Barbaric Yawp
Volume 8, No. 2

MR. HOYNE, who owns the resort, who is short and friendly but very tired in that way where one has thick bags under his eyes and wears a smile that looks like as if it’s held together with hooks.

coy MRS. BERNHARDT who works behind the front desk in the leaf-broken sunlight. She’s always eager to see you in your bathing suit, craning her neck in the window when you walk past along the gravel walkway to the pond. And when you ask for a towel: “Such a revealing swimsuit,” she says grinning, eyes darting downwards.

YOU with the white streak in your black hair. Idyllic punk. Irreverent forest nymph. You with saucer eyes. You lunar girl. Your big old pants flaired at the bottoms, frayed at the ends. The tiny straps of your tanktop lying so softly over your collarbones, not quite covering your deep red bra straps, your bare shoulders, your fingernails sparkly with nail polish, your cool palm on my flushed cheeks. You like to touch my ear. Sometimes when I’m talking, you take the lobe and hold it between your fingertips and I forget what I’m saying.

JULIE-ANN, the line dancing instructor. Our parents both make us go. You don’t dance. You sit off to the side, back against the wood-paneled wall, arms folded, annoyed. I stand where Julie-Ann tells me, move how she tells me, shuffle where she tells me. I’m such a dope. I’m watching you. Through the screen windows, the Hemlocks tower over you. It’s almost dark and the woods smell of pine. “Hey Isobel,” Julie-Ann says, “Come on and join the fun!” You roll your eyes. You’re too cool to believe. You blow my mind.

In the arcade, WENDY MYER, who cashes in our dollar bills for tokens, red hair tucked behind her ears, flipping through the pages of Cosmo. I play Hogan’s Alley, plastic gun in hand; I’m the cop clicking the trigger at the screen. I can see my reflection superimposed over the robbers I’m shooting–long bangs in my eyes, shirtless, gun squeezed in both hands. I fire my last shot and I’m all out of bullets and there’s still one robber left when suddenly he falls, shot dead and I didn’t know you were there, standing next to me, the game’s other plastic gun in your hand. You smile slightly–as much as I’ve ever seen you do–and raise an eyebrow; your eyeshadow sparkles in the black light.

MRS. HOYNE who runs the bingo game the old people play every night in the Rec Room. Your father, my father, your mother, my mother, their faces young and smooth next to the others. Grave, ancient faces like carved stone kings bent over cardboard cards; shifting, arranging, rearranging, now here, now there, their clear plastic tidily-winks; then dumping them all and the room sounds like a cashing slot machine. Outside in the cool night, we can see their long shadows stretched against the screen-window walls; we can hear the calls of “N-34, N-34″ or “O-6″ over the crackling microphone and the cricket-choked quiet waits in between. Probably they can hear us. “What are you doing now?” “Nothing. What are you doing?” “Nothing.” “Where are you going?” “Nowhere. Where are you going?” The night is alive with fireflies.

VICTORIA MULE, 14 years old, who disappeared a month before. We only see her ghostly face on partially peeling MISSING posters stuck on the walls and telephone poles around town and on the resort’s occasional birch tree.

THE “COOL” BARTENDER–”Hip” and young–well not so hip, not so young. He wears tight jeans with a comb in his back pocket. His feathered hair is short in front, long in back. “What can I get you?” he says grinning in the faux rustic bar area. We’re old enough to drink here in Canada but not in the United States. In the corner there’s a tiny dance floor with a disco ball and a handful of colored lights. We share secret eye-smiles when the middle aged folk get funky. There’s something about you unreadable beneath the irony, behind the eyerolls, painted over with sparkly eyeshadow, something secret, something girly maybe. Or sweet. Or ferocious, animalistic. I’d die to know what it is. You sip your mai-tai quietly through a straw, smirking slightly, eyes on me.

DARIUS HICKS, THE RESORT’S ASSISTANT COOK, 2 or 3 years older than us. Back behind the main lodge, leaning against the wall: handsome, unshaven, he stands with one knee bent, his foot stuck against the wood. Smoking cigarette dangling, dried splattered blood crusted on his once-white chef duds. Beside him, his meat cleaver sticks, stands upright in a tree stump.

your little sister SHANA who’s often seen back in the woods with Darius Hicks, groping and nuzzling.

and did I mention MR. HOYNE? He’s growing suspicious that something’s not quite right in his resort. He stands outside the main lodge sometimes when we pass, frowning, shaking his head slightly, Mrs. Bernhardt next to him, whispering in his ear.

DR. KELLY, long-retired, who sits hunched over a half dozen bingo cards that last night. G-56; G-56. My father, your father, my mother–all furiously concentrating on their cardboard cards. It’s long after midnight and the bingo game is still rocking. Your mother is strangely missing. You’re sitting at the back of the room. B-15; B-15. Your back against the screened window; behind you the moonlit breeze smells of hemlock. As I walk towards you through the long aisle of bingo card players, Dr. Kelly is tensing, “I-12″ and “N-44″ away from crying “Bingo!” You are looking up at me, smiling slightly the way you do–secretly, secretly. I sit down next to you.

and YOUR MOTHER now who is terribly frightened and you can see her hands are trembling; her face is white when she comes bursting into the rec room. “Where’s Shana?” she cries over the call of “N-44.” She’s been back to the cabin to check on her and found the lights out, bed unrumpled. She’s been up front in the main lodge and the laundry room and through the forest paths, and through the darkened tennis courts and past the Pepsi machine glowing eerily in the night, all the while growing more and more panicked. “Where’s Shana! Where’s Shana!”

MR. WARREN, out the next morning to fish, who finds Shana’s black panties under muddy leaves at the edge of the pond, thin bikini straps cut.

YOUR FATHER, who never really liked me; though I do like to hear his World War Two stories. At your cabin, when I come looking for you that last night, he tells me how he once shot a gypsy dead in a Romanian woods. And my god, the sobbing he will do, red-faced, red-eyed, his sorrow comes like a hideous smoker’s hack, like choking on a noxious gas–strong man with strong hands, to see him laid so bare.

And ME who sat next to you in the Rec Room that final night. There was a moment right before your mother burst in, face white, trembling with terror, when you leaned very close to me, that secret smile on your face, and I could smell your hair and the hemlocks outside and I was sure you were about to tell me a secret.