Whirl Away Read online

  Russell Wangersky’s most recent book, The Glass Harmonica, won the 2010 BMO Winterset Award and was long-listed for the Relit Awards. His previous book, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself, won the British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, the Rogers Cable Award for Non-Fiction, Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards, and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. It was also a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Non-Fiction Prize and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 selection in 2008. His 2006 short story collection, The Hour of Bad Decisions, was long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, First Book, Canada and the Caribbean. It was a Globe and Mail Top 100 selection in 2006. Wangersky lives and works in St. John’s, where he is an editor and columnist with the St. John’s Telegram.

  WHIRL AWAY

  ALSO BY RUSSELL WANGERSKY

  The Hour of Bad Decisions

  Burning Down the House

  The Glass Harmonica

  Copyright © 2012 Russell Wangersky

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wangersky, Russell, 1962–

  Whirl away / Russell Wangersky.

  Short stories.

  ISBN 978-0-88762-936-5

  I. Title.

  PS8645.A5333W55 2012 C813'.6 C2011-907120-7

  Editor: Janice Zawerbny

  Cover design: Michel Vrána

  Cover image: John Krempl/photocase.com

  Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,

  a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,

  390 Steelcase Road East,

  Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada

  www.thomasallen.ca

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  12 13 14 15 16 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed and bound in Canada

  For Leslie, who whirls.

  CONTENTS

  Bolt

  Echo

  McNally’s Fair

  911

  Family Law

  Little World

  No Harm, No Foul

  Look Away

  Sharp Corner

  Open Arms

  The Gasper

  I Like

  WHIRL AWAY

  BOLT

  T HE BOLT came through the open back window of the truck. It came in end over end. From a distance, if anyone had been watching it, concentrating, it might actually have appeared that the truck was doing the tumbling, and that the bolt was flying perfectly straight.

  Just a rusty bolt John had found in the driveway, a bolt that he’d tossed in the back of the pickup with the duffle bags and the mitre saw and the rest of his stuff.

  He didn’t hear the bolt whisper as it spun, the rushing air whistling along the even gaps of the threads; he had his hands full trying to figure out just what was happening to the pickup as it cut through the bright pink flowering fireweed, the truck leaving a four-wheeled, mown trail behind it, the wheels throwing up grass and mud and the petals of the flowers.

  The bolt caught him in the curve at the back of his skull, at the midline and just below his hair, hitting that smooth dent where a lover might rest the heel of her hand. John had a brief moment to think about what-if—what if he hadn’t reached across the seat towards the glove compartment, what if he hadn’t over-corrected when the wheels touched the shoulder. He didn’t even get to “What if I hadn’t put the bolt in the back?” or more importantly, “Why did it fly so straight?” or “What are the chances of that happening?”

  The bolt was still moving at close to a hundred kilometres an hour, the same speed the truck had been going before the front end smashed nose first into the bank. John, safely held in the grasp of the seat belt, had slowed as quickly as the truck had. He didn’t feel the bolt hit.

  John, for once, didn’t feel anything at all.

  The truck ended up on its roof, one wheel crookedly spinning long after the other three had stopped, and no one noticed the wreck until the next morning. Then a long-haul driver, riding high up in the cab of his Freightliner, saw the rusting bottom of the chassis standing out against the green and pink of the fireweed, rectangular and ochre and perched on the edge of a small peaty stream. There was already cold dew on the windshield when the driver waded down through the high plants to look through the window on the driver’s side.

  “John was coming home,” Bev said.

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Yes he was, bitch. He was on his way here when he crashed. He was coming home for good. Why do you think he had all his stuff?”

  “You’re lying.” Anne said the words quickly, as if saying them could force the doubt away, but she heard the tremble in her own voice—and she hated herself for betraying that feeling, even slightly. Because she hadn’t known where he was going. Sleeping, caught up in the false, warm security of comforter, sheets and pillow, she hadn’t even realized he had left.

  They were speaking in undertones, barely more than hissing the words, aware that there were other people in the funeral home but focused on each other. Outside, the sun had come out around a huge grey bank of cloud, and individual shafts of sunlight were sifting down onto the surface of Bay Bulls, lighting irregular, ragged patches of ocean as if the light actually meant to single something out amongst the choppy grey waves.

  Bev was small and blond and strangely angular. She gave the sense of always having her elbows in close to her sides and her hands up high, as if spoiling for a fight. That, and she finished her sentences by pushing her face forwards, like she was punctuating her words with her chin, daring the other person to disagree. It was the sort of habit that some people found off-putting, as much of a shove as if she had reached out and pushed them with both hands palm-flat against their chest.

  Whenever she saw Bev, whenever she spoke with the other woman, Anne was always left with the same disconcerting thought: just how had John ever ended up married to her? It made her wonder if there was some kind of hidden, underlying character flaw in him that she knew nothing about, or that she was trying to ignore.

  When she asked John about it, after they’d moved in together, he would shrug. “I was young, okay?” he would say, as if that was excuse enough. “We were both young.”

  But she found that hard to accept—trying to imagine how it was that someone as easygoing as John would choose to marry someone so abrasive. Other people offered up old sayings like “Opposites attract,” but Anne couldn’t see it.

  “No, really,” she’d ask him. “How’d you even get in the same room with each other, let alone end up married?” And John would do what he always did, pushing his hands through the hair at his temples, where it grew coarser and with slightly more curl than on the rest of his head. It was a motion that always dislodged flecks of fugitive sawdust from the day’s work with the sander or fine curls of shavings from the planer. There was always sawdust on him somewhere, Anne knew, fragrant small chips t
hat gave him an unexpected air of solidity, the green of birch, the closer, sticky familiarity of pine—a smell that was as much him as any other. He’d push his hands through his hair once or twice every time, but it was a way of saying that he wouldn’t answer, that the conversation was done. It was a signal that he was about to shut down. It was the one thing about him that she found infuriating—the ability to stop any discussion by withdrawing completely. He’d always done it, even before they’d moved into the old green house on the side of the hill, before he’d put up the new clapboard and trim on the outside, before he’d taken every single window down and replaced it with a new one. Before he’d built the walkway and the tidy, hip-high white fence with the gate and the big deck where they sometimes sat late into the night and looked out over the water at the wide white strip of reflected moonlight.

  From the house, Anne could look across the flat bay and see the cream-coloured, weathered side of Bev’s house, the blue car nose down in the driveway, and she imagined that Bev got up every morning and saw exactly what she saw too, only in reverse. Bev would have to look out over the metal grey of the bay and see John and Anne’s house, and her mouth would tighten.

  Lives like a mirror, Anne thought. Exactly like a mirror—every reflection an opposite. Where Bev was hard, Anne knew she was soft. Bev has angles, Anne thought, standing naked in front of the mirror; Bev has angles where I have curves. Bev has no give to her, and I, well, I always give.

  Bev’s house was on the north side of the harbour, Anne and John’s on the south, but both houses were high up above the water in timothy meadow—both hills bright green in the spring, straw yellow by mid-August.

  So much the same, she thought, but so very different.

  Anne wondered if the other woman ever even came close to seeing what she did when she stood outside the house; whether Bev saw the simple roses tangling in the ditch by the road, the alder catkins turning slowly through waxy hard green to brown. Whether she actually smelled the same wind, felt the same smooth surface of beach rocks between her thumb and forefinger. Somehow, Anne couldn’t imagine that she did, couldn’t imagine that Bev actually framed anything more than practical thoughts.

  “Would you have left if she hadn’t?” Anne asked late one night, her fingers gently touching the line of dark, curly hair that ran down from his navel to his crotch. John hadn’t answered at first, not until she pressed him. “Would you?”

  “Probably.”

  And while she didn’t doubt that it was true, it wasn’t anywhere near the answer she had wanted to hear. She wanted to punch him and say, “No, you dope. You say, ‘I would have left her, just to look for you.’ That’s what you say.”

  But she didn’t, and by then he was sleeping anyway.

  There was lots of work that year, much more than when John and Bev had eked out a living on Bev’s teaching salary and piecemeal carpentry work. John had been able to build the workshop by the harbour by the time he started living with Anne, and the shop was alternately busy with mundane work—installing cabinets here, pulling out rotten windows and replacing them with vinyl there—and the more involved projects in a small town, such as building new kitchens and pulling out entire rotten floors. She loved to hear about the tearing out, when John would come home with tufts of wet, rotten wood in the wrinkles of his clothes, with the rich, wet smell all around, pulling out small treasures to show her. A big round copper penny found caught behind a baseboard, or great long cut nails, every one of them over a hundred years old, solid and sharp and, she knew, not handled even once between the time they had been pounded into place and when John had pulled them out again. Anne loved the way he would open his big battered hands slowly, gently, as if he were about to reveal something as fragile as a flower or a small bird tossed from its nest, the way he would show her something both simple and complex that he knew she was going to understand.

  At times like that, she felt as if they had a unique connection, as if there was something between them that no one else knew, that they were lovers in a way neither of them had shared before with anyone.

  It was the same feeling she believed they shared over the big jobs, the occasional work that brought special, expensive wood to the work shed, jobs that seemed, in their own way, to reveal some part of John as clearly as when he brought something back to show her.

  John had built a custom dining room table for the president of the electric company—a man with more money than taste, John joked, but he loved the work intensely. The table was an oval sweep of light birch, the thread of the grain matched with precision and hours of careful work, the top glassy with varnish. Then he’d gotten the contract for an even bigger table, for the utility’s boardroom.

  Anne had brought his lunch down to the shop every day while he was working on the big table. She had caught him looking along the grain, his face a serious, complicated map, and when he’d seen her and straightened up, rubbing his hands on a piece of cloth, his eyes changed, like someone moving quickly away from the edge of a window and letting the curtains fall back into place.

  “I don’t know if I can give it up,” he said, and for a moment she felt a skip in her chest. He must have seen the stricken look on her face. “The table,” he explained. “I just don’t know what it’s going to be like not to have it here.”

  “That attached to it, are you?” she asked.

  “It’s not that. It’s just that . . . It’s just that sometimes people don’t deserve things, even if they can afford them.”

  Outside, the raspberry bushes were August high against the converted shed, and the wind coming off the bay made the canes switch back and forth gently across the exterior clapboard with a rhythmic, constant scrape. Some people might find it irritating, Anne thought as they stood there. John didn’t even seem to notice it, and to her, it was as regular and reassuring as waking up in the black of night and hearing John’s breathing beside her: regular, deep in his chest, her lover asleep flat on his back and completely unaware that she was even there.

  In the end, the big table went anyway. John had to get the movers to come and take it in the big van, in sections, and then he spent an afternoon at the utility’s head office, putting the sections together and tightening all the screws and fasteners. When he was finished, it was like a single piece of a huge tree, as if it had taken root there in the boardroom and grown.

  “If they ever have to move it,” he said seriously to the receptionist on the executive floor, “tell them to call me. I’ll come right in. It’s strong enough in one piece, but you can’t go dragging it around. It’s not made for that.”

  That night, they went out to celebrate at the Eagle, although Anne wasn’t sure whether it would turn out to be a celebration or a wake; John had a way of drinking just enough to topple sharply off a cliff into misery, even when everything seemed fine. One moment they could be laughing and the next he might be lashing out, a spiteful drunk for no clear reason she could fathom. And when they went into the lounge, she had a feeling it would be one of those nights, especially because Bev was at the bar with an after-hours group of other teachers. All the other teachers except Kevin, the grade four teacher Bev had left John for. Kevin, who had lasted all of five months before Bev had suddenly decided she wanted her quiet carpenter back.

  But by then it was too late. John always said it was as if he had hardened into something quite different than he had been. That he had cured quickly, like two-stage epoxy glue mixed together. There was, Anne knew, a certain flintiness about him now; Anne would run into it occasionally, abruptly, especially in the dark moments when John had had two or three drinks too many, or worse, when the work dried up and even the deep cuts on his hands had a chance to heal over. There was a great wide seam of distrust in there, Anne knew, and it was always unpleasant when she struck it.

  In the bar, Anne stared across at Bev and the other teachers, and wondered what John had ever seen in the small woman. Damn, Anne thought, looking at Bev’s rigid back, she even sits l
ike a block of wood. That almost made Anne laugh out loud. A few ryes too many, she thought, trying to hold back the giggles. A piece of wood—she knew exactly why John would have been attracted to that. Drill here, plane there, she thought, and then she was laughing, shoulders shaking, face down on the table next to her glass. And then John was back from the bathroom, and the band was starting again. He grabbed her hands, pulled her up out of her seat towards the dance floor.

  Anne was sweating and strangely elated when she stopped dancing and pushed her way through the swinging door into the women’s washroom. Late by then, and the bar was full of cigarette smoke and noise—the stalls all full, and Angie Porter, barely old enough to even be in the bar, was fixing her makeup in the mirror.

  “Hi, Ange,” Anne said.

  Angie turned and put a finger to her lips, pointing to one of the stall doors. “Bev,” she mouthed.

  Anne shrugged. “So what?” she said loudly. Too many ryes for sure, she thought, hearing how roughly the words came out.

  The toilet flushed and Bev came out of the stall, almost walking right into Anne.

  “Looks like they’ll let anyone in here,” Bev said, her chin up.

  “Looks like,” Anne said. “You’re here.”

  Then Bev slapped her—hard. Angie fled the washroom, banging the door back into the wall as she hurried out. Anne’s hand came up to the side of her face instinctively, feeling the heat welling up under her skin.

  When she came out of the bathroom, her face still throbbing, Bev was gone.

  “You gotta tell me,” she said to John later, after the moon had risen huge and orange and then had fallen back away behind the horizon. They were walking, climbing slowly back up the hill, holding hands, weaving slightly.

  Anne looked back over her shoulder at the one yellow light that was still on in Bev’s house, one yellow light like a hard, staring eye.