How Loveta Got Her Baby (7 page)

fog

IT WAS A
busy day and a lucky one for them, the day they ran over Aaron Stoodley in the fog. They could have killed him but they didn't, just by accident got involved in the event that turned his life around. It even gave them, Henry and Eunice, a leg up too, as it turned out.

It was a Monday, so Queenie and Henry and Eunice had to get up early. Eunice had the job—she did the laundry down at the nursing home. There was a lot of drooling there, and worse, so Eunice went in part-time. Turn-around time on the sheets, the towels, the washcloths was critical, according to Mrs. Hann. She could lose her license. So even though the visibility outside was down to zero, off they had to go. The rain was hanging out there like a shroud. Little Queenie materialized out of the mist like a mummer, held her shiny black purse with the gold chain out in front of her. You wouldn't know the ocean was anywhere, it was so quiet.

They drove real slowly, to keep out of trouble. Henry could barely see the ornament on the hood, and all the wipers did was move the water off till it layered up again.

As usual, it was Queenie's job to spot the stop signs. Two years old, but she was smart, dependable. If she didn't shout out “Stop Sign,” he'd drive right through like he was stunned. He had it all figured out, which made it perfectly safe. He stared straight ahead, looked out of the side of his eyes without moving them at all. All you got to do if you want to try it sometimes, is raise your eyebrows.

They'd all laugh when he did that, it made the seventeen miles into town seem like nothing at all. There were only two of those stop signs before the yellow flasher downtown, and when Queenie shouted out “Stop Sign,” Henry would stop right off and say, “Oh my God thank you, Pasquena, if it hadn't been for you we'd have gone through that stop sign.”

And Eunice would say, “Good for you, Queenie.”

They were used to fog, thick fog off the Grand Banks. It was a fact of life. Henry learned to drive long ago by the feel of the Goodyears; he wove his way back and forth ever so slightly from the blacktop to the shoulder, he felt the gravel kick up under the floorboards, turned back again to the pavement, snaked up and down the right side of the road. They kept the radio off so they could hear and feel the sound of the gravel kicking up.

Ten miles an hour, tops.

“Stop sign!”

Sure enough there it was off the right fender. Queenie was quick, even after forty minutes of nothing. Seven more miles, that meant.

Henry put on the brakes and came to a nice little stop.

“Oh my God, thank you, Pasquena,” he said.

“Queenie, good for you,” said Eunice.

They started back up again.

“Maybe, Eunice, ask for a raise? Seven dollars an hour, we'd at least pay for gas.”

“I know. We got to go west, Henry, I think, the tar sands.”

“Alberta? I don't know about that, that means a ferry ride. Could make Queenie sick.”

Henry had once been on the Fortune to St. Pierre ferry on a rough day. There'd been a lot of heavers on that trip, and to tell the truth, he got queasy himself. One guy by the rail had berry pie and carrots stuck in his beard. He should never have looked windward when he threw up his lunch. Sometimes it just happens though, it catches you unawares.

“Stop sign!”

No sign of let-up in the fog.

“Queenie, you're some sharp. Now watch for the turn-in.”

One hundred yards now to the Fiddler's Green Rest Home, best guess. Henry relaxed but kept the car at a crawl. It was a damn nice situation, the heater was kicked in, the three of them were happy, solid as could be. Still no sign of the yellow flasher though. All of a sudden Henry felt a thump somewhere near where Eunice sat, and then there was this bump, a kind of soft jar, they all felt it. It came up through the front right tire.

“Jeez, what was that?”

He stopped the car dead. The rear wheel hadn't bumped up yet.

“I saw nothing out there,” said Eunice.

“A moose, a bear?” said Henry.

“Something, that's for sure.”

They sat there and they listened.

“Eunice, you hear something?”

“Aaron Stoodley,” Queenie said.

“No,” said Eunice, “quiet, don't say anything. Listen.”

There. Henry thought he could hear a moan. He wasn't sure. There was still no sign of wind, nothing out there to make a sound like that.

“Jeez,” he said, “I don't know.”

“Henry, get out of the car.”

“Eunice, just open your window first, take a look down.”

Henry knew a trucker who hit a bull moose on the Trans-Canada near Gander, got out to investigate and then bang, his friend got skewered through and through by the rack of the moose. Mind you, that animal was dead, his neck was snapped and broken on impact, but the nervous system was still alive, the antlers kicked and thrashed on their own. Struck poor Mr. John Fudge right through the heart and he bled to death right there. The Mounties had to close the highway, call in the clean-up crew. They had to use Industrial Dust-Bane, that's what Henry heard.

Eunice rolled her window down.

“Can't see a thing.”

She was leaning half-way out of the car by then, her jeans lifted right off the vinyl.

For sure a kind of low-pitched groaning sound came from what seemed to be just under the middle of the stalled car. It didn't sound like a wild animal.

“Eunice, Queenie, I'm getting out now.”

It had to be done. For safekeeping, he popped out the keys and gave them to Eunice. He left the headlights on just in case, but he didn't want to get blinded so he went around in the red glow of the back fender, feeling his way alongside the car, sidling through the fog like he was Sherlock Holmes. Carefully, he stepped up to the passenger side. Then his boots hit something soft and the softness moaned out.

“Henry,” it said.

“Oh Jeez, Aaron Stoodley. You're no bloody moose.”

He was lying there at right angles to the car, just under where Eunice sat. His skinny legs were half-under and in the backwash from the lights you could see the tire prints on his overalls, round about the knees. They'd run him over sure enough, but they'd missed his head, his vitals.

Eunice opened up her door.

“Hey Eunice,” Aaron Stoodley said, “help me.”

Henry bent down. Aaron must have been outside for some time before they bumped over him. His woolen coat was sodden through.

Eunice then stepped out her door, and, blinded by the mix of fog and lights, she brought her boot and her weight down by accident on Aaron's lower stomach.

“Oh my,” Aaron said.

His legs bent up all of a sudden till they were stopped by the bottom of the car.

“Eunice, he's moving those legs just fine!” said Henry.

Things were beginning to look up.

“Let's pull him out from under now,” said Eunice. “Queenie, don't you go too far away.”

Queenie had gotten out of the car too. She was bent down playing in the grass, in the ditch grass, putting pebbles in her purse.

Eunice and Henry took an armpit each and pulled Aaron Stoodley out from under the car. They were careful, like first-aiders. Then they bent him up ninety degrees at the waist and they watched him work his legs real slow, up and down, flexing his knees. There was no blood anywhere. They half-lifted him, half-pushed him and sat him up against the back door. His head was kind of lolling around like one of those rear-window travelling dogs.

“Stand up, Aaron Stoodley!”

That was Eunice. She'd had enough, and now she was late for work.

“Put him in the back, Henry, sort of fold him up.”

They bent him double and Eunice got the back door open and they slid him in.

“Queenie! Get in the car, pronto,” said Eunice.

Henry took the keys back from Eunice, revved her up and eased down gently on the accelerator and then it was finally through the yellow flasher and there they were at the Fiddler's Green. Eunice got out with her ponytail, and though Henry couldn't see it for the fog, he knew that Mrs. Hann would be right there to say hello. The first few times, when Eunice first went to work, Mrs. Hann waited by the frosted doors—the ones you couldn't see through— and said, “Miss Cluett, it's ten seconds to eight o'clock.”

Now they were friends. She'd backed off watching like a hawk.

So there they were, just Queenie and Henry and the run-over Aaron Stoodley. Aaron obviously needed to be warmed up so they went to the Trepassey Inn for a cup of tea. They opened early there because, for the owners, there was nothing better to do. A perfect place, really, for customers. Aaron was like a cripple up the steps but they landed him safe and sound at the first table. Henry ordered green Jello for Queenie, which made her happy right off. They hung Aaron's coat up on a hook beside the table, and they watched it drip, start puddles on the floor.

“Aaron, that's the first time ever that I ran someone over.”

Aaron had a sip of his tea and shook his head.

“Henry, I lost it all. Lost all of my money.”

“Ran over your legs, though, that's all. Slow and smooth, and it looks like it was pretty much painless.”

“Nine thousand dollars, cash money. Oh my God.”

Henry then added a squirt of extra Top Whip to Queenie's Jello. It was good Jello, firm and well cooled. She picked up a lime-green cube of it in her fingers, turned it this way and that, held it up to the light and examined the surface striations.

“The money was like a package, solid, wrapped in one of those fat elastic bands. I dropped it out there, somewhere.”

“Had I driven, Aaron, I tell you, with less care or without the girls, I'd have flattened your head. We would not be having this conversation.”

“I think I must have pulled it out by mistake. Got my gloves out of my pocket, that's when it must have happened. Fell out. I patted my pocket where the money was. Where's it gone? Fallen to the ground, that's the only place. Nothing but darkness. Down I went on my hands and my knees, the whole night long, four, five hours and the fog, what, an inch away? Not even that. A blind man, hopeless. Finally, I'm played out, I lie down. Bang, sometime later you run me over.”

Aaron Stoodley was making no sense. He never had anything like that kind of money.

“A thousand dollars I'd give, as a reward, to get hold of that money again.”

Talking to Aaron that morning was like squeezing the bottom of a tube of Pepsodent. There was toothpaste in there somewhere but it took a half hour to drag his story out in some kind of sequence.

It seems that about three weeks ago Aaron got a letter with two names he never heard of at the top corner. Lawyers in Halifax, it turned out. They wanted to give Mr. Aaron Stoodley nine thousand dollars because some relatives of his had died over there, on the mainland, and somehow the money they left had come down to him. These distant relations had all died from botulism, sadly—they were young—all at one go, their food full of poison and down they went, all in a terrible heap. He asked his grandmother, Priscilla, “We're related to these boys?” “Yes, yes it's terrible, death visited upon them so cruelly. Such young men. Cousins, what a shame.”

Aaron drove all the way to St. John's, to the bank, as instructed, to see if it could possibly be true.

To his eternal wonderment and surprise, it was. He was handed the money by a lady in a suit. A real cheque with red numbers, but Aaron asked for it, “Please, please, in cash.” “No problem, Mr. Stoodley, here you go,” and she wrapped the dollar bills and snapped a big elastic band around them, cinching them at the waist.

He left the bank and walked down Water Street like a merchant prince.

Queenie switched to red-cube Jello for her second helping. She was quiet, always deep in thought for a girl her age, “still waters” as Eunice said. She wrinkled her forehead. She was never any trouble at all to take care of. Read her a book, sing her a song, she was happy.

She dipped her hand in and out of her purse and looked at Aaron Stoodley.

“Despite my riches, Henry,” Aaron said, “I was still suffering, I was sore at heart. How'd you feel if your distant relatives up and died like that, so many, so young, and so all at once?”

“I wouldn't feel good about that,” said Henry.

Aaron didn't spend a penny of his inheritance in St. John's. He came right back last night just as the fog came rolling in as thick as eiderdown, but damned if he didn't decide right then and there to walk one mile out of town. He was headed for Ed's Convenience Store, a sort of Shangri-La for Aaron Stoodley. The store had been for sale non-stop for seven years, and no way could he go by it without a turn of melancholy. He wanted to buy it. He wanted to buy it despite the fact that ten or maybe twenty cars a day went by. Once he tried to buy it on credit, on a promise.

“No money no way,” is what Ed said to him, “you already owes me twenty dollars on red licorice. Some fool am I.”

So now, when suddenly he had the funds, Aaron walked into the fog. A chill set in and he turned up his collar, pulled out his gloves, put them on, slapped his palms together in one of those surges of happiness and stepped out into the night. It was not until he'd gone twenty steps that he tapped his coat pocket, tapped it to feel the reassuring great chunk of money that was his. It was gone. The road-bed slanted hard into the ditch, the grass was thick, matted, invisible. For hours then, he crawled every inch of the path he'd taken, on his hands and knees, and he rolled gravel under his fingertips, raked through freezing puddles until pain and numbness were his constant companions and he cursed his own foolishness.

Then, as they all knew, Henry and the girls ran him over.

“I'd give a thousand dollars, Henry, to find it.”

Wishful thinking, Henry thought, but understandable. Anything could disappear out there in the wilds and never be seen again.