One Year in Coal Harbor (9 page)

We walked a bit in silence. We were heading toward town but I didn’t know where we were going. I wished I could take him someplace peaceful and then I thought of Jackson Road and the viscosity of its stillness. I know
some people are unaffected by it but I didn’t think Ked would be. I once biked there with Eleanor but I would not do that again. All she did was chatter relentlessly about Spinky. She managed to dilute the viscosity of Jackson Road with her incessant noise so that by the time we reached its end it was as thin and watery as everywhere else.

“Do you want to bike somewhere with me? My uncle has a bike you could borrow, I bet. We just have to go to town to ask him. But first let’s go to my house and get my bike and test-run a recipe. Would you like the first recipe in our book to be freeziola or ersatz gravy?”

In the end, Ked didn’t seem to have a strong preference so I picked ersatz gravy because it was fast. Ked learned quickly. In fact, so quickly that I began to suspect he had more than a passing acquaintance with the kitchen and wondered why he pretended otherwise.

After that, with the afternoon quickly disappearing, we charged over to Uncle Jack’s restaurant. Ked wanted to stay outside on the sidewalk because he said it would be awkward if Uncle Jack didn’t want to lend his bike. But I knew he would say yes, so I dragged Ked inside.

I found Uncle Jack covered in a thin film of plaster dust and looking irritated the way you are when you are breathing in things you shouldn’t be.

“Primrose, it’s not a good idea to come in here. Plaster and drywall keep falling from the ceiling.” As if to illustrate, a big chunk dropped down a few feet behind us.
“What the heck!” Uncle Jack roared, turning his head. Now all our heads were turned toward the window and we saw something even more disturbing. Miss Bowzer was standing in the door of The Girl on the Red Swing saying goodbye to Dan Sneild with a
kiss
. It was only a peck on the cheek but I was still appalled. I had never seen Miss Bowzer kiss
anyone
. I, frankly, didn’t know she had it in her.

Ked started coughing and I tried to introduce him to Uncle Jack but it sounded as if Ked were choking to death and he finally had to go outside to get out of the dust.

“That was Ked. That person over there being
kissed
is Dan Sneild,” I said with the secret thrill you get from being the bearer of news, even, or perhaps especially, bad news. “He used to be Miss Bowzer’s boyfriend and now he’s back in town. I haven’t found out why but when I do I will tell you.”

“No need,” said Uncle Jack. “I’m not keeping tabs on Miss Bowzer and neither should you. What she does is her own business. And this isn’t someplace you should be without a hard hat.”

So then I told him about Ked. “And can he borrow your bike when he needs one?”

Uncle Jack looked distracted as more plaster fell like snow. He headed for the stairs and called over his shoulder, “It’s locked in the garage. Key in the change jar on the kitchen table.”

I was turning to leave when I saw one of Miss Bowzer’s restaurant bowls on a window ledge. You could see the remains of red sauce in it, covered in a thin film of plaster dust.

“What’s this?” I called, holding up the bowl.

“Miss Bowzer brought over some salad dressing,” he called out over the stair railing. “She gets stranger and stranger. She came racing in and practically threw it at me. All she said was, ‘
VINAIGRETTE
. In case you didn’t know, it’s
FRENCH
!’ She’s very mysterious, that woman, Primrose.”

“Some people find mystery alluring,” I called back. “I’m sure Dan Sneild does!”

I went out to rescue Ked, who was now being swarmed by a bunch of dread-headed Hacky Sack players who had appeared out of nowhere and taken over the sidewalk. One of them grabbed the corner of his jacket and said, “Save the Mendolay mountain, man.”

“What?” said Ked.

“Dude, you don’t know?” said another. “Come on back to our tents. We’re set up outside town. We gotta tell you, like, what’s going on.”

They started to pull on Ked and he looked alarmed. I was pretty alarmed myself. You’re not supposed to go off with strange guys who tell you to come to their tent.

“I got things to do,” said Ked nervously.

“We have to go,” I said to the Hacky Sack boys. I tried to make my voice firm, the way you do when you’re
talking to dogs. This was to ward off any of the attempts they might make to throw us into burlap bags and drown us in the river. I knew this was probably just a flight of my imagination but I think it is better to be prepared in such instances than not. Then I wondered why
burlap
bags? Whoever saw burlap bags nowadays? Was it because I had read about trolls taking people off in burlap bags in some old fairy tale written when people actually used burlap bags? Or was it because guys who looked like these were usually very environmentally conscious and wouldn’t think of using plastic? So does one’s mind meander even when in precarious on-the-verge-of-getting-kidnapped situations. It’s surprising sometimes that our species has survived at all.

Fortunately the boys moved off down the street as I was pondering all this and they resumed their game without any further kidnapping attempts. I was slightly disappointed to have such peril fizzle out so quickly.

“Maybe we should stop at the sheriff’s and tell him there are some strange guys in town trying to make people come to their tents,” I said.

“I won’t go to the sheriff’s,” said Ked.

This was the most definitive statement I had heard out of Ked. “Why?”

“I just don’t like sheriffs,” he said, and shrugged.

“All sheriffs?” I asked. “Because ours is very nice.”

“Never mind the sheriff, what did your uncle say about the bike?” asked Ked.

“OH! He said you could borrow it, of course. Let’s go get it and we’ll bike out to Jackson Road and I’ll show you Mendolay Mountain. Maybe we can figure out why they want to save it.”

“They were probably just stoned,” said Ked.

I turned back to look at the Hacky Sack players. I had never seen anyone stoned. I was a little shocked at this suggestion. Of course we had an antidrug program at school so I knew about such things but it was the type of thing I imagined happening in big places like Vancouver. Had drugs come to Coal Harbor?

“Do you really think they were stoned?”

Ked shrugged. “Didn’t you notice their pupils? They were huge. I’m surprised they could hit the Hacky Sack.”

This was a new one on me. Clearly they had more detail-filled drug programs where Ked came from. “Did you see stoned people in other towns where you lived?”

“Sometimes,” said Ked. “Can we go to Bert and Evie’s so I can drop off my books?”

I nodded.

“I’m going to run.” And just like that he dashed down the street. I hoped this wasn’t one of his quirks. I am not a fan of sudden rapid movement. I hopped on my bike and followed.

When Ked put down his books and told Bert and Evie where we were going, Evie tried to fill us up with fruit
salad made with mini marshmallows. I didn’t want any but Ked ate two big bowls of it.

“It’s a good thing you like mini marshmallows,” I whispered to him when she left the room.

“I don’t,” he whispered back. “But she thinks everyone does and she just wants to make you happy by putting them in everything. This morning she put them in my cereal.”

And again I wondered how he had come through these years with such kindliness intact. We did Irish myths this year and learned that the Irish believe there are thin places, neither here nor the beyond but bordering between the two, and in these places dwell banshees, female ghosts that keen, which is a sort of high-pitched wail they make before someone dies. Ked wasn’t a banshee because he wasn’t a female and I didn’t see him going around portending deaths. But, I thought, he’s not really among us. That’s how he’s kept his kindliness. He exists in the thin places. He hovers there. He floats.

I knew these places from when my parents had disappeared and I felt I floated, not quite in touch with people who had lives in gear on planet Earth. It was like he was an outline of who he was but the substance was not available to anyone. I knew now that I could ask him questions about himself and his life but I wouldn’t get answers. He was keeping himself safe and apart someplace where nothing and no one could quite touch him.
When I was in the thin places I was so hardly on Earth that I was accident-prone and consequently kept losing digits and little pieces of myself. I wanted to keep a hand on Ked and keep him safe. Especially because I wasn’t sure that anyone else had ever really seen that he was in the thin places. I think you had to have been there to recognize it in someone else.

Ked, whose mind must have been elsewhere too, didn’t even ask me why I was so suddenly silent but rinsed his bowl and put it in the dish drainer. And then we went to Uncle Jack’s to get his bike.

In Uncle Jack’s kitchen I had to dig around the endless toonies and loonies in the change jar on his table and finally tip it out to find the key. I bet Uncle Jack had thirty or forty bucks in change alone. He must be very partial to gumballs and parking meters, I thought. I found his bike helmet on a hook but Ked said he didn’t want it.

“Wearing a helmet to ride a bike seems so arbitrary. You could hurt your head tripping on the sidewalk or as a passenger in a car. You know?”

“Oh, I completely agree! We have endless lectures about bike helmets during gym. It always strikes me as odd that the people who give you lectures about wearing helmets are all too happy to help you snap your neck by forcing you to do somersaults and backflips and balance one-footed high up on things you’ve no business crawling about on to begin with.”

We hopped on the bikes and headed out to Jackson Road, where there is so little traffic, you can bike down the center without worrying. A horn tooted behind us suddenly and we had to veer to the side to avoid a fancy black car that whizzed by. It was Dan Sneild, who must have been going back to the B and B, where he was staying.

“I hope he got his fill of French food,” I said bitterly, and Ked laughed and laughed although he couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about. “What?” I said.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. It’s just the way you say things,” he said, and laughed again. When he laughed he didn’t look so distant and floating. For a second you got a glimpse of who he would be if he were with you totally.

This made me want to say something else hilarious because really, Eleanor had never even gotten my jokes, much less appreciated them, but of course then I couldn’t think of a single amusing thing to say so I decided to impress him with my knowledge of local lore instead.

The scenery had been typical West Coast island, old-growth rain forest—covered mountains, dense and deep, full of moss and lichen and ferns, but now we approached the cleared rolling hills of the farm. We stopped our bikes to admire the emerald fields.

“They didn’t even
have
bulldozers when this land was cleared,” I said proudly, as if I’d done it myself tree by tree with my teeth. Miss Bowzer had told me the whole
history of the B and B, so for once I had some useful information to impart that I actually remembered. I do not have the type of brain that stores information well. I can glean concepts and imagine stuff but when I have to store any facts they go in one ear and out the other and I cannot recall them in the kind of coherent detail necessary to make sense. So it often appears that I know nothing at all, which is both embarrassing and untrue. Therefore I was quite pleased that I might actually be able to come up with some useful information like normal people seem to be able to. “Miss Bowzer told me the whole history of the B and B. It started off in the eighteen hundreds as a farm. This couple, Jed and Margaret Mason, built a log cabin and owned eighty acres that they had to clear to make a dairy farm. Jed died but Margaret kept the farm going anyhow. Then, in middle age, she meets and marries this millionaire.”

“Where do you meet and marry a millionaire alone out here?” asked Ked.

“I don’t know.” To be honest, this had never occurred to me and the fact that it immediately struck Ked made me realize how smart he was.

“Anyhow, so she meets this millionaire and he turns her humble farm into a big ritzy estate and buys all the surrounding acreage so now they’ve got fifteen hundred acres and they have big parties and he breeds horses and she’s supposed to be this socialite but really, she just wants
to be a farmer so during dinner parties she’s always racing out to help deliver calves and stuff. That’s my favorite part of the story—the image of her running from her chandeliered dinner table in a gown and long gloves to help birth some calf. She got the reputation of being some kind of madwoman because she was always coming back for the next course covered in blood and hay. But she didn’t care. That’s why I like her. She cared more for doing the things she loved than what people thought of her. She could wear the tiara and velvet because she loved her husband and wanted to accommodate his socialite ritzy needs and she could get her dress torn to shreds rescuing a laboring cow. She didn’t find the two things incongruous at all.”