They stood smiling at each other. Lish moved her hair around a bit and a few drops of water fell on the ranger’s pant leg. She made a big deal of wiping him off and he laughed and looked up at the sky as if to say Thank you God for this naked woman standing in front of me and rubbing my thigh. He took out two cigarettes and offered one to Lish. She shook her head and shifted her weight to one leg. The ranger was having a problem lighting his cigarette and Lish moved around slightly to block the wind from blowing out his match. They were talking and laughing. He was a cute ranger. It occurred to me to look at his pants to see if he was getting an erection, but I couldn’t really tell. I quickly looked away.
I tried to engage Dill and the girls in some kind of feeble splashing game but Dill started fussing about the water in his eyes and the girls began chucking wet sand at each other. I looked at the happy couple on the beach and wondered whether Lish would drag this guy off to the bushes any second and screw him while she was at it, but they seemed satisfied enough standing around and talking to each other.
What the hell was I supposed to do? There was no way I was getting out of the water naked, and I was starting to feel like a real idiot, hunched over like a clam and moving around trying to stay warm in the water and keep Dill from crying. I couldn’t exactly nurse him underwater — he’d drown if he took a breath. I guess I should have known it wasn’t my breasts anybody was interested in, except Dill, and it wouldn’t make any difference if I exposed myself or not. It could have been Normandy Beach on D-Day and Lish and the ranger wouldn’t have noticed.
Lish walked over a few feet and pulled her bottle of bourbon out from a log, and handed it to him. He had a drink and passed it back to Lish. Well fine, I thought, if that’s the only fluid they pass back and forth. I swatted a horsefly off Dill’s head.
Finally Lish turned around and looked at us and waved. I held up my hand for a second like a traffic cop, thinking okay if you’ve had your fun with buddy boy you might want to get back to looking after your kids, who were kind of drifting off down the beach by now.
The ranger started pointing in one direction and then moving his finger around his palm and then pointing again. He was giving her directions to some place. His, I imagined. I sighed. No way, I thought. I am not looking after your kids while you go off to some look-out tower with a total stranger.
Lish nodded politely while he spoke and looked off in the direction in which he had pointed. Then he smiled and said, “So?” with an animated shrug. Lish laughed. She said, “You never know.” He dropped his head in a comic gesture of defeat and then looked up at the sky again, supposedly for guidance. He was really a very cute ranger. Then they shook hands and while they were doing that he briefly placed his other hand on Lish’s bare hip. She smiled.
Then he just walked away into the bush. And Lish did the old brushing off her hands gesture that meant well, that’s over, and walked back into the lake with so much energy that she left a little wake behind her.
“You just never stop making waves, do you, Lish.”
“Oh, pa-lease, leave the comedy to me.”
“You’re not gonna go off with that guy later, are you?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said. She cupped some water in her hands and splashed it on her face. “He’s a nice guy, though,” she said. “He’s funny.”
“He’s pretty cute,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Lish, and we both stared off at the place in the bushes where he’d disappeared.
It’s amazing how refreshing a little bit of water can be. Mixed with bourbon.
fourteen
I guessed that it would take Lish some time for the truth about the busker to set in, to take hold and make her react. She was acting kind of weird, but she always did, so that wasn’t a big deal. She kept looking at me oddly, sort of smiling, like she wanted to ask me a stupid question but was kind of shy about it. If she had given up the hope of ever seeing Gotcha again she had replaced it with a kind of silliness. Well, maybe that’s a form of grief, I thought. She talked about their week together five years ago, and how she actually had never really known him and had gone for months at a time without ever thinking about him and how the twins had never known him either and never would and it’s too bad he died for sure, but she didn’t quite know how to feel. I understood. All the guys I’d had sex with, some even for a week or more, were vague fuzzy lost people I couldn’t really remember. That one of them could be Dill’s father was absurd. That the reason for his existence, which was such a big event in my life, was some man I couldn’t remember, some shadowy figure I couldn’t place, seemed crazy.
It was a strange sensation. Even knowing so much about Dill didn’t automatically make me know his father. Sometimes you wonder. Like Nike running shoes. I saw a show about the people who make them: sour-looking Asian women getting a few bucks a day making shoes that sold for a hundred bucks a pair. Sometimes you just wonder where these things come from. But usually you don’t. Usually I just enjoyed Dill without wondering how exactly he got here.
Anyway, Lish felt good that the busker had been trying to reach her, that it would have been a chance for the kids to meet him. But would he have come back again and again or just fizzled out and left the kids feeling that awful feeling of loss instead of just curiosity, which is a lot easier? He didn’t even know that he had kids and probably she would think he was alone and horny when he wrote the postcards and realized Winnipeg wasn’t too far from Denver — and hadn’t he had a good time with some woman from Winnipeg once upon a time? Maybe it could happen again. Sometimes that’s what Lish figured he was thinking. And sometimes, it seemed she believed he wanted only her, in a tender, spiritual kind of way. At least that’s what she said. As for me, I didn’t know which was worse.
When we stopped at the border, the guy asked us had we purchased any firearms, telephones or pets. Lish said, “Yes, and a large quantity of drugs and lesbian porn we are hoping to sell in schoolyards.” Fortunately Dill had woken up when the van stopped moving and was hollering as loud as he could and the guy didn’t understand Lish and said, “Yes it is, isn’t it.”
Getting back into Canada was a breeze. They had to let us in even if they didn’t want to. When we passed my mom’s ditch and the honey sign, Lish asked, “Do you want to stop?” and I said, after a couple of seconds of wavering and Lish’s foot hovering between the brake and the gas pedals and an enquiring expression on her face, “No.”
Lish told us a story about her mother and father. It was the girls’ favourite. The twins liked to hear it over and over. Both Lish’s parents had been raised on farms. Farming was the main event. Her mother’s family bought John Deere equipment and that was fine. But when their daughter, Lish’s mom, began dating her neighbour, Lish’s dad, the shit hit the fan, because Lish’s father’s family used Massey Ferguson equipment. In that area there was an ongoing feud between John Deere users and Massey Ferguson users. Something about the French buying one brand and the Ukrainians buying another, originally. Both camps swore up and down that theirs was the best, and because farming was their life, it was a big deal. So, for a John Deere girl and a Massey Ferguson boy to be dating, that was asking for trouble. It was like the Montagues and the Capulets. In the only café in the neighbouring town the John Deere clan sat on one side and the Massey Ferguson sat on the other. Sometimes the more good-natured farmers would try a little bit of friendly debate with someone from the other side, but they’d get glared down so fast even the waitress forgot to refill their coffee cups for the rest of the day. (The waitress’s family was a Massey Ferguson family, but she said as long as there was no fighting, she’d serve the John Deeres in the restaurant same as everyone else.) Everyone waited eagerly for someone from the other side to get their arm cut off or a piston blown because of a faulty part, but when it happened to one of their own it was very hush-hush. Repairs were done in the night, so no one from the other side would notice there was a problem.