“No.” The truck lurched.
Wayne wanted a glass of water but did not tell his father he was thirsty. “Did you bring any fly-dope, Dad?” He touched behind an ear and his finger was covered in blood crust.
“DEET.”
Wayne got the DEET out of the glove compartment and rubbed some behind his ears, on his neck, around his hairline, and into his hair. He hated its stink.
“Want some, Dad?”
“We’re here now.”
The truck swerved into a huge cul-de-sac, a place in the road where men with backhoes were digging dirt out of the side of a hill and heaping it along the road for the grader. This road had to be rebuilt after every winter. One day, said the politicians in Newfoundland, it would cross Labrador into Quebec with two full lanes, and even farther ahead in their crystal balls they saw it paved, so no one would have to spend the summer rebuilding it again. But now flies and heat and dust made the men sweaty and filthy. They sat high in their machines and swigged water out of plastic bottles, and they ate bologna-and-mustard sandwiches that had earth handprints on the bread. It was noon, and the men were happy to see a kid, and they joked with Treadway about putting the kid on the job. Treadway was a man who, though silent in his town, laughed and joked with the road builders and with any men in a group. He was a man who was made to be part of a team working hard with dogs on the ice or machines in the dirt. An easiness came over him. He did not have to think about what to say. It was not one man talking here, but the pack. What one man said could easily have been said by another. They threw their voices back and forth in the sun like baseball players fooling around with the ball. Summers were short in Labrador, and there were not many days a man could fool around with his friends in his shirtsleeves and feel sweat all over his body.
“Hey,” said Clement Brake, “Treadway. Is the kid ready?”
Treadway nodded and sat on a clump of lambkill and took a pack of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum out of his pocket and offered a stick to Wayne.
“Ready for what, Dad?”
“Sit down, son. That synchronized swimming you’re so fond of? Wait till you see this.”
Wayne sat beside his dad. The men got their backhoes in gear. They lurched out of their hollows and moved to the centre of the packed dirt.
“Hey,” shouted Clement Brake to Otis Watts, “Mister Music, please!”
“Right on,” yelled Otis, and he put Creedence Clearwater Revival on bust up in the cab. The backhoes lined up.
“What are they doing, Dad?”
Treadway chewed his gum. “Pay attention, son.” The backhoes lifted their arms. They tilted their shovels to the right, then to the left. They lowered their arms and raised them again. Wayne realized this was supposed to be in time to the music. The music was ahead of them, but that did not stop them. Half a beat behind the music the backhoes turned full circle, backed up, and lifted their arms up and down maniacally. Treadway chewed with his mouth open and stared appreciatively at the men. Wayne saw that he was half smiling in a way he had never seen his dad smile. His dad looked at him. Wayne realized he was supposed to smile back and he tried, but it was torture. He had grit in his eyes and he hated the backhoes. The song ended seconds before the machines stopped. Wayne saw the men’s teeth in their brown faces through the glass of each cab. They were so proud they couldn’t speak. Treadway waved at Otis, who had taken the lead. It was a high-five kind of wave, the kind Wayne never knew was coming.
“Well, son? Did you like it?”
Wayne knew he had to say “yeah” but he could not say it. He watched the crinkles around his dad’s eyes go away. His dad was chewing a toothpick now.
“You didn’t like it.”
Wayne could not protest this.
“The boys have been practising it all week. They’re pretty good too. I thought you’d like that. I got them to put on a special performance just for us.” He leant forward. “Go up and tell Otis you liked it.”
“Dad.”
“Just say you thought the boys did a good job. Come on.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Just come with me, then, while I say it.” Treadway pulled Wayne up by an elbow. Wayne followed him to Otis’s rig.
“Well, Otis, my son didn’t want to tell you this himself, but you know what he told me?”
“Dad.”
“He told me you’ve done an excellent choreographing job on that backhoe ballet.”
Otis threw down a banana and Wayne tried to catch it but it fell in the dirt. It had been bruised and now it was dusty too. Wayne picked it up and held it all the way back home. When he got home, he put it on the kitchen table and went to his room and waited until he heard his dad click the back door, then he slid the Eaton’s catalogue from under his bed and found the bathing suits. There were only two pages, and Wayne had circled the best suit of all. The others were plain: raspberry with a cream stripe, green with a yellow gusset, a lot of blue. Wayne had circled a flame orange suit with a necklace of oval sequins the colour of the eyes in a peacock feather: emerald and copper sulphate. The suit was twenty-six dollars, and he had saved up nineteen.
8
Wally Michelin
JACINTA DID NOT LISTEN TO commercial stations or to talk shows where people called in about the politics of the day, the state of potholes, or ailments of their houseplants. She kept it tuned to a station that played Chopin and Tchaikovsky and Schubert.
“I know it’s not real company,” she told Wayne, “but the radio is something. It’s a comforting voice that lets you know you’re not entirely alone in the world. I need that.”
All children, she thought as she watched him, could be either girl or boy, their cheeks flushed, their hair damp tendrils. Wayne looked at her so trustingly she badly wanted to sit beside him, to look at him and honestly explain everything that had happened to him from birth. At nine, she thought, a child has a capacity for truth. By age ten the child has lengthened and opened out from babyhood, from childishness, and there is a directness there that adults don’t have. You could look in Wayne’s eyes and say anything true, no matter how difficult, and those eyes would meet yours and they would take it in with a scientific beauty that was like Schubert’s music.
Treadway had said he liked classical music when he and Jacinta were first married. And he had. He had felt that the radio graced the rooms in his house. He had liked the way music floated from one room to another through an open door. But Jacinta had it on all the time, and Treadway longed for silence as well. And in his house there was no silence. There was always that radio. Now he thought of it as an incessant banging on pianos and operatic foolishness, and it irritated him. But he did not ask her to turn it off. Treadway had his outside world, his magnificent wilderness, and he could go out in it any time it pleased him, and he also had restraint.
Because Treadway was not a man who could reach out to his wife, and because Jacinta had her own inner world, her memories of the city, and her tormented wish for a world in which her child did not have to be confined to something smaller than who he was, the two of them grew separate throughout Wayne’s childhood. Each grew more silent outwardly and more self-sufficient, but lonesome inwardly. From the outside they looked the way many middle-aged couples do. Both were models of sensible good behaviour. Treadway was considered such a good husband that many of Jacinta’s friends wished they had married someone like him instead of being fooled by wit, grace, passion, or a handsome face. Their own husbands did not bring in as much wood as Treadway did before he went away on his trapline. They did not come back home as early or as faithfully. They did not work so carefully on their skins and furs as he did, and therefore their work did not bring in as much money, and the money it did bring, they did not spend as honourably on their household needs, but bought cigarettes and brandy and beer. That their own husbands talked to them, and took them dancing, and were intimate with them in fun-loving and coded ways known only between the members of each couple was something the other women took for granted. They did not realize that Treadway and Jacinta had moved away from each other, though outwardly each held the golden thread that looked like a marriage.