My Stomach is a Forest

John Lavery

The drink machine wheezes irritably, sweating in the intense heat. David leans against the machine, drinking from a can of pop. It is six o’clock, the coffee shop is nearly full. Through the windows he can see the edge of the woods, the spruce trees, frayed, grey, slouching against the syrupy, yellow sky.

“Here,” says the waitress, unfolding a metal chair which she places beside David, beside the drink machine. She might be David’s age, she might be sixteen.

A police car speeds showily past the restaurant. Its flashing lights leap across the ceiling.

The coffee shop is nearly full. But no one is eating. The conversation is sporadic, tense, surprised by sudden outbursts.

“I saw you drive into town,” the waitress says quietly, almost furtively. “In a red Cavalier? That was you? You’re on vacation are you? With your parents?”

The long day’s driving under the smirking sun, through the interminable, wooded landscape, against the creaking vinyl of the back seat. To where? To wherever Alan and Eileen drove. To this airless town, sweet with the stench of cooking pulp, the sky the colour of beer.

“Yes, yes and yes,” says David, although not all the yes’s are entirely true. He crushes the can in his palm. Another police car flashes by pretentiously, in the opposite direction this time.

They are not, strictly speaking, David’s parents. Alan is his father. That is true. David had left Alan and Eileen in the motel office, waiting for the manager to get off the telephone, Alan with his hand on Eileen’s hip, two fingers inside the waistband of her white shorts. “I’m going exploring,” he had said quickly, a soft bubble of nausea in his throat.

The waitress puts some coins into the labouring drink machine. It eliminates heavily another perfect pop can, which she gives to David. “The cops,” she says, “are everywhere.”

“I noticed,” says David. Alan and Eileen will, by this time, have rented the motel rooms. They will have tested the mattresses with their knees, have closed all the curtains, opened all the windows. Eileen will have flopped into a chair, feet well apart, heels stuck into the orange carpet. Alan will be reading a tourist brochure.

“They’re looking for Julie Fortune,” says the waitress. “She shot her husband this afternoon.”

The gleaming bubble of nausea, of surprise, slides up the sweetness in David’s throat, bursting with a creamy flush in the back of his mouth.

“You sound like you know her,” he says. “Do you?”

“She’s my cousin.”

“Do you know where she is?”

The waitress looks at David, as if to be sure that he is the one she wants to say this to, this being what she wants to say:

“No, I don’t. I can’t think. She wouldn’t run into the woods.”

The yellowness of the sky permeates the coffee shop. Eileen will by now be ventilating her hair with her fingers. She will be wishing it were later, darker, cooler, will be saying, “Do you think David is alright?”

Sirens sing out briefly, their urgency sapped by the humid air. They sound like toys.

The town is in a small state of crisis, a man has been shot, the police are everywhere, the coffee shop is nearly full. There are those who sympathize with Julie Fortune, and those who do not.

David hands the can to the waitress. She drinks deeply, exposing her seagull’s throat.

“Finish it,” he says.

“Your eyes are really blue,” she says. “Do you see things bluer than other people?”

David is embarrassed by the childishness of the question. He would like to squeeze the gull’s throat of the waitress, to feel her swallow.

Eileen will be pretending to read the tourist brochure over Alan’s shoulder. She will be holding her hair so it will not brush his face, she will be telling herself that it is not yet later, but that it will be, in time, later, cooler, darker.

“I see things,” says David, “just the way you do.”

The waitress is pleased with this. She wants to keep it for herself, does not want David to say anything more. “Bye,” she says, coy, clumsy.

Outside, the yellow sky is deepening, it is tinged with green. The smell of the pulp mill clings to David’s face as he looks up the street to the rising curtains of trees. The sight of Eileen and Alan releasing hands, walking towards him through this foreign townscape surprises him so little the bubble of nausea rises again in his throat.

“Bucket of fun being a cop here,” says Alan.

David does not know how to say that Julie Fortune has shot her husband. He does not want to appear to know something his father does not know, does not want to be asked, “How do you know that?”

“Some kid must have got bitten by a dog,” says Alan.

“That must be it,” says David. “Some dog must have got bitten by a kid.”

Eileen stands a little apart, not looking at them, but at the space between them. She is trying to concentrate on the coolness that will come. She is trying to pretend that her presence in this town is not the result of hours and hours of driving.

“Let’s eat,” says Alan. “There was a place down that-a-way a ways.”

The spruce trees appear to have melted together into a solid mass. David has the impression that if he started chopping his way through them now, he would come, before night even, to the open sea.

It is well after six now, the stench of the mill is cooling, reviving, stretching itself. Eileen walks beside David. They do not talk for a time, but the silence is too complex.

“Mmn,” she says, elegant, light, “whifferous ain’t it?”

“High-heavensville,” says David.

“Discover anything during your explorations?”

“Oh . . . ,” says David. The bubble begins to beat softly in his throat.

“Alan wants us to go visit a woodman’s museum,” says Eileen. “Oh joy.”

“Would you mind,” says Alan to the waitress, “telling me what is going on?”

The waitress is wearing one slipper and one shoe. She had been last seen some time ago, hurrying unevenly out of the restaurant, calling back as she did so:

“They’ve found her!”

Toy sirens had been heard.

“The police are looking for a missing girl,” she says. “They thought they’d found her.”

David’s cheeks are flooded with relief. He does not want Julie Fortune to be caught. He is thinking that she at least has the courage to resist while he, he must live out his life’s expectancy in the perfect pop can of its fizzy sweetness. He will live, say, to be seventy-eight. Sixty-two years of himself. Sixty-two years melted into a solid lump at which he must chop away. How many million seconds.

Eileen clucks her tongue with concern. “How old is she?”

“She’d be nineteen I guess,” says the woman. “They’ll find her.”

Only David hears the malice in the waitress’s voice. He is trying to be a substitute for himself in his own life. He is trying not to see Eileen holding her hair so it will not brush his cheek. To see his own hand running over the waistband of her white shorts.

“I’m going back to the motel,” he says.

“Want me,” says Eileen, “to come with you?”

Outside, he is set upon by the odour of the town. It is a living presence now, snuffling at his face. He has the impression that the odour can smell the bubble of nausea in his throat. He would like to go back into the restaurant. To say, “mind if I change my mind?” To hear Eileen say vigorously, “that’s what minds are for!” To hear Alan say, “as long as the new mind works a little better.”

He would like to be able to.

David looks out the bathroom window. It is the only window through which any air enters the motel room.

He has been looking out the window now for some time, has reached a state of nervous excitement beyond tiredness. He is thinking about Julie Fortune, only about Julie Fortune.

Alan and Eileen are asleep in the adjoining room. He had heard Eileen in their bathroom. “Come in here,” she had said to Alan, her voice not fifteen feet away.

Moonlight clings to the trees in the woods behind the motel. There is a large metal bin at the edge of the woods. The white letters of the word ‘garbage,’ painted by hand on the bin, appear turquoise. The ‘r’ is backwards.

“Come into the bathroom,” Eileen had said, her voice not fifteen feet away, “so David won’t hear us.”

The odour has calmed itself now that it has found the bubble in his throat. He has become accustomed to its presence, its bristly softness in his mouth. The trees behind the garbage bin are as though planted in moonlight.

David goes outside. From the motel he can see the flashing lights of a police roadblock. He ducks to the end of the motel, and looks up. The teeming stars squirm, eager for the signal to drop on him. He looks away quickly, thrilled. He has never been so intensely awake.

He runs through the long grass until he reaches the garbage bin.

“Julie Fortune,” he says softly. “I know you’re in there. I saw you. I thought you were an animal. I’m not from the police, I’m not even from here, I saw you from the window of my motel room, you don’t know me, I’m not from the police, you can’t stay in there, you lift the lid up, I’ve seen you, someone else is going to see you, I’ve got a red Cavalier, I’ll drive you anywhere you want, I’m not from the police, the police have stopped looking for now, you can come out, if you come out now I can drive you somewhere, anywhere.”

He rattles on. His voice is absorbed so quickly by the night air that he can barely hear it himself. And yet he does not doubt that Julie Fortune hears, does not doubt that he will say something to make her come out of the garbage bin. “I don’t blame you, far from it, I’ve wanted to pull a few triggers in my time.” His voice does not seem his own, it is moist, meaty in his throat, and yet he has never felt so intensely himself. “I seem to be missing the little gland that secretes high hope into the bloodstream, the future is sitting on me like a hen, like a wall sitting on Humpty-Dumpty,” he does not doubt, “don’t listen to me, Julie, I’m talking nonsense,” does not doubt that he will say something, “like music? I’ve got this basement band, I sing like farting geese on a muggy day, the bass player blows dead rats,” something, nonsense or not, “I need you in my band, Julie, so you can shoot the bass player for me,” he is increasingly exhilarated, increasingly himself, “here we go,” he says, making fricative cymbal sounds in his lips, doing glottal guitar, “I’m a hybrid that high-bred yooma-ooma-yooma folk find arresting at best yooma-ooma-yooma Part propeller, part angel, I sailed out of the nest, need I say, Julie, the ooma-yooma’s are you, we’re off, Tell again what you dream of yooma-ooma-yooma, I promise I’ll stop singing if you do the ooma-yooma’s, I don’t quite catch your drift yooma-ooma Are you thumbing, you can do igga-bigga if you find ooma-yooma too demanding, Are you thumbing your way out of the blandlands? Do the faces you face need a lift?” He is irresistible, manic, he is without doubt. He feels the malignant trees approach, the vicious stars descend, but he is all the more singular, intoxicated. To fill in the blank spaces igga-bigga-yuh between my ‘u’ and your ‘i’ ooma-yooma-yuh I lit flares out to the airstrip, I’m that sure you will fly. He is living nonsense, for once. I’m a hybrid that high-bred . . .”

He stops short.

Inside the garbage bin the humming continues, vague, barely audible, “oomyoom.”

He is exultant, victorious. He is, for once, himself.

He opens the lid of the garbage bin. For an instant he has the impression that Julie Fortune is an animal after all, that she will leap at his face.

“I’ll drive you anywhere you want,” he says. He has never been in such command of himself.

He takes Julie Fortune by the wrist and pulls her out of the garbage bin. She is insubstantial, lifeless. He could crush her wrist in his palm as easily as a perfect pop can.

The stars are very low now, and throbbing. Their fumes burn the inside of his nose.

David is in Alan and Eileen’s room. They are uncovered, splayed out over the bed awkwardly, as if sleep had seized them in an instant as they twisted in the heat. The key to the red Cavalier is in David’s hand.

He returns to his own room. He has not been gone for more than minutes, and yet Julie Fortune is already asleep on the floor. Her face is hardening with sleep. He has the impression that it will begin to crack and peel away, that she is rotting from the outside in.

He imagines the functioning of her brain behind her brittle face, its striations and massy lumps, congealed at the detonating instant of the gun, living in her hand.

He is trying not to be in love with Julie Fortune, but he cannot resist it. It is nibbling at the back of his eyes, it is coiled in his lungs. He is rotting from the inside out.

David no sooner touches her shoulder than it is as if the gun goes off again in Julie Fortune’s head. She revives so rapidly she seems to suck time into herself, seems to wake even before being touched. There is a quality almost of nakedness about her eyes.

“We have to get going,” says David softly. He does not know how to penetrate such eyes. He knows he never will.

“Where do you want to go?” he whispers. “Tell me. We’ve got to get going.”

“To the butcher’s,” says Julie Fortune. “In Hoytville.”

“Eh? What for?” he says, surprised, almost petulant.

Julie Fortune does not answer.

“How far is it to Hoytville then?”

“It’s just the next town. Twenty minutes.”

“Is that all? I’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”

“I want to go to Hoytville.”

David puts the red Cavalier in neutral and pushes it away from the motel. He gets Julie Fortune to lie down on the floor in the back, and covers her with sleeping bags and backpacks. He has only a beginner’s permit, has driven perhaps a hundred kilometres in his life. He cannot believe they will get through the police roadblock. He will be charged with aiding and abetting. The absurdity of this pleases him. He is almost laughing as he drives up to the roadblock, so certain he is that metal policemen will spring up on all sides.

But there are no policemen. There are only two patrol cars with flashing lights. A human arm grows out of the door of one of the cars and waves him through the roadblock. He is disconcerted, confused. He does not advance.

The door opens, a policeman emerges.

David’s assurance collapses. He has made a stupid, an adolescent mistake, has been given the opportunity to pass through the roadblock and not seized it. He knows he will not be given another. He can hardly breathe. He wants the policeman to hurry, to hurry, so he can confess. So he can be himself again.

“Heading out early are you,” says the policeman, “before the heat gets too hot? Those motel mattresses aren’t much for sleeping on, are they? They get a little too much exercise. You heard about what happened yesterday, I imagine. You won’t be picking up any female hitchhikers. Good enough. Carry on.”

David has barely enough strength in his foot to depress the gas pedal. He is victorious again, living nonsense, before the heat gets too hot, aiding and abetting.

It is so easy, he thinks, to be alive.

The car advances with dreamlike slowness, as though the intensity of Julie Fortune’s presence in the back seat were rubbing against time.

So easy. He has only to drive to Hoytville, and he will have lived the best kind of adventure, the kind of adventure he will be able to tell no one. He will only have to drive back then, to say he wanted to run away but changed his mind. Isn’t that what minds are for? It will all be nonsense, but he will be believed. He has sixty-two big years ahead of him. He has never felt better.

“So,” he says giddily, “Miss Julie Misfortune.”

He hears Julie Fortune emerge through the sleeping bags and sit on the creaking vinyl of the back seat.

“What is it you need to pick up at the butcher’s? A quarter pound of baloney?” Julie Fortune emits a sound not immediately recognizable as a laugh, and yet more a laugh certainly than a sob. “A little imported pemmican?”

“A little what?”

“It’s like dried meat mixed with fat.”

“I wouldn’t like that, I don’t eat meat. I smell like garbage.”

“We all do, Julie.”

“I feel like things are growing on me.”

“They are. On you and in you. There are entire civilizations of microorganisms growing on your body. Your stomach is a forest of competing fauna.”

“My stomach is a forest?” says Julie Fortune, emitting the sound again.

David too emits the sound. They are silent then. The illuminated road feeds itself gradually under the red Cavalier, the corridor of black, wiry trees slides slowly past. The becalmed car is filled with the rich, nocturnal odour of spruce.

They are so silent that David is not at first aware that Julie Fortune is humming, vaguely, barely audibly. He is sure he hears her murmur the words, “part propeller, part angel.” He is flattered. He will remember Julie Fortune for all of the sixty-two big years he has in front of him. He will never tell anyone.

“There,” she says, pointing.

David stops the car and Julie Fortune gets out.

“Good luck, “ he says.

It is over. He has aided and abetted and now he can just drive away. The stars are plentiful still, but distant, dim. He has the feeling that sleep might seize him at any moment.

Julie Fortune is signalling to him. She wants him to come. David gets out of the car.

The doors of the butcher’s shop are locked. She has found a window that can be opened from the outside, but it is heavy and falls. David holds the window up while Julie Fortune climbs into the butcher’s shop. He only needs to lower the window now, and drive away. He is very sleepy. He can just get into the red Cavalier and no one will ever know. He hears Julie Fortune moving, hears the clank of the cold room door latch, the grunt of Julie Fortune as she opens the cold room door. A light comes on.

He feels then, in every part of his being, the outrageous detonation of the gun.

The gun.

It had never occurred to him that Julie Fortune still had the gun.

The intensity of the silence that follows the detonation of the gun is more terrifying even than the explosion itself. David is so consumed by fear that he is as though entranced by it, tantalized. He wonders, with a soothing, groggy intellection, why he did not run when the gun went off. Because he was so taken aback. Yes, but was his surprise entirely genuine? Did he not know he was living nonsense? And can nonsense be said to contain the unexpected, seeing as it contains nothing else?

He knows he cannot now run from the silence.

He has no choice. It is as if the detonation of the gun had reduced the entire, trivial universe to a thin, black odour, leaving only David and the butcher’s shop with a substantial presence. He must, he will, enter the shop. Julie Fortune, perhaps, will shoot him. In the gut. He will clutch the wound, blood will dribble out through his fingers. He will grimace, gasp, fall to his knees, will no longer need to try to not be in love with Julie Fortune. He will hear her singing, tunelessly, barely audibly.

He has no choice. The silence outside the butcher’s shop is so oppressive as to make his ears throb. It will crush his cochleae. He must climb into the butcher’s shop to get out of the silence. He has no choice.

The cold room door is open, the light is on. A table has been dragged into the cold room. A man’s body is lying on the table. The body is naked, it is sun-tanned, deeply, luridly. Julie Fortune is crumpled on the floor beside the table, entangled in the sheet that had covered the body. She has lain down on the corpse of the man that she shot, and she has shot herself.

David is weeping. It is too much. He cannot imagine the intensity of feeling behind such an act. He knows he never will. He is not from here, he does not belong. He could not possibly have known that airless towns have no morgues, only butcher’s shops. He could not.

It is beyond nonsense. It is not fair.

He hears a toy siren. He wishes the sound of the gun going off were loud enough to wake Alan and Eileen and carry them immediately to him in the cold room.

He is weeping. It cannot be his fault. Julie Fortune would have killed herself in any case. Her gun is in his hand. She was as though dead already, in the garbage bin. She was. She used him. She knew he could not possibly have known. It is Julie Fortune’s fault.

He is struck by how quickly he has become accustomed to the presence of the dead. They are so helpless, so ineffectual.

The gun smells of warm oil. It recoils in his hand with a marvellous, sinewy quality. The siren squeals.

David is fascinated. The lifeless bodies are impervious to the sound of the gun which, in point of fact, is not uncomfortably loud. And yet the siren is distinctly angrier now, as if it were the siren that he had shot.

Fascinated. He fires again at Julie Fortune, and again it is the siren that screams in pain. The fumes of the gun burn the inside of his nose. He has never been so intensely alive. The barrel of the gun is in his mouth, it tastes of sinew, of warm oil. The bubble in his throat sniffs excitedly at the gun. Flashing lights leap across the cold room ceiling. The furious siren goes silent, suddenly. It is as though sucked into a hole in the ground. David imagines his brain, its glowing particles and turbulent, sparking clouds, dispersed at the detonating instant of the gun, living in his hand. He will never tell anyone.

THE END