This River Awakens (3 page)

A man’s brain shouldn’t leave him helpless. Nosiree. Shouldn’t. Nope.

A game he played. A battle between sobriety and surrender, the outcome always the same. Posture, strut, fall flat on his face. It’d been three months without a drop. Desire stayed under the sheets, at night, a soft hand on his cock. For a time (part of the game) he’d filled himself with long days of hard work. Stoke the furnace of his brain – read, read, read – keeping the cold fear at bay. Hammer and nails to keep the hands busy. Clean living. Living cleanly, mimicking health.

A talent for acting: could fool even himself sometimes. Posturing like his own king, strutting like his own lover, falling flat on his face – like his own clown.

I’m only human, he whispered to himself.
I don’t like pain. Who does? Reasons – okay, excuses. I’m only human.
He giggled, sending creaks through the bed, a coded message for the monsters, can’t be cracked, no point trying.

Bringing him around, like always, to Kaja and her sons. His dogs, pure-bred German shepherds. His obsession, a thin veil hiding his deeper obsession – the one with violence, but save that for later. He could see Kaja’s face, brown eyes accusing – it had to be accusing. Sten’s fault. The new kennel unfinished, the run’s side door unlocked, the stray dog crossing the playground.

Kaja and her three sons, now two. Max – the youngest – was in a green garbage bag three feet under ground, body crushed and twisted, lips drawn back in a frozen snarl.

The road killed dogs all the time. The tyres grabbed them, chewed them up, spat them out. Children cried, the faces of men grew dark and stern, women spoke of fate and became older and sadder.

It’s the way of things, he told himself. The way. Roads and tyres and garbage bags – that’s all there was in the end.

He struggled against a roar of laughter. That manly grief was a killer. Hollow words pretending wisdom, sod-cropper backwoods tic-below-the-eye bullshit.

He wiped wet streaks from his cheeks and pressed his knuckles against his eyelids. Swirls of colour spun, blushing outward and fading into blackness. He thought about going mad.

It shocked him, cleared his head. Madness, the monsters’ cipher, his father’s double-recessive crap-shoot.

No, not this time. Sten rolled on the bed and reached under it as far as he could until his fingers closed on the bottle’s cold glass. Not this time. He rolled back, holding the bottle against his chest, his sight fixing on the ceiling.

‘Look at all those cracks,’ he mumbled. They radiated outward from the corner above him. Cracks, stained yellow as if by thinned blood. Or rye. His father’s house, right? The walls, the floor, the ceiling, all reeked of that insane bastard. Wood and plaster playing the old game – swallowing histories, whole lives. Listen to the echo of the old man’s screams, the smashing dishes and crashing furniture. And the smell, of course, the smell. Booze and blood, piss and tears. Bile and canine fear. And faintly, so very faintly, the sweet, bruised-flower smell of his mother.

He barely remembered her face. The pictures had gone into the attic years back. But he remembered skin that had been innocent, almost translucent; he remembered arms holding him tightly, smotheringly, shielding him from the violence. He remembered her bouts of crying, and, once, the crack of her ribs and the gasp torn from her lungs.

Stupid woman. Should’ve run, taken him and run.

His father’s house. The angry, maddened god. And dogs, always dogs, filling the house, cowering and licking the old man’s hands. Dogs who stared at his father’s back with eyes hot with murder, the glare of starved wolves.

Young Sten had found a way to hide from it all. He’d built his own house, inside his head, where he lived and kept all the doors barred. Safe, and alone. And even now, twenty-eight years after the old bastard turned yellow and died, the house inside Sten’s head remained. But it had changed, almost imperceptibly.

He told himself that he knew every inch of it, every corner, every hidden room. All the while fumbling for door handles, falling down stairs, running into walls. His house – and this was the most cherished secret he kept from himself – his house had become a stranger’s house. Monsters under the bed, in the closets, in all the rooms where ruled the shadows. A wonderful secret, wonderfully bitter, like
Psychology Today
’s secession of free will.

‘So,’ he slurred to the cracks in the ceiling, ‘is this all there is?’ But the house in his head had no answer. He was alone, the furnace a bed of cold ashes, cold fear everywhere. Nothing to do but wait for the monsters to come clambering into the light, talons bared. He knew all their faces – easy to know – they were all the same. Guffaw.

He shivered in his father’s bed, the bed now his own. Clutched the bottle, frowning as a sickly-sweet stench filled his nostrils. A stench that didn’t come from the air around him, but from inside his head. That house he’d built, the secret fortress he’d called his own, now came to him with a smell that made his heart pound. The monsters edged closer, their breath washing over him – the breath of his house. Booze and blood. Piss and bile.

VI

Elouise Louper worked in her garden. Behind her the window to the bedroom was open and she could hear her husband crying. The sound filled her ears as she overturned the muddy earth and broke it up with her trowel.

There were steps to follow, she reminded herself. There were patterns to repeat over the years, as certain as the seasons themselves. Soon she would plant the seeds and if she could keep the pests away, she’d have enough tomatoes and peas and wax beans to last through the winter. And with the raspberries and cherries she’d make jam.

A gardener, she told herself, has to be patient.

As she worked, she thought of her husband dying. She thought of their daughter leaving home. She thought of living on, and on, immortal in her garden as the rest of the world slowly sank beneath the horizon. Watching the years pull at Sten’s face and body made her aware of the days dying behind them.

If she could drag her husband out of his bed. Away from his endless bottles. If she could pull him into the light of day. He’d see things differently, she was certain. It was when he was living the past that things went poorly; when he was feeling the weight of all those nights behind him – behind them – that look would come into his eyes. Skittish, like someone hunted.

Trying to talk about it never helped. She’d given that up a long time ago. His drinking had become a subject the family walked around, skirting its treacherous edge, a pit to be avoided at all costs. Still, they all circled it like the planets circled the sun.

Without words, she was left with what her eyes told her. Watchfulness had become an exhausting necessity.

The promise had been there, though. She’d seen her husband fight off the alcohol, strive through the shaking hands and bouts of stomach cramps and vomiting. She’d watched him find his way through it all, come out cautiously on the other side. She’d been ready to take a step towards him, then.

With promise comes hope. A small bud at first, then expanding like a blossom under the warm spring sun. Elouise had tied hope and love together, a long time ago, and together they seemed to wax and wane with fated rhythm.

She should have known. Deep down, she believed in fate. It kept her from expecting too much, from hoping too greatly. Fate blunted the edge of disappointment. It made hope wry and tolerable like a child’s frail belief. And she could now smile at herself for a lesson never learned, and the pain and sadness could be taken as just punishment. Punishment for the crime of hope. After all, she should have known better.

She heard Sten’s drunken words drift out from the bedroom.
So,
he said,
is this all there is?

Elouise’s face set like stone. She climbed stiffly to her feet and wiped her hands. Well, she said to herself, it’s time to check the crab-apple trees.

Tomatoes, peas and wax beans. And jam, jam for the winter.

She remembered breakfasts years ago. Mornings full of bright, clean sunlit air; of sizzling ham and fresh orange juice. Mornings without the sour smell of vomit and alcohol, without the broken dishes of the night before littering the floor and crunching beneath their feet.

It was a sickness, of course. Still, to see it, to smell it, to feel its fists. And the way it soured every remembrance, stained every memory of better times, these seemed dreadful prices to have to pay.

Hands on her hips, Elouise surveyed the budding branches of the crab-apple trees. Last autumn’s cutting back had done its job, she saw. It always helped to see what was coming and plan ahead.

VII

The machine had appeared in our driveway one morning as if conjured from the earth itself. It was massive, fully six feet high and five feet wide, weighing perhaps three thousand pounds. A cowl of raw, rust-pitted metal covered most of its inner mechanisms, except for what I took to be the machine’s back end, where a giant geared wheel was mounted on the machine’s flank, and seized gear chains emerged from the insides to hang like clotted braids of hair.

As I walked in from the road that day I saw that the cowl had been raised. A tarp lay on the driveway beside the machine and on it tools were scattered like discarded weapons. My father emerged from the garage with a mallet in his hands.

I approached. The rust had turned Father’s blue coveralls dusty red. He dropped the mallet on to the tarp then turned his attention to a wrench he had locked on to a bolt. He grasped it with both hands and pulled down with all his weight and strength. Metal shrieked. I watched my father’s thin face redden, the vein on his temple throb beneath a few stray locks of iron-grey hair.

‘Looks a hundred years old,’ I said.

Father grunted.

I glanced about the yard. Changes had come to it since we’d arrived. Most of the puddles in front of the garage had disappeared. The few that remained were now slick with oil. Alongside the winding driveway metal junk studded the ground like otherworldly plants, glinting with sharp, dangerous edges. Most of the yard remained new and fresh. The trees lining the front of the lot blocked our view of the road. Our yard lay in shadows, like an underworld.

I headed to the porch, then stopped and turned back to the machine, watching Father work. Behind me I heard the clash of cutlery and dishes from the kitchen window. Mother was angry. Father had promised he would leave the junk behind, leave it all back in the city, or in his new gas station on the highway. But the machinery followed him, as if of its own accord, like migrating beasts. Every day when I came home there would be more of it, encroaching deeper into the yard, hanging from hooks in the double garage, lining the driveway the way some people lined driveways with painted rocks.

I hesitated, then approached Father and the machine again. Sweat stained the underarms of his coveralls, and more glittered on his high forehead. He grunted and wrenched and poured solvent over the seized bolt.

‘What kind of machine is this?’ I asked, as I had asked a dozen times since it had first appeared a week ago. Once again, I didn’t get an answer.

He glanced over at me, his brow knotted. ‘Hand me that mallet.’ He took it and turned back to the machine. ‘You shouldn’t ever hammer a wrench, remember that.’ He swung the mallet and the bolt screamed.

‘Then why are you doing it?’

‘It’s stuck,’ he grunted, pausing to wipe his forehead. ‘Got to get it off.’

The screen door squealed behind me, and I heard my sister Debbie’s voice, ‘Mom says supper’s ready.’

Father glanced up. ‘It’s stuck. Tell her I’ll be there in a minute.’ He began hammering again.

I swung around to find Debbie staring down at me, still framed by the doorway. She was sixteen but looked older, especially with the make-up – she never used much of it, just enough to make her look somehow older.

‘What’re you staring at?’ she asked.

‘Nothing.’ I headed up the steps. ‘Move, I want to get by.’

Instead she turned around and walked inside. I had to catch the door before it closed in my face.

VIII

Somewhere in the attic was a photo of six-year-old Jennifer Louper. Wearing a bright flowery dress with white laced sleeves, she stood beside a grand piano, like a violet at the edge of a dark forest. On her face was an innocent smile, and her deep green eyes held the colour of summer. In her hands she held, awkwardly, a framed certificate.

Jennifer’s mother had written on the back of the photo the date and the title, which read
Jennifer’s first award.

The six-year-old girl stood in a pose of uncertainty, frozen by the camera, and by the silent nods and hushed predictions of the future – of concerts and standing ovations, of a child’s innocence played for the world.

The picture lay amidst countless others in a closed trunk that had not been opened in years. Its colours were still sharp.

Elouise had proudly written
Jennifer’s first award,
yet she remembered a hesitation, a slight bewilderment, and maybe something of fear. The talent had seemed to come from nowhere.

Jennifer herself had been born less than a year before Elouise’s fortieth birthday. A miracle in and of itself; she had made Elouise question her belief in fate, and she had made Sten happy to be alive.

It was a memory Elouise still believed in, though time and events since had badly faded it. She and her husband had suddenly found their dull world brighter, its blurred lines sharpened to breathtaking detail.

The grand piano that was and had always been no more than an heirloom dominating the dining room, now became something more, coaxed by a child’s hands. With a kind of fevered purpose, Elouise and Sten somehow found the money for teachers, who arrived and left as better teachers took their place. Not long after that the young girl had been made to stand beside a piano with a certificate in her hands.

But all along, Elouise had suspected the truth of things eventually to emerge, a tarnishing of this faith in gifts no one had thought to ask for in the first place. It wasn’t long before the world’s real colours, faded and worn, took the place of bright pictures.