The Retreat (6 page)

When Harris chose to speak, he addressed Lizzy, who was usually lying on a beach towel off to the side, sunning herself. He spoke offhandedly, as if he were addressing an equal, or as if he had been out walking and stumbled upon something banal yet extraordinary and had to share it with Lizzy. He was not interested in gossip or idle talk. And for Lizzy, this changed the atmosphere at the pond. She found herself looking forward to the mornings with Harris. She had never heard someone talk in this way before. Certainly not her mother, who was more concerned with what the mirror offered her, or her father, a man who had turned inward and appeared lost. Harris had revealed to her that a conversation could be full of surprises.

One morning, he placed the book he had been reading on his lap and he said, “Ahh, I don’t believe it.”

Lizzy opened her eyes and saw Harris’s shoes beside her chair, which she had removed for him earlier when they arrived at the pond. She looked at him, but she said nothing.

He continued, “This author assumes that I will trust what he tells me, but I don’t.”

“Is it true?” Lizzy asked.

“Not if he can’t make me believe it.”

“It still might be.”

“Doesn’t matter. Even a lie has to be convincing.”

Lizzy said that she didn’t like true stories. Her favourite stories began with “once upon a time” because that meant that the story was made up and made-up stories were always more convincing.

“That so.” Harris grunted. He said, “Once upon a time there was a man called the Doctor who claimed he could make lame men walk.”

Harris sat looking out across the water. He didn’t smile or make any motion to indicate that he had said anything remarkable. Then he said that of all the stories that could be told by him, one in particular came out of Africa, and maybe he would offer it to her. He said the word
offer
slowly, as if it were the most important word in the sentence.

Lizzy was not sure what to make of this, but she nodded. Fish and Big Billy began to fight over a stick at the water’s edge. Lizzy called out to Fish, and when he didn’t listen, she rose and walked down to him and picked up the stick and gave it to Big Billy, then carried Fish over to the towel and sat him down. “Here,” she said, and handed him a cracker. He took it and ate and then looked at Harris, pointed and said, “Your foot.”

Harris’s left foot turned inward, a small club attached to his ankle.

“Fish,” Lizzy said, her voice lifting in a reprimand.

Big Billy dropped the stick and came over and reached for a cracker. He ate quickly and then took another and pushed it into his mouth. Crumbs gathered on his wet lips.

Harris lifted his leg so that Fish could inspect the foot. “It has a mind of its own,” he said.

“Why?” Fish asked.

“I’d like to hear that story,” Lizzy said.

“Because it’s sick,” Harris said. He moved his leg up and down slowly, and then pulled it back towards his wheelchair. He looked at Lizzy and said that he would tell the story another day, though, from one day to the next, the facts would be slightly altered. “Everything depends on place and time and mood,” he said.

Lizzy wanted to say that she did not understand, but she kept quiet, then finally said, “That’s okay. No problem. Whatever.”

And then, one morning after breakfast, the boy came with his chickens. He lived up the road and twice a week he arrived in an old pickup and parked at the edge of the clearing and walked to the Hall. Lizzy and Fish had just come back from the pond and were sitting on the stairs to their cabin, hair still wet, when she saw Raymond’s truck. She knew his name was Raymond because she had seen him once before, just after her family had arrived at the Retreat. He’d shown up for dinner one evening and had sat beside the Doctor at one end of the long table. Lizzy, several seats down from him, had been
aware that he was younger than she first thought, closer to her age, and this stirred her interest. He had his hair in a ponytail and she noticed that he rarely spoke, except when the Doctor addressed him. He ate with his face close to his plate. No one else spoke to him. When he was finished eating he said thank you, stood, and left. The Doctor had asked if he wanted coffee, but he shook his head and said he had to go. She had hoped that he would notice her, but he kept his eyes lowered. Later, she had asked Margaret, the Doctor’s wife, who the tall, dark boy was. Margaret had told her his name, and that he lived in a cabin not far from the Retreat, and that every summer he provided them with chickens and rabbits. She said that her husband thought it was important to reach out to the community, and inviting boys like Raymond to dinner was one way to do that.

Raymond sat in the pickup, smoking and looking out the windshield. Lizzy thought he might be watching Fish and her on the stairs by the cabin, but it was hard to tell because he wore sunglasses, and his baseball cap was pulled down low. The only movement she could discern was that of his hand lifting the cigarette to his mouth and then dropping again.

Lizzy looked down at her legs. She liked their long slimness, a feature she had inherited from her mother. She had, according to her father, inherited other attributes from her mother – a soft vanity, wilfulness, and a heightened sense of longing – but Lizzy, at seventeen, believed that she was more hopeful and generous than her mother.

Raymond ducked slightly, shouldered the door, and climbed out. He stood in the sunlight. His cap said Black Cat.
He reached into the box of the pickup and then walked, with his slight limp, down the path towards the kitchen, carrying several dead chickens. One pigeon toe, Lizzy thought. She could see that the chickens were headless and they’d been plucked. When Raymond passed by, Fish said, “What’s that?” and Lizzy said, “Chickens.”

“Naked chickens?”

Raymond looked at them both briefly and then continued on.

The Doctor stepped out of his door and stood on the porch, then walked out across the clearing and disappeared into the bush. When Raymond came back a few minutes later he was empty-handed.

Lizzy stood and said, “I’m Lizzy, Lizzy Byrd, and this is Fish, my brother. I saw you at dinner one night last week. Remember? We had scalloped potatoes. So, you the chicken guy?”

“Guess I am.” He gave his first name and then, after a pause, his last. Seymour.

Lizzy looked at him and said, “Can’t see your eyes to know if that’s true or not.”

The side of his mouth went up a little. He lifted his glasses.

“They’re normal,” she said.

“I know that,” he said. “And I can see you’re not a bird.”

Lizzy wondered if he was trying to tell her something. His voice was soft but somehow coded. Maybe he thought she was fat. She lifted Fish up onto her hip and said, “Funny guy, eh? Not a bird.”

“Why?” Fish asked.

Raymond nodded, and then set his sunglasses back into place and went to his pickup, got in, and drove away.

That afternoon she sat on her bed and wrote a letter to Cyril, though by the time she had finished, she knew that it would never be sent. In it she described the Retreat as desolate, and she said that she was surrounded by old people and children, and that she had become a nanny, a kitten killer, and a nursemaid. Her mother had promised that all this would be great fun, but it turned out that this was not true; fun was hard to come by, as was illicit pleasure. There was nothing to do all day while the adults gathered in their silly discussion groups or listened to the Doctor talk about the compartments of the soul. She didn’t know how she was going to stand it here for the next two months. She had tried on her miniskirt the other day, the mauve silk one, and she had walked around inside her cabin, because there was nowhere to go here, nothing to dress up for. She had been alone, which was a rare thing, and she had stood with her back against the cabin wall and imagined hands sliding up under her skirt. She wrote, however, that the hands did not belong to him; they were disembodied hands, with skilful and knowing fingers. She said that he was rarely in her thoughts now, and that she had discovered here a man called Harris. He asked lots of questions. He was not embarrassed by candour. She said that she had been a child and now she was putting off childish things. Harris had a wife who appeared to have a lover, though this didn’t seem to disturb him, and she wondered if
she
could ever live that way. Could she ever be so uninvolved in the world, so cold, that betrayal would mean nothing? Then she wrote that
this was sort of humorous, because even as she was writing these words she was betraying him. Cyril. Though it wasn’t really a betrayal, she was simply stepping through a door from one room into another. She wasn’t lonely; she didn’t think that loneliness would ever plague her. Speaking of which, she had been reading a novel Harris had handed to her,
The Plague
, and though the story was weird and somewhat difficult, she was winding her way through it. She wrote that there was a boy who brought chickens to the Retreat. He wore cowboy boots with yellow stitching and he was quiet. He held his fork with his fist. Maybe more shy than quiet, she wrote. Or were they the same? She might, she thought, write a poem titled “Basic Problems,” or some such thing.

She studied her handwriting and the words and how the words, to a foreigner with a different language, would appear as beautiful nonsense. She tore the letter from her notebook, folded it, and pushed it into the drawer of the bureau next to her bed. Outside, in the clearing, she heard the voices of her mother and William. Her mother was talking and William was interjecting, asking questions, and though nothing was clear, and no words were understood, the familiar sounds were consoling.

Raymond came back four days later bearing skinned rabbits that resembled chickens, only they were smaller and shinier. It had been raining and Lizzy was lying on her bed, reading to Fish. When she heard a truck, she got up and went out onto
the porch and watched Raymond pass by. Fish stood behind her, holding her right leg.

Raymond nodded as he limped by. It was still drizzling slightly, and the bill of his cap was pulled down low.

“Chickens?” Fish asked.

Lizzy said, “Yeah, chickens,” because she knew that Fish was in love with rabbits.

When Raymond came back she asked him where he was going and he said, “Town.”

She asked if she and Fish could come along. “It’s raining,” she said.

Raymond looked up at the sky and then at the ground. “True.” He kept walking and got into the truck.

Lizzy waited, not sure. Then she picked up Fish and said, “Come on.” She ran to the pickup. She was wearing yellow shorts and she was barefoot and the path was slippery, and when she almost fell, Fish called out, “Ohh.” She climbed in the passenger’s side. Her feet were muddy and her legs were slick and wet and she thought of the shiny rabbits. She put Fish in the middle seat and said, “Here we go.”

Raymond started the engine and backed up and then pulled out onto the driveway. When they were on the highway, the rain began to fall more heavily. Only the wiper on the driver’s side worked. Lizzy felt a heaviness and wondered what she was doing, how could she have gotten in the truck. And with Fish. She thought she might ask Raymond to bring them back and then he turned and said, “Fish.”

Fish looked up at him.

“That your real name?”

Fish nodded.

“Huh.” He reached into a front jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette and lit it, exhaling out the half-open window. “Last year there was a different girl with your name. Liz, though.”

Lizzy was surprised that Raymond should talk about the Retreat so casually, as if it was a permanent and normal place, and she was curious about this other girl called Liz. She wondered how well Raymond knew her, if perhaps she too had climbed into his pickup. She felt jealous and then felt embarrassed that she was jealous. She could smell Raymond, a slightly wet musky scent, and she saw his hands on the wheel and the shape of his forearms. She said, “How old was this other Liz?”

Raymond shrugged. “Old enough. Maybe twenty. Closer to twenty-five.”

“How old are you?” Fish asked, looking up at the underside of Raymond’s chin.

“How old are
you?”
Raymond dropped his spent cigarette to the floor of the pickup and ground it with his boot.

“Four,” Fish said.

“Well, Fish, add fifteen onto four.”

Fish closed his eyes and opened them again. Looked down at his fingers and began to count.

It had stopped raining so they went to an outdoor hamburger stand, on Second Street, and sat at a picnic table under a green
umbrella. Fish was beside Lizzy, across from Raymond, who asked why his name was Fish.

“Because,” Fish said. He lifted his shoulders and let them drop. He appeared to be pondering the question.

“It’s a nickname,” Lizzy said. “His name’s Jack and then my dad started calling him Jackfish and then it became Fish. Now it’s just Fish. And I have a brother called Everett, who’s weird and three years younger than me. He’s fourteen. And then there’s William, who is really Will, but my dad loves Shakespeare and so he’s sometimes William Shakespeare or just Shakespeare. He’s nine.”

Fish’s mouth was full of fries. He looked at Lizzy and then back at Raymond. He said, “Lizzy and I are getting married.”

“That so?” Raymond grinned.

In the pickup later, Fish wanted to sit by the window. Lizzy said it would be cozier if he was in the middle but Fish insisted. Raymond said, “Let him,” and she said, “Okay, for a bit.” Fish fell asleep, pushed against Lizzy’s hip. It was raining again, the one wiper slapped at the windshield. The pickup had a floor shift and she sat with her left thigh pressed against the stick, which had a dark worn knob with numbers on a grid, 1, 2, 3, and an “R” that was closest to her hip. When Raymond shifted, his palm covered the knob, and his wrist brushed her bare thigh.

Lizzy felt like she did sometimes at the beach or the pool back in Calgary where the boys would stare at her. She felt almost naked. Raymond’s face was right beside her and she knew what he looked like because she had studied him at the
hamburger stand. He had a small scar on his upper lip, in the middle, and she liked how it broke up his face, which was smooth all over, perfect. He had small ears. His jeans had a hole at the knee. She put an index finger there and traced the cloth. She said that a colourful patch would look good and that she knew how to sew. He looked down at her hand and back at the road. It appeared he might say something, but he didn’t.