Given (5 page)

Vernal strode ahead, taking the steps two at a time, enquiring, over his shoulder, about the heat wave down south, what inedible meal had been served on the plane — the sorts of questions people always ask when they meet you at the airport and run out of things to say. I told him about Maplethorpe and the two lieutenants, and what had taken place in the Customs hall as he scanned the parking lot's third floor for his ride. “You're still the same old trouble-magnet” he said.

It was hard to miss, the Cadillac, black with stiffly folded drapery to match, and Ceese Fun (a ghostlike “erals” after the “fun” part) painted on the side. Vernal opened the rear doors to show me the cavernous interior, the rollers, embedded in a fake walnut floor, laid out in two straight lines. “To help ease the passengers out,” he said, as if he had read my mind, then adding, hastily, when he saw my look, “You're not
that
kind of passenger yet. Go ahead. Jump in front. You're riding shotgun.”

Vernal took an “On Appointment” sign from the glove compartment and put it on the dashboard where it could easily be seen. He said he'd got a deal on the hearse when Ceese, Sr., the funeral director on Kliminawhit, passed away. “His son sold off the old man's whole rolling stock and I took it instead of a retainer for some work I'd done.” When we left the parking lot, the attendant doffed his cap after taking Vernal's money.

I noticed how people glanced at us then looked quickly away. Vernal said after a while you got used to it. Driving the hearse had given him a whole new kind of freedom — there was no chance of getting stopped at a roadblock or ticketed for speeding through a school zone, for example. I wondered why anyone would need to speed in a hearse?

“Nuns,” he said, swerving to avoid sending two jaywalking sisters into their afterlives. “Sheep. One black one. Flock of starlings. Nuisances.” Vernal still had a habit of pointing out things to me, without giving me a chance to see whatever he'd seen, for myself, first. “Cyclists. Over there. Repair job. Without a manual.”

The outside air looked good enough to breathe. Vernal wanted to hear all about my great escapade (as he called it) and I told him it hadn't exactly been masterminded, there'd been an opportunity and I had simply walked away.

Half an hour later we headed onto a causeway that led to the ferry terminal. “Accident,” said Vernal, pointing to the twisted wreck of a car with NO DRY GRAD 2000 spray-painted on its caved-in roof. “I see that,” I said, a little tersely, thinking of my dead escort and driver, Earl.
No such thing as an accident.

I hadn't thought about my own car accident since I'd landed in Vancouver but now I wondered if the Latrine's Dickwad would tie a ribbon to the maimed blossom-tree, if the kids would leave their favourite teddy bears on the spot where their stepmother had exited this life. Would Earl's bossy wife place a bottle of Evian water on the spot where her husband collided with ETERNITY? I saw myself, too, broken on the ground, trying to get up, the words WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ARE GOING staring me in the face.

The trees all around us were beginning to be absorbed by the darkness. A great blue heron rose, like the ghost of a pterodactyl, and flapped off into the last remnants of an eggplant sunset, as Vernal paid for our tickets and pulled into the ferry line-up. We had an hour to kill before the ferry departed. I told Vernal I needed to stretch my legs and when I got out a fine mist of rain licked at my face, but I didn't mind; it felt like stars coming out all over my skin. The seagulls wheeled above me, around the flag that had snapped alive in the rising wind, and made me think of the congregations of dishevelled pelicans who kept dropping out of the sky like wind-blown umbrellas on the Tranquilandian coast, hundreds of them gliding south, that the locals told me meant rain. It rained the day I arrived in the City of Orchids and it rained the day I left. When all our other options had been exhausted, I'd taken Angel to a
curandero
, a faith healer, in that desperate place, an endless perfume factory of trees shedding their bright flowers on narrow roads where women fried fish on hot plates made from the ends of forty-four gallon drums, placed over dangerous-looking fires. I remembered rows of blackened huts, the passages between them stagnant chasms of sludge, silt and litter where small black pigs rooted for anything they could eat. And birds, wheeling above me that now brought back memories of my son.

Sometimes
any
memory of another can be godlike. I walked to the end of the wharf where I could hear the sound of each raindrop hitting the sea — each drip making a ripple that spread out from the centre — the lapping of waves. Looking down into the water I saw a white plastic bag billowing beneath the surface, caught in the current like a drowned swan.

A hard rain began to pelt the dock, the wind got up in gusts, and was soon whipping the flag so hard the
thwacking
sounds echoed out from the pole it was attached to. An announcement came for all passengers bound for Kliminawhit to return to their vehicles for loading. I wasn't dressed for weather like this, anyway, and sprinted back to the hearse, noting how much space the car behind us had left between his vehicle and ours. Not only do people dislike seeing a hearse, they especially don't like waiting in line behind one.

The lane next to us had filled up with a posse of RV's, with names like Rustler and Nomad and Wilderness Trails, implying their drivers spent a lot of time avoiding main roads, when the opposite was true. Parked beside us was a truck with MOTHER CLUCKERS painted on the side. The noises coming from the truck's cargo, packed together in crates the size of egg cartons, reminded me of the sounds some women on the Condemned Row made in their sleep.

I climbed in beside Vernal as the cars ahead of us began to move.

Rainwater beaded down the window as we drove onto the ferry like any ordinary couple riding towards their future in a hearse.

Vernal found something to keep me dry — a grey waterproof cape he kept in his Emergency Preparedness Kit behind the driver's seat. It fit over my head and shoulders, and was several sizes too big. “It'll keep the rain from getting in, that's what matters,” Vernal said.

We climbed the stairs to the main passenger deck. Vernal stopped at the purser's desk to pick up the key to our cabin and to book a table for dinner in the Fine Dining Lounge where he said he'd meet me in fifteen minutes. I stepped through two heavy doors onto the outside deck and smelled salt on the wind. A series of steel benches had been bolted to the deck and manacled to thick black posts at either end, as if someone were afraid the benches would be stolen. Piles of chain dotted the deck, coiled like great black helpings of spaghetti.

I heard the throb of the engine change pitch, and felt the ferry lurch beneath me. I leaned into the wind, pressing myself against the railing. As we slipped out of the dock and entered open water I reached into my pocket for the Latrine's ID, and dropped it over the ship's side, watching it stutter on the breeze until it landed on the foam and was swallowed in the ship's wake.
Ocean look way-blue, way it do on TV,
I heard Rainy whisper.
Any ocean blue, not just on TV,”
Frenchy shot back and then their otherworldly voices were drowned out by a recorded announcement welcoming us aboard.

I went back inside and followed the signs to the dining lounge where I leaned against the door, feeling self-conscious in my ill-fitting rain cape. I waited until I got tired of waiting, then fell in behind a party of revellers who stumbled into one another as they tried to negotiate their way through the Driftwood Bar door. I had never felt at home in a bar — Vernal's home away from home. I looked around for him, the way women for hundreds of years have done, standing lost in the doorway of a pub or lounge, wondering who they are married to and why it has come to this.

I spotted him at once. Vernal nearly always chose a corner table, farthest from the drink, as if trying to keep as far away from temptation as possible. Before I'd left him and moved into my own apartment, he'd always kept his commodity in the liquor cabinet in the living room and made the trip back and forth — from his office or outside by the pool or to wherever he did his drinking. He didn't like to have the bottle within arm's reach, believing this was the first sign of addiction, and that getting up and going to another room and then pouring a drink meant you had were not powerless over alcoholism.

On Vernal's right sat the most unattractive man I had ever seen, and I'd seen a lot of human ugliness, both inside and out. His skin, the colour of canned tuna, bore deep circular pockmarks.

A pregnant woman dressed in a short, sleeveless, loose-fitting tunic made of deer hide, combed the man's knotted waist-length mullet with the fingers of her right hand. She had eyes the same colour as the middle of a Mars Bar, so big they seemed to swallow the rest of her face, and cheekbones you could cut yourself on just from looking, and she cradled a little bundle in the crook of her other arm. She looked too young to be a mother, and to be expecting again so soon. Her own hair fell from her shoulders, a tantrum of red, which, if you weren't beautiful and fearless, you might consider an affliction. She was tall, almost too thin —
she be dying or else she be rich
, Rainy whispered. She'd slipped off her sandals, and kicked them under Vernal's chair.

As I stood watching, the woman leaned down and kissed the man I could barely stand to look at, the way new lovers do. Maybe he hadn't always been so ugly, I thought. Maybe he'd been handsome once and then, after the acid had disfigured him, she'd stayed with him out of the goodness of her heart: when you were beautiful you could squander goodness. Perhaps, being so beautiful, she didn't know how to be unkind.

I considered sneaking out, going to wait for Vernal in our cabin, but then remembered — Vernal had the key. Besides, it was too late — he had seen me, and was signalling me over.

I slid in next to him, and he introduced me — as “a ghost from the past” — to Grace Moon and her friend, Al. Grace, who had a soft, feline quality, wore three carved gold bracelets on one arm, a giant key and a medicine pouch around her neck. I saw her scarred throat, the stitches stretching from one side of her neck to the other.

When she reached across the table to shake my hand, I saw more scars up her arms — slash-marks that followed her veins all the way from her wrists to her elbows — not just your run-of-the-mill cry for help. Rainy used to say Frenchy was lucky to have scars you could see, what was the use of having scars on the inside where you couldn't show them off to anyone? Where another girl might have had a broken heart tattooed on her breast, or a handcuff with a broken link on her wrist, Frenchy spent a lifetime tattooing her rage on her skin, bringing blood to the surface where everyone could see her pain.

I pulled my hand back, startled, as the bundle in Grace's lap let out an inhuman wail. Grace lifted him into the air and began rocking him with such fervour I worried she was going to shake to death the source of the terrible sound.

“I'd kill for a fix right now,” Al muttered into his beer. His ugliness had not improved with proximity.

Grace's tawny eyes looked frozen gold, and her smile clicked off. “That's just Al,” she said, looking at me apologetically, as if being “just Al” were an excuse for any kind of bad behaviour. She rocked the inconsolable creature in her arms; Al — not, I hoped, the baby's father — reached up and pushed his snagged locks out of his eyes, which was when I noticed his forearm covered in sores, the kind Rainy used to get from the repeated use of dirty needles. I
wanted
to feel sorry for Al, but I didn't have enough sorry in me for anyone that unpleasant.

“He can't help it — he's programed that way,” Grace said, looking down at the bundle in her arms, and then back at Al. I didn't know whether she meant the baby, or “just Al”.

Vernal rubbed the stubble on his chin with the heel of his hand. I could tell, by the fewness of his words, he was uncomfortable being around Al. Al wanted us to know this was their anniversary, the reason they were celebrating; he'd met Grace exactly one week ago when he was fresh out of rehab and looking for a buzz. Grace said she had stayed off drugs ever since her visit to the hospital to have photographs taken of the baby inside her — but she'd let him buy her one for the road. Grace drank her beer straight from the bottle, draining it, then, when the bottle was empty, picking at a corner of the label and peeling it off in little strips.

“She's drinking for two,” Al said.

Grace lowered her eyes — now she was the one looking embarrassed. She said she believed her baby was going to be born with special powers — she had heard him drumming and singing from the inside of her. She reached into the pouch around her neck and took out a grainy ultrasound photo of her unborn child, stroking his tiny body, lightly, up and down, with her index finger, the way I had stroked my baby's eyelids when he was fitful or too tired to fall asleep.