Year of Lesser (4 page)

Johnny’s quiet for a bit and then near Sprague he says, “Jesus, Loraine, the thought of you is killing me.” He looks at her on the other side of the car and clicks his tongue against his teeth. Loraine dips her chin and slides over and lays her head on Johnny’s lap. He’s wearing suit pants and they’re cool on Loraine’s cheek. She slides a hand deep into his cowboy boots and pulls at the hair on his calf. She wants to crawl inside him. “Hey, Johnny,” she whispers.

“Hey,” he says back. He pulls the car over onto a side road. He lifts Loraine’s head and says, “Who’d have thought, you and me, huh?” And he takes her in his big hands and turns her small body, lays a nose on her flat stomach, gurgles and says, “Oh, my.”

And as for Loraine, well, she’d let him do anything. She and Johnny have been lovers off and on for years now. He comes to her when he’s lonely, or tired of his wife Charlene, and Loraine lets him because she likes his hardness, the way his jaw moves, his crooked mouth. Now, in the front seat of the Olds, she clings to him and won’t let him go. “My little fucking monkey,” he says. She chatters in his ear and sucks on his neck. “Yes,” she says.

Johnny doesn’t go to his appointment. Instead they cross into the States and drive the country roads, Loraine deep under Johnny’s arm, and then they head back up to Steinbach for lunch.

Loraine watches Johnny eat. He likes to put things in his mouth; she is just one of those things. She says, “I’m worried about Chris. He’s tough these days, doesn’t talk.”

Johnny’s elation has worn off. He’s stirring sugar into his coffee and staring out the large front window towards Main Street. “Chris’s been hanging out with this Krahn girl,” he says. “Melody’s her name.”

Loraine is surprised and hurt. It’s unfair, Johnny knowing this. She wonders what this Melody looks like. She knows the parents but can’t picture the daughter.

“Do you like Chris?” she asks.

“Sure,” Johnny says. “Yeah.” Then, “I was thinking. About us and what we’re going to do. Leaving Charlene would kill her.”

“Would it?”

Johnny is scratching at a match. It finally lights. He is looking over Loraine’s head, at something only he can see. He refocuses, seeks out Loraine. “Yes, it would,” he says.

Johnny pays for lunch and, out on the curb before climbing into the car, he pulls Loraine close and pushes his nose against her hair.

Loraine doesn’t really like the town of Lesser. Most of the time she tries to stay away. She does her shopping at Super Valu in Winnipeg, except when she runs out of butter or milk and then she drives into Lesser and stops at the Solo store. Loraine finds she doesn’t fit in the town. She’s the wife of a dead farmer and it’s still strange for women to run their own farms. She can’t hobnob with the boys at Chuck’s; she has no desire to. Lesser’s an ugly little place with a sickness at its core; it’s full of death and gossip and churches. This is what Loraine thinks. It’s made a man like Johnny go all to pieces. He doesn’t know any more who he is. He
wants to be a Christian and a do-gooder but he keeps falling and people laugh at him; they want him to fail. And when he does fail he comes running to Loraine.

She remembers the day Johnny’s father committed suicide. It was eight o’clock in the evening and she was in the refrigerator room, stacking flats. She’d seen Johnny earlier that day. He’d come by and they’d made love in the bedroom and the sunlight had fallen through the thin curtain onto his arms and stomach, and later, counting eggs, his scent was still in her nose.

Johnny had entered the refrigerator room and stood, leaning against the door, and told her about his father hanging from the tree and how he had no shoes, they must have been kicked off, and he told her about the dead dog and the bloody baseball bat. “Why on earth would he kill the dog?” Johnny asked.

Loraine didn’t have too much to say. She kept stacking trays and glancing up at Johnny. She didn’t want to touch him right then, either. “Sorry, Johnny,” she said once, but he didn’t seem to hear. She wasn’t terribly sorry, she’d never really liked Mr. Fehr. He’d been stingy.

“How’s Charlene managing all this?” Loraine asked. “Where is she?”

“At home. I miss you,” Johnny said. “You.”

Loraine shook her head. “No you don’t, Johnny. You use me. I’m sorry about your father,” she said, “but there’s nothing I can do. You and me, we’re apart. If you lay in my bed every night and I could hold you, not just have sex with you, then we could weep together, but what we have is nothing. We screw. That’s all.” Loraine was surprised at her own anger and at the word she’d just used. She hated it; so cold. She imagined that it was because her desire for Johnny had been spent that afternoon. Always, after the fact, she became rueful and disliked herself.

Johnny hung his head. Loraine picked up an egg and heaved it at him. It hit the plywood wall beside him. He looked up and grinned. Furious, she threw two more eggs. One hit the floor, the other he caught and cradled in his palm. “Hickety pickety, my black hen,” he said. He put the captured egg in his jacket pocket and walked out. He left the door open. The
chickens flapped and screamed in their cages. Loraine sat for the longest time, wishing Johnny would come back.

Loraine goes to parent-teacher interviews at Lesser Collegiate and she talks to Mr. Jameson, the Grade Nine Science teacher, and Ms. Holt, the English teacher. Science is okay, Chris could do better she is told, but he’s all right. Outside the English class she waits for her interview and looks over Chris’s writing folder and journal. She wonders if Chris knows his writing is available for her to see.

She reads, “Gonna write a cheap story about this woman who lives on a farm with her son. She’s a wannabe and so is he.” Loraine looks for the story but there is nothing else. Scribbled on the inside of the folder is this:

Sex is like math.
Subtract the clothing
divide the legs
and multiply.

Inside the pocket is a paper with Chris’s sprawling handwriting:

Your father was a bastard,
Your mother was a whore,
This all wouldn’t have happened
If the rubber hadn’t tore!

Loraine blinks, reads it again, and then she slides the paper back into the pocket and closes the folder. Ms. Holt pokes her head out and smiles, her face round, her eyes oily. Chris claims she’s a fossil and Loraine can see what he means. She knows that Ms. Holt taught Johnny. Taught him how to write a composition. She thinks she should ask about Johnny. Find out what kind of a student he had been, if back then already he was into sex. Of course.

They sit at a table and Loraine says, “It’s so odd to be in a school. I keep waiting to be tested or something.” She tries to laugh but it comes out too loud and she turns her head, stares at the wall.

But Ms. Holt is smiling and the two of them talk about living in this town, something Ms. Holt doesn’t do. She commutes from Winnipeg. “Oh, no,” she says, “it’d be claustrophobic.”

Loraine nods. She leans forward and says, “The kids, when they write their compositions, do they have preoccupations? You know …”

“Oh, yes, at this age everything ‘sucks’, of course. Our themes are violence and sex but we’re not allowed to write about either. When doing poetry, for example, we prefer the bucolic: pastoral scenes, rhyme, metre, odes.” Her voice sings on until Loraine says, “Where does he sit? Chris. Which desk?”

Ms. Holt seems surprised, but she points to the back corner. “Some teachers,” she says, “don’t have desks. Just tables, and everything’s a muddle. Hurly-burly. Me, I couldn’t abide it.”

Loraine goes and sits in Chris’s desk. It’s got a good angle on the room. Farthest from the teacher. By the wall. His name is carved into the top. So is Melody’s. “Is he insolent?” Loraine asks. She doesn’t really care any more. She hopes, in a small way, he is.

“Not at all. Not a peep from Chrissy.”

An awful name, Loraine thinks. Not his at all. She wants to raise her hand and say, “Hello, Miss Holt. I’m a whore. A slut. I’m gonna have Johnny Fehr’s baby. Remember Johnny? Picture’s out in the centrum there, on the wall. Class of ′75. Saw it when I walked in. Even back then he had that sneering smile, as if life couldn’t beat him. Anyway, he’s my main man.”

But, instead, Loraine sighs and pushes herself from the desk. “Thank you,” she says. “I’ve gotta run. Thank you.”

Mr. Jake Wohlgemut, manager of the Lesser Credit Union, likes Loraine. She can tell. He sits in his chair, gaily swings his short legs, and stares
at her neck, her mouth, her breasts, her shoulders. He fiddles with his tie and then says, “A new generator? No problem, Mrs. Wallace.” Feet swing.

He is married to a tall big-boned woman with black hair. Gloria. Loraine tries to imagine them in bed together. All she can see is Jake working his way up and around Gloria’s body like a mountain climber. They must have fun, she muses. Loraine often pictures couples having sex. She is not mean-spirited about it, just curious. She will talk to another woman and images will begin to flicker and jump; the rabbity hunch of the man’s buttocks, nipples covered by big hands, the vein in the throat beating, the roll of stomachs.

Today, after getting her loan, she runs into Charlene by the Credit Union door. Charlene works here and is on her way out for lunch. “Do you want to come?” Charlene asks. They’re walking out to the sidewalk together.

“I can’t,” Loraine says. “I’ve got chores.” She’s studying Charlene’s face which still suffers from the scars of teenage acne. But her body’s large and full, much bigger than Loraine’s. Loraine wonders if Charlene is still holding Johnny at bay, as he claimed. How could you keep a man like Johnny away from a woman like Charlene? She wonders what Charlene’s eyes and mouth do when Johnny is inside her.

Charlene’s talking. Her hands are moving skyward and Johnny’s name is on her lips. “We’re seeing a counsellor,” she says. “I told Johnny we’d have one more try. He’s like a sheep. Do you want him?” She touches Loraine’s arm, red nails. Loraine smiles at this tall woman. Her size is intimidating. Loraine lifts a hand quickly, says goodbye and walks to her half-ton. A little quip like that is so perfect, she thinks, like the light touch of God on a sinner’s head. As if Charlene’s known all along.

Loraine drives home slowly, down Main Street past Bill’s Hardware, Herb’s Electric, the centre, then the cemetery where Johnny’s parents are buried. The mother died and the father couldn’t take it, lonely perhaps.

There’s an old woman standing in the graveyard. She’s wearing a blue polka-dot dress and holding flowers. Loraine doesn’t recognize her.
Beyond the cemetery lies OK Feeds where Johnny’s big dark car sits in the lot. Then quickly the highway begins and Loraine picks up speed. In the distance there is this other graveyard, for buses and combines and tractors—Wayne Wiebe’s Tractor Parts. Ugly. A sin, Loraine thinks, to allow one man to destroy the lay of the land. Past Wayne’s and Lesser is lost behind her. The trees are bare, though there are still leaves blowing across the road. Smoke rises from a far-off field. She approaches the three-mile turn-off and coasts along the gravel road. Her barns become two white lines in the distance. She likes having her own place. She thinks about Charlene and how she’s a woman who needs Johnny. Needs his money, his land, his house. But not Loraine, no. She doesn’t need anything like that. Not today, anyway.

The following Saturday, eating supper, Chris says he’s got a ride to town later—Brian’s dad is going to a hockey game—so he’s going to go hang out at the centre. “Okay?” he says.

Loraine nods and studies her son. He wears his hair long in back, not like the other skaters who walk around like skinheads. “I want you home by eleven,” she says. She notices he has a second earring, something they haven’t discussed. “You’ll do the eggs with me tomorrow?” she asks.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“It was our deal,” Loraine says. She tries to keep her voice light. “You would help me on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday.”

“Okay, okay. Johnny asked about you yesterday.”

Loraine finds it strange to hear Chris talking about Johnny. She pauses and waits.

“He’s weird, Mom. Not a bad guy, but weird.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“I don’t know. Kinda like he’s in this time warp. You know, like you have those bell-bottoms in your closet but you wouldn’t dream of wearing them. Well, Johnny’d wear his.”

“Does he do religious stuff?” Loraine asks. She wants to keep Chris talking.

“Some. Not really. He’s big into guilt. Says salvation is like doing drugs.”

“You guys talk about drugs?”

“Some. Sometimes. He has this big speech. About how he used to get stoned and wasted but how now he’s straight, and then he gets really excited and talks about angel dust and acid. Half the time we don’t know what he’s blabbing about.”

“You like it there, at the centre?”

“No, not really. It’s okay.”

Loraine’s mouth is hurting. She has a cold sore. She pores some salt into her palm, licks a finger and dips it. The salt, when eased between her gum and lip, inflates the pain. She hisses, licks her finger and studies her nails. “What’s this Krahn girl like?” she asks. “Melody. Right?”

“Oh, all right. She’s nice.” That’s all. No more is offered and Loraine won’t push. Chris seems so childlike, so immature, she can’t imagine any danger lurking. She wants to believe that. For Chris at this age, girls are dreams.

After her son has left, Loraine fills the tub and slides in. She touches her body, experimenting, believing in this, cupping her breasts and remembering Chris as an infant and milk dripping from her nipples. Johnny pulls her from the tub to the phone. She stands in the upstairs hall, dripping onto the carpet, a small towel covering her, and listens to him exclaim, “Loraine, I was just thinking, God, it’s wonderful. Really. I closed my eyes and you were there, big-bellied, thick-legged. I wonder if your belly button will do that little trunk thingy the way my sister’s did. I’d like to slip it in my nostril, I would. When do you feel the moving?”