The Wives of Bath (11 page)

“I don’t know what you told the Virgin, and I don’t care. But you’re not going to get anything out of me,” Paulie said.

“All right,” I said.

Paulie pressed her face into the wire mesh of the ravine fence, like a convict gazing at the outside world. “Did she make you promise anything?”

“She said my detentions were for silly things and that I should be more careful next time. She said—” I stopped, flustered. “She said I should let her know if you did anything strange.” My big ears felt hot. “But I won’t, Paulie. Honest.”

“I bet,” Paulie said. “Well, I’m not going to fucking tell you if I do do something strange.”

“All right,” I said.

“All right? All right! Is that all you know how to say, Bradford?”

I hung my head in shame. I was in awe of her fierceness, and frightened of it, too. She seemed so much older and bigger than me. She must have realized by then that I was no threat, because I heard her sigh, and we walked on along the top of the ravine without talking. The ground was beginning to feel slippery from fallen leaves. Above our heads a light burned in the tower where Miss Phillips stood behind her curtain watching us.

For the first week, we hardly talked. I took Paulie at her word and walked with her silently, watching her kick out at the shiny chestnuts that littered the school lawns. I wore my school sweater—the green one with the crest on the breast pocket—and the scarf that Sal had knit for me. Paulie wore nothing but the kilt and blouse we were allowed to wear after the school day was over. Often we stood at the edge of the grounds and stared through the fence at the ravine. Sergeant kept the holes patched, so there was no easy way off the grounds except by climbing the fence. I wondered if I could escape from the school by digging a hole under it, the way World War Two prisoners had escaped from Stalag 17. Once I was over on the other side and into the woods, the Virgin and her army of matrons could search and search, but they’d never find me.

One night, as we stood near the ravine, a fog rolled in from the
lake. It swallowed up the ravine and the clock tower of Kings College to the south. I stared back in the direction of the school, searching for the bright pane of Miss Phillips’s window. I saw only foggy bits of lawn and a shape rising in the gloom like a dark ship. When I turned around again, Paulie was gone. I began to walk quickly in the direction we’d just come from, calling her name.

The mist kept filling up the school grounds, like the moist breath of a giant. Here where I stood, the ivy ran over the floor of the grove like a ground cover and then up the south trunks of the ravine’s elm trees, where the plant was sheltered from the coldest winds. A few minutes passed. I called Paulie’s name again. No sign of her. I turned to go, and there was Lewis sauntering toward me, clenching and unclenching his fists. He wore his old hunting hat, the chin strap dangling loose from one of the far side-flaps. And in the fog, his teeth sparkled and glistened like a werewolf’s. Get a grip, Mouse, I thought. This is the grounds boy. What do you think he’s going to do? Rape you? Down in the ravine, where nobody can see you—not even the Virgin. Who seemed as far away now as Morley in Madoc’s Landing.

Lewis smiled and beckoned for me to go with him. I shook my head no.

“Got the willies, have yuh?” He pointed to the darkest part of the ravine, toward the heating plant. “Paulie’s waiting for you over there. She asked me to get you.”

“Paulie? You know where she is?” I asked.

“Here—she asked me to give you this.” He handed me the large safety pin she used to do up her kilt.

I took the pin and stared at it wonderingly. Perhaps Lewis had killed Paulie and now was going to do the same to me. He must have read my thoughts, because he patted my shoulder.

“Come on,” he said. “Paulie told me you don’t have much time left on your walk.”

It was true—only another eight minutes. Wordlessly I followed
him down the path. He stopped at the old coal shed that stood behind the heating plant near the school fence. On the other side lay the ravine, which stirred with funny rustling noises I couldn’t identify. I listened for a moment. It was the wind in the ravine trees mixed with the soft whooshing sound of traffic on the highway bridge to the north. The whooshing sound rolled toward us like the roar of surf. Lewis called “Paulie—Paulie.” Nobody answered. Then he kicked open the door of the shed and went in to find her while I stood at the entrance shivering.

I thought of going after Lewis and decided against it. I peered into a darkened room. A huge boiler sat in one corner, its door open so I could see a stack of firebricks inside. A creepy feeling came over me that Lewis was hiding in there. That he was not who he said he was. That he’d lied. I wanted to run back to the tower. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. When I turned around, Lewis was smiling at me, a cigarette drooping from his bottom lip. In the background, I heard the sound of whatever dilapidated machinery the Virgin used to heat her school. For a second, I felt irritated. Nobody used coal furnaces anymore: even the school in Madoc’s Landing had switched to oil. Now sharpen up, Mouse, I told myself. It doesn’t make sense to be thinking about a rundown furnace just now, when you’re about to get yourself killed. And then Lewis leaned so close I could smell the Brylcreem on his hair. He put his hand on the back of my head. I didn’t move; I was too frightened. He tilted my head back and stuck his tongue in my ear. His mouth stank of nicotine. I tottered back, waving my arms, and he grabbed me and held me close. He put his bony face right next to mine and hissed: “Bradford, don’t you know who I am?”

Lewis took off his cap, and a thick black braid fell down his back. Then he popped in one of his front teeth and smiled. I didn’t know what to say, and Lewis began to laugh. He said he hadn’t meant to scare me—he’d just got a little carried away because he liked practical jokes. And then he took my hand and yanked me into the dark shed and closed the door.

It wasn’t the boiler I heard. It was the automatic coal feed, Lewis said. He made me listen to its rhythmic clink—a sound like a bicycle chain going round and round, of metal hitting metal in the darkness. I stood trembling beside him, my ear still wet from his kiss.

Then Lewis—I mean, Paulie—struck a match, holding it between her muscular thumb and forefinger. I stared at her, breathless, not sure what was going to happen next, and not caring. The flame crept slowly down and burnt out soundlessly between her fingers. I smelled something funny under the sulphur, and then I realized she’d put the match out with her own skin. Paulie lit another match and handed it to me. “Your turn,” she said.

The match burnt down halfway. I felt the heat before the flame touched my fingers. “Ow!” I said and dropped the match.

“It’s not that it doesn’t hurt; it’s that you don’t mind if it hurts,” Paulie said. “Lawrence of Arabia—remember? That’s what he said in the film.”

“Yes,” I said meekly.

Paulie lit a candle this time and held it so close to my face I couldn’t see a thing except the halo of its flame. Fingers suddenly poked my left bicep.

“You’re flabby, Bradford—like a girl,” Paulie said. She handed me the candle and flexed her arm so her muscles squirmed like small moles inside the casing of her skin. I’d never seen Paulie’s
biceps before; they’d been hidden in the sleeves of her school middy. But I’d seen Lewis’s arms. Oh, yes—a few times. It was impossible not to notice Lewis’s arms, dangling like twin cobras from his rolled-up sleeves. No girls I knew had arms that grew like snakes from their torso. And now here were Lewis’s arms on Paulie.

Or
was
this person Paulie? Maybe it was a creature who could move with the authority of a man one minute and giggle like a girl the next. The sight was confusing and interesting—like watching a wizard melt into male and female shapes before your eyes. And every change in Paulie provoked a change in me. When she acted like Lewis, I wanted to exhale responsibility for myself like a sigh; when she acted like Paulie, I was myself again. Well, almost myself—as much as a Mouse can be. And then I heard Sal’s voice in my ear—see, Mary Beatrice, you’re a girl after all—deferring to a man the way a woman should. And I felt sick. Was I no different from the dummies at Morley’s hospital, who followed him into the operating room carrying his surgical tray?

Bewildered, I let Paulie lead me past the hills of coal into the boiler room. It smelled of male sweat, and I saw the white coats of the janitors hanging on the wall. They had made a kind of sitting room for themselves next to the boiler. Two broken-down chintz armchairs spilled stuffing like seeds from a burst milkweed pod. On an overturned Kotex carton somebody had arranged copies of
Playboy
in a row, the way Sal arranged Morley’s medical magazines on our coffee table.

Behind this makeshift sitting room stood a door draped with the same striped olive-green curtains the Virgin hung in her office.

Paulie went right over to the curtain and lifted it, and inside I saw another tiny room, with wooden sides like a horse’s stall. The clink of the coal feed grew fainter as we stepped inside, me still holding the candle. We were standing in an old coal chute. In the middle of the chute was a piano stool with a stack of bananas sitting on top of it.

Beside me, Paulie lit an incense stick, then dipped her knee and crossed herself, genuflecting as expertly as the High Anglicans we saw at St. Paul’s. Then she made me hold the candle close to the wall, and I saw a creature with mad, raging monkey eyes. His hairy arms held lightning bolts, as if he were about to hurl them into our hearts. I nearly dropped the candle.

“Give them to Kong,” Paulie said, and tapped my pocket where my Sweet Caps nestled. I just stared at her, and she snatched them up for herself and put them next to the bananas on her altar, the pack open so my fags spilled out onto the floor and shone in the gloomy room like white fingers. I was looking at a movie poster of King Kong—an old one, from the thirties. In the dark, I could see New York at Kong’s feet—a silhouette of bumps no higher than his massive calves.

Oh, Kong was terrible to look at if he was mad, and lovable as a teddy bear when he was doing things he liked, such as holding Fay Wray in his fist and gently peeling off her clothes. I could see why Paulie liked him. I was fond of him myself.

Near my cigarettes I spotted one of Ismay Thom’s scarves, some dead geraniums from the Virgin’s favourite plot, a
Book of Common Prayer
, a sheaf of new school notepaper with the school motto and the tassel of the clover, and—I had to look again—the book by Norman Vincent Peale that Sal had given me.

Before I could say anything, Paulie pounded her chest and swung her arms back and forth the way Kong does when he’s protecting Fay Wray from danger—like the time he ripped apart the jaw of the
Tyrannosaurus rex
. “Kong the beautiful, Kong the bold, Kong the brave,” Paulie bellowed. I shrank back into the furnace room, embarrassed for Paulie and her strange behaviour.

“I fooled you, didn’t I?” Paulie followed me out, smoking one of my Sweet Caps. “And I fooled the Virgin, too. She swallowed every lie I told her about Paulie having a brother. The Virgin thinks she’s so smart, but she swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker.”

Despite my uneasiness, I was impressed. Oh, Mouse, I thought,
here you are with a master rule breaker, you, who bows down to authority like a willow tree in the wind! What a job of mimicking! In her own way, Paulie was a genius. “And Tory?” I whispered.

“Yeah.” She squinted, as if she were seeing me for the first time. “Kong likes you, Mouse,” she said. “He says you can be a boy, like me.”

“You mean dress up?” I said nervously.

“Yeah.” The cigarette flipped upside down and then disappeared completely inside Paulie’s closed mouth. “But you have to pass his tests first, okay?” she mumbled. Wisps of smoke escaped from the lit cigarette inside her mouth and snaked upwards into her nostrils. How could Paulie stand holding the hot cigarette in her mouth? I waited for her to start coughing. Instead, she clamped her lips tightly together so no smoke could leak out. Maybe the moisture from her tongue kept the cigarette from burning the roof of her mouth. And, then again, maybe not. I waited for the smoke to start coming out of her ears.

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do.” Paulie flipped the cigarette out of her mouth with a fold of her tongue. “You’ll look better as a guy.” She nodded toward my hump. “It’ll be easier to cover up—that.” She put her hands on my shoulder, and for a second I swear she was Lewis again and she was going to stick her tongue in my ear or do something worse, like French-kiss me on the mouth. But she only laughed and sat me down on the shabby old chairs and outlined what I had to do.

Here are the preliminary tests of Kong, just as Paulie devised them.

I completed the first two preliminary tests and missed the third. (Lucky for me, Sergeant had taken down the swings for the winter.) I did the other tests the next evening. I won’t say how well
I performed—not in detail, anyway. Let me put it this way. Kong liked Mouse and closed his eyes to the pee dribbling down my thigh and wetting my shoes. So I could sneak past his exacting standards the first time around.

Why did I do the tests? I was scared to say no to Paulie, and maybe I wanted her to be Lewis. Lewis was a bully-tease, and I found that exciting, because, although I didn’t know it, I was beginning to develop a taste for fear. Fear makes you feel alive. Without a drop of fear now and again, life wouldn’t be worth living.