THE WATER WAS DARK AND BRACKISH. IT IS WHAT EVA remembered. She had changed behind the trees, and walked to the beach alone. She was angry at her mother and father, and she knew no one here. They had moved in the spring, she had to move schools, she had no friends, and it was all their fault, and she had no one to talk to, and she wished she was dead, and she had no money and had a package of menthol cigarettes but couldn’t inhale and she would stand on the side of the road puffing and hiding the cigarette behind her when a car passed. And sometimes boys looked at her and she was queasy and didn’t know how to react, and at other times there was a sensation she was frightened of. And then that night came.
A moment in that night. A night where she was supposed to be studying and the curtain blew and warm air came into her room, and she snuck out and went down into the small village. She was alone on the sidewalk, all seemed pleasant and deserted at that moment, the white buildings in shadow, and their back sheds shaded by trees, and there, in the shadows of an old staggered building with only one small light on at the back, a strange man grabbed her. And he hustled her behind the dairy bar and kissed her and put his hand under her sweater, and she said no don’t and then she ran. In a way it was a terrible thing, that this was the first boy she had met on that backstreet. The first boy who had ever kissed her.
It was where her father had brought her, with a dip dip dip and a tip tip tip in his walk up the stairs jauntily into a worn two-bedroom apartment, the hallway carpeted with green carpet and smelling of cat piss. It was as if he was providing her a portico into a new, exciting world. And this was the world he had brought her to.
The next day that Shane man phoned her.
She hung up on him. She sat by the window looking out over the old parking lot with crabgrass withered at the edge of the cement. She had no one, she knew no one at all. A fan blew, and an old, old picture of the Fab Four sat on her small dresser.
Then glowing little flowers came by way of a deliveryman in a white truck. Then a question:
“If you don’t have a date for the prom I will be your beau.”
Then he met her on the street, and said: “Here’s a card for you—it shows a flower, see—” And he showed her the flower. He looked scared that she would not accept him for who he was. His nicotine-stained finger shook as he pointed at the flower.
It was a young girl’s romanticism that had caught her first, saying to herself, that night: What if I even would let him kiss me?
But what had happened because of that kiss, and that wondrous ideal that was still bathed in the scent of naivety with the trees waving coming unto dark?
“No, thank you,” she said when he offered the flower.
He began to follow her.
Then, after a time, he began to threaten her, in phone calls. He told other boys not to talk to her. He told her not to ever talk to other boys.
Once by the candy store, with the tinkling bell over the black door, and in the rain he said: “What did you talk to him for?”
A chilling feeling and a dreadful realization that he was right behind her, wearing his torn leather jacket and his cuffs turned up above his worn black boots, and she ran.
One day an Indian boy was kicked and hit, because he had spoken to Shane and said: “Leave her alone—don’t bother the young girl, have some sense, she’s a lot younger than you are.”
He was Gordon Hammerstone, Melissa’s younger brother.
“You are not being very nice to me—not very nice. What other fellow sends you flowers?” he said after he had punched and kicked that boy.
So she hid, and then in late June the heat became insufferable and the apartment bled away her resolve to hide. She could hardly breathe, and the sunlight came in on the old shag carpet and made her ill. So she went out to swim.
The sand was soft and hot, and she wanted to swim to the red marker and back, to the laconic drift of water to one side of it, coming out from what was called the Arron Tickle.
She got out to the red marker but couldn’t get back, and pieces of bark floated by her. She could smell dreary summer pulpwood—that is what she remembered, that she would die with the smell of pulpwood in her nose. And she realized at this moment if no one else in the world did realize it, her life had been so ordinary, so sad. She had never been anyplace farther than Moncton and had two pairs of sneakers, an old pair and a new pair that were becoming old.
You see she had moved with her parents to Dunn’s Road, a small side road off a side road between Arron Brook proper and Good Friday Mountain, where from her bedroom window she saw three transformer towers, the bulbs and steel of godawful progress, and the giant oil tanks where oil for the whole north of our province sat in isolation, like some round whitish leviathans, owned by Raskin Asbestos Mining and Trucking. She moved to where her parents had nowhere else to go, with all her small dreams enclosed in a small bedroom in a corner apartment.
She and her parents lived on that side road in a ten-unit apartment building sitting on a scraggy lot of grass and shale rock, a few pitiless starving trees, hallways carpeted with dirty carpet, the perpetual smell of cigarettes and hash, the sound of people yelling upstairs and down, and she went for a walk. Many of these people worked for the asbestos mine, drifted in and out.
Some years before this apartment building was built, a little square wooden apartment building stood, and that was where even more hopeful and poorer Mary Lou Toomey grew up, with her two brothers, Arlo and Arnie. (They were twins also.) That apartment had been bulldozed away by the Raskins and another, grander apartment was built. But by the time Eva Mott got there, it had gone to seed, to the perfidy of time, motes of sunlight on carpets fading, and men in boots and work hats.
It was during her walks where she, Eva Mott, could pretend that her father hadn’t failed again. That he had not gone back to school, tried to take a course, failed again.
“Never never will I live like this, never ever, ever never!”
So they had fallen all the way down to Arron Brook siding, not knowing where they would go next because there was nowhere left to go. It was an asbestos desert without the sand, a mountain without a peak, and a roaring wild brook where children when young were lost.
And then she became silent as if she was broken, and said nothing. She would go for a walk and find a nice boy, and he would take her dancing and to a restaurant. And this is who she found, Shane Stroud, in the darkness of a building late at night. When she got to see him in the light, she realized he was a grown man. But he would not stop bothering her.
He once told her he had a watch to give her, a silver watch worth two hundred dollars, if she would go with him to a dance in Boiestown, and she stayed inside and hid until she could not suffer it anymore.
So that day in June she went swimming, and felt the tug of the riptide hauling the top of her bathing suit away—until Torrent Peterson was there. It seemed it was destiny. She, after the terror of almost drowning, felt very important to him.
Torrent went back to work in the woods, bare-chested, his pants soaking wet, and she came to thank him the next day. She stood hidden in the small maple trees behind him for almost an hour watching him, and then he saw her, almost hidden, her face looking at him in wonder and curiosity.
She then came forward, and her back was covered in welts from deer flies; so he took some pitch he had made earlier that morning and rubbed it on her back.
“I am sorry my top came off.”
It took him a long while to answer. “Nah,” he said. “Didn’t notice.”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, a tad.”
But if he thought of it at all, it was with compassion at that moment, for her, that he had noticed her nakedness; even perhaps as if they were in the garden before the fall. He noticed her as a human being, needing assistance to become well. And he knew that she had to become well—that she was asking him to help her become well. This was now the unspoken question in the soft summer air, her smile of curiosity when she was hidden in the trees. She knew she would also use him for protection against that man Shane Stroud. He, Torrent, knew nothing of this yet. That she picked him almost unconsciously to aid her, to rid herself of the dread that the world creates.
“I knew you from school,” she said. “Are you really Oscar Peterson’s son?”
There was a dead quiet. He quit rubbing the ointment and then he started again.
“Yes,” he said.
“Well, we are both damned—right?” she said.
She told him about this boy—actually a man—who bothered her. She didn’t tell him right away, but at the end of the day, toward evening, when he kissed her softly. She told him.
“Do you know who he is? I don’t even know him.”
“His name is Shane Stroud,” he said.
So the Strouds, those who had influenced his life through his father and mother, were suddenly back in it.
“Never mind him,” he said.
Yet Stroud would mind her. He would drive his car behind her. He would shout out the window at her, “Come here—no, now just come here for a moment.”
And when she didn’t he would yell, “Stuck-up cunt,” and roar off in a trail of dust and smell of gas, the car wresting around the turn in a fatal way, the fox tail waving shadowlike on the aerial.
“I will make sure he doesn’t hurt you ever,” Torrent said. And he meant it. For, kind and gentle, Torry Peterson was no one to mess with either.
When Torrent went home the night after he had hauled her from the tickle, Oscar looked very impressed. The day was ending, the sky was filled with smoky rays of late sunlight, and Oscar Peterson, the youngest son of Morrissey Peterson, his father named after the Raskin industry creator, asked him to come and sit with him on the porch.
He smiled at some unknown thought, staring gravely ahead into the twilight. But he had heard of the noble bravery of his son.
“Imagine—right up to the tickle,” he said. And he patted his son’s arm.
His son Torrent could hardly read or write and had been going once or twice a month to Clara Bell who was teaching him his words. So Oscar was very proud of this young boy.
Oscar hadn’t meant to be an absent father, but all his life he was. He loved his son, but all his life other things happened to make others question it. Since he was a child Torry would go down at night to the tavern, and wait outside with snow falling over his khaki coat, walking in the snow in wet, torn boots, waiting for his father. The lights inside the fogged windows would illuminate a world he did not know; he would hear laughter and cursing, the sound of glass, the door opening with a wet smell of beer and heat. Everyone knew it was Torry Peterson waiting and some men coming out would go back inside and say: “For God sake, Oscar, your little boy is waiting for you out in the cold.”
“Yes, well, I’ll be along in a moment.”
The tavern would close at eleven and by eleven thirty Oscar would appear, dishevelled and unsteady. They would start their trek back to the small out-of-the-way trailer, the snow falling into their open coats and torn boots, and sometimes his father would fall into the drifts of snow. Torry at ten or eleven years of age would be bent over him, trying to pick him up.
“I’m getting up, son—don’t you worry about me—go get Pete.”
And Torry would run and get the horse Pete and walk him along the old snowed-over road to where Oscar slumbered. Then with Torry helping, Oscar would make it onto the horse’s back and Torry would lead them home. That is, he would simply walk ahead of the horse and the horse would plod behind, the snow flying up from the horse’s hooves, with Oscar holding on to the mane, and on clear nights the great sky cast in glinting flint like stars interspersed in endless black. Those glinting balls of fire so far, far away from such a small, humble scene that silently revealed the traits of men and beast. Then came the soft, faraway smell of smoke, then the last ice-slicked turn, and then the great silent yard, with the barn like a huge silent being, almost hidden in the black night, but its form like a heavy presence, ominous of the endless coming days of drudgery and work.
The horse would clomp toward the barn’s open door, but stop just before the entrance, and Oscar would fall off. Then the horse would continue to its stall, the sound of its great unshod hooves thumping on the cold floor telling of its denizen now home to bed, so if you met the grand horse at that moment he would look at you with bold, upturning eyes, as no more than a speck of curiosity, for this was his barn and it was now night.
Yet for all of Oscar’s own reading ability—some said he had read Balzac and Dickens—he had no idea that Torrent could not yet read. He had known, but he had forgotten. And his usual excuse was: “I had no idea—imagine that.”
There was a rival.
Albert was taken by that girl and convinced himself over the next week that this Eva would need him. He had begun to daydream about it all. He would be instrumental in saving her from a terrible life that living and being with Torrent would have in store for her.
I have a real opportunity to help someone here, he thought. He would make it all up.
How would he approach her?
They would go for walks. He would speak to her about poetry and social injustice, and Laurence’s Hagar Shipley. He would speak to her about Black sound poets, about Eldridge Cleaver who had signed a book to him, and the renegades of the left like Allen Ginsberg who he had met twice, and Germaine Greer. He would speak to her about going to Pittsburgh and having his picture taken with Simon and Garfunkel. He knew how much this would impress her.
Then, when she left her husband (for she would have to leave her husband), he would be there for her. There would be a scene, but he would stand firm. She would come to him, want to make love, he would say, “No—”
She would be the one person he would tell about Annie Howl, and she would be the person he asked forgiveness from. Why? Because she was to him another Annie. So he was desperate to do this.
She would cry—give him a note. The note would say: “You have made me free because you have taught me—you have freed my soul and saved my life.” (Well, he had different scenarios about how it would work.)
She would realize he was noble. A cut above the dreary boys she knew. They would part as friends. She would hug him and say goodbye. Her husband would be devastated.
“I now know how I should have acted,” he might say.
“Yes, well perhaps now you can change your ways,” Albert would say sternly. “Life is more than hunting and carousing. Think of what she had to go through with a man like you.”
The man would turn away and then he would come back and shake Albert’s hand, and finally he would say: “Thank you.”
And Albert would say, “Do not thank me—thank her.”
In doing this Annie Howl would go away.
Then he too would be free.
Shane was very morose and unhappy, and he wandered about town very lovesick. First he thought that woman Carmel loved him. He was sure she did. She was just scared because she was respectable. So he wrote her love letters and asked her to meet him secretly. Near a tree—he had even picked the tree out. “The little one right beside the big one near the bush—thirty-two steps from Miller’s Brook, that’s where we will lie down. It will be night and no one has to see you—come as you are—wear that peach dress, the one with the zipper—you know why—!!!”
But she wouldn’t even allow him in the house.
Still, that was okay, because seeing Eva at the picnic, he decided he loved Eva again.
He went all to pieces over Eva all over again.
He went to the tavern. But soon an altercation occurred with a crippled man. He was thrown out. He got in his Mustang and drove toward Dunn’s Crossing by Load Road.
That very moment there was a young girl getting ready to pick berries with Eva Mott. She lived on Load Road. She would take the bicycle Eva had given her last May—the bike Eva’s father had sent away for years before, packed in a box with Chinese writing on it, the cardboard box buckled down with brass rivets, with assembly instructions inside, in English, French, Spanish and Chinese. The bike was green, pale green and flimsy, and its tires were thin. It was not like the bike Eva had dreamed of.
The box had sat at the train station for a week in October, and then sat in the Motts’ back room for almost a month. Eva’s mother then put it together, with a spoon, butter knife and Allen wrench. Eva tried to ride it that first day in the snow and rain. That was some years ago, when she was thirteen.
The girl had gotten a new brake pedal and a new front basket, which Torrent had put on for her. He had tightened the spokes and made sure the chain was oiled. He had fixed the little bell that rang so people would know she was coming.
Shane left the tavern, driving his Mustang, and he went up Load Lane so he could cross to Dunn’s Crossing to see if she, Eva, was at her apartment. His licence had been suspended, and his car always pulled to the right. He wasn’t thinking of anyone but Eva Mott and how she had used him, and he was drunk. He had a .22-calibre rifle on the back seat.
He said he did not see the young girl on a bicycle going down the hill ahead of him. He said he didn’t even know he had hit her.
“Surprised me,” he said.
She had been invited to visit Eva Mott—they were going to pick strawberries for the men who were about to hay. The hay was not only for Torry but for this girl’s father as well. She was sixteen years of age.
When she got the call from Eva, Shane was being told to leave the tavern, barred for a month. When she got on her bicycle, which she proudly kept in the porch of her house, she had eleven minutes left to live. There were rocks and ruts on Load Lane; she had to ride her bike carefully when she went over the hill. So she was very careful.
She thought a boy named Danny liked her, and she would pick some of the strawberries for him. That was her last thought before she thought she heard a car and tried to pull over just to be safe. She rang her bell to tell people she was there.
The suggestion was Shane had intentionally run into this young woman thinking she was Eva Mott. For it had been her bicycle. Whatever he thought, he did not stop but left the scene of an accident, while this child lay bleeding on the road. No one found her for twenty minutes. Then Becky Donaldson drove by in her police cruiser. She had been called to the tavern because Shane had thrown a chair at the waiter.
The girl lay on her side, almost as if she was sleeping. Her left foot was jammed between the frame and the front wheel, and her eyes were slightly opened. There was blood from her nose, and her right hand was still on the little bell, ringing it so she would be safe.
Shane was sent away to Dorchester Penitentiary in August. Even his brother Mel said it was the best place for him.
“Can’t do much with him. Momma and me tried.”
Though he had intended to, Albert became busy with various things, and didn’t get to the young girl’s wake, but Torrent and Eva Mott attended, in the pale evening, after supper, with the heat still beating down, and the sound of the great Arron babbling incessantly, as if calling out in time to the sweet, careful sobs of parents who had rashly separated from one another just a few months before.
The coffin was closed.
Their daughter was dead.
When he visited his mother, Albert discovered she had these three women terribly confused: Eva herself, the young woman who was killed on her bicycle, and Annie Howl who flew from a bridge to her death.
She began to believe their death was her fault.
One day when he came in, she was seen packing all her clothes—she was going away and she would never come back! Her son was at a loss, and could do nothing with her. He spoke to her about getting help.
“Help—I need no help. I need to be listened to—something happened.”
“What?”
“Kisses and everything,” she said, throwing a blouse into a suitcase. “And my sister—do you understand? No, you don’t—my sister.”
“I did not know you had a sister.”
“Yes—I told—no one.” She said, “If Byron was here—goddamn it—if Byron was here, no man would bother me—but I have no man here—I have no man here anymore. Can you imagine what he would do to men who bothered me! A man who fought hand-to-hand combat—ha.”
“Mom,” he said. “I am here!”
“You,” she said in despair, “are a boy, you can’t do anything for me—and—”
“And what?”
She glared at him like the old Carmel Goya she once was, and lighting a cigarette said: “And your Professor Dykes is an arsehole.”
So her brother came back into her life at this time. She kept saying something bad was all her fault. But she wouldn’t tell him. She said her son would have to do so.
“I want Albert to go to confession, and when he does everything will be good again.”
Yes, she had lied, to her mother, to her husband when he had asked her who that man she had danced with was, to her friends in Taintville, arrogantly driving her new Cadillac up to their small crumbling houses, with a sudden look of rapacious ego and stepping gingerly across the spring mud holding her hat against the wind and her drizzle of perfume on the air.
All came flooding back when her brother who had warned her of all of this anguish she was causing clutched her hand.
“I want Byron,” she said, looking at him, almost accusatory. “I want Byron to help me—to help my son—he is the only man I ever knew.”
She had given forty-eight hundred dollars to the Strouds, and her son had given by now some thousands, all because they were helping the poor.
“What did your son do?”
“Murder,” she whispered, “murder. Though he will never admit it now. And perhaps he keeps telling himself he never did.”