If Annette’s mother was on the floor, her jaw askew from a punch firmly delivered and her head bloody from the blow it took in the fall that followed, and she was seriously dead, no blame can be laid except to the wind, the damnable, disreputable wind.
My worry was that police and lawyers and courts would, like Annette, not see it this way.
But it was the wind, the bloody-minded wind.
The jet stream had arched up over Alberta, an infrequent thing, and only drooped back down when it reached the eastern edges of Saskatchewan. Thus the Arctic high November would normally invite into this prairie province was denied entry. In it’s place a high from the south, a trundling traveller from the Pacific, was shown in. It accepted and came from the west, leaping up and over the mountains like a gymnast, blowing strongly and warmly and disruptively.
It was a chinook and it put me in a rage.
Almost from the moment it began to blow I fumed, aimlessly, pointlessly, fatally.
“Why do we have to go to your mother’s?” I had asked earlier in the day, using my cranky voice.
“Because we have to,” Annette said dogmatically, the chinook a bellows to her own restless anger.
“I don’t want to. I’m not going.”
“Yes you are.” Although I could hear her voice becoming quiet, her words fewer (certain signs she was approaching the point of exploding in a rage) the winds were acting on me and I prodded.
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“I’m …”
The plate crashed against the wall beside my head. A shard flew off and scratched my temple. Though it bled, it was a flesh wound only.
“Fuck!” I bellowed stupidly.
“Fuck!” Annette cried back. “Look what you’ve done now! That was one of the good plates!”
“I did? I’m not the one who threw it!”
“You might as well have!”
And so we fought and fumed and fought some more until we eventually went to her mother’s, where we battled on raging, raging.
Outside the chinook’s winds continued to breathe disorder and disaster. Like Spain’s tramontanas or California’s Santa Anas, they streamed over us like flame and we were firecrackers, our wicks exposed and ready to ignite.
Annette’s mother, too, was in a mood. For spite and contrariness she had planned a dinner of liver and onions, though she knew I despised this.
“I can’t eat that!” I insisted.
“Try.”
“Yes, try,” Annette added as a warning.
“I won’t!” I shouted.
“You’ll eat what you’re given and be thankful!” her mother yelled back.
“Eat this, bitch!” I exploded. “Be thankful for this!”
I hit her. It hardly seems possible now, yet I did.
Her jaw swung right but, strangely, the rest of her head more or less remained in place. She was like a puppet. Her eyes widened in wonder. I don’t imagine anyone had ever socked her before.
In the street beyond the house, the trees’ thrashing increased in violence as the winds grew, howling like drunken revelers rushing past.
And then Annette’s mother, in a rigid weave like a dropping bowling pin, tilted left, then right, forward, and back. Finally, she fell, cracking the back of her head on the kitchen counter.
She lay on the floor like an abandoned doll, blood pooling around her.
“Oh god,” Annette whispered. “What have you done?”
“It wasn’t me,” I said quietly. “The wind …”
“The wind?” she said, turning to look at me. “The wind? Did the wind hit my mother in the face? Did the fucking wind fucking crack her fucking head open?”
Annette’s anger had it’s second steam. Beyond the house, the winds still blew though it seemed to me they were somehow different.
“I don’t mean that …” I tried to say.
“Well what the hell do you mean?”
“I mean … oh shit. Shouldn’t we do something? She’s bleeding.”
“Should we do something? ‘Should we do something’ he asks. Of course we should do something. So fucking do something!”
“What?”
“I’m a nurse now? How do I know!”
I had my cell phone. I called 911 although I knew there was a strong likelihood of unfortunate consequences for myself.
“Help,” I said.
“Can I get your address, sir?”
Thus the call was made. Not long afterwards police and paramedics arrived. The scene unfolded just as it does on local TV news, only without the editing or banal narrative. I saw a neighbour of Annette’s mom with a cell phone taking pictures. Another appeared to have a video camera. Both were buoyant with the tools of happy technology. Disaster was like going to Disneyland.
I had to recount my story several times to the police. I remember saying, “So anyway, my girlfriend was pissed about the whole thing. The whole thing being me because I was pissed. We were all pissed. It’s the winds, you know. The chinook? …”
Later, we would all be on the news – with editing and banal narration.
In all the collecting of details, the pronouncement of a death, the stern expressions of the police and earnest looks of the paramedics, I believe it was only I who noticed that, as I had suspected earlier, the wind had changed. It lacked commitment now. It had acquired an austerity and Zen-like ambivalence.
And it was now not so much from the west as from the north. It was no longer warm either. It carried a retributive coolness in it.
And my anger was spent. As was Annette’s.
The chinook was over.
(Originally published on Crazy Ass Planet, Saturday November 19, 2005.)
{ 0 comments }
