Bull Head (11 page)

“Two more sleeps,” her girlfriend says. “And we're out of here. No prisoners.”

The woman laughs and breaks away, pulls the boy toward them by his hand, and the three of them dance together, the boy in the middle.

“What's your name?” The woman hears herself giggle. She hears herself ask, “Where you from?” Her girlfriend flings her arms around the woman's neck and kisses her while grinding herself into the boy, but he never replies. He smiles and waits as the three of them dance. The woman kisses her girlfriend deeply over the boy's shoulder. His breath rises and falls in her ear; she kisses her girlfriend again. Her girlfriend pushes the boy away and holds onto the woman, whispers, “Don't do this to me, not after the winter we've had.”

The woman hears herself laugh, “You're the one who's wasted.”

The girlfriend shakes her head, veers away like a marionette, and throws up in the corner. She slurs, “G'night,” and staggers out of the Quonset.

“She all right?” The boy leans on the edge of a table, grinning.

The woman loves the way he moves, like someone at ease with who he is, and she wants to feel that, too. She pulls him toward her, tugs fiercely on the belt loops of his well-worn jeans. They go outside and walk to the edge of the block to the tree line. The storm has broken, and the thin veil of snow is gone, the sky clear and littered with stars like broken glass sparkling on pavement.
The trees dark and tall and fragrant.

“It's as if they're scratching the sky,” he says. “No, it's as if they're holding it up.”

She tilts her head back and watches the stars, leans into him for balance. “A poet. I should have known.”

He smiles. “You ever wonder, what if this is it, what if all you need you have right now instead of thinking that what you need is someone or somewhere or sometime else?”

She feels dizzy looking at the stars and focuses on the trees instead. He's right, they did look like they were holding up the sky. She leans into him again. “For a quiet guy, you sure talk a lot.”

The woman's tent remains clinging to the branches, high up a tree. She sleeps in the boy's tent with her dog; the boy insists on sleeping on the front seat of his pickup truck, parked nearby. Her girlfriend sleeps alone on a bench in the Quonset. At the end of the shift, as they load the boat for the ride out, the woman tells her girlfriend she wants to stay for another shift.

“He's not the answer,” her girlfriend says.

“How do you know?”

“You're just another distraction. Put a dog in the Taj Mahal, and it's still a dog.”

“You're jealous.”

“He's gonna mess you up. It's all over your face.”

The woman stares at herself in the side mirror of the crew truck. Her perpetual grin, strange shiny eyes, pigtails poking out the sides of her toque. “He's different.”

“Like hell he is. You'll spend another winter recovering from
this one. Why don't you ever listen to me?”

After they disembark from the boat, the girlfriend hitches a ride into town with some of the others from camp. The woman and the boy drive in his truck, speed down the dark highway, pass loaded logging trucks, the yellow centre line unfurling like an umbilical cord on their left. She sits close against the boy, her hand in his thick hair, tugging it. She sees the broken crayons on the dashboard, the dirty handprints on the windows, the toy race car on the floor. And she's sure that if she opens the glove box, she'll see a whole lot more.

For two days in the Reel Inn, the boy and the woman keep the shades drawn, drop ecstasy, drink cheap red wine by the litre, and eat greasy take-out from the Copper River Convenience. Welfare kids run around in the gravel lot, chase each other with water pistols and knock on their door. Fishermen push off in the early dark hours for steelhead.

The boy tells the woman about the home he has built over the years, pouring his planting money back into the house during the off-season. The house now finished, he's bored and needs another project.

He speaks of his partner, how they met in a planting camp four years ago, how she's changed since the birth of his son. His voice softens. “He's a neat little guy. It kills me not to be with him.” They didn't have sex anymore, and she didn't look him the eye. Each time he raised the issue, she told him there was nothing wrong, and after a while he decided she wasn't attracted to him, never had been.

“You ever hear of the fatal flaw in a relationship?” he says. “The moment you meet someone you fall for, you get a quick
glimpse of the true thing that might drive you apart. You ignore it at the time, you don't even know it to be a flaw, you might even think it's cute or quirky, and you're attracted to it. You even think it's something you can change in them. But it's there, and over time it grows, digging deeper into your life so that one day you stand across a valley from one another with no way of closing the gap because you can't, because you know the thing between you can never be forgotten, it's always been looming there since the beginning.” He leans against the headboard, stares at the ceiling. “She hated being alone. I couldn't go anywhere, not even into town to pick up the mail, without her wanting to be with me. At first it was flattering. Like I was important to her and she really loved to spend time with me. But after a while I realized she was just afraid, and it had nothing to do with me.”

After the ecstasy wears off, they smoke a joint and drink more wine from the bottle, pass it back and forth, the sheets twisting around them like rope. She spills some on his stomach, the stain spreads across the sheet beside him. She licks his belly and brushes her face against him, looks into his eyes. “So, what's my flaw?”

“You don't have one.”

“I'm serious.”

“You're too damn pretty.” He tickles her fleshy ribs.

“Quit screwing around.”

He stops. “Fine. You have trouble following through on things.”

“Bloody hell. You don't have to be so harsh.”

“Sorry.”

“You're the same, anyways.”

“No. I'm the opposite. I keep my commitments.”

“You mean like the one to your girlfriend?” She knows that she's hurt him because he's silent and turns away.

“Fair enough. Almost all of my commitments.”

“Then we should get along just fine, right?”

They laugh, roll in the sheets, smear the wine between them, and when he lifts his face to meet hers, he blurts out the thing she wants to say herself but cannot, should not, will not, not after knowing someone for a few days. She kisses him quickly in reply and turns away, stares at the wall until she falls asleep.

In the morning, on the boat ride back to camp, she sits in the rain with the boy and her dog. “Don't you dare say that to me again unless you mean it, understand?”

The boy says it again, and keeps saying it the rest of the spring. He shouts it across the cutblock when they plant together, murmurs it while they brush their teeth. He tells her in sign language, and he says it with little gifts—an empty wine bottle with wildflowers in it; notes scratched by rock into the waxed cardboard of the tree boxes slipped into her lunch bag. He draws hearts on a sandy beach. Carves them into trees at the edge of the cutblock. He tells her before they go to work in separate crew trucks and again when they get home and share a beer and shower together. Each day he tells her he planted every tree for her. She is surprised by his emotional, theatrical displays of affection, resists it by telling herself that he is infatuated with the idea of his own infatuation. He'll gain his senses and lose interest.

“There's so much beauty in a cutblock,” he says one sunny afternoon while they sit on the landing, leaning against flattened tree boxes eating their lunch.

“It's a moonscape. There's nothing here. No birds, no sounds, no trees. Nothing's alive or growing.”

“You have to look closer. See the beer can and plastic oil jug with their faded labels? Rusted chainsaw blade. Spray can. Signs of men who worked here for their families. In another month or so, it'll be covered in a sea of pink and green fireweed. After that, snow so deep you won't see the stumps, and it will look like a winter meadow; you'll be able to snowshoe across it. Wouldn't it be great to build a place on one of these, watch the trees you planted grow up around you?”

“It's still a cutblock. Barren and boring.”

“It brought us together.”

In late April, when they are breaking camp, the boy runs over a feral cat that crouches beneath his truck. The cat lifts its head, mouth bloodied and broken, and bolts for cover in the bush; the boy climbs out of the truck and sprints after it. Crew bosses bellow reminders about making the barge in time. The woman runs after the boy, leaps logs, ducks beneath furry branches that scratch and pull at her arms, shouts the boy's name over and over. But it is no use; he's faster and disappears. She gives up, turns around and cautiously walks across the cutblock, over long, grey logs onto springy piles of slash, using stumps as steps, and heads toward the idling trucks.

Her crew boss lays on the horn and shouts, “That's a goddamn dead cat. Let's go.” The woman searches the tree line for a sign of them.

Someone shouts. The boy walks out of the bush, cradling the
cat in his arms. He traverses the cutblock with ease and offers the cat to the woman. “I found it where your tent used to be.”

She touches the cat's head, inspects its face, and senses it will be okay. In the relief of the moment, of learning something new about the boy, she hugs him ferociously. She starts to cry, and he holds her close, kisses the top of her head.

“It's okay. Everything's okay.” He takes the cat from her and holds it up to whoops and hollers from the rest of the crew.

The woman begins to depend on him. They spend the rest of the spring together, her dog and his cat between them; she goes to bed early instead of hanging around the campfire late, smoking pot and drinking. She waits a few weeks and breaks the news to him once she resolves she will keep the child. The boy surprises her with his enthusiasm, his tears of joy; he starts a list of names, brings her chamomile tea in the mornings, massages her feet in the evening. He works every day he can, first and last to bag out.

On a rare day off together at the Reel Inn, the boy slips out of bed early and crosses the gravel parking lot beneath a lead-coloured sky. The woman heaves into the toilet, grips the bone-bleached bowl to haul herself up to the window where she wraps a blanket around her bare shoulders and peeks through the filthy curtains. The boy stands hunched over the pay phone, smiling into the receiver before hanging up and returning to the room, the smell of rain clinging to his broad shoulders.