Given (14 page)

“I sure miss that dog. He never visits me anymore,” Grace said.

Vernal and I followed Hooker inside, hesitantly. A teapot and a matching set of cups and saucers sat next to a bowl of sugar with silver tongs on a table that looked as if it had been laid for afternoon tea with the late Queen Mum. The cups were thin and veined, heady with Victorian roses. Grace leaned forward to remove a syringe from a water glass.

Al, who was not wearing any clothes either, sat hunched over the table, getting ready to fix. I tried not to look at him, my eyes moving around the kitchen instead, stopping at the handcrafted sign over the electric stove saying, “Welcome Friends”.

Grace said she'd just made tea, and asked if anyone else would like a cup. Vernal tried not to look at Grace's body while Hooker focused somewhere beyond the “i” in “Friends” dotted with a bullet hole.

“I made tea?” Grace repeated, making it sound more like a question this time. “Don't anyone go. Please?”

Hooker cleared a space on a couch — the maroon cushions, once dark as pig's blood, faded to pink except for a few places around the upholstery studs — and told us we might as well sit. I squeezed onto the couch between Vernal and a pile of
Bride
magazines. A coffee table had another syringe and a length of rubber tubing in the middle of it, and a pamphlet from Social Services on how to breast feed your baby.

I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Baby-Think-It-Over, lying twisted in a corner, wires spilling from his gutted body, a pillow covering his head. All his lights, it was evident, had gone out. Grace, who no longer wore the giant key around her neck, kept glancing at Hooker, then smiling anxiously across the table at Al.

Al scowled, then lowered his eyes into his lap. Both his hands, one holding a hypodermic needle, disappeared under the table.

Grace looked at him, hopefully. “You all right, hon?” I had been too distracted at first by Grace's nakedness to notice her resemblance to her brother. Even though her skin was paler than his, she had all Hooker's dark, uneasy restlessness, and something else besides. She draped a blanket over Al's shoulders and asked Vernal what he took in his tea.

“Just sugar, please,” Vernal said.

“One lump or two?” Grace asked.

Al sat with his hands under the table staring numbly through the window. Grace asked him, for the second time, if he was feeling okay. “If you keep worrying about shit you'll fuck up my high,” Al said.

Al had more track marks than Grace had scars on her arms. Vernal asked Grace how the baby was doing and Grace said he'd been doing a lot of sleeping lately. She showed us the Moses basket she'd been weaving for him, from cedar bark cut into strips, soaked, boiled and beaten. “It's harder to find the bark I need now because — where are all the cedar trees? They're gone, all logged off. Miles and miles of nothing.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Al raise his teacup to his lips with one hand and then, as if he had decided swallowing wasn't worth the effort, or he resented the attention Gracie was paying to the rest of us, spit out the tea and let the cup drop to the table. Even as the hot liquid scalded him, he didn't lose his stunned expression.

When Al and Gracie started fighting, Hooker said he was leaving, he didn't want to get Al's kind of blood on him. Grace began shouting that all Hooker had ever done was ruin her life. She said Al only needed unconditional love. “You can't kill our love, Hooker,” she cried. “You can't even kill it with all your hate.” Vernal went to comfort her but — I'd been watching Al's face — I pulled him away.

Vernal and Hooker walked ahead of me back to the hearse.

“She's high, she didn't know what she was saying,” I heard Vernal say.

“What that Al needs is an unconditional bullet in the head,” Hooker said.

The rain had let up and the sun broke through again, the way it had at the Honour Site. Vernal's mood had darkened since he'd set eyes on Grace. On the plus side, though, he hadn't invited her to come and stay with me at the farm.

Hooker said he had to stop at the Uncle's to see if his dog had ended up there, and told Vernal where to pull in. He got out, said “right back
,”
and Vernal and I waited in the hearse until he returned, alone, five minutes later. “No dog. I'm not worried — wherever I end up, Toop always finds his way back to me,” he said. Vernal exhaled, as if he'd been holding his breath the whole time Hooker had been gone.

We drove north through the village, past the fucked-up church draped in black tarpaulins held in place by scorched timbers, with “Painkiler” sprayed across the door, past a solitary memorial pole that stood ten feet from the tide line on the gravel beach covered with Styrofoam snowballs. Vernal made another stop at Matt's Yaka-Way, the only store in the village that sold tax-exempt gas and cigarettes for anyone with a Status Card, and gave away free coffee and packages of flavoured condoms to everyone else. Most of the shelves had been given over to objects associated with killing, in particular fishing and hunting. I helped myself to “gratuitous” coffee while Vernal gassed up.

When we were on our way again, Hooker said he'd get out at Dead End Road. “They call it that because it ends at the graveyard, eh?” He gave me another quick smile. “I like it there. It's where you'll find all the people I get along with best.” We left him, roadkill in hand, then drove back the way we'd come, through the village.

The sun dropped behind the rain wall into the sea as we passed the lone totem pole. I asked Vernal why it had been raised so close to the tide line and Vernal said from what he knew of the case a judge had awarded Lawlor Moon's wife custody of their only daughter, so Lawlor bought her a colouring book and some new Magic Markers and took his daughter to the beach. “He drowned her because he didn't want anyone else raising her. Then he took his own life.” Vernal said the memorial pole had been raised on the spot where the Magic Marker pens had been found scattered amongst the stones.

Further on I watched a fat, white tourist dog being humped on the road by a three-legged skinny dog half its size.

“I had a teacher who used to say nature thrives in mongrels,” Vernal said, honking at the dogs, then giving up and driving around them. “It's called hybrid vigour — if you want to create the strongest healthiest offspring you should mate with someone whose strengths are different from your own.”

As we left the village behind Vernal tried to tell me why he felt responsible for Grace, how much he was to blame for her circumstances. He told me he had met Grace when he first came to the island and had encouraged her to move to Vancouver, to get into modelling, to make a life for herself. She made the move and then, walking home after an audition, in daylight, she had been raped. “You've seen the scars . . . her wrists, her throat. She tried to commit suicide after that. On more than one occasion.”

Vernal seemed comfortable talking to me as long as we were in transit. Driving was an ideal time for intimacy, because it forced him to keep his eyes on the road, and he didn't have to look at me.

He said Grace started doing heroin again when she found out she was carrying the child of a rapist and because she kept failing at killing herself. She had promised him she was flying straight, because of the child, but he realized she'd been high again today when we'd arrived at the house, even though she tried to hide the fact, unlike Al, who had to fix in his penis, where he still had one vein left that hadn't collapsed.

As Vernal spoke I noticed the paper bag that had rolled out from under the seat. I opened it and saw a 26er of Silent Sam and a bottle of homemade wine.

“Hooker must have forgotten this,” I said, almost too quickly, tucking the bag back where it had come from. It had to be Hooker's — Vernal would never, even in his worst moments, drink homemade wine. I suppose I should have thought it strange that Vernal didn't ask what was in the bag, but this was symptomatic of our entire marriage. Any marriage, come to think of it. You learned to accept things, as if they had never happened.

We drove home down the east coast road, so that I would be able to say it was official: I'd gone round the Bend. I questioned Vernal about Hooker — how he had lost his hand.

Vernal said everyone on the island had a story. Some said he had been born without it, others that his hand had been wizened at birth and later dropped off. There was speculation that the injury happened in his teenage years, a rumour involving a homemade grenade and a car-bombing campaign.

“That's not all he lost,” Vernal said, keeping his eyes on the road straight ahead. Some people swore he'd gone to Vancouver and injected so much cocaine into his urethra that he got a hard-on for three days, then gangrene set it. “He's supposed to have left the hospital minus five fingers, and his dick.”

Vernal must have heard my small exhalation. He said he didn't want to talk about Hooker anymore, he wanted to talk about
us
. Neither of us spoke until Vernal asked me if I thought I might ever come to love him again, the way I once did. I said I had already used up a lot of my mind thinking about the way things had been; I tried not to think about the future.

“I just keep wishing there was something I could do. To make you feel, you know,
better,
” he said
.

Vernal had always tried to protect me from myself, from my own melancholia. I believe he was jealous of my moods, because they belonged to me, I owned them. It had been easier for him to control my ups and downs as long as there had been cocaine, but eventually the drugs, and what was left of our marriage, had run out. Vernal took my hand and said he was sorry. For what, I could only imagine. Our shared history of sorrow?

The east coast drive was uneventful, no Honour Site, no dangerous curves, shrines or garbage dumps. No hitchhikers, either. Back at the farm I poured the homemade wine down the drain and stashed the bottle of vodka under my clothes at the bottom of a Chrysalis, then sat for what seemed like hours, staring at the patterns the rain made inching down the glass, seeing nothing beyond the pane. When I thought of Hooker's mouth, his lips, his melting eyes, all the songs of lovesick devotion I'd ever heard came back to me then in one confused medley.

Part of me wished I could love Vernal again, but love, I knew, never agrees to share your attention with anyone.