Saltwater Cowboys (13 page)

“First, as in Albertans. Give us those seats; we don't want no eastern bums and creeps stealing our chairs.”

Peter rose and stood within an inch of the cowboy's hairy nostrils, pustules on the end of his nose red and inflamed.

“We will sit wherever we damn well want,” Peter said.

The cowboy laughed, and a tight speck of wound-up snot flew out of his whistling nose.

Peter raised a fist and grunted, and the cowboy backed away. Jack stood up sharply and jetted toward Peter, hovering behind his back. The first punch made the cowboy stagger. He took a few steps back and then charged.

The women in the bar screamed and ran for the exit, stumbling in their salt-stained heeled leather boots. The men crowded around and cheered raucously. The first punch Jack took knocked him flat. A chair was upon him in an instant, four spindly wooden legs like tent pegs around his head. He got out from under the chair to see Peter held up against the wall by the throat, the cowboys alternately pummelling his belly with fierce punches.

A few of the other miners had pulled the cowboys off Peter, who had fallen to the ground. Jack was dumbfounded. His best friend, the man who had won all the diving contests, the drag races, and who had scored the most goals on the hockey team, lay slumped in the corner, beaten up, humiliated, brought to his knees by the west, no hero here, just a stranger, a newly arrived and unwanted stranger.

Jack moved gingerly through the debris, lifted Peter's bloody body from the beer-soaked floor, and perched him on his shoulder. Bobbi approached from the side and took his other shoulder.

Jack deposited Peter in the truck and sat beside him.

“Let me drive,” Bobbi said softly and dug through Peter's pockets for the keys. “He'll be alright,” she added soothingly.

Jack didn't say a word. He kept an arm around Peter, one hand over the bloody cuts, the other pinched around his own nostrils.

Bobbi got in on the driver's side and turned on the truck. The forced heat was slow to warm the air. She kept one hand on the wheel and blew into a cupped hand at her mouth. The truck moved slowly across the icy parking lot. The tight wheels creaked and scratched over the ice like a dried-up scuttling winter leaf, brittle and cold. She drove cautiously along the barren highway back to town.

The headlights illuminated something moving on the side of the road. Jack looked out the window as they passed, straight into the glittering eyes of a sleek red fox, thin and hungry, scavenging alongside the road. It rose and fell on its haunches as it swiped at a few crimson dogberries dangling on a bush.

“Look, a fox,” Bobbi said and pointed.

Jack looked from the fox to the blood dripping from his nose onto his hands, crusting on the sleeve of his winter coat and Peter curled up beside him, defenseless and meek.

“Where does he live?” she asked.

“First right past Birch Street.”

The house lights were on at Peter's. Wanda paced by the window. They carefully took Peter out of the truck, struggled through a freshly fallen mountain of snow, and brought him into the house. They lowered him onto the couch. Wanda stifled a moan and rushed off to get ointment, medicine, and bandages.

“Hey, buddy,” Jack whispered in Peter's ear, “you're home now, you're gonna be alright.” He headed to the door and climbed back into the truck with Bobbi.

Bobbi backed out of the driveway and turned left.

“You're going the wrong way. I live down the hill from Peter, not this way,” he shouted.

“I'll turn around at the end of the street —”

Bobbi swerved too far to the right and they drifted straight into a snow bank at the top of the hill, bordered by heavy trees on either side. The truck stalled.

“Oh for the love of,” Jack said and slammed his fists onto the dashboard.

“I'm sorry,” she said softly.

He rested his head in his hands.

Through the windshield they could see the aurora borealis, iridescent green and yellow flicking tongues of light, wobbling above them. They quivered across the sky like a baby's fingers, delicate yet fierce and full of life.

“It's beautiful,” she whispered. “My grandmother Maki, from Finland, used to call the northern lights Fox Fires. They were called
revontulet
and were thought to be caused by foxes. Look at them,” Bobbi said, pointing upward.

Jack wasn't listening. He thought of Peter losing all of his money, the debt load, and the shame of letting Wanda down. Beaten up in a bar by some redneck cowboys claiming territory. Jack's own shame at letting him down, of not being able to defend him properly, and above all the longing for home, the safety of it, the comfort of it, gone.

A tear trickled down his cheek, pausing to swell like the bottom of a water balloon then cascading down the side of his face and disappearing into the collar of his red plaid shirt. She moved in beside him and he reached out to touch her cheek. As they curled into one another, heavy clumps of snow, as white as apple flesh, splattered on the hood of the truck. It streamed down over the warm windshield like tears.

Jack pushed the truck out of the snow bank and watched her drive off. He stared meekly after the grey truck, wondering if he smelled like her, if any of her blonde hairs were stuck to his clothes — thank God she'd had a condom in her purse.

He walked glumly toward the mobile home in the distance. It looked soft and gentle, like cream-coloured nougat under a nest of thick snow. Flakes and wind were arching and peaking, cresting and rolling on the roof. His heart plunged in his chest. Pangs of fear, self-loathing, and guilt rose sharply, knifed his stomach and tightened the muscles in his face.

The curtains from the bedroom window were pulled back. Jack quickened his pace.
She knows
, he thought.
She called Wanda, expected me home an hour ago. She's wondering where I am.
Excuses ran through his mind:
Pete's truck broke down, honey, I got stuck in the snowbank, I slipped and fell
. Jack reached down and scooped up a handful of snow, wiped it on his knees and backside and rubbed it in, so he was good and wet.
I'm full of snow, my love, no need to worry, I just fell and passed out for a bit, too much beer
. He laughed out loud, practicing. He reached the trailer, waded through the snow in the driveway, and fumbled as he put his key in the door.

Jack crossed the living room to the bedroom.

“Jack —”

“I'm sorry, honey, I was out with the boys —”

“Jack,” she whispered, clutching her belly, her face jellied with sweat, “take us to the hospital.” She pulled back the comforter to show him blood, heavy with pink and silvery clots, on the white flannel bed sheets.

The hospital in the civic centre was on the ground floor, down the hall from the skating rink, curling club, and community gymnasium. Jack had used the emergency exit that faced the street. The lights blinked lazily, one little bulb dead on its hinges, others listlessly clamouring for life. One nurse and one doctor were on duty, a fellow from Vancouver with a fading British accent. They stood behind the counter, swathed in clipboards and stethoscopes.

“My wife —”

The nurse looked at him sternly, as if his absence, on a Friday night — out drinking with the boys — had much to do with his wife's condition. Her shrunken eyes shrivelled inside a tight, bony face. Her hair parted in the middle, sharp and clean, pulled the skin from her face. The bulk of her hair rested on the nape of her neck in a no-nonsense ponytail.

The doctor smiled sympathetically. “She'll be fine. We see this at least once a week.”

“It's not a high-risk situation,” the nurse said.

“We wheeled in a large bed for the children,” the doctor added quietly as Jack's stoic demeanour crumbled before them.

Jack wondered exactly what else they would see during the week. His mother had been a nursing student in St. John's before she dropped out and came back to Brighton to marry his father. During her internship, she'd told him, she'd seen many drunken husbands staggering in the hospital at all hours, their wives black and blue, the stink of alcohol rampant. They'd offer no apology or excuse, demand a drink, and get caught trying to steal medical supplies, rubbing alcohol, and painkillers. His mother would catch them pilfering open cabinets and drawers that the student nurses had forgotten to lock up. Or they'd pass out on waiting room chairs, sprawling with their zippers undone and their briefs hanging out, while their wives, silently, passively, unflinchingly accepted iodine and the sting of antiseptic on torn skin. The thick surgical thread needed to stich them up was a painless procedure compared to the blows that had brought them here.

“Come on, Mr. McCarthy, we'll bring you to your wife,” the nurse said and put her hand gently on his shoulder. She steered Jack down a wide, dimly lit corridor. Boxy machines littered the hallway, pushed up against the walls, cumbersome and poorly stored outside of examining rooms, the small lab, and patients' rooms. Cardiac machines on wheels, blood units and intravenous machines with clear plastic bags, half empty, slung on thin, erect metal wires like birds splattered against window panes, abject, abandoned, and lifeless. The hospital smelled horrible, like urine and cheap floral cleanser, bitter and soiled, sweet and clean all at once.

The nurse poked her head into a small room. “Mrs. McCarthy?”

“I'm awake,” Angela whispered.

Jack shuffled in quietly as the nurse flicked on the bedside lamp. Angela's damp hair was stuck to her temples and cheeks, the length tangled and knotted on her shoulders. Her skin was damp and flint-grey. Her watery eyes were puffy, her lips cracked and dry.

“I'm sorry —” he said and picked up her pale hand.

“I'm going to lose the baby,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Jack was dumbfounded, speechless. He turned white and threw up in the wastepaper basket by the bed.

“Are you alright?” she asked weakly.

Jack wiped the corners of his mouth and held her hand again.

“The doctor said that once the cervix starts to open there's nothing they can do to stop it.”

“Are they sure?”

“There's a small chance the baby will survive. It could just be bleeding. We'll have to have an ultrasound to see if there's a heartbeat.”

“When?”

“In the morning,” she whispered and began to cry.

Jack wiped her tears carefully with the back of his sleeve, salt-stained from the snow, white marks like waves on his cuffs. He kicked off his winter boots, shucked off his parka, and crawled into the large hospital bed beside her.

As she slept in his arms, Jack reached over to flick off the lamp, and in the darkness, he lay wide awake, his bones and muscles locked with tension and anger, a smattering of tears dribbling down his cheeks, soaking the top of Angela's unruly hair.

Angela lay in bed alone. Jack had taken the girls to stay with Wanda. A pasty-faced nurse with short black hair brought her some tea and eggs. Angela couldn't eat. She felt like she couldn't breathe.

“There was a pop in my abdomen this morning,” she'd told the emergency room doctor last night.

The cramping was almost like labour until she went to bed at midnight, done pacing the room in vain, waiting for Jack, and then the gush of blood came through her sweatpants and over the sheets. This morning when she woke there were three pink blood clots, thick as snails in her underwear. A nurse came to take the breakfast tray away, another to bring her to ultrasound. The diagnostic imaging room smelt salty, the lubricant like runny egg over the sonographer as it was inserted between her weak and tired legs. The nurse typed and sighed, typed and sighed. Shook her head several times, and then Angela knew. She knew the baby wasn't alive. There would be no heartbeat.

She still cried an hour later when the doctor read her the results.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

No heartbeat detected
, she heard over and over, pulsing through her mind, grinding away the shock and its ability to let you believe in lies.

“Go home, get some rest. The hardest part is yet to come,” the doctor said sympathetically.

That night the pain was unbearable. Clumps of red tissue burned their way out in droves. Angela screamed and shook, clutched her abdomen and vomited. She sweated and shivered with cold. Jack silently sat beside her. In the wee hours of the morning Angela got up to use the washroom.

“Want a juice, love?” Jack asked.

“No,” she said and wiped her lips.

After she peed and wiped, a solid pink muscle fell into the palm of her hand. Her three-month-old fetus, one beady eye dislocated, the outline of flipper-like hands and feet, small nubs of fingers and toes already formed, a curled little pink piglet of a body with a misshapen head, deflated, not puffy like the ones in the maternity ward that showed the process of gestation, each fetus in little bubbles, gradually getting bigger and bigger, inside the stomach of an outline of a female body.

Angela screamed dryly. Jack rushed in and stood by her side, trembling with fatigue.

“Our baby,” she said and cried.

He looked on, horrified.

“I didn't know it was going to come out — whole,” she said softly.

“Neither did I,” Jack said glumly and turned away.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“Flush it. The ground's frozen, what can we do?”

Heartbroken, Angela longed to hold it and keep it with her. Why hadn't the doctor told her the baby would come out whole? Fully formed like this, distinguishable as a human being. It scared her, this sudden ferocious feeling of anger lodged like a bone in her gut. Why couldn't she stop this from happening? Why did this have to happen at all?

“Angela, let it go,” Jack said and turned away, refusing to look.

When she finally let it go, her fingers trembling and limp, she flushed quickly, covered her mouth, and watched sadly it as it wound itself down the toilet.