Oil people, p.18
Oil People, page 18
“It’s for you,” Angie said. “For me, too, I admit that. But I mean, this place, we need to get out of here.” I sat there thinking about this, listening to the wheeze and whir of the struggling AC unit. Did I even want to leave?
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“What do you want to do? Nothing?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Doing nothing’s doing something.”
I shrugged. I thought of sludge, of Marc, looked up at the window where the sun seemed to melt and seep, a crushed blood orange.
“Don’t tell,” she said. “Just don’t.”
I looked at my pale, worn sister with her blistered tattoo.
“You used to be fun,” I said.
She smiled. “I used to be blind.”
* * *
I woke that night to a slurping sound. I opened the trap door in a sour clutch of fear and hope, but it wasn’t coming from there, it was coming from outside. I drifted down the dark steps, felt the bulging, ill-formed eyes of the owl, the red-tailed hawk. I walked barefoot over the earth, heedless of frogs and slithering things. Slurp. Slurp. Slurp. I came over the brambles, dew and dirt up to my ankles, and I came through the willows, stood at the edge of the creek and saw him there, drinking like an animal, his back rising, wavelike, his hand a paddle steering the creek water into his mouth, and then he turned to me, and I saw that it was not water. It was smeared on his forehead and cheeks, gobbed in his beard, sluicing down his thick neck. His face opened into a moon-shaped grin and I saw that his teeth were black and gleaming, his mouth bright as gore.
* * *
I didn’t tell my parents about the article, and I didn’t know why. Was I part of it now? Was I a saboteur? Why didn’t I want them to sell the house, the land? Why didn’t I want Dad to succeed? Some days I hated this place. Some days I was sure Angie was right: My parents were irresponsible. We were all contaminated. And yet, deeper, there was an urge to stay, to remain.
Mum stayed in her room. Angie pressed me again and again, saying I had to choose a side. She didn’t seem to trust me, and I began to wonder why she’d told me in the first place—I wondered if maybe she wanted them to find out, if she herself was unsure. Why should I even care?
Then came the night of the bush party. A night with Marc, with my promise, the gleaming S of his scar. I felt that it was a special night for us, monumental, a kind of covenant. Two lovers swimming across the river and back. It would bond us, fuse us. Ollie would pick up Marc first, then me and Val. After that, we’d drink pinched Alberta Premium at the bush party and then we’d swim, just the two of us. We would achieve something, together. We would swim across a river, a country. We would cross over together, come back changed.
That afternoon, I bumped into Thea at the Esso. I was biking home from Val’s and when I passed the gas station, I saw her sitting on the hood of her dad’s Cadillac. They were parked at the pump, but Sandy must have been inside, settling up. Though the air was gauzy with heat, she wore jeans and high-tops and a denim jacket. Somehow, she wasn’t sweating.
“Hey Leak,” she said. “How’s Marc?”
I stopped the bike and stared up at her, the Cadillac behind her, the bright-blue visor on the top of the windshield, a neon unibrow. The fields beyond swam with heat shimmer.
“What?” I swallowed, stammered, mind clenching. “Why?”
“Relax,” she laughed. “Don’t have a hairy canary.”
That night, back at the gas station waiting for Marc and Ollie, Val was telling me how dumb the whole thing was, how I shouldn’t listen to Thea she was just fucking with me but I also shouldn’t swim across the river, no way, that was definitely stupid. We were sitting on the edge of the ditch beneath the fluorescent altar of the gas station and Val was asking did I have any idea how toxic the river was and who cares if Faucet wants to go to Michigan, getting nostalgic about his mummy and whatever. Fuck him. How long had I known him anyway? What was I trying to prove? I sipped the thick, sugary tang of my one-litre green Slurpee, because we lived in a world where neon green could be a flavour. I felt in my pocket for the key with the broken wing, then in my handbag for the Mason jar of Alberta Premium.
Van Halen guitars blared around the corner before we saw the yellow Mustang, Ollie in the driver’s seat revving unnecessarily as he skidded onto the grass at the edge of the gas station. Val rolled her eyes and led the way, opened the door, which was covered with decals of centaur demons and pornish mermaids.
Ollie greeted us with a reptile grin, a cigarette posed in the corner of his mouth. He lit it and exhaled through his nostrils. He had big ears with the lobes attached at the bottom, wore a bomber jacket and a studded bracelet with a pair of Wranglers and boots, his hair bleached like Billy Idol. “Hey ladies,” he said.
“Hey perv,” Val sniped.
“Wait,” Ollie said. “Are you Indian?”
“Why,” Val said. “You like Indian burns?”
Ollie laughed, too hard. “Got gas money?”
“Sure got gas,” Val said. She pretended to fart and toss it at him.
“Ew,” Ollie said.
Marc turned and smiled from the front seat and I wondered what he thought of Ollie. He took my hand and kissed it like some smooth prince and I wavered, wondered, for a moment, who he was.
We drove by fields and houses, backyard pools pumping chemicals. Tire swings hanging noose-like from willows. I mixed the liquor into my Slurpee and drank that sweet, raw nausea then passed it to Val. I had no doubts about the swim, about ignoring Val. I felt nothing but the urge to bring Marc close to me, and I knew the swim would do it.
Up front, Ollie lit another cigarette, only this one was not a cigarette. Marc took a toke and passed it back with a dumb, dreamy smile. I passed it to Val and she pulled, so I did too. I’d tried a few hits before, though I’d never felt a thing. Angie said inhaling was harder than it seemed; you had to suck it right in. She said it was best to learn with cigarettes, but they’d always made me think of the smell of Mum’s car, that old stale reek mixed with artificial pine.
The joint tasted off, made my tongue numb. Ollie bragged about his breakdancing classes and a friend he knew who’d bought a condo in Toronto, right next to the CN Tower.
“His uncle,” Marc said.
“Shut up,” Ollie said.
I looked out the window at the pulsing stars, the dark rows of soy and corn, the glow of the plants in the distance, a pair of tractor headlights lumbering down a gentle hill, a great gasoline animal.
We passed dilapidated farms and decapitated silos and then we were out in the lush dark fields, the stars singing above. I sipped my swamp of sugar and rye. Ollie’s tires skittered and spat gravel. A red-brick building hunkered in a silver nest of clouds. Where was he taking us? I thought of the story about the serial killer who’d come up from Detroit, worked his way to London. I looked at Marc, at Val. My heart shuddered, chugged. The river curled and shook.
Then laughter. Teenage laughter, bodies spilling through the grass, tiny flaming beads of lighters raised to hooded faces. I was foolish. I was high, suddenly fearless. The car rolled on, headlights swooping over plaid jackets, tossed bicycles, parked ATVs. The bush party was not in the bush, but on an old set of bleachers on a soccer field on the edge of an abandoned school. Close by lay the river, dark and twinkling, the lights of the refineries in America and at home.
The parking lot was riven with thick, dark streaks where the concrete was broken, hip-high weeds rising up. Towards the river there was a rocky beach with a couple of rusted-out truck cabs and a few metal barrels.
We climbed out of the car, into the smell of river and pot smoke and thirsty yellow grass, clover and dandelion and goose shit underfoot. The parking lot was full of deep dents where puddles should have been. Ollie pulled a pair of boots and a tackle case and a couple of rods from his trunk. The rods bent and the sky sort of thickened, the night gone gooey. I spotted Thea, heard her high-pitched laugh, feminine and fake. She was talking to a group of older guys, Ollie’s friends. She was tugging at her bra straps and slapping the boys on their chests as she laughed at their jokes. When she saw me, she flipped her hair and turned away, leaned into some huge hockey player, whispered sexily into his neck.
Ollie went and sat next to Thea, who gave him a big hug, cozied in like old friends. We walked through spilled beer bottles, condom wrappers, a green steel barrel garbage can with a sticker that read SLAM DUNK YOUR JUNK. Next to it, a tampon applicator in the crabgrass, pale pink with its fanged circle mouth.
I sat down with Val on the edge of one of the bleachers, asked if she thought that joint might have been laced. She said settle down, forget it, have a good time. I stared at a small paper gum wrapper caught in the weeds, flailing as if tortured, lost. Marc sat beside us and rubbed my back as we watched someone draw figure eights in a Dodge Ram, the suspension teetering, mud spitting over the roof, skidding at our feet, the reek of torn muck all over the air, everyone cheering, shrieking in the ripe smell of gasoline and desiccated grass.
Marc rubbed my thigh and I looked at his hand, remembering how he had fed the pigs so gently. “I’m excited,” he said. “For our swim.” I looked in his eyes and saw that he was high, and that he was smitten by me, that we were good, we were close. His gaze was tilted, his eyes red and watery, almost as slick as his mouth.
“Me too,” I said. Marc stroked my neck and kissed me on the forehead and rose, walked off laughing with Ollie, who had a handful of fishing worms and was pretending to eat them. Val squeezed my shoulder and said again that I shouldn’t do it, the swim. It was dumb, especially if I was buzzed. Some guys in plaid shirts and cowboy hats came up and started telling us about their junior hockey careers, backcheck forecheck paycheck. They all had matching sideburns and jackets or shirts with various team names—Broncos, Vipers, Storm. They laughed and patted each other on the butt and Val asked if they preferred plastic trophies or human. The hockey guys looked around at each other then left us alone and I pretended not to look around for Marc. The night scrolled on, thick and loud, filled with tree frogs and crickets, the smell of river and mud and diesel. Someone was building a fire in an old garbage can and a different, larger truck was roaring around the scored football field.
Then I saw them together. Thea on the bleachers, sitting close to Marc, way too close, and her legs kept bouncing against his. She was cackling, laughing far too hard and hitching her bra and what was next, what was coming?
I slurped the last loud trickle of my electric-lime rye, tried not to stare. Val rubbed my back. “Don’t look,” she said. There was an eel inside me, turning and turning. “Laugh,” Val said. So I did. I remembered what she had said on the bus, how it had worked. I laughed as if she had just said the most hilarious thing in the world. I slapped my knee and rubbed my phony watering eyes. I felt the heads turn, but I kept my eyes steady on Val and the lawn and whatever other hockey bozo wanted to catch my gaze.
Val’s cousin Lacy appeared beside us, her navel ring bright in her midsection. Val introduced me and Lacy pretended not to know me, though I’d met her a dozen times, had sat at the table with her, watched her twirl Gloria’s spaghetti. Ollie came over holding a Maglite, said everyone was going fishing and did we want to come? Val rankled, hugged her knees into her chest. Lacy rolled her eyes: “Night fishing?” Ollie grinned, blinked the Maglite twice, grinning toothy. He said not to worry, they’d toss everything else back, but they’d catch the eels and then they’d burn them.
“Lake rats,” Ollie said. “Fucking vermin.”
I felt myself queasy and flinching, like I was tasting burning eels, and I was seeing that same green haze creeping over the sky. Maybe it was just the booze and the drugs. I dared to look at Marc, saw Thea laughing hard, Marc chuckling too. She licked her lips, touched his chest, and I broke, from the inside. Broke and grew. Bloomed.
I stood, marched over to Marc, and said, “Now.”
Thea glared, her mouth hanging open. Marc smiled up at me from where he sat on the bleachers. “What?”
“Come on,” I said, peeling my shirt off. I’d worn a pale-pink bikini top instead of a bra, stood there shivering, stoned, full of counterfeit confidence. “That river ain’t going to swim itself.” I spun away, not knowing if he would come, a truck roaring and roaring, spitting muck over the fields, its engine a chainsaw shredding through a place that had once been a school, before that a forest.
I didn’t know if he would come until his hand took mine. It was clammy and strong and tender, that hand, an extension of the night, and something turned, softened in the wind or the drugs, some change in my blood and so it was all all right now, all right because Marc’s hand was gentle, a feeder of pigs, and we walked together past the steel garbage can, past the fanged applicator, over the muck and broken concrete, down the overgrown lawn towards the rocky beach.
Ollie was shouting and flailing the fishing rod, Val and Lacy off to the side, smoking. The hockey guys peeled off their plaids, stood shirtless with backwards caps and ill-fitting jeans, waving rods around and joking about hooking nearby girls. The hockey boys were whooping and Marc was looking at me strange, a fat moon lumbering up behind him as I strode down through the eelgrass and the rock, cringing at the sludge underneath my feet but moving fast, pretending I didn’t care, feeling the swell of some charlatan courage.
Val was behind me, calling out, “Don’t be stupid! Come back!” And I loved her for that, saw what she was doing, saw that she was a good friend, but I was already in the water and wheeling my arms and everything that had felt terrible was suddenly good, suddenly warm and wet and passing over me, through me, because I was swimming in darkness that was also light. Because the light lived in the lake, trembled there and replicated, and everything was liquid, cool and liquid and dark and shimmering, and I thought of the river getting deeper beneath me while the surface stayed where it was. I thought of the life in the bottom, the mussels and the lake weed, the pike and the eels and the giant, monstrous catfish.
The hockey boys cheered for us. Ollie called out and even Thea’s voice carried shrill over the water. The whoops and hollers grew quieter from the shore and then I heard him, heard another body, heard the breath and knew it was him, turned and treaded water, found myself almost in the middle of the river, around me a trove of liquid jewels, the tiara of the bridge high above.
“You’re fast,” Marc panted. I bobbed under, looked up at the lights where they danced and slurred on the surface. When I came back up, Marc was beside me and we stayed like that for a moment, our legs silver and glimmering, formless forms.
“You all right?” Marc said.
“Yeah,” I told him, thinking maybe it was true, maybe for once I was all right, maybe I would be fine after all, maybe it was good to sink into the river, to fade into the wet, lose for a moment all the pain it is to be a body. I wished I could explain that to Marc, and I wished I could ask what he had been doing with Thea, told him that that probably shouldn’t have hurt me but it did.
“Come on,” he shrieked, leading the way now, his lean arms rising, sinking, wheeling, entering the jewel-bright river, fast as a fish. I came on behind him in front crawl, then back crawl, pushed and pushed and tried to catch him but could not, chased him over the calm, dark river, sliced clouds swimming above and to the north the wide lake and we were alone out there, alone in the dark, sliding through the black water, towards the familiar dazzle of Port Huron, the far side of our little world.
I followed the vague flash of his limbs, got tired, heard myself panting. I stopped, sure I would sink. But he looked back, over his shoulder, said he knew the place, we were almost there, and I found some deep, thick energy, rode it over the surface thinking only of breath and air, trying to stay light, willing my feet to kick kick kick and then there we were.
My feet in a slime of lake weed and rock. Something sharp between my toes. I flinched. An eel? I staggered panting up the shoreline, saw Marc grinning, flushed, shirtless, the water trickling down, droplets resting in the troughs between his ribs.
I was nothing but the wet twinkle of him. His diamond eyes in the underwater light, tracers curling and zooming, tunnels wending to him. I watched the lights buzz and blur and bleed. We had crossed into another country on the far side of home. The lights glinted and trembled and I thought of signals, voices. Two cities calling to each other, calling back.
We climbed some large pocked rocks, interspersed with rebar and rusted steel beams. We approached a rusty fence. Beyond it, an abandoned plant, all fences and concrete, cinder blocks and waist-high weeds. We had some of these abandoned sites on our side too. Places where, Angie had told me, coyotes made their dens, chased rabbits, skulked out into the city at the quietest hours.
“We’re aliens,” Marc said, sitting down on a large rock with a dip in it, a rock that made me think of a molar. “Illegal aliens.” He looked at me with bad-boy mirth in his eyes. “We’re aliens!” he screamed at a whooshing truck.
We watched a freighter pass by, headed south, huge and dark. Was it going to the plants, or all the way down the river, to Lake Erie? I was glad it had not been there as we swam. We sat on a rock and I leaned into him, lanky and smooth. I felt his flesh, wet and drying. A droplet of water slunk down his chest, rested for a moment on the end of his nipple. It paused there, poised, a hesitant creature. Then, at last, it dropped, trickled through the rocks. “She didn’t believe in death.”
I laughed, couldn’t help it.
He smiled and said sure, it was weird, he got that, but the thing was, she believed that all things were connected. Like she’d be in the bellies of the birds that ate the worms. “Look for me in the mud under your feet,” she’d said often. Something from one of her poets and he didn’t know who but he’d always liked that line, that idea. He liked to think she was out there, dispersed in the earth, in the muck. It was as pretty as her being up there, but—
