Cool Water (13 page)

It dawns on Norval that Lila has had quite a bit to do with Rachelle's decision to get married, and not just so she can stage-manage a big production. He hadn't realized she felt so strongly about this. Maybe she's right. What does he know about these things?

“I'm going to work,” he says.

“I hope you're planning to get dressed first.”

Norval is surprised by the sarcasm. Lila hardly ever uses sarcasm—that's been his domain.

He goes upstairs and dresses (Lila has his clothes laid out, summer-weight khaki pants, a blue shirt, a tie and a lightweight sports jacket), and before he leaves he says to her, “You're probably right, Lila. I don't know anything about this business of teenage motherhood. But surely you can see why I'm worried.”

“Of course I can,” Lila says. “But you just let me take care of Rachelle. Here's what you can do.” She hands Norval a piece of notepaper with cheerful-looking purple flowers across the top.

“What's this?” he asks.

“It's the list, Norval. The things we discussed last night, the church renovations. You just take care of the list and I'll handle the other. Rachelle is likely at Kristen's. I'll track her down and we'll have a talk.”

Norval folds the notepaper in half and puts it in the pocket of his khaki pants.

“Aren't you going to read it?” Lila asks. “You might have questions. Points of clarification.”

“Maybe Rachelle and Kyle could get some counselling,” Norval says.

“They don't need counselling,” Lila says. “They just need to grow up a little.”

A little,
Norval thinks,
will not do it,
but he's said all he can say.

He steps out the front door and finds Kyle sitting dejected on the top step. Kyle looks up and is about to say something, but Norval beats him to it and says, “Let me give you a bit of advice, Kyle. A wise man knows when to keep his mouth shut.”

Norval heads down the sidewalk toward Main Street and the bank, resisting the temptation to look back. He knows that he would feel some sympathy for Kyle and God knows he doesn't want sympathy entering into this whole situation. Not unless it's for himself.

Small Talk

When morning finally comes, Willard Shoenfeld goes inside to the kitchen and Marian is there, as always, with the coffee perking on the stove and the frying pan ready for his eggs. He thinks back to the pre-Marian days when he and Ed ate cornflakes every morning and burned themselves a couple of pieces of toast.

“How do you want them this morning?” Marian asks, and Willard says, “Over easy, I guess.”

The eggs are ready in minutes and Marian slides them onto a plate, adds two slices of perfectly browned toast, then hands Willard his breakfast. He's in a bit of a stupor. Marian asks if something is wrong.

Willard can't get the picture of her in her nightgown out of his mind, the way she opened his bedroom door, and he wonders if he should just say,
It's okay, you know. You
do what's best for you.
But he can't; he's paralyzed. He says, “No, nothing,” and he dips a corner of his toast in the deep yellow egg yolk. “You've eaten?” he asks, just as he asks every morning.

She nods, as always, in response to his question.

He takes a bite of his toast, expecting pain to shoot from a lower molar up into his face because of his toothache dream the night before, which still seems real. No pain, though. He savours the perfect over-easy eggs, eating one piece of toast with the eggs and saving one to slather with raspberry jam.

Marian is now standing at the sink with her back to him, leafing through a cookbook.

Perhaps if I start a conversation,
Willard thinks.
About
anything at all. Try,
he thinks.
Try to say something.

“I do enjoy my breakfast,” he says.

Marian turns to look at him. He fears he's said something stupid.

“Do you?” she says. “So do I.” Then she returns to her recipes.

Well, that's it. Willard can't think of anything else to say. He spreads some of Marian's homemade freezer jam on his remaining slice of toast and tries to plan his day. There's the new movie to pick up at the bus, and a few repairs he should make to the fence. Some kids tried to light fire to it one night a few weeks ago. They'd barely got the kindling organized and the match lit when the barking dog had awoken Willard. He'd looked out his bedroom window and seen just enough to know what was going on. He pulled on his pants and when he got to the living room he saw that Marian was already up, looking out the picture window.

“I think they've started a fire,” she said. “The fence on the east side.”

“Damn kids,” Willard said.

He kept a fire extinguisher handy for times like this and he'd grabbed it while Marian flicked the yardlights on. The drive-in was flooded with light and, sure enough, about half a dozen kids jumped in a truck, some into the cab and some the box, and roared off down the access road. The dog was going crazy by now, running in circles and barking wildly in the middle of the sandy drive-in lot.

Willard hopped on his ATV and drove, the dog running along behind, to where the fire was trying hard to get started. When they got there, flames were licking up the sides of one fence panel, but they were quickly squelched when Willard turned the fire extinguisher on them. The fence was still standing, but he'd have to replace three or four boards. The dry grass was burned to the ground along the fence. This was the real danger, with section after section of dry grassy pastureland running to the north. “Damn stupid kids,” Willard said again, and then he told the dog once more what a good dog he was. He'd gone back to the garage for a shovel, and then he'd spent an hour shovelling sand onto the grass along the fence to make sure the fire didn't flare up again.

When he returned to the house at three in the morning, Marian was still up, watching through the window. She wanted him to call the RCMP in Swift Current, but Willard figured that was pointless. The kids were long gone and he wouldn't be able to give any kind of useful description. Marian made a pot of tea and put a plate of cookies on the table. At three-thirty, they'd gone back to bed.

Willard is getting plenty tired of this nonsense. He's of the conviction that the kids of Juliet don't know the value of either work or money, and don't have enough to do, especially in the summer when school's out. He'd like to think the town kids are the main culprits because surely the country kids know the dangers of a prairie fire. The land is tinder dry and a small fire wouldn't stay small for long. It's not just the drive-in they'd be burning down. He's amazed by their stupidity, whoever it is that's doing this. Maybe it's drugs.

When Willard has finished his breakfast, he takes his plate to the sink. Marian is at the counter, assembling ingredients to bake something.

“Willard,” she says.

He stops, his hand holding the plate in mid-air above the sink.
Here it comes
, he thinks.

Marian picks up a measuring cup and then puts it down again.

“I just want to say that I know for a fact you are a kind and generous man,” she says.

Willard waits for more; that was the good news, now comes the bad. But Marian picks up the measuring cup again and dips it into a canister of flour, and then pours the flour into her big mixing bowl. She begins to hum. That appears to be all she's going to say, at least for now.

Willard carefully sets his plate among the cups and cutlery already in the sink.

“Well then,” he says, and goes outside to begin his fence repairs.

Desert Dwellers

Drift

When Lee was a boy, he developed a passionate but not very scientific interest in deserts and oases and Lawrence of Arabia. Back then, the words
Gobi
and
Sahara
were enough to send him into an imaginary world where he lived in a nomad's tent with a desert moon overhead. Even the Mojave (not so far away, Lester told him, you could drive there in a few days if you wanted to) had exotic possibilities, with its scorpions and Joshua trees. The Little Snake Hills couldn't compete. They were simply a good place to pretend you were in a real desert.

As Lee lies on his back in the former schoolyard and watches the horse graze, he thinks about Lester's Ancient Lands anthropology books, a set of six written by an early twentieth-century English adventurer. The books— themselves now ancient—are still in a bookcase in the living room, along with several out-of-date atlases and
World Book
encyclopedias, collecting dust like everything else in the house since Astrid died. He recalls one favourite book on northern Africa and the Middle East that he'd read so often the pages started to fall out and Astrid had to bind them together again with tape and an elastic band. He'd been drawn to the book's hand-coloured photographs in pastel pinks and blues, accented by a brilliant red flower or a bit of gold jewellery. His favourite photograph depicted a Bedouin family sitting in a little courtyard in front of their open tent, smiling for the Englishman, with sand dunes rolling on to eternity behind them.

The text that accompanied the pictures was equally intriguing. Lee would copy the English explorer's dramatic pronouncements onto slips of paper and glue them into a scrapbook, along with pictures cut from magazines and articles photocopied from the library in Swift Current. Once he'd gone into a travel agency and asked for tourist brochures and the agent had given him a booklet on travel to Egypt. It contained several glossy photographs that he'd cut out and glued into the scrapbook, but the text in the brochure had been uninteresting. It couldn't compete with the mythical captions from Lester's books, which Lee memorized as though he were memorizing voice-over lines from a documentary movie:
The Arabs who inhabit these
arid wastes are very different from the pale townsfolk. They
are a hardy race, descendants of warriors.
Another favourite:
The desert wastes might be likened unto quicksand, for
old civilizations, religions and cities have been engulfed by
those fine tawny particles that trickle through one's fingers
like water.
That one made him wonder what was buried in the sand hills down the road. Arrowheads maybe, the bones of domestic and wild animals, rusty old farm implements, nothing as exotic or colourful as artifacts from a buried Bedouin encampment.

Then there was the day when Lester came home with the news that Willard Shoenfeld had bought a real camel. That this desert creature existed in reality was remarkable enough, but that one now lived close to Lee, right here in Juliet, was astonishing. At every chance, he rode his bike to Willard's to see Antoinette, and he regularly spent his allowance on camel rides. Willard seemed happy to have a sidekick who appreciated Antoinette as much as he did, and Lee asked him endless questions: how she got her name (
after that fancy French queen
), how fast she could go (
about
as fast as molasses on a warm day in March
), how long she can go without water (
won't know until I take that pack trip
I've been planning
). Lee and Willard could barely contain themselves whenever Ed got too close to Antoinette and they heard the gurgle in her throat that meant she was preparing to spit at him.

When Antoinette disappeared, Lee shared Willard's distress. After she'd been missing for a week, Lee asked Willard again how long he thought she could go without water. Willard said, “Don't worry, there's lots of water out there for her.” But Lee persisted—he even used the word
hypothetically
—and so Willard told him it was a myth that camels can go for weeks without water and that a camel will lie down and refuse to get up after only four or five days of thirst.

“Why do they refuse to get up?” Lee asked.

“They give up hope,” Willard said. “They just lie down and decide to die and you can't talk them out of it. Of course some camels are special. The real athletes. They can go longer. Not the pampered camels, though.”

Lee was thinking that they needed to find Antoinette right away because she was a pampered camel. He worried in bed at night that Antoinette might not be able to find a slough or a dugout, or that she might be afraid to go down into one of the coulees with a spring-fed creek running through it. He pored over library books looking for evidence of ordinary camels going longer than a week without water but he couldn't find anything that told him one way or another what to expect of Antoinette.
A camel is the life
blood of those crossing the desert
was all he could find,
with
its ability to go without water far surpassing that of the horse
. That had given him some hope.

Lee wonders if Willard ever thinks about Antoinette and what happened to her. No sign of her had ever been found despite the fact that CBC Radio had done a story on her disappearance. Willard had eventually given up looking and decided she'd been stolen, but Lee thinks she must have died. He imagines Willard out there in the sand all by himself, looking for his camel. He wonders if Willard searched this far north where the dunes are the size of a two-storey house.

He wouldn't mind having a closer look at the dunes, now that he's here. They're just across the road. A quick look while he's waiting for the Lindstroms to stir wouldn't cut too much into his day.

“How about it, buddy?” he says to the horse, who lifts his head and then goes back to grazing. Lee tightens the cinch on his saddle, letting the horse know they're moving on. He offers the horse another drink from the pail that's hanging on the pump, and takes a long drink himself. Then he hoists himself into the saddle. He can feel the beginnings of saddle burns and bruises.

He cuts southwest across a Texas gate and onto Lindstroms' pasture lease, and almost immediately the grazing land is overtaken by sand. Huge dunes rise up out of the grass and sage, gently sloping formations with sharp-edged shadowy ridges along the tops. He can't recall the last time he was here—high school probably, and the dunes would have shifted since then—but they look the same, the curving shapes, the way they roll as far to the west as he can see, sometimes connecting one to another. The sand surface is pristine except for the delicate wind patterns of ripples and waves. He looks back at the horse's tracks, which form a line of cavernous holes. He likes the way the tracks mark his trail, but at the same time he regrets that he's marring the perfect surface.