Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [53]
“Gettin’ any?” the front man said with a midwestern accent; traditional greeting.
“Lots,” David said, smiling back. I was expecting him to say something to them, insult them, but he didn’t. They were quite large.
“Us too,” the front one said. “We been in here three-four days, they been biting the whole time, caught our limit every day.” They had a starry flag like all of them, a miniature decal sticker on the canoe bow. To show us we were in occupied territory.
“Well, see ya,” the back one said. Their canoe moved past us towards the next beaver house.
Raygun fishing rods, faces impermeable as space-suit helmets, sniper eyes, they did it; guilt glittered on them like tinfoil. My brain recited the stories I’d been told about them: the ones who stuffed the pontoons of their seaplane with illegal fish, the ones who had a false bottom to their car, two hundred lake trout on dry ice, the game warden caught them by accident. “This is a lousy country,” they said when he wouldn’t take the bribe, “we ain’t never coming back here.” They got drunk and chased loons in their powerboats for fun, backtracking on the loon as it dived, not giving it a chance to fly, until it drowned or got chopped up in the propeller blades. Senseless killing, it was a game; after the war they’d been bored.
The sunset was fading, at the other side of the sky the black was coming up. We took the fish back, four of them by now, and I cut a y-shaped sapling stringer to go through the gills.
“Poo,” Anna said to us, “you smell like a fish market.”
David said “Wish we had some beer. Maybe we could get some off the Yanks, they’re the type.”
I went down to the lake with the bar of soap to wash the fish blood off my hands. Anna followed me.
“God,” she said, “what’m I going to do? I forgot my makeup, he’ll kill me.”
I studied her: in the twilight her face was grey. “Maybe he won’t notice,” I said.
“He’ll notice, don’t you worry. Not now maybe, it hasn’t all rubbed off, but in the morning. He wants me to look like a young chick all the time, if I don’t he gets mad.”
“You could let your face get really dirty,” I said.
She didn’t answer that. She sat down on the rock and rested her forehead on her knees. “He’ll get me for it,” she said fatalistically. “He’s got this little set of rules. If I break one of them I get punished, except he keeps changing them so I’m never sure. He’s crazy, there’s something missing in him, you know what I mean? He likes to make me cry because he can’t do it himself.”
“But that can’t be serious,” I said, “the makeup thing.”
A sound came out of her throat, a cough or a laugh. “It’s not just that; it’s something for him to use. He watches me all the time, he waits for excuses. Then either he won’t screw at all or he slams it in so hard it hurts. I guess it’s awful of me to say that.” Her eggwhite eyes turned towards me in the half-darkness. “But if you said any of this to him he’d just make funny cracks about it, he says I have a mind like a soap opera, he says I invent it. But I really don’t, you know.” She was appealing to me for judgment but she didn’t trust me, she was afraid I would talk to him about it behind her back.
“Maybe you should leave,” I said, offering my solution, “or get a divorce.”
“Sometimes I think he wants me to, I can’t tell any more. It used to be good, then I started to really love him and he can’t stand that, he can’t stand having me love him. Isn’t that funny?” She had my mother’s leather jacket over her shoulders, she’d brought it because she didn’t have a heavy sweater. With Anna’s head attached to it it was incongruous, diminished. I tried to think about my mother but she was blanked out; the only thing that remained was a story she once told about how, when she was little, she and her sister had made wings for themselves out of an old umbrella;