Parallel Rivers Read online

  “Of course children are happy,” said Anna. “Even when they don’t seem so. Isn’t that true?” She looked from Eddie to Irene.

  “It’s true,” said Irene.

  “It’s not true,” said Gabby. “They’re good at hiding. Keeping secrets.”

  Eddie watched Gabby take Anna’s arm and lead her toward the cattails, which the kids were trying to uproot. Beside the barbecue Peter and Winston were quietly sipping beer. Aloof. Dignified. Ill-at-ease. Stilted. Sombre. Lonely. They added coals and lowered the lid. Peter pulled out his video camera and Winston ran to his car to get his, then they stood side by side, comparing.

  “Winston won’t show me his camera,” said Eddie.

  “Poor soul,” said Irene.

  “He won’t look at me the whole afternoon. You watch. Thinks I’m pathetic. He’ll offer to push me around so he doesn’t have to look me in the eye. He pities me.”

  “No,” said Irene. “He’s afraid of being judged. He doesn’t want you to see his feelings.”

  “Look at them,” said Eddie. He gripped her soft white arm. “They’re identical, those men, identical. They’re selfish and childish. Business and architecture. Don’t know a thing about real work. I’d built three houses single-handed by the time I was their age.”

  She pulled away and began to organize the utensils, plates and napkins on the table, everything including the food. Eddie felt tired. His head was beginning to ache. He wished it wasn’t such a grey afternoon. If the sun stayed out there’d be less tension in the air. And if it rained, they’d pack up the cars and go to Peter’s house and eat in the warm basement under bright fluorescents and be in a home with walls and a roof and kids playing close by, then Gabby would drive Irene and him home.

  Ants. A small variety going up one leg of the table and down another, patrolling the top amid the food. Robin screeched and Winston’s boys pounced, squashing as many as they could.

  “Head ‘em off.”

  “Stomp ‘em!”

  “Give ‘em orange juice.”

  “Only two reasons to kill a thing,” Eddie told the kids. “If it attacks your stock or if it is in terrible pain.”

  “Potato tails make new potatoes,” said Robin. She held aloft one of last year’s with milk-white horns.

  “Liar.”

  “Yeah. Liar.”

  “Okay, boys,” called Anna.

  “This salad is made from ones grown right here, right Grandpa?”

  “Yes. That’s so. The new ones.” He took the old potato from his granddaughter, snapped off the horns, tossed it into the compost. He sighed. And they ate, the ants and the family, together in a clearing, in a green place between highways, as evening came on.

  Winston and Peter abandoned their plates, scrambled from the picnic table and aimed their cameras. The young wives threw herring into the air. An eagle lifted from the oak in the middle of the allotment. At ease, it swung down and snatched a fish mid-air and flapped back to the perch. This had been rehearsed other years. Herring was the item everyone remembered to bring.

  “Grandad,” said Paddy.

  “Yo.”

  “Can we ride in your wheelchair?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll stay on the paths.”

  “No.”

  “I bet I know why you won’t let us,” said Evan.

  “Why won’t I let you?”

  “‘Cause you don’t like sharing,” said Evan. “Right?”

  “Your dad tell you that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t mind sharing, but being mean is what really turns my crank. You ever think maybe your mom and dad will split up? Your grandma here worries about it all the time. What would become of you kids? You’re fine right now. But who knows? Who knows what will happen.”

  “Take no notice, boys.” Irene began to clean up the dishes, pack the baskets. “I don’t know about you, Eddie. What’s wrong with you?”

  The men closed in, cameras raised, shooting the table, the kids.

  Eddie waved them away. “Fuck off, paparazzi. Anyway, it’s too bloody dark.”

  “It’s his medication,” Irene whispered.

  Eddie spun his wheelchair, kicking gravel. “Yes, it’s the drugs,” he told the cameras. “A thousand bottles with my name on each label, that’s who I am. I’ll tell you a secret, boys. There’s expiry dates with your names on ‘em.” He felt breathless and excited. “Hey, Win. Catch!”

  As his son took his eye from the viewfinder a potato hit him in the belly. “Ow!”

  “A spud, my friend.” Eddie chuckled. “Should see your face.”

  “He gets emotional,” said Irene. “He woke me up last night, crowding me so I could hardly breathe. He was shaking like a leaf.”

  “What the hell are you on about, woman!” He glanced around furiously, then stared at his daughter. “I dreamt about Nigel, Gab.”

  “Jesus,” said Gabby. She turned away crunching a carrot.

  Winston set his camera on the table and seemed ready to speak.

  “Winnie?” said Eddie. “Nigel riding his bike. Gab, don’t run away. Your therapist was coming for dinner, by boat. I was fighting my old man. We’d all been in court again and I had to pee but there were so many people in the courthouse I couldn’t move and I had to pee in an ashtray.”

  Gabby kept on walking to where Peter on his knees was zooming in on a single rose.

  “Pissed so much it overflowed and made a real stinky flood.”

  “Dad, for Christ’s sake,” said Winston.

  Eddie gulped air. His voice came out strained. “The pee turned into gasoline and caught fire and the therapist was my old man and we were like heroes putting out the flames, and when it was over there were all these smiling women. And Nigel riding his bike. Sweet boy.” He looked around. “God,” he said. “What’s happened here?” He lifted his left arm. He wanted to signal someone. “Irene?” he called.

  The pain hit fast, a perfect clarity through which he could see his son bending over him, intent, lips flapping — That hungry bird, that hungry bird — what’s he saying that for? and Irene, out of focus, her face a knot. How sad everything is. Across the highway, a river of stars, that long ride upstream against all odds, a line of men holding numbers. “How’m I doing?” The new ones, the new ones. “You’re the lone ranger now, Win.” Trees of this spinning glade bounded by roads.

  In the hospital parking lot a girl cursed out a baby. The naked boy sat on a garbage can, while the girl held his hips so he wouldn’t fall in. Shit made a soft plop plop in the trash. Eddie was trundling across the face of the moon toward his spaceship home.

  The woman in the emergency waiting room had a face like a stuffed deer. She followed his wheelchair as Irene pushed him down the corridor. “This town’s a slaughterhouse,” she said. “They’re amputating cabbies like cattle. My husband was a cabby all his thirty-five years and when he retired they came after him. Amputation after amputation. I don’t want to witness it but there’s not much choice. Listen, I don’t want to see you in pieces, son.”

  “Please go away,” said Irene.

  The woman ignored her. “It stinks in here, don’t you think, son? They’re a shifty crew if you want to know the truth. Legs arms feet. They take any which limb, no rhythm to it anymore. I’m finding out who. Soon I’ll know who all they are.”

  Eddie’s jaw ached. The deer was still talking amputation, and kids with bloody noses were running everything. He tried to tell Irene the cabin was false, these weren’t real cowboys, these gingham girls were too clean.

  A nurse guided them into a side room. “How’re we feeling, Eddie?”

  “Fine.”

  “Is that right?”

  No, it isn’t right. Eddie’s too busy to feel responsible for other people’s confusion.

  “Can you feel this?”

  “No.”

  “Does this hurt?”

  “Ouch!” said Eddie. “Jesus fuck! Yes, that hurts!”

&
nbsp; Some fading image of battle sweeps him up on foreign soil, a different person, a person with blood on his hands who knows how to do this. Heart, stroke, attack, whatever. When he checks back in everybody will be amazed, especially the doctors. He’ll give them a run for their money this time.

  The pain puts him in mountains with a woman he’s in love with and a man jealous of him. The woman’s unbearably beautiful. The man’s got revenge, possibly murder, on his mind.

  You’re okay, Eddie, he says sweetly. What have you been up to?

  Keeping out of mischief.

  You’ve made mistakes, Eddie. Told lies. We’ll patch you up and send you back out.

  I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to her.

  The glass doors slid shut and beyond emergency it was night, a row of cabs at the curb, drivers staring. Apparently he’d been wheeled back to the waiting room. The doors opened again and stayed that way, in time for him to see the girl stuff the baby into a ratty carriage and light a cigarette and square her puny shoulders. The wheels squealed over the sidewalk. The baby sobbed. Attendants with a gurney rushed past to a tilting ambulance in which sat a white-faced woman.

  He struggled to catch these important goings on. Where was Irene?

  In the valley.

  Where?

  Where everyone goes in winter. It’s too cold in the mountains.

  On the morning of the river crossing Eddie wakes refreshed. Sun sparkles on the frost. Trees shimmer in sunlight and the moss is wet and springy underfoot. As he wades into icy water, Nigel appears among the others paddling out. On the far shore his own father and mother lean forward to encourage him, but he begins to go under. Midstream he has to struggle back, a failure, to abandon those he wants most to be comforted by.

  “Eddie. Wake up, Eddie.”

  “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m too young to have a son as old as Winston. That boy’s ancient.”

  “You’re old enough,” said Irene. “Don’t kid yourself.”

  “This is one hell of a place.”

  “I’m here, Eddie. It’s all right, love.”

  “People are always on their way from one person to another, aren’t they?”

  Wind drives leaves off high branches, blows against their backs, Irene’s and his, cooling their sweat. A piece of highway visible below, the way they’d come, what, sixty-odd years ago?

  “I always figure outbound travellers have someone waiting at home.”

  There’s coyotes, she says.

  I can’t hear them.

  Tonight’ll be cold, she says.

  We’ll be warm together, darlin’.

  I know, she says.

  Tell me what you know, he says.

  Night

  AFTER DAD’S DEATH, WIN SAW GABBY less and less often. He moved his family to the prairies, while she and Peter stayed on the coast. When Peter died in a car crash he did not attend the funeral or the memorial.

  Winston’s sons left home, Paddy and Evan and Nigel. Eventually this day came, but nothing had prepared him. He’d felt it coming. Waking that morning to the empty house and the note was a feat, as was parking the truck, walking toward his wife. Down in the coulees he saw a quick shadow, coyote or wolf. He spotted a wasp nest, strangely intact, in the ditch. Anna’s little dog was curled at her feet.

  “I can’t,” Anna said when he got close.

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t go back, Win. Can’t deal with you.”

  “When’s the bus due?” he said.

  “Soon,” she said.

  “Travelling light,” he said.

  She sighed, “You know what’s happening here.”

  “I guess I do. I don’t accept it, though.”

  He crouched and the dog wagged close and licked his hand, then started to pant, thin body nearly shaking itself to bits. He looked round at the country, the few trees, the haze on the reservoir. “You can’t take the dog.”

  Anna started to cry. She pulled a Kleenex from her pocket.

  “I mean on the bus,” he said.

  “She’s just small. She fits in my bag. No one will notice.”

  “You can’t take the dog.”

  They both turned toward the reservoir. The day had an immense feel to it. So easy to lose anything in a place this big. He started to cry.

  “Why do this now, Winston?”

  He looked at her eyes. Her tears had stopped. He took a deep breath and looked in deep. Allowed a tiny spark of himself to kindle down in the calm in there.

  “Goodbye,” she said. “Sweetheart.”

  He smiled at her. “You are everything.”

  “No.”

  “Well. You are.” He closed his eyes. He whispered, “Now you are.”

  For about an hour they stood still under an orange sun, the day yawning around them. A flock of starlings wheeled over the water. The road started to melt a bit. She pulled her sunhat down low. He made that step toward her a thousand times and each time she stepped away. Neither of them moved.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said. “Tell me what to do.”

  “Go home. Please.”

  “I don’t understand you. This is terrible. What do I have to do?”

  “Winston. Go home now.”

  He put his hands in his pockets and felt a buzzing in his head; everything was too bright. He heard his father’s voice singing, “Everyone has mud on their shoes.” His eyes went up, up, like hot air balloons, and he fell to his knees.

  He felt her hands on each side of his face. Wasps, black ones, were coming and going, one at a time, in and out the hole in his head as they brought in big balls of yellow pollen. As soon as his head was as yellow as the sun, he ascended. On the ground, Anna was bent over him. The highway barely interrupted itself for them as it snaked by the reservoir, skirted the town where they’d lived twenty years. They were both of them small, he thought, and the country looked organized, like a well-tended garden.

  Down the end of the horizon floated the Greyhound bus whirling dust. He felt hot in the eyes. He couldn’t say her name with such a violent pulse in his forehead. “I love you, honeybunch. I love you like crazy.”

  Anna stood and made a tiny gesture with her hands. “Get yourself up now. Take the pup. Take care of her. Go home and have a shave.”

  The faces at the windows of the bus as she boarded looked like they’d been travelling a long time and knew a thing or two. They looked like they were judging him. He climbed back into the smell of exhaust, rattled treeline, a little pile of shit on the road where the dog had squatted, his wife gone. He couldn’t quite feel his fear. As he walked to the car he was already phoning his kids to tell them what happened, telling his mom, his clients, the gas jockey, the mailman. He saw Anna’s face for a second as something vivid and hard-looking. Small nose and tough mouth, the bluest eyes, flawless. A red leaf came spinning along in some breeze that ran close to the road. He heard the factory whistle, far away. The road was empty, still and empty, no one else travelling this Saturday morning, no animal or bird in the land around. He shrugged. Then he missed the dog and called her as he scuffed along the soft shoulder.

  He thought of Anna’s skin, not tight as it once was, but soft, under another man’s loving hand in some place unknown. Her cells, which had been woven in with his, were pulling up stakes. His pulse hammered. His head held the dawn of a monster ache. The sky seemed absorbed in an impossible peace. He crossed the road and jumped the fence and swished his cap in the reservoir, sluiced his face with cold water, saw stars, and knew that his skull was too thin to protect him from such distance. He couldn’t believe how raw he felt. When the dog came running along the fence, he climbed back over, lifted her into his arms and buried his nose in her neck. She squealed. He trudged to the car, jamming the wet cap on his head.

  At the first intersection the men fixing the road called hello. The gal with the stop sign winked at him. He looked at her, nothing but secrets up his sleeve and a devil in his ear. They’d a
ll find out soon enough. He needed to talk to his kids first, one at a time. Paddy, then Evan. Nigel.

  Saturday morning on the Sea to Sky Highway. Vague country streamed past the Mercedes windows, grey from rain mixed with dirt thrown up by SUVs hammering through with tourists that as Gabby thought about them made her feel small. Winston did not die. He wasn’t dead. Just separated from Anna. She kept trying to get in touch, but he wasn’t even capable of picking up the phone. She wasn’t doing very well, something was wrong with her. It didn’t show on any scans, but it was there. In the fall of the year Peter had died, Winston had visited. He’d sleepwalked into her room with Robin locked into his arms. She woke the house screaming. Gabby had felt something then. Now she wanted to buy something. She wanted to masturbate. She wanted a drink. Later this afternoon, by the time the old man on the reserve leaned with his trumpet out of his trailer window to honk a few sad notes, as he did every Saturday and Sunday, she would be desperate. Already wind from Hawaii was blowing shards of light about and the sea looked chaotic.

  “We will both die but not today,” she said to the rain.

  Winston driving home slowed and waved, then gunned it. Dust swept over the heads of the swimmers as his flatbed fishtailed down the gravel road toward town.

  They were thin children, the swimmers, always together. Every evening he drove by, the same kids were swimming in the reservoir or riding their bikes to the reservoir. He liked to go to the edge of town after work to watch planes taking off from the airfield. Sun reflected off the airport windows all gold. He slowed down along that stretch to see the gold and the kids swimming or hanging out smoking cigarettes, just laughing together.

  Nigel had been born with foetal alcohol syndrome and a face that always looked surprised. They called him Nigel after Nigel who had been shot. Their Nigel walked slowly behind his brothers, had a high chirpy voice, and he’d punch anyone who said anything he didn’t like. He loved music and shopping, but was often confused about time and the order of things. He worshipped his brothers, let them take things from him, a basketball, a teddy bear, acting as if he didn’t care. Then he’d ambush one or both, biting and clawing, kicking with his skinny legs, till an adult dragged him off.