Shot-Blue Read online

  Then two or three days later everything was gone.

  ‘I wonder where the walking sticks are?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘I buried them,’ he told her.

  She would see them later that day, littered across the water, bobbing at shore, looking alive.

  The heron’s legs were like driftwood sticks, the colour of dust and dry. They’d snap in his hands, he thought. Tristan was frightened of the eye, so he looked at the legs. If he could get his hands on them, he would go ahead and snap them with one sharp bend. He looked at the legs, but when he threw his stone he aimed for the eye.

  Rachel didn’t want her boy to be a cruel boy. She watched him weigh the stone in his hand but never imagined that he would try to hit the heron.

  He missed, but in the same motion was struck in the back by something sharp and hard. Then he was down, chest pressed against the wet rock, face nearly in the water. He stayed down. He knew to stay down without being told.

  It was not surprise that Rachel felt as Tristan let go of his stone. It was sadness. And it was sadness she felt as she let go of her own.

  ‘That’s what it feels like,’ she said, coming down to him. Maybe he could hear her, but he didn’t answer.

  §

  When he talked in his sleep, his small voice strained, like he was trying to sing, but he never sang. She could have reached out then but didn’t want to wake him. She had always felt it was embarrassing to be woken from a dream, to know that you were seen when you could not see.

  He was dreaming that he was treading water and couldn’t find shore. The sky, the land, the lake were all the same fresh black. There was the slightest shimmer, but from what light? He tried to find it from his dugout.

  She played shadow to him all day. Only at night could she break off on her own. But here she was leaning over him, her body like a shield, protecting him from what? Maybe she was the reason he never sang out. Maybe she was what he needed her protection from.

  She needed him to eat more. Tomorrow he would eat something from a package. They would go to the trading post, and she’d buy him anything. With the money she would get. Her plan was good, because it was not complicated.

  Rachel sat on the floor beside him. ‘No more of this,’ she whispered. She leaned and put her lips close to his cheek. ‘No more sleeping on the ground.’ He was his own child. She wrapped his blanket around his waist and legs, then pulled her own blanket down off the bed. As she spread it over him, her hands moved across his shoulders, down his arms, to his hands. She wanted to hold his hands down, to reason with him, to tell him to stop talking in his sleep, to stop sleeping on the floor, that he must eat; but then there was a different want, which was to keep her hands off and learn from him.

  Dreaming was exhausting. She was grateful to have a night of work ahead. She struck one match and it stayed lit long enough to light the kindling in the stove. There was no question the fire would burn, not smoulder – she’d used all the best pieces. She took her blouse from the old tissue paper it was folded in and put it on, fresh against her skin that smelled strong. She put on her jeans and a loose sweater, pulled her hair back and tied it. When she lowered her chin against the collar of her coat, she could smell the sweet blouse and her body too. As a teenager, Rachel would sell herself to a friend. She didn’t think of it as selling sex. They were not good friends, but he would pay her, and they went like that, having sex in his bedroom, even when his parents were home, for about a year until he got a girlfriend. Another time, it was one of her brother Sheridan’s friends, who’d heard about what she’d done. He asked her, said he liked her, promised he wouldn’t tell Sheridan, and he would pay. At fifteen, she had no other way to get money. She knew those boys, and she wasn’t afraid of herself.

  She carried the canoe down to the water against her thighs. It felt light, which it wasn’t, and so she recognized her body was rising to the occasion. She pushed off and started south, staying close to shore to keep her line. The only place to go at this hour was the drinking house on the mainland at the bottom of the copper-mine road, Sebastian’s place. If she was at the heel of the lake, it was at the hip. It was a place only men went, so they would know why she’d come.

  An awkward moon lit the way, which seemed right. It would have felt forbidding if the moon had been pretty. It was a useful moon, a hunk like a ham roast, that gave enough light to see the shoreline but roused no wind and called no spirits on.

  She passed the time listening to her own breath and the sound of the paddle pulling through the water, and to the eddies that swirled and sucked as she drew the paddle out. After two hours, when she was almost there, she heard a motor. She stopped paddling so whoever it was wouldn’t see her paddle flash in the moonlight, the wet blade like a mirror. But it wasn’t any use: no one seemed to notice Rachel when she was in plain sight – then they ignored her – but when she tried to hide or slip by, she was cornered.

  The boat came straight for her and slowed until the motor idled. It was the water taxi again.

  ‘Is that you? I thought you were a man!’ He cut the motor.

  She wondered what he was doing out there and decided he was probably drunk.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’

  As she let go of her paddle for the first time, Rachel felt patches of blisters on the palms of her hands. They felt gross, like holding warm teabags. Oh my god, she thought. Paddling back would break the blisters.

  ‘You aren’t sleepwalking?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, feeling her hands start to pulse.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone you saw me out here,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t talk to people,’ he told her.

  But that wasn’t true, he’d been asking people about her. Why hadn’t he seen her before? She had kept to herself, they said, lived outside of town in a trailer with her brother. Now she lived with a boy and had no way to support him. His wife said she’d seen Rachel a few times: ‘I don’t know what she’s thinking. I can usually tell what people are thinking.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her eyes were everywhere.

  ‘I can give you a ride where you’re going.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ she said, ‘not tonight.’

  She looked out at the water, not at him.

  ‘I’m going to the place up there, Sebastian’s,’ he told her.

  ‘You are?’

  ‘You should come with me.’

  She would have refused and met him later, if that was meant to happen. But her hands.

  §

  There was no more light inside than out. Over the bar two propane lamps smouldered like abandoned coals, not gold like they should have been, but a sunken red. The brittle mantles were seared at the bottom in black rings. Rachel always wanted to crush dead mantles, since they turned to ash at the lightest touch, into a powder finer than flour. She had to stop herself.

  ‘Where’s your boyfriend, Rachel?’ asked Sebastian. Women weren’t really welcome, but Sebastian had always liked her.

  ‘Oh, he died, I think.’ She looked past him.

  ‘He died, you think?’

  ‘He probably didn’t die. But if you never see someone again, how alive are they really?’

  ‘Not very,’ Sebastian agreed, ‘unless you think of them.’

  As children they’d danced together, or at least very near to each other, on Treble Island on those summer nights her father kept her by his side. She remembered how Sebastian flicked his fingers as he danced. He would flick them, then pull up and brandish the bottom of his button-down shirt like it was the hem of a dress, showing his stomach then covering it again. He’d shown everyone his stomach.

  There were three old guys at the end of the bar, copper miners, she figured by their tight builds and matching black steel-toe boots, and by how they talked so close to each other’s faces. They were comfortable that close. They were good at being buried alive together, both under t
he earth and here, under a cloud of cigarette smoke so thick it looked painted onto the air above their heads, the same grey as their hands and faces.

  Summer would bring tourists and migrant workers, but she couldn’t wait for them. She was here now, hoping to find a man she’d never seen.

  ‘One day this place will burn down,’ said the man from the water taxi. ‘It’s so dark it’s turning in on itself.’

  He was right to interrupt her. There was no one else, and she’d already chosen him.

  ‘The dark’s good. We can’t see how disgusting everything is,’ she said. ‘The floor, the counter. It’s sticky.’ She lifted her glass and took a big sip. ‘My glass is dirty, I can taste it.’

  He looked at her hard.

  ‘Okay, what’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Keb.’

  ‘That’s your nickname?’

  ‘No, that’s my name. I don’t have another one.’

  Keb saw that Rachel was too thin. Her bones – her shoulders, the clavicle – pressed against the skin. It was hard to see her whole, since all these lines called for attention. There was her wrist. He’d seen piles of wrists, but never one so clearly. She put her hands on the table and stretched her arms. He followed the movement of her hands from the table to her neck, through her hair, back to the table, down to her thighs. She moved a lot. Only her eyes held still. But she wasn’t looking at him. She seemed to be looking nowhere.

  He tested himself by staring at her sunken cheek. It didn’t make him apprehensive. He told himself that he didn’t wonder about the story. He felt defensive on her behalf: her scar wasn’t a big deal, didn’t make her ugly. It didn’t make her hands, or where she put them, less interesting to him.

  ‘You’re looking at my face,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She didn’t mind.

  They drank mixed rye straight, and it tasted good until it didn’t taste at all.

  ‘I’d go home,’ said Rachel, once she realized they’d been drinking for hours. They’d been keeping pace with the miners, but it was impossible to finish with their kind of composure. ‘I’d go now,’ she said, sliding her legs out against his.

  ‘You can,’ he told her.

  ‘I wonder what time it is.’

  It grieved him that she should mention time.

  Rachel fell asleep in her bed at six-thirty. When she woke at nine she was fully dressed. She smelled of whisky and bile, but her limbs felt light as she lifted them. As she rose she felt exceedingly physically good, better than other mornings. First thing, she took off her blouse and wrapped it in its tissue paper. It was wet at the back – she’d been sweating in her sleep – and crumpled and marked with black down the sides, where Keb had reached under her sweater and put his hands the first time. He’d cleaned his hands on her. But if his hands weren’t clean, she didn’t blame him. They weren’t supposed to be.

  She crouched by the woodstove in her bra and held her hands out, but the stove was blunt cold. She filled it with balls of newspaper and kindling and lit it, her hand shaking the match. A strange momentum in her body had carried her out of bed, out of the blouse, to here, and it wanted to keep going, so she put oatmeal and water in the pot, went outside and brought in an armful of firewood. When the oatmeal was done, she filled a bowl and put it down on the table with a hard knock, almost breaking the dish. Distances were hard to judge. Like the distance between her hand and waist. She tried to rest her hand on her hip, but her hand wouldn’t land. That’s when she remembered Tristan.

  She searched everywhere. Under the bed, across the floorboards with her hands. Something was wrong with her hands. She searched in impossible places, as if searching for something smaller than a boy. She opened the cupboards, lifted the blankets, two and three times. Did he always scatter the blankets? She couldn’t remember. Maybe he’d been taken away. Someone had come. Her body tightened around the idea. She sat down and threw up.

  Rachel rose to her feet, walked wall to wall and touched the walls like a swimmer pushing off. Her hands were beating with pain, a ragged pulse, but she refused to look at them. Her hands didn’t matter.

  She went to the window, not to look out, but to hate this place she loved. Why did it matter? Why did she think it was hers? She was ready to see the sky empty, the water empty, her eyes empty, but there was Tristan down low on the shore, sitting where he always sat to watch over the water.

  ‘We’re going to Treble Island,’ she said, coming up behind him, breathing like she’d been running. ‘But don’t worry, not to see anyone. We’re going to the store.’

  He didn’t look at her.

  ‘You can choose something. I’m going to choose something too.’

  ‘Friends are hard. It’s okay you don’t have a lot.’

  Sitting on the verandah of the trading post, eating butter tarts out of a greasy brown-paper bag, they watched a game of Capture the Flag take place in sprints and chase below. The boys were fast runners, even the smallest ones. Their bodies punched the air as they ran, making room in the crowd and splitting the tall grasses. Their legs wheeled without thought, stopping only when kicked out or wrapped.

  Rachel knew these boys were different than Tristan. They were creatures of instinct. They knew exactly what they were doing: this. And later they would do something else. Tristan hadn’t said anything since she’d found him at shore that morning. His life, like hers, would never answer any question with that kind of confidence. One boy clipped the legs of another boy. The way people treated her, Rachel didn’t think anyone knew what they were doing. They were all making it up – throwing their weight around, hedging against the unknown – and why not just admit that? One boy caught up and pulled another boy’s hair, then seemed to apologize, petting him for a long time. Maybe hedging was the answer. Maybe that was what she was supposed to do, hedge, but she never could. Two boys ganged up on a smaller third, but he was explosive and easily outran them, leaving them breathless, hands pulling on the bottoms of their shirts. People disappointed each other but most of all themselves. The two stragglers were livid but still cheerful. One spat hard on the ground at his own feet, as if to say, fuck it, at least we’re together and he’s alone.

  They had to believe in the game. They had to believe in every dash and blow, or get run over. And that’s why she couldn’t imagine Tristan down there, he was too much a part of her.

  He felt her hand on the back of his neck and leaned into it. He didn’t know what she was thinking about, but he knew she needed him to be there with her and nowhere else. Together they watched as one boy grabbed the front of another boy’s shirt, twisted it in his fist and pulled him to the ground, shoulder first. The shoulder unnaturally compressed and the boy stayed down.

  ‘See, friends are hard.’ She would tell him all the hard things.

  Time to go, they walked down the boardwalk to the dock with plastic bags full of groceries, the handles stretching thin and banding their skin. The Treble boys didn’t make way but included them in their game as obstacles. One boy hid behind Rachel and tempted another to come and get him. Tristan hated that but there was nothing he could do, and soon he was likewise used. The game sped up once they were in it, and now shouts heard as playful from above sounded different – they didn’t give direction but menaced – a kind of music like bats flickering around your head. A small fist hit the side of a small head with a pop; a body slipped, another slid; a shoe fell off; a string of beads broke off a wrist, but that was soundless, even the tears. The game was getting better since every second it was more terrible. The point of a stick was dragged lightly down Tristan’s back, but he didn’t turn. He would fall and hit the ground on that boy’s tears, the one who’d lost his bracelet. He’d cover the tears with his chest and cheek, gathering them to himself.

  Rachel was satisfied they would make it through the summer as she put her bags into the bottom of the canoe. She liked feeling how heavy they were. It would be an easy trip home with the boat sitting so low.
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br />   Tristan saw the flag first, hanging under the front edge of the dock, tied from below. It wasn’t a rag like he thought it should be for Capture the Flag, but a fine cloth embroidered at the edge, the wet tip translucent where it hit the water. It shimmered in the strained light under the dock and he liked it.

  Rachel crawled into the stern, where finally last night’s exhaustion overtook her. Satisfaction brought it on, now that she was done and they had their groceries. Her back ached through to her stomach. The feeling of the canoe’s lacquered cedar, warmed in the sun, made her want to lie down. She thought of stretching out in the bottom of the boat. It smelled like a dug-up garden. If the canoe were a cocoon, she would wake in a different shape. She felt herself slipping into that shape already; her chin dropped, shoulders slunk, hands curled around her blisters, and that’s when she saw the cloth twisting under the dock.

  She thought it was for her. White was her colour. So she untied the tight knot. It was hard to untie, but that only convinced her she was right. It didn’t occur to Rachel that a boy might have borrowed one of his mother’s kitchen window curtains to make a game worth playing. Later that afternoon, the boy’s mother would notice it gone. She wouldn’t yell, or even bother to find him, but would sit down and grow quiet because she had saved up for the cloth and had sewn the curtains to please herself, and she never did anything for herself.

  §

  Keb usually stopped by their place on his way down the lake, but now he wanted to go there straight without an errand. He thought about telling his wife Anuta that he was going fishing, but she would never believe him. You either fished or you didn’t. So he told her he was going to work. He was going to put a new roof on the old hunting cabin. Marie could come and hold the ladder, or help carry things. She could play with the boy who lived there.

  ‘Hold the ladder? If you slide over or start to come down, she won’t do you any good.’

  ‘She can stretch her legs out.’