Cool Water (19 page)

A car coming slowly up the street catches his attention. It gets to the end of the block and then the driver does a U-turn and comes back. The car stops by the curb bordering the playground and a woman steps out, no one Shiloh recognizes. She's wearing high heels and a light blue suit and big black sunglasses. Shiloh watches as she leans against the car and stares at the school. She lights a cigarette and then notices him on the swings. He looks away but he can still see that she is coming toward him, tottering through the sparse and dusty playground grass on her high heels.

“Do you go to school here?” she asks when she reaches the swings.

Shiloh says, “If you want to smoke you have to be at least a block away from the school. That's the rule. I thought everyone knew that.”

“Oh,” she says. “Well, I'm not from around here.”

“That's the rule everywhere,” Shiloh says. He knows he's being rude, but it feels good. She's a stranger. Who cares what she thinks?

“I don't imagine anyone's going to enforce the rule during the summer,” the woman says. She takes a drag on the smoke and then butts it out in the dirt, grinding it beneath her shoe.
Her fancy city shoe
, Shiloh thinks. No women here wear shoes like that, at least not where he sees them. She picks up the butt and holds it in her open palm.

“So is this a pretty good school, then?” she asks Shiloh.

“It sucks,” Shiloh says.

“You like the teachers? The principal?”

“They suck too. This whole town sucks.”

“That's kind of what I thought,” the woman says. “Call it a first impression.” She looks like she might be about to ask him something else, but then she turns around and walks back to her car. She stops to read what Shiloh wrote on the wall of the school before getting in her car and driving away, this time not slowly. She even spins her tires.

Shiloh is wondering what he should do next when a kid comes into the schoolyard with his white dog, some kind of little terrier. Shiloh recognizes the kid from the reading buddy program. He wasn't his own reading buddy, but he was in the same class of grade ones and twos—the one that Daisy is in. When the reading buddy program started up, Daisy wanted Shiloh for her partner but the teacher said no.

The kid recognizes Shiloh, and comes to the swings and asks him if he wants to play Frisbee with the dog. The kid has a lisp. Shiloh says sure, and they take turns throwing the Frisbee, which the dog is pretty good at catching. Shiloh tries throwing it harder and the dog runs like crazy and picks the Frisbee out of the air. Shiloh keeps trying to throw it farther and farther, but the dog always manages to get there and catch it. The kid gets more excited about how far Shiloh can throw the Frisbee than he is about the dog's ability to catch it. He keeps saying, “Farther, Shiloh, farther.” The kid's own attempts to throw the Frisbee are pretty bad, so Shiloh gives him a lesson. The kid thinks it would be a good idea to invent a Frisbee that would come back, like a boomerang. Shiloh hangs out with the kid and his dog until the kid decides he should go home. As the kid is leaving he sees the writing on the school wall and he wants to know what it means.

“Nothing,” Shiloh says. “Just some dumb crap.”

“Someone's going to get heck,” the kid says. He pronounces it
thumb one.

“It's summer,” Shiloh says. “You can write whatever you want on the school in summer.”

After the kid leaves, Shiloh heads across the lawn in front of the school. There are a couple of high school girls—grade ten or eleven—on inline skates in the parking lot. They're wearing shorts and tank tops, and they're all geared up with helmets and knee pads and wrist guards. Shiloh hardly dares to look at them. In fact, he decides to skirt the parking lot altogether.

But then one of them yells to him, “Hey, Shiloh, want to see a cool trick?”

How would they know his name? He must have heard wrong.

“That's your name, isn't it? Shiloh Dolson?”

He keeps on going with his head down.

“What's the matter? Cat got your tongue?” And then the other girl says, “We think you're cute, Shiloh. Come and see us in a couple of years.” This is immediately followed by the sound of girls laughing, completely pleased with themselves.

He hates girls. He crosses the street and heads down the alley that runs behind Brad's house. He doesn't expect him to be home, but he looks over the back fence anyway, and sees that the house looks quiet and locked up. There's usually a camper trailer parked on a pad behind the house and it's not there. Shiloh takes this to mean the whole family has gone to the hockey camp. That makes sense. Brad's parents are the town's biggest hockey fans, along with Greg Bellmore's mother. Greg Bellmore, who played eight seasons in the NHL and never lived in Juliet, but his mother married a Juliet teacher, who died a year later. Mrs. Bellmore (she kept the name Bellmore because of her famous son) had stayed, and now the town talks about Greg as though he was born here. In the winter Mrs. Bellmore hangs out at the rink every day along with Brad's dad, who doesn't work because of an accident he had several years ago and now is just a hockey fan. The two of them had headed a committee to raise the money for a new rink and they'd been so successful that the rink is practically theirs. The rink has no smoking signs everywhere, but Brad's dad and Mrs. Bellmore are allowed to smoke during practices. They have to butt out during games, though, when the bleachers are full of other smokers who are expected to follow the rules. One Saturday when Shiloh was killing time in town he had gone over to the rink to watch Brad practise and he'd sat in the stands behind Brad's dad and Mrs. Bellmore. They talked on and on about Greg and Brad as though they weren't even real people. Mr. Weibe talked about Brad as though he were already in the NHL.

Shiloh continues on down the alley, pretending that he doesn't know Brittney Vass lives just a block away from Brad. When he comes to her house he looks over the fence and there she is, suntanning in a lounge chair beside an inflatable kiddy pool. She's wearing a bright blue bikini and music is blasting from a portable CD player that is attached to an outlet by a long red extension cord. Her eyes are closed and she dangles one foot in the pool. The lounge chair and the pool are on a low wooden deck, and there are pots with flowers in them everywhere. Shiloh can't help it; he stops and stares over the fence. The yard is like a park and Brittney looks so grown up. He doesn't even recognize the music she's listening to. He tries to commit it to memory so that if he hears it on the radio he'll be able to find out who it is. He leans against the fence and closes his eyes, taking in the music, and when he opens his eyes again Brittney is sitting up in her lounge chair and looking right at him.

He jumps back from the fence and walks quickly away down the alley. How could he be so stupid, like a kid drooling for candy, and how could he be even stupider and look back just in time to see her grab her CD player and run into the house, dragging the red extension cord after her, as though she were being chased by some kind of creepy pervert? The cord catches and she yanks it free, and then the screen door to the Vass house slams shut and Shiloh feels like the whole town is slammed shut. It's not his town. He's just a farm kid. His parents don't raise money for hockey rinks, and they don't have a cabin for summer holidays, and he doesn't have a backyard with a deck and flowerpots.

He breaks into a run and when he gets to the end of the alley he turns up the street toward the swimming pool, still running. When he gets to the swimming pool he'll tell Vicki they have to go home
right now
and do the beans like Blaine said. He runs along the sidewalk with the memory of Brittney Vass and her red extension cord chasing him, and when he gets to the pool he has to stand under a tree and catch his breath. He can see his brothers and sisters— four of them anyway—in the blue water, and now he's so hot and sweaty that the water looks inviting and he thinks maybe he should go for a swim, just a quick one to cool off, and he realizes that he's left his backpack somewhere. The schoolyard. He'll have to go back for it.

His life has turned out to be so crappy, he thinks. It damn well better improve before school starts again. If it doesn't, he'll quit school and move. He hates this dump. Anywhere else would be better.

Solo

Dan

Lee is amazed that the horse goes forward so willingly in the late-morning heat across a seemingly endless tract of low dunes and sand flats. Creeping juniper stands out here as an oddity, a sprawling evergreen shrub where tall cactus would be more expected. The breeze—not strong enough to provide any relief—sends wisps of sand snaking their way across the surface. Little snakes of sand. Lee wonders if that's how the hills got their name. He watches the surface shift before his eyes, fine wavy patterns appearing and then vanishing again.
You could stand out here and watch your
own footprints disappear,
he thinks.

Out of curiosity, he asks the horse to stop, and he watches the sand blow into the hoofprints, feathering the edges and slipping into the holes. As Lee looks back the way he came, he sees his trail becoming less distinct and then disappearing not far from where he's standing, so that it looks as though the horse emerged out of nowhere. He asks the horse to move forward again and they create new prints, sharp-edged for only seconds.

Besides feeling the effects of the sun, Lee is now feeling the effects of over thirty-five steady miles horseback. He's thirsty and saddle sore, and he wishes he'd thought to put a cap on his head when he started out. He reaches behind the cantle where he tied his jacket and loosens the saddle strings, planning to use the jacket as a makeshift head covering, but it slips out of his hands and slides to the ground. He doesn't bother stopping to pick it up. It's an old jacket, ripped around the pockets and not much good any more without Astrid to patch it. He looks back and watches it settle in the sand, and wonders how long it will be before it's completely covered. He thinks again of Willard's camel, wonders if her remains are buried out here somewhere. He pictures a dead camel with clouds of sand blowing over its body, creating a mound, the beginnings of a new dune. Is this how the ancient Egyptians came up with the idea of the pyramids, after watching the wind build massive sand monuments over the dead bodies of camels and horses?

As the sand soaks up the sun's heat and discharges it back at him like a giant furnace, he stands in the stirrups to try to take some pressure off the tender places, tries to readjust what Lester referred to as his “equipment.” He remembers when Lester first said to him,
Don't get your equipment in a
knot,
and Lee understood then that Lester thought he was old enough to talk a certain way when they were out of the presence of women. There's no adjusting that relieves all the sore spots—taking the pressure off one puts more on another—and he feels an inkling of regret that he made the impulsive decision to cross this desolate strip in the heat of the day. But it's too late now. He must be more than halfway to the Catholic church, and it would be crazy to turn back. There's a good well in the churchyard, or at least there used to be. He closes his eyes for a few seconds and thinks of water, cool water, like in the old cowboy song that Lester had on a vinyl record. Lee sings for a while, only half remembering the words, something about a cowboy lost in the desert with a horse or a mule named Dan, their throats parched and their souls crying out, but then Lee decides singing takes too much energy and, anyway, the song is depressing and it's just making him more thirsty.

“Dan,” he says out loud. “That's a good name for you.” The horse turns his ears in Lee's direction.

The beating sun adds a silvery sheen to the grey-gold colour that stretches as far as Lee can see. The horse steps without hesitation into the shimmering hot sand, his head high, moving forward, keeping up the same steady pace. He's an efficient machine, Lee thinks jealously, built for distance, while the man on his back is miserable and about to die from thirst, or at least that's how he feels.

Until finally Lee sees a road to the northwest, and then the old war memorial comes into view, which means the church is not far ahead and, more important, the well. He turns toward the road and travels westward in the shallow ditch. Sweet clover tempts the horse and he tries to snatch at it, but Lee keeps him moving past the stone memorial and toward the church. Another half-mile and he can see it, a small fieldstone building with white trim, the wooden steeple and cross reaching into the sky. Across the road from the church is George and Anna Varga's home. The sun reflects brilliant green off the distant poplars and caragana hedges of the Varga yard. Lee knows, without a doubt, the relief that real desert travellers feel when their instincts or their animals successfully lead them to an oasis.

When he reaches the churchyard with its mowed grass and neat picket fence, Lee slides to the ground and carefully lets his body absorb its own weight. Without having to look, he knows the insides of his calves are chafed. He hobbles into the churchyard leading the horse, and latches the gate behind him. The roof of the church has an overhang and Lee makes for the shade it creates and removes the saddle and bridle. The saddle pad is soaked with sweat. As soon as the horse is free, he's into the dry grass edging the church's foundation.

Lee heads for the well and takes a long drink directly from the pump, and then splashes water on his head and back, soaking his shirt. There's a bucket hanging on the pump, which he fills for the horse. He lets him drink a bit, and then he splashes water on the horse's neck and chest to rinse off the sweat and cool him down. The horse shivers as the cold water hits him, and moves away from it. Lee fills the bucket again and this time he lets the horse drink what he wants, and then he drinks some more himself before stretching out in the shade. He thinks of food and is tempted to go rummaging in the church for something to eat, but he closes his eyes instead. As he nods off, ripples of sand pass endlessly in his head and then turn into waves of water lapping gently against the shore of a sandy beach.