Stunt (17 page)

The letter to the eighteen-year-old girl strains in his liver-spotted hand. Quaking, he slips it into the pocket of his silk bathrobe. Looking down, he sees that he is still wearing the note he pins to himself every night before falling asleep: NOT DEAD YET. PLEASE CHECK FOR PULSE OR MORTAL WOUND – having been taken to the mortician and pronounced dead and nearly buried three times already.

Sound of a match striking the air. And my name. ‘Eugenia.' Finbar is not calling me. He is testing it on his property.

I wake up to something prodding my left side. It feels like a snout. Probably the last wild boar. ‘What ho,' it says. I open my eyes. The sun is bright as a blister. A red stamp, it blights the shape above me, making it black. But I know that voice, those words like ancient shale, ostrich feathers, hops and grunts in a mouth. I wonder if the sun is his permanent backdrop.

‘What ho,' I respond.

The man is wearing a diving suit. It shimmers wet. His dark hair drips. He holds a metal detector with a round disc at its base and presses it up against my breast pocket. Beeps come through the headphones that hang around his neck.

Mink told me that she had two hearts. One where a heart should be and another in her stomach. She put my hand on her stomach and I could feel a dull thud there. I imagined a baby in captivity and Mink confusing the baby with a surplus of love. My hand under hers, pulsing, she said that when I was a baby my skin was so soft it was tarantula skin.

‘When did you touch a tarantula?'

‘Before you.'

‘What else did you do before me?'

‘Everything.' She said
everything
like she was drinking it. ‘Don't worry. You'll do everything too.'

We are in the sand dunes at the western end of the island, Hanlan's Point. I slept here, the tall grasses shooting into a fence around me, a net below. The man hoists me up. I land in the hollow of his chest where, if he lay flat, he would collect rainwater. The capped teeth. The beginnings of a beard. His hair is longer than I remember and his nose is a nose that has been broken more than once.

‘How did you break your nose?'

‘I didn't break it. Somebody else did.'

‘Why?'

‘He said he didn't want me to forget him.'

‘He must have said it a few times.'

‘He did.'

‘Why didn't you duck his punches?'

‘If he was looking at my nose he wouldn't look in my pockets.'

The man's jaw is strong. With it, he could play a villain in a movie. But not with the rest of his face. It is too gentle. His eyes are an opalescent grey, the colour of a tent left out of doors too long.

‘There was a store here on this end of the island. Durnan's Boat House. It was built over the water. A lot fell through the floorboards.' The man wears bags around his hips. One is heavily weighted with rusty square-headed nails, pocket knives and bottle caps. A single coin in the other. He holds it out for me to see. ‘Copper goes green. Silver goes black.' Blackened, the face is nearly rubbed off. It reminds me of your portraits tied up, a parcel on the curb, the weather vulturing them, the paintings taking on the bruises and the galaxies of mould.

‘You're a treasure hunter.'

‘Though when I walk into the water everyone thinks I'm trying to kill myself.'

‘Has anyone ever tried to stop you?'

‘No.' He is not perplexed.

Lying in the dunes is a pair of roller skates, black with red stoppers. The man slings them over his shoulder. I hit the sand from my suit. It sounds like an hourglass. Patting down my breast pocket, I feel there something the size of a thimble, a glass eye. I will see to it when I am alone.

‘I made the pie.'

‘No fire.'

‘Not this time. I'll feed you.'

‘You live here.'

‘Since the day I was born.'

‘What about your accent?'

‘I was away for a long time. Now I'm home.'

My stomach groans. I place my hand over it, parting my suit jacket, and there, the size of a minnow and rust in colour, is the blood dried from my fall onto the glass. It looks like a keyhole. Before he lifts the tail of my shirt, the man says, ‘Excuse me, I am a gentleman.' He circles the cut with his finger, skin rough as burlap. ‘You are hurt.' The pull in my jaw.

Without saying anything more, the man picks me up and piggybacks me northeast and over the bridge to Algonquin Island. He is not wearing shoes. He does not look down once, feet fast as hummingbirds. On the way, he stops, puts me down, turns around, wipes his hand against his wetsuit and extends it. We shake.

‘Samuel Station.'

‘Eugenia.'

‘Eugenia. Samuel Station.'

‘Eugenia Stunt Ledoux.'

‘Stunt.' He repeats the word as if it were an unopened box in his mouth. ‘I am pleased to make your acquaintance.'

‘And yours.'

Our eyes meet like we are duellers in the woods who have forgotten to shoot each other.

I say, ‘I think we're the only people awake.'

He lifts me onto his back again. Through my shirt, I can feel his spine. A new set of buttons, it runs down the centre of my chest, shortcut to a dissection.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

13. have a backup plan.

Samuel Station lives in a houseboat. It is a cedar-planked affair, thirty feet long and ten feet wide. It floats under a stand of cottonwood. In blue cursive, it tells me its name, the
Station.
I imagine its voice – a drawl, almost elderly, it has so much gravel in it. Ducks swim the surrounding water. They are teenage ducks: petulant, dirty and coming together in the shape of a wishbone. The
Station
has been well cared for. If it were in miniature, it would be on display amidst tie pins, badges and cigar boxes on a mantel above a roaring fire.

With me still on his back, Samuel follows the tilted dock to the
Station.
He then steps onto the slender deck of his boat, spattered with shadow, leaves above bristling silver. Cottonwood seeds fall to the ground, confetti in slow motion. He lets me down delicately, a sleeper, the swoon of water below. I adjust my stance. A ladder runs between the deck and the roof. Samuel climbs it. Stopping halfway, a buccaneer hanging from a mast, he leans out and says, ‘Please. Sit.' I do. In a wingback chair, its velvet worn. A pair of black boots beneath it. Polished, leather, steel toes poking out.

You had one scar that was ugly. Your left big toe. When your adoptive mother, Plump Marie, saw that toe, that disquieted lump of flesh, its nail worn right off, the flesh bunched and yellow beneath, she lit a prayer candle and cried for a week, saying that your feet were rooming-house feet and that it would be her fault if you ever ended up in one. You had not wanted to bother her, she gave you so much already, letting you sleep between her breasts when you were a newborn, the size of a pint of blueberries, so you fastened your too-small boots every morning, and walked,
face screwed into the wind. Passersby thought you were worrying a point when it was really just pain, your first encounter with pain and all it had to offer.

You called Plump Marie your
second mother
when your
first mother
disappeared twenty minutes after delivering you, the night of Kapuskasing's fiercest snowstorm, in her baby-blue hospital gown, bare feet, toes painted red, a single leather suitcase in hand. She climbed into a Cadillac that purred black between the snowdrifts. She left behind a pair of white high heels that the nurses all agreed were inappropriate for a woman who knew she would become a mother that night. The nurses measured the baby and then, not able to help themselves, they measured the high heels beside him. Twenty-one inches. Six inches. The nurses clapped their palms to their cheeks, vaudevillian shock. The mother was tall enough without shoes like that. And, they whispered over the baby,
sexy.

The only thing you knew about your first mother was that she had the name of an Italian movie.

Samuel Station jumps from the bottom rung of the ladder, a beet in his hand. Its broad-veined leaves spill out, bouquet for an asylum. His fingers are crumbed with dirt.

‘The leaf will bind your wound.'

‘Where did you learn that?'

‘The Ural Mountains. A weather station.' He looks sternly at the cut.

‘You have a garden on your roof ?'

‘Just beets. Though one day I hope for a horse.'

We pass the vestibule: in it, shovels, sieves, his roller skates, a second metal detector and a bow and arrow.

‘Have you ever shot anything?'

‘Yes.' Pulling open two sliding doors, ‘Welcome.'

The houseboat is narrow. If Immaculata were here and she stretched out her arms, a woman on a clifftop, it would fit her twice across. Cedar, it is reminiscent of a glory box, filled with ancestral jewellery. From the ceiling hang hundreds of rings. Suspended by dark thread, they flicker and twirl in the midday light. Tiny acrobats could swing from them, their backs bent, their slow arcs and contractions through space.

Following Samuel, I duck between them. The rings are silver and gold, some embedded with gemstones, others finely scored. He picks up a nub of metal. ‘My jeweller's mark.' It is the size of a fingertip. Now I understand why he was salvaging from the beach.

In one corner is Samuel's worktable. On its surface, in loose order: acorns, an envelope of gold dust spilled open, a watchmaker's drill, a surgeon's pliers, cuttlefish bone for casting, a lave, a ring mandrel, a rawhide mallet, rolling mills, files, a toothbrush, tweezers, sandpaper, glittering hills of sapphires, rubies and diamonds. Old tobacco tins store jewels: children's signet rings, pendants, watches and broaches. Lined up beside them are albums thick with coins. I flip through the weighty pages. A meticulous hand has labelled each one, where it was found and its approximate value. Samuel sells nothing. It is the act of seeing what is not readily apparent that propels him.

A blowtorch is hung against the wall. Below it, a gold ring. Washing the beet, Samuel says, without looking up, ‘It cracked last night when I was finishing it. First time in a long time.'

Two windows are carved into the houseboat's sides. They are covered in nautical maps to temper the sun, which, in the
Station,
would otherwise be the sun of the desert. Immaculata would want the whole thing under an umbrella. Samuel, the spark of his skin too. There is also a window on the roof – a pyramid jutting up between the bulbs. Stippled with dirt, it makes the light in the boat that of a late afternoon. Samuel could eat breakfast by candlelight without being accused of eccentricity.

Later, he will tell me that this window was a hole when he found the boat eight years ago beached in a junkyard and looking like the world's oceans had dried up. Samuel loved the boat. He paid his nose for it, his front teeth too, having stolen keys, lock combinations and the only food that would subdue the German shepherds that roamed the yard – the owner's dinner.

Against the eastern wall is a single bunk hanging twelve feet above the living space on a wooden foundation. It is a bed for a monk, so close to the ceiling that Samuel could not spring up in a nightmare without banging his head. Hand-fashioned rungs lead up to it. They are what he balances on in the mornings to make his bed. White sheet. Red blanket, black stripes. Single pillow. A book tucked under it. Always the same one.

Below the bunk, a saddlebag tacked to the wall that could be fitted over the hump of a dromedary and ridden across the Arabian desert. Three wrought-iron pegs: a yellow raincoat and bib overalls hang from one, thick fur hat on top. Beside it, suspenders, the shirt and wool pants Samuel was wearing when
we first met. White long johns on the third, moccasins beneath. Samuel is a man of systems and sure preferences. He thrives on the economy of space. He prints his initials in his clothing, a habit leftover from the house he grew up in. It feels like a tribute to his mother. He hides his socks. This, a tribute too.

In the centre of the room is a couch. Stacks of books raise its feet. It looks like Samuel, in collared cloak, lifted it from the court of Louis
XVI
, all turquoise and gold silk brocade, mahogany claws curled for traction against the wide plank floor, and carried it through centuries – a thief's portage – home. There should be a prostitute on it, face lead-oxide-whited over, Marie Antoinette hairdo, snoring intermission.

The western wall is a built-in bookshelf crammed with titles, piles laid crookedly upon other piles. Between them are small objects: the letter S in lead type, bars pulled from a xylophone, a horseshoe, an ostrich egg, a silver camel and boxing gloves. I pick up
The Small Lenormand Divinatory Card Game According to the Simplified Method Admirably Devised by Mademoiselle Lenormand.

‘Do you want to know the future?'

‘Yes.'

He grins. He is missing some of his side teeth. ‘Every night I dream the boat is sinking.' Samuel has met all of the emotions but only really recognized two of them as his own: seriousness and thrills. ‘We are all destined for the bottom.'

Records lean up against a record player. David Bowie's
Hunky Dory
faces out. I read the spines of the books: Cugle's
Practical Navigation, The Compleat Angler, Let's Have an Encounter, The Book of Miso, The New Science of Skin and Scuba Diving, Larousse Gastronomique.
A number of heavy volumes in languages I do not
recognize. Their letters are the contortions of insects. A strong wind would knock all of them to the floor.

Two bowls, two mugs, two sets of chopsticks.

‘Were you expecting me?'

‘Not even close.'

Beside the galley kitchen, there is a banquet table. It has been sawed and rebuilt to fit the space. The portion cut away forms the kitchen counter where Samuel stands drying the beet leaf in a towel that looks to be shrunken wool. He has the posture of a pharaoh. His motions are purposeful and exacting. He is a man who rarely gets lost. Or caught.