Arthur takes her rain slicker from a peg. He’ll be a gentleman, hold it for her. She turns, pinches his bearded cheek. He steps back, startled.
“You know what-someone told me you were a vicious son of a bitch in court. But you don’t seem so bad. I like you, you’re cute.”
Arthur is all business. “I’ll need your statement in writing.” He puts his shoulder to the door to open it. He can still feel that light pinch. Somehow it aroused him, a little sample of pain to tempt him, she reads him rightly as a masochist. “Do you have a flashlight?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t want to see anybody. Can’t have people thinking you invited me over and we rode out the storm in the dark.” She smiles, seductive in the yellow lamplight. Suddenly, she is pressed to him, and he is momentarily overcome by patchouli and hot breath and buoyant breasts pooling against his ribs.
He backs up, and she stays in step with him, like a dancing partner. She stabs her tongue into his ear, an electrifying sensation, then whispers, “How do you want me to pay for the advice?”
“No charge.” A strangled sound, it barely escapes.
“Thanks, counsellor.” Her hand goes between his legs, hefting the baggage there, her fingers tracing along the stiffening spine of his penis.
Then she is gone.
At 3 a.m. he is still awake, tossing and farting. He has given a wide berth to the murder bed, is on a foam mattress in the loft. Outside his small window, the wind groans in the trees, and a swollen sea lashes the beach. He ought to test the door again, to ensure the lock clicked shut.
The byplay with Hoover, the exchange of advice for a crotch caress, keeps returning like a dirty joke. Did you hear the one about the hooker and the lawyer? A subtle joke, because who knows who’s screwing whom? Arthur feels used by her, but isn’t sure why. Had he somehow invited that intimate au revoir?
That he had fantasies involving her is disgusting. A young prostitute…Her lick and fondle, her offer of more, her warning about nasty rumours: a shot across the bows? A threat to embarrass him in court if his questions are too probing?
“‘More is meant than meets the ear.’ Who said that? Milton?”
This vocalizing to the void has got to stop, it’s a habit from the garden, talking to his beets. He tries not to think of the farm (he shouldn’t have allowed Stoney loose with the backhoe), it only keeps him awake. But two cups of instant coffee are doing that anyway.
The kids must still be arriving. He closes his eyes and counts goats, but the image of them springing over a broken fence makes him more fretful. His thoughts finally find their bumpy way to Margaret. He is in dire need of her comfort, her confidence, her ability to keep her amateur farmer husband from tripping over his feet. He must devise a face-saving plan to bring her down from that tree.
He backs up, that’s wrong. He must think in new ways if he’s to grapple with the ineffable inexplicableness of the female psyche. Margaret wants no face-saving plan. She wants to be rescued. You’re going to perform like Cyrano or else.
The storm abates for a while, and there is an eerie silence but for the murmur of trees shedding rain, then the winds start anew. He finally surrenders to sleep and agitating dreams of looking on while Margaret hugs a fleshy, muscular tree.
15
After his fitful sleep, Arthur is anxious to put a gruesome night behind him, and, as Syd’s Beaver coasts into Blunder Bay, he entertains thoughts of a nap. But he is suddenly wary because Stoney is waiting at the dock, effusive in welcome, eager to be the porter of Arthur’s bag.
As if trying to shield Arthur’s view, Stoney walks backwards in front of him. “While you were gone, I must’ve put in fifty hours, I wanted to surprise you. Struck a spring, it looks like, it’s filling fast. We weren’t expecting that rainstorm last night, she kind of caved in on the sides, but not a problem.”
When Stoney steps aside, Arthur sees a berm has been cast up beside the pond, a clay mound on which Lotis Rudnicki and Shiftless and Underfoot and two geese are standing, watching events unfold. Nearby, Dog is hitching a chain to the backhoe, which is running, but with a slight cough.
“Had to make an emergency run for diesel yesterday, missed the gas station by five minutes. I would of siphoned the Toyota, but the tank was locked, and I couldn’t find where you hid the key.” An accusatory tone. “Anyway, when I got back, I parked the old girl by the edge there. Must have slipped out of gear overnight, and started rolling. It was one of them chance events you can’t predict.”
Arthur manoeuvres past him to the pond, where he observes the cab of his Fargo, or that part of it that shows above the water.
“We’ll have her flushed out, carb cleaned, the fuel lines, everything, and she’ll be ready to roll when the roosters crow.”
Arthur watches in an exhausted daze as Dog uncoils the chain and wades into the water fully clothed. While fastening the chain to the undercarriage, Dog slips, submerges. Finally, to Lotis’s applause, he rises. He waves to Stoney, who climbs aboard his backhoe and puts it in gear. Predictably, it utters a final cough and dies.
Stoney taps at the fuel dial for several moments, as if that might correct the problem. “There’s always something, eh, Arthur? Maybe I can use the tractor to pull it out?”
Arthur shakes his head. His little tractor would end up joining the Fargo.
“Okay if I borrow the Toyota then? I’ll be back in five minutes with some diesel.”
Margaret’s truck is clean, undented, he’d bought it last year for her birthday. But Arthur is too enervated to resist, and he yields up the keys.
He stares at the submerged truck for a while, a meditative time disturbed only by the chattering of Dog’s teeth. Lotis sends him in to warm up. “You’re still my hero,” she calls after him.
In the Woofer kitchen, Arthur hovers over Kim Lee as she slices a warm whole-wheat loaf. “Lotis make.” Lotis, the baker, wonders never cease. Kim rewards him with the crust for his sad-faced pantomime of hunger.
Retrieving peanut butter from the fridge, he glances down the hall at Lotis leaving the bathroom, topless, pulling up her jeans, hurrying to answer the phone. He averts his eyes from this casually immodest performance.
“Yeah, we’re packing a lunch for them. I’ll get a ride with Arthur. Ciao.” She strolls into the kitchen tugging down a new T-shirt: I’m a Friend of Gwendolyn. “We’ve ordered three hundred.” She hands him one. “Thirty bucks. Who was Gwendolyn, anyway?”
“A corruption of a Salishan name-G’win d’lin, a maiden of the forest who joined her lover in the Salish sea, and who lives there now, and whose long hair can be seen drifting like kelp with the tides.”
This causes Lotis an odd moment. She seems speechless. There’s a shine to her wide oval eyes as she says, “That is fucking beautiful.” She turns spirited, theatrical. “I want Gwendolyn’s role. For every tragedy, there must be a balcony scene. ‘O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb.’ East Pasadena Rep, I was fifteen, it ran two weeks.”
A creditable Juliet. “‘How silver-sweet sound lovers’tongues by night.’”
“I’m beyond impressed.”
He’s too modest to boast about his heralded performance with the Garibaldi Players: Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night.
Lotis hands him a thick file: Dr. Winter’s entire output of published columns, three years’worth, magically secured from the vast tangle of information that floats about in the World Wide Web.
He idly leafs through them as he relates his adventures in Bamfield, capped off by Holly Hoover’s nocturnal visit. “She made a rather bold sexual advance before she left. Awkward. For me, at least.”
She wrenches the details from him, how Hoover offered sex as payment for advice.