Galveston (13 page)

Maywell waved a hand at Lester dismissively and then levelled his sunglasses at Jimmy Newton. “So now they’re saying the storm may hit us?”

“Yeah, they’re saying she
may,”
said Newton. “I’m saying she
will.”

Maywell lit another cigarette, pulled a piece of tobacco from a lip that was bloodless and caked with dead skin. “Another couple of hours,” he said, “they’ll be saying something else again.”

“Look at that,” said Beverly, pointing across the island to the eastern sky, to the shadow at the edge of the world.

They all turned to look. The horizon was smudged with a thick black line, and the darkness shimmied and pulsated into the welkin.

“What will be, will be,” whispered Lester, “and it looks like it’s going to be soon.”

“Can’t be the storm.” Jimmy Newton shook his head.

“I think I know what it is,” said Maywell Hope.

Caldwell realized what it was too, understanding why the shadow changed shape, why it pulsed and quivered. But as he was about to say, Beverly held up a finger. “Shhh. Listen.”

They could hear the sound the shadow made, like a thousand violin bows quivering across the top of the world.

“Ah-yuh,” said Maywell. “I’ve read about this in the book.”

As the shadow drew near, it began to splinter, as did the sound, exploding into a huge chord. The air was rippled by a host of rhythms. There was screeching and cawing and wails made piercing by separation.

Birds covered the sky.

Beverly managed to whisper, “Isn’t it beautiful?” and took Caldwell’s hand in her own.

The others could not speak for a long moment, then Jimmy Newton said, “Shit. I’ve seen birds come before a storm before, but never anything like this.”

“‘The sky was darkned,’” began Maywell.

“Darkned?” wondered Jimmy.

“‘And all manner of Bird appeared in every parcel of the sky’”

“Where’s that from?” asked Beverly, but Maywell was walking briskly away.

“I’ve got work to do,” he said.

“So now,” Jimmy Newton called after him, “you believe the hurricane is coming?”

“Oh, she’s coming,” agreed Maywell Hope. “People lie or are mistaken or believe what they want. But
birds …”
Maywell spun around and waved a hand irritably. “Come along, Lester.”

B
EVERLY TRIED THE FIRST PART OF HER STORY
out on Caldwell over coffee, sitting at the long bar in the Pirate’s Lair. She was worried that he might be frightened away, but the advent of the storm made her giddy and reckless. Still, she didn’t launch right into it.

“I enjoyed fishing with you today, Mr. Caldwell.”

Caldwell nodded. He didn’t supply his first name, nor did he echo the compliment. Apparently he was going to converse with a woman. They were going to share information, interesting tidbits and pieces of personal history. The prospect unnerved him.

“The only fishing I’ve ever done,” said Beverly, “was on Lake Simcoe, with my grandfather.”

Caldwell opened his mouth and a small sound came out. Beverly interpreted it as polite response, an interjection of encouraging interest, so she continued before anything could stop her. “I was brought up by my grandfather. My parents died when I was a baby.”

Really what Caldwell had almost said was,
Hey, I used to fish on Simcoe too. I fished there with my dad and my uncle Basil and then I fished there with my son, Andy.
But he hadn’t said it, and now Beverly was telling him the story of how her parents died.

She began with an evocation of her mother, Brenda. This was based on nothing, really, beyond her grandfather’s drunken
assertions that Beverly favoured her mother, that in his soggy mind the two seemed like sisters. Beverly made Brenda dreamy and poetic, which is what Beverly would have been like if not for the forsaken nature of her life. “My mother was a very spiritual young girl,” Beverly said. “She was attracted to mysteries.”

And her father was nothing if not a mystery. Beverly’s grandfather rarely spoke of Gerald, except when he should have been passed out in the Dominion Tap Room but for some reason was still talking. So when Beverly told the story to Caldwell, she elaborated on the few facts she had. Her father was born in England, for instance, that much she knew, so in her telling Gerald acquired vaguely royal blood. He was certainly aristocratic at least; he had no job or profession, nor had he need of one. Gerald had money enough for his needs, which were few but expensive: he needed money for cigarettes, thousands of them, he needed money for liquor, vast quantities of it, and he needed money for heroin.

Beverly formed her impression of her father from various sources. She remembered a photograph of Gerald. He wore a T-shirt, thick spectacles, and he smoked a cigarette; even in faded black and white the nicotine stains were evident on both hands.

She had seen this photograph fairly recently, in the office of one of her counsellors, who had determined that the story of Gerald and her mother lay at the root of Beverly’s so-called problems. This counsellor—the very aggressive Dr. Noth—had produced the old Toronto
Telegram
suddenly, in the middle of a dull session. Apparently Dr. Noth thought this might spark Beverly into animated conversation, although Beverly
was a very long way from that. She was perpetually tranked, for one thing, which was Dr. Noth’s doing, so why the fat, nasty woman thought this photograph might rev her up was anybody’s guess.

Beverly gazed at the photograph and her mind idly threw up questions. Where had the newspaper got it? Why wasn’t her mother in it? Beverly recognized the background as Orillia; indeed, Gerald was standing in Coronation Park, the water bright behind him. Beverly imagined that he was never far away from Brenda while he was in Canada, and then it dawned on her that her mother had taken the photograph, and in that instant Beverly felt connection. She handed the newspaper back to Dr. Noth—the counsellor’s nostrils were flaring with anticipation—and said, “Motherfucker sure smoked a lot.”

Beverly knew about the liquor because she had it in her blood: the black Celtic thirst. True, she could have inherited the curse from her grandfather, but it seemed so strong in Beverly that she couldn’t credit more than a generation’s distance from the source.

She knew about the heroin because everyone in town knew about the heroin and spoke of it often, hoping that it would explain what had taken place. “Of course,” people would say, “he was a heroin addict.” No one in Orillia really knew anything about heroin, so they’d embellish the story with sentences like, “Mind you, he’d snorted a bunch of heroin.” Beverly imagined, maybe remembered, how it truly was, how Gerald would spend what seemed like hours methodically preparing the drug in a spoon at the gas stove, how he would disinfect the syringe (Beverly imagined, maybe remembered,
that he’d had a laughable fear of germs) and adroitly drive the needle into his arm.

Beverly paused in her telling; Caldwell looked confused. “You keep saying, ‘I imagine, maybe remember,’” he pointed out.

“Right, I do keep saying that.” She took a sip of coffee, allowing herself a moment to consider her behaviour objectively, to see if she had crossed once again into creepy oddness. She decided she was on fairly firm ground here. “Memory is an interesting thing.”

Caldwell said, “I don’t really have one,” before he could stop himself.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I don’t really have a memory. Not one like other people have one. Not a memory that goes, you know, from back then until now. I have
memories
, but I have trouble putting them in order.”

“What order are you trying to put them in?”

“Just order. ‘This happened, then this happened, this happened next.’”

“Chronological? Or, um,
causal?
This happened
because
that happened.”

Caldwell avoided the question. “But what do you mean, ‘I imagine, maybe remember?’”

“I
saw
these things,” Beverly answered. “I know I saw my father doing heroin. I must have. It was only a one-room apartment, so I must have watched him, I must have seen him. But I was not even two years old when it happened.”

Beverly sat in a high chair in the corner of the apartment. She had a large bowl of soup and a wooden spoon. They gave
her a wooden spoon because she was an active baby, who liked to smash and pound things. She had once cut her mouth with a metal spoon, that’s how frantic she was to feed herself, so they took that one away from her and gave her this wooden one.

As to what they were arguing about, Beverly had no idea. She was not even two years old. All young couples—Brenda was only nineteen, Gerald twenty-five—argue. Over money. Perhaps they argued over Gerald’s drug habit, but Beverly had a hunch they didn’t. They lived in a world where drug habits were commonplace, where it took a brave beast indeed to wander around without a crutch. Most people drank in the land of the damned, but the adventurous found the good drugs. So Brenda likely stood in the corner, watching, picking up the wooden spoon when Beverly spat it across the floor.

Perhaps they didn’t even fight. People presuppose a room full of violence, but this doesn’t necessarily hold. Ennui, world-weariness, can be as destructive as rage.

Gail and Sorvig came in, wet from a swim in the ocean. They were still determined to have fun, although their brows were furrowed with worry. Jimmy Newton followed after. Confident that the hurricane was on its way, he had decided to relax and enjoy himself. He was wearing only swim trunks, and the sun had already reddened his belly and shoulders. Jimmy had spread zinc ointment down his nose and across his brow.

“What I don’t get,” said Sorvig, “is this: if this huge hurricane is coming, why is it so beautiful outside?”

“Ah! Good question!” said Mr. Weather eagerly. It was just like Jimmy to think that the girls might be impressed with his
weather-related pedantics. “It’s because of the outflow. You see, the force of the storm essentially blows all other weather away. So for a while yet there’s going to be nothing but blue skies. But that’s what it is—nothing. No weather.”

“Well,” said Gail, “at least we get to work on our tans before we get killed.”

Beverly imagines, maybe remembers, quiet. She hears peaceful music. There was an old record player in the apartment, and Gerald had a huge and eclectic collection of LPs and 45s. He usually listened to blues and plaintive country and western, but for this occasion he pulled out one of his classical albums, Ravel’s
Pavane for a Dead Princess.
This is what Beverly hears, anyway. Just the music, just the jeremiad. Beverly hears no screaming as Gerald slices Brenda’s throat, as he carves into her body. Beverly bangs with her wooden spoon. Gerald then kills himself, with the knife. This is the part that people find most disturbing—not the evisceration of the young bride, rather the fact that Gerald was able to take his own life in the same manner: first opening his throat and then his stomach.

Beverly looked into Caldwell’s eyes. She wasn’t searching for understanding, because she knew none of this explained anything, or was itself explainable. It all just set the weird and messy stage. Beverly was looking for some sort of acceptance, maybe, acknowledgment that life is full of black holes. Perhaps what she was looking for was
no
reaction. A sincere lack of interest in her past would be a great act of kindness.

What Caldwell did was ask an unrelated question, almost as though he hadn’t been listening. “What did you mean back there at the airport, when you said ‘I’ve done what you just did?’”

“I’ve used the past—the pain—to get what I wanted,” she said. “And what’s funny is, most people would think, you know,
How heartless. How little it must mean.
They don’t understand. When you get to that point, where you can
use
it like that, you’re way past suffering, mere suffering. You’re …” Beverly searched for the right word.

“Removed,” suggested Caldwell.

“Right.”

“And what do you think it would take,” wondered Caldwell, “to get unremoved?”

“Well, that’s easy, Mr. Caldwell,” Beverly answered. “It would take an act of God.”

P
OLLY WAS IN THE BATHTUB
, because that was part of her routine. Between eleven a.m. and noon, Polly sat in the bathtub. Not always for the entire hour, mind you, although that happened on occasion. The bath was part of her routine, and Polly wasn’t about to change that because of nasty weather being on its way.

In the quarters Polly kept (two large rooms snugged behind the reception desk in the main building, connected by a short, narrow washroom) there was a deep old tub, the stands fashioned to resemble lion’s legs. Polly had a plastic tray that hooked onto the rim and stretched from one side to the other. It was loaded with bills, invoices, personal correspondence, newspapers, whatever paperback book she happened to be reading at the time. She could get quite a lot of clerical work done, fill in a few squares of a crossword, and it was the only chance she ever got to read. Polly enjoyed mystery novels—green-spined Penguins were her favourite—although they were hard to come by on Dampier Cay. There was no bookshop on the island; the local general store, Millroy’s, kept a few titles, but only best-sellers, thrillers centred around serial killers and the most grisly of crimes. And even these books went unsold, turning dusty and brittle. The natives simply didn’t seem to think much of reading as a pastime. Take her lover, Maywell, as an example: the man owned exactly one book.

Maywell entered the bathroom, pausing to look at her. Polly’s feet were pointing toward him, one crossed over the other on the lip of the tub. She wriggled her toes by way of greeting, because she had a pencil in one hand and newspaper in the other. She was trying to think of a five-letter word for “three-toed animal,” but she abandoned that for a moment and watched Maywell as he looked at her. It always occurred to her at such moments that Maywell was like an artist, a painter judging a canvas-in-progress. His gaze was cold and steadfast, sweeping the length of her body, searching for imperfection but receptive to beauty.