Way the Crow Flies (35 page)

But the car passes. She picks up a rock and hurls it after, then turns and runs again, past the airfield on her right, dragging the toes of her Mary Janes, wrecking them, this is the way to pound someone when there is no one to pound.
Put your hands around my neck, little girl. Now squeeze. That’s it. Harder
. Standing beside his desk. Feeling the muscles packaged in the fat, and that strange floating thing in the front of his soupy neck like turkey bones. His eyes bug out, why doesn’t he clean his glasses? Perhaps because he is using his hanky on his thing. It sticks up under the white fabric
like the chalice in church. Madeleine didn’t ask to think that, it just came into her head, and God controls everything, “So don’t blame me!” she yells, jutting her chin forward, marching now. But there is no one to hear her, the base is far behind, and the roofs of the PMQs are sinking behind the gentle rise and fall of autumn fields.

Her head is back to normal size, of a piece with her body again, and the air no longer seems so flat and far away. The grass looks real now, the pebbles at the side of the road look real and so is the feel of her paper bear crumpled in her hand. The Huron County road has become a corridor of birches and maples, farms opening on either side like the pages of a book. The light has changed, no longer flint but liquid. Cool grey has gathered, multiplying shades of hay, bales of shredded wheat dotting the fields, old gold of dry stalks, the abrupt river-green of a pumpkin field—miraculous splashes of orange, gifts the size of beachballs under each broad leaf. The fading grass of the roadside leans thick and chewy, dirty hair brushed against fenceposts. A turnip lies where it bounced from the back of a truck, milky purple like the inside of a seashell. She thinks, if I never went home again, I wouldn’t starve.

She smells rain and slows her pace. The velvet scent of hay, a cud-mown field to one side; a big brown head heaves round and looks at her across the fence, its moist mother-eye. Somewhere a red-winged blackbird, its dark sweet song close up in the misted air, like a bird in a movie. Telephone wires criss-cross overhead, trapeze artists swinging voices from pole to pole, balancing nests and conversations. She stops and faces the field to her right. Beyond the ditch running with weeds is the corn. Papery yellow, standing at attention like veterans, decorated and depleted, still marching in columns, ribbons furling from empty stalks.

The first big drops fall. Massive and far apart they come, exploding dust at her feet. She tilts her head back, catching drops that taste both soft and metallic, they tap her face like fingertips, impossible to tell where the next drop will fall, as rapid as thoughts. She looks ahead again, feels her bangs flattening against her forehead, water streaming down her nose to her lips. If she never went home again, she wouldn’t go thirsty.

Up ahead, a willow tree sweeps the ground where the Huron County road intersects with a nameless dirt road. The tree stands at a slight sway, as though in sidelong greeting, underwater green and fading with the season, trembly with the rain that, at Madeleine’s approach, sounds lighter against its many small leaves, the song of a long-haired soprano. She sees it shimmer in the rain, a tree made entirely of wands. Perhaps this is where she will spend the night, a broad and level limb for her bed. She parts the green curtain and beads of water melt along her arm and down the back of her neck as she enters the cool dry arch, and at once the sound changes. It’s like being in a tent in the rain. She smells, before she sees, that she is not alone. Wet animal. Familiar.

Rex is lying at the base of the tree, his fur steaming, droplets of light around his neck, the tips of his ears. An old clothespin bag sits on the ground next to him. “Hi Rex.” He must be lost. His tail pats the ground at her approach, but she stops because she has seen something out the corner of her eye. Holey white running shoes, light brown legs. Colleen, sitting on a branch. She has a long stick stripped of leaves, it bends from her hand supple as a whip.

She slides off and drops to the ground. Madeleine takes a step back. Colleen reaches down to the clothespin bag and, without taking her eyes off Madeleine, brings out a canvas pencil case, unzips it, dips in and comes out with a tuft of tobacco and a rectangle of white paper. Madeleine watches her roll, lick and seal the paper, then put it between her lips. Colleen takes a book of matches and lights up.
Success without College
promises the cover. She inhales, squinting through the smoke, and leans against the tree, cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Her dirty white T-shirt glows clean in the green shadows. The leather string around her neck disappears beneath her shirt to form a tiny bump in the centre of her chest.

Madeleine asks, “Can I see your knife?”

Colleen reaches into the pocket of her cut-offs.

Its handle is carved in yellowed bone. “From a bear,” Colleen says, unfolding the blade, polished and ultra-thin with use and care. She holds the knife flat across her palm. Madeleine reaches for it. “Don’t touch it,” says Colleen, not closing her palm.

“Why not?”

“’Cause it’s not a toy.” Colleen talks with her face slightly averted, pale eyes narrowed. Madeleine sees the fine white scar at the corner of her mouth, faint frown.

“I’m not ascared of you,” says Madeleine.

“I don’t give a shit.”

“I know,” says Madeleine, shocked yet curiously at ease.

“Know-it-all, eh?”

“Come here and say that,” speaking before thinking.

“I am here, stupid.” The corner of Colleen’s mouth rises, sarcastic amusement in her eyes.

“So you is,” says Madeleine, her mouth to one side like Bugs Bunny. She reaches out and takes the knife. Colleen makes no move to stop her. “On guard!” declares Madeleine, and slashes the air like Zorro. Colleen just watches. Madeleine holds up her soggy bear with his smearing smile and impales him—“Take that!” She taps her chin with the point of the blade and invites Colleen to “come on, hit me right here.” She starts laughing helplessly, arms limp and noodly—“Goodbye cwuel wowld!”—staggering, knife flailing, cross-eyed, pretending to stab herself. Rex stands and barks.

Colleen takes a drag, then flicks her cigarette aside and holds out her hand for the knife. Madeleine returns it, weak with laughter. Colleen folds it and shakes her head. “You’re a maniac, McCarthy.”

Madeleine replies in a bright voice, as though reading aloud,
“Oui, je suis folle, je suis une maniaque,”
starting to do a mechanical twist.

Colleen says,
“C’est ça quoi ja di, ya crazy batar.”
Which is how Madeleine finds out that Colleen speaks a kind of French.

“It ain’t French, it’s Michif,” says Colleen.

Michif
. Sounds like “mischief.”

Colleen hooks the clothespin bag over the end of her stick and walks out from under the tree, back into the rain. Rex follows.

“Colleen, wait up.”

Madeleine catches up and they walk in silence. She takes off her shoes and socks. The rain hits the ground in a perpetual mist, it falls so hard. It’s easy to run in a hard rain, puddles become trampolines, it’s like running on a path in the woods, impossible to get tired. Mirage-barns waver across the fields, thunder shakes the trees at the
foot of mile-long farm driveways. Paws and bare feet and soaked running shoes. She smells wet dog. There is no smell in the world more comforting except perhaps a campfire. Although a campfire is melancholy too, because you sit around it with your family in the big dark, knowing that your love and who you are stretch only a little way into it.

“Where’re we going?” asks Madeleine.

“Rock Bass.”

It isn’t a whip, it’s a fishing rod.

There is still a bit of summer left down there. The greens are vivid with a sheen like old leather. Blades of grass still tall but easily bent and broken now, they will not spring back if you step on them. Leaves are still fleshy at the stems, fused to their twigs but only weeks away from that moment when they may all blow off at once. When is that moment? Some years the breezes come gradually, taking a few leaves at a time, while other autumns are still and calm, trees fully clothed and many-coloured until November, when with one huff and puff the woods stand suddenly naked.

“Are we there yet?” asks Madeleine. They have stopped at the crest of a ravine. Below is a stream which, come spring, will be more than a creek and less than a river. On the opposite bank, a maple tree grows. The rain has slowed and the drops say
hush hush hush
against the red and amber leaves. It’s an afternoon sound.

It is amazing to think that, while we are at school or asleep or watching TV, the woods are here. Breathing, changing, their stately grace made up of countless frantic lives lived high and low, each rustle and cry part of that sweeping rhythm. Breathe in, it’s summer. Breathe out, it’s fall. Stand still, it’s winter. Open your eyes, springtime.

The maple tree is so quiet, yet it is passionately changing. Part of it is dying. The pretty part. Its sadness will soon be exposed, its true age and wisdom, casting up its gnarly prayers. That is the beautiful part.

“This is Rock Bass,” says Colleen, and skids straight down the ravine to the stream below. Rex follows. So does Madeleine. There are stepping stones but they wade across.

There’s a flat rock under the maple and, nearby, the remains of a campfire. Colleen takes an Eight O’clock Coffee can from her
clothespin bag, removes a wax-paper lid and lifts out a fat worm. She hooks it onto the end of her line, it curls in spasm, she casts into the stream, then stands on the flat stone and waits.

Madeleine squats on the ground and waits too, hugging her knees. She reaches for a charred stick and writes her name on the stone. Her name looks like her face and she wishes it looked fiercer. The vowels look as though they could be stolen and carried away wide-eyed, and there are too many syllables—each one a weak point of connection, separable like a joint. She wishes she had one syllable, compact, inviolable. Like Mike.

She says to Colleen’s back, “How come you didn’t pound me that day?”

Colleen keeps her eyes on the stream. “You’re not worth it.”

Madeleine rubs the palms of her hands with soot from the stick. “Why not?”

“’Cause I’m not going back, that’s why.” Colleen flicks her line back over her shoulder and recasts.

“Back where?”

“None of your goddamn business.” She sounds calm. Content.

Madeleine wipes her hands together as though the soot were soap, then smells them. They smell like a campfire now. Clean. “Why would your parents send you back?”

“Not my parents.” Colleen glances down at her and Madeleine is reminded that she is afraid of this girl.

She revises her question. “Why would you get sent back?”

“For violence.”

Violence
. The word looks like a slash of red and black. Madeleine can see the muscles in Colleen’s calves, dusty and lean—still brown, although summer is long gone. They contract as she shifts forward. She’s got a bite. She pulls in a small fish. It whips about, grey and yellow at the end of her line, staring. She unhooks it and tosses it back. “You ever hear of Children’s Aid?”

“No.”

“You’re lucky.”

The sun comes out from under the grey coverlet of this rainy afternoon just in time to begin its descent into evening. Madeleine has no
idea what time it is. The airfield comes into view on their left and she feels as though she is waking from a dream. That’s when she realizes that she has lost her shoes.

“Where were you going, anyhow?” asks Colleen.

“Nowhere.”

“If you say so.”

Madeleine says, “I was running away.”

“I done that.”

“Yeah?”

“Lotsa times.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Once to Calgary,” says Colleen. “We stoled a horse. Me and my brother.”

“Ricky?”

“Who else?”

“You ran away all the way to Calgary from Centralia on a horse?”

“Not from here. From a place in Alberta.”

“What place?”

“None of your goddamn business.”

They walk. “I was born in Alberta,” says Madeleine. Colleen is silent. Madeleine asks, “Where were you born?”

She doesn’t expect an answer so she is surprised when, after a moment, Colleen says, “In a car.”

“On the way to the hospital?”

“No. It was around the border somewhere. Either in Montana or Alberta.”

Madeleine pictures Mr. Froelich pulling over to the side of a lost highway, trying to boil water over a campfire while Mrs. Froelich has a baby in the back seat. She puts her hand out and feels Rex’s wet nose nudge her. “What’s Children’s Aid?”

Colleen spits neatly from the side of her mouth. “They come and put you in a training school if they think you’re bad enough.”

“Oh. What’s a training school?”

Colleen shrugs. “It’s a jail for kids.”

Up ahead, the PMQs look as tame as animals in a corral. The Spitfire looks friendly once more and the white buildings of the base as
cordial as a collection of barbershops. But a feeling is growing in the pit of Madeleine’s stomach. Apprehension. “Are you going to get in trouble?”

“What for?” says Colleen.

Madeleine doesn’t have in mind the smoking or the swearing, because presumably Colleen does neither in front of her parents. But skipping school can’t be concealed. How else could Colleen have already been hanging out at the willow tree with her play clothes on? “You played hooky.”

“So? It’s my life.”

Madeleine glances at her profile—serious mouth, narrowed blue eye trained on the horizon—and wonders if this means she and Colleen Froelich are friends now.

“Boy, are you ever gonna get it!”

It’s Mike, standing on his pedals, pumping furiously toward her up Columbia Drive. “Maman is going to kill you!”—slamming on his brakes, coming to a showy side-stop. “Where the Sam heck have you been?”

“Have a hairy fit, why don’t you?”

Mike shakes his head, looks at the state of her.
“Va-t’en dans la maison, toi.”

Roy Noonan and Philip Pinder’s tough older brother, Arnold, ride up from opposite directions. “I got her,” Mike tells them.