Beach Reading Page 4

  “R-r-r-really?” And he didn’t say another thing until we entered the kitchen when he blurted out, “We got a m-m-man on the inside!”

  “What? Who?” said Wallace, looking up. He was seated at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee from the jar that held the last of it, filled with hot tap water.

  “Him,” said Brucie, pointing at me. He had particular difficulty with the letter C and I think my name was hard for him to say.

  “Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are,” said Wallace, who on the other hand simply didn’t know my name.

  “He’s going to work at the p-park office.”

  “No shit.”

  “I start tomorrow.”

  “You sly bastard!” Wallace said with admiration. “You can be our spy!”

  And it seemed to me there could not be any complications arising as a result. Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are: The Spy With No Name.

  “And he knows about l-l-law, and r-r-rights and things.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “R-R-Rat-face stopped us, and he just s-s-snowed him under. You should have seen it.”

  “Really?” Wallace looked at me. “Well, tell me now. I’m pretty sure they can’t just kick us off our land, but where does it say they can’t.”

  “Who?”

  “The government. They want to kick us off our land.”

  “Exp-p-propriate us.”

  “I don’t know much about the law,” I said. “I just memorized the Canadian Bill of Rights is all.”

  “OK. In the Bill of Rights then, where does it say that they can’t kick us off our land?

  “I’m not really…”

  “C-come on, you told Rattray that he couldn’t move you. How’d it g-g-go? That bit about ‘no law of C-C-Canada…’

  I repeated the part of the Bill of Rights about detention, imprisonment or exile.

  “That’s it,” said Wallace. “Exile… They want to exile us!” He turned to me. “And you’re saying they can’t.”

  “Yeah. Well I guess not…But like I said, I’m not a lawyer…”

  “Exile! Just like they exiled the proud clan MacAkern before. And exiled Bonnie Prince Charlie.” Then he started to sing:

  “Speed Bonny Boat,

  like a bird on the wing,

  something the sea to Skye.

  Born to be something the something the king

  Why God oh why tell me why….”

  “That’s not how it goes,” said Robbie. We all turned to look. She was standing in the doorway to the parlour with a large mouldy reference book in her arms.

  “Well you sing it, then.”

  “I don’t sing.”

  “Well then?”

  “Just ‘cause you sing a song doesn’t give you the right to change the words.”

  “Oh?” said Wallace grandly, and with a sweeping arm gesture indicated me. “Talk to my lawyer about it”.

  “Well?” said Robbie.

  “There is the right to freedom of expression, I suppose,” I said.

  “There. See!” said Wallace.

  “OK. Maybe. But it doesn’t make you sound any smarter.”

  “What’s smart got to do with it?”

  “Nothing, in your case,” said Robbie. Wallace punched Robbie on the shoulder. “Ow, that hurt.”

  “It was meant to. The point is, they want to exile us. Like Bonny Prince Charlie was exiled.”

  “Yeah,” she snorted and sat down. “To France, where he lived high off the hog in the lap of luxury, thank you very much, while his own people were dying for his sake at home.”

  “A pack of lies!”

  “From some bog in Scotland, to a court in France? That’s not exile, that’s social climbing.”

  “G-g-good one,” said Brucie.

  “Watch it,” said Wallace to Robbie, “You are dangerously close to defaming the name and reputation of the rightful heir to the line of James.”

  “He was gay.”

  “He! Was! Not..!”

  Robbie waited with a raised eyebrow, and Wallace looked at Robbie, and backed out of a trap he sensed was being set for him. “Not that it matters, of course, and even if it did, which it doesn’t, so what? You some sort of a gay-bashin’ red neck arsehole?” A neatly turned accusation, I thought.

  “On the contrary,” said Robbie, as though from a prepared text, “I think homosexuality is both a natural part of the human heritage, and, as can be seen by the innumerable important advancements which can be traced to their involvement in the arts and sciences, that the gay community is, if anything, more creative than the majority of dough-head heterosexuals…”

  “There you are, then.”

  “…But for all that, it’s not a community which has ever been known to be good breeding stock.”

  “So?”

  “Pretty hard to preserve the line, then, wouldn’t you say?”

  “G-g-got ‘im again, Robbie.”

  “What about artificial insemination?” said Wallace.

  “Yes, that was very popular back then. But have it your way,” said Robbie. “If you prefer the image of Bonnie Prince Charlie lying in a bed with his makeup and manservant, and some big hairy bastard in a kilt sneaking up on him with a circa 1750 model artificial insemination syringe to jab into his testicle …well, fine, believe that then. Might explain why he did bugger off to France, with that waiting for him back home.”

  Wallace saw a chink in her argument. “But I am confused,” he said like an overly-polite barrister. “Why would they jab his nut with a needle?”

  “To extract the semen.”

  “There are methods which are simpler,” said Wallace. “And a tad more pleasurable, I should imagine.”

  Robbie’s eyes darted around quickly. She obviously didn’t know much about this topic. “What? You’re saying that they don’t use a needle in artificial insemination?”

  “They do not.”

  “Well then… I mean, how do you get the cow to…”

  “You don’t get the cow to do anything,” said Wallace. “You get a bull.” He was smiling and dominant now.

  “All right smartass. How do you get a bull to, you know…”

  “I know something you don’t know,” sing-songed Wallace.

  “Oh for God’s sake! How?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m not sure that you’re ready for it.”

  “Do not condescend to me.”

  “I’m not condescending to you. I’m patronising you.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “When you’re old enough to understand, I’ll tell you.”

  Robbie flung an arm around Wallace’s neck and hauled him back in a choke-hold so that the chair was leaning on its hind legs.

  “Ow! Stop it!”

  “How.Do.You.Get.A.Bull…”

  “OK OK OK I’ll tell you!”

  She let the chair rock back forward. “Now,” said Robbie. “How do you get a bull to, you know…”

  “Donate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Knock on his door and sell him some girl-guide cookies,” said Wallace, and he mimed a rim-shot on the table and said, “Badum-bum chhh!”

  Robbie snorted a laugh.

  “The point is,” said Wallace from his new lofty perch on top of the argument, “Bonnie Prince Charlie was a great Scottish Hero…”

  “Aha!” said Robbie, seeing an opening. “He was Italian.”

  “He...? Oh…bullshit!” And they were back into it.

  “‘Fraid so. Born and raised in Rome.”

  “You’re just making that up.”

  And she opened the book she had carried in and flipped through it. “Charles Ed
ward Louis John Casimir Silvester Severino Maria Stuart.”

  “No need to swear,” said Wallace.

  “Born In Rome, in 1720…”

  “O.K. OK. I get your point. It’s just a fucking song. And where did you pick up all this garbage, anyway?”

  “All my life I have been listening to you spout your BS and it occurred to me that maybe I should start checking up for myself.”

  “I should charge you for the education.”

  “I should fine you for the mental abuse.”

  “Let me see that book,” said Wallace. Robbie handed it to him. Wallace read the section, then flipped to the front page and snorted.

  “What?”

  “Read that.”

  “The Oxford Encyclopedia of History. Yeah? So?”

  “It’s English. What do you think they’re going to say?”

  I realized right then why I liked them. They were as different from my own family as it was possible to be, but they reminded me of home in the way they used argument as play.

  Robbie boiled the potatoes I’d brought, and after they cooled we sliced and stirred them up with a little water and thyme along with the chanterelles in the frying pan. While we cooked, everybody ate the raspberries, an hour of picking gobbled down in minutes. The cook’s life. I thought of Mom, and reminded myself that I should phone her.

  “Excellent,” said Wallace, finishing off the last handful. “Where’d you buy these?”

  “They’re wild.”

  “Really? In our woods?”

  “Around the edges.”

  “Hunh! Those mushrooms too?”

  “Yep. Chanterelles.”

  “Aren’t wild mushrooms poisonous?”

  “Not these kind.”

  “Didn’t by chance find any wild beer, did you?”

  Wallace cleaned off the table and put the dishes in the sink to “soak”, then he turned to me, where I was fiddling with the banjolele.

  “Give us a tune on that thing, Whoever-The-Hell-You-Are. Know any songs?”

  “Not many.”

  “How about ‘The Lass of Glencoe’?”

  “Don’t know it.”

  “ ‘The Green Fields of Montague’?”

  “No.”

  “ ‘Farewell to Peter Head’?”

  “Hum a few bars.”

  “Dum diddy dum dum…Ah, fuck it, I hate that tune anyway. Well, you gotta know ‘MacAleese’s Lament’ or ‘The Lament of the Bartons’?”

  “No.”

  “Any laments at all?”

  “Not really.”

  “How about ‘Vanderburgh’s Fusiliers’?”

  “Never heard it.”

  “(Jesus!) ‘My Love Has To The Lowlands Gone’?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Christ! Well, play something you do know.”

  I put my fingers in the position of a C minor chord and rolled the chord backwards and forwards twice.

  Wallace waited. “That’s all?”

  “So far.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’ by Claude Debussy.”

  “Jeez. Title’s longer than the piece.”

  “I told you I didn’t know much.”

  “Right, well, we’ll obviously have to teach you some.” And he looked up suddenly. “I’ve got it! The Barley Boys are playing at the mall tonight.” Robbie and Brucie looked up at him, then Wallace had a depressing thought. “But what about money?” The Old Problem. “How much we got in the jar?”

  “Nothing,” said Robbie. “We never have anything in the jar.”

  “Brucie? You wouldn’t have any money, would you?”

  “G-g-good one, Wallace.”

  They sat thinking. I coughed. They looked up. “I got some,” I said.

  “How much?” said Wallace.

  “Almost three hundred bucks.”

  Wallace smiled at me. “What’s you’re name again?”

  ***

  “Now Brucie. You’re obviously underage so you can stay here and hold down the fort.”

  “OK.”

  “You’re gonna be all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good man.”

  Wallace got into the driver’s seat, I got in the middle and Robbie opened the passenger’s window, saying, “Oh my. What ever will become of us?”

  We spun out of the driveway, scooted down the causeway, and in less than an hour drove the distance to Charlottetown that I had taken six hours to pedal by bike. We took the more direct Town Road and not the back roads I had biked, passing abandoned farms and gas stations, churches and tamarack swamps, lone houses with woodpiles outside and monogrammed aluminum doors. With the windows open, wind buffeting us like a gale at sea, Wallace played an eight track of The Barley Boys and turned the volume up so loud the cab was shaking with the high notes. They played a variety of stringed instruments and sang stirring songs of violent insurrection and cruel betrayal. Manly harmonies retold the heroisms of betrayed soldiers of bygone revolts. Happy ditties celebrating the joys of intoxication were interspersed with grim ballads narrated by soon-to-be executed prisoners. Thievery and rebellion were celebrated. Wallace and Robbie sang along with everything and I joined in where I could.

  As we approached town, we drove through a small new subdivision and suddenly onto a road through an empty field, around the back of a large store, past dumpsters, and out front onto the parking lot of the mall. The gold and pink sunset cast a light which came very close to making even the mall beautiful.

  There were people standing around the entrance beneath a billboard which announced the upcoming movie, Jungle Justice, a poster of a body-builder in camouflage holding a machine gun to his hip and protecting a girl from a motorcycle gang swooping down on them. “Sometimes you have to make a stand…” ran the byline.

  Inside the mall, the stores were all closed and shuttered around the atrium that acted as the lobby for both theatre and bar. A drunk was retching into a potted plant and a young security guard was saying, “Eric? You can’t do this here…Ah, Eric, why did you have to do that, Eric?” We went to the entrance of the Shamrock Lounge in the corner. From inside, I could hear thumping of microphones and the babble and hum of a large crowd. Entering, we approached a lady set up with a cash box, and I paid the two dollar cover charge for everybody. Nobody asked me for an ID.

  Once inside I could see and hear a full house in the dark, and standing on a brightly lit stage against the back wall were three large Celts, recognizable from their poster, but in real life, uglier. A bearded man with a twelve string guitar, another with an eight-string mandolin, and a dour gnome with the shifty eyes of a terrorist and a five-string banjo. That made a total of twenty-seven strings, all of which they were in the process of tuning. “Ping ping thump ping babble hum ping!” went the room. The guy in the middle of the trio was probably the hardest to look at, but they all had a fair shot at that title, and in wildly individual ways. It said something about the marvellous variety of life on earth that three of God’s creatures could all be individually that ugly yet so different in their ugliness. Their foreheads were either low and Neanderthal or high and boxy. Their eyebrows were thick and bushy or matted as if they had been applied with road-working tools. Their noses were the shape of potatoes and the colour of beets, or veiny and snubbed. Their eyes were squinty and piggish or staring and thyroid. Their hair was everywhere. Two of them had thickets of red straw, kinky, curly and profuse, climbing up to their eyes from their beards, down their neck, and out of their ear holes and nostrils. The third sported a page-boy haircut which did not in any way lend innocence to his seemingly oft-punched face.

  They wore identical thick cable-knitted turtleneck sweaters, perfectly suited to the deck of a dory in the North Atlantic, but under a bank of spotlight
s in a crowded bar it must have been like wearing parkas in a sauna. Sweat was pouring off their faces and they must have lost pounds every night, though what remained was still substantial.

  “There’s a table over there,” said Wallace, and we followed him to the back corner through the close press of the crowd. “Move over, make a space…Now, introductions…” He looked at the crowd around the table, realized he’d never be able to recall anyone’s name and said, “Everybody, this is everybody. Introduce yourselves. I’ll go get myself a chair.” He left and Robbie and I sat down next to a man with a face like an axe.

  “How you doin’ Robbie?” said the man.

  “Fine, Sid.”

  “What are you having?

  “Nothing, thanks. I’m driving.”

  “No. Really. What are you having?”

  “Nothing. Honestly.”

  “You gotta have something.”

  “OK. An orange juice.”

  “With vodka?”

  “No. I told you. I’m driving.”

  “Christ! I’m not buying just juice!” said Sid, as if it was an insult.

  “Look, Sid,” Robbie said with perfect seriousness. “I lied to you about driving. I’ve sworn off alcohol because I’ve just recently taken Jesus as my personal saviour.”

  “Oh,” said Sid, and he nodded for a while then started talking to the person on the other side of him.

  “I’ve found that usually works,” said Robbie to me.

  “Are you a lesbian?” I asked.

  “Moot point,” she said. “I haven’t been laid in a dog’s age.”

  “That’s all right,” I offered. “I’m a virgin.”

  “I figured.”

  “Oh shit. Does it show?”

  She laughed.

  “It doesn’t bother me,” I said. “I’ll find something.”

  “Better start thinking about her as someone, is my advice. Assuming it’s a her you’re interested in.”

  “It is.”

  “So you’re the competition, then.”

  “Oh…”

  “Only kidding. I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  By this time, the band was tuned up and ready to go. They nodded at each other, and the guy in the middle came to the microphone and said in a thick Belfast accent, “Good evening. We’re The Barley Boys, and this is a song I’m sure you all know. One! Two! Three…” And they hit a chord and started to bellow their first number with gusto. Their voices were powerful and raw with the timbre of heavy machinery. They grinned and shouted with a verve and brio which belied the lyric’s tragic narrative, a tale of the miseries of alcoholism in a northern industrial town. Within the song they interspersed shouted demands to participate. “Sing along!” “Come on!” “You know it!” “Everybody!”