2

The next day, I woke up to the sound of a long swell on a smooth sea that rose and fell like something breathing, under an unruffled surface. It snapped and thudded on the shore, then a long wait till the next one. The sky was overcast, but the clouds were breaking up to the north and the wind had veered a few points towards Newfoundland.

I crawled out of the tent and waded into the ocean, swam for a while, dried myself with my shirt, and crawled back into my tent. I pulled out my banjolele, tuned up, and went over my new scales in G, D and C.

“Anybody in there?” said a voice outside, and I poked my head out the tent flap. A big girl in a red checked shirt too small for her was standing beside a twelve-year-old boy wearing the same make and size of shirt, but for him too big.

“Hello,” I said.

“You owe us money,” said the girl.

“What?”

“You’re camped on our land, so you owe us money.” She sighed like she was saying it solely out of a sense of duty.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Twenty bucks.” She sighed again. “We’re suppose to kick anybody off our land unless they pay us. And we do need the money, so I kinda see the point, but I told Wallace already there’s probably a more civilized way than just, like, demanding cash from strangers. I mean, God, what are we, highwaymen? But when I tell him that he just starts singing some song he knows about ‘The Bold Deceiver.’ So like I say, we could use some cash and you did sleep here, so if you got thirty bucks…”

“You said twenty.”

“No I didn’t.” Her eyes darted around and her mask of authority, anyway not too firmly affixed, slipped a bit further.

“Yes you did.Twenty bucks.”

“OK. Twenty bucks, then. Or we have to steal your stuff. At least that’s what Wallace told me.” But she seemed less and less committed.

I was sitting in the doorway of the tent now and I hadn’t let go of my banjolele.

“Not a lot to steal,” I said.

“There’s your bike,” she suggested, but with almost no conviction now. She peered at it more closely, then at me. “You a girl?”

“No.”

“It’s a girl’s bike.”

“I know. But it works.”

She was looking at me with more interest.

The boy started to say something. “D-d-d-d……”

“Go ahead, Brucie,” she said, looking at me like I’d better not make fun of him.

“D-d-d-do you play that thing?”

“Not really,” I said, ignoring the stutter, and seeing out of the corner of my eye the big girl relax slightly. I put my fingers into position and did a G scale three times, then a transition into the relative minor, resolving on the highest note of the D. I looked up and they were looking at me wide-eyed, like I was an angel. “Do that again,” said the girl. So I did, with a little fillip in the middle.

“Let me try,” said the little guy with the stutter, and I held it out to him. It briefly occurred to me that that might be the last time I saw my banjolele, but I didn’t think so. They were music lovers.

He strummed the open chord and started to sing.

“Like seeds in spring, beneath the snows, Love stirs deep in my heart…”

And right through the whole song without a stutter. He strummed only the open chord, but I could hear in my head the accompaniment as he sang, a cycle of three chords, fifth, relative minor and a first. He had a beautiful singing voice, and the song itself was heartbreaking. Women were the only thing worth living for, it said, and as he sang he acted the part of somebody who believed just that, helpless in their presence.

He finished the song and the big girl applauded. “Good job, Brucie.” Then to me: “He’s good with music.”

“Want a potato?” I asked. We’d forgotten about the money. I dragged the bag out and we sat on the beach together in the beautiful morning.

“How long you been playing?” said the girl.

“A couple of months.”

“You s-s-sound good.”

“You too.”

The girl’s name was Roberta, or Robbie. “We were both named after Robert the Bruce,” she told me.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“Robert the Bruce. You know, and the spider?”

“Sorry.”

She looked at me in growing disbelief. “You never heard of Robert the Bruce?”

“No.”

She kept looking at me like I hadn’t heard about the existence of gravity. “We’ll get Wallace to tell you.” She jumped to her feet. “Come on…” she said. “And bring that banjo thing.”

They started walking away and I followed them down the beach and up onto the land. The path went around a pile of driftwood like broken statues, then past wild rose and bayberry and into the spruce forest, plastered by the wind on the seaward side into a thick mat, but once behind, a protected grove, reddish brown and dappled. We came out by the side of a sea-pond with water the colour of whisky and we rounded the end where there were more wild rose bushes and labrador tea. We walked around the back of a dune, down through another smaller spruce wood, and into a clearing where there was a farmhouse and a barn. Scattered about the yard were junked cars overgrown with weeds, and in the middle of the lawn an old spindly tractor. The remains of what once was a dock stuck out from the shore and a small heavy skiff lay half-sunk by the water’s edge.

The house, with its porch that went right around, was well-built but had seen better days, and a blue plastic tarp covered part of the roof, inexpertly tacked on with nailed planks. In the yard was a big linden, a row of balm-of-Gilead trees lining the dirt road in, and behind, the dune which had ringed this side of the sea-pond was moving in and had half-buried some of the spruce. Soon it would be engulfing the porch where it wrapped around the back of the house, but it was happening so slowly that marram grass had taken root on the crest.

Just as we came around the front the screen door exploded open and a large man burst out. “Robbie! Brucie! You!..” He stopped, looked at me and then remembered he had things to do and did not want to be distracted. “…Whoever the hell you are. Get over here. We gotta move that tractor into the barn. Get the damn thing outta sight once and for all. And put something overtop of that oil patch, or cut the grass. No! Damn! The mower doesn’t work. Scythe! That’s it, there’s a scythe in the shed. Shit! No, its handle’s broken. But we had a what-do-you-call it? Swipe, there’s a swipe. Where the fuck did I put that? Robbie, you see that swipe? Brucie? No? You? Whoever the hell you are… Who the hell are you anyway?”

“He was camping on the beach,” said Robbie. “I wanted to charge him for it like you said we should, though I still think that’s horseshit, but he played a song, then said he didn’t know who Robert the Bruce was so I said you’d tell him.”

“You don’t know who Robert the Bruce is?” he said. He looked as astounded as they had. All other plans could wait. This was a problem that demanded immediate attention.

“Or the s-s-spider,” said Brucie.

“Jesus Christ,” he snorted, with disbelief that anyone should be so uneducated.

“So, who was he?”

“Robert the Bruce was one of the ancient Kings of Scotland.”

“A-a-actually only a g-g-g-general.”

“Yeah well that’s the way you tell it.”

“H-h-h-he was!”

“OK! General, then. Doesn’t make a difference. The point is, he was sitting in a cave after a battle, all bloody and scarred. Some English bastard had stabbed him from behind, and he had already killed about a thousand of those sons-of-bitches, so he was bleeding, and his ear was ripped off nearly, and he sewed it back on with twine. Must’ve hurt like a bastard. So he’s lying there, bleeding, wounded, his whole army wiped out…”

“He r-r-ran away.”

“He didn’t run away, Brucie. Christ! He was hit over the head.”

“From behind.”

“Right. From behind. Which was against all the rules of war in Bannockburn or Glencoe, or wherever the fuck it was. Doesn’t matter. Point is, he was feeling pretty out of it. And he was lying there.”

“Wounded.”

“Pouring blood. One eye all swole up.”

“V-v-vomiting. “

“What?”

“You said they’d p-poisoned him.”

“Who said?”

“You said. Last t-t-time.”

“Oh yeah. They’d poisoned him, that’s right, that’s why he was wounded in the first place. They’d invited him over to a dinner the night before the battle, I remember now, and there were all these hoity-toity stick-out-your-little-pinky tea-drinking English bastards sitting around, and he only went over because though he was their sworn enemy, he was a trusting Catholic soul who always believed that his enemies had a chance at mending their ways, but they poisoned him, thinking, ‘He’ll be dead now for sure.’ But he had a noble constitution…”

“And he drank oil.”

“What? Oh yeah. Although he was a trusting soul he still suspected those English pricks were up to no good, so he took the precaution, the wise precaution when you’re dealing with backstabbing pricks like the English, to drink some olive oil before, which coats the inside of your stomach so you can’t be poisoned. And they were all “how come he didn’t die? He must be superhuman, some sort of a God,” as he marched away straight as an arrow after the truce, but it didn’t completely stop the poison from working and that’s why next day when they ambushed him he didn’t just wipe them out entirely, ‘cause he was feeling poorly ‘cause of the poison.”

“Where’d he get the olive oil?” said Robbie.

“G-g-good point.”

“What?”

“The olive oil. It’s like thirteenth century Scotland. Lot of olive groves around, were there?”

“Look, Scotland in the middle ages was the most civilized place on earth. They had universities when the rest of Europe were living in mud huts.”

“And the sun was in a different place in the sky?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, olive trees don’t grow farther north than the Mediterranean.”

“So what? They traded for it.”

“From where?”

“Italy or France or wherever the fuck they make olive oil.”

“Thought you said they were living in mud huts there.”

“Mud huts with olive trees outside, then!”

“Just trying to get the facts straight.”

“Facts!” Wallace snorted. “Where was I, Brucie?”

“He was w-w-wounded.”

“Yeah, ‘cause he’d been poisoned. Otherwise they could never a-laid a hand on him.”

“Though he did p-p-pretty good though.”

“Well, yeah, he did pretty good, no doubt about that. I mean, Robert the Bruce, even half-poisoned with a dose that would leave the average man writhing around on the ground or dead, could still kick the bejeezus out of anything they could bring onto the field of battle, let me tell you…”

“The cave,” reminded Robbie.

“Right! Anyhow, the cave. So he’s lying there, and a spider’s making a web and he figures, if that spider can do that, I can beat the British, so he got better and he did. Now where’s that fucking lawn mower?”

“That’s not how it goes,” said Robbie.

“Look. You telling the story or am I?”

“Well, tell it right.”

“It’s my story.”

“No it’s not. Dad used to tell it.”

“Well, you tell it, then.”

“The spider. That’s the important part. He was watching the spider make a web. And he’d been beaten six times.”

“Robert the Bruce?” said Wallace.

“Yeah. But then he watched the spider make his web seven times.”

“Why would he do that?” said Wallace.

“I dunno!” said Robbie. “Because he had fuck-all else to do.”

“Robert the Bruce had fuck-all else to do? How about saving Scotland from the English?” said Wallace.

“Yeah, but he was wounded, after he lost six times…”

“Not my Robert the Bruce.”

“Yes your Robert the Bruce. That’s the way you used to tell it!”

“Well….how the hell am I supposed to remember what I tell you? And who gives a shit? The point is he rallied and beat the crap out of the English. Got it, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are?”

I nodded.

“OK. Now can we cut the grass and move the tractor?

“You said the l-l-lawn mower was broken.”

“It is.”

“And you also said the t-tractor won’t start.”

“It won’t .”

“So how we g-gonna move it?”

“Push it.” We followed Wallace over to the tractor. “Get behind, there. And Brucie, get up in the seat.”

“How come he gets to drive?”

“You’re too heavy to push.”

“Well, what about you?” said Robbie. “You’re no sylph.”

“What’s a ‘Silf’?”

“A skinny little scrawny fuck.”

“Don’t swear. OK. Now, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are get behind here. One, two… and push.” We heaved. Nothing happened. “Is it out of gear, Brucie?”

Brucie rattled the gear shift in neutral. “Yeah.”

“Is the brake on?”

“I g-g-guess.”

“Well take the brake off.”

“H-h-how?”

“One of those foot pedals.”

“Which one?”

“I dunno. Just start kicking things.”

Brucie stood up on the tractor and stepped on pedals until the tractor unclenched and rocked.

“There! OK. Ready? One. Two. HEAVE!” And we pushed and the tractor moved. Wallace grabbed the tread of the wheel and leant into it, and the tractor proceeded across the yard with Brucie steering, and when it was rolling, Robbie ran ahead and opened the barn door, and we rolled it right inside, where it was quiet and strange and the light came through the gaps in the boards and streaked everybody like zebras.

“Right,” Wallace announced. “Lunch!”

We traipsed back out and across the yard to the house, onto the porch and through a door on the side to enter the kitchen.

The house was built on Rural Canadian pre-electricity standards, and the kitchen had a table and big shelves, a huge woodstove, an electric stove as well, and beat-up linoleum on a sagging floor.

Over near the corner where a lawnmower was stripped down and lying about in parts something rustled in the walls and the fridge was humming with a dangerous electrical sound. Wallace flung open its door to reveal not very much.

“No bread, no milk, no eggs,” he listed. “What’s this? Cheese Whiz?” He opened the jar and sniffed. “Smells OK, and…What else?…. Oreos. That’ll have to do.” He threw the package of cookies onto the table. I ate one. The filling tasted like chemically sweetened paper and the chocolate biscuit was like sugar and soot.

“OK,” said Wallace when he’d finished. “I’m going to Barrisway to get some nails. You, Robbie?”

“I gotta read up on something.”

“Brucie?”

“N-nothing.”

“O.K. Then I suppose I’ll have to buy something for supper. You want supper, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are?”

“Sure,” I said. “I can bring some potatoes.”

Wallace looked at me. “Oh good.They’re hard to find on PEI.”

“That was pretty sarcastic,” said Robbie.

“It was supposed to be funny.” And because Robbie was still looking at him accusingly he added, “What? I’m inviting him to supper.”

“Yeah, and all he’s got to do is bring his own food, and oh yeah, food for us. What does he get out of it?”

Wallace looked around at the sagging floor, the worn linoleum, and the rodent-infested walls. “Atmosphere,” he said.

“That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll go get what I got.”

“And you can stay here overnight if you want,” said Robbie.

If this was the kitchen, I thought, the upstairs was probably not spotless. I thought of my fresh bed in my tent, aired by sea breezes. “That’s OK. I’m set up pretty good on the beach.”

“Suit yourself.”

We walked out onto the porch. Down by the remains of the dock, the twinkling inlet had swollen up on the shore. A quarter moon stood in the daytime sky.

“High tide,” said Wallace, taking a deep breath and drumming his fingers on his chest.

Shit, I thought. “Shit,” I said.

“What?”

“I gotta get back…” I leapt off the porch and ran around the corner of the house.

“Where’s he going so fast…?” I heard Wallace say as I scrambled over the dune and sprinted down the path. I ran around the sea-pond and through the spruce wood and jogged out onto the beach and toward my tent.

The tide hadn’t swamped it yet, but it was a near thing. I dragged everything above where a line of eel grass marked high water. It wouldn’t have been disastrous, even if the tide had washed everything away. I could always warm some stones in a fire and sleep on them or wrap myself in kelp and let the mermaids sing me to sleep. Anything was possible on a day like today.

I ate a potato to take the lingering taste of Oreo out of my mouth, and went back to the path to MacAkerns’ where I’d seen a raspberry patch which I ate my way through. When I’d had enough for myself, I went to the shore and found a plastic bottle bumping in the waves and with my penknife sawed off the heel for a berry basket, then went back and filled it. I didn’t know how long the season would last and thought I’d better pick as many as possible while I still could.

Then, walking back to camp, I saw under the spruce a small patch of chanterelle mushrooms, picked them all then saw another patch a few feet away. One patch led to another. A squirrel sat on a limb and chattered at me, calling me names at high volume and velocity until I walked off. I went back to the beach, left the food in the tent, then walked to the road and picked some thyme. I could also make raspberry leaf tea, or labrador tea. I could try for trout where I had seen the geezers by the bridge, and over by the rocks, if I dove down, I might find lobster or crab. I went for a walk up the beach in the other direction to see what else I could forage.

The dunes to the east cut up sharply above jumbled piles of flat red rock like terracotta, but in one spot the cliff had eroded under and toppled a weathered spruce, its roots in the air, making a ladder which I scaled. I dropped over the lip into a bowl of marram grass, and the sound of the sea passed over my head in the wind. I walked out of this bowl around a small dried marsh, and stopped when I saw a rabbit crouched motionless ten yards ahead of me. He waited, then hopped tentatively toward the undergrowth, took three quick zig-zag hops and disappeared. I could always snare rabbits too, I thought, but I didn’t know if I’d like to do that. I didn’t have any qualms about killing fish, which was odd, come to think of it.

In the distance somebody was honking a horn.

I had to remember, though, that not everything was edible here. Growing around the driftwood there was a beach pea which looked delicious but contained a neuro-toxin, and I must never mistake wild carrot for wild parsley, the same plant as the hemlock used to poison Socrates.

The honking in the distance became more insistent.

I looked up and saw a truck parked on the road and standing beside the truck was a man in a brown uniform looking right at me. I couldn’t make out his face, but even at this distance, I could see his whole body scowling. I heard him yell something like “Get over here,” I guessed, judging from the way he pointed at me then jabbed at the ground at his feet. I could easily have dodged away and escaped back in the direction I’d come from, but I’d never felt more innocent in my life. And his anger was reaching out across the beautiful day and made me want to retaliate. Why should I be bullied? What had I done wrong?

So, innocent no more, I purposely took my time picking my way towards him, which made him angrier. He was so concerned with glaring at me that he didn’t notice Brucie, a hundred yards behind him, wandering up the road towards us. The man stomped, put his hands on his hips and glowered, reminding me of the squirrel. As I got closer, he started nodding his head faster and when I was within earshot I could see his red face and a vein in his forehead pulsing. What was his problem?

“Do you have a permit?”

“No.”

“Well, you need one.”

“What for?”

“To walk in the dunes.”

Brucie arrived. “Hi, C-C-Christian,” he said to me.

“Hi,” I said.

The man in uniform looked at Brucie. “Well, if it isn’t the MacAkern brat.” Then he turned back to me. “C-C-Christian is it? Is that your name?”

“Hi, R-R-Rattray,” said Brucie.

“My name’s not R-R-Ratrray. It’s Rattray.”

“Sorry R-R-Rat-face.”

“You mean Ratface.”

“So you admit that’s your name?” snapped back Brucie without a hint of a stutter, looking right at him.

Rattray’s face dropped. “I don’t admit anything. I don’t have to. I’m in charge here, and I was just arresting your friend for walking in the dunes without a permit.”

But I didn’t like the way he’d mocked Robbie’s stutter. “Where does it say I need a permit to walk in the dunes?”

“Never you mind where it says. You just come with me.”

“Where to?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “But it is so my business.” He stopped, surprised at my new tone. “First we have to establish where I am going and whether you have any authority to take me there.”

“Who says?”

“Every citizen of Canada has the right to liberty, as defined in the Canadian Bill of Rights.”

It was a game I used to play with my older brother Benjamin, who was studying to be a lawyer. One day, bored, I had come up to him as he was reading. “Why do you want to be a lawyer, Benny?”

“Why don’t you want me to be a lawyer?”

So I fell right into it. “I’m not asking whether or not I want you to be a lawyer, I’m asking you why it is that you, personally, want to be a lawyer.”

He looked up from his books. “And on whose authority are you asking this?”

“Mere idle curiosity,” I said, a phrase I had read somewhere.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “But I do not choose to indulge it.”

“And who gives you the right to withold that information?” I said.

“The privacy section in the Canadian Bill of Rights.”

“Oh to hell with it. I don’t want to know anyway,” I said and started to walk away.

“That is of course your right,” he said, turning back to his work and smiling. I was thirteen at the time and he was in his second year at McGill. I went off and memorized the damn Bill so that I could argue with him better. My next encounter I was more informed, and a few arguments later, it ended, I remember, in an imaginary Supreme Court case.

Back here on the beach, Rattray was looking at me narrowly. “What do you know about the Canadian Bill of Rights?”

“‘No law of Canada” I said, “shall be construed or applied so as to (a) authorize or effect the arbitrary detention, imprisonment or exile of any person; or’ (jumping down to (c)) ‘…deprive a person of the right to be informed promptly of the reason for his arrest or detention.’”

Both Brucie and Rattray looked at me with surprise, but it was really nothing special. Once memorized it was like A Field Guide To The Birds, where you sifted out what was pertinent from what was not, until you had identified the animal in question, or in this case, the relevant right or freedom.

“Exile?” said Rattray. “Who said anything about exile? Nobody’s going to send you off to a… goddamn island somewhere.”

“We’re a-a-already on an Island, Rat-face,” said Brucie, grinning widely.

“Shut up!” said Rattray, turning and pointing a finger at him.

But I broke in and he turned back. “‘Arbitrary detention’ is the relevant phrase in the Bill. On what authority are you threatening arbitrary detention?”

“On what authority?” and pointed with his thumb at his shoulder badge. “You see this?”

“I do. But by my interpretation, you seem to be over-reaching that authority.” I said it in a tone of voice which was undoubtebly very annoying. “Perhaps we should talk to your supervisor. Who’s the head park ranger?”

Strangely, this allowed him to find some solid ground. “Provincial parks have rangers,” he sneered with contempt for anyone who would not know something this basic. “This is a national park and we have wardens.”

“Then who’s the head warden?”

“We don’t have a head warden. We have a chief warden,” said Rattray, flying high now.

“Who’s the chief warden?”

“Fergie Monroe, not that it’s any concern of yours.”

“Let’s go see him, then.”

“Now you want to go?”

“Sure.”

“So what’s the difference?”

“Consent,” I said.

“Jesus! It’s the same thing. I mean, you either come with me or you don’t!”

“It’s a question of principle,” I said.

“What principle?”

“My mother told me never to take rides from strange men,” I said. “You might be a pervert.”

“What?”

“A p-pervert,” said Brucie. “That’s what he said. You might be a p-p-pervert.”

“Fuck off!” Rattray said, stomping over to his truck, getting in and slamming the door. Fumbling for his keys, his face was beet red.

“On second thought, I won’t go with you right now, thanks all the same. I’ll be over tomorrow morning anyway.”

He didn’t even want to know what this meant. He was livid.

And to tell you the truth, it shook me. It’s taken until my age now to be able to push that sort of behaviour behind me as soon as I see it. But at eighteen it was disturbing. It was an argument, but it wasn’t for fun. I looked past him across the inner bay. There might be clams there at low tide, which I could dig and eat, though I didn’t know much about shellfish…

“Is there a library near here?” I asked Rattray, I suppose to try to change the subject. His face was red and murderous.

“A what?”

“A library?”

“Do you see any big fucking buildings with, like, fucking librarians in them?” he said, then added, “You can both go fuck yourselves,” and roared off, spinning his tires and spitting up gravel.

We watched the truck disappear down the causeway.

“Poor old Ratface, has no c-c-clue, what to say, or what to do,” said Brucie like a schoolyard rhyme, though I don’t know whether he had composed it on the spot or if it was something he had just picked up.

We went back to my tent and retrieved the food I’d collected. I left a few potatoes and some raspberries for myself, and Brucie said I should bring along the banjolele. On the way to MacAkerns’ I told Brucie how I was hired at the park and how I would start work tomorrow.

“R-r-r-really?” And he didn’t say another thing until we entered the kitchen when he blurted out, “We got a m-m-man on the inside!”

“What? Who?” said Wallace, looking up. He was seated at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee from the jar that held the last of it, filled with hot tap water.

“Him,” said Brucie, pointing at me. He had particular difficulty with the letter C and I think my name was hard for him to say.

“Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are,” said Wallace, who on the other hand simply didn’t know my name.

“He’s going to work at the p-park office.”

“No shit.”

“I start tomorrow.”

“You sly bastard!” Wallace said with admiration. “You can be our spy!”

And it seemed to me there could not be any complications arising as a result. Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are: The Spy With No Name.

“And he knows about l-l-law, and r-r-rights and things.”

“What are you talking about?”

“R-R-Rat-face stopped us, and he just s-s-snowed him under. You should have seen it.”

“Really?” Wallace looked at me. “Well, tell me now. I’m pretty sure they can’t just kick us off our land, but where does it say they can’t.”

“Who?”

“The government. They want to kick us off our land.”

“Exp-p-propriate us.”

“I don’t know much about the law,” I said. “I just memorized the Canadian Bill of Rights is all.”

“OK. In the Bill of Rights then, where does it say that they can’t kick us off our land?

“I’m not really…”

“C-come on, you told Rattray that he couldn’t move you. How’d it g-g-go? That bit about ‘no law of C-C-Canada…’

I repeated the part of the Bill of Rights about detention, imprisonment or exile.

“That’s it,” said Wallace. “Exile… They want to exile us!” He turned to me. “And you’re saying they can’t.”

“Yeah. Well I guess not…But like I said, I’m not a lawyer…”

“Exile! Just like they exiled the proud clan MacAkern before. And exiled Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Then he started to sing:

“Speed Bonny Boat,

like a bird on the wing,

something the sea to Skye.

Born to be something the something the king

Why God oh why tell me why….”

“That’s not how it goes,” said Robbie. We all turned to look. She was standing in the doorway to the parlour with a large mouldy reference book in her arms.

“Well you sing it, then.”

“I don’t sing.”

“Well then?”

“Just ‘cause you sing a song doesn’t give you the right to change the words.”

“Oh?” said Wallace grandly, and with a sweeping arm gesture indicated me. “Talk to my lawyer about it”.

“Well?” said Robbie.

“There is the right to freedom of expression, I suppose,” I said.

“There. See!” said Wallace.

“OK. Maybe. But it doesn’t make you sound any smarter.”

“What’s smart got to do with it?”

“Nothing, in your case,” said Robbie. Wallace punched Robbie on the shoulder. “Ow, that hurt.”

“It was meant to. The point is, they want to exile us. Like Bonny Prince Charlie was exiled.”

“Yeah,” she snorted and sat down. “To France, where he lived high off the hog in the lap of luxury, thank you very much, while his own people were dying for his sake at home.”

“A pack of lies!”

“From some bog in Scotland, to a court in France? That’s not exile, that’s social climbing.”

“G-g-good one,” said Brucie.

“Watch it,” said Wallace to Robbie, “You are dangerously close to defaming the name and reputation of the rightful heir to the line of James.”

“He was gay.”

“He! Was! Not..!”

Robbie waited with a raised eyebrow, and Wallace looked at Robbie, and backed out of a trap he sensed was being set for him. “Not that it matters, of course, and even if it did, which it doesn’t, so what? You some sort of a gay-bashin’ red neck arsehole?” A neatly turned accusation, I thought.

“On the contrary,” said Robbie, as though from a prepared text, “I think homosexuality is both a natural part of the human heritage, and, as can be seen by the innumerable important advancements which can be traced to their involvement in the arts and sciences, that the gay community is, if anything, more creative than the majority of dough-head heterosexuals…”

“There you are, then.”

“…But for all that, it’s not a community which has ever been known to be good breeding stock.”

“So?”

“Pretty hard to preserve the line, then, wouldn’t you say?”

“G-g-got ‘im again, Robbie.”

“What about artificial insemination?” said Wallace.

“Yes, that was very popular back then. But have it your way,” said Robbie. “If you prefer the image of Bonnie Prince Charlie lying in a bed with his makeup and manservant, and some big hairy bastard in a kilt sneaking up on him with a circa 1750 model artificial insemination syringe to jab into his testicle …well, fine, believe that then. Might explain why he did bugger off to France, with that waiting for him back home.”

Wallace saw a chink in her argument. “But I am confused,” he said like an overly-polite barrister. “Why would they jab his nut with a needle?”

“To extract the semen.”

“There are methods which are simpler,” said Wallace. “And a tad more pleasurable, I should imagine.”

Robbie’s eyes darted around quickly. She obviously didn’t know much about this topic. “What? You’re saying that they don’t use a needle in artificial insemination?”

“They do not.”

“Well then… I mean, how do you get the cow to…”

“You don’t get the cow to do anything,” said Wallace. “You get a bull.” He was smiling and dominant now.

“All right smartass. How do you get a bull to, you know…”

“I know something you don’t know,” sing-songed Wallace.

“Oh for God’s sake! How?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Tell me.”

“I’m not sure that you’re ready for it.”

“Do not condescend to me.”

“I’m not condescending to you. I’m patronising you.”

“What’s the difference?”

“When you’re old enough to understand, I’ll tell you.”

Robbie flung an arm around Wallace’s neck and hauled him back in a choke-hold so that the chair was leaning on its hind legs.

“Ow! Stop it!”

“How.Do.You.Get.A.Bull…”

“OK OK OK I’ll tell you!”

She let the chair rock back forward. “Now,” said Robbie. “How do you get a bull to, you know…”

“Donate?”

“Yes.”

“Knock on his door and sell him some girl-guide cookies,” said Wallace, and he mimed a rim-shot on the table and said, “Badum-bum chhh!”

Robbie snorted a laugh.

“The point is,” said Wallace from his new lofty perch on top of the argument, “Bonnie Prince Charlie was a great Scottish Hero…”

“Aha!” said Robbie, seeing an opening. “He was Italian.”

“He...? Oh…bullshit!” And they were back into it.

“‘Fraid so. Born and raised in Rome.”

“You’re just making that up.”

And she opened the book she had carried in and flipped through it. “Charles Edward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart.”

“No need to swear,” said Wallace.

“Born In Rome, in 1720…”

“O.K. OK. I get your point. It’s just a fucking song. And where did you pick up all this garbage, anyway?”

“All my life I have been listening to you spout your BS and it occurred to me that maybe I should start checking up for myself.”

“I should charge you for the education.”

“I should fine you for the mental abuse.”

“Let me see that book,” said Wallace. Robbie handed it to him. Wallace read the section, then flipped to the front page and snorted.

“What?”

“Read that.”

“The Oxford Encyclopedia of History. Yeah? So?”

“It’s English. What do you think they’re going to say?”

I realized right then why I liked them. They were as different from my own family as it was possible to be, but they reminded me of home in the way they used argument as play.

Robbie boiled the potatoes I’d brought, and after they cooled we sliced and stirred them up with a little water and thyme along with the chanterelles in the frying pan. While we cooked, everybody ate the raspberries, an hour of picking gobbled down in minutes. The cook’s life. I thought of Mom, and reminded myself that I should phone her.

“Excellent,” said Wallace, finishing off the last handful. “Where’d you buy these?”

“They’re wild.”

“Really? In our woods?”

“Around the edges.”

“Hunh! Those mushrooms too?”

“Yep. Chanterelles.”

“Aren’t wild mushrooms poisonous?”

“Not these kind.”

“Didn’t by chance find any wild beer, did you?”

Wallace cleaned off the table and put the dishes in the sink to “soak”, then he turned to me, where I was fiddling with the banjolele.

“Give us a tune on that thing, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are. Know any songs?”

“Not many.”

“How about ‘The Lass of Glencoe’?”

“Don’t know it.”

“ ‘The Green Fields of Montague’?”

“No.”

“ ‘Farewell to Peter Head’?”

“Hum a few bars.”

“Dum diddy dum dum…Ah, fuck it, I hate that tune anyway. Well, you gotta know ‘MacAleese’s Lament’ or ‘The Lament of the Bartons’?”

“No.”

“Any laments at all?”

“Not really.”

“How about ‘Vanderburgh’s Fusiliers’?”

“Never heard it.”

“(Jesus!) ‘My Love Has To The Lowlands Gone’?”

“Sorry.”

“Christ! Well, play something you do know.”

I put my fingers in the position of a C minor chord and rolled the chord backwards and forwards twice.

Wallace waited. “That’s all?”

“So far.”

“What’s it called?”

“‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ by Claude Debussy.”

“Jeez. Title’s longer than the piece.”

“I told you I didn’t know much.”

“Right, well, we’ll obviously have to teach you some.” And he looked up suddenly. “I’ve got it! The Barley Boys are playing at the mall tonight.” Robbie and Brucie looked up at him, then Wallace had a depressing thought. “But what about money?” The Old Problem. “How much we got in the jar?”

“Nothing,” said Robbie. “We never have anything in the jar.”

“Brucie? You wouldn’t have any money, would you?”

“G-g-good one, Wallace.”

They sat thinking. I coughed. They looked up. “I got some,” I said.

“How much?” said Wallace.

“Almost three hundred bucks.”

Wallace smiled at me. “What’s you’re name again?”

***

“Now Brucie. You’re obviously underage so you can stay here and hold down the fort.”

“OK.”

“You’re gonna be all right?”

“Sure.”

“Good man.”

Wallace got into the driver’s seat, I got in the middle and Robbie opened the passenger’s window, saying, “Oh my. What ever will become of us?”

We spun out of the driveway, scooted down the causeway, and in less than an hour drove the distance to Charlottetown that I had taken six hours to pedal by bike. We took the more direct Town Road and not the back roads I had biked, passing abandoned farms and gas stations, churches and tamarack swamps, lone houses with woodpiles outside and monogrammed aluminum doors. With the windows open, wind buffeting us like a gale at sea, Wallace played an eight track of The Barley Boys and turned the volume up so loud the cab was shaking with the high notes. They played a variety of stringed instruments and sang stirring songs of violent insurrection and cruel betrayal. Manly harmonies retold the heroisms of betrayed soldiers of bygone revolts. Happy ditties celebrating the joys of intoxication were interspersed with grim ballads narrated by soon-to-be executed prisoners. Thievery and rebellion were celebrated. Wallace and Robbie sang along with everything and I joined in where I could.

As we approached town, we drove through a small new subdivision and suddenly onto a road through an empty field, around the back of a large store, past dumpsters, and out front onto the parking lot of the mall. The gold and pink sunset cast a light which came very close to making even the mall beautiful.

There were people standing around the entrance beneath a billboard which announced the upcoming movie, Jungle Justice, a poster of a body-builder in camouflage holding a machine gun to his hip and protecting a girl from a motorcycle gang swooping down on them. “Sometimes you have to make a stand…” ran the byline.

Inside the mall, the stores were all closed and shuttered around the atrium that acted as the lobby for both theatre and bar. A drunk was retching into a potted plant and a young security guard was saying, “Eric? You can’t do this here…Ah, Eric, why did you have to do that, Eric?” We went to the entrance of the Shamrock Lounge in the corner. From inside, I could hear thumping of microphones and the babble and hum of a large crowd. Entering, we approached a lady set up with a cash box, and I paid the two dollar cover charge for everybody. Nobody asked me for an ID.

Once inside I could see and hear a full house in the dark, and standing on a brightly lit stage against the back wall were three large Celts, recognizable from their poster, but in real life, uglier. A bearded man with a twelve string guitar, another with an eight-string mandolin, and a dour gnome with the shifty eyes of a terrorist and a five-string banjo. That made a total of twenty-seven strings, all of which they were in the process of tuning. “Ping ping thump ping babble hum ping!” went the room. The guy in the middle of the trio was probably the hardest to look at, but they all had a fair shot at that title, and in wildly individual ways. It said something about the marvellous variety of life on earth that three of God’s creatures could all be individually that ugly yet so different in their ugliness. Their foreheads were either low and Neanderthal or high and boxy. Their eyebrows were thick and bushy or matted as if they had been applied with road-working tools. Their noses were the shape of potatoes and the colour of beets, or veiny and snubbed. Their eyes were squinty and piggish or staring and thyroid. Their hair was everywhere. Two of them had thickets of red straw, kinky, curly and profuse, climbing up to their eyes from their beards, down their neck, and out of their ear holes and nostrils. The third sported a page-boy haircut which did not in any way lend innocence to his seemingly oft-punched face.

They wore identical thick cable-knitted turtleneck sweaters, perfectly suited to the deck of a dory in the North Atlantic, but under a bank of spotlights in a crowded bar it must have been like wearing parkas in a sauna. Sweat was pouring off their faces and they must have lost pounds every night, though what remained was still substantial.

“There’s a table over there,” said Wallace, and we followed him to the back corner through the close press of the crowd. “Move over, make a space…Now, introductions…” He looked at the crowd around the table, realized he’d never be able to recall anyone’s name and said, “Everybody, this is everybody. Introduce yourselves. I’ll go get myself a chair.” He left and Robbie and I sat down next to a man with a face like an axe.

“How you doin’ Robbie?” said the man.

“Fine, Sid.”

“What are you having?

“Nothing, thanks. I’m driving.”

“No. Really. What are you having?”

“Nothing. Honestly.”

“You gotta have something.”

“OK. An orange juice.”

“With vodka?”

“No. I told you. I’m driving.”

“Christ! I’m not buying just juice!” said Sid, as if it was an insult.

“Look, Sid,” Robbie said with perfect seriousness. “I lied to you about driving. I’ve sworn off alcohol because I’ve just recently taken Jesus as my personal saviour.”

“Oh,” said Sid, and he nodded for a while then started talking to the person on the other side of him.

“I’ve found that usually works,” said Robbie to me.

“Are you a lesbian?” I asked.

“Moot point,” she said. “I haven’t been laid in a dog’s age.”

“That’s all right,” I offered. “I’m a virgin.”

“I figured.”

“Oh shit. Does it show?”

She laughed.

“It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “I’ll find something.”

“Better start thinking about her as someone, is my advice. Assuming it’s a her you’re interested in.”

“It is.”

“So you’re the competition, then.”

“Oh…”

“Only kidding. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

“Thanks.”

By this time, the band was tuned up and ready to go. They nodded at each other, and the guy in the middle came to the microphone and said in a thick Belfast accent, “Good evening. We’re The Barley Boys, and this is a song I’m sure you all know. One! Two! Three…” And they hit a chord and started to bellow their first number with gusto. Their voices were powerful and raw with the timbre of heavy machinery. They grinned and shouted with a verve and brio which belied the lyric’s tragic narrative, a tale of the miseries of alcoholism in a northern industrial town. Within the song they interspersed shouted demands to participate. “Sing along!” “Come on!” “You know it!” “Everybody!”

As soon as the music started the audience welded into one organism with a common purpose. Not only did they sing along with all the words, there was even some choreography. At a given place in the chorus of that first song, for instance, everybody pounded the table three times. There was a small dance floor in front of the stage, but who needed it?

A large mug of beer appeared in front of me, and when I went for my wallet, Sid reached across Robbie and stopped my hand, then gestured that he was buying this round. I raised my glass to him, put the mug to my lips and sipped my first beer ever.

It tasted awful, like licking brass. What was all the fuss about? Robbie smiled at my puzzled face. Sid reached in front again and chinked his glass against mine. I sipped again unwillingly, but the second taste was better than the first, more like old pennies with a hint of dandelion. I might be able to finish this glass and not embarrass myself by revealing that I was not a hard-drinking man. I saw Robbie move her lips, but I couldn’t hear her over the music.

“What?” I yelled.

She had to lean in and yell into my ear. “Wallace!” She pointed, “Look!”

Over by the dance floor on the far side of the room I could see him, picking his way slowly towards us through the seated crowd, smiling apologetically to the people around him while holding upside down over his head a chair he had discovered in the back corner. His path was impeded by having to time his progress to the movements of the drinkers who were swaying in rhythm to the song they were singing, but he had made it this far without incident, to where the bank of lights spilled out, shining on him like he was part of the act. Now though he found himself having to go beneath a rustic chandelier, a wagon-wheel affair with red glass mock candle holders, held by chains to the ceiling. He couldn’t lower the chair because of the heads around him, and he couldn’t hold it up much longer because his arms were tiring. Disaster loomed. And just as he elected to turn around and get out from under this trap, he attracted the notice of the Barley Boys, who all saw him at the same time, smiled broadly, then nodded to each other. Those of the audience who were watching the band now had their attention drawn to Wallace who crouched there, twisted and panting, holding a shaking chair above his head like antlers, a stag at bay. And just then the Barley Boys, with devilish looks in their eyes, switched into their next song without a break, and as the first verse headed inevitably toward the chorus the audience saw what was about to happen, and nudged each other in anticipation.

The song was “Stand Up!”, a stirring political shanty which inhabited a place in the culture somewhere between a political call-to-action and a soccer chant. In the course of its performance history it had accumulated its own set of moves: during the chorus, at “Stand up!” everybody would leap to their feet, and then, at “sit down,” they would likewise obey. Newcomers to the song were quickly recruited into these moves because if they didn’t, they’d be crushed. Waitresses had learned to stay clear whenever the song started lest they be pummeled by the sudden press of upward-shooting bodies and displaced chairs.

The Barley Boys started slowly, punctuating the words with a simple root chord.

“The rich live off the poor while the poor are left to rot

The bastards just get richer and the meek inherit squat…”

The chorus was approaching. Anxiously, Wallace glanced around.

“Now I’m a peaceful man, but sometimes you must fight

When the only way to stop it is to stand up for what’s right…”

And then the chorus.

“Stand up! (Stand Up!) For the right to fight for Freedom.

Sit Down (Sit down!) for everything that’s wrong.

Hooray! (Hooray!) for our rights, by God we need ‘em.

Stand up, sit down and sing out loud this song.”

At the first stand up! the crowd leapt to their feet, and two chairs and a patron bumped Wallace, who lost his balance and started to teeter backwards onto and across the dance floor. If he had just allowed himself to fall he would have put an end to it then and there, but he chose instead to make a heroic fight to stay upright, and so managed to turn a harmless case of clumsiness into a sprawling catastrophe. Trying to get his feet back under him, he took three rapid steps backwards across the dance floor towards the stage, but the chair he was holding smacked another chandelier overhead and he slipped. It clattered to the floor, he hung in the air for a second, then fell like a tree, smacking the back of his head against the edge of the stage, and instantly going limp as a rag doll.

The music stopped. Robbie shrieked. The room was suddenly very quiet.

And from where he lay motionless, like a voice from the grave, singing the same tune but with new words, his voice warbled,

“Fall down (Fall down!) for everything that’s wrong….”

And the room erupted in a huge explosion of laughter and relief.

“Hit it!” said the head Barley Boy, and the band went into a fiddle tune as Wallace pulled himself to his feet, picked up the chair and carried it towards us. Patrons cleared the way for him now, slapping their congratulations on his leg as he passed.

Without thinking, I took another gulp of beer. It seemed to be quite drinkable now. I giggled at the thought of what I had just seen, started choking, and to clear my throat, took a good large swallow. I don’t know what I had been thinking, it didn’t taste bad at all. You just had to get used to it.

Soon there was a break in the music between sets and we could talk. Two men who had to be brothers, dressed in jeans and Canadiens hockey jerseys, came over and sat down in some temporarily vacated seats.

“Hey Christian,” said Robbie. “This is Toe and Gump Blake. They run the stand where you got those potatoes.”

They were built close to the ground, squarely, as wide as they were tall, and Gump may even have been wider. If he was a goalie he would have fit almost perfectly into the opening of the net.

“Are you a goalie?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. “Heard of me?”

“Can’t say I have. But your name, of course.”

“Yep. That’s who they called me after. It’s not my real name though. My real name’s William.”

“Like the poet.”

“Yeah. Mom’s an English Professor.”

“What’s your brother’s real name?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Toe? I mean…”

“No. That’s how they christened him. Mom fought it, but Dad said if she could name me after some fag poet then he could name Toe after the finest coach ever to lead the low-flyin’ Frenchmen to victory.”

I had a brief shocking glimpse of what life in the Blake household must’ve been like.

“I didn’t know William Blake was gay,” I said.

“He was a poet, wasn’t he?” said Gump. “Name me one poet who wasn’t a fag?”

“Wilson MacDonald,” I said, and his eyes lit up.

“Boston she ‘ave good hockey team,” he recited. “De Maple leafs is nice, But Les Canadiens is bes’ Dat hever skate de ice!” He clicked his tongue and winked at me. I was all right. “Got me there,” he allowed. We chinked mugs.

“I met Maurice Richard once,” I said, not knowing why I said it, except that it was true. But the effect was sudden and extreme. They both looked at me in awe, their eyes wide as pie-plates.

“Where?” said Toe.

“My father was doing some sort of a fundraiser with the Molsons, and there he was. I was only, eight, though. It’s not like I had a long conversation with him or anything. Just said hello. And he said, ‘How you doing, little fellow?’”

“ ‘How you doing, little fellow’?”

“Yep.”

“How’d he say it?”

“Sort of ‘Ow’ ya doin’ little fella.’”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Fine’.”

“Shoulda asked him about his fifty goals in fifty games.”

“No time. He’d left.”

“Wow. Maurice Richard!”

“The Rocket!”

“Yep.”

“Let me shake your hand,” said Toe.

“Me too,” said Gump. “I’m buying you a beer!”

“Me too,” said Toe. And they left to do so. Robbie came over.

“They seem to like hockey,” I said. She nodded. “They don’t seem to like gays, though.”

She nodded again. “That pretty well sums up Gump and Toe.”

The Barley Boys got onstage again and launched into their second set and my beer arrived. I could feel my forehead giving off heat from the sun I had caught that day, and the skin there was stiff and tight when I wrinkled my brow. The beer was tasting better and better.

More songs, and everybody linked arms and swayed. Like in a jostling crowd, you were forced to follow. I watched one patron, his arms hopelessly linked with his neighbours, trying to sip from his beer as he passed and repassed in front of it. Sweeping close, in a doomed drunken effort, his jaw hit the mug, knocking it over. Next time he passed, he tried to lick this spilled drink off the table.

It seemed to me that the music of The Barley Boys was both thunderous and wondrous. That rhymed. I tried to tell Robbie that I’d thought of a rhyme, clever me, but she couldn’t hear what I was saying. She told me this by yelling into my ear, which hurt my ear-drum, and rendered me more deaf. So, next time I had to yell harder just to hear myself.

Another beer appeared, this time from the man to the far side of Sid. “Oh! Thank! You!” I bellowed, astonished at the goodwill and generosity of the human race. This was the way the world should be. It was all so simple. Not that I had ever found anything particularly wrong with the world before, but I knew it wasn’t that easy for everybody, and this buying of each other beer was one way we could all improve things, by welding together more firmly the Brotherhood of Man. I caught the chorus of the next song, which as it happened was a celebration of alcohol. I couldn’t agree more. This stuff was great. More songs followed, and more great cool refreshing tankards appeared, which I now slurped down not just with sips but large sloppy gulps. The rounds were being bought by these lovely strangers whom I’d only just met, and who were now firm friends for life, whatever their names were. One after another around the table they bought beer for the whole table, till it was Wallace’s turn, who looked at me. My round? I was honoured. Besides, I was in no condition to deny. The world was free. You just had to share. Everything so-called wiser heads had told me about propriety, sobriety and piety was utter horseshit. “Propriety, sobriety and piety” rhymed too. As it turned out, I was quite the poet. And contrary to Gump’s opinion on the subject, I wasn’t gay, either. Not that it mattered if I was. Nothing mattered. I had discovered my place in the scheme of things. Poet and buyer of beer. I pulled out my wad of bills and peeled off what was needed. Other people saw me from neighbouring tables and started to nudge slyly closer. I sent down towards the waitress the cost of the round plus a huge tip, which arrived in Sid’s hand, half of which he passed along, the other half kept to help for future rounds. The waitress scowled at Sid.

The music was unending and visceral. It shook you with its force and plain good sense. No woozy-poozy “Crimson effervescent stardust, universal rainbows of your mind” lyrics here. Hangings, thievery and military insurrections mixed with paeans to God’s Golden Gift To Us All: Beer! Which kept coming. I looked around, smiling hugely. Wallace was walking from table to table with a sheet of paper which people were signing, for some reason…

The next thing I remember clearly was hitting the fresh air outside the mall as though I was coming awake, and walking across the parking lot toward the truck.

“Here’s the truck! The truck, everybody! It’s here! I found the truck!”

“You don’t have to shout,” said Robbie. “We’re outside now.”

“What? Oh,” I shouted. “Wait!” and I ran in a stagger around the corner of the mall, unzipped, faced the wall, and pissed like a horse. I was at it for ages, the whole time bellowing a deep maniacal laugh I didn’t know I possessed. I felt much lighter when I finished, making it easier to walk back, nearly floating in fact, my legs, oddly enough, filled with helium. I refused to get into the cab, arguing that it was cramped in there and that the fresh air would do me good, and Robbie got me into the box of the pickup truck after only three tries. Maybe I should forget it, I said, once I was in. Why go home at all? I could go back to the bar to live. I could sleep under the stage. I had money.

“Well, actually…” she started, then stopped, waiting for a more opportune time. “Now stay down,” she said, but as soon as she started the truck and got it rolling, I stood up in the box with my hands on the top of the hood, thumping the remembered rhythm of their last song, their fifth encore. The Barley Boys were the most sublime musicians ever to tread this great green earth. By comparison, Claude Debussy was garbage.

I maintained my balance as the truck picked up speed, but the air wasn’t sobering me up at all. Maybe it would help if I opened my mouth wide to absorb more oxygen, I thought, but it didn’t seem to, possibly because it roared into my lungs and pounded the alcohol more firmly into my bloodstream, making me actually drunker. I faced straight ahead and let bugs bounce off my face. One large insect the size of a June-bug zoomed right into my windpipe, causing me to sit down and try to cough it out. It wouldn’t dislodge, so I flung myself onto my back in the bed of the truck again and again until it spat out, bounced off the side of the truck and thrummed away dizzily. I knew how he felt.

But I was lying on my back now, and suddenly very sleepy. We turned onto a bumpy dirt road shortcut and the back of my head bounced up and down against the floor of the pickup box for a good ten minutes, but it didn’t bother me at all, in fact it felt rather pleasant. I might even have slept for a while. Eventually we halted.

“You’re home,” said Robbie. “Unless you want to come to our place.”

“What! No! Home! Here!”

“You don’t have to shout,” she said.

I leapt to my feet. It suddenly seemed very important that nobody should think that I couldn’t hold my liquor. I took two quick swaggering steps to the back of the truck and the tailgate caught me on both shins and flipped me face-first into the ball hitch, then continued to flip me, and deposited me on my back half onto the pavement and half onto the gravel shoulder. Robbie shrieked.

“It’s all right!” I shouted, quite relaxed. “I meant to do that.”

Robbie, still terrified, laughed in spite of herself, “You really don’t have to shout,” she said. She helped me to my feet. “Are you all right?”

“Perfectly.”

Wallace in the cab was leaning his head against the side window, asleep. What a wimp.

“Well, go to bed,” said Robbie. “I’ll wait till you’re on the beach.”

I walked down the path and to the top of the dune, Robbie watching.

“OK?” she yelled in the distance.

“Yes.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“You do have to shout now!”

“O! K!” I yelled back.

She waved and got back into the truck.

A fine lass, I thought. Too bad she was a lesbian, though I’m fairly sure that I could at any time entice her to switch. I had detected a definite note of concern for my well-being after that flawlessly executed tailgate flip.

I giggled, turned and slid down the other side of the dune, cutting my ankle at the bottom on a broken beer bottle. I faintly heard behind me the truck pulling away, the sound almost lost in the music of the darling surf. I saw my tent in the starlight and tacked toward it like a crippled warship. It was the poor footing of the sand that caused me to stagger. I fell to my knees in front of my tent and unzipped the door and crawled inside. Life was good. I flopped down, the tent started spinning like a fair-ground ride, and I pushed myself up to crawling position and raised my head until it slowed somewhat. But what the hell, it was fun, so I flopped back down, and the tent revolved faster and faster until I was flung off into sleep, where I kept falling, falling, falling…