Fever (13 page)

“I’m going to ball practice,” he had said, mumbling, so that it took Charlotte a moment to understand. Then Jerry had taken down his arm and sat at the table across from Charlotte with Doug, who had stopped crying, at his usual place between them.

“McFarlane is coming back to the stand later,” Jerry said, rising and folding his lawn chair. “I don’t want to miss it.” He set the lawn chair against the house, then went back inside. Doug said, “Can I have some Kool-Aid?”

“In the fridge,” Charlotte said. “Don’t make a mess.” But he was gone, running across the lawn and up the steps into the house. The screen door slammed shut behind him.

Then Jerry had called the Mountie. Art was his name and he was a friend of theirs, at least he and his wife had drinks with them and their other friends on weekend evenings in one basement or another while the kids of the house giggled and thumped around on the main floor until their hostess ran up the stairs with an exasperated expression and overhead there was an abrupt silence. Art had come over without his wife and he and Jerry had sat in the basement family room each with a glass of beer while Charlotte had sat outside in the cool shadows under the trees, looking out over the back fence and Dave’s wheat field to the birds silhouetted against the luminescent evening sky, and listening to their calls. Vaguely she had heard the front door shut and knew Art had gone home. In a minute Jerry had come to sit beside her. Had she heard the strange bird that night for the first time? She couldn’t remember anymore.

“What did he say?” she asked finally when Jerry didn’t speak. He sighed. “He said he could go and get her, bring her home, if we tell him to. He said he could evict the kid from that shack. It doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to the town, it went back for taxes.” The birds had set up that steady, rolling chirp that they always did just before they settled down for the night, when all their songs evened out and you could no longer tell one from the other. Otherwise, the evening was as still as it would have been if they were the only family in the village.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him no.” Even though the sky still glowed with light out over the field, resonant blue over shadowed gold, it was quite dark under the trees and Charlotte could make out Jerry only as an indistinct shadow where he sat a couple of feet away. She was comforted by the darkness under the trees.

“Why?” she asked, surprised. She had been prepared for more shouting, or for more silent violence.

“What’s the use? Art’s had experience with this kind of thing. He said, ‘You bring ‘em home and they just run away again.’ He said we’d just drive her farther away. At least if she stays in town we can keep an eye on her. Know if she gets into serious trouble.”

Charlotte had tried to imagine what serious trouble might be. Drugs, she thought. Or maybe Rick would be cruel to her, beat her up. After all, Rick was a stranger to them, had come from another town. Or she might get pregnant. She would be sixteen in the fall, if she got pregnant maybe they would get married. Married and pregnant. One child after another, no education, a useless husband. She tried to picture Cindy gone fat and slovenly. I must have done something wrong, she pointed out to herself. Somehow or other this has to be my fault.

“What about school?” she asked. “Legally, she has to be in school.”

“It’s no use,” Jerry said. “She’s almost sixteen. No social worker is going to waste energy on her. She’s too old, there’s too many of them. There’s thousands of incorrigible teens out there that nobody can do anything about.”

Dougie came past her again. He hurried the length of the yard to the open gate and jumped on his bike.

“I’m going to the playground,” he called and was gone, his bike tires grating on the gravelled lane.

The next morning Jerry was up earlier than usual.

“Poindexter takes the stand today,” he told her. “This is critical.” He dressed neatly in his good grey slacks, his grey and blue-striped shirt and his blue tie. She lay in their bed and watched him as he set his glasses carefully on his nose, arranging the arms along his temples and hooking them over his ears. He looks like
he’s
going to court, she thought, and laughed to herself. “Aren’t you getting up?” he asked, turning to frown at her.

She almost said, if you don’t go to work, why should I get up? but the implications of this frightened her, she had a glimpse of their neatly arranged world sliding that easily into chaos, so she pushed back the covers and was on her feet reaching for her dressing gown.

Later in the morning, although she didn’t want to, Charlotte felt herself reluctantly drawn into the living room. The sun had moved around to face the front of the house so that its light shining through the gold-coloured curtains had a warm yellow glow that was faintly eerie. Jerry was leaning forward in his armchair, his eyes on the
tv
set where a roomful of people, mostly men, were listening in silence to a droning male voice. She thought of going back out again without speaking, but it seemed that to do this would be to lend the whole business—Jerry’s not going to work, the steady, unending murmur of the
TV set, the new heaviness in the house—a seriousness she was struggling not to allow it.

“What’s going on?” she asked finally, casually.

Jerry didn’t answer. After a moment, while she still stood beside him staring at the top of his faintly greying head, a pair of commentators appeared on the screen where the hearing room had been. Jerry leaned back, not so much sighing as exhaling pent-up air. Then he rose slowly, stiffly, and stretched.

“You know,” he said, tucking his shirt more carefully into his slacks, “North says there was a fall guy plan—that North would be the scapegoat to save whoever higher up was giving the orders, but Poindexter says there was no such thing, that he would tell the truth and accept the responsibility for whatever he did.” He peered into her face and she looked back at him, nonplussed by the intensity of his gaze.

“Oh,” she said.

“What I can’t figure out is how we’re supposed to tell now if this is the fall guy plan in action—to deny there was a fall guy plan—or if there really wasn’t a fall guy plan at all, like Poindexter says.”

Charlotte hesitated a second. “I see,” she said.

“The point is,” Jerry went on, “he seems so honest, but he’s lied to everybody: to General Secord, to the Iranians, to Congress. How do you tell if he’s telling the truth now or lying again?” Charlotte screwed up her face, just a little, and looked into the distance over his shoulder.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. She turned quickly and went out of the living room into the kitchen, conscious that Jerry had followed her, but pretending she didn’t know he was there. She poured herself a cup of coffee and went outside into the back yard where she sat down on the lawn chair. Jerry came behind
her and sat down too. To her relief, he didn’t speak, but sat staring out across the sun-and-shadow dappled yard to where the robins were searching for insects in the flowerbed under the back fence. Faintly, through the steady chatter of the birds in the trees, Charlotte thought she heard the strange bird’s call again.

“Listen,” she said, her voice hushed. “There it is again. What is it?”

“What?” Jerry asked.

“Shhh,” Charlotte said, leaning forward in her chair. “Hear that? That
coo-coo chirpety-chirp.”
She tried to imitate the bird’s call.

“I don’t hear it,” Jerry said.

“You’re not listening!” Charlotte said, angry suddenly. “There!” The call was picking up volume, it rose clearly above the cascade of sound from the trees, a harsher noise. It must be a big bird, Charlotte thought, bigger than a starling or a robin. She wondered why she couldn’t see it.

“Oh, that,” Jerry said. “I don’t know.”

“You’re supposed to know!” Charlotte said, outraged. “You’re the scout-master here! You’re the one with the bird books!” Jerry turned to her, his eyes furious behind his glasses.

“Well, I don’t know! Why are you bugging me? You’re always bugging me about something!” He stood abruptly, anger in every line of his body, and strode away so quickly that his chair toppled over, back into the house, letting the door slam behind him.

Charlotte didn’t move, but her hands had begun to tremble so violently that she spilled her coffee. Carefully she set her dripping cup on the damp grass beside her chair. She clenched her hands into fists, rested them on her lap and forced herself to take slow, deep breaths, the way she had been taught to do when she was in labour. The robins had flown away into the safety of the
tops of the Manitoba maples. She closed her eyes and kept taking slow, deep breaths and exhaling gently.

Cindy hadn’t explained. She hadn’t said anything. She had simply done what she had wanted to do, and ignored everything Charlotte and Jerry had said or done to stop her.

“But why?” Charlotte had pleaded. “Haven’t we been good to you? I never took a job, I was always at home looking after you. Your dad never hit you, not once, none of you. You had everything you wanted, that you needed, that we could afford …”

Cindy had smiled faintly at her, a knowing smile, her small mouth barely curving, her blue eyes deep with knowledge Charlotte didn’t have.

“You’re fifteen years old,” Charlotte said, suddenly conscious that she had said this before and before that, and that now she no longer knew if it was relevant or not. Other sentences rolled around in her head—
how could you do this to us, I guess you’ll have to learn the hard way
—but, familiar and natural as they were on her tongue, she didn’t say them again. There was a new language to be spoken here, but she didn’t know it, the sounds moved around inside her, would not form themselves into words no matter how she strained.

Slowly, as the deep breathing began to take effect and her heart stopped its flutter in her throat, Charlotte became aware that the bird was no longer singing, that it must have flown away. She was torn between wanting to know what it was, where it had come from, what it looked like, and being glad that it had gone. Good riddance, she thought to herself, and then said it out loud, “Good riddance.”

Dougie was late for lunch. Lyle had come hurrying in from the grocery store, had washed his hands quickly and then sat down and reached for the casserole in one movement. At seventeen he was always hungry. Jerry sat across from Charlotte eating
methodically, neatly, and in silence. When Lyle had finished serving himself, Jerry said, “What I can’t understand is how President Reagan could go on making speeches and Nancy wearing those fancy dresses to dinner with famous people and behind it all, this guy North and Poindexter were running their own show and changing the way things happened in the world.”

They heard Doug’s bike hit the cement patch at the back door with the crash that no amount of scolding seemed to cure him of and then his sneakers on the steps. He rushed into the kitchen, letting the door slam. Jerry looked up, but before he could speak, if he had been going to, Doug said, panting, to Charlotte, “we’re having a 20 K bike-a-thon at the playground tomorrow. Will you guys sponsor me?”

“What’s 20 K?” Charlotte asked, smiling at him. Doug took a step closer to her, as though proximity might help her to understand

“Kilometres,” Lyle said, his mouth full, lifting his glass of milk.

“Isn’t that an awfully long bike ride for somebody only ten?” Charlotte said dubiously, “and in this heat.”

“Oh, Mom!” Doug said, angry. “It is not!” He was close to tears. “Please?”

“Well, how far is it then?” Charlotte asked. She reached for the salad.

She wanted to tell him to wash his hands and sit down, but he came even closer to her, so that his small, tense face was looking directly into hers and she had to look back at him. The muscles around his mouth and in his neck were taut with the effort to persuade her.

“Why don’t you ever know when I say things like that! It’s metric! Everybody knows what 20 K is but you guys!” Even his fists were clenched. Startled, Charlotte looked to Jerry to scold him for raising his voice to his mother.

But Jerry was watching Doug intently, seriously, with the same expression on his face he wore when he was watching the Iran-Contra hearings. It was as if he believed if he listened and watched carefully enough, he might finally come to understand something important, something that troubled him deeply, some puzzle that Charlotte had not stumbled on. Carefully, not seeming to notice he was doing it, he readjusted his glasses delicately, using both clean, white-fingered hands.

Lyle said, giving her that same faintly amused, knowing smile Cindy had given her, “Twenty kilometres is about twelve miles, Mom. It’s not too much for him. He can make it.” He turned to his little brother. “Can’t you, buddy.” Doug, seeming to know he had won, broke into a smile, then, without being told, hurried away to wash his hands.

Lyle set down his empty glass.

“If I hurry I can get in a swim at the pool before I have to go back to work.” He was already pushing back his chair.

“You haven’t had dessert,” Charlotte remarked, from habit.

“Save it for me,” Lyle said. He hurried out of the kitchen. Charlotte and Jerry could hear him thumping up the stairs and almost immediately back down again. He came into the kitchen zipping up his gym bag, went to the back door and paused, his hand holding it open a fraction. He turned back to Charlotte. “The metric system’s easy, Mom,” he said. “I could teach it to you in a minute.” Charlotte moved her eyes from Lyle’s across the table to Jerry whose head was lowered silently over his plate as if he were praying. She wished he would speak, or at least look up, let his eyes meet hers, but he remained like that, contemplating something she couldn’t see.

Lyle waited a few seconds longer, then, when Charlotte still didn’t reply, he went out, shutting the door gently behind him.

All day the smoke had billowed upward into the even blue of the sky to the north. Flare-off from an oil well, Gabe had told his wife, but secretly doubted it. The smoke was not black enough, and lacked the purposeful skyward lunge. It must have been buildings burning, but he didn’t tell Frannie this, who wasn’t well, hadn’t been ever since the miscarriage in the early spring. Now she was lying down in the living room with the curtains pulled shut to keep out the light and the
tv
set turned on, but without sound. The bright pictures themselves reminded him of fire, the way they flickered, vanishing to reappear in a different form.

He squatted on his heels on the bare ground in front of his machinery shed and squinted through the heat waves toward the house where there was no sign of life. He could summerfallow, he supposed, and gave a wry laugh at his own folly. It was too dry, and if there was no crop to speak of, there sure as hell weren’t any weeds either. Besides, the way things were going even if there were weeds, he couldn’t afford the fuel for his tractor to go over them. He rose reluctantly, stiffly, and trying to avoid stepping on the few patches of grass left, he went through the powdery dust of the yard to the house.

Just as he opened the screen door he heard a loud hammering
on the roof. It seemed to come from above the bedrooms at the opposite end of the house.

“What was that?” Frannie said. She stood stock still in the centre of the kitchen holding a steaming cup. The kettle on the stove behind her was still hissing. He thought,
tea in this heat?
but said as casually as he could manage, “Oh, God knows. Probably the wind ripping off a few more shingles.” She stared at him, her eyes big and dark in the white oval of her face, then went on to the table where she set down her cup, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

“I thought you said it isn’t windy today,” she said in a low voice.

“A little gusty,” he said, although it was the only quiet day in weeks, at first a blessed relief from the incessant wind and then disconcerting, eerie.

“Want some tea?” she asked, her voice changing, softer now, the tension going out of it.

“Don’t get up,” he said quickly. “I can make it myself. The kettle’s still boiling.” As he dipped her discarded teabag, which he took from the sink, in his cup of boiling water, he asked over his shoulder, “I thought I might drive into town, see if anything’s going on. Want to come?” He heard her sigh, knew she didn’t want him to go, and yet would refuse again to come herself. But dammit, a man couldn’t hang around all day with nothing to do but watch his farm dry up. A man … “Come on,” he said, “it’ll do you good. I could drop you off at Shelley’s, pick you up in an hour or so.” He had set his cup on the table near hers and stood behind her, his hands on her thin, tight shoulders. He bent forward, lifting his hands to stroke her neck, his nose buried in her thick, dark hair. “Come on,” he whispered again, beseeching.

In the evening when the sun had cooled, he asked Frannie to
go for a walk with him. She was a city girl when he’d married her, she was the one who’d taught him to go for walks, he’d thought walking over the farm he’d grown up on was only for children; hunting gophers, shooting magpies, stalking deer in the thin brush of the coulees, or climbing up to an eagles’ nest high on a clay hillside.

But he went with Frannie and found delight in showing her things her untrained eyes had missed; the rabbit trails narrow as ribbons lacing over the hillsides, or how to distinguish the droppings of the various animals. Her awe at seeing her first medicine wheels on the dry hilltops to the north had brought back his boyhood excitement at the mystery inherent in them.

“I’m a little tired today dear,” she had said, almost timidly, so that he felt like a brute for asking her. He thought of saying again, it’ll do you good, but the doctor had said he mustn’t pressure her, so he said, okay, and went out by himself. Just as the screen door was closing behind him she called, a note of panic in her voice, “Don’t stay out after dark!” Still holding the door open, he had called back almost simultaneously, “I’ll be in before dark.”

The wind had still not started blowing, it had been more than twelve hours of this startling quiet and he still couldn’t get used to it. He felt as though the wind, a malevolent force if ever there was one, was only holding its breath, waiting to catch him when he least expected it, and then it would blow so hard it would blow them all—buildings, cars, animals, people—right off the face of the earth. It would blow them all to kingdom come and there’d be nothing left, not even trees or soil, nothing but bare, wind-scarred rocks and black chasms through which the wind would swoop and howl, screeching like the devil himself.

Gabe shuddered, surprised and frightened by the picture he himself had drawn and abruptly struck out for the hills three-quarters
of a mile away. It would stay light till almost ten. He had plenty of time to get there, walk a little and get back before Frannie started to get frightened. And before the noises started again, the thought coming so quickly that it was whole before he could censor it.

He speeded up, striding down the once grassy road allowance next to a bare summerfallow field. At the opposite end of the field he paused for an instant, looking at the fine, dark soil that had drifted off the field and filled up the ditch. As always, he pondered how he could collect it and put it back on the field, then gave the idea up, making a disgusted sound. His own fault that his best soil lay useless in a drift in the ditch. Not enough trash cover, the soil worked too fine, though it wasn’t his fault, he didn’t think, that it refused to rain. He noticed that the smoke to the north beyond the hills had died away and wondered whose place had gone up this time.

It was a relief finally to be walking in the prairie grass in the steep, rocky hills, too rocky, too steep to cultivate, and he was secretly glad, though he’d never say so out loud, that he had an excuse to leave this last little bit of real prairie. Since Frannie’s illness he had come to use it as his thinking place, coming here when he needed to get away from her and her refusal to get well, from the lack of rain, and the worries about bills. Here he tried to solve problems, or sometimes simply tried to clear his mind of everything, to stop thinking, to listen only to the wind whistling across the slopes, to the distant screech of high flying hawks, or to the tiny sounds of the insects, although he’d noticed lately that there were hardly any insects left crawling over the pale, yellowish clay or hanging from the sage and greasewood. What did that mean? he wondered. Probably just another effect of the lack of moisture.

He climbed a low hill and sat on a bare spot. At his feet there
were only a few clumps of grass, short and dry, cured already by the heat. He hadn’t realized how little grass there was left even here, and now he saw that as the grass died, the hills had begun to erode in the wind. He lifted his eyes to the distance and saw his house, small, the paint too bright under the dead and dying trees, the empty pens where he no longer kept livestock, since the bank had made him sell it all.

He would lose the farm this year. It was no good trying to hide it from himself anymore. It had become inevitable, because there was nothing left that might save it. Drought relief programs weren’t nearly big enough, he had no crop to sell, he still had land payments to make, was three years behind in fact, hadn’t a cent of equity left in the place so he couldn’t even sell and come out ahead. He supposed Frannie knew it too, and that was why she wouldn’t get well. Sometimes he could hardly contain his rage at her, as if he didn’t have troubles enough without the worry of a wife who thought she was sick when there was nothing wrong with her.

Abruptly, following some urge he didn’t even try to explain, he rose, turned his back on the farm and strode up and over the small hill and up the next, higher one. At the top he went straight to the medicine wheel that crowned it and stopped in its centre. Wordlessly, he stretched both arms high and wide, sucking in his belly with the stretch, throwing back his head, his eyes opened to the radiant sky. Now, he implored silently. Now you bitch, stop this, give us some rain. Give us some water, goddamn you, save us.

In the stillness, standing like that, extended and helpless, he waited. The earth dragged him down, he could feel it tugging at his heels, inexorably drawing him downward till he fell to his knees in the centre of the medicine wheel and fell further, dropping his forehead into the dust where grass no longer grew. He
listened, but all he could hear was the pounding of his heart and the dry groan wrenched from his own throat. He thought he could feel the sky on his back, felt it drop down his sides, surrounding him. Give us some rain, he whispered into the earth, the sky cradling him, give us some goddamned rain.

Frannie’s pale, mute face rose up in the darkness behind his closed eyes and he stood quickly, dusting off his knees, feeling absurd, glancing around as if by some miracle a neighbour might be standing there watching him make a fool of himself. He rushed down the hill and over the next one, striding through the stillness, making his own wind as he passed. As he hurried down the road allowance the coyotes began their twilight singing, pulling on the descending night.

And Frannie was waiting at the kitchen door for him, clutching her arms across her chest, peering out, waiting for his form to emerge out of the dusk.

“I was so scared,” she cried.

“For God sake, Frannie,” he began, then caught himself. “Why? Was there …”

“Yes,” she whispered, “creaks and more banging on the roof.”

It had begun, he thought, after the miscarriage when Frannie had almost bled to death, or had it been before? He no longer knew for sure, had been able for a long time to ignore it, to pretend something else was causing the noises: the frost coming out of the wood, the wind which never let up, birds, until they had all disappeared when the nearby dugout had dried up. Now he knew it was ghosts. Hadn’t the slightest doubt, had decided to wait it out. What else could they do, having nowhere else to go and no money to go there with?

Frannie lay in the crook of his arm, her head on his chest, her hair tucked under his chin.

“I heard today the rattlesnakes are moving in,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she whispered. They had lived in a pocket free of rattlesnakes with rattlesnakes both east and west of them. “How do people know? Did they see them?”

“Somebody lost a horse,” he said. “You know how horses are. Curious. Must have seen one in a field, put his nose down and the rattler got him on it. Poison went straight to his brain and he died. Richard Blakely says he’s got a gelding with a leg that’s swole right up, you can see the two bloody holes where the fangs went in.” Frannie turned her face into his flesh and a shiver ran through him. “So don’t go walking in any tall grass,” he whispered, his voice tender, and they both laughed, for there was no tall grass from where they were all the way south to the Missouri far below the border.

He was wakened around two by the sound of footfalls coming down the hall toward the bedroom. Not again, he thought, his fright mixed with irritation. He lay rigid and listened. The footsteps were muffled, but sounded like those of a large, heavy man. The first time this had happened he had felt huge goosebumps rise on his arms and legs and he had broken out in a cold sweat, but despite his fear he had managed to reach for the bedside lamp and turn it on. There was no one there. Now, as frightened as he was, he didn’t bother to reach for the light. When the footsteps reached the bathroom next to their bedroom, they halted. He waited for them to start up again, but they were gone.

He found himself wanting to wake Frannie and shake her, and realized for the first time that he blamed her for the ghosts, felt somehow that she, with her love of death, was bringing them around to plague them. He’d had enough of the blankets being pulled off them in the night, of being wakened by the sound of coins being jingled at the foot of the bed, or of someone standing by the windows breathing deeply and sighing. He wanted to shake her and tell her to stop.

But it wasn’t her fault she’d lost the baby. God knew, she wasn’t the only one. There’d been a regular epidemic of miscarriages that people were blaming on the grasshopper spray, potent stuff that killed birds, other insects, and sometimes even the family dog, everything but the goddamn grasshoppers. Frannie had been further along and sicker than most afterward, and who knew, maybe the stuff had gotten into her system and that was why she was still sick. Her friend Shelley had been sick for a year from something the doctors couldn’t give a name to. And there she was, as thin as Frannie, with a pinched look to her mouth, and the last time he had seen her she had that same look in her eyes as Frannie had, like she was bothered by ghosts too.

He got out of bed and felt his way into the living room. Without putting on the light he went to the big window and stood looking out into the night. His mind went as always to what would happen when the foreclosure came. Where would they go? What would he do to support Frannie and the baby he hoped to persuade her to have, maybe next year, when she was stronger?

He would have to get a job, but where? And doing what? He had no education, he didn’t know how to do anything except fix a little machinery, farm a little. And jobs were scarce, everybody said so, and he wasn’t any eighteen year old anymore.

He hit his fist on the window frame, then held himself still, listening, afraid he’d wakened his wife. But there was no frightened, “Gabe?” from the bedroom. He dropped his arm, the knuckles aching in a way that almost pleased him, and watched the stars. The truth was, he couldn’t imagine life without the farm, or maybe he still wasn’t ready to try. Every time he started to get a picture, anger and revulsion rose up in him so hard that he hit something, or cursed with such viciousness that he disgusted himself. Once he had even caught himself crying and
that had scared him more than anything. So if he could help it, he didn’t think about what it would be like.