“You’re not ugly.”
“Yes I am, go away.”
“You’re hurt. I’m going to help you, I’m going to get my wife.”
“No!” she hisses.
Her life depends on this. “No one can know. I came here tonight ’cause you’re the only one I can trust. If anyone knows, if he finds out where I am, he’ll come and kill me.” She takes a deep breath. “I can understand if you’re not willing to help me, you have enough troubles, thank you anyway.” The passenger door clunks open in the dark.
“Wait, wait —”
She pauses, her feet dangling.
“— where do you need to go?”
“It’s about five miles out of New Waterford. No one knows about it, it’s an old mine. I’ve got food and money. If I can stay there a couple of days, he’ll think I’m already off the island. Then it’ll be safe to hitch a ride to the ferry and go.”
“Go where?”
“Just go.”
He hesitates.
“Forget it,” she says. “Sorry to bother you, Mr Taylor.”
“I’ll take you.”
Silence.
“I said I’ll take you there, Frances.”
“… God bless you.”
“Just wait here a minute.”
Boutros is serene behind the wheel. They’re heading back to Sydney, it’s the last run of the night, the sun’s long gone, it was a too-hot day. If Frances agrees, they’ll drive to British Columbia. He wants to grow things. Cherries. And grapes, for wine. The thought of his own orchard, and Frances free and flourishing among rows of gnarly trees in bloom, full fruit, heavy vines — he pictures stuffing their own grape leaves with rice and lamb, he loves to cook, anything that consists of something wrapped around something else. Driving is a wonderful place for dreaming.
Boutros doesn’t enjoy violence. It’s just the job he’s always done for his father. Mostly it consists of walking into other men’s violence and turning it off for them, like groping for a switch in a dark cluttered basement. To do this he often has to hurt them. He rarely gets angry. Though he got angry last night with Taylor on the rail tracks. Boutros spared him for Mrs Taylor’s sake. She’s a hard-working woman and doesn’t deserve to be a widow. And Taylor seems to have learned his lesson and backed off.
“Slow the Jesus down, ya moron!” Jameel’s nerves are shot.
Up ahead comes Leo Taylor’s truck. It whizzes past them on the land side of the Shore Road. The one-second aperture of his headlights has taken a picture for Boutros which is just now coming up in black and white through the film on his eyes: Frances in the cab, looking straight at him, her face a battered mess. Taylor at the wheel, laughing at her.
“What the fuck are you doing!” Jameel grabs the dashboard and goes slamming into the passenger door as glass collides in the back — “Shit!” — and the Kissel fishtails out of the U-turn, speeding after the truck in a wake of rye whiskey.
“Leo Taylor’s got Frances.”
Jameel screams, “So what the fuck what?” and begins slapping Boutros.
Boutros puts up a hand to keep his line of vision clear, they’re gaining on the truck.
“She’s my cousin.”
“She’s a whore!”
“Don’t talk about her like that.”
Jameel starts laughing. Boutros trembles.
“You sweet on her, b’y? Eh? You sweet on the whore? You smelt her? Ha ha.”
Boutros blinks hard.
“You gonna cry now, crybaby?” Boutros does have tears in his eyes. “Eh little sissy-boy, sooky-baby, eh, little mama’s boy gonna cry now, eh? Go ahead, go on —”
The windshield explodes with Jameel’s head, shattering Boutros’s view of the road. He sticks his face out the window just in time to swerve out of the way of an oncoming carload of nuns. His hand is still around the back of his father’s neck as the Kissel hurtles off the road, over the ruts and along the cliff at eighty till the terrain changes abruptly to silent air. Jameel is dead before they hit the rocks below.
The nuns turn around and drive back, dropping off three of their number to investigate while the other three drive back to New Waterford to get an ambulance. By the time the rugger-playing one picks her way down to the water’s edge, there is only one man, his neck all but severed. The other man is found the next day. The engineer didn’t quite manage to stop the coal-train in time, but the big man lying on the tracks was already dead.
“I’ll just talk to Piper and turn right round and come home,” Ginger had told Adelaide just after nine.
“I love you….”
It gave him a twinge when she said his private name, but he wasn’t lying for his own sake, and this time there was a reason — to protect that poor beat-up girl waiting for him in the truck. In a couple of days she’d be gone right off this rock, and that gave him a light feeling even as he told the lie.
It’s a cloudy night but Ginger gets a good look at Frances as they pass the fires of the steel plant. There’s blood crusting her nose and filling the gully that meets her upper lip. The lip is split and fat on the left side. Her left eye is likewise puffy and blacked. That Piper is more than just a negligent father. This explains everything.
“What happened to you?” she asks, and for a second he isn’t sure what she means because he’s been concentrating on her injuries.
“Last night,” he says, “fella got me.” He feels himself blushing. “I was following you home, along the tracks. I wanted to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Well I know the answer now, I was just going to ask you why you kept coming around me.”
“Because you’re the only good man I know.”
Ginger feels ashamed. Sydney is behind them now. He picks up speed on the Shore Road.
“I’m sorry I ignored you at the picture-house,” she says. “It’s better for Lily’s sake if she doesn’t know anything.”
“That’s your little sister?”
He turns. There’s just enough dark to swallow her wounds and light her eyes. She gives him a calm, knowing look. It’s like an invitation to rest — it says, don’t try any more, stop fighting, I know. I understand something that’s so deep you think it’s behind you. But it isn’t. It’s inside you. Let me touch it.
“Lily,” he says. “That’s a pretty name.” He sounds foolish to himself. Something has hit his stomach like a fiery drink and it’s spreading out through his limbs. He shakes it off. “You and me make a fine team, eh?” he chuckles.
“What do you mean?”
Her voice is so grown-up he feels callow but he presses on. “I mean the two of us with our wracked-up faces, what a sight.” He turns to her and laughs, and she smiles slightly, as he’s glad to see by the light of an oncoming car. Frances keeps one eye on the road as the headlights of the Kissel slice by the truck.
“Can this thing go any faster?” she wants to know.
At Teresa’s house, Hector rocks quietly by the kitchen stove and follows the conversation with his eyes. Adelaide is sick with worry.
“I have to go out there, Teresa, she’s got him, oh my God,” she leans over and holds her stomach.
“Settle down now, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, Addy. First we’re going to find out if she’s home, ’cause if she is there’s nothing to be worried about — we’ll get Wilf Beel to drive us out and, okay, here’s what we’re going to do, listen now: I’ll go up to the door and say old Mahmoud is dying and wants to see his granddaughters at the last minute, and if Piper says forget it, I let him know there could be money in the will, you know? And then I say Mahmoud also says for them all to come or none, so we’ll know if Frances isn’t there — what’re you doing, girl, sit down.”
“Where’s Hector’s gun?”