Whirl Away (11 page)

The living room was small and close, a black cast iron stove squatting in the centre of the room, cold. “There was a time when that was the only heat, that and the oil stove in the kitchen, before we got the electric. I still have the oil stove—I just don't think the other stoves cook things as well. I haven't anything to offer on such short notice. I was hoping Millie would have some bread, you go over and she can't help but share, and I take advantage of that, I know I do.”

Helen sitting down then on the couch, the small living room dark and smelling of damp. “He brought this couch in from the truck on his own back. He was strong like that, strong and stubborn too. You couldn't tell him anything. When we were first married, I thought I would change him,
smooth him out a bit around the edges. But it always ran right off him like he wasn't paying attention at all. I had my own ideas, but a place can drag you down. ‘Your own little world,' that's what Patrick used to say to me. ‘You're just living in your own little world.' Millie isn't any better. Once, she said, ‘You've got your head up there in a cloud, and I ain't saying a cloud of what.' And I suppose I did, making up in my own head the way things were supposed to be—that Patrick was a good man in a rough skin, heading out there every day. But it's important to keep that idea—it keeps you safe.” She stared. “You've got to keep a piece of yourself there, you know. A shiny, safe little bit. Like a place you can go away into in your head.”

Helen looked out through the curtains as if something moving on the other side of the glass had caught her attention. But nothing changed, the outdoors as still as a picture—each stalk of grass, each frond, suddenly still.

“That's something they don't teach you in any school. The trick is that you don't let go of that last little bit. That wary bit. You keep just a little piece of your guard up, if you're smart, just keep that little bit back inside you, and it will keep you safe.

“They don't do it now, you know, they're down on the wharf with their boyfriends and they don't stop to think that you always have to have a little part of yourself outside looking in. Just in case. You split something off to just keep watching. I've always been good at that.

“I remember I said something to Patrick once, it wasn't important, I can hardly think of what it was now, but he was
moving logs in the stove, the little door open and the orange flames licking all around, and he had the poker in his hand, the short iron one, and the watching part of me saw his hand, just the way his fingers were around the handle, and all at once I knew. I knew because I was sensible enough to be watching, and really, I only had to take a couple of steps away—just enough space so he would think for a moment and change his mind before he actually got all the way over to me. You don't give all of yourself ever, that's for books, because you have to be ready. Have to know when to get out of reach, far enough away from the world that no one can touch you.”

Helen's eyes were black then in the dark of the living room, her body perched on the edge of the couch like a bird about to take flight, her hands in her lap and busy with each other. The living room was cooler than outdoors, the air slightly thick with an unmoving humidity.

“You get better and better at it as you get older—put the walls up, and don't let anybody shift them.

“I thought I would find her the next day down by the rocks at the far end of the beach, but I didn't. That's where she should have been, unless the tide was strong and she got swept out around the point on that first night. I know I thought about finding her there where the beach goes away all to gravel, her hair spread out all around her head like a fan. I would have called you right away then.”

Helen gave a brief, harsh snort. “Millie asked me if maybe I was making it all up in my head, she says I jump to conclusions sometimes, and beside, she hadn't heard anything. She
claims a mouse couldn't come down the road without waking her up, she sleeps so lightly. But half the time when there are kids on the wharf she says she doesn't hear anything, and she's up above it all, anyway. Made me doubt myself enough to make me go down on the wharf to look at the tire tracks. I even got right down on my hands and knees and smelled them, just to see if they were fresh, but I couldn't tell.

“I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get to a phone and call you, but I don't think it would have made any difference. Millie probably wouldn't have called—I know she didn't want me to. She's a stupid woman, really, although I do love her dearly. She won't put things together even when they're right there in front of her face. She leaves things out to suit herself, and she just runs away when there's something she doesn't want to talk about. She says I live in my own world? It's nothing she doesn't do, but ten times worse.”

Helen got back up from the couch, smoothing her dress down over her knees, looking around the room. “It wouldn't hurt for you to have one last look around the beach. I'll certainly walk down there with you, show you the top end where the current comes in close to shore. The place she should have wound up, all things considered.”

Helen was quiet for a moment, then headed for the door. “Did you know my husband, officer? You look like my husband. He was from Great Barrisway. He was a handsome man, like you.”

Helen looked around, blinking in the bright sunlight as she stepped off the porch and down the three sagging steps
to the path. A pair of crows were calling back and forth across the valley, their ragged croaks hanging in the air.

“I don't know where Millie is—I don't have any idea where that woman might have got to. I suppose she'll talk to you. Maybe she won't. I don't think that she could have gone that far—she has to be around here somewhere.”

She reached the beach, the great heaped stones of the barrisway, tons of rock brought in by the winter waves and thrown up in a long drift from one end of the cove to the other. Helen moved slowly, carefully, her feet slipping sideways on the round beach stones, heading for where the stones were smaller and the beach was flatter.

The black from the car tires, sharp-edged like ink on the concrete. The two black crows, high up in the valley, watching the woman as she walked. Helen completely alone.

L
ISTEN
, I've never minded driving, and I've never minded company, either. I mean, if I don't have anyone riding with me, I'll even talk to myself, that's how much I like to have someone to talk to. Once, I was on that big wide toll road across Nova Scotia, heading for Prince Edward Island—that one that lets you miss the dangerous stuff at Folly Lake. I mean, there aren't any crossroads coming in, just trees as far as you can see, and most of them are tree-farmed black spruce, stretching out away from you in the straight lines they were all planted in—and I found myself answering my own questions, except I was answering them in a fake Scottish accent.

A guy in a big Crown Vic rolled by me, one wheel on the yellow and then the other way out next to the gravel on the other side, swinging back and forth like he's about to lose it all and roll into the ditch. Ten o'clock in the morning and he might have been loaded, for all I know. You see it all, you drive long enough.

And I said out loud, “Big car like that, and he has to be all over the road with it. He's not a very good driver, is he?”

“Nae, he isn't, laddie,” I answered. “Don't ken how to merge or nowt.”

All right, it sounds pretty stupid—and it was a pretty bad fake Scottish accent, too. But you've got to pass the time—and time, I've got a lot of that.

I've got a lot of all kinds of other things too. A lot of car, a lot of attitude, a big old sense of humour. A pretty big wallet back behind me. A fair amount of gut out there in front of me, too.

I sell. That's what I do. I've always sold, one way or another. They call me a “manufacturer's agent,” but the truth is, what I'm really supposed to do is to get a product, any product, into someone's hands and make them think they absolutely have to have it. Right now, it's energy drinks—whatever the latest thing is, guarana, enough caffeine to straighten curly hair, you name it. Ten tablespoons of sugar hidden in a liquid thick enough to stand a spoon up in. In the past, it's been fruit juices, snack food, and once, for a while, even agricultural machinery. Agricultural machinery—I was a fish out of water with that stuff, even if I did manage to unload some once in a while. The money was good when you sold something—even three percent is a lot when you're selling something in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, just ask a realtor—but sales were few and far between. Ever buy a combine? Exactly.

Back in Halifax, I've got a little apartment in a big building full of neighbours I've never met, satellite television for
company, and one goldfish who seems to be impossible to kill. I just give it as much of the food as I think it will take until I can get back again, and when I do get back, it always seems to have managed to stay alive. And if he—or she, I guess—dies, well, goldfish all look the same, and if you've given them all the name Fish anyway, they're pretty much interchangeable.

I hang the suit bag by the side door, back passenger side, enough clothes until I think I'll be back, and I take that into the motel with me every night, unless I want to advertise that I want someone to bash in my window and take whatever I've got. I bring the suitcase in and the samples too. Some people tell you they'd love to be travelling all the time, but a long time ago in a motel outside Corner Brook, Newfoundland, I spent most of the night listening to a bathroom tap dripping and had a little epiphany. There's a word for you. And here's what I mean: hotel rooms are all pretty much the same, just different places on a scale, and there isn't much you can call romance even in the good ones.

Maybe the good ones do stick in your memory for a bit, but the really bad ones do too—and there are more of the bad ones. I had a room near Amherst, N.S., that smelled like someone had thrown up in it. The carpet was soaked, like they'd run a faulty steam cleaner around the place that couldn't suck the water back up again, so I had to make a path from the bed to the bathroom with every single towel from the rack. There was another where I was right up over the bar, and when the band finally stopped and I got to sleep, the whistle blew for a four a.m. shift change at the paper
mill. And too many times to count, there was a couple going at it in the room next door like it was some kind of Olympic event and they were damned if they weren't going to medal at least. Another place, none of the tiles in the bathroom seemed to be anchored to the floor, so that moving around the bathroom was like a stroll around a quarry.

But as long as the rooms are clean, I suppose I can live with it.

Driving eventually becomes the same too, regardless of how big your territory is; even new roads look just like the ones you're familiar with. I've got all four Atlantic provinces in my district now, from New Brunswick, where the roads are too narrow and too dangerous for my liking, to Nova Scotia, where urban is urban and rural can be, well, more than a little scary for the uninitiated. I saw a couple of guys near Kentville pushing a new bed home from a Stedmans store there once, just the two of them heading off into the distance, pushing a bed on those little metal casters for all they were worth. Stop to talk to them? Not likely.

Prince Edward Island? P.E.I. might be a great place for a summer vacation, but they're not so welcoming when it's winter and it seems that just by being there you're keeping some Islander from getting a job. I don't expect a lot of love in P.E.I., not in a big car with Nova Scotia plates. And Newfoundland? Sheer mathematics is against you from the start. A lot of ground to cover, not enough people, and not a lot of disposable income. Not much in the way of commissions to show for it. But it's part of my territory, and I'm expected to get out there, so I go through the island a couple of times a
year, end up there for a month or so in summer if I can manage it, the same old familiar loops of highway over and over again.

And everywhere, I pick up hitchhikers. If I feel like it. If they look like people I'd like to talk to. Yeah, I know it's dangerous, but it really is better than talking to myself, no matter who I'm trying to sound like.

Once, outside Sussex, New Brunswick, it was a teenager in a long coat with a machete right up his sleeve. Couldn't even bend his elbow, his arm right out straight next to the door the whole time. I didn't see it until he got out of the car, so I guess he didn't think he needed to whip it out to protect himself from anything. But I saw it as soon as he closed the door, the blue-metal flash of the big curved tip. I dropped him near Saint John, in Hampton, I think, and afterwards I'm pretty sure we were both relieved.

Stopped for a woman on the side of the road in New Glasgow or Truro one summer. Whichever town it was, it was right above the Heather Hotel, anyway, you don't forget a place with a name like the Heather Hotel. And this woman—not young, either—she had her feet out of her shoes and up on the dash before I even got the car back in drive, and she was putting bright red nail polish on her toenails. Even had the little bits of cotton to stuff in between her toes, putting the enamel on as smooth and easy as you like, her in a little spaghetti-string top with these great tufts of hair coming out of her armpits like she was sprouting moss or something. The only thing I could think of was that I wished we were coming up on a bridge, so I could hit the
seam in the pavement real hard and see if that would mess up her toenail-painting technique.

She told me she was going to British Columbia, that “life was easier there,” but she didn't have much luggage and she must not have had much money either—offered to stay with me in my hotel room in Moncton, but I bought her dinner and begged off instead.