The evening started dull, as most evenings did.
You could watch a feature film in the Avalon, on Main Street in Coronation’s only movie theater.
The Alberta tiny town featured nine hundred plus souls. You could wander over to Chong’s Café for a cold Coke and a warm piece of pie. You could shoot eight ball at Mac’s Pool Hall, if you were desperate enough to breathe smoke and be insulted by an old drunk. Or you could wait for a fist fight to erupt behind the beer parlor and you usually didn’t have to wait long.
Mac’s had no ventilation. The place was dark blue with roll-your-own cigarette smoke, and Mac, who was in his eighties, smoked Camels in a long, dirty, cracked black cigarette holder. He was usually drunk and horrid to his wife.
One night he threw the poor woman out of their house. She was seventy-five, weighed about ninety-five pounds, and she had to sleep in a wicker clothes basket in the old drunk’s tool shed.
Mac teased me about being a virgin. “Hey, Sport,” he’d say, loud enough for every farmhand and mechanic in the room to hear, “when you going to get yourself a piece of ass?”
This was hard enough to endure when the pool hall was half-empty. When it was packed on a Saturday night, it was more than I could manage.
So I avoided Mac’s.
I was walking beside the alley that bordered Chong’s Café when a voice called out: “Hey, Sport.”
I squinted into the dust and saw Kort behind the wheel of a new 1961 Chevy coupe.
Kort was eighteen, about my age, except he looked like a man. He had been shaving since he was twelve and had muscles the size of small livestock. He worked as a roughneck on the oil rigs of northern Alberta and could fling hay bales around his stepfather’s farm as though they were prairie puffballs.
“What are you doing in town?” I asked.
“Came to see Jill. It’s her birthday tomorrow. Got her some imported French perfume.” He patted the dashboard. “Like my new buggy?”
“It’s great,” I said.
But I was thinking about Jill.
Jill had sparkling green eyes and was my idea of what a seventeen-year-old fox should be. She could have had almost any guy in town, which is why I never put the moves on her. Kort had asked me to keep an eye on her while he was away working the rigs.
Keeping an eye on Jill sounded like a wonderful assignment until you got down to brass tacks.
Brass tacks was Kort’s term for getting laid.
Kort and I had been buddies since the third grade. At least a dozen times he had stopped locals from breaking my underdeveloped body into smaller pieces. When a friend like that asks you for a favor, you do not say no.
“Pile in,” Kort said. “Let’s liven up this burg.”
I walked around and got in.
For a new car, the Chevy was deteriorating quickly. The rear fender was dented, the bumper was bent, one tail light was missing, and the back window was cracked and caked with mud. That was what happened when a new car spent time in the oil fields.
“So,” said Kort, grinding the car into second, “you seen much of Jill?”
“No.”
“Anybody been getting down to brass tacks with her?”
“Not that I heard.”
Kort reached under his seat and came up with a bottle of beer. He offered it to me.
I shook my head.
“Remember the time your old man got drunk at the barbecue and old lady McCalpine called your mother and said he was crawling around like a bear in her carrots?”
“I remember.”
We both laughed.
I found the bottle opener and flipped off the cap. Kort lifted the bottle and took a long pull.
Then he gave me a sidelong glance.
“You’re putting on a little muscle. Another couple months, you could work the rigs.”
“I don’t know if I want to work the rigs. Too dangerous.”
Kort shrugged. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jean jacket and smiled with the satisfaction of a man who had left home and was now successful in the world.
“I don’t think Jill stays at the farm all the time,” he said.
I wondered if he had heard I had gone to the movies with her a few days earlier.
“How do you figure?”
“Because,” said Kort, “she’s right over there.”
Jill was standing in front of Builder’s Hardware among a group of Hutterites who had come into town for Saturday night.
The Hutterites dressed mostly in black. Black shoes, black pants, black skirts, black shirts, black hats. They spoke English with a thick German accent and lived in a colony twenty miles from Coronation, where they collectively held massive sections of land. The individual owned nothing.
On Saturday nights, the head man gave the men enough money to buy a couple of beers. The women got no money, so they waited on the street and window-shopped while their men drank.
Jill stood among them like a daisy in a field of black clover.
I do not think I had ever seen anyone more beautiful.
She did not recognize Kort’s car. She did not see him either.
But she saw me and gave me a warm smile, with teeth as white and perfect as Chiclets. Then she looked past me and saw Kort grinning at her.
“Hi, Kort,” she said. “What are you doing back in town?”
“Passing through.”
“I like your car.”
“This old jalopy? Bought it off a tool push who got a contract in South America. Get in.”
“Is it okay if Irene comes with us?”
“Sure.”
Jill smiled at him.
Until that moment I had not known Jill was capable of a warmer smile than the one she had given me. That gives you some idea of how much I knew about women.
Jill opened the back door for her friend.
Out of the shadows came Irene.
She had acne that looked close to terminal, crossed eyes, and a nose that was not helped by any surrounding feature. I was immediately afraid she was going to be my date for the evening.
Then she looked at Kort’s damaged Chevy and said, “This car has been loved with farm equipment.”
I laughed.
No one else did.
Instead of getting into the front seat, Jill got in back with Irene.
“Hey,” said Kort. “Why don’t you sit up here with me?”
“What’s on your mind, Mr. Roughneck?” Jill giggled.
Kort gave me an annoyed look.
“Women,” he muttered.
He stepped on the accelerator.
“Oh, by the way — happy birthday.”
He dug out Jill’s present, a small package wrapped in silver and gold, and passed it back to her.
Jill undid the wrapping. Both girls examined the tiny bottle of perfume.
Kort kept one eye on the rearview mirror and one eye on Jill.
Suddenly Jill screamed.
“Stop!”
Kort hit the brakes and my forehead bounced against the windshield. If we had been going faster, I would have gone through the glass.
Standing two inches in front of the Chevy’s hood was Bart Barley.
His real name was Harland Barley, but everyone called him Bart Barley.
Never to his face.
Bart Barley and Kort were the two toughest guys in town. No one messed with either of them. They shared the same philosophy: if challenged, explode like a hammer coming out of hell.
Bart had seen Rebel Without a Cause about a dozen times. He was lighting a cigarette.
He took a long drag, let smoke leak from his wide nostrils, tucked the package into his sleeve, pulled his ear, adjusted the crotch of his jeans, and examined the Chevy as though it had just appeared from outer space.
He had skin the color and texture of old potatoes from working summer sun on his uncle’s farm. The mercury vapor lights made the metal tabs on his collar glisten like twisted stars.
His shirt was western cut. He always wore it when he had on his silver belt buckle.
He had won that buckle at the Stettler Rodeo when he was sixteen. It had cost him five broken ribs, a twisted ankle, and the tip of his right small finger.
He once told me the buckle would have been worth the whole finger.
Bart ran a callused hand along the hood of the Chevy.
“Sonabitch,” he said. “This is some car. Where’d you get her?”
“Same place you could get one if you’d work the rigs,” said Kort.
Bart looked in and saw me. Then he spotted the two girls in the back.
“Hop in,” said Kort. “I’ll show you how this thing takes corners.”
Bart shrugged and reached for Jill’s door, figuring he would sit beside her.
“I want to sit beside a window,” said Jill. “Likewise for my friend Irene.”
“You expect me to sit in the middle between the two of you on the hump?”
“You can sit where you please,” said Jill. “But Irene and me each get a window.”
Bart walked around to my side and opened the passenger door.
“You don’t mind sliding over, do you?”
“Heck no,” I said.
First, Bart had seen me with Jill at the movies. If I gave up my window seat, he might keep his lip buttoned.
Second, although Bart was often gentle, when he was riled, bones got broken. I had seen his rough side.
It was awful to behold.
Just awful.
We tooled past the Alberta Liquor Vendor and the Co-op while Jill opened the perfume. Suddenly the entire car filled with the most delicate scent of flowers I had ever experienced.
“Cost me a week’s salary,” said Kort. “And I’m talking overtime. Bought it from a peddler who picked it up in Paree.”
He pronounced Paris as Paree and nudged me, as if to say: if that doesn’t get her down to brass tacks, nothing will.
I smiled feebly.
The town cop was parked outside the telephone office, visiting his girlfriend Beth, who was married to a car salesman.
Kort finished his beer, belched, and stepped on the gas. Gravel kicked behind us in a wake of dust and tiny rocks.
By the time we reached the edge of town, Kort had made certain everyone in the car had a bottle of beer.
Everyone but me.
Soon we were headed north on the gravel road to the cemetery.
It was about three miles out of town.
Irene asked why the graveyard was so far away.
I explained that when Coronation was founded, people thought it was going to become a small city and the cemetery would eventually be near the center.
“So much for turn-of-the-century urban planning,” said Irene.
I was the only one who smiled.
“I don’t know why we’re going to the graveyard,” said Jill. “It’s getting dark.”
“It’s not the dead ones you have to watch out for,” I said. “It’s the live ones.”
Bart threw back his head and made a noise like a wolf. Then he said dead people walked around the graveyard during a full moon.
There was a full moon.
Its light flickered through the yellow shafts of harvested grain on both sides of the road.
“Could someone open another beer for me?” asked Jill.
I reached for the bottle, but Bart grabbed it.
“Hell,” he said. “Here’s how you open a Goddam bottle of juice.”
He ripped the cap off with his teeth and handed it back to Jill.
Jill had seen Bart do this before.
Irene had not.
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll break your teeth?” she asked.
“I got plenty,” said Bart. “Gimme your beer and I’ll open it.”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“I said gimme it, bitch.”
He yanked the beer out of Irene’s hand. For a big man, Bart was fast. Before she could protest, he had ripped off the cap with his teeth and returned it.
“You chipped your tooth,” she said.
“Doesn’t hurt.”
Kort nudged me in the ribs and winked.
“Hey, Bart — tell her how you lost the tip of your finger at the rodeo.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” said Irene.
“A Brahma bull trampled me,” said Bart. “When I got up, the finger end was gone.”
“He’s telling the truth,” said Kort, laughing. “That’s how he won his silver buckle.”
“That’s how I won her,” said Bart.
He tipped his beer to his lips and drained half the bottle.
“God,” said Irene. “There’s blood on your mouth.”
“Got lots where that came from.”
He finished his beer and stared back at Irene.
“Don’t you drink?”
She took a tiny sip.
Bart threw his empty bottle out the window. It smashed into a spray of glass. We were doing about fifty miles an hour.
Then he nudged me and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “God, that woman is uglier than a mud fence.”
I winced.
When I turned around, Irene was trying to look calm, but I could see she was on the verge of tears.
Bart had hurt her.
Kort leaned across me.
“Don’t talk that way.”
“She’s a pig, man.”
Bart was acting drunker than he should have been. He hunted around inside his shirt and came up with a mickey of whiskey.
“I like something with a little life to it.”
He bit the cap off the bottle.
“That’s quite an outfit,” said Irene from the back seat. “Part western, part Bohemian.”
“What’s a Bohemian?” asked Kort.
“They don’t go along with the establishment,” said Irene.
“They’re into music and art,” I said.
“Hank Snow is the only guy I ever heard I liked,” said Bart.
We reached the graveyard.
It was dark, but the moon shimmered over the stones.
Bart took two pulls of whiskey, staggered out of the car, jammed the plastic cap into his mouth, chewed it into pieces, and swallowed them.
“Why did you do that?” asked Irene.
“Because when I open a bottle, I finish her, you dumb pig.”
He raised his arms like an airplane and pretended he was a B-52 pilot, zooming among the headstones.
The rest of us got out.
The cemetery was filled with names I knew. Grandparents and great-grandparents of kids I had gone to school with. Young men from World War I and World War II. Some of them had died in Europe when they were seventeen or eighteen.
I saw one small gravestone for a young girl who, I had heard, died after an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and a botched abortion by a Ukrainian midwife.
Kort took Jill by the hand. They walked behind a white cement angel holding a cross. I heard them whispering and guessed they were kissing.
Bart set his half-full whiskey bottle on a black tombstone.
“’Scuse me,” he said. “Got to choke the old gopher.”
He unzipped and disappeared behind a hedge.
That left me alone with Irene.
She ran her fingers over the carved name Cuthbertson on a headstone.
“He died young.”
“Yeah. World War I.”
“He was about your age when he left Canada.”
“I’d hate to go to war.”
“You’d do all right,” she said. “You’ll do pretty good at almost anything.”
“I will?”
She nodded.
“How come you don’t drink?”
“Makes me feel awful the next day.”
“Me too.”
We could hear Bart peeing.
“He thinks I’m ugly,” she said.
“He’s drunk. I wouldn’t pay much attention.”
“But I am ugly. Outside, anyway. Inside, I try not to be.”
“What?”
“My nose is too big. I have acne. And my eyes cross.”
I was relieved she had brought up the eyes so I would not have to pretend not to notice them.
“Your nose looks fine to me.”
“You tell nice lies.”
In the moonlight her acne almost disappeared, and her nose did seem fine. Her face softened. Her eyes were still crossed, but somehow that made her look more alert, as though she were watching two truths at once.
“When I’m older,” she said, “the acne will go away, and I’ll get my eyes fixed again. Maybe I’ll even get my nose done. The doctor said I have to wait another year before my eye uncrosses. I already had two operations. They cut you right here.”
She pointed to a tiny dimple beside her eye.
“I still don’t know what you meant about trying not to be ugly inside,” I said.
“When people hurt me, I try to get even. It’s dumb. My mother says I have to stop.”
Bart stepped out from behind the hedge.
“Like it here with all these corpses?”
He laughed, grabbed his whiskey bottle, and took another pull. Then he offered it to Irene.
She took the bottle and flung it over the headstones.
It broke.
“Dumb pig,” muttered Bart. “Almost empty anyhow.”
From behind the angel I heard Kort say, “Come on, let’s take them back to town, then you and I’ll—”
His voice dropped too low for me to hear.
Jill said yes.
Then neither of them said anything.
A moment later they came out from behind the angel holding hands. Jill’s hair was mussed and the top two buttons of her blouse were open.
We got back into the car.
Jill sat between Kort and me. Bart and Irene ended up in the back seat.
Bart said there was a rodeo coming up in Lacombe and he planned to enter.
“Nice thing about rodeo work,” he said, “is you meet great pussy. Women with good bodies. Good noses.”
He reached over, took Irene’s nose between his fingers, and made a honking sound.
I was going to say something.
Irene looked directly at me, shook her head slightly, and smiled.
Then she reached over, squeezed Bart’s knee, and gave him a different smile.
Bart looked curious.
“I heard cowboys are hellishly good lovers,” said Irene.
“You heard right, bitch.”
“I bet you screw assiduously.”
Bart’s expression made it clear he did not know whether assiduously was praise or insult.
Then Irene said she had also heard that men who rode bulls were fags.
“You don’t know jackshit,” said Bart.
“In the city,” said Irene, “drugstore cowboys play at being pretend cowboys so they can wear silk shirts like yours.”
Bart frowned and finished another beer.
Then Irene said she wondered whether he had really lost the tip of his finger in a rodeo.
She had heard that when a man got screwed by other men, they cut off the tip of his finger so all the other queers would know he liked to switch-hit.
“Think a fag could do this?” asked Bart.
He opened the car door and stepped outside.
By God, we must have been doing more than fifty miles an hour when Bart dove into the gravel.
He bounced like a sack of watermelons.
Kort skidded to a stop and backed up. He almost ran over Bart, who was lying face down in the road.
Kort and I carried him back to the car.
Bart was bloody and dirty, but no bones seemed broken. Jill said we should take him straight to the hospital.
Bart shook his head, spat blood, reached for another beer, and said, “Forget the hospital.”
Then he gave Irene a cold look, as if to say: what do you think now, bitch?
“Too bad the door popped open,” said Irene. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have fallen out accidentally.”
“It was no accident,” said Bart.
Irene pinched his cheek.
“You don’t think anyone believes you’re tough enough to dive into a gravel road while this car is moving, do you?”
Slowly, deliberately, Bart reached for the door.
I yelled for Kort to stop.
Bart stepped out into the gravel.
Jill screamed.
Kort swore at Irene and asked why I had not stopped him.
The moon slipped behind an old owl as we got the Chevy stopped.
Kort found a flashlight. After a few minutes, we located Bart pitched on his head, one foot sticking up toward the North Star. His face was crunched against a boulder and his hair dripped blood.
I knelt beside him and felt for a pulse.
“He doesn’t have a heartbeat,” I said.
“Don’t be nuts,” said Kort. “You’re taking his pulse from the wrong side of his wrist.”
By then Jill and Irene were out of the car.
The four of us dragged Bart back. There were low moans coming from him.
“Is the hospital still open?” asked Jill.
“The hospital is always open!” said Kort. “Get some paper under his head. He’s bleeding all over my seat.”
I found a newspaper and slipped it between Bart’s head and the upholstery.
Irene dabbed at Bart’s wounds with her handkerchief.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “You have to forgive me. I didn’t mean to trick you.”
Bart’s right eye opened.
“He’s awake,” said Jill. “Now let’s get him to the hospital.”
Kort started the car and eased it into second.
“’Course I’m awake,” said Bart.
He grabbed Irene’s arm.
“What’d you mean, forgive you?”
“Stop the car!” screamed Jill.
Irene leaned close to Bart.
“I tricked you into jumping out. It’s not your fault. I made you do it. You’re just more stupid than any of us can imagine.”
“Shut up,” said Kort. “You’ll have him diving out again.”
Bart got his hand on the door handle.
“I do what I want. No ugly broad gets me to do nothing.”
Then he opened the door, made a sound like a duck, and flew out into the night.
We were doing less than ten miles an hour, but he still hit hard.
Then, dripping blood and spit, Bart stood up and raced around the Chevy, flapping his arms and making a noise that sounded more like a crow than a duck.
“What the hell does he think he is — a mallard?” asked Kort.
He jumped out, and the two of us tried to grab Bart.
We had him for a second, but he twisted away and vanished into the ditch.
Rain began to fall.
At first just a few hard drops. Then the sky opened.
Lightning snapped across the black prairie.
We searched the ditch, the road, the stubble field. The girls stayed by the car, shivering.
“He must have walked back to town,” said Kort. “It’s only half a mile.”
Another flash of lightning lit the Nose Hills.
In that white burst, we saw Bart running along the crest of the hill.
Backlit by the storm, he looked like something from another planet.
Kort cursed and climbed through the barbed wire fence. He held the strands apart for me. By the time we got through, we were covered in mud.
More lightning etched Bart against the blackness. He looked like bas-relief carved into an old headstone.
I remembered a movie about Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. That was what Bart looked like — galloping across the prairie, flapping his wings like a disturbed duck.
Kort and I ran after him.
The mud sucked at my shoes, but Bart seemed not to feel it. He laughed maniacally and raced along the hilltop, his cowboy shirt flapping in the wind.
Kort was a strong runner and soon closed the distance.
Bart looked over his shoulder, blood dripping from his chin. He jumped once, half flying, half falling.
For a second he seemed frozen in the lightning.
Then he disappeared.
Gone.
Vanished.
When I reached the top of the hill, I saw what had happened.
Years earlier, the Canadian National Railway had cut away part of the hill to make a level bed for tracks. Later, after the line fell into disuse, locals tore up the rails and sold the iron for scrap.
All that remained were scattered railway ties, cracked and waterlogged.
Bart was splayed across one of them.
If the rails had still been there, he would have been dead.
The wet ties had saved him.
Jill and Irene began honking the horn.
Kort yelled that we had found Bart and ordered the girls to stay put and shut up.
We half slid, half crawled down the muddy bank. Kort kept threatening to beat Bart for ruining the evening.
Bart was unconscious. Rain washed blood from his face and collarbone onto the gray gravel.
We got him upright and dragged him back toward the road.
We must have looked like three ragged clowns in a stop-action nightmare. Every few seconds the sky turned white, then black. Each flash showed us fifty feet away, then forty, then twenty, staggering through rain and mud with Bart between us.
At the barbed wire fence, we shoved Bart under, then climbed over and carried him down and up the ditch toward the Chevy.
I cut my hand on the wire.
Jill and Irene had the back door open.
We were trying to load Bart inside when his eyes snapped open.
Maybe he had been pretending to be unconscious.
Maybe he had been visiting another planet and just returned.
I do not know.
I do know that when Kort tried to stop him, Bart cracked Kort in the nose, turned, and ran back down through the ditch. He seemed to go straight through the barbed wire fence and slopped through the stubble.
Kort rubbed his nose, got back into the car, and roared at Jill to sit beside him. He ordered Irene and me into the back.
I started to argue, but Irene pulled me in.
We drove back to town.
Kort said Bart was crazy and he never wanted to see him again.
I started to say something, but Irene put her finger against my lips and shook her head.
I tried to imagine what she would look like with clear skin and straight eyes.
Actually, she was not that bad.
And she was smarter than a tree full of owls.
Also dangerous to cross.
While I was thinking this, she buried her head under my chin and began nibbling my ear.
She was one hell of a nibbler.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Jill staring back at me.
“I’m dropping you two in town,” said Kort. “Then I’m taking Jill home.”
“We better tell the police about Bart,” I said.
“Do what you want,” said Kort.
“You can let us off at my aunt’s,” said Irene. “We’ll call from there.”
A few minutes later Kort stopped in front of a white two-bedroom cottage a few blocks from my house.
Irene and I got out.
The rain had stopped. The first rays of sunlight were beginning to spill across the eastern horizon.
“My aunt and uncle won’t be back until tomorrow,” said Irene. “I’ll make you something to eat.”
Inside, she made coffee, bacon, and eggs while I tried to call the police.
There was no answer.
“Boy,” she said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m soaked to the skin.”
“I got pretty wet.”
“Let’s have a shower.”
“I can go home.”
“Be more fun here.”
She went into the bathroom and turned on the shower.
I did not know what to do.
Then she called, “Come on in.”
I went to the bathroom door.
The room was dark because she had closed the blinds. Steam filled the air.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“In the shower.”
I thought about Jill and how much I liked her.
I thought about Bart and the crazy night we had survived.
I thought about how much fun it would be to get into a shower with a naked girl.
I had never done anything like that before.
Part of me wanted to get in.
Another part of me was frightened.
Irene was something else. I believed her when she said she would be beautiful one day. I also knew how good she was at dealing with people. If Bart had not called her ugly, he might have been standing where I was, being invited into a shower.
And Bart would have gone in.
“Come on,” said Irene. “Don’t be chicken.”
I let myself out the back door and walked to the policeman’s house.
His car was gone.
At home, I crept in through the garage.
My father’s Oldsmobile was parked there. I considered borrowing it and trying to find Bart myself, but I was not allowed to take the car without permission, and it would have been impossible to explain to my father what was going on at five in the morning.
I went to my room, peeled off my damp clothes, and crawled under the covers. I figured I would rest for an hour, then go look for the police again.
The sun woke me around nine.
My mother heard me get up and asked if I wanted breakfast.
I said I had something to do.
I did not want to explain that Irene had already made breakfast for me a few hours earlier.
I hurried to Bart’s house. I figured his father would help me find him.
When I got there, Bart was slumped in the shade, sipping a beer.
“Want a brew?” he asked.
“No thanks.”
“Found ’em in the ditch,” he said.
He finished the bottle and uncapped another.
“That Irene is some bitch, huh?”
“She might not be so bad if you got to know her.”
“I bet she’ll be careful who she calls queer next time.”
His shirt was stained with mud and blood. There were gashes on his cheek, crusted dark around the edges. His right eye was swollen half shut.
“You sure you’re all right?” I asked. “You want me to take you to the doctor?”
“Naw. Besides, he couldn’t do anything for this.”
Bart held up his left hand.
His thumb was gone.
For a moment I could not speak.
The stump was raw and dark, packed with mud and dried blood. Flies had already found it. One landed, lifted off, and came back again.
My stomach turned.
Bart looked at it as casually as if he had misplaced a glove.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Lost it last night.”
He took another drink.
Then he grinned.
“But what the hell. I got nine left.”
He laughed, the same crazy laugh he had made while running through the lightning, half man and half wounded duck.
After a few more minutes I went home.
That afternoon Irene came over and asked if I wanted to see the matinee at the Avalon.
I said sure.
My mother said she thought Irene was a nice girl.
Kort and Jill were at the matinee.
Jill looked different.
She was wearing the perfume Kort had given her.
She had put on too much.
Irene and Jill talked for a while. Later Irene told me Jill had gotten down to brass tacks with Kort.
Jill had asked if the two of us had.
Irene told her it was none of her business.
A few days later Irene went back to the city. We wrote once or twice, but I did not see her again for five years.
And then not in person.
I saw her photograph in a magazine.
She was runner-up for Miss Canada.
I thought about Irene after that.
I thought about the graveyard, the storm, the shower, and the girl who had tried very hard not to be ugly inside.
But by then it was water over the dam.
Or down the drain.
