The Bay of Love and Sorrows Read Online Free Page A

presence did.
    The place smelled thickly of spruce bark and tar.
    Everette was about thirty-six, bald, had a scar on his cheek that was black and red, and wide, dark eyes. He moved slowly — his hands now and then made signs for something and Gail would run to get it. She had prayed most of the month of November for him not to come to her when he was released from jail but he had made it directly to her shack that afternoon. And now he was half-drunk. So none of her prayers had been answered.
    The door opened. Michael and Silver entered. Everette looked at Michael as he sipped from a small pickle jar of moonshine.
    “Your father put me in jail,” he said. The air was hot where they were. There was in Everette’s look a peculiar expression of outraged morality that is the bare bones of every criminal face. Michael sensed he had to do or say something to prove himself very quickly.
    There was a moment when Silver started to go to the door. “C’mon, Michael,” he said. He put his hand on Michael’s arm, but Michael shrugged him off.
    “You’ll find I’m not my father,” Michael said, moving towards Everette as he said it.
    Michael then took out a slab of hash wrapped in paper, and cut off a chunk.
    “I'll give you this for some shine.“
    Everette was startled by this. He picked up the hash, smelled it, touched it with his tongue, and said, “The case against me was for that new prosecutor, Laura McNair, to get her wings. A just-out-of-college quiff. I’ll get her back the last thing I do.“
    Everette was talking about the assistant prosecutor who had helped send him to jail. Michael knew Laura McNair. He had taken her to a dance one Christmas when he was home from private school (the date had been arranged by his mother) and had kissed her on the cheek. Now, at this second, he had seen the underworld and how it spoke about his world, but he was unperturbed by this, because he felt he had the wit to side with the underworld. Men like Michael always felt that by holding no judgement they could flit back and forth from one world to the other.
    “That’s how things go,” Michael said, shrugging. He then moved his left hand towards the white jar. “Won’t blind me, will it?” he added, with it close to his lips, glancing over at Everette.
    “Means it’s good,” Everette said, not looking up from the block of chocolate-coloured hash and waving his hand. In that wave was the one other trait he exhibited as much as rough power — a certain indefinable hatred for those about him.
    The hash was worth five times as much as the shine, so Everette was pleased. Everette, pleased with how his comment sounded, said it again.
    “Means it’s good.”
    Everyone in the small, meagre shack, in the middle of broken windfalls and trees, began laughing, and their laughter, filtered by yellow light, caressed the snow and reached almost to the dump in back of them, where a rat burrowed down to suckle her nine young, her favourite, one with a small, black, slick face.
    Silver stood near Michael, agitated and restless. He hadn’t had any moonshine as yet because Madonna had been keeping an eye on him. But now she was at home and he was here. When the jar was passed to him, he tried to remember what they had told him at the hospital about peer pressure, and how miserable he had felt just a year ago when he was sniffing glue. He closed his eyes and bolted it back.
    “Eeeeuhhhoo!” he called, banging his foot on the floor, and waking Brian, the little boy.
    Although he was only a few minutes from Tom Donnerel’s and could go there at any time, Michael spent the rest of that winter at Madonna and Silver’s place. And once in a while they would meet Everette as they came and went. They were always pleasant with him and he with them, sharing a toke of hash oil, which was plentiful, and a drink of moonshine, and going on their way.
    Michael, all during this time, lived with Silver, began, at the exact moment she wanted him to, to