Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Gray took Laura places. Unlike anyone else she had ever dated in her nineteen years in this world, he did not take her to hang out at the lake with his friends, or wait while he polished his dirt-coloured Gremlin, or watch while he swept the loading dock at the back of the IGA until his shift was finished. He took her to Dallas’ tavern one Sunday night when prime rib was being served — Dallas always used instant mashed potatoes, her mother sniffed, you could tell — but never mind. It was a meal in a restaurant. He took her to the drive-in in Lister and bought popcorn in a flimsy candy cane-striped box that they shared until there was nothing left but grease stains and salty unpopped kernels. He took her to the spring fair parade, the Legion marching band and the school kids all dolled up like peacocks. It wound up at the ballpark outside the arena, with lemonade and homemade ice cream. Laura’s straw hat blew off and into an adjacent field, but Gray climbed the fence, picked it out of the stiff fallow grass, brushed it off, and handed it back. The straw smelled of orange where he had touched it.

   He was gallant, handsome — and thirty-one. “Graydon Wells? I went to school with his brother, for the love of Jesus.” Her mother slammed a tin pie plate down on the counter. A cloud of flour rose. “You can’t see him.” But her father said she was old enough to make her own mistakes now, and there was not much her mother could do to stop her, which they all knew was true.

   So when, on a warm Indian summer day, Gray suggested they head for his sister’s cabin on Porcupine Lake, Laura said what she normally did whenever he made a suggestion.

   “Makes no matter to me.”

   Once — when he wanted to drive to Port Barreau where a carnival was set up in the plaza parking lot for the long weekend, but she wanted to see the movie — Laura did say something.

   “But this is the last night for the movie. Rides make me sick.”

   “Sick?” His laugh had an edge that took her off guard, and she was like a skater on a pond who trips over an unexpected frozen bit of cattail. “You’re the first girl ever said that to me.” He shifted the car like he was chopping wood, and they careened down the road — to the drive-in. He ate the popcorn like he was a feral creature, then kissed her roughly. “Gray —” Laura pushed him away when he forced his mouth onto her neck, his shaved jaw coarse against her cheek. His elbow hit the horn, which cut through the sky like a dull blade, and he backed off. She decided that night getting her own way was not always in her best interests. Anyway, whatever they did, wherever they went, she mostly had fun. And so it came to be that, indeed, it did not matter what they did.

   The lake was easily an hour away, over a straight, even highway. The tires hummed along the surface, and when they finally turned onto the dirt concession line that led to the lake, Gray rolled down his window.

   “Just smell that air,” he said, and draped an arm across the back of the seat. He ran a fingertip along the nape of her neck. She shivered, and shifted. Gravel, thrown up by the wheels, popped and crackled when it struck the underside of the car. She felt a rock on the other side of the floorboard thud against her foot.

   Laura struggled to convey agreement. “Lovely day for a drive,” she finally said, then felt inadequate when he said nothing. The years yawned between them — what was it that a thirty-one-year-old man was interested in talking about anyway? — and she swore to herself, once again, that she would try harder to figure it out before their next date. More than anything in her life right now, she feared losing him. The question of her own ability to interest him hovered over their every meeting, and she could not stop the nagging fear that one day, in a week or ten days or a month, he was going to just drop her for someone more mature and less awkward at conversation.

   The cabin was rustic, thick logs chinked together with moss, in an L-shape, surrounded by scrappy red pines. The rocky ground, thick with fallen needles and seed cones, sloped down to the lake, which was still and beautiful. A few yards out into the water, a homemade raft, ringed by shards of rubber tire, was anchored. No other cars were in sight.

   “Where’s your sister?”

   “Did you come here to see my sister — or me?” Gray laughed.

   Despite her unease, Laura joined in, not wanting Gray to be hurt by the notion she found his company lacking, and conscious, once more, that she had to try harder to talk with him, joke with him, to reach his level somehow. She couldn’t imagine he had planned this — it was a simple misunderstanding, being alone out here, that was all.

   Gray tried the front door. It rattled, but did not open. He walked around the cabin, checking the windows. All were locked.

   “Don’t you have a key?” Laura said.

   He said nothing, but began a search of the front porch, the window frames, the stones that lined the path to the entrance. The same finger that had run along her neck now poked into shadowy recesses, dark corners, until it emerged, a flash of brass in his palm, victorious.

   “Aha,” Gray said. It fit the lock.

   The cabin was dim and musty inside, faded cotton curtains closed, furniture covered with mismatched sheets and old vinyl tablecloths. Cobwebs, once spun with anticipation across doorways, hung empty except for dust. Laura stood before a shelf of framed photos, but did not recognize a single face among the women, men and children captured there — in swimsuits, lifejackets, noses peeling, eyes squinting, hair bleached white. She picked up one of the frames, a plump woman gripping a horseshoe, smiling like someone caught in the midst of a foolish act. She looked just slightly older than Gray.

   “Which one is she?”

   “Huh?” Gray was going through the cabinets in the kitchen. He grunted when he found what he was looking for — a half-empty bottle of whiskey — and looked briefly at the photo in Laura’s hands. “Yup, that’s her.”

   “I don’t see the resemblance,” Laura said.

   “The Wells’ are a sundry and assorted bunch. Tilda takes more after my father’s side.”

   He handed her a tumbler and pulled her down beside him on a divan. “Here’s looking at you, kid,” Gray said. He tilted his cup toward her, then took a long draught. Laura was disturbed by his use of the word kid — couldn’t decide if he meant it, if he was trying to please her, knowing her fondness for Bogart, or perhaps a bit of both.

   “Drink up now. My elder sister would be offended that a guest not accept her hospitality.”

   Laura put the tumbler to her lips. The sharp smell stopped her. She had never drunk whiskey before.

   “Isn’t it good enough for your refined tastes?”

   “It’s not like that,” she protested, then to show him how wrong he was about her attitude, her background, her willingness, she gulped. She resisted the urge to choke and cough, until she was red in the face and tears welled up in her eyes.

   “You’re a good sport,” Gray laughed. “That’s why I like you.” He finished his whiskey, and went to the kitchen to get more.

   He topped up her cup once, twice, she’s no longer sure how many times, only sure it wouldn’t have taken much to make her as dizzy and nauseous as she was that day when Gray pushed her down on the divan. The room spun.

   “Gray, no,” she said. There had been twelve — no, thirteen dates so far, and Laura was certain there would have to be at least another six or seven before she would agree to even broach the subject.

   “Come on, why not?”

   “I’m not ready.”

   Gray’s hand slid up her leg. “No? Well, I can do something about that,” he said, misunderstanding, deliberately she knew, her meaning.

   “That’s not what I mean. Please stop.”

   Though she tried to push it away, his hand continued until it cupped her groin, held it like a tumbler full of whiskey. His hand was hot. “You want it, I can tell.”

   Laura willed the room to stop revolving, willed her body to tighten, to shut him out. He was at least partially right: the whiskey had eroded away a rusty layer. She felt twisting bands of attraction and danger and recklessness beneath, wrapping around each other and squeezing. She willed them to stillness, too. “No. We have to wait.”

   He let go of her crotch. “You don’t love me then?” His eyes were narrow as kindling.

   “I do,” she said, startled. This was the first time either of them had mentioned love.

   “Well, I love you, too,” he said. “This is what a man and woman who love each other do. It’s natural.”

   Laura reeled from the whiskey, from the declaration, from his use of the word woman. She was unsure now. Suddenly, the cabin and everything in it seemed hostile as outer space, and the fusty smell consumed all the oxygen. “But not here,” she said. No, it couldn’t be, wouldn’t be here. She would do it with him — but not today, not here. She grasped hard onto this argument, brighter now, because surely Gray could feel it too, could feel the harm of making love in this forsaken place.

   “You’re right,” he said, and pulled her to her feet. She swayed and slipped into his arms. “Come on then.”

   She laughed then, delighted. How easy it was, how understanding he was, what a good man. And he pulled her, not toward the front door to go home as she expected, but through one of the cobwebbed doorframes, deeper into the cabin.

   “Where are we going?” she cried. She fell back, but he would not let go.

   Three steps across a sun porch, one through another doorway. Her resistance was measured in jerky dance steps meant for a different kind of song. Gray pushed Laura down onto a bed covered with orange canvas lifejackets that smelled of rancid suntan oil and dew worms. “I understand everything about you.” He held her wrists in one hand.

●

   On the way home, Gray held a second bottle of liquor, which he’d snatched on their way out the door, between his legs. He grasped its neck and took mouthful after mouthful. The car went faster with each swallow. He did not offer a drink from this bottle to Laura.

   They hurtled past farms with fields of cattle and horses, past the mouths of secondary roads that led into the lakes and rivers nestled in the land nearby, past reforested plots, the trees too evenly spaced to be real. She tried to count the rows of trees to keep from counting the drinks, to keep from feeling the ooze between her legs. To keep from looking his way and seeing reflected in his eyes who
she now was.

   When he finished drinking and they stopped at a deserted intersection, he tossed the bottle into the ditch. Laura, braced for the sound of shattered glass, heard only an empty thud.

   It was twilight when he stopped the car in front of her home, then slumped over the wheel.

   “Gray?” He said nothing. “Gray? What are you doing?” She shook him, but still no response. “For heaven’s sake, wake up.”

   He stirred. “I don’t feel so good,” he slurred and reached in her direction. “Laura? Where are you?”

   “Sober up. You’ve got to go home now.” Laura panicked. A picture of her mother or father at the front door in the morning, seeing Gray’s car still parked there, Gray passed out at the wheel, spun into, then out of her mind. “You hear me? You’ve got to go home.”

   “Laura, Laura. I can’t see.”

   “What do you mean?”

   “I can’t see.”

   “You’re drunk.”

   He groaned, something from the gut, from a scraped throat, a bloodied tongue, a sound she had never heard before, never imagined possible.

   “Gray. You have to go home.”

   Rumbling in the background like a movie soundtrack, she heard her mother’s voice. Superior, knowing, she was right about that Wells boy. No. It would be worse. Silence. But a look, a telling look, the way she would lay the table for breakfast tomorrow, everything so crisp and certain, as if to say, yes, you are old enough to make your own mistakes now, and look what a magnificent blunder you chose for your first time out.

   She could not ask her parents for help. There was only one thing left to do.

●

   It was a day of firsts for Laura. She walked home that night, having managed somehow to have driven Gray’s car to the front of the house where he still lived with his parents, and left him there, slumped in the passenger seat. She washed. And washed. And even though her body ached for rest, and it was well past midnight, she washed again. She took four aspirin. Her sleep, finally, was dense and cold as cured concrete.

   The police smiled the next morning, and were surprisingly kind to Laura at first. They didn’t press her — much — on what they were doing at the cabin all afternoon. Nor did she say. It was obvious. As it was obvious that she hadn’t given Gray the anti-freeze, hadn’t made him drink it, for it was common practice for cabin-owners to keep gas line anti-freeze around for motorboat engines, snowmobiles, frozen locks and such.

   “We tell them every year — store it in the original container — lord knows why they don’t listen,” one officer said to Laura’s father.

   She told them how Gray threw the bottle out the window. They questioned her about the exact location of the intersection.

   The police also hadn’t realized the cabin was Gray’s sister’s — in the confusion, the detail must have slipped past unnoticed. They thanked her for the added information.

   But then they asked why she hadn’t sought help: her parents, his parents, even the hospital. His sight might have been saved, they said, if there had been more time.

   “I don’t know.” Then Laura started to cry, unable to explain, to understand herself the layers of barriers that made her walk away from her boyfriend’s poisoned body. She could barely suppress the outraged voice inside that said: he got what he deserved.

   “Kids,” the same officer said to her father.

   “She’s not a kid anymore,” said her mother.

   When Gray was finally released from the hospital, Laura called.

   “He don’t want to speak to you, honey,” his mother said. “Sorry.”

   She tried again, because she didn’t believe it could be true. The response was the same. Then she went to the Wells’ house, once, twice. Though Gray had never taken her home, they now knew who she was and did not answer the door. Finally, when she heard he’d been admitted to a hospital for the blind in the city, she gave up. Police called the whole episode tragic, a tough lesson for all parties involved, and laid no charges. Nevertheless, Laura was on trial: the way people stared, then looked away, the way she was served quickly at the Chinese take-out, the pharmacy, the doughnut shop, the silences that were broken when her body was barely out the door, broken in whispers and murmurs. She knew what they were saying: that he would still be able to see if she hadn’t made such a gross mistake. Or worse: that she is the tramp who led him astray, the Delilah who destroyed one of the town’s future bright lights, knocked him down in his prime.

   Laura understood the verdict. She counted the days, and when her menstruation began, she accepted their sentence and left town.

●

   Laura knows her show is as unreal as a soap opera, but keeps hoping that some germ of truth is getting out there. When she reads the letters from the audience  — . . . another example of why this country needs the death penalty . . . — . . . that’s God’s way of controlling the population and weeding out the perverts . . . — . . . that green blouse makes you look like a hooker . . . —  she understands her hope is futile. The network hires someone to deal with the mail, and she gets more time to work on her stories.

   The tornado rushed through farmland next to the town where she grew up. A 150-year-old farmhouse was knocked down. A car was lifted off the concession road and landed on a tree. Someone reported a lost cow turning up nearly two miles away, grazing in a peaceful field in the wake of one of the worst storms ever to hit Ontario. It is all fodder for Laura’s show. Reluctant though she is to return to her place of exile, she does.

   It is the first time she has gone back. At first, her pain kept her away, then her spite, but finally, she stayed away because she could — her parents happily visited her in the city, her old friends were replaced by new, more cosmopolitan friends. Her exile no longer mattered.

   She insists they stop at her parents’ place on the way to the first interview. Once on the very fringes of the town, it is now surrounded by new subdivisions, has been swallowed into a plain of uniformity.

   Laura was notorious here before, but is even better known now, though thankfully, for different reasons. Her parents, while they would never admit it, are quietly proud of her fame and the important way her crew and their equipment orbit around her. Her father makes coffee and her mother offers cookies.

   “We can’t stay long,” Laura says, looking at her producer for something she cannot explain. Her producer just studies her clipboard.

   Her father nods. “We’ll catch up next weekend then. Sure great to see you back here for a change.” Her mother shows her how they have just converted her old bedroom upstairs into a sewing room. “I should have done it years ago.” A bolt of yellow cotton is folded on a table. A triangle of sun beams down on it. Laura is blinded by reflection.

   “Your first interview’s in ten minutes,” the producer calls from the foot of the stairs. And off they go to the farmland, leaving her parents radiant, framed in the front door, looking like a portrait.

   The matriarch of the family that lost its ancestral home cries soft, satisfying tears. There was no insurance. Laura knows the camera is on extreme close-up.

   Then they are in her cornfield. The swathe of destruction cut through the land is startling. The house is indeed a shadow of bricks lying on the ground. The barn has folded in upon itself like a collapsed cardboard box. There were trees here, Laura is sure, old, majestic maples and rows of poplars. The hopeful smell of fresh manure, lifted on a breeze, fights against the devastation, and loses. The producer, the cameraman, and Laura are moved to silence.

   “Are you getting this? Are you getting this?” the producer cries suddenly, breaking into their reverie. Laura has crumpled to the ground. She curls into a ball in the dirt and moans. The old woman looks on in disgust as Laura hijacks the injury that should belong to the farmers alone.

●

   Laura blames it on a bad night’s sleep, caffeine, stress — but the cameraman and producer treat her gingerly the rest of the day. Laura tries even harder than she usually does to maintain her professional calm. To radiate objectivity.

   Their last interview is at the township office with the deputy reeve. Laura is shocked to see Gray’s sister, Tilda. She looks down at the list of questions the producer has prepared, but there must be some mistake. The paper says her name is Catherine Tremblay.

   “Aren’t you Tilda Wells?” But the woman frowns and shakes her head. “I mean — didn’t you used to be Tilda Wells?”

   Catherine smiles now, politely, looks puzzled. “No.”

   “You used to live behind the Anglican church. Your brother, Gray — I used to — know him.”

   “I do have a brother. But his name’s Leonard.”

   “And he’s blind, right?”

   Catherine laughs. “God, I hope not. He’s a pilot. He lives out west.”

   Laura hesitates, looks to the producer who’s looking at the cameraman and shaking her head again. “The resemblance is amazing,” she says to herself, though loud enough so the others can hear, will understand she has not lost her mind.

   The interview is quick and easy. The list of losses is being compiled, and should be completed by week’s end. The township will appeal to the province for emergency funding. Laura thanks Catherine.

   As the gear is being packed up, Laura takes a good, hard look at Catherine Tremblay. Though it’s been nearly thirty years since she last saw it, she is certain this is the woman with the horseshoe in the photo at the cabin.

   “Didn’t you used to have a place up at Porcupine Lake?”

   “We did. It was lovely — an old log home — but we found it hard to keep when the kids grew up. Once it got to the point where we couldn’t even haul the raft out of the lake for the winter, we sold it.”

   Laura grips her notes all the way down the 400. When they enter the city, she asks the cameraman to drop her at home.

   “But we need you in the edit suite,” the producer says. “What’s going on?”

   Laura turns on all the lights and fills the tub in her apartment with scalding water. She doesn’t get out until it’s cooled to room temperature. The puckers on her toes and fingertips are deep and the skin sickly white. She throws the towel in the garbage instead of the laundry hamper, but does not stop to correct her error.

   That night, she sleeps naked, on top of the sheets. Her skin devours the cold. Her eyes remain open, like a dreaming baby, like a snake, like a somnambulist lost in a long hallway of trick mirrors and closed doors.