The Shore Girl (13 page)

He should have asked, too. I'd worked the rigs for two decades, in countries so cold you were scared to take a piss, so hot you could lick up the salt pouring out of you. Bad equipment, bad conditions. Such lousy food I'd dream about Safeway — about sprawling on top of the lettuce display. In all that time, he never asked about any of it.

Maybe falling off a rig is a wake-up call. Matt's leaving, too. I wanted to think I was a part of his plan, even if I was only on the butt end of feeling good.

* * *

I musta looked pretty bad. The kid wearing the grocery store apron kept five feet between us and kept glancing at me sideways as he carried the bags to the truck. I got beer, wine, an assortment of pops, ice, three steaks, potatoes, corn on the cob, butter, a bumbleberry pie, toilet paper, a teen magazine and a giant roll of tinfoil.

I rounded the corner a few minutes before four, groceries rattling on the seat beside me, dust trailing behind. When I spotted the van and the girls stretched out on those big pillows reading their books, I felt the muscles in my neck relax. I had no business going back. But after a week in the trailer with Matt's ghost, I told myself I needed company; lightness and laughter and girl talk. I didn't know if it was Harmony or Rebee I needed to see.

All I knew was something had been rankling me ever since I found them. Their playing house beside a dried-up river, with their make-believe lunch of peanut butter and purple Kool-Aid, their rundown van, their washing hung like rags on a ratty rope, a whisper of trouble between them.

Rebee jumped up right away. Harmony just leaned on her arm and stared. “Brought you some toilet paper,” I yelled to her as I stepped out of the truck. My shoulder throbbed mercilessly, a burning beat, like it housed its own heart. Rebee was beside me. I touched her shoulder, smiled and handed her the two lightest bags.

“Sorry, wasted trip,” Harmony said. “Your brother hasn't shown if that's what you're after. And we got to the store yesterday.”

“Yeah, but I bet you didn't think of a bumbleberry pie.”

“I've forgotten your name.”

I looked at her closely for evidence of a lie, but couldn't find anything in her blank expression.

“Jake. Melanie and Phoebe, right?”

Harmony stood, stretching long brown arms over her head, hands clasped, flexing the muscles of her striking legs. She wore a black two-piece bathing suit and a beaded ankle bracelet. I tried not to gawk. When Rebee and I got to the table and started unloading the groceries, Harmony wrapped a coloured skirt around her hips and came over to join us.

“Thought we could share a couple of steaks.”

Rebee was in her same overalls as last time, her nose in one of the bags, her throat circled in a necklace of grime.

“Did you? You in the habit of inviting yourself into someone's space? I've met people like you.”

“Like me? I don't think so. But technically, this is my space. I found it first. And I come bearing gifts.”

I pulled out the teen magazine and passed it to Rebee.

“I'm not sure this is the kind you like.” Rebee smiled and nodded. I decided I liked making her smile.

Harmony sat on the picnic bench and looked over the goods. “Why do people keep wanting to feed us? I could tell you we have plans.”

“I'd figure it out. I'd build a fire at spot number four and cook my steaks, and wave at you every so often, and then I'd notice you weren't going anywhere, so I'd figure your plans fell through and I'd invite you over for supper, and you'd ask, ‘Anything I can bring?' and I'll say, all the dishes, a couple of chairs, and the tablecloth, please.”

Rebee giggled into her hand and Harmony looked faintly amused. I decided I could stay. We settled into the preparations with hardly a word. We threw the ice in the banged-up cooler, and scattered the pop cans and beer in the empty spaces, of which there were plenty. Rebee chose a ginger ale and I opened two beers and passed one to Harmony. She sent Rebee into the forest to gather kindling and I built the fire high at first, then let it mellow to hot red coals. Rebee and I scrubbed the potatoes in the river. Then we lathered them with butter, wrapped them in tinfoil and threw them on the coals beside the corn.

Rebee moved her pillow to the shade of the van. She lay on her stomach, feet in the air, thumbing through her magazine. Harmony and I sat under the tarp on opposite sides of the table.

“So how long you going to be here?” I asked.

“No idea,” Harmony said. Rebee looked up from her magazine and focused on her mother's back with a troubled stare.

“Do you live around here?”

“No.”

“But we lived in Coaldale for awhile,” Rebee called over. “Coaldale's close isn't it?”

“Not too close,” I answered. “We're closer to Calgary.”

“We lived in Calgary, too,” Rebee said.

“Who's talking to you, Rebee,” Harmony said, not turning around.

“Sounds like you've lived in a lot of places,” I called back, taken off guard by Harmony's stony expression.

Rebee just nodded.

“Me, too,” I said. I thought of pumpjacks. Of places blurred into one long row of makeshift metal bunks and variegated siding, airplane sinks, the snores of many men, brown, black, and yellow. Of Matt and the trailer I called home.

Harmony cracked two more beers and handed one to me. When she brought out a deck of cards, Rebee bounced over and sat beside me. We chose
21
, taking turns winning, using pinecones for chips. Rebee played like she'd shuffled a thousand decks. Not a weary practice. Not like on the rigs, all our dealing cards as a way to shift time, bored to madness, itching for a fight, for something, anything.

Rebee just seemed easy is all. Her mother, too. They slapped cards on the table, locking eyes every so often like they shared a language that required no words. We avoided conversation that could lead to anything, stuck to card talk instead. Harmony didn't ask what I was looking for and I didn't ask her. Those questions just hung in the air beneath the tarp.

For dinner, Harmony lit candles inside plastic cups and placed one beside each of our plates while I opened the wine. Harmony picked at her food. Rebee gobbled down her man-sized steak and two fat pieces of pie, berry juice dribbling from the corner of her mouth. I thought I could see her belly expand, like a snake that had swallowed an egg, and I considered it an accomplishment, to fill her up like that.

Before Rebee went into the van, sleepy from excess, she gave me a necklace of rosehips, strung together with thick black thread. For good luck she said. Harmony walked me to the truck and closed the door softly behind me. The air had turned frosty and she was wrapped in a striped blanket. “Goodbye, Jake.” Her fingertips rested on my open window.

“You take care now,” I replied. I wanted to tell her I'd see her again.

Driving home in the dark, I remembered my broken left side for the first time in five hours. I swallowed three Tylenol with a swig of lukewarm beer and slowed to a crawl on the empty black road. Rebee's rosehips dangled from my mirror. I thought about pumpjacks in open fields and riches rising from deep below the dirt.

* * *

Rita taught me one thing: don't get caught without money. Even back then, all crackling and boyish green, I knew something was off-kilter. There I was, lashed to a girl I could barely stand, and all I could think of was money. I didn't think about a lifetime of getting liquored up so I could bear to wake beside her, of gritting my teeth and steeling myself for a storm every time I walked through the door, of closing my eyes and pretending she was someone else, and I was a different man, and we were two people easy with each other. I didn't think about any of that. All I could focus on was not being poor.

I've enough to haul away Matt's trailer and replace it with a manor. To buy out Farley and ship his herds north. Or to hire the detective with the flashiest ad.

He charges $
500
a day, plus expenses. Elroy Lloyd is his name. For all his ad's sizzle, he looked less than dangerous. He was tall and skinny and wearing a ridiculous pink shirt buttoned tight at the neck. I imagined him being trampled at the supermarket when the dollar daze announcement came over the loudspeaker.

“You any good?” I asked. We had this conversation in his small Calgary office on the second floor of the professional building.

“I'll get the job done,” he said. “Although I won't guarantee the results will be what you're hoping for.”

I had no recent pictures of Matt. None, in fact, except the one of him with the woman taken back twenty years or more. I wasn't about to hand this to Elroy.

He asked about family, friends, enemies. Business partners. Women. A wife? Partner? Lover, maybe?

His questions gave me a worse headache. I just wanted to find my brother, not dissect his inadequacies.

I gave Elroy a fat wad of cash and he told me to check in at least twice a week. With no place else to go, I went back to the trailer. Hauled out the shed junk and stacked the rotted wood and garbage near the fire pit. Fixed the latch on the outhouse door, poured processed lime down the hole, swept webs off the corners and ceiling, reminded myself to buy toilet paper.

I thought about my day with Harmony and Rebee. About Rebee forgetting to hide her finger's crookedness while she clutched her cards. How when she laughed, tilting her head back, she could have been a desert flower sucking up water in a flash of rain. The way Harmony's hair brushed against my shoulder as I passed her the plates to wash in the river. Her smell of earth and sun. The way the firelight caught her eyes before she melted into the dark. I imagined Matt's land, my land now, with a two-storey house. A picture window and yellow marigolds in pots. Harmony, Rebee, Matt and me on white deck chairs, drinking iced tea, staring east, away from the pumpjack.

I thought about the men in this world who settle next to the rhythm of a woman, one woman, their whole lives. That one guy coming off a middle-of-the-night flight after a seven-weeks-on, three-off rotation. He practically leaped into the aisle when the plane finally docked and the lights came up. He jogged past our dog-tired group, smiled at the customs officer, and bypassed the escalator, taking four steps at a time. The waiting room was crammed like always. But he found her in an instant, home in her arms.

I'm a believer. I just don't know how it's done is all. What kind of chromosomes, hormones, cyclones bring all that together? Do you fall hard for a woman because of the light in her hair? The look she gets when she's looking at you? And if you fall for one reason, do you stay for another, until there comes a time when you can't remember why you fell in the first place but you don't even notice because it no longer matters. Somewhere between your falling and landing, what floats in between? What anchor drops to hold a man steady?

I was at the sink, patching the hose, when Farley showed, eyes barely clearing his wheel. He had a pair of antlers tied to his hood. He stepped out of his truck and I stepped out of the trailer, crunching through gravel until we met in the middle. Grinning, he handed me a basket tied with a green ribbon. “The Mrs. wanted you to have some muffins. Orange bran with raisins.” He seemed especially pleased.

I looked down at him and caught the glint of the silver buffalo head cinching up his pants.

“Your brother was a good man, Jake,” he started. “You're a lot like him, you know.”

“You talk like he's dead.”

“I don't think that. Just don't think we'll be seeing him anymore, that's all.”

“Thanks for stopping by.”

“Least I could do.” He stood his ground, as though the conversation was not over. I figured if I went back into the trailer I'd find him at my table.

“Wha'd you want, Farley?” He blushed. I moved in close to block him from coming further.

“Want to know how you're getting along.”

“And what I'm going to do with this quarter section?”

“Well, that too, I suppose. I'll give you a fair price. No question about that.”

“I appreciate your concern, but go home, okay? I'll let you know when I'm ready to talk.”

Farley blushed deep, turned on his heel, and left without another word. I finished patching the hose at the trailer sink. After the taps quit spewing and the water ran clear, I built a fire with the last of the shed wood and roasted hot dogs, eating them off the stick. An African sky, breezeless, mosquito gauze layers above the smoke. I could hear Farley's bull elk in the distance, bawling like their hearts were broken. I thought I could hear the thump, grind, and hum of the pumpjack too.

* * *

A ridiculous August evening, even by Alberta standards. Fat flakes crisscrossed my windshield in the driving wind like a field of white daisies. Despite my low beams, the road was hard to follow. The heater blasted stinky heat. Campers from Okotoks to Pincher Creek would be layering up, hunkering down in the bottom of their bags or packing for home. I'd stuffed a duffel bag with all I could find: two wool blankets, a couple of sweaters, an old fleece jacket, and one pair of thermal mittens. I stopped at the Dairy Queen and asked Lisa the Hostess to fill my thermos with hot chocolate. She didn't know how to ring up a thermos, so I ordered two extra larges, filled it myself and saved both paper cups.

The local radio station guy compared this to a night back in
1922
, recorded in history's weather books as the storm of the century. He gave us “Frosty the Snowman” sung by a choir of kids. I fiddled with the buttons and almost missed the campground turn. The truck slipped sideways down the incline. I shifted into neutral, eased my foot on the brake, and skated to a stop several feet from the van. I kept the lights on and the truck running and stepped down into six inches of slushy muck.

No girls in sight. By the looks of things, they didn't try too hard to find shelter for their stuff. Pillows lay buried on the white ground, towels twisted into sopping lumps hung on tree branches. The orange tarp nearly touched the tabletop, sagging deeply under the heavy snow.