by Ibolya Kaslik

I wait with the engine off, till the porch light goes on and the moths start stabbing into the yellow light with their wings. I pull the headlight knob out as Lina makes her way to the truck. I notice her hair is a little puffed up at the crown of her head, as if she’d been sleeping on it all day.

“Shit,” she says, pulling her red and blue checkered flannel shirt, probably Lloyd’s, out of the car door where she’s caught.

“How’s the baby?” I ask, turning onto the highway, as she lights a cigarette and rolls the window wide open.

“Alright. Cranky as hell though.”

She pulls the rearview down and smoothes down her eyes will her fingers. I think about telling her I need the mirror just the way it was, but decide against it.

“You bring your counter this time?”

“Uhuh,” I say, flicking on the indicator, though there’s no one behind us. “How’s Lloyd doing?”

“Uh good, you know, he’s got a new contract up at the McGivem’s, so he’s pretty tired alright. The money’s good though.”

I used to do roofing with Lloyd until my shoulder got dislocated a couple of summers ago. I always think it was a good thing it happened that way, I couldn’t keep up with Lloyd, I was really more of an apprentice than a partner, but Lloyd was too nice to say anything. Besides, Lina probably talked him into hiring me in the first place.

We don’t say much, just listen to the wind streaming over the truck. We turn down the service road and Lina yawns a couple of times and rubs at her eyes some more. When we get to the shack, I leave the high beams on for a second so we can squint at the ivy and decide how to plod our way through the wet, complicated webs. She pulls out the clipboards and hands me one, along with a pair of safety glasses.

“Do we really have to?”

“Alright,” she says, stuffing them back into her black purse, “I just don’t want to hear you whining about bat shit on your face for the ride home.” But she’s smiling.

I follow her into the rotted house, the intermittent squeaks of sleepy bats mixing with the cricket echoes in the bush. I don’t turn on my flashlight till we’re inside.

“You do the left.”

“Sure thing,” I say, waving the flashlight to the top left corner, where, under a wet broken beam, a group of twenty or so bats sway.

*

They got married young. Too young, some thought. Lina got a scholarship in biology in the city but said she’d defer it until after the wedding. I meant to ask her about the scholarship but when she started to show a couple months later I figured it’d be best if I didn’t.

I was best man at the wedding. I don’t remember much of the reception, though everybody said I made a really funny speech. I remember one of Lina’s Ukrainian uncles kept kissing me on the mouth and snapping my ocean-blue cummerbund. Between him and Lucy, Lina’s ten year cousin, a blonde flower girl, who kept me company all evening, and whose tiny little bows I coaxed off her patent white shoes and somehow pinned to my lapel, I don’t see how I could have not made an ass out of myself that night.

Lloyd, who was only working weekends then, had saved enough to take her to Acapulco for their honeymoon though I knew Lina wanted to go somewhere less touristy. Somewhere more remote, like Portugal or Cuba. But Lloyd wanted to go to a resort and so they were driven half past two in the morning to catch a red eye charter to Acapulco.

I remember feeling lucky that I had engaged Lina’s father, Van, in a discussion on the failure of modern communism so that 1 wouldn’t have to try to talk to them or look at them too long when they walked across the dance floor in their travelling clothes. As Van spoke in his thick Ukrainian accent, I tried to shake off the sudden high-frequency pitch that throbbed through my skull and tried to focus on him through the my alcohol-blurred vision. The world, it seemed to me, had been reduced to a wild, spinning, screeching place. But I believe I tucked my head to my chin, in a serious, listening way and nodded politely at everything he said.

Lloyd and Lina stood behind Van for a minute or so arranging their carry-on luggage before Van turned around to shake his new son-in-law’s hand. I looked at Lloyd, at the muscles in his arms, his long, dark hair and then at Lina, who, without her wedding dress, suddenly looked like a teenager in her jeans and leather jacket. When Van hugged Lloyd I smiled at Lina and imagined her eyes were desperate, that they locked on mine. When she smiled back, looking a little sad I thought, I imagined that I could have done anything at that moment. So I shook Lloyd’s hand, with one eye shut, trying to focus on the double image of him and toasted them off.

But most of all I remember my hangover the next day and how I had to drive from Salmon Arm to Vancouver with a ten foot long load of underground pipes. The image of my best friend’s brand new wife’s back, tanning in the Mexican sun, sprawled across the winter highway as I drank my fifth coffee. Her smell: sharp sweat, mixed with pineapple and talc, still on me. No matter how many cigarettes I smoked.

*

Sometimes they swoop down, waking up mid-drop.

This lazy, falling act used to really freak me out but now I’m used to it. Sometimes I poke one, or wave my hand in front of it, just to watch that reflexive twist in their pink, transparent wings, just to admire them in that mili-second of abandonment. I like the way they are so self-contained, the way they sleep, their wings tuck around them like leaves, concealing their viscous, little feral faces.

“Ugly little blind bats,” Lina whispers, her finger hovering over one of the twin tips of a bat’s wing. Their musty smell is almost overwhelming. I feel it more at the back of my throat than in my nose.

“How many did you get?”

“Seventy-three.”

She does some quick mental calculations and smiles. “Their breeding is up!”

“Let’s get in the car, it’s getting cold.”

On the drive home I listen to the trail of her excited voice. She tells me that the bats’ population has tripled in the last two years. That, if it keeps up, she’ll apply for a grant to create an actual wildlife preservation project based on counting the mostly female bats.

“It ain’t Galapagos,” she says shrugging, “but it’s something.”

I park in the gravel driveway and stretch, watching the clouds etch white streaks across the almost black sky. Instead of getting out, she sits, looking straight ahead, chewing her cheek.

“I see you got your guitar back there. Do you feel like a beer? Maybe playing me a song?”

“What about the baby?”

“She and Lloyd passed out together.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, if not we can go to the boathouse.”

Lloyd is up with the baby, who is bundled in her car seat, on the kitchen counter, next to some beer bottles, calmly watching her barefooted daddy checking out the fridge.

“Lo’ Lloyd.”

“Hey Dan.”

“You been drinking?” Lina closes her eyes, smells the top of Emma’s head, and kisses her forehead.

“Just two, one and half actually, I gave her half and it doesn’t seem to have had any effect…”

“You gave the baby beer?!”

Lloyd has that glow of a man that’s been drinking alone for a couple of hours. Effusive but unpredictable. Lloyd gives Lina a crazy grin before catching her up in a bear hug and squawking.

“No! I didn’t give the baby beer!” Emma coos at the two of them and Lina digs the baby out of the car seat and goes into the nursery. Lloyd plucks another two beers from the fridge and hands me one. Lina comes back in, opens the fridge and gathers four beers against her chest quickly, as if she fears someone will stop her.

“We’re going to the boathouse. Dan’s going to play me some songs.”

“Okay. How’re the bats?”

“Busy.” She says, grabbing two parkas from the coat rack.

“Bring some more beer down when you think she’s out.” Lina says.

“Sure thing.”

We walk a few steps on the porch, and then pause to look at the sun, bleeding into the northernmost point of black of night.

*

When the sun has completely disappeared and she has drunk three of the four beers, she asks me to play a song.

“Which one?”

“The new Hip one.”

“Can’t. It’s too hard.”

The river is high and lapping at the edge of the boathouse. The doors of the house are missing so we have a direct view of the river. In fact, because the tide has been so high this year, the house itself is part way in the river and every once in while the underwater pillars wheeze and Lina leans over to dip her hands in the water, splashing me as if to prove how close it is. I sit in the back of the boathouse, on a thin mattress Lina and Lloyd sometimes sleep on in the summer. I sit close to the candle because one of the hardest things in the world is playing guitar in the dark.

“So play it. I know you know it. It’s on the goddamn radio all the time. Play the end at least.”

“Okay.”

I start playing, singing in my thin, whiny, Gord Downie voice.

And that’s when the hornet stung me
And I had a feverish dream
………something about mosquitoes I can’t remember, tonight we smoke them out. And you are ahead by a century you are ahead by a century, you are ahead by a century…
And disappointing you’s getting me down!

I start plucking out a different tune, embarrassed about my voice, thinking about the words. Wondering who Cord Downie was thinking of when he wrote that song, of who he was so terrified of disappointing. Of who he would consider being ahead by a century.

“Hey, wake up Dan.” Lina flicks water on me.

“What does he mean? What is he talking about?”

“What are you talking about?”

She tries to suppress a laugh but instead makes a big snorting sound and almost falls into the water. As she steadies herself on the edge of the floorboards, I realize that she’s kind of drunk. I put my guitar down and walk over slowly to where Lina is sitting to watch her pale blue face under the moonlight. She laughs uncontrollably, stupidly, for a couple of seconds and then stops, sighing dramatically.

“You O.K.?”

“Yeah. I didn’t eat much today, those beers went straight to my head.”

“No kidding. So, unless, there’s any more requests, I think I’ll head home, pick the truck up in the morning.”

“Don’t, not yet. Stay for a minute.”

“Sure thing.” I say, crouching on my feet, thinking of the beaten path behind the boathouse to my trailer. How it takes exactly sixteen and a half minutes to walk to the trailer at night, less in the morning. How the path runs parallel to the river and how, if I start walking now, I will be seeing the same curve of water Lina will be seeing in a minute, here, in the boat house. And then I think about all the times I’ve smoked a joint by the river, leaning up against my trailer, thinking of her. How I often imagine myself walking sixteen and half minutes, less if I were running, towards the house. I usually imagine her alone, here, like this, waiting or drinking or smoking, or, up in her room with Lloyd and the baby sleeping beside her.

“You got to do me a favour.”

“What’s that?” I say in a friendly way, standing up.

She takes my hand while looking over her shoulder at the house.

“What is it?”

She stands up, facing me, holding my hand so tightly the tiny bones in her palms crush my knuckles. With her free hand she pulls up her layers of shirts. She molds a fist of my hand and places it high, right under her ribs, and then moves it back, like a careful mime, making a slow pendulum of my arm.

“I’m late Dan, like two months late.” Her voice is suddenly very sober.

I try to free my hand from hers.

“I think this is something you should talk about with Lloyd, really.” I dart away from her, into the shadows at the back of the house, and finger my pocket, looking for a stray joint. In the light of the match, I close my eyes and concentrate on the orange colour of the flame behind my lids. Before opening my eyes again, I imagine the path, the narrow trail, the cool dark brown earth below me. “Please Dan, it’s awful I know, but it’s easier, so much easier…

“For who?” I snap, pacing up and down the creaking floorboards inhaling the last sweet smell of rotted wood, of sap, before its beaten out by the skunky waves of smoke. As the pot inundates my lungs I wait for the feeling of it entering my blood, my hands until I get that stoned certainty of weight and time being slower, heavier. What seemed complicated, my steps on the boards, Lina’s quiet crying, now seems smoother and longer.

“Want some?” I hold the joint out to her. She shakes her head puts her hands on her hips and bows her head, her crying almost drowned out by the lapping sounds. I grind out the half-smoked pinner against the doorway. She turns her back to me and sways slightly.

“What do you think of when you look at the river Dan?”

“Nothing, I don’t think about anyone. What do you think of?”

“I think of diving upstream, like a salmon, you know, swimming against it, to that big salmon Mecca.”

“Don’t be dramatic, hey, get away from the edge.” I hook my arm through hers and pull her back a bit.

“Please Dan.” And I see us, arching into the water, like bent arrows, like half-asleep bats, soaring for a second, straight down into the river.

“This is crazy. I can’t fucking punch you Lina. I can’t.”

She folds into me, sobbing. I close my eyes again and see the path before me, only a few steps away now. I open them and see the river next to her shoulder, heaving a stray branch along quickly. I think of the word ‘womb’, of how much I like it. I say it over and over silently, moving only my lips. It makes me feel safe, hearing it transform itself with repetition: womb room swoon broom june. I smell the pine, the harsh mosquito repellent in Lina’s hair, the warm yeasty smell of beer coming from her mouth and hold her to me.

Source: Headlight Anthology, no. 2, 1999, pp. 20–27.