The maple tree is so quiet, yet it is passionately changing. Part of it is dying. The pretty part. Its sadness will soon be exposed, its true age and wisdom, casting up its gnarly prayers. That is the beautiful part.
“This is Rock Bass,” says Colleen, and skids straight down the ravine to the stream below. Rex follows. So does Madeleine. There are stepping stones but they wade across.
There’s a flat rock under the maple and, nearby, the remains of a campfire. Colleen takes an Eight O’clock Coffee can from her clothespin bag, removes a wax-paper lid and lifts out a fat worm. She hooks it onto the end of her line, it curls in spasm, she casts into the stream, then stands on the flat stone and waits.
Madeleine squats on the ground and waits too, hugging her knees. She reaches for a charred stick and writes her name on the stone. Her name looks like her face and she wishes it looked fiercer. The vowels look as though they could be stolen and carried away wide-eyed, and there are too many syllables — each one a weak point of connection, separable like a joint. She wishes she had one syllable, compact, inviolable. Like Mike.
She says to Colleen’s back, “How come you didn’t pound me that day?”
Colleen keeps her eyes on the stream. “You’re not worth it.”
Madeleine rubs the palms of her hands with soot from the stick. “Why not?”
“’Cause I’m not going back, that’s why.” Colleen flicks her line back over her shoulder and recasts.
“Back where?”
“None of your goddamn business.” She sounds calm. Content.
Madeleine wipes her hands together as though the soot were soap, then smells them. They smell like a campfire now. Clean. “Why would your parents send you back?”
“Not my parents.” Colleen glances down at her and Madeleine is reminded that she is afraid of this girl.
She revises her question. “Why would you get sent back?”
“For violence.”
Violence. The word looks like a slash of red and black. Madeleine can see the muscles in Colleen’s calves, dusty and lean — still brown, although summer is long gone. They contract as she shifts forward. She’s got a bite. She pulls in a small fish. It whips about, grey and yellow at the end of her line, staring. She unhooks it and tosses it back. “You ever hear of Children’s Aid?”
“No.”
“You’re lucky.”
The sun comes out from under the grey coverlet of this rainy afternoon just in time to begin its descent into evening. Madeleine has no idea what time it is. The airfield comes into view on their left and she feels as though she is waking from a dream. That’s when she realizes that she has lost her shoes.
“Where were you going, anyhow?” asks Colleen.
“Nowhere.”
“If you say so.”
Madeleine says, “I was running away.”
“I done that.”
“Yeah?”
“Lotsa times.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Once to Calgary,” says Colleen. “We stoled a horse. Me and my brother.”
“Ricky?”
“Who else?”
“You ran away all the way to Calgary from Centralia on a horse?”
“Not from here. From a place in Alberta.”
“What place?”
“None of your goddamn business.”
They walk. “I was born in Alberta,” says Madeleine. Colleen is silent. Madeleine asks, “Where were you born?”
She doesn’t expect an answer so she is surprised when, after a moment, Colleen says, “In a car.”
“On the way to the hospital?”
“No. It was around the border somewhere. Either in Montana or Alberta.”
Madeleine pictures Mr. Froelich pulling over to the side of a lost highway, trying to boil water over a campfire while Mrs. Froelich has a baby in the back seat. She puts her hand out and feels Rex’s wet nose nudge her. “What’s Children’s Aid?”
Colleen spits neatly from the side of her mouth. “They come and put you in a training school if they think you’re bad enough.”
“Oh. What’s a training school?”
Colleen shrugs. “It’s a jail for kids.”
Up ahead, the PMQs look as tame as animals in a corral. The Spitfire looks friendly once more and the white buildings of the base as cordial as a collection of barbershops. But a feeling is growing in the pit of Madeleine’s stomach. Apprehension. “Are you going to get in trouble?”
“What for?” says Colleen.
Madeleine doesn’t have in mind the smoking or the swearing, because presumably Colleen does neither in front of her parents. But skipping school can’t be concealed. How else could Colleen have already been hanging out at the willow tree with her play clothes on? “You played hooky.”
“So? It’s my life.”
Madeleine glances at her profile — serious mouth, narrowed blue eye trained on the horizon — and wonders if this means she and Colleen Froelich are friends now.
“Boy, are you ever gonna get it!”
It’s Mike, standing on his pedals, pumping furiously toward her up Columbia Drive. “Maman is going to kill you!”—slamming on his brakes, coming to a showy side-stop. “Where the Sam heck have you been?”
“Have a hairy fit, why don’t you?”
Mike shakes his head, looks at the state of her. “Va-t’en dans la maison, toi.”
Roy Noonan and Philip Pinder’s tough older brother, Arnold, ride up from opposite directions. “I got her,” Mike tells them.
“Where’d you find her, Mike?” asks Arnold, as though she were a lost cat.
“I wasn’t lost!” yells Madeleine.
“Oh yeah?” says Mike. “Where were you, then, making mud-pies with the girls?” The boys stare at her. Roy offers to ride her home double — her house is only a stone’s throw away, is he off his rocker?
Mike says, “Thanks, you guys, I’ll take it from here.”
“Welcome,” they grunt, and ride off.
Madeleine turns to gauge Colleen’s scorn at her humiliation, but Colleen is gone.
“Is Dad home yet?” Madeleine asks, as she trails after him up the driveway toward her execution.
“You better hope not,” says her brother, leaning his bike against the house, taking her elbow as though she were his prisoner. She yanks free and pulls open the screen door.
Her mother comes out of the kitchen and stands at the top of the three inside steps; she is on the phone. “Never mind, Sharon, here she is.” She hangs up. “Dieu merci.” Her eyes are red. She reaches down for Madeleine.
At the touch, her relief turns to anger, she hauls Madeleine up the steps and spanks her bottom through the living room, toward the stairs. As they pass the kitchen, Madeleine sees Mike at the fridge calmly pouring himself a glass of milk. “She was with Colleen Froelich,” he says. “Elle a perdu ses souliers, maman.”
The French comes so fast that Madeleine can’t understand a word, although it’s not difficult to imagine what her mother is saying — she has called half the PMQs, she just got off the phone with Mrs. McCarroll, where are your shoes?! And in English: “You’re not to play with the Froelich girl, do you hear me?”
She shoves her through the door of her bedroom and slams it shut. “Bouges pas! Attends ton père!”
Madeleine sits on the edge of her bed. The early evening light warms the flowered spread and her frilly pillowcase. Her giant pixie dolls with their cracked faces stare merrily — Christmas gifts from Tante Yvonne. She shoves them to the floor and reaches for Bugs, pats him and rearranges his ears, folding them back so he can relax. “That’s a good Bugsy.” She looks down at her muddy bare feet, her streaked dress, blackened hands. Discovers speckles of mud on her face. Waits in the unnatural bright silence of her closed bedroom. She lies down. Her feet are cold although it’s warm out. Bugs nestles against her shoulder.