I cheerfully refuse, p.18
I Cheerfully Refuse, page 18
“Let’s go over there,” she said, nodding at the kids. In the bright morning, the whole kite arrangement was easy to see. The line glowed as if wet. The kite was patched and stitched in many places, and light shone through tiny holes that had no patches yet. It had a short, fraying cloth tail wagging this way and that. It might have been the tattiest kite ever to fly the Michigan shore.
“It’s pretty. I bet they’d let me try,” Sol said.
Now that it was a kite and not a malignant apparition she was determined to get the string in her hands. I had to smile. She asked if I’d ever done it—flown a kite.
“A hundred times.” There was an old man when I was a kid who always had one in the air. He flew on the shore in treacherous weather—adults feared him, roaring out poetry in his gruff voice, but I thought him a champion from early in the world.
“What’s it like?” Sol asked.
“Like catching a big smart fish in the sky.”
“I want to try.”
“We’ll build one later,” I said. The canal was coming awake. Birds whistled, a dog was upset somewhere.
After some teasing the outboard started and idled uneasily. Sol went below while I pulled the anchor in a plume of murk off the soft bottom.
When I looked up a clutch of boys was coming along the near shore. Ten at the oldest, five or six of them, big grins and black teeth, jostling and poking and whacking each other as they came. A couple had plinky little air rifles slung soldier-style across their backs; another carried a length of PVC pipe. The smallest among them struggled with a bucket of pale lumps that turned out to be rutabagas. This crew looked so happy and dirty and free and good-natured it kind of lit me up. I waved and they waved back, hollering something I couldn’t hear over the outboard. Then one of these innocents unslung his air rifle, knelt in the weeds, and pointed it at me. Well, we were all of us laughing. I held up my arms in mock surrender. His gun barrel jumped with a visible puff, and something hit my chest like a wasp.
“Hey!” I roared, and a few other things I do not remember, and boy did that please the next generation. In half a second I was looking down two more gun barrels, and wasps were hitting my arms and cheeks and a place just above my left eyebrow that hurt all out of proportion. I stepped behind the mast to hide at least part of myself. When I peeked out the tall kid with the PVC was sloshing fuel from a gas bottle into the base of the pipe while the infant crammed a rutabaga down its wide mouth.
All this time we drifted slowly closer to shore. The air guns weren’t lethal but they stung hard and these joyful little bastards were crack shots. I was preparing to cover my face and get to the outboard when the PVC pipe made a deep hollow foom. A rousing cheer broke out as a root vegetable whistled past my head. Who knows the physics of rutabaga velocity but it landed at least fifty yards out.
Then the onslaught suddenly stopped. They saw Sol before I did. The hatch slid open and up she stepped in shabby long cotton, sleeves rolled up, feet bare on the planks and the wind knocking her curly hair around. Maybe what quelled the monkey brigade was the glinting three-pronged spear in her hand. Maybe it was just how she stood there silent in full view like something from an ancient story none of them knew yet each somehow remembered. Their paralysis or confusion held for long moments until one of the marksmen raised his weapon and took faltering aim at her. Instantly the tall one reached over and slapped the air rifle out of his hands. Busy with embarrassment they gathered their gear and went trotting along toward the canal entrance.
Before they could reconsider I hunched over the outboard and got us moving. The canal narrowed and the wind came up. It was nice to motor along not bothering with sails. My clothes and blankets had finally dried. Sol vanished below and returned wearing everything she owned. Looking behind us her face hardened. Those boys with their primitive ordnance had stopped opposite the kitefliers and were firing rutabagas at the big wing as it trembled in the sky. From her chin it was plain Sol wished to turn back and enlist me in combat against those piranhas, but I and not she had the tiller, to say nothing of eight or ten stings still bright from the earlier skirmish. I held course. The motor hummed. The war faded behind us. There began to be farms and smallholdings, woodlots, orchards, and orchard remnants. A jouncing car on an invisible road. The world got smaller and more peaceful. Burrowing inland we smelled dirt, oil, plants, impromptu septic arrangements, and dark wet smoke tumbling from chimneys on the mainland side. It was Sol who pointed out how few chimneys on the island side smoked at all, and these emitted no bold plumes but instead frail white spirits scattering in the gusts.
Noting such disparities became a dismal game as we pushed farther into the canal. Mainland houses wore proud paint and shingled roofs; island homes went to bare weather and windows tilting in their frames and rafters showing themselves. On the island, dogs were rangy coyotes running loose with heads held low. The few cars we saw were covered with muck and squatted randomly at angles of disuse. The island even had lousier weather—so many of its trees were cut down or broken off that winds had undisputed fetch across the landscape.
It was easy at first to crack wise at the expense of unlucky islanders but this soon wore us into silence. Nothing sinks your spirit like your own cruelty. Sure the canal was pretty, just as Folsum said. Sure the sumac was a scarlet cloak spreading over the hillsides, the water unspooled before us like a glimmering ribbon and so forth. It also resembled the frontier of an intermittent war in which one side endured continuous defeat.
I was looking for a gas station. There’d been plenty on the canal in Folsum’s day, and I wanted to be sure we could attain the lower entrance.
Besides fuel we needed facts. Every mile the specter of the lift bridge troubled me more. The Mighty Huffin. Many times I’d seen the similar bridge in Duluth majestically hoist its slab of roadway into the sky, ships of all sizes passing easily beneath, but how much major engineering from the early twentieth was still in operation? I did not want to navigate half the canal only to be turned back by a stuck bridge. Meeting even one large vessel coming from the lower entrance would’ve been reassuring, but the few boats we saw were small—a motorized canoe hugging the mainland, a paddleboard poled along by a woman, her small patient dog balanced up front.
Then, as we eased round a tallgrass promontory, Sol aimed her finger at a shoreline fuel station on the island. Once-bright stucco gone yellow as teeth. Part of the roof looked to have lifted off then settled back askew as if from a bomb or tornado, and a boxy addition had detached and leaned away. It didn’t look open, but at least there was a person there—a tall man in colorless clothing, shading his eyes with his hand and looking our direction.
I adjusted course but maintained a cautious pace. In her excitement Sol waved, but the man did not wave back. The closer we got the more woeful he appeared. Short thick legs, sloping shoulders. I expected him to brandish something. A cudgel would not have been a surprise. Still he didn’t move. Twice Sol hailed him which he ignored. Everything about this reticent brute set me on edge. His candid glower, his crude posture. Eyes set back in his head as if with a ramrod. Could a stranger just once be friendly? We got within thirty yards before Sol startled me with a barking laugh.
“Not real!” she shrieked. “Rainy, look! He’s a picture.”
I cut the engine, bumped up to a creaky dock, and out Sol leapt twirling a line. Sure enough the gas station man shed bulk and threat as we walked ashore. At forty feet he flattened into a competent painting. At ten it was clear his proportions were dicey and the artist had trouble with hands. I felt stupid to have bristled at this amateur likeness, which from its faded pigments had been there for some time. Meanwhile the building was locked and the gas pumps shut off. We cupped our hands, peering through glass at bare shelves.
There was nothing for us in that place. We scouted around a little. Behind the building was a bulk propane tank, empty. A brown dumpster had been tipped over and lived in. Over the back door hung a shredded awning and the door itself was damaged, secured with padlock and hasp. Sol urged me to put my shoulder to it but I saw no upside to this. The sky had earlier gone a bashful pink but now cold gloom returned. We boarded Flower and cast off. As we backed into the canal the painted man reacquired depth. His dour spirit revived. I kept having to look back. His eyes appeared to glitter in their holes.
At this point, I nearly decided to reverse course and head out the way we’d come. The canal was lonely and depressing and I was spooked by the painted observer and hostile children. We weren’t many miles from the entrance and still had fuel enough to regain the open sea. So what if it took longer to reach Redfield and Griff? I was in no hurry. Nor was Sol it appeared.
We needed provisions, though. With two people it was shocking how quickly the food disappeared. Also it had begun to rain. The wind came slicing out of the northwest, which decided it. I didn’t want that gale in my face.
Rubicons get crossed for all kinds of petty reasons.
Forward then past farms and orchards and fallow plots, scudding along through sudden gusts that whitened my hands on the tiller and drove Sol below to paw through our diminishing supplies. She found our last two apples and ate them both. She lit the chilly little alcohol burner and brewed coffee and brought me a cup that steamed and dimpled in the rain. When the weather began to lift I saw a woman on the island side, watching us from an upstairs window. I raised my cup to her in greeting.
“Don’t bother,” Sol said, hugging her elbows. “She’s a painting too.”
“Really?” But I could see it now and another static figure on a house a hundred yards along. “What about that one?”
“They’re everywhere,” was her observation. Clearly some artwork had slipped past me in the rain, but once I started seeing them I couldn’t stop. There knelt a man working on an upturned bicycle, farther along a grandmother with trowel in one hand and seedling in the other. An old man stood tall beside an empty wheelchair. A tiny girl held a basketball at her side watching a young woman ascend into the sky on fierce black wings sprouting from her shoulders. What really stood out wasn’t even her wings but her laughing expression as she glanced back toward the canal—surprised, beaming at the enchantment of flight, and thrilled to be getting out. All these figures were depicted in muted colors and all adorned buildings leaning or abandoned. Mostly houses but also barns and bait shops and long low broken-windowed poultry sheds from better days. Through a veil of rain they were both unsettling and spellbinding. A few were emphatically sinister and hinted at retribution. It was impossible not to see these as memorials to the dead who from all appearances outnumbered the living.
I was so taken with this silent rainy ghost parade I didn’t hear Sol trying to get my attention. It took her actually tugging my elbow, or I’d have gone right past what we were looking for—the open fuel station on the mainland, with a pump at the T-shaped dock and what looked like a small grocery on the shoreline. The grocery had a flagpole and was flying a double banner that flopped around heavily like trousers. Beside it a mesh corncrib contained a bucket and a heap of fur. A plank sign said ONE DOLLAR FEED THE BEAR. Coasting up to a pier of warped pine, I cut the motor and Sol hopped out to secure the boat. How did it not seem strange that her dock line fluency surpassed my own?
The proprietor sat outside his shop in a motorized chair creaking back and forth as he lifted blocks of ice from a wagon into an upright freezer. When the wagon was empty he closed the freezer, locked it, and spun the chair around. He was gray-faced and broad with a big green slicker on and a dappled cotton scarf wrapped five or six times around his neck. One leg stopped at the knee and the other had wilted from disuse. His voice was beseeching and high-pitched and gave even neutral statements a tone of complaint.
“Fuel shipment’s way behind,” he announced, seeing the empty jerrican in my hand. “So there’s your disappointment for the day.”
I asked when the shipment was due.
“Yesterday. They used to catch me on their way to Blinker, but they keep changing routes. It’s potholes and pirates and God knows what all. It won’t be this afternoon, and maybe not tomorrow.”
“Would I find gas in Blinker?”
“Probably. Right now your best shot would be Ray’s. Two miles past the bridge, you’ll know it when you see it. Anything else I got you covered. I’m Douglas, by the way.” To Sol he added, “Did you see my bear? How would you like to feed him? I bet you never fed a wild bear before.”
She glanced at the corncrib with its dark hump sleeping beside a bowl of dirty water. It may have been dead. A small sheaf of coarse fur lifted and settled in the breeze. She said, “That’s no bear. That’s a bulldog.”
Her disrespect was a blunt object but Douglas was unbothered and in fact seemed happy to engage.
“Nope, sweetie, that animal is a bear. On the small side I admit! But a bear he is. Normally I charge a dollar to feed him”—Douglas reached under his chair and produced a crust of bread—“but I like a skeptic. Good for you! Iron sharpens iron! Here now, keep track of your fingers. He’s not a pet.”
Sol reached for the bread, but he pulled it away. “And what is this creature you’re about to feed?”
“A bulldog.”
“Ope, no, we haven’t got any bulldogs here,” said Douglas. “Tell you what. You call him what he is, and then I’ll let you feed him.”
Sol’s eyes went behind a cloud.
Douglas hesitated, then swelled with generosity. “You know what? It doesn’t even matter what he is. Wah hey! You say bulldog. I say bear. People of goodwill can disagree!” And he held out the bread to her again.
“He isn’t hungry,” was her curt reply before I hastily asked Douglas what he had by way of fresh produce, and he led us into his shop. Before the door swung shut, the furry hump sighed and lifted its head. Pushed-in nose, red-rimmed saggy eyes, a single broken fang—a forlorn old English bulldog, thinning on out of this earthly life and meantime bored off his nut.
The shop itself was a dim stew of batteries and bruised light bulbs and ferruled graphite fishing rods alongside chisels and breakfast cereals and local spirits in glass jars, squalid stacks of magazines, bits of verdigris copper ore, a clumsily taxidermized sturgeon, a Rand McNally Road Atlas propped open like a fantasy of painless travel. A chalkboard listed items for which Douglas would barter. I had several of these on the boat, including standard open-end wrenches (no metric specified in red) so I went up and down the few short aisles collecting what we needed in a cloth sack. Sol went out the door I assumed to see the dog. Douglas rolled along in my wake. He was lonely and eager to please. His high voice was disarming and for a fact it never stopped. Above all else he was a narrator.
“Your girl’s a sparkler! That’s no bear! I got a niece like her. Keeps my sister alert I can tell you.”
I picked up a cabbage, asked about the Huffin Bridge. Did it still operate?
“Does it operate? Like an army surgeon! I was on the committee eight years. We were the ones made it a free market bridge. Alistair himself appointed me,” he said, swelling a bit.
“Who’s Alistair?”
“The bridgemaster. You’ll meet him. He’s credentialed as hell. Wide discretionary powers. His first move was raising the tariff for islanders coming across.”
“How did the islanders feel about that?”
Douglas was amused. “You’re imagining that matters. Have you been to the other side? Had dealings with islanders?”
I lifted some potatoes into the sack, two cans of chili, coffee. “Haven’t seen anyone except some kids flying a kite.”
He said it was just as well. There were no guarantees, over on the island. He said Blinker and Brighton used to be like one city. People moved easily between them. Kids flirted and dove off the bridge with each other. Now the islanders hated their mainland neighbors. “We got to defend ourselves,” Douglas said. “They’ve gone full evil, over there. You wouldn’t believe it, how they hate us.”
“Maybe the bridge tariff seems unfair,” I suggested.
“That’s not it,” said Douglas. He said it was because mainlanders were happy and took care of their houses and had good jobs and compliant women. The islanders were filled up to here with the sin of envy. They refused to be grateful and chose to be insolent. They also left. Their hardware closed, their pharmacy. Teachers disappeared, then city staff. Postal clerks and orchard hands and wind-turbine crews and ministers of the gospel followed. Those who remained forged a cult of rage. When someone died they were cremated in open bonfires and their likeness painted on derelict walls. The painter knew sly incantations from the voodoo latitudes and after dark his images peeled themselves off the ruins and drifted across to moan at Blinkerites. Douglas had seen them shimmering past windows, sliding under locked doors. To fight this devilry he joined a sacred brotherhood that crossed the bridge once a month to evangelize the man burners and druids and wicked poets and ordinary perverts, a daunting enterprise with pagans prancing up out of the shadows to pitch rocks. “We go the last Friday night of the month,” he said. “That’s tomorrow. You could join us, if you like.”
“We have other plans.”
Besides groceries, I’d picked up a rolled sheet of silicone and rubber cement. Douglas rolled up behind the cash register where I stood calculating what I had to barter. I hadn’t seen Sol reenter the shop, but there she was at my side.
“Cash or trade,” said Douglas in his high voice.
While opening my mouth to offer sockets and box-end American wrenches, I heard Sol answer, “Cash.”
I looked down. She held in her hand a large tan envelope. It was tattered and resembled a folded roadmap with its history of stains. The envelope was tilted wide open and in fact was stuffed with green money.
