Annabel - Kathleen Winter [112]
Steve popped the top off his second beer and said he was sorry, he only had enough money for three. Derek Warford charged him three dollars apiece and there was no way they would even look at him down at the store. Steve kept glancing at Wayne, and finally he said, “How come your face is like that now, puffy?”
If Steve Keating had asked this in an aggressive way, or with a drop of ill humour or insult, Wayne would not have answered him, but Steve had no ill humour in him. He was merely curious, and with a kind of good humour that Wayne liked. He had not met anyone in St. John’s to whom he could tell anything. He could not talk to any of his customers, not even the ones who asked him to fix their stair rails or remove caulking with a chisel so they could open their pantry windows after the winter, and he certainly could not talk to his employer, Frank King.
Spring had tortured coltsfoot out of the ground in vacant lots all over St. John’s. There was a tiny railed landing between Church Hill and Cathedral Street where hyacinth bulbs had newly burst and he had smelled them. He knew all the world was about to open up because of summer, but he had to remain closed. He had to keep secrets and he had to keep his body covered because of what people like Frank King and his customers and Derek Warford’s crowd on the wharf might think. He did not know Steve Keating, and Steve Keating was not his friend, but Wayne felt he wanted to tell him things. It was not just Wayne’s face that looked puffy, as Steve had said. His abdomen was filled with fluid, as it had been at puberty. He wore loose shirts to cover it and kept the button on his jeans undone, but he was starting to feel afraid. He was afraid that what had happened before inside his body might have happened again.
“As a matter of fact,” Wayne said, “I should probably go see a doctor.”
“Are you sick?”
Wayne had a feeling you could present Steve Keating with any problem and he would look at it without moral or social judgement.
“Steve, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?”
“Yeah. Black sea bass are hermaphrodites. Me and my dad catch them every fall. They don’t come this far north any other time. But that’s what black sea bass are. Half male, half female.”
“Did you ever hear of a person being that?”
“No.” Steve took a mouthful of beer and lifted his eyebrows and made great big eyes at the sky as if to say to the clouds, Here’s a good one. But there was no judgement or ridicule in him. He looked at Wayne with real interest, dying to see what he would say next.
“Well, I am. I was born like that. And I didn’t know for a long time because no one told me and they did surgery and I was on a lot of pills. But now I’m off the pills. And the one thing I’m worried about is something you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’d believe it if it was true. I’d have to, wouldn’t I?”
“The one thing I’m worried about is, my body apparently has everything it needs inside itself to make itself pregnant. I bet you never heard a guy say that before.”
Steve looked at him, impressed. There was a sound coming from down on the docks. Night crane workers were lifting containers off a ship that had come down the St. Lawrence from Quebec. There were two cranes. Wayne loved seeing their lattice booms lit against the dark, and he loved how slowly but surely they moved, lowering the containers on their hoist lines. The lattice design was like the bridges he had loved and sketched as a child; there was something about the sight of the cranes that reminded him of the beauty of bridges, and of the slow music Wally Michelin had wanted to sing. Sitting here, now, on the makeshift veranda with Steve Keating, reminded him too of the summer he and Wally had spent on the bridge that he had made with his father. It was intimate, and there were lights strung nearby, and the world was held back a little bit, so it did not encroach on the two people who sat together, set back from ordinary