Strange begets strange. Rose stops short at the threshold of the small log cabin that will serve as my new office. Does she distrust me now—me and my inexplicable cinnamon sucker? Just as I start gushing about the charming link-log construction, she pinches the bridge of her nose as if the sound of my voice has given her a headache. She hands over the keys and mumbles the most minimal workplace training instructions: “Walk the grounds about every hour. You’d be surprised how eventful the nighttime hours can be around here. When you’re in the cabin, keep the door open. Never shut yourself in here alone.”
“I won’t sleep on duty, Rose. I leave that for data-entry nerds and policemen,” I quip. I want to lighten her sober instructions. Turn her ominous into humorous. Her frown upside-down.
“I doubt you’ll get a chance to fall asleep.” Rose yawns, as if she has grown tired just by the idea of sleep. “Leave the door open because soon enough someone will come looking for you. Someone always needs something. Medical supplies, light bulbs, household cleaners, bleach and stuff, it’s all in that trunk or under the cot. There is only one hard-and-fast rule: never call 9-1-1. Drag me out of bed if you have to, just never ever call 9-1-1. Capisce?”
“Capisce,” I nod.
Rose’s flip-flops sound like a metronome as she marches away.
“Night,” I call after her. And it is night, like someone-just-switched-off-the-lights night. A night-blindness kind of night. No blue television light pulsing in trailer windows. No campfires. Certainly no campfire songs. The nearby tree line is pitch black, and again I think, there could be a man standing out there, several men, all lined up at the campground’s perimeter, and I wouldn’t be able to see them coming.
I decide within seconds of my shift that the cabin is a womb. Snug and warm. I shake the dust from the burlap lampshade, appreciating the lopsided speckled orange ceramic base. A beginner’s pottery project, I suspect, along with the similarly slanted mug beside it. The desk is a live-edge slab on rusted sawhorse legs. I run my finger inside a lacquered termite groove. Am I inside someone’s back-to-the-land art project? Could this link-log cabin be by the same maker? I see axe marks on the timber. Hand hewn—not cut in the hardware store parking lot. I squat down to inspect the rag rug under my feet—woven old flannel and blue jeans. The supplies chest looks to be made from reclaimed barn wood. And the single cot along the wall must have a real straw mattress (it crunches delightfully under my weight), topped with a simple square quilt made of worn denim and flannel that matches the rug. A room of my own, I muse. Much more butch than if I designed it myself, yet this is just the type of room in which I could write a manifesto, a collection of letters, a future banned book. I could be just like Simone de Beauvoir retreating to Kate Millett’s folksy feminist farm in Poughkeepsie. I bet the final draft of When Things of the Spirit Come First was penned in a room just like this.
This cabin is a kazillion times better than a university classroom, I decide. I curtsy to the straw broom in the corner before beginning to sweep. The broom can’t waltz and neither can I. I whisper, “One, two, three. One, two, three,” anyway, as I rid the ceiling of cobwebs. I sweep a fine coat of dust from under the cot and stop.
I am certain that it’s a painting from the amusement park before I kneel down to check. A peculiar pause trips the seconds. Here and now sort of falls forward—feels like coming up on LSD. You’re fine, I tell myself as I kneel down beside the cot, everything is fine. Dust bunnies rim the frame, the same way they gathered around the Laugh in the Dark stunt under my own bed. “Come on!” I exclaim at the bare nail I spot above the cot. “Is my calling to re-hang all the ugly Crystal Beach art around here?”
Mustiness punctuates the air as I lift the wooden board off the floor. It’s almost as heavy as my stunt. It reads, “Hold on to Your Hats” and “Not Responsible for Lost Articles.” I can almost hear the Comet roller coaster in my head. That tick tick tick as the chain heaved the train cars up to the first drop. I remember that this was one of the many signs at the front of the line, along with “You Must Be This Tall to Ride” and “Keep Your Arms Inside the Car at All Times”—which no one obeyed. Who could resist the thrill of raising both arms in the air as the coaster dropped eighty-some feet?
I turn the sign around to look for a nail hole or framing wire and discover the flip side is, as I suspected, a painting. Ugly art. Or ugly is way off. What is more than ugly?
I hold a strange libido before me. A utopia of Id. Tits of all sizes ascending to heaven. “Pervert,” I spit, not considering whether the jab is at the painter or at myself for feeling so giddy looking at it.
I force my eyes down to the bottom of the canvas where the heavy, rippling brush strokes imitate Van Gogh. Painterly, but disharmonized. This landscape brings together The Point’s turquoise blue quarry and the harried tree line beyond the grounds. I can spot where a fan brush was brought in—wispy little spruce trees. Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting kind of trees. At the midline, the view begins to change. Peeping out above the treetops is an odd half moon rising—it’s the tallest peak and drop of the roller coaster, oddly, the very peak I was just imagining. Except the coaster isn’t painted. It’s pieced together in a kind of decoupage of faded photos and newspaper clippings of the Comet. The edges of each cutout are ragged and lifting from the canvas. Perhaps the artist used ripped-up photographs and painstakingly doctored them back together? I trace my finger along the scrapbooked track. That coaster was quite the tooth chipper. I was always afraid to holler like the other kids because I didn’t want my open jaw to slam shut at the bottom of the first drop.
Above the coaster, the painting’s skyline takes a deviant twist. Instead of stars or sunset colours, there are glossy porno magazine images. Vaginas and puckered lips layered over more vaginas and puckered lips. A galaxy of ass. Dissected breasts are low-hung planets. All heavily glazed with so much glitter glue it needles my eyes. I can’t decide if this expressionist-esqe landscape meets celestial jerk-off is trash or brilliant. “R. Esposito,” I read the autograph. “Is that Robert or Rino? Rocco?”
Without fail, there’s a nail above the head of the cot where I hang Rocco’s painting. The wooden board rattles slightly against the log wall, and I flinch as if it might fall. I have to right it on the nail a few times before stepping back to appreciate the mounted view before me. My head buzzes just looking at it. I blink hard and head out the cabin door. Better get to work. Rose isn’t paying me to gawk in bewilderment at ugly art.
Everything seems very ordinary after experiencing Rocco’s artistic rendition of The Point. My flashlight illuminates a slim path of ordinary gravel bordered by ordinary grass. At the dock, I find a canoe resting right side up in the rack, collecting dew, and manage to turn it without making much noise. I collect a trail of bottle caps along the shore. The pay phone receiver is dangling on its hook. I pick it up to check for the dial tone, then hang it back up again. Along what I just now dub Resident Row—a long paved walkway—are only three trailer homes. The first is a giant orange, blue, and white Winnebago set slightly back in the trees, with a red Volkswagen Rabbit parked beside it. This resident loves colour. There are bumper stickers covering the entire right side of the trailer. I let my flashlight briefly rest upon the collection of gnome ornaments on the lawn. One of the gnomes has dropped his pants, and his little ceramic butt moons anyone who might approach the Winnebago’s door. A flagpole mounted at the end of the tiny driveway flies black and purple flags. I watch the flags sag, then slightly sway in the night breeze for a long time before I figure out what they are. The black: a pirate flag. The purple: a Haudenosaunee flag. I recognize the Great Tree of Peace symbol, the Eastern White Pine. The white squares represent the Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, and Oneida. C.O.S.M.O. Cosmo, like the cocktail or the magazine. A mnemonic I created in high school to help me remember the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
We had one teacher, Mrs Paul, in high school who taught Aboriginal studies, and she was a substitute teacher. She was Mi’kmaq and Acadian from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia—she told us that on her first day. Sometimes she’d say, “Pens down and just listen,” and she’d talk for an entire hour. I guess that’s why I created a mnemonic to remember Cayuga, Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, and Oneida. We took so few notes in Mrs Paul’s class that I started inventing mnemonics and songs to try and remember her lessons. Maybe I knew she wouldn’t last long at our school.
I remember Barbara complained that there weren’t enough books in our library for our class of twenty-five students to all be doing school projects on Native peoples. I think there were a lot of reports on arrowheads and knives made of chert that year. Mrs Paul never smiled, but somehow I felt like she cared about us more than any other teacher. Most teachers took us out of town to a museum, but for our field trip Mrs Paul brought us to Shagbark Park and had us pick up garbage. Afterwards, she took us to the beer store to collect money for all of the empty beer bottles we picked up.
It was on this field trip that Chris Sakokete asked me out, for the second time, and I said “yes.” We liked to listen to The Clash and smoke hash from a dented Coca-Cola can and fuck awkwardly under the train bridge. Normal teen dating stuff. But we also did real stuff. We’d go fishing for walleyes in Black Creek or babysit his nephews or drive up to Niagara Falls just to go to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum.
I liked the guy, and I never liked anyone in high school. I liked him so much I became a genius at concocting stories about how he was cheating on me. I retaliated by wearing frosty pink lipstick and partying overzealously with all his friends. Normal teen drama. Fear-drinking with boys isn’t the best revenge, it turns out. Nowadays, when I see teenage girls riding the subway or wherever, with their depressed bitch faces, I think, Hey, I know that face. That’s the face of having your tits and ass groped by hands you were too wasted or too trained up in the ways of feminine passivity to ward off. That’s the face that wears next-day shame, the face that appears blank when being next-day shamed by your bogus friends. And then the whole miserable scenario happens all over again the following weekend. Girls earn their depressed bitch faces. Anyway, I did my history report for Mrs Paul on the Haudenosaunee flag, created in the 1980s to honour the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, probably the oldest participatory democracy in the whole world, if I remember what Mrs Paul told us during one of her “pens-down” talks. I lost my so-called virginity to Chris Sakokete the year she was a substitute teacher. Way to make it all about me. I’m such a narcissist.
When Mrs Vandemere came back from maternity leave, Aboriginal studies was no longer a part of History. Chris Sakokete started dating some girl from Fort Erie High School. I only saw her once at a bush party, and I’m pretty sure her face was just as depressed and bitchy as mine.
I back away from the Winnebago before I can attach any more of my crybaby teenage memories to it.
A few paces further, the next trailer is one of those vinyl-sided shotgun homes. My flashlight beam wanders close to the front door before suddenly noticing the man sitting in a lawn chair in the dark under a corrugated aluminum awning. He flicks a lighter to let me know he’s seen me. How long has he been sitting there watching me? “Sorry,” I mumble, and swiftly slink away.
“Management entering,” I call out at the washroom door before venturing into the campground washroom. I call out twice before entering the men’s. Apart from a thin lip of mildew, the showers are empty and so clean I almost feel let down. There’s not even Magic Marker graffiti for me to scrub off the washroom stalls. I suppose this will change once camping season starts. “There’s literally nothing for me to do around here,” I complain aloud.
“Help my boy,” a man bellows nearby. “Girl, come help him.”
Okay, I spoke too soon. There is the sound of late-night chaos. I rush, almost crashing into him a few paces outside the washroom. My flashlight falls into the freshly cut grass. Bending down to retrieve it, I see the man’s bare feet peel off ahead of me. “Come with me.”
“I’m the new night manager,” I say, catching up to him. “Starla …”
“Welp, we brought our son to you, but you ain’t there.”
“To me?” I realize he’s hurrying us to my cabin. “What’s wrong with your son?”
“Rabbit fever,” he tells me. Slapping his hands down on each of my shoulders he halts me in my tracks. His breath is malt liquor.
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask, quickening my pace.
“Are ya th’ new girl or are ya useless?”
The cabin door is open. Inside a woman kneels beside the cot. “I already got the first aid kit,” she says, the contents of the trunk spilled out around her.
I rush inside to find her kneeling beside an awfully small and fragile child. He can’t be more than four or five, while his parents must be headed toward fifty. I was expecting a teenager, not this last-call baby. An unexpected-pregnancy little nip. His mother delicately holds his head like it’s a helium party balloon that might float away.
“If you didn’t gobble up all our aspirin by the bottle his fever woulda never got this high,” the woman hisses. The boy has a weeping rash around his mouth. His PAC-MAN pajamas are sweat-soaked.
“I swear I’ll bust both your knees with your own damn hammer if he get’s any hotter. I’ll soak that old goat beard of yours in kerosene and set you on fire.”
I scramble through the scattered contents of the chest. The woman has already popped open a bottle of Tylenol. “What do you know about this rabbit fever? Anything,” my voice is angry too, rivaling the woman’s. Stay calm, I tell myself. “How’d your son catch it?” I grab Bactine, Solcoseryl ointment, and a few bottles and packets I don’t recognize. The mother and I begin to clean his broken skin. The boy’s sweat smells like a cheese platter at the end of a party. The soft skin around his lips moves under my finger. He whines, and the mother nudges me away. Her hands are quick and gentle. Her wedding ring is a thin gold snake eating its tail.
“If you wanna do something, dampen his socks in cold water and get ’em back on his feet,” she says to me, and then to her husband, “Make yourself useful and fetch your big wool socks. You know where your own socks are?”
“My rabbits are clean,” he says.
“That ain’t news, Hal.”
“Clean,” he repeats.
“Hal keeps rabbits,” the woman explains to me. “Clean rabbits, like he says, for the meat. We eat more rabbit than we do hamburger.”
“‘Cept a wild rabbit comes around the pens. Young buck wantin’ to mate. I runned the pest over with the lawn mower.”
“And left him, guts and all, on the lawn.” The woman gulps on her words. I don’t want to see her cry. “Lucky is a sensitive boy. If he found the dead rabbit, he wouldn’t let it lay on the wrong side of the grass like that. Boy’s got respect. Not like his stupid father. I figure he gave it a proper burial.”
“Boy ought to know better. Rabbit fever’s contagious even after the animal’s dead. I bet he stuck his fingers in his mouth afterwards.”
“He’s a kid. I told you a hundred times, kids put every darn thing in their mouths.”
“What about this?” I ask the mom, showing her a sticky bottle of cherry-flavoured penicillin V syrup. I take a closer look at the label. “Probably expired.”
“Better than a kick in the head, I ’spose,” she says.
“He’ll never touch another rabbit again, that’s for sure,” grunts the father. He crowds behind us, rubbing his palms together frantically.
“Only a dimwit leaves a dead rabbit on the lawn! You think you own this whole place? Do us a favour and go for a long walk, would you?”
To my horror, the man shoves his wife in the back. She topples onto her son as the rag rug buckles under her husband’s feet, and he comes tumbling down to the floor, cursing and slinging insults.
“I’ll go to sleep in this bed, thank you. I like it here,” little Lucky says. His throat must be swollen for his voice to sound so slight. “The lady likes it here,” the boy tells me. “She makes the windows glow.”
Fuck no. This can’t turn into some kind of rock ’n’ roll Keith Richards near-death drama. My hands shake and he shakes with them. I realize I’m holding him by both shoulders. I can’t bring myself to tell him he’ll be all right. But that’s what a normal, compassionate person does—says that everything is going to be fine. I’m the worst caregiver ever. I’m such a bad caregiver that I’m indulging my insecurities about being the worst caregiver rather than just giving the fucking care. My shaking’s no more than a tremble, but his sweaty little head bobs around on his neck.
His mother pushes me away again. “What lady, Lucky?” she asks.
“She says you got a treat for me.”
“Yes! I do have a treat. A special, special treat,” my own words startle me as I pull the cinnamon sucker from my sweater pocket. “So special that there is only this one left in the whole world.” Something in the air shifts as I hold the sucker up for the boy to see. His mother lets out an awful gasp and curls her body closer to her son. His father becomes quiet and still on the floor. Rocco’s painting clacks against the wall again. And just as Lucky said, the window seems to grow a bit brighter, like the moon’s pointed directly down on us. I get the urge to rush away, like I rushed out of the abandoned candy store and run all the way back to Barbara’s house. I hold the sucker out of his reach, my hand trembling more than ever. “I can only give you this treat if you promise me you’re going to be a very brave boy and get better.”
Lucky’s puffy eyes widen as he makes his promise. To my surprise, I find myself crawling into the cot beside him and his mother. The three of us lie together, side by side, listening vigilantly as the rhythm of his sucking and swallowing grows steadier. She hears what I hear, I can tell by the slight smile on her lips. The smell of cinnamon fills the cabin. This must be the strongest, strangest cinnamon Hall’s sucker ever to be made. Truly the last of its kind. Stuck to my sweater so that I could bring it here to this boy. Ammazza! Weirder than what’s what.
“I’m Bobby.”
“Starla,” I tell her.
“Next time we meet, we’ll drink some tea together, and you can tell me a bit about yourself.” She closes her eyes, presses her lips to her boy’s flushed cheek.
Hours later, I wake up on the rag rug beside the cot. The cabin is whirling, and I’m weak-kneed. Lucky is still tucked under his mother’s arm, sleeping. Bobby’s half awake. “Check his socks, eh?” she whispers.
His fever still hasn’t broken. The dampened socks are warmer than room temperature. There’s a halo of sweet cinnamon heat around his entire body. “Should we give him another Tylenol?” Bobby wriggles her arm free and gently rolls him up to sitting. Lucky seems to swallow the pill without waking up.
His father is gone. We must have fallen asleep long enough for him to wander away. I step outside, expecting to find him passed out in the grass. He’s not outside either. He’s not on the campground payphone calling the health hotline. He didn’t go to their neighbours’ to ask for help. Nope. My guess is he merely crawled back to his own bed.
The first of the mourning doves coos, and I decide that all there is left to do before the sun comes up is pray, except I am a lapsed Catholic and therefore conflicted about exactly to whom I should pray. Boobs of heaven, I think, picturing images from Rocco’s painting in the sky above me. Boobs and Vivienne Westwood shoes and lightning bolt panties. Sacred objects, no doubt, but can they answer prayers?
“Dear Saint Veronica,” I try again, as if I am dictating a carefully worded letter to a completely mythical woman. “Children in this half of the twentieth century should neither suffer nor die from rabbit fever. We’re both aware that Lucky deserves better than an over-the-hill alcoholic for a dad. The mom’s solid enough, but there’s only so much one woman can do, eh.” I realize I’m quoting Barbara. She always used to say There’s only so much one woman can do. It was her single mother’s catch phrase. “Anywho, I’m not here to ask for the world. I only want the tiny scruff to get well. If you save him tonight …”
A light goes on in Rose’s home. It’s all I can do to finish my prayer before making for her front door. “If you save him and watch over him, then I promise to look out for him too. I’ll personally make it my duty to ensure he stays healthy, at least through the summer, and that he has something besides a rabbit carcass to play with, and I’ll read him Maurice Sendak bedtime stories just like my mom read to me,” I break into a run. “You have my word. Sincerely, Starla Mia Martin.”
All I have to say to Rose is “Lucky” and she yanks her housecoat on. She pauses again at the log cabin door, and I whiz past her to the cot where the boy is sitting up, sipping water. “Do you have juice?” he asks. All three of us exhale audibly in relief—Rose, Bobby, and I. Bobby scoops Lucky up. For a moment, I wonder if she’ll head back to her trailer, but she marches directly to Rose’s house.
“Should we call the hospital?” I ask Rose, as we trail behind.
“Lucky’s already been to the hospital once this year for ‘falling off his bike.’ Another emergency room trip and the hospital will get suspicious.”
“Yeah, and they should be suspicious.”
“No, they shouldn’t. You ever see the way child welfare treats poor mothers around here? No way.”
“Lucky’s a little kid.”
“Yeah, and Bobby was a little kid when foster care scooped her up. What did that do for her? Listen, I shouldn’t have to be telling you everyone’s business. You’re making me gossip. Just trust me and don’t argue.”
Rose darts ahead to hold the door open for Bobby and Lucky. Sets them up in the living room in front of morning cartoons—Bugs Bunny waving a carrot in the air. I watch her shoot around her kitchen turning on stove elements and pitching food from the fridge into pots and pans. She won’t look at me. Did I offend her? Or is she just one of these hyper-focused kitchen matriarchs? Within minutes eggs are scrambled and toast is popped.
The three of us exhale another audible sigh as Lucky digs into his breakfast.
Rose picks up our conversation again as we’re drinking coffee at the kitchen table. She leans in closer, makes eye contact. “Ascolta me! Bobby is hard to get to know. For the longest time I thought she was just an old hippie with a suntan. She’s Native, now you know, and she’s got no blood family around her, no aunties like she ought to, and the hospitals in Fort Erie and in Welland already have crossed her real bad, and her husband has been on a wicked bender pretty much since their son started walking, you understand?”
“I’m sorry. How was I supposed to know?”
“You don’t have to know everyone’s p’s and q’s to know better. No hospital. No police. No 9-1-1. You’ve been in the city way too long, Starla. You forgot how things are round here.”
I nod, sincerely. It clicks—I’m definitely back in Crystal Beach. The land of bootlegged off-sales, under-the-table employment, and unspoken rules.
“I don’t mean to be hard on you, cara. You couldn’t have come along at a better time. It’s been a tough year.” There’s a considerable pause between Rose’s words “tough” and “year.” She pats my hand, her gold rings cold on my skin.
My walk home feels like a distorted déjà vu. The sumac branches leaning low with dew along the back road. The vacant beach cottages backlit by pink morning clouds. Hall’s Candy Company Store—I cross the street to avoid it, then cross back again and defiantly stare at it until the world turns sideways. I am so fucking tired. Into Barbara’s kitchen I float, toward her singing to her bowl of cereal. When she hugs me I go limp.
“Thank you for reading me Maurice Sendak at bedtime,” I say.
Barbara recites what sounds like the first couple pages of Where the Wild Things Are. She has a magnificent memory for story, and she likely reads this very book to children at the library. I let myself be soothed, listening to her soft, storytelling voice.