Because sad-eyed Ernie didn’t look sad any more. His eyes had
lost their droop, and his mouth had managed to turn itself up at the
corners, opening a little more than usual in the middle. She’d seen
him smile once or twice at least in their twenty years together, but
Janie didn’t remember her husband having so many teeth.
He jumped at her.
He came so fast she might as well have had her eyes closed. One
second he was standing there grinning, showing off those teeth —
the next, he was on top of her, and she was back on the floor. He
punched and punched. Lying now on the floor with the sky turning
black before her eyes, Janie remembered him hitting her in the
stomach, in the ribs, a bad hit to her neck, and then, when she put
her wrist up to block him, he
bit
—
And that was all.
“Ow,” muttered Janie. She brought her hand up to her head,
touched it to a crusted-over gash above her ear, and took it away
again. She didn’t remember getting that one. Must’ve happened
after the neck punch and the bite; in that whole time Janie couldn’t
remember when the sky had gone from blue to black.
Janie put the hand underneath her, and pushed herself upright.
She was scared that she wouldn’t be able to stand up, and she was
a bit dizzy at first. But she shut her eyes and counted to three, and
when she opened them again she felt better. She got to her feet and
looked around her.
The pages from the story magazine she’d ripped were still on the
floor. Some of them had blood on them. There was a lot of blood on
the floor where her head had been. The front door from the porch
was closed. The floor lamp by the big window had fallen over. When
Janie went to pick it up, she looked out and saw that the waves were
so big they washed clear over the top of the dock. There was no boat
at the dock. So Ernie was gone.
Janie looked at the floor where her head had been, and although
she knew it would hurt, she touched the cut over her ear. The cut was
shaped like a crescent, and had scabbed over it felt like. Janie knew
better than to pick at it. She looked outside again.
Mr. Swayze’s island wasn’t very big — it didn’t have room on it
for more than his lodge, a shed for the gas generator and one dock
for a motorboat. That was all Mr. Swayze needed, though. He liked
to come out here to write his stories these days, and like he told
them both when he gave them the keys last month, too much room
is distracting.
Ernie was gone. He had given her a beating for no good reason
and now he was gone. It didn’t figure.
Somewhere outside, something fell over with a clang and a bong.
It was probably a drum, one of the open ones that didn’t seem to
do nothing but collect rainwater by the side of the lodge. When she
had met Mr. Swayze and they learned that he was a writer of scary
stories, Ernie had said, “I guess you want a horror story, can’t find
nothing scarier than that acid rain. Kill a whole lake full of fish with
just a drop. There’s your horror story.”
“That’s pretty scary all right,” Mr. Swayze had agreed. “I’ll have
to put it in my notebook.”
Maybe the rainwater gave Mr. Swayze ideas for his acid rain story.
Well, now it had fallen down and was spilt out everywhere and no
good to nobody. Janie opened the front door and stepped outside.
The wind felt good on her — it was cold, colder than it had a right
to be for early September, and it cooled her cuts and bruises like an
ice pack. When she turned to face it, however, it took her breath
away, so she moved with her back to the wind, down to the dock.
“Ernie!” She cupped her hands around her mouth, and called
off across the waters. “Ernie! Come on back! I ain’t dead! You got
nothing to fear!”
For surely, thought Janie, that was what had happened. She
had fallen down into her blood, and there had been so much of it,
and she had been out like a light, and poor Ernie had thought the
worst — that he’d killed her.
So he’d run. The OPP had already come by the house two times,
on account of complaints from neighbours, and each time they
asked Janie if he’d been doing anything to her. Like hitting or
punching or kicking or biting, or even just pushing. Janie’d said no
both times, and the second time — with Ernie in earshot — the one
policeman had told her that she had to complain; they could only
arrest him otherwise if he killed her and it was murder. “I don’t want
it to come to that,” said the policeman, and Janie had replied, “Then
me neither.”
“Ernie!” She yelled so loud her voice cracked and turned to a
scream. “Ernie! It ain’t murder! It’s okay! I won’t complain!”
There was another gust of wind then, and it nearly blew Janie
off the dock. It sent the water-drum rolling down the rock face, and
it entered the bay with a splash that sprayed ice-cold water up the
back of Janie’s dress. Janie steadied herself, and opened her mouth
for one more yell, then shut her mouth again.
It wouldn’t do her no good. Ernie was long gone.
The drum clanked up against the dock, and Janie kicked at it as
she passed it on the way back. The kick sent the lip of it underwater,
and that was enough. The rain-drum started to sink.
There was a shelf in the lodge’s living room that had every one of
Mr. Swayze’s books — although not one of them had his name on the
cover. Mr. Swayze used what he called a pen name, so all the books
were “by” Eric Hookerman even though Mr. Swayze wrote them.
There were a lot of books, and Mr. Swayze said that a lot of
people bought them in their time. Janie thought that might be true.
Sometimes, she would even see one at the drug store in Fenlan,
and they only ever got in the best books. It was no wonder that Mr.
Swayze could afford to own all that land outside Fenlan
and
this
island here in Georgian Bay.
“I guess you can’t call me a starving artist anymore,” he joked
one time.
“You’re not starving,” said Ernie. “You don’t know what starving
is, Mr. Swayze.”
And then Mr. Swayze had laughed — a scary laugh, like those
books of his must be. “I guess not,” he said.
Janie had never read any of Mr. Swayze’s books — she was just
getting to reading stories now; anything bigger than ten pages made
her feel sleepy, even if she picked it up in the morning. But she looked
at the pictures on the covers, and she read the titles, and she had a
pretty good idea what they were about. There was THE HAND, and
it had a picture of an old dried-up hand with long fingernails and a
drop of blood on the tip of each; THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL, with
an old-fashioned hand-pump, and a snake poking its head down out
of the spout looking all fierce and frightening; and ONE MILLION
COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD, with a cover that was all black,
but had raised parts that Janie could see as the shape of a bird with
wings spread, if she held it just so in the light. That cover took some
work to enjoy, you couldn’t just look at it and see, but it was her
favourite of them all.
When Janie stepped into the living room, she nearly tripped on
ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD! THE DEAD BIRD. That book along
with most of the rest were spread all over the floor.
“Oh, Ernie,” she muttered, “look at the mess you made.”
Janie flicked the light-switch on the wall, to get a better look at
what had happened, but it stayed dark. Did the wind knock out the
generator too? If it had, it’d be up to Ernie to fix it — Janie could lift
and haul things, she’d always been a big girl that way, but machines
and such were beyond her. She flicked the switch once more, to
no avail, so bent down and in the grey light from the window she
started to gather up the books. Fine thing that’d be, thought Janie.
Mr. Swayze loans out his lodge to us, we ruin all the books he wrote.
Never invite us to dinner again.
Sometimes, Janie wondered why Mr. Swayze bothered with Ernie
and her at all. Mr. Swayze was smart, and he must know a lot of
people, and he sure had a lot of money. Ernie and Janie didn’t have
much money — Ernie’s work with his chainsaw and his contracting
wasn’t steady, and paid poor when it came; they sure didn’t know
many people; and smart? They did their best with what they had —
but folks in town said Ernie and Janie were a good match for each
other, and they didn’t say so in a kindly way either.
Yet from the time he moved up to Fenlan, Mr. Swayze took them
on. He bought the land back on Little Bear Lake in the 1980s some
time, and after asking around hired Ernie to come lay foundations.
Land was no good, and Ernie told him so — more than half of it was
swamp, and most of the rest was bare, knobbly rock. Mr. Swayze said
he knew that now, but he bought it because he liked the feel of it and
hadn’t been thinking practical. Was there nothing that Ernie could
do? “Not for cheap,” said Ernie.
“Then let’s not do it cheap,” said Mr. Swayze. “Tell me what it’ll
take.”
It took a lot, but Ernie’d done pretty good for him by the time it
was done. Found him a level spot on high ground to build his house,
then brought in some fill and a digger and made a road across the
firmer parts of swamp so Mr. Swayze could get in and out. Sunk
a well through the rock, deep — so Mr. Swayze wouldn’t have to be
drinking swamp water — and strung a power line in so he wouldn’t
have to be using candles and oil lamps to see at night.
Janie’d spent more than a few workdays out at the site — in those
days, she was as good a worker as any man and came twice as cheap,
or so said Ernie. That was when they’d got to know Mr. Swayze and
learned about what he did to make ends meet. And that was when he
started inviting them for dinner — first at the farmhouse Mr. Sloan
rented him about five miles up the concession road, then once his
own house was done, in there.
Got so they’d dine with Mr. Swayze one time a month — whether
at his place or theirs. And oh, those dinners would be fine! Mr.
Swayze was a real good cook — a magic cook. He could take a chicken
and make it taste like Thanksgiving turkey; make a cheap cut of
steak into a restaurant-fine meal that’d dissolve on the tip of your
tongue. He wasn’t much on vegetables, but that was fine — neither
was Ernie, and Janie didn’t much care one way or the other.
Ernie figured that Mr. Swayze cottoned to them so well because
there weren’t many others who’d accept him in town. He lived
alone, and Ernie said many in town felt that might be because he
was whoo-whoo. When Ernie said whoo-whoo, that meant he was
talking about a fellow that liked to lay with men and not women.
But Janie didn’t think that was true about Mr. Swayze on a couple
of counts.
For one thing, the way Mr. Swayze was working, she didn’t think
he’d have time to lay with
anyone
, man or woman. The day he moved
into his house at Fenlan, he started writing. From dawn to dusk,
he wrote and wrote or so it seemed. When she was working in his
yard, the typewriter was going clackity-clack all the day long. When
they got together, there was always a new stack of paper by the
typewriter and he would often go and just look at it, making a mark
here and there. One time she asked him how he wrote so much, and
Mr. Swayze said, “Because when I’m here, I feel like it. The place here
inspires me. It’s got a
soul
to it. I just look at the rocks, and there’s a
spirit in them. Sometimes I can find it written in their face. Do you
understand what I’m saying?” “No,” she’d said, which was the truth.
So he winked at her. “Maybe you just inspire me, Janie.”
Which was another reason she didn’t think he liked to lie with
men.
When she got up with a stack of books in her arms to look at the
shelf, she saw what’d happened. The shelf was the kind that screwed
into the walls, and right on this wall a couple of those screws had
come loose. The shelf must have fallen off. Screw-holes must’ve
been stripped, and it must’ve fallen off. Probably happened while
she was outside just now.
Probably the wind shook it down.
Janie set the books down on the floor beneath it, and tried to
reset the shelf. She found the screws on the floor okay, and the
bracket for the shelf, and after feeling around on the wall found the
holes they’d come out of. But when she lined up the bracket and tried
to push the screw in with her thumb it wouldn’t go. Even though
it must’ve been stripped, the hole in the wood wasn’t big enough.
It’d take a screwdriver to put the bracket back on. Just like it hadn’t
been shook out at all — but unscrewed.
Janie punched the wall in front of her with her good arm, and
even though she knew she’d likely be punished for it, she swore.
What the hell was she worrying about the books for? Her Ernie’d
gone off in his rented boat because he thought he killed her, and
now there was a storm up on the Bay that’d swamp him in a second
if he were out on it, and here she was stuck on an island with no
phone or nothing. Mr. Swayze didn’t even keep a radio here. He said
he bought the place a long time before anyone had a radio on these
islands, and he liked the privacy — like his place in Fenlan wasn’t
private enough. These days, Mr. Swayze had a radio in his boat, and
he said another one here would just be a distraction.
“I’d welcome that distraction now,” said Janie. “Goddamned
right.”
She giggled — let Ernie come and punish her
now
for
Goddamn
swearing — and felt bad about it almost right away. Then she took a
breath, and felt her rib aching and her elbow starting to smart, and
remembered the cut in her head, and thought about Ernie doing all
those things for no better reason than because she was reading a
story magazine . . . and she let herself laugh again.
“Let him,” she said. “Let him come.”
When she got to the kitchen, Janie wasn’t laughing any more.
She went there figuring to empty out the fridge into the big cooler
they’d brought with them, so that she’d at least have fresh food for a
day or so longer. But the cooler was gone from where she’d put it by
the stove, and when she opened the fridge, it was all empty — but for
a little jar of French’s Mustard and a quarter stick of butter that’d
gone rancid yellow where the wrapping didn’t cover it right.