Just Beneath My Skin (2 page)

DRIVING FROM HALIFAX DOWN TO
North River, pushing the Pinto as hard as she would go and playing Houses of the Holy in the tape deck, I remembered something my old man used to say. The river flows only one way. I was never sure what he meant by that, other than to say that you can't go back in time, but doesn't everyone already know that?

Then again, my father is a master of the obvious. He used to say a lot of things I never agreed with. But this one kept coming back to me. The river flows only one way, the river flows only one way, the river flows only one way.

What river? The Memragouche? He never said, but that must have been the river he meant, because there aren't any other rivers in North River. I remember the stories my granddad used to tell me about it, stories my father never had much time for. He always said my grandfather was an uneducated, ungodly fool of a man with barely two teeth in his head and a too-simple heart. This was another of my father's sayings that bothered me, for as true as all these things about my grandfather seemed to be, they were also the things I liked most about him when I was a kid. It was true, for instance, that he had no teeth. When my father would take me to visit him he would wait until my old man's back was turned and thrust his top dentures out of his mouth with his tongue and let them fall into his lap. Then he would look at me with his mouth collapsed in on itself and all wormy and smile, and I would giggle behind my hands. By the time my father turned around, Granddad McNeil's dentures would be back in, and we would be sitting innocent as pie, him drinking his tea and me the chocolate milk Nana McNeil made for me out of fresh cow's milk, powdered cocoa and a tablespoon of sugar.

In between he'd tell me about the loggers, and how they would drive herds of cut trees down the river from the Memragouche lakes to the match and lumber mills below Great Falls. Men would ride and roll the logs, he told me, poling and prodding the ones that hung up on the banks or that slowed and gathered in creases in the eddies. It was a dangerous job. Men slipped and got crushed between two logs just as they were being tossed together on the currents, or drowned when they went all the way under and never got a break in the logs to come back up again. My grandfather was one of the lucky ones. He rode the logs for years and never got so much as a soaker.

My grandfather's dead now, and the river logging stopped years ago. There's boom trucks to bring in the pulp logs these days. I would lie in my room nights when I was a kid after my granddad talked to me and I'd imagine I could hear the men shouting on the river outside my window, the thunder of the logs as they crashed together, the squeaking of the herd, stripped of their bark, rubbing against each other as they floated gently by. I heard this so clear in my mind that one time I asked my father if it couldn't have been ghosts I was hearing on the river at night. I was only twelve.

“Could be, Jacob,” said my father. “I've heard of stranger things happening under the Lord's blue sky.”

Like most ministers, and all Baptists, my father believed everything invisible was a possibility.

And everything real was a sin.

THE ROAD FOLLOWS THE RIVER
. Jake used to tell me that once there were loggers on the river and a bunch of mills and Indians in canoes. It's hard to believe now 'cause it's just a river, and in the summer below the mill it stinks of sulphur and foam clings to the banks as thick and yellow as pus. But up here it's okay. Mom lets me go swimming off the bank where Harmony Lake Road meets Highway #7. There aren't any other kids on Harmony Lake Road. Last year Wendy McNutt had a baby girl called Lucy but she died right after. Wendy came crying and screaming down the road in the middle of the night in her nightdress when she found her. Our neighbour, Irene Lang, took her in and called the police and got her calmed some. Mom said the baby died of crib death. I didn't know what this meant 'til Jake told me that sometimes babies die for no good reason.

“So why do they call it crib death?”

“'Cause they just die in their cribs,” Jake said, “and that's where their mother finds them.”

I asked Jake if older kids could die like that too. Jake laughed and said as far as he knew it was just babies. Still, I tried to stay awake for a few nights after in case I just stopped breathing and Mom came in and found me all blue and cold in my bed in the morning.

That's how they found Lucy. Blue and cold. I heard Irene telling Mom the day after it happened. “As blue and cold as a fish,” said Irene. “I swear she was. Poor thing must have been dead for hours.”

A few times after I dreamed baby Lucy was in bed with me, blue like Irene said. Her eyes were open and looking at me and she was frowning. I woke up scared in the dark and couldn't sleep again 'til morning. I kept falling asleep in Mrs. Burns's Grade Two class all that week until she called Mom and told her I wasn't getting enough rest. Mom yelled at me for staying awake reading
Archie Digest
. I didn't tell her about baby Lucy. I didn't want anyone to know.

I WOULD HAVE GONE RIGHT
out to Carla's and seen Nathan as soon as I got into North River, except I drove past Johnny Lang and Charlie Whynot hanging out in the liquor store parking lot on my way through town. I could have driven by and pretended I didn't see them, but you don't play those games with Johnny Lang. I've known him since we were in school together, and I've always managed to stay on the right side of him. But that could change. I'd seen it. Guys who he'd never had a beef with, he'd suddenly decide he didn't like anymore. When that happened, watch the fuck out. So when Johnny waved me down from the parking lot I turned in to see what he wanted. As soon as I did they jumped in without asking. Charlie in back and Johnny in front.

“Hey Jake,” said Charlie. I noticed he was still wearing that stupid fucking white glove.

“Heyya fuckface,” said Johnny. “I thought you got smart and left this shithole for good.”

“I did,” I told him. “I'm just home to see Carla and the kid.”

“That bitch,” said Johnny. “You give me the word, man, and I'll take care of her. You can take the kid to the city and never bring him back, for all I care.”

“Naw,” I said. “It's okay. I got my own methods.”

Johnny shrugged. “Whatever.”

I wouldn't put it past Johnny to waste Carla if I asked him. Not because he's devoted to me or anything, but because Johnny's just itching to waste somebody, and it would be better if he had a good reason. Once I heard he beat up some guy from Oldsport in his cabin up on River Road and nearly killed him. I don't know what the fight was about, but Johnny was having a party, and Johnny's parties usually ended with him beating up some guy from Oldsport. Someone called the cops, and by the time they got there they found everyone cleared out, the guy unconscious in the middle of the living-room floor, and Johnny and Charlie kneeling beside him trying to start Johnny's Husqvarna power saw. Fortunately for the guy, whoever he was, Johnny had flooded it, and when the
RCMP
officer asked him what he thought he was doing, Johnny supposedly said, “What the fuck does it look like I'm doing? Having a tea party?”

They arrested him and he spent a few nights in jail. But the guy wouldn't lay charges and they could never prove Johnny wasn't seriously intent on just cutting up some wood for his stove with the power saw. I asked him once, when we were drunk and I worked up the nerve, if he would really have cut the guy up into little pieces.

“Do birds fucking fly, McNeil?” he said, and he asked me to pass the bottle.

Johnny Lang is seriously disturbed, and it makes me nervous just to be around him. But as my dad is fond of saying, you make your bed, you lie in it. I made my bed with Johnny long ago, probably from the first day I met him in high school. He gave me a pack of smokes that day, I remember. I was broke, and I'd asked him for one smoke, and he took an extra pack out of his jacket and gave me the whole thing. He can be really generous to people he likes, and really dangerous to those he doesn't. The scariest thing about him is how easily you can fall from one category into the other. The thing with Johnny is you are either a friend or an enemy: there is no in-between.

Being either is dangerous.

MOM IS SITTING AT THE
kitchen table like she was when I left. She has a cup of tea beside her and the
Oldsport Banner
open on her lap. “It's about time,” she says. “I needed that milk for my tea a half hour ago.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I —”

“Never mind. Bring it here.”

I do. She opens the carton, pours a dash into her cup, and gives it back and tells me to put it in the fridge. When I turn around again she's gone back to the
Banner
. I don't know how to tell her about Jake so I just stand there until she looks up again.

“What the blazes is wrong with you? You gonna go and change out of those wet clothes, or you gonna try for pneumonia and put me to the trouble of paying for your funeral?”

When I come back dry out of my room, she's set up the paper and is staring out the window into the yard. Two rusted hulks of cars sit on blocks out there, one yellow and one green. Jake towed them home and never got around to fixing them. I slip into a chair at the table with her. Finally, Mom looks across at me, her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand.

“Who'd you see in town?” she says.

“Johnny Lang,” I say, “and Cousin Charlie.”

“Those two!” scoffs my mom. “Did you talk to them?”

“A little.”

“What was they doing?”

“They was at Douglas's drinking wine.”

“Wonder where they got the money for that? Cheques don't come out 'til Tuesday.”

Here is my chance, clear as day, and I still can't tell her. For three days after Jake left for Halifax she ranted and raved and threw things around. She broke a sink full of dishes one afternoon. She heaved the cement block she kept to prop open the kitchen door in the summertime on top of them. I had to pick shards of glass out of the sink and throw them away before we could have supper. I figured if she knew Jake was back in town there might not be enough dishes in the house to do her. We'd have to eat off the table or with sections of the
Banner
laid out underneath us like Jake told me those people across the ocean do with cod and chips. But Jake said to tell her he was coming. It's best if she knows before he shows up at the door. So I take a deep breath and say, loud as lumberjacks, “Jake's back!”

Mom barely stirs. She's looking out the window again. She does that a lot the last week before cheque day. She turns to me and says, “What?”

“Jake's back,” I say, not as loud, but trying to get it all out at once. “I saw him outside Douglas's store with Johnny Lang and Charlie Whynot. They was passing around a bottle of wine. Jake bought it. Charlie said Jake's got money now and Johnny said they was going to his cabin on River Road to get drunk. Jake said —”

“You mean my Jake?” Mom says. “Jake McNeil?”

“Jake,” I say. “I saw him. With Johnny and Charlie. At Douglas's store.”

“You talked to him?”

“Yup.”

“Is he back for good?”

“For a visit, he says.”

“And what else he say?”

“He said he was comin' out tonight to see us.”

“And he's got money, you say?”

“Charlie said so. He said Jake was rich and Jake was buying 'em wine.”

“That bastard!” breathes my mother. But I see she's excited, not mad. She jumps up from the table. “Did he say what time he was coming?”

“No. He just said tonight.”

She stands in the middle of the floor looking around. Her eye settles on the sink full of dirty dishes. I think about the cement block again. She points at them and tells me to get to work.

“Why?” I say. “Jake don't care 'bout no dishes.”

“Don't you question me!” she shouts. “Now you get up there and do the dishes like I told you, or I'll box your ever-lovin' ears.”

She runs off to her bedroom to do something — she doesn't say what — and I pull a chair up to the sink and start running the water. There's a lot of dishes and most of them has some thing dried on them because they've been there for days. It takes me a half hour to do them all and even then some of them aren't completely clean when I put 'em away.

Mom runs around the house straightening up. She even scrubs the kitchen floor with a Wonder Mop. What got into her? Jake had been around as long as I remember and she never washed the kitchen floor on account of him before. Sometimes Jake complained the house was too dirty and Mom told him to clean it himself if he was so particular. Sometimes he did. Now here she is running around like she's on fire, fixing this and that, talking to herself and acting like she hadn't ever heard of Jake McNeil and he's something special come to Sunday dinner. Like he's some great white angel sailing with arms outstretched down the river and come, as Irene Lang says when she comes from Bible study class all worked up about the Lord God Jesus, to deliver us from the error of our ways.