Cape Breton Road (21 page)

“That’s what I like about you two,” Claire said, “a real yen for adventure.”

“I had the idea you’d had too much adventure,” Starr said.

“There’s a big difference between adventure and bullshit.”

“Careful, there’s a minor in the room.”

“Who? Me?” Innis grinned. Comic distraction. Keep the peace, relieve suspicion, he was good at it, sometimes. Maybe the Captain’s Caddy wouldn’t come up again, a rumor that would drift away like fog. Starr went to the kitchen for a beer. The moment Innis heard the cap hiss, there was a sensation on his bare foot: Claire had brushed him lightly with her toes, not even looking at him, then pulled her leg back just as Starr returned, his eye not on them but on the TV He cursed the score and turned the game off.

“Hooray,” Claire whispered.

“What’re you doing in the woods these days, Innis?” Starr said, standing over them. “Those woods, I could go through them in my sleep.”

“A pheasant almost stopped my heart this afternoon. Came blasting out of the underbrush. Protecting her chicks, I guess, trailing her wing on the ground.” That was the best he could do: his mind wouldn’t leave the feel of Claire’s toes—sly, playful, maddening. “I just look around, pick up a little here and there. Toadstools are out.” He’d seen mushrooms red as lipstick, others with caps the color of lemons he’d heard you could get high on, psychedelic stuff. You know those, Uncle Starr?
And the ones that poke out of the moss like little white dicks?

“Stay away from those,” Claire said. “Poison.”

“Some you can eat,” Starr said. “You’ll see pale yellow ones later, like scrambled eggs. Chanterelles. Tasty. Don’t die up there, Innis, I don’t want to have to come get you.”

“You’ll never have to come get me, Starr. I’ll make sure of that.”

“I could show you a few things. You’re not the only one whose killed time up there, you know. I might surprise you in those woods some day.”

“If you can find me.”

“I can find anything. You probably look for those magic mushrooms, eh? The kind that spin your head around?”

“Not me, Uncle Starr. I don’t know a thing about it.”

“Don’t call me Uncle Starr. It’s too hot to be anyone’s uncle, yours in particular.” He stared at Claire, took a slow sip of his beer. “All right, Claire, we’ll go for a swim tomorrow. If it doesn’t rain.”

“Hardly the same thing as a midnight dip. It’s really different under a moon.”

“There isn’t any moon either.”

“Does that include me?” Innis said.

“Does what, the moon?”

“Swimming. Tomorrow.”

Starr looked at him, nodded slowly. “Everything includes you,” he said. “One way or another.”

BY MIDDAY THE
sky had cleared and Innis let Starr lead the way to the shore, trailing behind, watching Claire, her bare slender legs as she walked ahead of him, a baggy white T-shirt
over her swimsuit. What was she up to, touching his foot? He’d thought about her all night, flinging the sheet off him, wishing the lynx would show up and scare her to death, frighten them all in their beds. Starr pointed out a red squirrel on a stump chomping a brown mushroom big as a saucer. “That’s an eating mushroom he’s got all right, but don’t trust an animal. They eat stuff we can’t. Like those red berries there. Birds love them but they’re poison.”

Claire dropped her striped beach towel and stooped to pick it up, showing the bottom of her swimsuit. Oh, mercy. Innis nearly turned back, he didn’t need this. He was supposed to fix that leaking roof for Father Lesperance, why torture himself looking at this woman he couldn’t touch?

“Ah, look here!” Starr stepped off the path a few feet and returned with a thin-stalked, pale yellow flower. “Bluebead lily. Later in the summer this’ll have dark blue berries on it, pretty, like beads. Pretty enough to put around your neck, Claire. But they’re not for eating.”

“I’ll remember that, Professor Corbett.”

Before it dropped down toward the cove the path rose, giving a view of the marsh that spread back to grass cliffs studded with scrub spruce and alder. A large bird was lifting into the breeze on long slow wings. “Crane,” Starr said. Innis had seen that bird more than once, he’d looked it up, it was not a crane but a blue heron. But this was Starr’s show. Naming, naming. The marsh grass was a lovely fine green, and dark water wove among it, but as they crossed the single plank bridge over the inlet, you could see how clear the water was, that only the black mud bottom and its twigs and leaves were dark, mottled with white oyster shells. Minnows veered in a silvery flash.

“Used to be full of oysters here, just off the shore,” Starr said. “Munro and me, we’d come down with our dad and get a bucket in ten minutes. We’d have a stew of them for supper, in fresh milk.”

“What happened to them?” Innis said.

“Fellas from town came in their boats and fished them out. The old story. We didn’t own them, but we didn’t wipe them out either.”

Claire said she didn’t like fresh milk, too rich, and buttermilk was plain awful, but Starr said no, no, on a hot day nothing could refresh you like a glass of buttermilk, slightly sour and just cool from a springhouse.

“Oh, Starr, please!”

On the hard sandy ground behind the beach, they passed through a few wind-bitten spruce, then a long band of daisies, laced with blue vetch. Gooseberry bushes, Starr said, plucking a translucent green berry. There were plants that looked like oats, and ropes of eelgrass, dry and stiff-white but underneath still dark, damp, laced with stones and wood bits. Small blue butterflies touched briefly upon one orange hawkweed bloom and then another.

“Starr, what about that old boat up the beach there,” Innis said, “with the tarp over it?”

“Your dad’s, a fella up North River built it, a Morrison. Well, we all used her at one time, after our father gave up his. She’s still sound, I think, somebody borrowed her last year. I’m not for rowing anymore, not like your dad was. Now your Granny, Innis, she knew the wild medicines. See that? Cow parsnip.” He fluffed the big white flower heads of a sturdy plant, waist-high. “She made a tea from the roots. Good for
sore throats, headaches. But that over there.” He led them to a tall solitary plant whose white umbels, just emerging, were more delicate, loose, its thin stalk streaked with magenta. “People have confused this with other ones you can eat the roots of. But any part of this will kill you.”

“What is it?” Claire said, stepping back.

“Water hemlock. I heard of a kid—see, the stalk is hollow—he made himself a whistle out of it. It killed him just blowing on it, the juice got on his lips, his tongue.”

“Good Lord, yank it out,” Claire said. She was backing off toward the shore.

“Why? We know what it is,” Starr called after her. “Doesn’t attack, never bites. So we’ll just leave it alone. Right, Innis?”

Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. He lingered there, barely touching, as if they were electrified, the leaves, the stiff squarish stalk. He wiped his hand hard on his jeans. He’d seen this plant somewhere. The shorebank maybe, near the marsh pond. But knowing he’d seen it was not enough. Suppose he had chewed on it, made a peashooter for the hell of it like he had as a kid out of hollow canes from a backyard bush. He could feel his lips on the hollow stem, the poised breath—
pooh
, a pebble stinging someone’s head, but that little meanness, if he’d done it here, could have cost him a sudden and surprising death simply because he did not know what water hemlock was. He pulled a small pad from his back pocket and sketched the still-forming flower heads, the stalks, the fern-like leaves. No strange markings, just another weed, like an alder or willow shoot. He heard Claire calling him and he backed away slowly, thinking.

Down in the soft sand Claire was pulling off her shirt. A one-piece swimsuit, a dark wine. He had tried very hard to keep her out of his mind, but there she was. Now he seemed to forget everything except her, sorting out every little thing he had observed, heard, felt, for her, from her, about her. And the pages of drawings she had not seen, hidden under his mattress, a few of them harsh when he was angry with her, others erotic, flattering, true to his fantasies.

“You going in, young man?” She was lying out on the long beach towel, her hands folded across her tummy. Her eyes were shut to the sun and she was smiling. Innis watched Starr, pale and wiry in a pair of khaki shorts, stomp into the water, roaring until he dove and disappeared. The surface of the wide cove was barely skittered with a breeze. In the shallows, red-brown seaweed swayed, clinging to small rocks, its shadows moving on the light sand that faded away into dark water, and a mile across was the long green mountain, feeling higher, nearer, extending west toward Red Head, east toward the bridge, the wooded slopes losing their wooly texture and becoming tight and fine. In the high sun it took on the easy green sweep of a sea swell, streaks of lighter and darker green, like light on a rising wave.

“No swim trunks,” Innis said. That wasn’t true, Starr had lent him an old pair that showed his balls if he wasn’t careful, but he felt paler than his uncle, awkward, his body lanky and white, wintered. He used to slouch into his height, too skinny to bear it, too visible. Claire looked darker than before, as if she belonged on sand with the sun above her. Sitting on a stump of driftwood, Innis pulled his shoes and socks off and wormed his feet into the cooler sand.

“Go in without them,” Claire said. She lay like a sleeper, none of her moving but her lips. Without lipstick they looked soft and innocent.

“Without what?”

“Trunks.”

“You kidding?”

“Chicken.”

“Starr would love that.”

“Don’t do just things he would love.”

“That’s not what you told me before.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s something else I’m telling you.”

“Jesus, Claire.”

“Come sit next to me.” She patted the sand, let a scoop of it run through her fingers. “Take your shirt off. It’s summer.” Starr was swimming out into the channel, pounding the calm surface, all arms and legs and spouts of water. Starr had to be out of shape and yet there he was churning away, not far from those long, snaking currents where the light reflected differently.

“Look at Mark Spitz out there. He better make it back. I can’t save him.”

“Would you?”

“Not while you’re around.” Innis looked frankly at her, from her red toenails, painted for sandals, up her legs, up the wine suit, to her chest, her composed face, her closed eyelids. “Are you bored, Claire?”

“Summer is a different time. This is good as Bermuda. Are you?”

Innis lay belly-down in the sand, looking out. Starr was returning, swimming slowly on his back.

“Sometimes. But I’ve got plans.” It had now occurred to
him that he might chop that hemlock plant into bits, wrap it tightly in plastic and send it to Ned, with instructions. A dangerous weapon, bad magic from the north woods. See how the likes of Tony T. and his stupid brother could handle that. “A little pot helps too.”

“I suppose it might.”

Innis brushed his finger over her leg, barely feathering the faint golden down of her skin. He could hear Starr staggering through the water, yelping at the stones, his tender feet. Innis groaned. He gave her leg a light smack.

“Deerfly,” he said. “Bite like a bitch.”

Claire smiled, opened one eye at him. She patted his backside. “You have a nice hard butt,” she said, folding her hands serenely over her stomach. Along the edge of her swimsuit, on the inside of her thigh he could see a few short curly hairs. He wanted to touch her so badly he ground his teeth. Starr tiptoed up the sand, shaking himself like a dog.

“She’s brisk, b’y, but good for the blood. What are you two doing, lounging at poolside? Let’s see you in the water.”

“He forgot his trunks,” Claire said. “And I’m too hot right now for water like that. Maybe later.”

Starr dried off, his head lost in a white towel, muttering. “You said you wanted a swim, not a sunbathe.”

“The sun’s good for you too, Starr,” Claire said. “There’s a long winter to burn away.”

“Burn’s the word. There wasn’t a lot of sun way back in the Hebrides. Our people aren’t noted for browning up. Look at Innis there, half an hour he’ll look like a lobster.”

“I’m okay.” Innis laid his head on his arm. His face, turned away from Starr, was inches from Claire’s leg and he
could smell the coconut oil, so redolent of girls in bathing suits, arranged on towels just as Claire was, bare, all midriff and shoulders and legs, it might have been an aphrodisiac. The sun soon made him dozy and Starr was dancing on one leg, struggling into his trousers, beating sand from his shoes.

“I’m not much for lying around like this,” he said. When he was dressed, he stood looking out to where he had swum. “We used to use that water, all of us. We’d go back and forth shore to shore, up and down here. Was like a road. Damned few around now jump in a skiff at two in the morning and row home. People drive across the bridge, they don’t know it anymore, that water. Just fishermen. We lost something there, lost another hold on things. We came into houses the back way, up from the shore. A little thing, that way of coming, but it gave us … a different look at each other, another way of greeting. Eh? Yes, you come by boat, you come different.” Innis felt the long pause of his uncle’s shadow. “I don’t want to keep telling you stuff like this, I know it doesn’t matter to you. I don’t want to tell you this cove was full of oysters and we could rake up a bucket in minutes. Why should you care? I could tell you we swam here in October, me and my brother and our cousins, in our clothes, the water would turn your balls to stone. But we’d build a big fire on the beach and steam ourselves in it. It was just something we did, maybe no one else in the world swam like that in October, I don’t know. And why tell you about Peter MacAulay, depressed so bad he wanted to drown himself, he couldn’t get it up anymore. But he only waded out to his waist and then he turned back and went home. Too cold, he told his wife, I think I’ll hang myself instead, but by summer he died in his chair.”

“You’re awful cheerful today, Starr.”