Surfacing (11 page)

He wasn’t there with me, I couldn’t remember why; he should have been, since it was his idea, his fault. But he brought his car to collect me afterwards, I didn’t have to take a taxi.

From the forest behind us came the sound of sporadic chopping: a few blows, the echoes, a pause, a few more blows, one of them laughing, echo of the laughter. It was my brother who cut the trail, the year before he left, the axe hacking and the machete slashing through the undergrowth marking his progress as he worked his way around the shore.

“Haven’t we done enough?” Anna asked. “I bet I’m getting sunstroke.” She sat back on her heels and took out the un-smoked half of her cigarette. I think she wanted us to exchange more confidences, she wanted to talk about her other diseases, but I kept on weeding. Potatoes, onions; the strawberry patch was a hopeless jungle, we wouldn’t do that; in any case the season was over.

David and Joe appeared in the long grass outside the fence, one at either end of a thinnish log. They were proud, they’d caught something. The log was notched in many places as though they’d attacked it.

“Hi,” David called. “How’s the ol’ plantation workers?”

Anna stood up. “Fuck off,” she said, squinting at them against the sun.

“You’ve hardly done anything,” David said, unquenchable, “you call that a garden?”

I measured their axework with my father’s summarizing eye. In the city he would shake hands with them, estimating them shrewdly: could they handle an axe, what did they know about manure? They would stand there embarrassed in their washed suburban skins and highschool clothes, uncertain what was expected of them.

“That’s great,” I said.

David wanted us to get the movie camera and take some footage of both of them carrying the log, for
Random Samples;
he said it would be his cameo appearance. Joe said we couldn’t work the camera. David said all you did was press a button, an idiot could do it, anyway it might be even better if it was out of focus or overexposed, it would introduce the element of chance, like a painter throwing paint at a canvas, it would be organic. But Joe said what if we wrecked the camera, who would pay for it. In the end they stuck the axe in the log, after several tries, and took turns shooting each other standing beside it, arms folded and one foot on it as if it was a lion or a rhinoceros.

In the evening we played bridge, with the set of slightly greasy cards that had always been there, blue seahorses on one deck, red seahorses on the other. David and Anna played against us. They won easily: Joe didn’t know how, exactly, and I hadn’t played for years. I was never any good; the only part I liked was picking up the cards and arranging them.

Afterwards I waited for Anna to walk up to the outhouse with me; usually I went first, alone. We took both flashlights; they made protective circles of weak yellow light, moving with our feet as they walked. Rustlings, toads in the dry leaves; once the quick warning thump of a rabbit. The sounds would be safe as long as I knew what they were.

“I wish I had a warmer sweater,” Anna said, “I didn’t know it got so cold.”

“There’s some raincoats,” I said, “you could try those.”

When we got back to the cabin the other two were in bed; they didn’t bother going as far as the outhouse after dark, they peed on the ground. I brushed my teeth; Anna started taking off her makeup by the light of a candle and her flashlight propped on end, they’d blown out the lamp.

I went into my room and got undressed. Joe mumbled, he was half asleep; I curled my arm over him.

Outside was the wind, trees moving in it, nothing else. The yellow target from Anna’s flashlight was on the ceiling; it shifted, she was going into their room and I could hear them, Anna breathing, a fast panic sound as though she was running; then her voice began, not like her real voice but twisted as her face must have been, a desperate beggar’s whine,
please please.
I put the pillow over my head, I didn’t want to listen, I wanted it to be through but it kept on,
Shut up
I whispered but she wouldn’t. She was praying to herself, it was as if David wasn’t there at all.
Jesus jesus oh yes please jesus.
Then something different, not a word but pure pain, clear as water, an animal’s at the moment the trap closes.

It’s like death, I thought, the bad part isn’t the thing itself but being a witness. I suppose they could hear us too, the times before. But I never say anything.

T
he sunset had been red, reddish purple, and the next day the sun held as I guessed it would; without a radio or a barometer you have to make your own prophecies. It was the second day of the week, I was ticking them off in my head, prisoner’s scratches on the wall; I felt stretched, pulled tight like a drying rope, the fact that he had not yet appeared only increased the possibility that he would. The seventh day seemed a great distance away.

I wanted to get them off the island, to protect them from him, to protect him from them, save all of them from knowledge. They might start to explore, cut other trails; already they were beginning to be restless: fire and food, the only two necessities, were taken care of and there was nothing left to be done. Sun rising, drifting across the sky, shadows changing without help, uninterrupted air, absence of defining borders, the only break an occasional distant plane, vapour streak, for them it must have been like living in a hammock.

In the morning David fished from the dock, catching nothing; Anna read, she was on her fourth or fifth paperback. I swept the
floor, the broom webbing itself with long threads, dark and light, from where Anna and I brushed our hair in front of the mirror; then I tried to work. Joe stayed on the wall bench, arms wrapped around his knees in lawn-dwarf position, watching me. Every time I glanced up his eyes would be there, blue as ball point pens or Superman; even with my head turned away I could feel his x-ray vision prying under my skin, a slight prickling sensation as though he was tracing me. It was hard to concentrate; I re-read two of the folk tales, about the king who learned to speak with animals and the fountain of life, but I got no further than a rough sketch of a thing that looked like a football player. It was supposed to be a giant.

“What’s wrong?” I said to him finally, putting down my brush, giving up.

“Nothing,” he said. He took the cover off the butter dish and started carving holes in the butter with his forefinger.

I should have realized much earlier what was happening, I should have got out of it when we were still in the city. It was unfair of me to stay with him, he’d become used to it, hooked on it, but I didn’t realize that and neither did he. When you can’t tell the difference between your own pleasure and your pain then you’re an addict. I did that, I fed him unlimited supplies of nothing, he wasn’t ready for it, it was too strong for him, he had to fill it up, like people isolated in a blank room who see patterns.

After lunch they all sat around expectantly, as though waiting for me to dole out the crayons and plasticine or regiment the sing-song, tell them what to play. I searched through the past: what did we do when it was sunny and there was no work?

“How would you like,” I said, “to pick some blueberries?” Offering it as a surprise; work disguised in some other form, it had to be a game.

They seized on it, glad of the novelty. “A groove,” David said. Anna and I made peanut butter sandwiches for a mid-afternoon
snack; then we basted our noses and the lobes of our ears with Anna’s suntan lotion and started out.

David and Anna went in the green canoe, we took the heavier one. They still couldn’t paddle very well but there wasn’t much wind. I had to use a lot of energy just to keep us pointed straight, because Joe didn’t know how to steer; also he wouldn’t admit it, which made it harder.

We wavered around the stone point where the trail goes; then we were in the archipelago of islands, tips of sunken hills, once possibly a single ridge before the lake was flooded. None of them is big enough to have a name; some are no more than rocks, with a few trees clutched and knotted to them by the roots. On one of them, further along, was the heron colony. I had to strain my eyes to spot it: the young in the nests were keeping their serpent necks and blade heads immobile, imitating dead branches. The nests were all in a single tree, white pine, grouped for mutual protection like bungalows on the outskirts. If the herons get within pecking range they fight.

“See them?” I said to Joe, pointing.

“See what?” he said. He was sweating, overworked, the wind was against us. He scowled up at the sky but he couldn’t make them out until one of them lifted and settled, wings balancing.

Beyond the herons’ island was a larger one, flattish, with several red pines rising straight as masts from a ground harsh with blueberry bushes. We landed and tied the canoes and I gave each of them a tin cup. The blueberries were only beginning to ripen, the dots of them showing against the green like first rain pocking the lake. I took my own cup and started to work along the shore, they ripen earlier there.

During the war or was it after they would pay us a cent a cup; there was nowhere to spend it, I didn’t understand at first what the metal discs were for: leaves on one side and a man’s head chopped off at the neck on the reverse.

I was remembering the others who used to come. There weren’t many of them on the lake even then, the government had put them somewhere else, corralled them, but there was one family left. Every year they would appear on the lake in blueberry season and visit the good places the same way we did, condensing as though from the air, five or six of them in a weatherbeaten canoe: father in the stern, head wizened and corded like a dried root, mother with her gourd body and hair pared back to her nape, the rest children or grandchildren. They would check to see how many blueberries there were, faces neutral and distanced, but when they saw that we were picking they would move on, gliding unhurried along near the shore and then disappearing around a point or into a bay as though they had never been there. No one knew where they lived during the winter; once though we passed two of the children standing by the side of the road with tin cans of blueberries for sale. It never occurred to me till now that they must have hated us.

The shore bushes rustled: it was Joe, coming down behind me. He squatted on the stone beside me; his cup was only a third full, sprinkled with leaves and green-white berries.

“Take a rest,” he said.

“In a minute.” I was almost finished. It was hot, light glared from the lake; in the sun the berries were so blue they seemed lit up from within. Falling into the cup they made a plink like water.

“We should get married,” Joe said.

I set the cup down carefully on the rock and turned to look at him, shielding my eyes. I wanted to laugh, it was incongruous, it wasn’t what he would call his trip, the legal phrases and the paperwork and the vows, especially the finality; and he’d got the order wrong, he’d never asked whether I loved him, that was supposed to come first, I would have been prepared for that. “Why?” I said. “We’re living together anyway. We don’t need a certificate for that.”

“I think we should,” he said, “we might as well.”

“But it wouldn’t make any difference,” I said. “Everything would be the same.”

“Then why not do it?” He had moved closer, he was being logical, he was threatening me with something. I swivelled, scouting for help, but they were at the far end of the island, Anna’s pink shirt tiny and blazing like a gas station banner.

“No,” I said, the only answer to logic. It was because I didn’t want to, that’s why it would gratify him, it would be a sacrifice, of my reluctance, my distaste.

“Sometimes,” he said, placing the words evenly and deliberately, pegs in a peg-board, “I get the feeling you don’t give a shit about me.”

“I do,” I said. “I do give a shit about you,” repeating it like a skipping rhyme. I wondered if that was the equivalent of saying I loved him. I was calculating how much getaway money I had in the bank, how long it would take me to pack and move out, away from the clay dust and the cellar mould smell and the monstrous humanoid pots, how soon I could find a new place. Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead. As long as there’s a victory, some flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head.

“No, you don’t, I can tell,” he said, unhappy rather than angry; that was worse, I could cope with his anger. He was growing larger, becoming alien, three-dimensional; panic began.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve been married before and it didn’t work out. I had a baby too.” My ace, voice patient. “I don’t want to go through that again.” It was true, but the words were coming out of me like the mechanical words from a talking doll, the kind with the pull tape at the back; the whole speech was unwinding, everything in order, a spool. I would always be able to say what I’d just finished saying: I’ve tried and failed, I’m inoculated, exempt, classified as wounded. It wasn’t that I didn’t suffer, I was conscientious about that, that’s what
qualified me. But marriage was like playing Monopoly or doing crossword puzzles, either your mind worked that way, like Anna’s, or it didn’t; and I’d proved mine didn’t. A small neutral country.

“It would be different with us,” he said, disregarding what I said about the baby.

At my wedding we filled out forms, name, age, birthplace, blood type. We had it in a post office, a
J.P.
did it, oil portraits of former postmasters presided from the beige walls. I could recall the exact smells, glue and humid socks and the odour of second-day blouse and crystallized deodorant from the irritated secretary, and, from another doorway, the chill of antiseptic. It was a hot day, when we stepped out into the sun we couldn’t see for an instant; then there was a flock of draggled pigeons pecking at the scuffed post office lawn beside the fountain. The fountain had dolphins and a cherub with part of the face missing.

“It’s over,” he said, “feel better?”

He coiled his arms around me, protecting me from something, the future, and kissed me on the forehead. “You’re cold,” he said. My legs were shaking so much I could hardly stand up and there was an ache, slow like a groan. “Come on,” he said, “we’d better get you home.” He lifted my face, scrutinizing it in the light. “Maybe I should carry you to the car.”