The Retreat (7 page)

They were still sitting like that as they passed the turnoff to the Retreat. Lizzy made note of the road but she said nothing. She experienced a slight moment of panic, until Raymond lifted a finger and pointed into the distance and said, “My place is right up there.” He drove fast, the palm of his left hand on the wheel. A few minutes later they turned off the main highway and drove up a gravel road, past houses that had signs with numbers on them, all the way up to sixteen. In the yards, there were trailers with boats, pickups on blocks, bicycles lying down as if in wait for something or someone. The gravel road fell into a tunnel of trees and the further they wound into the backcountry, the more Lizzy felt a sinking, a falling away.

When Raymond slowed, she held her breath and looked around, but there were just trees and trees. Raymond shifted, his hand pushing up against the stick, away from her. He turned onto a narrow trail and followed the tracks, which were muddy and slippery and full of holes that held the rainwater. He kept the pickup in low gear and reached with one hand into his jacket pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and handed it to her. “Light me one.”

Lizzy removed a cigarette and put it in her mouth. Fish stirred beside her, and slept on. She slipped the pack between her thighs and took the book of matches from the dash. She lit the cigarette and inhaled as his hand reached up and asked for the cigarette.

He said, “You’re okay,” and at first Lizzy thought this might be a question, but it wasn’t. He was proclaiming something, or laying out an assessment of sorts, and she knew she was supposed to be pleased.

“Better than,” he said, and he grinned and flicked the cigarette ash out the window.

They came to a stop before a small cabin with a sagging roof and a faded blue door and windows that had plastic taped over a few broken panes. The door was open. Fish sat up and said, “Where?” and he rubbed his eyes and then lay down again, eyes open, staring at the dashboard. Lizzy stroked his forehead, which was sweaty and hot.

Raymond said, “Here we are. My brother’s here. He came back home a month ago. He has a cat.” He got out and stood beside the pickup, looking out across the tops of the trees. Then he walked towards the cabin and disappeared inside. Lizzy sat and waited. There was a black cat in the sun near the side of the house and just over to the side of the cat was a swing made from thick chains and the seat of a car. When Raymond reappeared he was with a boy who looked like him, only his hair was shorter and he was heavier. Raymond’s head moved slightly as if to indicate something and then the other boy said her name, “Lizzy.” He walked over to the pickup and leaned into the passenger door. He said that his name was
Nelson and that his brother was too shy to be polite and they should come into the house. It had sounded like he’d said
hose
, and at first Lizzy was confused. She gathered up Fish and said, “Okay,” then climbed out and stood on the muddy ground in her bare feet.

“Lizzy and Fish,” Nelson said. He led them into the cabin and offered them two chairs, one covered in blue plastic and the other wood, painted red. He sat on the corner of the table and asked if she wanted a beer.

“Sure,” she said. There was a propane tank in the corner with a gas burner beside it. A few pots and plates and cups in a wooden box. Some tins, beans and corn, beside the box. And beside the box a large green garbage pail that held water. There was a dipper floating in the water. The walls of the cabin were rough and unpainted. Beyond the makeshift kitchen was a door that led somewhere, perhaps to a bedroom. The light in the room they were standing in was muted by the plastic on the windows.

Raymond stood in the doorway, smoking. Lizzy took a beer from Nelson and went over to Raymond and stood beside him and because she didn’t know what else to say, she said, “So, this is where you live.”

“In the summer,” Raymond said. He gestured towards Nelson and said that his brother had just moved in. Nelson was the cook and the cleaning lady. He grinned and said, “Not doing a very good job.”

“That’s right,” Nelson said. In the dusty light he raised his bottle as if proposing a toast. He drank. “No electricity, so warm beer.”

Lizzy asked Raymond if he wanted to share her beer, and she offered it up for him to take. He shook his head and said that he was fine. He wasn’t thirsty. Fish, who was still dazed from sleep, slipped off his chair and went to Lizzy and wrapped his arms around her bare leg.

“Funny thing,” Nelson said. “Ray said there was this girl down at that place who was pretty good-looking. That’d be you, I guess.”

“Or someone.”

“It’s you,” Raymond said. He seemed embarrassed; he made a slight grimace as he leaned back out the doorway and spun his cigarette towards the pickup.

Fish pulled at Lizzy. “Swing?”

She looked at Raymond and said, “He wants to swing. That okay?”

“Course it is. Come on, Fish.” He held out a hand and Fish let go of Lizzy’s leg and went outside. Raymond turned to look at Lizzy as he stepped out the door. “My brother was taken away to live with a perfect family in Manitoba and now he comes back full of bullshit.” He nodded gravely at Lizzy and then he grinned.

Nelson lifted his beer in a salute and told Raymond to fuck off. His hand was big on the bottle and his wrists were thick. He seemed to be much stronger than Raymond. From where she sat, she could see the swing and Raymond’s back as he faced Fish, who was talking, and she felt a sudden affection for Raymond. The sound of the swing came in through the open door. Lizzy said, “We gotta get back. I didn’t tell anyone where we were going.”

“Raymond told me about the Retreat,” Nelson said. “Every year the Doctor arrives, and every year there’s this new group of followers.”

“We’re not followers,” Lizzy said.

“Ray manages to make money there selling chickens to city people who think chickens don’t have to be raised and then killed. You don’t look like that kind of person. What do you do down there?”

“The Doctor who runs it says that it’s a place to gather and make sense of the world,” Lizzy said. She shrugged, looked about at her surroundings, and then said that she shouldn’t have to defend it. “Maybe it doesn’t have to have a purpose. It just is. People live there for the summer and then go home.”

Nelson’s skin was slightly mottled, like he’d had acne when he was younger. He wasn’t as handsome as Raymond but he seemed surer of himself, with his bigger vocabulary, his wider mouth. He was a little too sure of himself, as if he had some secret he was hiding. He asked why Lizzy had gone there anyway.

She didn’t answer right away. Outside, by the swing, Fish called and Raymond said something, but she couldn’t hear him properly. She finished her beer and put it down on the floor. Her parents were there, she said, her brothers were there, and so she was there too. “Where else should I be?”

“I don’t know. You’re old enough to have a kid, you’re old enough to be somewhere else. The Retreat sounds like this church I went to as a teenager. Where one man has a vision and throws it out for others to lap up. Don’t you think?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

“I was raised by a white family. Did Raymond tell you that when I was ten, I was taken away to live with a white family in a place called Lesser? You remind me of my stepsister.”

Lizzy looked away.

“The family I lived with was religious and I went to a Mennonite church for a while and then I went to the Pentecostal Church where people spoke in tongues and moved their hands through the air and one night Pastor Phil tried to raise a cat from the dead. There were good things, though, living in Lesser. We had linoleum on the kitchen floor and I learned to play viola. You play an instrument?”

“No,” Lizzy said. “My brother Everett does.”

“’Nother beer?” Nelson asked again.

“No, thanks, we have to get back.” She rose and stepped out the door and said to Raymond that they had to go. “Okay?”

Raymond grabbed one of the chains on the swing and slowed it and as he did so he said, “Whoa,” as if he were talking to a horse. Fish said, “Don’t want to go.” He was looking at the cat and he went over to it and took it into his arms. He scrubbed at the cat’s ears and then held his head close to the cat’s chest and listened to her purr. “Bull,” he said, looking up at Lizzy.

Raymond was standing by the open door to the pickup. He slipped behind the wheel. Lizzy walked to the pickup and got in. Looked back at Fish who was taking his time. She said, “Nelson thinks that Fish is my kid? Did you tell him that?”

Raymond was looking through the windshield at the sky. “Nope, that wasn’t me. I didn’t say anything about Fish, or you, or you being a mother.” He seemed pleased with himself.

“Well, that’s what he thinks.”

“Like I said, Nelson can be full of shit. Anyway, you know what’s true and what isn’t.”

Lizzy called for Fish. Then she opened the door and went and took Fish by the arm and hauled him back to the pickup. Bull, suddenly out of Fish’s arms and on the ground, went over and rubbed the side of its face against the corner of the cabin. Fish started to whimper. Then he said he was hungry. And thirsty. Lizzy put him in the middle of the seat, so his feet were touching the stick shift. Fish began to cry.

Raymond started the truck and said, “He’s thirsty.”

“That’s okay. He can drink at home.”

Raymond put the pickup in gear and crawled down onto the trail. She looked out the window at the trees and the sky and thought about Nelson. She wondered what he had done wrong to be taken away, but didn’t want to ask. The sun had finally come out and the puddles reflected the trees. Above them, as if drawn against the sky, a falcon hovered.

When they got back to the Retreat, the only person visible was Emma Poole, standing at the edge of the treeline in her butterfly-catching outfit. She was leaning forward, peering into the bush. It turned out that no one had known Lizzy and Fish were gone; they hadn’t been missed.

E
verett was not happy. He yearned for where he had come from, the city, and he yearned for his clarinet lessons, taking the bus downtown to the apartment of his music teacher, Miss Douceur. She lived in a high-rise in downtown Calgary and her apartment overlooked the Bow River. There were large windows and from the balcony on the seventeenth floor you could see the river below and the streets and on the streets there were the small dark slashes that were people. Once, Miss Douceur had asked him out onto the balcony for a drink. They had sat on padded chairs around a glass-topped table and sipped at lemonade. The sun was falling onto their shoulders and their heads. Everett was facing the sun and he had to squint to see Miss Douceur, who was wearing a pale green dress that fell just above her knees. The dress was sleeveless and Everett snuck looks at Miss Douceur’s thin, tanned arms. She always wore shoes with heels, even in her apartment. She was married, he thought, because there were signs of a man in the apartment – suit jackets, loafers, a tie thrown over the back of a chair – though Everett had never met her husband and she did not speak of him. He loved her carriage and confidence. He loved her straight posture and the
way she sat and kept time, tapping her hand against her thigh. He loved her apartment with the shelves filled with many different kinds of books and the wineglasses that hung from under the cabinet, as if in wait for a party. He imagined dinners in the apartment. A group of men and women, all well-dressed, all rich. And Miss Douceur would be the prettiest and the smartest.

Once, when he had arrived a little too early for his lesson, she had invited him in and asked him to wait on the couch in the den. He had heard voices, hers and another voice, lower, that of a man, he thought, and then the front door had opened and then closed and she had appeared and asked him to come, please. That day she had worn a yellow skirt and a white blouse with black swirls. Her legs had been bare and her feet were bare. This was the first time he had seen her feet and he could not stop himself from glancing at her toes and ankles.

For hours during the day, Everett read. Both Harris and the Doctor had collections of books that were kept in the Hall, though most of these books were strange and unapproachable, especially the Doctor’s. Lewis called them philosophical and theological tomes, and not very good ones at that. Everett discovered several short novels by John Steinbeck and he also read
The Old Man and the Sea.
He found a slim book on knots and so now he knew all about knots. He had not read any of Harris’s novels, though they were available; it was too strange to think of reading Harris’s words while the man was living next door.

Down by the pond, in the afternoons, Lizzy and Harris talked while Everett lay nearby and listened. Harris spoke of his life as a writer and he spoke of trips he had taken by himself and trips he had taken with Emma. One time he spoke of a month that he had spent in the south of Italy, and he said that if he were a wealthier man, and if Emma would follow him, he would live out his life in that place, close to the cliffs that fell down to the Mediterranean Sea. Everett, listening, but pretending not to, imagined a world of villas and late-evening meals with the sound of laughter and the ocean crashing on the rocks below. He recognized, perhaps for the first time in a real way, that the family he had been born into was poor and not very sophisticated and he wished that it weren’t so. Lately, he had been aware of his parents’ battles, of quarrels that upset his father more than his mother. His mother seemed to slip around the fights; she would smile and turn her back on Mr. Byrd, or later in the Hall she would be leaning in towards the Doctor and enjoying herself as if everything was normal and good.

One time, he had been asked to join some members of the Retreat as they drove into town to gather stale food – day-old bread and cast-off cinnamon buns – from the Dumpsters behind the Safeway. This was a regular event but Everett, curious at first, quickly found that he did not like the smell of the garbage. He was also uncomfortable with behaving in this way. He went once, and then decided to stay back at the camp and read, or to go down to the pond, where he lay, chest down, chin resting on his hands, conscious of Harris’s faint voice offering stories of lives that had been lived in other places.