The last day of the contract ran late. The block had to be fully planted out and so Ortwin instructed us to push the spacing to eight feet. The last few trays seemed to multiply even as we claimed them, and it was after seven before I popped my last container-stock pot into the ground. I tied a ribbon to that tree and did a little dance around it, whooping and caterwauling with the others. My feet were light as I walked my gear out to the road. We drank beer and wound Paul and Clara up in ticker-tape. Joe and Ed were goosing each other and squealing. I felt my shoulders soften as the aches from weeks of labour descended upon me. It was as if my joints no longer had cartilage between them. Karl stood off to the side with a strange unflinching smile on his face.
Cheers, he said, raising his beer bottle toward mine.
Bug off.
He said, To morality, then. A toast! Everyone!
Nobody bothered with him. Was he there? His foul odour, his crass presentation, his numerous sexual advances, his impropriety. I walked over, smiling, and pushed him with both my hands, and he lost whatever precarious balance he had on the surface of the earth and fell over into the sand-dusted weeds at the side of the road.
Paul said, Perfect, Alma, now he’ll really think you like him.
Raise a toast. Joe and Ed hoisted their beer in the air.
To Garlic Karlic!
Whoohoo . . .
Karl’s eyes bulged slightly and then he started to laugh, a laugh of hearty joy. He had managed not to spill a drop of beer in the fall. The vans started up and we piled in and still he laughed, although his laughter was drowned out by puttering motors, the squeak of drive shafts engaging. He scrambled in at the last minute, brushing dust off his jeans, moving to the back, pitching comically to and fro with the jerky motion of the van.
The party went on into the night, ending sometime in the wee hours with Joe and Ed and Paul doing a striptease on one of the fold-out cafeteria tables. Osho sat morosely in the corner, trying to pretend he wasn’t bothered that Marilene was laughing and dancing to the music that whined out of the tinny ghetto blaster, naked men around her. I drank too much and let Karl walk with me to my tent. He held me steady and put his hand out once to lift me when I fell. I found everything strangely funny — his large hand, the gesture of help, his awkward face, the waft of garlic, that I should even let him walk with me — and I laughed until the tears ran down my face. He cried, I recall, he joined in my mirth and laughed until he cried. And he unzipped my tent and helped me in and zipped the arch up again, and I heard his dying footsteps as he retreated to the cookshack and the party, a perfect gentleman. I pulled my clothes off and was asleep as my head touched the air mattress. I slept for a time, and when I awoke I could no longer hear the sounds of festivity.
The night was still and I lay there wondering what had awakened me. There were already light particles in the air. Morning was near. First I thought that perhaps the light woke me, but then I heard it: scratching and a rustling of plastic. It must be an early morning squirrel and I tapped at the inside of my tent. It was no squirrel. The thing bounded off heavily into the forest. Another moose? I pulled on a T-shirt and tugged the zipper open. I looked about for tracks, and when I could not find any I began to walk into the brush in the hope of seeing the beast. I kept my head down looking for tracks, wanting to discover the direction in which the animal had fled. It was not until he grabbed at my arm that I realized.
He swung his other arm around me and covered my mouth just in time to muffle my scream. He was so drunk the pong of booze masked the garlic.
I see you have forgotten, he said.
Let me go.
Think about Rumpelstiltskin, he said. He was clutching at me, trying to push me to the ground even as I struggled against him.
Just calm down, Karl, and go to your own tent, okay?
I didn’t scream.
You know the story I’m sure, he muttered. It’s not new to you. Stupid peasant tells the king his daughter can spin straw into gold; stupid king believes this in spite of himself. He locks her in a room and tells her to spin up his straw. Who cares if the peasant girl is neither beautiful nor well born? He’s going to be the richest man in the world. Well, that girl cries and cries until this ugly little dwarf comes to save her. Then ol’ Rumpel does all this work for her, spinning straw into gold thread, and all for the sake of a child, something to call his own. But man cannot have a child by himself, not even a really randy bastard like me. Rumpel is nothing without a girl, and who would have him? He’s disgusting. You agree with me here. He smells like rotting compost. And he’s a shit disturber too. But the history books are full of women outsmarting men. Rumpelstiltskin is nothing new, history repeats itself, et cetera et cetera et cetera. It’s no wonder we men are so brutal. Without you, we’d have no hope of evolving.
Karl? You don’t want to do this. I mumble through his fingers. The taste of earth and garlic pressed into my mouth. I could not pull my arm away. The clutch became more convincing as his fingers pressed into me. There were tears in his eyes, and eventually these tears began to stream down his face. I struggled to get away from him, but his arms were stronger than mine. He held me with a power I couldn’t imagine someone possessing, pushed me onto the forest floor, into the scat of thousands of years of little forest creatures. In my half-drunken lucid state, I wondered if this was a bad dream from which I would never awake. I kicked at him but his strength was brutal. He held me down with the length of his body, his hand again over my mouth, his bulbous finger pushed in between my lips, and he pulled his trousers off halfway down his legs, pushed my legs apart. He dryly bumped against my cervix. I tried to turn away and shut my mind to what he was doing. I left myself. I played dead. Something along the ground rubbed against the scab that had finally grown over the nettle wound on my shoulder and scratched it open until it bled. And all the while I could hear him breathing, could smell the rankness of him, so that the words he spoke, the drink and the garlic became one association.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry, he said. All I ever wanted was something to call my own, you know. It isn’t asking for too much. I just can’t help it.
July 29. Can’t you see, I loved her? I loved her indecision, I loved her resistance, I loved where the bugs had bitten her, where the treebags had formed a callus around her waist, the muff of hair like a small creature, the everything of her everything. Can’t you see?