Just Beneath My Skin (7 page)

AT SIX O'CLOCK MOM GOES
up to Irene's and asks Tom to drive her into town to look for Jake. “If he comes while I'm gone you make him stay,” she tells me. “Don't you let him go 'til I get back, you hear?”

“I hear,” I say.

I kind of hope Jake comes while she is gone. Mom tells me to get my own dinner out the fridge, but there's nothing in there — there never is the last week before cheque day — so I have some crackers with peanut butter and a glass of milk and watch
M*A*S*H
on
TV
. I think about going up to Irene's for a visit but Mom will kill me if she comes home and I'm not here. And I don't want to miss Jake. So I lie down on the couch and fall asleep. I dream I'm in the woods with Jake and we are running from something, some bellowing monster who is knocking over trees and screaming and breathing purple smoke in the air and making it hard to see. Jake has my hand and we're running and Jake keeps saying, over and over again, “We came from the earth and we shall go back into the earth.”

I don't know what it means and it feels like it's getting harder to hold on to Jake's hand. The air is getting darker with that purple smoke and I know the monster is getting closer though I can only hear him and not see him and Jake's hand is hot and sweaty and starting to slip out of mine. Jake is thinking that when the purple smoke runs out the monster will stop but I want to tell him this isn't true. The monster will keep on coming, purple smoke or not. The monster is not really mad at Jake. The monster is just being a monster and Jake is in his way.

I wake up scared and almost crying for some reason and Mom still isn't home. I turn on the
TV
and watch
Three's Company
and wait for Jake and try to forget the purple air and the monster and laugh at Jack, Terri, Janet, Larry and Mr. Furley.

I can't, though.

I should always listen to my dreams, 'cause sometimes they turn out to be realer than television.

JUST AROUND THE BEND A
tall, crooked black spruce is leaning into the path. It's bright green and dripping rain, one of those that in winter will be so heavy with snow the branches'll sag under the weight and you'll have to step off the path altogether and go around if you don't want all that snow to come avalanching down on your head when you pass. I don't remember this tree being here, though by the looks of it, it's ten years old. I know all about trees from the years I spent at the mill, and the winter I spent up north with the silviculture crew. That was a good winter, and being in the woods, even having Johnny with a twelve-gauge shotgun at my back, reminds me of it.

“Rejoice with trembling!” Johnny says suddenly, out of nowhere, and laughs.

Of all the things Johnny has said so far, this is the strangest, and I feel a goose walk across my grave. I think how soon it might be that that grave is dug — if Johnny even bothers and doesn't just throw me into the swamp to be sucked into the earth like a stone. The acid must be working in him good, because it doesn't even
sound
like him, and it makes no sense either. I don't want to know what's going on in his head, and I don't turn around because I know he'll be looking at me and I don't want to see him smile.

I realize I shouldn't go around the spruce like Johnny expects. The idea comes to me all at once, and just in time. Up ahead is the clearing, and the swamp, and the hunting blind me and Johnny built all those summers ago and had to clear of the dead branches covered with rusted needles and then cover in strips of new spruce to hide us from the deer. It's funny how you know some things, even when no one tells you — Johnny is gonna stand in that blind when he shoots me and I can almost hear how the shot will echo up through the trees, and see Johnny standing there breathing heavy while I lie bleeding in the middle of the swamp and sinking all night into the water and muck.

“We come from the earth and so we shall return to the earth,” I hear my father say in my head, from one of his Sunday sermons, and for a minute, before I walk into the spruce, it is as if
I
done the purple microdot. Things are so intense and the trees around me so distinct and the sound of Johnny breathing and I can see him, though he is behind, bringing the shotgun to my head, as if he is practising. And then I walk into the branches of the tree and push through them hard like I am gonna force myself the whole way past the tree into the path beyond.

Rejoice with trembling, Johnny said.

I hope so, for mine and Nathan and even Johnny's sake, and when I sense he has stepped into the space behind me, in range of the branches, I let them lash back into his face and spring to one side.

“Fuck!” Johnny cries, and the gun goes off. For a minute I think I have been shot and am looking down. I can see Johnny below me dancing from where the spruce branches have lashed him in the face, and holding on to his eye, the gun pointing harmlessly to the ground. The shot is so close my ears are still ringing with it, but I run through the woods. I think of Johnny's phrase —
rejoice with trembling
. The trees sail by and Johnny shouts, “McNeil!” He curses and screams and tries to reload the gun. I run farther into the woods, farther than I have ever been even when Johnny and I were hunting. I can't hear anything behind me, but I keep going, like somehow, in all the vastness of this land and the pointlessness of its anger and the certainty of its vengeance and the way the land and the people suck you into the swamp of its hopelessness I can somehow still come through to the other side, to get what I came for, Nathan, and the two of us can leave this goddamned fucking place forever.

JAKE TRIED TO WRITE A
book once. He worked at it every night after work at the kitchen table on loose leaf and when Mom asked to read it he said she would have to wait 'til it was finished. I was seven then and I could read, and I knew Jake hid the book in the bedroom closet in a shoebox and Mom didn't know it was there. So one day when Mom and Jake weren't home I went and found it and tried to read some of it. There were some big words I didn't know, but I found out Jake knew this girl named Cindy in high school and they drank a “pint of lemon gin” together and then he got “laid.” I didn't know what any of it meant, except Jake wrote he and Cindy were lying together in the field behind the North River Fire Hall after the Friday Night Junior dance and Jake asked her if she thought there was life on other planets when they were looking up at the stars.

“There's hardly life on this one,” Cindy said.

I was still trying to figure this out when Mom came home and I didn't get it put back quick enough. She caught me in the closet and swore she'd beat me within an inch of my life if I didn't tell her what I was doing, and so I had to show her Jake's book. Then she wasn't mad anymore and she took it out to the kitchen and sat down at the table to read it. By the time Jake got home she was fit to be tied. She held up the papers to him.

“You slept with that slut Cindy Luxton?” she said.

“Where you'd get that?” Jake said.

“Nathan found it in the closet. Now answer me. You slept with that whore?”

Jake just got home from work, and he looked tired. He shrugged. “Eleven years ago,” he said. “I was just telling my life story.”

“If that's all the story you got,” Mom said, “you ain't got much. Half the boys in town laid with that bitch.”

“So what?” said Jake. “She was my first. I didn't care if she was somebody else's seconds. I was just writing.”

“Burn it,” said my mother. “You wanna live in this house with me, I ain't having you telling all and sundry who you laid down in a field with. I'm surprised you didn't get the clap.”

“Jesus, Carla,” Jake said. “That was four fucking years before I even
met
you.”

“I don't care,” said my mom. “Burn it, or get out.”

Jake looked at me, and then back at the papers in Mom's hand. I stood in the doorway to the living room and watched them both. Jake took the papers, went outside and burnt them in the fireplace. I went out with him. “I'm sorry, Jake,” I said, as we watched the papers burn.

“Don't worry about it, squirt.”

“What's lemon gin, Jake?”

Jake didn't turn away from where he was watching the papers on fire. “That night? The sweetest thing I ever tasted.”

“Who's Cindy Luxton, Jake?”

“That night? The sweetest person I ever met.”

I didn't understand this either, and we watched the papers burn until they fell to ash and went out.

I RUN FOR HOURS, IT
seems like, and when I stop I have a stitch in my side. I am drenched in sweat. Johnny is gone. The woods are dead quiet. I crouch down on the ground with my back against a tree. Johnny didn't let me bring my jacket — maybe he wants to keep it as a trophy — and I am getting colder. I try to keep warm by hugging my knees and rocking back and forth on my haunches while I keep an eye out for Johnny.

I think about what I should do.

I don't know where I am. I ran so hard and so fast I didn't bother to mark the way. The woods here are big. Go west and you can walk sixty miles all the way into Digby County and not cross so much as a logging road. To the north is Middlebridge, but that is five miles or more, and to the east lies Johnny and his gun. That leaves south, across the river and back out to Highway #7. I'll have to leave the Pinto at Johnny's place and worry about picking it up later, if Johnny ever comes down from the acid.

I START WALKING SOUTH, RUNNING
over in my mind all the names of trees I ever knew in order to stop thinking about the possibility of running smack dab into Johnny. Hoptree, dogwood, ash, basswood, Douglas fir, beech, hemlock, buckthorn, cherry, plum, crabapple, tamarack, elder, elm, witch hazel, hackberry, chestnut, hickory, laurel, birch, madrone, honey locust, maple, oak, pawpaw, poplar, larch, ironwood, redbud, sumac, sycamore, tupelo, mulberry, viburnum, alder, willow, juniper, blue-beech, pine, spruce, yew, coffee tree and hackmatack.

It's strange — all those years of hunting deer in here only to be hunted myself, by a man I once considered my friend now stoned out of his mind on purple microdot with double-aught buckshot loaded into the breech of his gun and nothing short of murder on his mind.

I don't doubt it is double-aught shot, though it's illegal to own.

I know Johnny has some, and he would consider killing somebody with anything less to be cheesy and unprofessional. The crazy bastard once shot a rabbit with some out behind his house, and when we went to pick it up there was nothing left but the ears and the tail. “Imagine what that would do to a deer, or a person,” he told me that day. “Fuckin' mincemeat, McNeil.”

Fucking mincemeat.

If I ever get out of here, that can be my nickname.

Mincemeat McNeil. It has a nice ring to it.

I MAKE IT ALL THE
way through woods, 'til I get to the river, without seeing Johnny. Memragouche bends to the east a mile and a half below the Eight-Mile Bridge and then bends back to the west before Johnny's. Below that is Great Falls, where Cleve Ramey built his wooden ramps every year and dipped gaspereau for the market in Japan. When we were kids we used to help him dip on Sunday for a quarter a crate. Sometimes we'd come home with two dollars or more, which we'd spend at Douglas's on Monday. My father didn't like Cleve, because he didn't go to church and he didn't wash and he exploited us boys from the village by making us work on Sunday when his regular crew wanted a day off. But we didn't mind. Once, when the planks on the ramp were soaked with foam from the river and treacherous, I slid off into the falls but Cleve happened to be walking the ramp, a rare thing. He grabbed me by the collar and dragged me back out again.

“Careful there, young fella,” he said, reeking of pipe tobacco and sweat and fried fish, which his wife made him every morning for breakfast. “You go into those falls and you ain't gonna live to tell the tale.”

I loved dipping fish with Cleve, even besides the money. There was something about dipping a long pole into the falls and coming up with a netful of wriggling silver-sided fish. We'd dump them into the blue plastic crates and watch them flop and fight for breath, mouths gasping and eyes turning milk-blue as the life slowly drained out of them. Some of the men Cleve hired would wait until the crates were filled with fish then lug them back to the shore and dump them in bigger wooden crates on the truck. Cleve was too fat to dip, so he sat in a chair on the back of his truck and smoked his pipe and watched the dipping and kept a running tally of the crates being brought in from the ramps. Dad said he likely cheated us, but I didn't know it if he did. I kept track of my own crates, and the number Cleve wrote down on his tally sheet at the end of the day always matched mine.

When I reach the falls through the woods, I stop because it is like I can almost see those days again. Sometimes this happens in North River. I run across some place I'd been when I was a kid and the feeling of being back there is so strong it's like there's two places — the one now pasted on top of the one then. When this happens, and I remember something about being a kid, like how good it was to be dipping fish for Cleve when I was fourteen and how grown-up I felt having all that responsibility and money, it's like this great empty space opens up inside me I didn't even know was there. I almost feel like I want to cry.

It's weird. Here I am, running from Johnny and soaked right through and coming out of the trees to the banks and the whitewater roar of the falls and no one but Johnny and his gun for miles around and I feel this way. Cleve Ramey has been dead for years — heart attack — and they tore down those dipping ramps ages ago. The gaspereau don't run like they used to. Acid rain from the States and Ontario has put paid to that. Same with the salmon. Only thing left that runs like it used to is river eels, and even the Japanese got a limit on how many of those they'll take. But damned if I don't have one of those moments right then, when I can almost see us all again, and I picture the ramps out over the water, and hear the shouting and laughing and old Cleve calling to his oldest son from his lawn chair on the back of his truck, “Get them goddamned crates out there, Aubrey! The boys
need
'em!”

For a minute I forget all about Nathan, and Johnny and his gun. All I can remember is the past, swirling up and around and across and over me like water, drowning me in memory.