Just Beneath My Skin (8 page)

EVERY SPRING WHEN HE WAS
home Jake would take me up to the top of Harmony Lake Road in spring near the river to smash June bugs with badminton rackets. They made a loud “pop” when we hit them and we smacked the bugs right out of the air. Jake kept score and I always won. Once I killed forty-two June bugs in one night. I asked Jake once if it wasn't a sin to murder June bugs.

“Naw,” said Jake. “They don't feel. No bug feels.”

I wondered sometimes though.

Sometimes I wondered if everything didn't feel.

But we did it anyway, because Jake said it was something he used to do when he was a kid at his house in Middlebridge and I liked to do things with Jake that he used to do when he was a kid. Like go with him to the North River fair in September and get on the Ferris wheel and look out over everything from way up high. Sometimes the wheel stopped with us on top and the chair rocked back and forth and I was scared. But Jake said not to be.

“It's safe, squirt,” he said. “Just enjoy the view.”

I told Jake it didn't look like North River at all.

“My old man always said when he took me up here when I was a kid that it was a ‘God's eye view.'”

“What's that mean, Jake?”

Jake laughed. “You know what, squirt? I have no idea.”

That was the same month Mom made Jake burn his papers, and though we were up high and at the fair and Jake would get me cotton candy after I was sad. I could tell Jake was getting ready to leave, even though he never said anything to Mom or to me, and I was wondering if it wouldn't be for good. I almost asked him, but the Ferris wheel started again and we were spun back to the ground.

I START TO WALK DOWN
along the river towards the eddies below the falls. If it was summer and the river was low I could have made it all the way across on the rocks at practically any point above or below without getting so much as a wet sneaker. But in August the water starts to rise, and by late September, after the fall rains, the river runs fast and wide and unbroken from Memragouche Lake to the ocean twenty miles away in Oldsport. The water is colder and the current swifter than she looks. I need to be careful where I step in. I think if I can get across the river here I can get out to the Highway #7 and hitch or walk to Carla's. I don't give thought to what will happen when I get there, or how I'm supposed to get back to the city without the Pinto.

Below the second eddy is a place they call the salmon pool, where the salmon spawned before the acid rain killed them off, where the out-of-town fisherman would line the banks with their fly rods every May and June hoping to catch a salmon griltz. Below that is the narrows, where the river pinches off to no more than a stone's throw across, and runs shallow over rocks and sand for a quarter mile before she deepens and broadens and ambles on her way again. I decide to cross here. By the looks of it, the water isn't deep and I can get across no problem. I step in with my Nikes on. The water is freezing, and the current, even in these shallows, is strong, tugging at my legs and threatening to carry me off my feet and down the river if I'm not careful. For a moment when I first wade into the river, it feels like I'm above myself again, staring down, and suddenly I feel the fool. Why don't I face Johnny Lang anyway, instead of running off like a scared cat and ending up here, knee-deep and half-froze to death in the river? But Johnny has a gun, I tell myself, and I don't. Maybe in a fair fight I could take him. And even if I couldn't I would have the satisfaction of trying. But with Johnny there's no such thing as a fair fight. If I try, and get killed, what will happen to Nathan?

There's no such thing as heroes. Anyone who stands up to Johnny Lang has to be stupid. Most would end up dragging their chicken ass across the river in September 'cause they don't want to wind up dead. I wade further into the river, thinking this and that, and trying not to think about the water as it rises around me. I stop and gently place each foot ahead before I step, arms lifted to keep them dry, and so I won't lose my balance and go under. Then the bed of the river dips and the water reaches my nuts and the world turns blue for a minute. I gasp at the shock of it. The current pulls and pushes and is getting harder to fight. The river gurgles and murmurs and tugs seductively as it breaks around my waist, but I keep pushing on.

“Hey McNeil.”

I don't bother to turn. There I am, standing in the middle of the river, my arms raised and water now up to my chest, and there's Johnny standing on the shore behind me. Maybe he had me in his sights all along and was waiting for me to wade into the river where I wouldn't be able to get away.

“Turn around,” he says.

Slowly, a few steps at a time, I shuffle around against the current 'til I am facing Johnny, arms still raised like I am being held up in a cheesy Western. Johnny stands there on the bank, holding the gun loosely at his waist but pointing at me. He's smiling. “You're fucked, McNeil,” he says. “I wasn't going to shoot you. Just scare you a little. But now I am.”

“I know,” I say, as Johnny slowly lifts the gun to his shoulder and aims it at my face. I close my eyes and wait for it. For whatever comes next. Let it be quick, I pray, though I don't believe in my father's God, or in any God at all. The shot comes. The explosion echoes up and down the river and suddenly I am under water and being carried away by the current and, for a while, in my confusion, I'm certain this is what death is, this cold swift numbness, this travelling towards something, God knows what, and the bittersweet milk-blue relief of not having to fight the current any longer.

MOM COMES BACK FROM TOWN
at seven without Jake. She has a six-pack of beer under her arm. I don't know where she got the money and I don't ask. Maybe she borrowed it from Irene against what Jake was gonna give her. She opens one and sits down at the kitchen table. After a while she tells me to come and sit with her a bit.

“You remember when you was little, and me and Jake used to take turns doin' airplanes with you around the room?”

I nod. I remember once Mom was drinking and she dropped me and Jake yelled at her. She might have remembered too, for next she says, “You remember when you fell down and broke your collarbone, and Dr. Bell had to set it, and you wore a sling to school that year?”

“I remember.”

Whenever Mom drinks she plays the remember game. It's like she's sad for things that happened a long time ago, though I don't remember things being any different than they are now except for missing Jake. But I like when Mom gets this way. Sometimes she calls me “hon” and ruffles my hair like Jake used to do. Sometimes, though, she cries, and I can't tell what she's crying about. And sometimes she gets mad and throws things, or just passes out in her bed when she's had enough. Tonight though she stops the remember game, looks at the clock above the sink, which says it's ten past seven, and then out the window.

“He ain't comin',” she says.

I know better than to say anything, though I think she's wrong.

“If he was comin',” she says, “he'd be here by now, wouldn't he?”

She looks at me, and I stay in my chair looking at her like I don't know what she's saying. “Never mind,” she says. “Get me another beer from the fridge.”

If Jake's coming, I think, he better hurry up, 'cause she's gonna be drunk as a skunk by the time he gets here. Mom makes me turn on the radio to
CKBW
, where they're playing the top ten country countdown, and she gets up and forces me to dance with her to Ricky Skaggs. After, she's winded and has to sit down. The Silver Fox is next, who Mom doesn't like. We sit and listen to the radio. Outside it starts raining again, and when the knock comes at the door we don't know who it could be. We didn't hear a car, so it can't be Jake, and Mom doesn't think it's Irene out in the rain and she doesn't come after dinner anyway. She tells me to get it and I open the door and there's Jake, soaked and shivering on the stoop with no Pinto behind him, and a bad scratch on his cheek and his wet hair plastered flat to his head and frowning a little like Jake always does.

“Heyya squirt,” Jake says.

PART II

NORTH RIVER USED TO BE
called Saakawachkik by the Indians. My father says the word means “old one,” and North River is really named after a woman who used to live in the Mi'kmaq village who was a witch. When we were kids we used to go to the old village — we knew it as the Indian Gardens — and hunt for arrowheads along the banks of the Memragouche. Sometimes we even saw some real Indians there — an old man in galoshes from the Wildcat Reserve setting muskrat traps along the shore, or a younger man hunting bear or deer with his rifle on the reserve lands that bordered the gardens. Johnny Lang had some Indian blood in him from his mother's side, and he spent some time hunting on the reserve, and once or twice took me with him. He didn't introduce me to any of his friends on the reserve, though I knew he had some; we always stuck to the woods. Sometimes we'd see a carload of reserve boys in North River, shooting the drag on Saturday night or parked behind the Masonic Hall drinking and smoking joints. They were always in a beat-up station wagon or old van with rims and rocker panels painted with mud from the Reserve Road. Johnny called their cars “Injun Engines,” though he was care ful where and when he said it. Even Johnny Lang knew not to fuck with Wildcat Reserve boys.

MY FATHER WOULD NOT ADMIT
it, but Johnny Lang wasn't the only one with Indian blood in him. My father's hair was raven black and his skin as brown as a chestnut. I found out later my grandmother, who wanted my father to become a preacher, was born on the reserve, though she was adopted into a white family in North River when she was very young and didn't admit to coming from Wildcat at all.

It was my grandfather who told me about it.

“Sure,” he said to me, one Sunday afternoon in August when we were turning the hay over in the fields with pitchforks to let it dry. I was fifteen then, and I came out to work at the farm alongside my granddad as much as I could. “Your grandmother's as Injun as they come, and so is your father. You ain't never noticed?”

“None much,” I say.

“Your grandmother don't like to talk about it, and I'll be a crossed goose if I ever held it against a woman where she come from or whose people she was born into. But she was raised white, which is what counts.”

It wasn't long after I went with my father to the Sunday service on the reserve. Twice a month my father would go there and preach at the community hall on Sunday night, and most times he took me with him. Mostly old people came, and sat in the wooden chairs and listened to my father go on about the Lord Our God. An old Mi'kmaq woman sat beside me and whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “You the preacher's son?”

I nodded, and she said, “Your father come from here.”

“From where?” I whispered back, though I already knew because of my grandfather. My father heard us talking and shot me a look from where he stood at his pulpit, which was a metal music stand where he kept his reading glasses and the papers for his sermon.

“From
here
,” hissed the old woman. She didn't once look at me — she kept her eyes glued all the while on my father, who was telling us about Jesus coming to the river Jordan to be baptized by John. “Your father's part of us. That makes you part of us, too, though not as much a part as he is.”

It made sense to me then, why they let my father preach twice a month at the Wildcat community hall. And why some of the old Mi'kmaq women like the one who sat beside me, Saakawachkik, half-smiled to themselves and lowered their eyes to the floor while he spoke of Jesus and salvation.

I WAS BORN ON A
Sunday. I had blue eyes. Jake said the brightest things about me were my eyes. Mom said that proved Jake wasn't my father because he had brown eyes. But I heard Jake tell her once that his mother had blue eyes and I must have got them from her. I never met Jake's mother, but I can picture her sometimes.

JAKE COMES INTO THE HOUSE
and I say, “Jake? Where's your leather?”

Jake looks at me and shrugs. Mom gets up from the table and I can see she's feeling her beer and I look at Jake and know he can see it too. “Hi Carla,” he says.

“Hello Jake. You're a sight for sore eyes.”

He is too. He's soaked through and through and his hair is sticking up and his eyes are red, like he's been drinking, or crying. Mom tells me to run in the bathroom and get Jake a towel. By the time I get out Jake is sitting down and Mom's staring at him like she's never seen him before. She keeps plucking at the lint on her slacks and shifting in her seat and taking sips of her beer. Jake isn't saying anything, just staring down at his hands folded on the table. I hand him the towel.

“Thanks, squirt,” he says.

“You're welcome, Jake,” I say and I watch as he starts drying off his face and hair.

“So what you been up to?” Mom says.

“You know,” says Jake. “Working.”

Jake lays the towel down on the table and Mom starts playing with the corner of it. I take a seat between them, though neither of them looks at me. Mom's looking at Jake and Jake's still staring at his hands. Outside the rain is falling harder. I can hear it drumming on the roofs of Jake's cars-on-blocks. That makes me think of something.

“Where's your Pinto, Jake?” I ask him.

“At Johnny Lang's,” Jake says.

“What's it doing there?” asks Mom. Jake doesn't answer. Mom tells me to get another beer from the fridge.

“You want one, Jake?” I ask. Mom shoots me a look. Jake shakes his head. I get the beer from the fridge, open it, and take it to Mom and sit back down.

“I got something to say,” Jake says.

“Say it,” says Mom, and it's like something has passed between them while my back was turned. Mom doesn't look nervous around Jake anymore, and Jake looks like he's lost something or he doesn't know where he's at. I wonder if he's upset because of his leather. I wonder if it has something to do with my dream of Jake in the forest with the gun and the purple smoke.

“I want Nathan,” Jake says.

For a minute I don't know what Jake is saying. But Mom acts like she knows. She takes a long drink of her beer, sets the bottle down, and squints hard at Jake.

“Over my dead body,” she says.

“He's mine as much as yours,” Jake says. “You've had him long enough.”

“He ain't yours at all,” Mom says. “You ain't got nothin' to do with him. He belongs to someone else.”

Jake sighs. He looks really, really tired, like he used to when he'd come home Fridays from the mill in his dungarees, covered in sawdust and reeking of diesel. He'd fall asleep on the couch in the living room in front of the
TV
without changing.

“He's mine,” Jake says. “You know it and I know it, and everyone else knows it too.”

“You can't prove it,” Mom says. “There ain't nothin' on his birth certificate. I told 'em I didn't know.”

“There's tests,” Jake says. “I can get one and prove it.”

“And who's got the money for that?” Mom says.

“I got money,” Jake says.

Mom takes another drink of her beer. “How much money you got, Jake?”

Jake looks at me, then back at Mom. “Send him out,” he says. “We shouldn't be talking about this in front of him.”

Mom looks at me. “Git,” she says.

“But Jake —” I say, and Mom reaches out to hit me.

He reaches out and grabs her arm. “Don't you fucking dare.”

“Fuck you!” Mom screams. “Fuck you, Mister Jake fuckin' hotshot McNeil.”

“Git,” Jake says, and I get up and run into my room while Mom is screaming at Jake.