The Shore Girl (11 page)

“And who might you be?”

“I might be the teacher. Miss Bel. The one you've so abundantly replaced.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, then.”

Rebee stepped tentatively into the hallway, obviously frightened, but then she saw me and smiled wide. I put my finger to my lips to keep her quiet until the door closed.

“Miss Bel,” she whispered. “Are you going to be the teacher again?”

“Only for you, Rebee. I have something to give you before I go.”

She took my hand and clung on tight as we tiptoed down the hallway. I had my other hand in my pocket, clasping two rolls of wintergreen Life Savers and the fairy mirror with the sparkly frame. We were heading to the boiler room. We'd make it black as a starless night before we burst into light.

REBEE

SOME MOTHERS CHEW THE ENDS OF THEIR BABIES' FINGERS AND SPIT OUT THE NAILS.
This keeps the babies from scratching their noses and cheeks when they bat their fists at nothing. I asked my mother if she did that for me. She looked out the window and said I should ask about French kissing or rosebud tattoos like normal girls.

If you're left-handed, the fingernails on your left hand grow faster. Visa-versa for right-handers. When people die, their fingernails keep growing after they're buried in the ground. Toenails too. They grow straight, like daggers. When they run out of room in the coffin, they curl and loop like roots.

I don't use my left hand much anymore. My fingers must be confused. All my nails are stubby dead ends. They stopped growing after being hammered by a volleyball. When gym class was over, my first finger drooped at the knuckle like a candy cane. I could pull it straight, but when I let go, it curled back under. Mallet finger, the school nurse called it. She told me to get it splinted at the hospital. Said I'd be right as rain in six short weeks.

Mom doesn't believe in hospitals.
Does it hurt, Rebee?
she asked.
Look at that, like pokin' a caterpillar.
She laughed and said I could point at people, and they'd never know. I tried a Popsicle stick and Scotch tape, but my finger just turned purple. When the Scotch tape ran out, I gave up.

I can't button shirts or pick up a jellybean with a floppy finger that has no feeling. But if I rest my left hand against my coat sleeve or desktop, it almost looks normal.

* * *

I collect nail clippings and keep them in a plastic box that used to hold elastics. Nobody knows.

My nails come from all over. Most are my mother's. She calls herself Harmony. Harmony leaves the slivers lying in the tub. I come along afterwards, scoop them up and drop them in the plastic box. Passion purple pinky trimmings from the lousy bed hotel. Carstairs. Sparkly red glitter bits from the place with ceilings that peed when it rained. Fort McMurray I think. I've picked up a few from the floor of the van. Harmony could do without shoes year round if her toes wouldn't fall off in the snow. I read somewhere that it's illegal to drive in bare feet. When I told this to her, she said, “So hand me over, Rebee. Here's your chance.”

At my Aunt Vic's place I saw on
Ripley's Believe It or Not
the old man from Bangkok with the longest fingernails in the world. Over twenty feet of nails. His one hand had five golden twisted ropes that dragged the floor and curved back up again like a ram's horns. He couldn't ride a bike, turn pages of a book, or sleep through the night. He tried to sell them for $
20
,
000
, but nobody wanted nails. If I had the money, I'd buy them in a flash. Nails are like magic. Roll someone's nail between your fingers, it brings back a slice of somewhere you've been. A whisper, the smell of oranges, fridge noises. Somewhere forgotten, but it's out there somewhere.

* * *

We move around a lot. Harmony gets restless. For her, a new place has a three-month expiry date, same as fruit bars. Harmony loves moving day. She skips between rooms, pink cheeked, eyes glowing with the thought of waking in a place where she has to hunt for the light switch. She collects her candles, crystals, incense sticks, her bear claws and peacock feathers, creates a pile on top of the Indian sari we use for a tablecloth, and folds it like a diaper.

We roll foamies and quilts. Stuff our clothes into green garbage bags. Fill cardboard boxes with our garage sale dishes and mismatched cutlery, half-empty jars of mayo and peanut butter. Harmony laughs as we struggle onto the street with the giant blue pillows, the folding wooden table and old chairs, the ghetto blaster and the rest. Everything we own fits in the white van.

My stuff goes into a bag I keep at my feet. My toothbrush and Walkman, jalapeno chips and Sour Pusses, my sparkly mirror and my nail clipping box.

We arrange ourselves on the front seat. Be a doll, Rebee, quit smacking your gum. She places her sugared coffee in its holder beside mine. I pull out my Walkman and plug myself in.
Shake it down ladies. Make this your night. Be free, uh-uh,
be free. Are you ready?

I flick the tip of my bad finger against my zipper pull and watch it flop like a fish. I stare at my fingertips. At least I won't be like the Oklahoma nurses. The nurses cuddled the sickly babies, changed their diapers, fed them warm milk, loved 'em to death. All that bacteria festering under their long, shiny nails. When I have babies, I'll nurse on their curled fists and hold their slivers in my mouth — tiny white slivers. One at a time.

We rumble along the highway under a watery sky, past wheat rolled into giant soup cans, cows frozen in muck. I think about where we just came from. I can't remember the colour of the walls or feel of the curtains or shape of the bathroom sink. Blank as water, like on a test day in a new school and I end up at the fountain, gulping, drowning.

I slip off my runners and slide my toe across my bag until it touches my nail box.

We'll get to wherever we're going tonight. Unload the white van. Light an incense stick. Find the little hidey spots.

Harmony will crash, a smile on her lips.

I'll wait awhile. Sprinkle the brittle bits on my blanket. Sift them like seashells.

JAKE

I CAME TO, GULPING, CLUTCHING MY RIBS,
opened the eye not nailed to the table, and stared blearily through the empty Jack Daniel's bottle. I tried to think, to find one quiet body part. I rolled my ankles in circles, right, then left.

After several minutes I unfolded and stood, wobbled painfully to the trailer door, opened it, and pissed into the gravel. I took in Matt's view. I liked coming here. Matt lived in squalor but our visits were clean. He never asked questions. It didn't matter if it was six months or a year in-between, he always acted like I'd never left.

It's been nine months this time. Except that Matt's missing, nothing else has changed. Rockies to the west. A pumpjack pawing the ground to the east. Close by, the well house and dripping tap, rotting outhouse, cobwebbed shed for rusted tools. Out further, the vomit-green swamp that glows in the twilight and Matt's quarter section of scrub brush.

I stumbled into the sticky July heat, squinted into the naked sky and wished for a baseball cap. I thought I could hear the oil-sucking sounds of the pumpjack, the thump, grind, hum, but it was all in my head. It was Farley's truck I heard. He eased down the gravel and stopped in front of me. Farley has the section of land beside Matt's. Three years ago he gave up on potatoes, planted hay, and pounded in row after row of fence line. His number one job these days is grazing rotation, trundling his bison and elk herds from one square to the next.

Farley's stubby legs hit the dust. “How are you, Jake?” He ambled towards me like I was his best friend. I braced myself as he grabbed my hand, sending a jolt clear to my ear. “Saw car lights. Last night, late. Thought you might be back.”

Farley looked me over. My four days of stubble and a neck as shiny and dark as an eggplant. “Not much of a homecoming,” he added. “Your brother gone and all.”

“Where's he got to?” I asked.

“Well, you read the note, didn't you? Your guess as good as any.”

“Matt left a note?”

“Been gone — well, let's see — going on six months now. He took the old truck. Saw him off myself.”

“Matt left a note?” I couldn't find anything to lean against.

“I've been out here a dozen times at least.” Farley, the good country neighbour. “Just checking. In case he came back.”

“Chrissakes, Farley, Matt left a note?”

Farley wrinkled his fat cheeks and rubbed his finger up and down the length of his nose. “Thought you'd a read it by now. Plain as day. On the cot right where I left it.”

It was a long way back to the trailer. “Must have missed it. Give me the gist.”

“Matt says the place is yours, land and all. The deed's there, too. Says he's not coming back. Says you can burn the trailer like you talked about.”

“That it?” I was so dizzy I tilted into him. Farley hopped forward to take my weight, and I shifted my feet to get straight.

“That's it. Make sense to you?”

Farley would like nothing more than to sit across from me and gossip about Matt's peculiarities and this quarter section in need of a master. “Thanks for dropping by, Farley,” I said, guiding his shoulder towards his truck door.

“Well, yeah, sure. Let you get settled.” Farley hoisted his miniature frame behind the big wheel. “What happened to you anyway? Fall off a rig or something?” He actually winked he was so pleased with his joke.

I winked back and slammed his door with my one good arm, waving him away.

* * *

The company-sponsored doctor ran some tests. It took thirty minutes to drive to the office in Calgary, another fifteen to find a place to park. X-rays, range of motion stuff. Poking and prodding. I shuffled from one green-walled room to the next, filling in forms. I pissed in a cup and watched the blood lady fill six vials. Another lady made me take off my shoes and stand on a scale, then she pointed to a room and ordered me to strip down to my socks.

Williamson, the doctor in charge of my file, knocked on the door.

“Your system has had quite a shock,” she said after considerable manhandling.

“When can I go back to work?”

“Kenya, wasn't it?” She rummaged through her papers. “Your ribs will take eight more weeks. Your left arm — we'll wait and see.”

“Eight weeks. Jesus.”

“That's right. We'll start you on physio. See how you do.”

“What am I supposed to do if I can't work?”

Williamson looked up from the file, pushed her glasses up her nose, smiling. “Rest, relax, heal. Take Tylenol
3
.” She wrote out a prescription. “Your insurance will cover your expenses. Consider it an extended paid leave.”

I bought the Tylenol at Shoppers Drug Mart. A herd of giggling girls blocked the magazine aisle, making it difficult to sidestep them. At the counter, I fumbled with the childproof lid until I finally asked Cindy the Pharmacist to open the bottle. She gave me that “sorry for you” expression, and I popped two, then one more, in front of her. She looked kind of frightened, like she just helped a child swallow rat poison.

“Maximum of two, sir, every four hours.”

“Sorry. I didn't bring my glasses. I'll be sure to read all about it when I get back home.”

I hobbled back to the truck, my shoulder throbbing — bong, bong, bong. I stopped for a case of beer before I hit the old highway and headed in the direction of Matt's trailer. There's a campground along the river where we go fishing sometimes, about thirty kilometres east of Matt's land. It has five ramshackle sites with picnic tables, firepits and flat patches for tents. One self-pay station, seven bucks a night. One outhouse, one bear-proof garbage bin, one water pump, and the river. Nobody goes there. At the unmarked fork, the pavement turns to gravel, and I slowed down to a crawl to prevent my insides from falling out. Dust filled the cab as the road wound and dipped towards the river, clumps of rock and dried mud heaped high along both sides.

I knew my arm was no good for fishing even if I had my rod, but the beer was cold and I'd have the place to myself. Except I rounded the corner marking the end of the road and there was an old van parked badly in the middle tent spot, like it had run out of gas and coughed to a halt. I memorized the license plate number. This is something I do — memorize license plate numbers. I guess I got shamed into it after that fiasco as a witness. The cops kept saying, can't you remember anything, like the colour of the car or how many men inside? I was just a little kid standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it stuck with me, that dummy feeling.

Whoever owned the van had been there awhile. An orange tarp stretched from tree to tree, making a roof for the picnic table. The table was covered with a bright blue tablecloth, plus several boxes, plastic containers, water jugs, and books lined up one side. A bouquet of wild flowers sat in a water-filled jar beside candles stuck onto tinfoil clumps. Large pillows, stacked on the grass; chairs and
TV
tables arranged around the fire pit like a pretend home. There were girl things strung along a rope tied between two trees: panties, bathing suit tops, thin white socks. No signs of fishing gear. No tent. No people. But shoes lined up on a mat outside the back van door.

I saw all this before I got out of the truck. This had been my fishing hole, mine and Matt's, for as long as I could remember. Now it had squatters, probably pot-soaked tax dodgers who couldn't tell a whitefish from a rainbow. I cut the engine, opened a beer and drained it. I wanted the satisfaction of meeting them.

The truck heated like a furnace under the muggy sky and when the squatters still didn't show, I cracked a second beer, eased myself down to the ground and limped along the riverbank. The river was low, a trickle of its usual self. A person could easily cross from one bank to the other on the giant pink stones. It must have been an unusually dry winter. The hills to the west looked brown and patchy and the dull silver leaves of the willows had curled into themselves, like they'd given up on rain for the season. I could have called Matt while I was gone, chatted about the weather, asked how he was doing. He always talked Mexico. Maybe he was decked out on a beach somewhere in his undershirt and shorts, a tequila bottle propped in sand near his feet, skinny white thighs baking brown.