old Joe to wipe two tables. I think she’s got you by the foreskin already, Sammy, and she means to hang right on. Teeth, if she has to. Your days are numbered, my son, but don’t you worry, I’ll stand by you for old time’s sake and we’ll…”

“Shut up, Magarry! I don’t care what you think.”

“…dress Martin up for maid of hon…”

“Just shut… the fuck… up!”

David took a half breath of relief, “So, it’s not true romance, she’s not gonna be barefoot and pregnant? She hates babies, they won’t do what she says. It wouldn’t be a nurturing experience.”

“Hoo, no, not a chance, Sam’s worst nightmare’s a diaper pail. You should hear him on the subject. What comes before neanderthal? No, she’s safe, knowing Sam, he’ll have found something new by tomorrow, or he’ll just disappear till she takes the hint and packs it up.” Paul hoped he sounded reassuring to David, he didn’t feel so positive himself.

“Yah, so, anyway…” More than he’d wanted, less than he’d feared, David had heard enough and tried to change the subject, “…what d’ you think?”

“She’ll be home Friday, Sunday at the late…”

“The church supper, you flaming idiot!”

“Oh. I guess you’re right, ‘nuff said. I don’t know. How? You driving? Gonna come and get me? I haven’t got any way to get there from here, in fact, you can’t really get there from here. It’s either ‘way up and around, or ‘way down and around. Thanks anyway, but I think I’ll pass.”

“If I picked you up and delivered you right back, would you go?”

“Are you gonna do that?”

“I could.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“Don’t sweat the little stuff, I can borrow, I can rent, whatever. Point is, will you do it?”

“Why?”

“Oh, Jesus, Paul, I don’t know.” Suddenly exhausted, David had to remember why he’d called, “Because I want to go and I don’t want to do it alone. Okay? I don’t know… I need a hit of something, sentimentality, connection… I need a feel-good moment, a telephone commercial, or one of those Seventh Day Adventist moral moments. Know what I mean? I guess I’m lonesome.”

“Umhum, and why me? For that matter, what’s in it for me? Not that I’m like that, but if you want to be self-indulgent, what about me?”

“You get to fill up with the milk of human kindness. Empathy, sympathy, compassion, being kind to your old friend could make up for all the times you jerked off in the church basement.”

“Baptists can’t make deals like that, we have to give up the first born, or do without teeth, or go fix tractors for the pygmies. We can’t be just nice and own things, like Anglicans, we suffer.”

“Oh, I can make you suffer, if that’s what you want.”

“I wish. So, I’m supposed to do this because you feel lonesome, that it?”

“‘Cause I know you can do it. It’s been family. You know? I’m not exactly flush with family and I kinda got used to it. And now I’m gonna lose it. I want to go there one more time. And what the hell, I paid for two tickets, after all, and if she’s not going to be there it won’t hurt to take somebody else along.”

“Do I have to take pictures? Am I supposed to record this trip down memory lane? Something for the last page of the scrapbook? Hell, man, you want memory lane, come on up, I’m living down memory lane, a dose of this’d cure ya. You ever in Scouts? ‘Member the ‘Gone Home’ symbol, the trail marker?”

“Yah. What, a circle, or something?”

“With a dot in the middle. One little dot in the middle of the circle, that’s what you are down memory lane. Think about it.”

“Look, we both obviously need therapy. I’ve got some really good bud, we’ll suck back a couple of Tillie’s whisky sours, smoke our brains out, eat everything in sight, and you’ll remember the whole thing like a heritage moment. Honest. You can handle it. You’re the only person I can…”

“The only person you know, obviously. Couldn’t you have a warm moment with some nice tv friends, David? You want me to put up with your not-anymore-in-laws and do a sit-down bun fight in a church hall on a couple doobs and a cocktail, ‘cause you’re feelin’ like a Hallmark card? David, I would deserve marriage for a favour like that. Tell you what, you want a memory, I’ll give you a memory. You throw in a colour tour and I’ll give you a ride you’ll never forget.”

“Don’t start, Paul, please. I’ll forget you said that.”

“Yah, well, the leaves’re down anyway.”

“There y’ are, then, nuff said. So listen, I’ll pick you up noon, Sunday, just tell me where.”

“You out of your mind? It’s one hell of a drive, y’ know, take you three hours, anyway, just to get here. Must be another three to get back over to Strawbridge, you’d be doing a triangle, ‘way out of your way. And then what’d we do, come all the way back here after the bun fight? You’re nuts. You want to do this so bad, there must be somebody else’ll go with you from down there. Think about it, eh. You’re getting too carried away with this cheap sentiment thing.”

“No, I don’t want to think about it. I want some cheap sentiment, and no, there isn’t anybody else I want to do it with. You’re the only person I know who can make it fun instead of pathetic, so there. Where’s your sense of adventure, Paul? So, okay, maybe it is too much driving. What if I come up Saturday instead, stay the night, and we go over Sunday? Must be some kinda motel up there, eh? I’ll get a room, we can go out for some beers somewhere… Yah, what the hell, I haven’t had a blow out since Adam was a pup. Hey, maybe I’ll even get lucky. Got any wild women up there?”

“Oh man! You’re not going to listen to reason, are you? You’re really hot to do this, aren’t you? Okay, so, there’s a spare bed here you can…”

“No, I don’t think so, from the sound of things I’d as soon skip your black hole. Must be some kind of hotel, motel, or something, isn’t there? What’s this Arlen place, it got rooms?”

“You’re coming after her, aren’t you?”

“No! No, I’m not. I was going to come get you anyway, before you said she’s there. I really and truly do not want to see her, Paul, believe me, not after Friday night. She must’ve been in one hell of a twist looking for somebody to blame it all on. It wouldn’t be enough to blame it on that bitch, Preston, it has to be somebody she knows. She was already pissed with me for leaving, so I’m quite sure it’s me. Didn’t she tell you when you saw her that I caused the whole thing?”

“No, actually, she didn’t, David. I mentioned something when I first talked to her, but she shut me right down.”

“Huh, must’ve still been working out her side of the story. And she had Martin with her, eh. Then it’s me for sure. According to him I’m the chauvinist pig monster who doesn’t understand her. Had she come on to your friend yet? Was he there?”

“Uh, yah. No, Sam was showing off on the pool table and it wasn’t till he came over to…”

“Exactly! So she could grab his ass and make that my fault too. Christ, Paul, I tell ya, I know how her mind works. I’ll bet by now she was the one dumped me, I smashed up her painting and made a big scene to get back at her, and she’s been forced into hiding in the backwoods with some redneck to protect her from my insane jealousy. I’ll bet ya, Paul, I’ll just bet ya. That woman can effect a cause faster than a two year old. So tell me, how do I find you?”

Bea made herself tea and watched an Irish girl seduce the squire’s son. Where the story would end was obvious from the opening credits; love him, lose him, keep the baby, charm the squire and land up in the big house. Nothing could go wrong, provided she produced the vicar to prove the secret vows. Romance isn’t what it used to be. Finish your tea and go to bed. I can’t, I have to plan. Mother goes into the Chateau. I don’t care what she says, she’s senile, I’ll get papers. Katherine… What? Give her this house? If only she and David had been settled in here, this falling apart wouldn’t have… Oh, sure, Bea, she wouldn’t live here, she hates it, she’ll never come back. Just as well she’s forgotten all about the Fowl Supper. And thank god the old battle-ax was too busy flirting and losing her mind all weekend to remember to mention it. I guess David forgot, too. I’ll say they’re both working. That’s best, nobody needs to know. If only one of them showed up, Velma’d never believe it’s not divorce. Bea blew a huge sigh through her nose and decided on a fresh pot of tea.

Struggling up from the soft couch, she was forced to wait on pins and needles in one foot, which she tried to conjure into a stroke that… No, wait! Not a stroke, a heart attack, a fatal one that’d get me out of this whole painful misery of a life with one quick jerk on the rope. A stroke’d just leave me at the mercy of those two. It’d be hell on earth. And Velma and Vera’d come visit me with pickles and talk at me and I wouldn’t be able to escape and I’d go mad in a wheelchair. Oh, God, thankyou, it’s not a stroke! And she hobbled off to plug in the kettle.

Mother into the Chateau, she can have the best, she’s no idea what that house is worth. But Katherine… She’s already got that little house. Not much of it, though, that godawful city price she paid. What if I gave her the price of something sensible, something she could settle down to, something big enough David could have a proper share in it, and that way…? I could give it to them both, tie it tight enough they’d have to share. It’d have to be something she really wants. Huh! Bea dropped a fresh bag onto the wet one in the bottom of the teapot. Not since she got out of diapers have I ever known what she wants. How on earth would I find out now? David? Could I ask him? D’ you not think maybe that’s why he’s left her? He has no idea what she wants, either. That why you lost yours? Oh, leave it! Pouring with anger, Bea flooded the pot, so that the wiping of counter and canisters side-tracked old pain and let her think of George.

He’s bored. He’s obviously hiding out from her. You can hardly blame him, she’s a madwoman. Who’d have thought old Bossy Bessie would turn into a raving lunatic, always so perfect, no runs in her  nylons, the only one who wouldn’t wear those ugly winter stockings, even Maude did. Said our legs looked the colour of old bubble gum, something scraped off a shoe. She really thought she was something else. I suppose no mother to slap her down wasn’t her fault, but Maude didn’t turn out like that, so it’s no excuse.

And what’s Maude doing coming to see George? What I’d heard, she never left the house, never did if she could help it, head in a book. They always said she only came out to Institute because Harry Matthew forced her. But she was certainly there, front and centre, Friday night. Wasn’t she? I don’t think Maude’s the important factor in all this. D’ you, Beatrice? I don’t think I… Oh, give yourself some air! Well… D’ you suppose there’s been a real rift? Has he left her? Surely not. Why’s he up here, then, and why’s he calling me? He’s bored. You really won’t give yourself an inch, will you? That’s enough of that! I have to think this business of Mother and Katherine through. He’s an awfully handsome man.

Katherine and David should get an old farmhouse down a dirt road and lock the old woman in the back bedroom. Feed her under the door. Elizabeth made a fool of herself and he walked out. D’ you suppose? And just what do you think of that, of a man who’d leave you for being foolish? Yes, well, you try thinking of something, anything a woman might do that some man wouldn’t find foolish. Getting pregnant, having Katherine, apparently, was a joke. Oh, now, he didn’t think it was funny. No, but he didn’t think it was serious, either, not enough to ever come back. Yes, well, you know he wouldn’t have lasted anyway, he’d have rotted from the inside out, he wasn’t meant to be kept in a barrel with the rest of us. Bea sighed a long sigh of deep regret, whispered, “He was a good-looking fella!” and leaked a tear that rolled to her lip. She licked the salt, shook her head, carried her tea to the diningroom table and went to the cupboard next the fireplace for her tackle box. Best to see just how generous she could afford to be, before she tried selling her daughter and son-in-law on a return to conubial bliss.

“I wouldn’t think so, Elizabeth, surely he’d get what he needs in at the Landing, or on up to Tier.” Velma Lettie was on red alert__ Elizabeth Preston calling to ask if her husband had been seen in the village? Impossible. That man couldn’t have been anywhere near here without my knowing. The man’s finally run away from her. I said it would happen. She wouldn’t be asking me, if she knows where he is. Too proud of herself to telephone us . “None of you people up on Joe come down our way anymore, it seems. Of course, we’re not much good for shopping, unless you want a snowmobile, which is hardly what you people want, even though you can get a fairly nice lunch now at the Carousel, quite reasonably priced. It’s changed hands again, more foreigners. They want to shoo you right on through just when you’ve begun to settle into your tea, and it wouldn’t occur to them to bring in the kettle for a second pot. There’s so much liqour served, it has to have its own menu. It’s the same baking here as up at Tier, too, nowadays, same people, not local, the bread, oh it’s baked  right in the store, of course, but the dough, you see, comes in on a truck from Lord only knows where, imagine the hands! We won’t have it, although the brown makes a nice toast, when it’s stale. McGee’s keep them, the IGA’s, the one here, of course, and then the new one in Tier after MacCallam’s burnt. I won’t say they took advantage. Ted McGee was smart to get out of the hardware when the Canadian Tire came, he wasn’t much in school, but he’s done well for himself since, bought up quite a few who wouldn’t have a roof otherwise. And he was good about the church roof, too, though he wanted to go with the asphalt tiles, we spoke to him about it, and that Milne girl from his office took a job somewhere down your way, new slate, on the church roof, and the asphalt went up on the manse. Still claims it was all a mis…”

“So, you’ve not seen George?” Elizabeth’s glare could’ve lit the stack of birch in the drawingroom fireplace as she roamed her rooms with a phone to her ear. That Velma Lettie should ever wonder why the George Prestons were always currently-on-tour whenever she and her dingbat sister threatened to come to town… “It’s a problem with the phones, you understand, Velma. George managed to forget to pack his mobile, he just can’t get used to it really, and his laptop, left them in his study. All this technology, it tires him out, I think. And up your way, it seems, some fool operator’s gone off and left a switch open, or closed, or whatever they do, gotten above themselves, is what’s happened, the service gets worse by the day, I’ve told George to tell Bell to smarten up, we do have a good piece of them, but of course he won’t, too much the gentleman. He’s just up for a few days rest, poor man, so vital to the world of finance, to the country, and I’m so unbelievably busy with my own responsibilities, committees here, committees there, I couldn’t possibly join him though he begged me to go along, of course.”

“He is up alone, is he?” Forgot his mobile telephone, did he? Poor man needs every bit of rest he can get away from her, I wouldn’t doubt for a minute. Not a breath for a how-are-you. Phone switch, my aunt Fanny! He’s put it off the hook. You don’t suppose… Having been invited to the wedding in St. James, but not after to dine at the Granite all those many years ago, Velma and Vera had presented Elizabeth with the usual salver in a Birk’s box and waited for trouble to come. “Perhaps someone strange to the place has upset things, the young are so careless, that loose Milne girl leaving her drapes open, they don’t think, and then people are hurt.”

“Of course he’s alone!”  Don’t you dare try that, you viperous old virgin, it’s not that hard to bring you to your knees. You really think Vera believes brandy evaporates? Old Albert tried that one on her when we were girls, for godsake, “Last time we were in touch I remember that Vera…  Oh, must be a year now, isn’t that terrible, even two. D’ you think? How the days go. And here it is, autumn again. I remember Vera saying you were well into a pickling last time we spoke. Did you put up a lot of pears, Velma?”

Velma was disgusted by the wet heat that bloomed to the surface of her skin. Always thought you were special, didn’t you? You and your precious Havergal, nothing but a fancy reform school for girls can’t keep their feet on the floor. “They don’t keep, you know,” She shuddered from memory of the cellar bins reeking with the sweet rotting fruit of Albert’s gleanings, “If you want a pear at Christmas, I always say…”

“Vera said you use domestic. Niagara, did she say? Still, it does the job, does it? And I suppose a spoonful of pear helps the medicine go down, Velma.” Elizabeth stopped her pacing in the diningroom before a little Watteau bateau in a colour wash of light, “So, I guess we know George is having a nice rest all by himself, probably lazing out in that old boat of his all day, fast asleep with a string in the water…” She smiled, at an image of a pastel George in a pastel boat floating in her eye, “…so relaxed he’s not even noticed the phone isn’t working. I really think I might have to jump into the car and run up there about this business,” She had no intention of fighting traffic on that suicidal highway, to say nothing of a filthy boat ride on that freezing lake, that’s why there are telephones, but Velma needed to be kept in place, “I’m President, you see, and important decisions have to be made.”

President of your own fan club? “Oh, yes?” Seething with the injustice, herself in fallow, Velma couldn’t prevent her respect for office stepping on her envy, “Is it the Gallery?”

Elizabeth froze. Was that sarcasm? How could Velma know? Bea McAlpine! That miserable, whining… She wouldn’t, surely, her own dreadful behaviour, that awful hat! It was all so disgusting for her, humiliating, surely the Letties were the last people on earth Bea would tell. Oh, my God! But not that old bitch, Tillie, “No! Is that dear old mother of Beatrice’s up visiting with her? A lovely time of year, autumn, cooler for the seniors and they do like the colours. Is she up?”

“Oh, I’m sure she will be this weekend, for the Supper. Bea’ll fetch her up Saturday, likely. No, what?” Velma was disgusted by such blatent dodging, “Are you not President, then, of the Art Gallery?” What’s she on about Tillie Sutherland for?

“Oh, no no no heavens no, Velma, there isn’t one, you know, it’s a Chair, but no no no, a symphony! An orchestra! For music, for symphony music, yes, quite an honour. Not the TSO, of course, we all know how that works. I couldn’t lend myself to that kind of thing.” Furious, Elizabeth had had no intention of mentioning her grand new scheme until she had assured George’s support, and certainly not to Velma Lettie who’d be of absolutely no use to her whatever. But there was danger here, distraction was best, “You said the Supper. The church supper, is it? The Fowl Supper? You still do it, isn’t that marvelous, and there’s no doubt, I’m sure, that you’re the guiding hand behind it all, Velma, you and Vera, as you always have been, of course. What would the church do without you? Strawbridge, for that matter?” Declare a public holiday, I wouldn’t be surprised, dance for three days on your grave. “And it’s still in the church? What I wouldn’t give for all that delicious turkey and… and stuffing and whatnot.” Elizabeth fought her gag reflex at the thought. That’s why you’re all pie-faced size eighteens! Although she would have described the Letties as hatchet-faced and scrawny, she liked to believe everyone but herself ate like a pig.

“Well then, Elizabeth, you should think of coming up on Sunday for a good feed. And we should root George out of his hide-a-way. He’ll have need of some good Christian fellowship and a decent meal, if, as you say, he’s been without company for a week.” Which I don’t believe for one minute. “Should I run up, d’ you think? There’s the water taxi out of the Landing, and I’d be more than willing to slip along and look in on George for you, see how things stand. Perhaps I could ask Reverend Ross to go along, he’s our vicar. Have you met him? Quite good with a problem. He married Anna McGee. You remember Anna, surely? It’s the least we can do in the circumstances.”

“What circumstances? No!” Mind your own business, you meddling bitch! What d’ you mean, how things stand? Furious, suspicious, confused by Velma’s intimations that things might be other than they ought, Elizabeth panicked, “What problem? Who’ve you been talking to?” A stab of pain between her eyes stopped her, but she knew damage had been done.

Smoke. Fire. It’ll be the secretary, some chip of a thing. Velma smiled happily to herself, and ever the pedant, “To whom? No one, dear Elizabeth, but yourself. Is it not just trouble with the telephone, then?”

“Yes, yes, of course it is,” Punishing herself for a foolish loss of control, Elizabeth snatched a still quite adequate arrangement of freesias from a bowl on the diningroom sideboard, “But you do know how people talk, Velma,” Intending neither irony nor sarcasm, she punched through pantry doors to the kitchen, “Some people will make up any old story to excuse themselves,” Snapping open the Saniboy with one slap of a kid-shod foot, she dropped the still sweet clutch of blossom, “Not that I mean anything by it, but has anyone in all these years ever known hide or hair of that husband of Bea’s, for instance?” The lid snapped shut. “I’m not saying, but it’s always left me to wonder.” Making do without a floral arrangement for a day would teach her to open her mouth before thought.

“Oh Velma, dear, you of all of the people I know can understand the exhaustion of responsibility, the burden of trying to do something nice anymore. It’s because of all this new-age foolishness, I think. Wear what you like, no matter how it looks, hemlines all up and down the map. Girls with bald heads, pierced… unh… everythings! Awards and medals for anybody who knows better than to sing at the dinner table. Not a standard amongst the lot of them. Ethnics walking into the country expecting to have whatever’s on the menu. People like nurses and teachers demanding pay for things they’ve always just done! Can you believe it? And gossip and back-stabbing have become a way of life for some of these people, Velma, you’ve no idea.”