For All the Obvious Reasons Page 2
She had missed the bus. And she’d seen others, friends of hers with their thumbs out, catching rides with other students into the city, or across the Lions Gate Bridge to North Van where it was cheaper to live. Where she and Harry lived now. Plenty of them did it.
They heated two cans of beef stew over the fire and sopped it up with bread. Afterward, the Indian rinsed the cans in the river, burying them and marking the place so that they would not have to carry them but could pick them up on the way back a week later. He did not drink and he did not eat the candy bars that were Harry’s weakness, his only one, so far as she could tell. Reuben and Harry were familiar with the routine and with each other. They did not need to tell stories, the way men did, establishing who they are and what measure of deference or disregard each warranted. Even among men like her father, men who cared for a living, Charlotte had heard late-night versions of Great White Hunter tales, about patients with problems the books never told them about and that were usually the result of some strange thing they had managed to do to themselves, and these were the stories that had bothered her the most—the unavoidable exposure, the hoped-for and foolish trust, then the hunting tales that betrayed them. Once, even, she had overheard her father talking about her mother—‘will you just stop doing this, Mary,’ Bellows said to her. Bellows was a colleague of theirs in the practice. Charlotte had seen the cuts, too, but until that night, she had not known how they got there.
Around the fire the three of them sat. Reuben had found the desiccated root of a cottonwood five to six centimetres in diameter, and had begun carving it. His nose was striking, the kind suburban women with stereotypical views about Indians might want to paint, with a strong straight center bone, the flesh planing down evenly like the sides of a tent, one in shadow and the other a coppery gleam against the firelight. Harry was reading aloud from the fisherman’s guidebook about Dolly Varden, the trout they were after, “maximum weight, six to seven pounds, 18” long, hearty and colorful, stunningly spotted in scarlet with halos of pale silvery blue.” A log had settled out of the fire and he poked it back in among the embers, releasing an outburst of sparks. “Dollies are anadromous—seagoing.”
Over in the river shallows they could hear the hollow booming of the oil drum against stone. It was so deep and muffled by the current that the sound seemed to come to them subliminally, like some kind of animal, a moaning beast out there calling to them, needing, needing, needing and not about to give up.
“Expect strikes to be savage,” Harry read.
Charlotte had recently begun biting her nails again, a habit leftover from childhood and the time after her mother’s breakdown, a habit now revived with a vengeance. The sound of the drum banging restlessly in the eddy was getting to her. Abruptly, she tore her hand from her mouth and leapt up, plunging into the water. The drum sent up a great rumbling commotion when she reached it; under the trees the Arabian began to dance nervously.
The Indian didn’t rise to help. Harry scrambled his boots off, but Reuben extended one hand, palm down, and Harry stopped, and then the two of them stared into the fire, listening to her struggle to shove the oil drum out of the shallow eddy and into the main current.
Harry put away the guidebook. Reuben’s knife hesitated, then a thin curl of cottonwood grew from it, and then another and another.
“Dr. Schleifer said to talk about it,” Harry whispered to her later in the tent.
It was pitchy inside the tent walls, but somehow she could see the negative white of his eyes. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“He said it would help.”
“I told them everything.”
“Char.”
“The hard parts too. I told everyone everything.” She was thinking at that moment of the younger of the two RCMP officers doing his level best not to expose a twitch of emotion about what she was being asked to tell them, what she heard herself having to say to strangers, to herself who had now become a stranger. “I’m through with my talking.”
The officer had not been much older than she. It was worth hating him for, that and his fumbling inexperience, his dropped clipboard, his fat tender face and the tiniest glint of excitement she was sure she had detected in his eyes. It was like having to talk to a brother, if she had had one to talk to.
Harry propped himself up on one elbow, trying to see her through the darkness. She hadn’t cried yet and they all seemed to be waiting for that—signs of release and metamorphosis. A proper lamentation. But what was it that she had lost? What had slipped from her hands? What had died and what could she grow into, now that she had been ruined?
“Charlotte,” he whispered, “I’m almost a doctor.” She could hear in his tone an attempt at some misguided order of distracting levity, a detour onto the sunny well-tended boulevard that was Harry’s life and career where it was always safe to talk or cry, or to be yourself, because everybody would still love you. Harry was not afraid to be at anyone’s mercy. “Why won’t you talk about it, even with me?”
She rolled over. “For all the obvious reasons.”
Adoration was a dangerous proposition, potholed with hazards, obstructed by roadblocks, strangers asking intrusive questions that challenged your assumed identity. One day, one look across a room at him, and there were things you knew you didn’t dare reveal about yourself. Parts of you were quarantined as abruptly and dismissively as if officials had nailed a sign to your forehead—until further notice—or until you had somehow determined his receptivity—or his immunity—to the bad habits, the nasty thoughts, the lies that lacked any real point, the silly female rituals of love, the regrettable but not forgettable deeds of youth that you were convinced said more about who you were than all the make-up days that followed or coincided with that downfallen, down-at-the-heels version of you yourself.
She hadn’t told them everything. She hadn’t told them, for example, that she had been hitchhiking. They might have thought that she had been asking for it, or at the very least, that she had been reckless. Or that she was some sort of girl that she was not, a girl who hitchhiked.
On the second day they rode east along a creek that cut through the mountains, traveling in and out of shadow and then, leaving the creek, they found themselves beneath the tall fir and cedar and hemlock, resolutely in shadow. A disturbing quietude enveloped the Arabian. Charlotte began to worry that something important had gone out of her; began to wish for the fire and fight of the day before. From the trail a damp fecundity issued, and clouds of mosquitoes materialized, with single or double deer flies orbiting her dark curls and buzzing protest whenever one or the other became entangled. The thumping echo of slow hooves marched them along steadily, the Indian, the girl, and the tall young man leading the pack mule, and for a while no one broke whatever spell had been cast once they had left the sound of moving water and entered the silent forest.
Not long after, the Indian turned his horse, a stocky old stallion unexceptional but for a striking compliancy, and came back alongside Abra. “They like hair,” he said to Charlotte. “Hair like ours.” It was true: the deer flies did not bother Harry with his thin colorless wisps. Abra lifted her nose against the old bay and snuffed as Reuben handed Charlotte a tin of some kind of homemade salve, sharp and bitter smelling, that she was to rub around her neck and tousle into her thick curls. Reuben did the same to his own neck and hair. He had small blunt hands, but they moved—as he did—with a fine deliberation. Everything about the way he moved, in fact, suggested someone conserving himself in the face of an impending battle, an illness that he knew he could not beat, or an unbearable feeling that he knew he would simply and finally have to feel. For the first time since she had met Reuben, she offered a smile and he returned it with a slow solemn nod before resuming the lead.
What possible motive, she had to wonder, could this stranger have for treating her with such unearned and mannerly respect?
Behind her she could hear Harry humming something; he had such a reassuring voice, not especially strong but clear and valorous as rushing water. When the humming stopped she glanced back and saw that he was reading from another of his guidebooks, the one on native trees and plants. It was knowledge that bore no interest for her except insofar as having it might help her acquire some of his power. Harry was a great conqueror of things. When he took on a subject, he took it over entire, not obsessively but with a sanguine thoroughness that sometimes made her nervous, as if, once he had delved her through and through, he would leave her behind just as thoroughly. Charlotte did not want to be another topic on which one day he had finally sated himself. Even if there were not other reasons to hold some of herself back, this was reason enough.
And could he ever forgive her for this new knowledge she had not wanted, for what she had learned about men? A sudden raw shame came into her stomach. She was no longer innocent. She knew things, had done things. All of the shine of being Harry’s girl, Harry’s trinket, had been rubbed off. A dirty, needing, wanting world had simultaneously converted and convicted her: she was an adult. Adults did not need protection. And the very last thing she could stand to lose was Harry’s protection.
A polite distance had opened between Abra and Reuben’s old stallion. She watched the muscles of his rump flex, alternating with each step, left, right, left, right, unhurried and obedient, and felt herself settling into a dozy comfort. Between the Indian and Harry she felt safe; they were
keeping her safe, these two men each with his own fields of knowledge, each a conquering hero. For now, she was safe.
And in that safety something terrible stole to the surface: They would not be looking for someone who stopped for hitchhikers; they would be looking for a man with a different approach, more aggressive, more obvious. And there might be another girl out there like Charlotte, just trying it out, hitchhiking for the first time, who maybe was mad about something, in that sort of mood, the Devil take it all. There was something real and tangible at stake here—another life, another satchel of innocence someone had managed to carry away from the kingdom of childhood with its unsleeping monsters and its daily traumas disguised as lessons, all of them coming thick and fast as locusts in a private and inescapable parable of biblical proportions. Family bibles, she thought, each one personalized with barren dreams and born crosses, suppers trailing betrayals, doubtful redemptions.
Parables … people either broke down or went off, leaving you alone … that was what her life had taught her. That was the moral of her story. Relentless contingency.
But there was another life, anonymous but real.
She had missed the bus because she and Harry had had a bit of a row. About a woman who was going to be a doctor too—one of his classmates. Alex was her name. Charlotte didn’t even have a major yet, and was in fact considering dropping out, now that she’d met and married Harry. What more could she want, after all? After Harry.
Alex, she thought, staring into the melancholy depth of the forest whose tree trunks and branches scratched out the distance and held her to the narrow, viewless path. Alex was probably Harry’s equal in ways that Charlotte could never dream of being or achieving. Even her name suggested equality, male but not male. Charlotte had not understood that Harry’s friend was a woman. Alex this, Alex that. She pictured them side by side, peering into the half-dissected vitals of a bird or a rat, poking about with cold steel tools and making cold steely notations in journals, cracking jokes only an insider could get. Making eye contact.
The bus was gone and there she stood on the curb. Harry was back in the Faculty of Medicine building, and Alex somewhere in there too, and Charlotte was needing to file some kind of cosmic complaint, not exactly for his having Alex, or an Alex, but for occupying a world to which Charlotte would have only peripheral access, wifely access … social events or professional functions or perhaps during staff vacations, she might fill in as the receptionist. She might even help with accounting. She’d always been handy with numbers. Having children would increase the stakes, but just about the time they went off to live their lives, her female charms would begin their inevitable slump and slide. She might take up volunteer work, join a book club, take a last-ditch lover, have a small-scale breakdown. But it would all be part and parcel of the inequality for which she had gladly signed on. She hadn’t driven much of a bargain, had she? And here it was, the seventies. From the very beginning she had been dazzled by Harry. She hadn’t given herself much of a chance or even tried to be a person yet, she’d been so busy setting herself up as Harry’s protectorate.
They camped late along Hat Creek. Using grasshoppers, Reuben and Harry caught a string of rainbows, no more than what they could eat that night, and Charlotte boiled rice, and then there were two cans of Le Sieur peas upon which she had stubbornly insisted. No matter the healthy attributes of frozen vegetables, Charlotte would never give up canned Le Sieur peas. Reuben had gone away and come back fifteen minutes later with a bright orange mushroom, chicken-of-the-woods, which they fried up with the fish. After dinner, after scrubbing the tin plates with gravel and creek water and spacing them out on a downed tree to dry, Charlotte took her towel and wandered downstream until she found a deep enough pool to bathe in. Washing had become especially important, all parts of her body but some more than others. The men had been reminiscing about Harry’s father, and Harry’s voice had gone wobbly. It had been a long day. Everyone was tired. She did not want to hear Harry’s voice with so much feeling in it, not now, not this week. It had the effect of unstitching some of the day’s seams enough to send her back to the tent and into her sleeping bag before any more came loose.
Within minutes, a car pulled to the curb, a turquoise VW Beetle, maybe ten years old, judging by the thin chrome bumper and the seat configuration. A cheap car, repainted, balding tires. A student car. Clean—she had noticed that. It had made some kind of skewy difference as she leaned down to look through the passenger door glass. She can’t now remember what he said. What she said. What she remembers: nice-enough looking guy, brown hair cut short but not so short that it said something else, something you wouldn’t want to know. A man who was too fastidious could not be trusted with the accidents of being human. Small brown eyes, round as beads, olive skin, like her own; a checked shirt on a slim torso; flashing smile, bored, or hurried—one or the other—that tells her he might be doing her a favor, that he probably is doing her a favor. So she gets in. Because that’s all she wants right now, a favor from a stranger. Maybe he looks a little like Ricky Nelson, or some other teenage star. She’s not sure. She’s not sure now and doesn’t really want to know, because then she won’t breathe so well.
He has his left hand on the steering wheel and it looks like it’s trying to be casual, that hand with the fingers draped over the top, tapping, though the radio isn’t on so there’s no beat to follow. It’s the other hand that isn’t quite right but she can’t say how. Not when it’s shifting. When it’s shifting it looks fine, but in the space between shifting it seems to scurry back toward his body, or the seat … she’s not sure. There is a smell … vegetables … broccoli, it’s in the top of a paper bag, backseat—he’s been to market. Heading home. His window is half down. Hers is all the way up. The smell of the broccoli is making the car feel smaller than it already is. When she tries to find the window lever, he says it’s broken, but it’s actually simply gone. Maybe that’s the first sign. They’re on the Lions Gate Bridge and it’s not so far from Lynn Valley, from the neat middle-class neighborhood she lives in with Harry Fairbanks in their rented bungalow, and so she just wants to get over the bridge and figure out the rest of the way some other way. Walk. That’d be fine with her now. There’s a lot of traffic that is helping her feel all right about this in a roundabout way. Commuters. Commuters seem to make everything feel normal, crankiness and petty aggressions, tailgating. She’s never before hitchhiked, and she decides she’s just nervous. Her mother used to say dramatic. That Charlotte should grow up to be an actress. Her backpack is propped in the gap between the driver and passenger sides, and she rests her hand on it, as if it’s her dog watching out for her. Some of her friends hitchhike regularly. She ought to be able to do it too, though Harry’s always telling her she looks too innocent for ice cream practically. It is something he seems to like about her, so she doesn’t tell him otherwise. It is part of the part of her that isn’t quarantined, her presumed innocence.
He’s telling her that he goes to college too, not university but one of the city colleges. Money, he says, apologizing. It feels like a line he’s used to advantage. Struggling, hard-working fellow cheerfully accepting his lot, making the best of things, philosophical about it, not jealous—that line. Some part of her decides to buy this line. And why not? Half of who anybody was was who he pretended to be, or wanted to be, or had to be just to get along. Then he’s talking about girls he’s dated and how difficult they are, making him quit smoking before they’ll kiss him. University girls, not the ones at the city college—most of them smoke, he says. Now she remembers that he’s chewing gum. He keeps his mouth closed. Someone has taught him manners along the way, but he has a slight underbite and it doesn’t look all that easy. She would rather not hear about girls and how difficult they are. She’s wondering why he was driving around UBC when he attends one of the city colleges. “I quit smoking 2.6 weeks ago,” he’s telling her, and she makes herself mentally deliberate the .6, whether it means 6 out of 7 days or six-tenths of a week, because he’s still saying things—about mood swings and lack of sleep and periods of random aggression. He says the word “gum,” as if he’s saying “uncle” and surrendering, then gestures at his mouth and smiles without parting his lips. It’s not really a smile, it’s a flinch. She wants to get out of the VW now. A dumb word enters her mind—shenanigans—one of her mother’s words. “What sort of shenanigans have you been up to?” Charlotte needs to laugh … shenanigans, shenanigans, shenanigans, she repeats to herself, trying to shrink what’s happening down to a prank.