Читать книгу Bivouac - Kwame Dawes - Страница 17

seven

For the next two days Ferron had the old sensation of wanting to run. This time he was trying to resist the urge, but in the past he’d done that kind of thing a lot. When things became too pressured, he would pack a bag, take a van downtown, and get on the first bus to any destination that suited the length of time he had to escape. If he had a day, he would take a bus to Edgewater—that dry landfill of a suburban experiment which overlooked the Kingston Harbour. He would walk along the scarred, salt-white roads toward the large marl hill where only the most rugged of bramble survived. It was always hot, blazing, unrelenting. He would crawl down a narrow pathway to a small crevice in the face of the hill. This faced the sea and was completely hidden from the road. He would sit there and stare at the sea for hours, simply allowing his mind to empty. Nothing happened around there. The occasional plane would land at Palisadoes, a boat would trundle by, and a few sea gulls would dive at some prey on the water. Nobody would know where he was. He would disappear for the whole day relishing his return to the dorm to the chorus of “Where you was? People was looking for you . . .”

When he needed to disappear for longer periods, he would take the bus to St. Mary. It was always to the same place, a small community called Clonmel where an old girlfriend of his had grown up. He had spent one summer there working with a church theater group and had become a part of her family. They always welcomed him with fried fish, buttered hardo bread, and milk. They asked no questions. Mr. Robertson was a plump, cheerful man who worked for the Education Ministry, but farmed in St. Mary. His wife was a retired schoolteacher who still ran the small primary school built on their property. All their daughters, seven of them, were either in boarding school, at the university, working in Kingston, or abroad. The parents lived alone and welcomed Ferron’s visits. He would stay for several days, and they would let him stay aloof, go for long walks, or simply talk about anything at all. Nobody knew where he was. Nobody needed to know.

There was one farther destination he would use when he did not want to see anyone at all. He’d used it when his need to write had been greatest—or his need to make sense of his life. There was something about this place—like a place of punishment. Whenever he felt he’d hurt someone, or failed himself, he’d go there to wallow in self-pity, to suffer from the fear of being alone in the woods, with fantasies of being attacked or killed by some wandering person. The plyboard shack was in an open lot somewhere in Jack’s Hill. He’d discovered it when he was going on a long hike into the hills. Someone must have intended to live there, but changed their mind. They had probably thought better of such seclusion. It was stark, had scarcely any furniture but was quite dry. He’d made a mental note to return there when he needed to. One evening, on a whim, he decided to take the chance. It had been after an argument with Lucas, or something painful like that; he found the hut and spent the night. The fear nearly destroyed him, but he left the next morning feeling somewhat cleansed by the ordeal. He spent three more nights there during the very difficult period of examinations and final assignments; then it became a writing retreat. Nobody, as far as he could tell, knew about the hut, nobody except one of his hallmates. He thought he needed to let at least one person know, so that if he died there, the body would not be left to rot to nothing.

The last time he’d been there was when the wedding to Delores was in its first incarnation. Two weeks before the event, he’d panicked. He was also working on several postgraduate assignments. At home he grew silent. He could feel heaviness and gloom consuming him. It was not long before he knew he was going to go into the hills to wait out the wedding. He watched friends and relatives planning everything. The old man asked him what was wrong. He did not answer. The old man said laughingly, “You’re going to bolt, aren’t you?” Ferron laughed, and the two just sat there laughing, and nothing else was said.

He’d bolted the next night. It was that escape to the Jack’s Hill hideaway that now most occupied his thoughts . . .

* * *

When his sister and Delores eventually found the hut and tried to bring him home, he’d been there for several days. There were clothes strewn all over the bed and sweat-stained socks stank in a pile behind the door. Books and letters were scattered where he had left them after a frantic search for a lost chapter of his thesis. This document supposedly contained the secret to the completion of the project he was working on. He’d found it, but was wrong. The writing was weak and the only relevant aspect of the paper was a sentence that was in itself a naive misinterpretation. He stopped working on the assignment. He’d brought several packs of beer with him and stayed indoors drinking. After the beer he went hungry; he had no more money.

He’d spent hours standing at the window looking out into the woodlot. The earth was parched. Whatever grass survived the onslaught of the tractor tires was withered. Huge tire marks crisscrossed through the dried mud. The trees started uncertainly a few chains away from the building. There were stumps and felled trunks tangled among the hardy bramble. Gradually the forest assumed a sturdier character. Beyond that was darkness.

He’d seen the sky purple gently above the treeline, heard the faint sound of traffic on the highway about a mile away. It would get dark soon. Acid burned in his stomach. He’d felt hungry and worried, certain he had an ulcer, but the pink antacid fluid had dried up in the bottle that lay on its side on the floor. He couldn’t afford another bottle. Probably couldn’t even make it out to the highway . . .

* * *

The food was finished but that hadn’t worried him. Hunger would draw something out of him. It produced a mediocre poem about writing. The creative secretions stopped.

He went to bed early and did not sleep until it got light. No clear moment of structured thought came to him during the night. In the afternoon, when he could think clearly, he could not recall his thoughts of the night before. He burned the poem and placed another sheet of paper in the machine.

His eyes began to ache again. He rubbed them and winced at the pain. They felt heavy and watery. A grating irritation, like a tiny grain of gravel under the eyelid, cut into one eyeball. He held the eye open until it dripped tears. He hoped that would wash out the particle. When he let the lid fall, the pain was still there. He dragged the lamp with its naked bulb into the bathroom. He stared into the mirror, the light blazing under his chin. The image was grotesque. There were sunken holes on his eye sockets, his cheeks, and under his lip. He pulled open the damaged eye again, raised the lamp to the side, and winced as the glare pierced into his cornea. It was bloodshot, but there was no foreign particle in the eye. He blinked and blinked again. The eye still hurt. He put down the lamp and doused both eyes with water. His nose was flowing. The irritation got worse. He thought of rubbing the eye until the pain became so unbearable the eye would grow numb. He resisted the urge.

* * *

He must have fallen asleep because he did not hear the car drive up, nor for a time hear the two women whispering outside the door. He heard the knocking and the calling. He didn’t move. Nobody was supposed to know where he was. They continued to call. The knocking stopped. There was a long period of silence. Perhaps they feared that he was ignoring them in anger. Then it must have struck them that perhaps he was dying inside the room, so the knocking became more insistent. He did not move. He wanted them to go away.

He could hear them walking around the house. Clarice did most of the talking. She kept calling his name and then she started to shout. She was silent for a few seconds, then she sent Delores to check the back for a door. Delores said she could find no entry. Perhaps he wasn’t there and Harry was wrong. Was there another cottage nearby? Delores thought it better that they left. Clarice wouldn’t leave. She said he could be dying inside and in need of help. Delores didn’t say anything. Clarice began to knock on the door again. She kept calling his name.

He stayed still. His eyes were open now. He thought about what he must look like. His shorts were filthy but he had already worn the red ones so much that it became painful to put them on. He had grown used to the smell of his body. He made sure to keep a clean shirt and trousers in his bag for his return trip to town. He’d have to hitchhike home so it was important that he at least looked decent. His hair and beard hadn’t been combed for days. The knots were tight and hard. He didn’t want them to see him like that.

Clarice had started to push against the door. He thought of getting up to open it, but his body did not respond. He just lay there smiling and wondering whether she would manage to break it down. Clarice was a determined woman. Delores’s attempts at discouraging her were futile. Delores said that perhaps somebody else lived there and it could be very dangerous if they came home and found two women trying to break in. Clarice told her to either shut up and help or just go and sit in the car. Delores shut up and helped.

The door was rotten so after a few blows it cracked and Clarice got her hand through to unlock it. The room was filled with glaring white light. They had parked the car directly in front of the door and the headlights were on. He turned his head and squinted into the glare. Clarice stood with her legs slightly apart, silhouetted by the light. She was wearing a light skirt and her legs were outlined through the fabric. She whispered his name with caution. He kept staring. His eyes dripped. Delores leaned against the door looking away from the bed. He watched her. Clarice walked into the room and moved toward the bed. When she was very close, he moved. She stopped and called his name again.

He sat up on the bed and propped his chin in his hands, his elbows pressed into his thighs.

“You alright? You alright?” Clarice peered into his face. “Your eyes are red.” He closed his eyes. “This place is a mess, man. Where is the window? Delores, don’t just stand there, open the windows, eh?” Delores moved quickly to the window in the bathroom. She did not look at him. She stayed in the bathroom.

“I can’t believe you wouldn’ tell anybody where you were. What is wrong with you? Mama is very worried about you.” Clarice was moving around the room trying to create some semblance of order. After a while she gave up. “Hey? Hey? Talk to me. Are you alright?”

He stared into a corner of the room. He wanted them to leave. He began to smell the room properly now. The waft of air from the open window and the cracked door stirred up the latent musk. He chuckled to himself.

Clarice said: “Delores wants to talk to you. Now hear, she didn’t want to come so don’t get upset and start bawling her down, but I think this is pure foolishness so you better talk to her. I mean, you must be gone mad, man. She deserve better. It’s alright if you want to vex and confuse everybody else, but this woman hasn’t done anything to be made a fool of like that . . .”

“Clarice, please . . .” Delores said from the bathroom.

“You see? She is afraid of you. Anyway, right is right. Please. Explain yourself, sir.” Clarice stood in front of him. He stared at her feet. “My God. You haven’t even combed your hair!” She placed her hand on his head and raised it so he had to stare at her face. She had on makeup: pink lipstick—he hated that; she must have come straight from work. “You look bad, sah. Delores, come out of there. Come. Talk to him.”

He got up and stretched. Clarice stepped back. He got down on his knees and reached under the bed for his sneakers. He sat on the bed and slapped them on the floorboards. Then he pulled them on. He ignored the laces.

“You can’t just change your mind about a wedding, okay? There are other people involved, not to mention Delores. You can’t be so selfish, man. People will start calling you a madman.”

He got up and moved to the bathroom. Delores moved away from him as if he was a madman. She sensed something disquieting about his silence. She was afraid. He turned on the tap and splashed his face.

“Look, you better say something. The cake is still there, the food is spoiled, but we can work that out. Delores’s parents will sue if this thing doesn’t happen . . .”

“They won’t . . .” Delores’s voice trembled.

He turned to her and felt a deep pity. He could only see a shadow for her face but he could feel her fear and despair. She looked so small and vulnerable.

“They will,” Clarice said with emphasis. “Now, you better get your act together . . .” She stopped as he walked past her toward the door.

He turned around and looked at them, smiled slightly, shook his head, and then continued. Stuffing his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts, he trotted down the stairs. He stooped for a few seconds to regain his balance, then his shadow cut through the light and vanished into the dark.

“Come, Delores. He wants to go home now,” Clarice said. But when they did not hear the car door open they looked out and saw him walking toward the edge of the woodlot. Clarice shouted his name. He did not turn around. He continued walking steadily until the forest swallowed him.

He felt the wetness of the thicker grass in the bush. He could hear the two women talking to each other. He watched as Clarice ran to the car and started it up. Delores stayed at the door. Clarice maneuvered the car toward the spot where he’d disappeared. He stood behind a tree as the lights glowed through the bushes. She moved slowly, the car rocking on the tractor-tire marks. When the lights were off him, he moved farther away, though still at the edge of the bushes. She blew the horn and shouted his name. She did this for about ten minutes and then she stopped the car. The air of the lot was cut through by the din of crickets and frogs. After another five minutes, Clarice moved the car back to the shack. Delores stepped down to the ground and walked toward the car. Clarice stepped out and they stood beside each other staring directly at him in the forest. They remained in silence for another few minutes until it became clear that nothing would happen.

“Let’s go,” Delores said. “Let’s go.”

The car bumped through the woodlot toward the dirt road that led out to the brightly lit highway. He stepped out of the bushes and stood staring at the car. One of them must have seen him, because the car stopped. He stayed still. He saw Clarice’s shadow emerge from the car. Slowly, Delores’s shape emerged as well. He did not move.

“I thought you said you saw him. You see him?” Clarice asked.

“It was nothing. Just a shadow,” Delores said, moving back to the car. “He’s gone.”

He watched the taillights bump along the lot until they turned onto the paved road, and then all light was gone. He stood in the darkness listening to his heart pulsing. There was something complete about this whole thing. He knew that it would not be long before he walked out of this place, went back into the world. Delores understood what it all meant. In a peculiar way, he was sure she’d been expecting it to happen. He walked slowly back to the hut, his head bent down . . .

* * *

Back in town, to life, no one spoke to him—not really. The jilting of Delores was like a death best left ignored. He did not see her for almost a week, and then they met for lunch, and soon they were an item again. This time marriage was not mentioned. He had tried to explain to her what had happened several weeks later.

“I needed to escape, to get away . . . It was all coming down.” He spoke slowly.

“You needed space . . .” she said sarcastically.

It had been the gradual movement back into the mundane of a relationship without direction that assured Ferron that there was no future with Delores. They would get married, have children, but he was sure they would be divorced. The apparent reason would be his unfaithfulness, but the real reason would be sheer disinterest. He had known this for sure.

But then the rape had injected something emotional into the relationship. At least she expressed real anger. That she blamed him was clear. That she felt it was unfair to blame him was clear. But that she still, despite that, blamed him and felt great anger toward him was even clearer. It was hard for him to ask her what she’d wanted him to do, whether she’d wanted him to fight, get shot, even die for her, whether that is what she expected. It was hard for him to tell her that he, too, had been so scared, so petrified by everything, that the night had left with nightmares. He could not tell her that because in many ways, he did blame himself. His sense of relief at being alive after it was all over was something that filled him with guilt and left him incapable of even fighting with her. But the worst truth was something she never actually said, but that they both knew to be true. Before the rape, all affection had dried up between them. Now, after the rape, the absence of affection had to be filled with some other emotion because they were connected by this trauma. What he felt was resentment, even anger, at the idea of having to feel something, having to think of themselves as two people who needed to support each other. He felt her withdrawing from him, and he did not mind her doing that. He disliked himself for feeling incapable of giving her the affection and care she needed. He felt overwhelmed by deep anxiety about being near her, about being in this mess with her. Everything about that night was a massive weight, a very inconvenient mess. He recognized that what she had experienced was far worse than anything he could have felt, but managed to push that farther back in his mind. The more she grew cold with him, the more she seemed to blame him for what had happened, the more he felt himself pulling away emotionally. After a few weeks they started counseling with Dr. Davis, a bearded ex-Catholic priest who seemed to have no clear agenda for their sessions. It became clear that they were covering their anger and resentment with something that looked like boredom and disinterest. After a testy session which revealed that they were no longer being physical with each other, Dr. Davis had suggested that perhaps they needed to remind themselves why they were together in the first place. If the bed was a “site” of contention, and if, “as was understandable,” it brought back unpleasant feelings that had to do with the rape, then they should start meeting in public places. So, for a month or more they’d been meeting in public places, trying to “regain some balance.” The meetings were flat and dull unless they quarreled. Even then their fights were not loud, but filled with snide remarks, sarcasm, heavy silences, and very short sentences. The meetings continued largely because neither was willing to be the one to admit that their relationship had been purely physical. His father’s death had provided a good excuse for avoiding the last two meetings, and now, with the visit to the clinic, he was going to add another excuse. He was not going to tell her he would not be able to make it. He would just not show up, would call her later and tell her why.

Now, even though he knew that if he bolted again everyone—everyone, including his sister and his mother—would see him as a predictably weak person, a selfish person, the worst thing that could have come into Delores’s life, he still wanted to run. He needed to run. And he might have taken off to the shack had he not known that they would come to find him there and, more importantly, had he not felt so sick in the stomach. To go up there with the plans for the funeral still not put together and his sickness at such an intense level would have been too much even for him. The pain in his stomach had gotten progressively worse. He could feel the churn of acids by midday. The best he could manage was escape into Kingston proper. He would avoid places where he might run into friends and family. He would head downtown to the Institute’s library or to one of the downtown high schools to watch a football match or something. Each day he would plan something. Now, with the sickness, his plan was to go to the clinic on Maxfield Avenue, a rough area on the edge of downtown where his mother had taken him as a child, but where he did not have to go since he could have seen doctors at the university. But down on Maxfield Avenue, he would be away from everybody for at least half the day.