Chapter 4: The Pootie

Meg was born in British Columbia, in a small town that stretched along Zero Road, next to the rain forest separating Canada from Washington State. Her parents moved often; by the time Margaret P. was sixteen, they had migrated towards Vancouver by four towns, to 86 Avenue. Even then, she lived with creeks and forests as her backyard. Nature was everywhere in those days; many years would pass before the ruling Locust Party was to hand it over to developers for slaughter.

Before meeting Olney, she had spent three years in the interior, in the Monashee Mountains, a range whose rain-shrouded, massive darkness was only occasionally broken by tiny points of glittering light. There she lived with a male companion and his dog. With pug-like tenacity they shared the frontier rigours of the last century. They built a house with adjoining sheds, dug a well and a root cellar, cultivated a vegetable garden, put up fences, jams and jellies, and tried to make wine out of rotting Bartlett pears from the Okanagan. The first vintage was so bodiless and astringent, they converted to beer, bottled after the recipe of a leading drunk from the region. It was a crude brew and hard on the palates of all but self-sinewing neophobes like themselves.

They were busy from sunup to sundown recreating a past that still held North America in its grip. Every movie they had ever seen coalesced into a nostalgic montage of sweat and grime at the frontier. Only here, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell replaced the Coplandesque soundtrack serving to cheer on the wagon-wheelers and hearty homesteaders of yesteryear. Ghetto blasters in nature played their songs to the mystic Indian rain forests, and all backcountry hearts melted with white man melancholy.

As the calendar flipped its pages off stage, her male companion took to spending his days at the Pruneville pub, mumbling into his beer-soaked beard about "that space queen on the hill." Her Highness, in turn, drank evapo-whitened coffee at the Compost Cafe next door, chatting intermittently with a torpid scattering of women friends, each of them wondering what happened to their "Michael from Mountains."

After a couple of years of hanging out in silence as they worked their fingers to the bone, he decided to get away for a good time. In accordance with B.C. tradition, he went logging. She remained with the silence. It was better entertainment than the company of her companion and less wearying than those afternoons with her friends. They were all her age, in their mid twenties, but already turned to seed from taciturn husbands and Ritalin-gobbling children. They seemed to unfocus and fade in front of her, and so the silence became a refuge. Were it not for the CBC, which kept her informed of the outside world--a world no less desperate than her own--she might have faded too.

When her companion came back, he greeted his dog with tenderness and affection. He was loaded with money, which he proceeded to spend at the Pruneville pub, muttering to his buddies about "that disappearing act I bunk with."

When the money ran out he went logging again. This time he took the dog with him. She didn't bother to see them off; once had been enough. It was a pattern bound to repeat again and again until that expressionless day in the future when she would simply turn over and die, unaware of ever having lived.

The weather turned from the usual bad to the inevitable worse that day. Dark, swelling clouds rolled in to hang over forest and clearing. She refused to care. Rain and gloom were natural in the Monashees; there was no reason to look for omens. But the clouds heaved and pulsed for days on end, neither bursting nor moving on; they shrouded the land like a massive display of the end of time. Little by little, she began to surrender. Often she would find herself standing in front of the windows and realise she'd been there for an hour or more, staring blindly into the unrelenting mist. There was nothing in the house but her self and emptiness, while outside a frightening, oppressive force was biding its time before it entered and absorbed her.

One day, she looked up with a start from the book on her lap. She hadn't turned a page since opening it. The darkness finally seemed to be closing in. It was midday, but the room needed kerosene lamps. She turned up the wicks; it didn't help. The forest was somehow nearer, the clearing smaller. Closing the book quietly, almost stealthily, she went to the bedroom, dragged her smallest suitcase from the doorless closet, packed a few clothes, her I Ching, put on her gumboots and left the house. Trying not to run, she walked swiftly through the gate that never got built, along the muddy trench that never got filled in enough to be an access road, and down to the desolate highway, almost too remote to be mapped.

After walking an hour, she flagged a VW bus heading west. The driver had a case of van-temperature "high test" malt liquor, a shoebox filled with tapes of the latest British rock and roll, a carton of tailor-mades and plenty of dope. Paradise! She looked back only once, as Roxy Music did "The Strand," to give the finger to her thumb-in-the-mouth dream. The driver asked her to roll a joint and open two stubbies. They boogied clear to the coast.

§§§

Olney was her man now. Taciturn, Monashee beer drinkers were behind her, as well as the little cabin on Pepper Island.

A few days after moving in with him, she told Olney what the initial of her middle name meant. He was appalled. "Pootie? You're middle name is Pootie? You gotta be kidding!" But no, Margaret P. Bebette wasn't kidding. She explained. Her cute middle name was a voluntary misspelling of "Putti," those little cupids at play in old paintings and sculpture. Her parents were afraid she would be nicknamed "cement mixer" after the hit song of their generation, "Cement Mixer, Putty, Putty ... " if they didn't alter the spelling. "Putti?" exclaimed her new lover, facing altered dimensions in his devotion to the opposite sex.

At first he wondered if an anonymous call to the Child Abuse Hotline was in order. What kind of parents would legalise a name like that? But his scoffing changed to dazed tenderness as the name grew on him. It had to be stressed carefully; no running together of syllables. Whispering it back to her one night, he felt himself going mushy. "Poo-tee," he murmured, "you are so mignonne ..." The name was destined to drive ol' Olney down, right on down to the Cream O' Wheat monad glop at the centre of his soppy American heart. He was hooked.

Before she was school age, her parents had withdrawn the name from circulation, fearing ridicule for their daughter and themselves. Goopy feelings, they finally realised, should be kept private. And it came to pass that only in the privacy of their own home did they call her by the cherished name. Beyond the threshold dear, Margaret P. Bebette was Meg's official name, the one she used to sign on the line with the pencilled in "x."

Her friends called her Meg. She was a dainty thing, but the hint of a tomboy youth caused people to treat her like one of the guys, usually with fond slaps on the back, "Hey, how's it goin', Meg?" They never asked what the middle initial stood for and she never dared tell. Except to Olney. Besides her parents, he was the only one who ever knew, and although he was never to meet them, they hated him for it. Perhaps they hated him for other reasons as well, fearing the gigolo's lecherous hand upon the private parts of their only daughter. At least the other one had had a job.

§§§

Meg was innocent of make-up. Her peers took this for a mark of purity: a primitive original untainted by the cosmetic lie, skipping pigtailed over verdurous pastures as fresh and natural as a cow pie. But Olney was appalled. He blamed her mother. "What is she, some kind of Jehovah's Witness? You don't send your daughter into the world without certain instructions, of which the art of maquillage is one of the most important. Thereafter it's the daughter's choice, but, for Christ's sake, I mean, fathers teach their sons how to tie Windsor knots. Do I tie Windsor knots any more? No, but I could. Pop taught me. I can do a lot of things I don't do any more. For example--"

"It's not the same thing!" she interrupted, confused. As Meg got to know him better, she would learn to spot his incipient rants, by then fully aware of his penchant for obsessive soliloquy. She would also learn, by his own admission, that his father had never taught him a thing. For Olney's part, he would come to learn that her mother had indeed turned a blind eye to everything concerning her upbringing.

Belle Nipponovich was reluctant when called upon to edify the budding Pootie. "She doesn't need it."

"She does." Olney insisted. "How can it hurt to know how to apply make-up?"

"Let's turn her into a whore," contributed Crusty. He agreed with Belle.

"Aw, you're a bunch of bumpkins," Olney fumed. "Come on, Belle."

"Yeah," said Meg, feeling somehow drawn into the debate. "I'm afraid to try it on my own."

Belle relented. She proved to be expert. Meg's eyes suddenly changed from slightly offset to mysteriously so. Her uneventful eyebrows took on curves of intrigue. A little colour applied to her cheeks invited a tropical turn of mind. Belle became absorbed, tongue poking out of a corner of her mouth. "Here, take a look." She handed Meg a mirror. Meg gasped at a face she barely recognised. "Va-va-va-voom," cheered Olney. Crusty grunted.

"What's the matter, man," Olney sneered, "can't you handle painted women?"

"Naw, they taste awful."

"Who's asking you to eat their face?"

"Pipe down, you two," Belle scolded, "you're ruining my concentration." She worked on. "Now you try," she told her student. With the combined excitement and experience of a twelve-year-old girl, Meg made herself up to look like a twelve-year-old whore. "Little Lulu," said Crusty, "you naughty girl." Olney rubbed himself against her. "Hey, Lolita, you want to be abused?" Belle rolled her eyes, but Meg beamed. She was walking into a new life and loved it.

Her childlike enthusiasms opened Olney's heart. He wanted to be her guide and protector as well as her lover. She was always ready to make each moment new, seemed incapable of holding grudges, and never kept her anger seething inside. Her freshness was contagious; it helped.

Belle and Crusty were suspicious. With them she had always been sensible, if a little cheeky, more subdued than perky. They weren't used to her newfound liveliness. They looked at the budding romance with slitted eyes. After all, Olney was several years older. They thought she was becoming Olney's little girl. Crusty expected any day to see her sitting on Olney's knee, babytalking. "It's perverted," he told Belle. "Maybe Meg's really in love," she offered. "Shit," was Crusty's disgusted reply. He couldn't bear to see Meg get excited about something or other; she'd clutch at Olney's arms and dance up and down with that saucy smile. "I think it's cute," Belle said, wondering what it took to feel that way with a man.

Meg's little dance moved Olney with incestuous delight. And she was cuddly, too. She could snuggle in his arms like a child. It seemed they were embracing all the time. The Pootie was all femininity now, despite her tomboy upbringing. Olney could never imagine her as a bush wife, catering to the growls of a beer-bellied logger.

§§§

With Olney she would learn how to live in discrete episodes, compartments of experience that seemingly had no connection with other times and places. He would show her how easy it was to burn bridges, even though it was against her nature. When Olney looked back, he looked for the wreckage he'd left. But Meg didn't dare look. She was afraid of her mistakes and what people thought of her. Olney invariably offended people, but Meg was mortified at the thought of hurting anyone. Brash though he was, Olney was barely breaking even on self-confidence, but Meg had none. People intimidated her; she always deferred to their opinions. Her ever-expected faulty judgment drove his insecurity wild. He would never learn to trust her, especially with his life. She stopped to talk with anyone who beckoned, not from kindness or genuine interest, but from the fear of offending. He was sure some sluggertyjib would sweep her off her feet one day, simply because the bastard insisted. She was too vulnerable; her discerning faculty was off staring into space. She didn't even realise, he realised not long after they met, that aside from a few peculiarities in his character, he was the best she'd ever find.

How had she gotten through life without being molested? Olney often thought of her as the rapist's delight, easily coerced, easily captured. "Malleable" was the word that appeared in his darkening mind when they met. She seemed to offer no resistance to the world. An easy target, the fiend casually walking up to her: "You. Come with me." And then, province-wide headlines tolling the atrocity, her poor torn body found sprawled in the bushes (the bushes!) of some squalid suburb of Vancouver.

Yet nothing awful had ever happened to her. She picked up lots of hitchhikers in her old Chev, some of them, as Olney tried to convince her, "fresh from killing sprees, you foolish goose." But they simply thanked her upon arriving at their destination and got out. "Well, that's because they were exhausted," he added sheepishly. The worst ordeal she had ever faced was no doubt a few days ago, when Olney asked her to go down on him in the car near a Catholic girl's high school. "What are you parking here for?" she asked with astonishment. "Listen, Pootie… " Inflamed, he choked on his words as the knee-socked beauties giggled and chatted their way past the car, unaware of it's inhabitants. "For the sake of God Almighty," he squeaked, "suck me off. Quick! Before that one gets by." She'd refused, of course.

Like everyone, Meg could forget the business most important to her health and welfare until it was too late. Like waking up one morning to a cold, dark and silent house with the gas, light and telephone bills unopened somewhere. Unlike most people, she often compounded the fuddle by forgetting what she was doing in the midst of doing it, her attention adrift in a fog that lifted only here and there. She would refer to important things she had said to Olney, things which, according to him, she had at the same time forgotten to actually mention. Well, she had told him, but only in her mind. Sometimes he thought he was going crazy when she insisted a particular event or point had already been discussed. "One of us is nuts or trying to rewrite history, and neither of 'em is me," he'd insist with increasing desperation. She took shopping lists to the grocery store, lists he always made, but if she didn't lose them on the way, forgot to buy most of the items anyway.

For all of her faults, Meg was no paranoid, like Olney. He saw The System as an entity of benign malevolence. It turned people into liars and cheats. Worse, it made them helpless, and all for the privilege of watching TV in vegetal bliss. For this privilege, people would elect any government that happened to reflect their own meaningless values, and then sluggishly look the other way while that government armed the scum of the earth and sent them to slaughter any and all disobedience.

Less a "system" than a concord of greed manipulated by econocratic bullies, its ubiquitous hand was in everyone's mind and pocket. People were born into it according to caste and hue, with the darker lot filling in most of the open pits ritually reserved for Hun fodder. Its surliest, nastiest outlet came in the form of small business, whose proprietors looked upon the world through pinholes of consciousness from which malignant rays of suspicion emanated towards anyone different.

People tolerated The System, and Olney hated them for it. Their tolerance represented the abdication of self-esteem and responsibility. Yet, he too was absorbed by it. The Order presented few alternatives and the ones it did allow were contained well within it. It even enslaved the masters.

Nature he accepted as the crude untamed feminine principle unleashed upon cowering sentience, alternating between rampant terror and destruction, and a seductive, vanquishing bliss. But from governments, bureaucracies and machines, he (foolishly) expected no obstructions and a minimum of meddling. Obstacles not of his choosing threw him into a fury. If a machine broke down or a clerk was inattentive, he flew into a rage, losing control even in public, where the dumbfounded Systemites were unhappily entertained by a variety of the filthiest epithets in several languages. He'd leapt over counters in anger more than once, grabbing the shirt of some smug civil servant who had just told him that due to a mainframe breakdown he couldn't have whatever he'd come to expect.

Olney didn't really expect very much. But he insisted on controlling what little he had. It was useless behaviour, he knew. He also knew that when the Nazi's marched into town again, he'd be the first one they murdered. "Get out of here you interfering son's of bitches!" would be his last words.

Obstacles for the Pootie were tests of strength. She met them bravely as Things to Overcome, perhaps with an unconscious determination to survive at all costs. But survive for what? Olney wanted to know. He felt he'd already survived. Now was the time to get on with the tasks at hand, which, according to him, included the gamut between washing dishes efficiently and becoming a god.

Somewhere in the Pootie's mind a dial was set for a future when she would understand, when it would all fall into place. In the meantime, she was at ease with Things and the world, but not herself. Olney could handle the crazy perversities and outraged idealism fulminating in his mind; it was the world that disgusted him.

§§§

Chapter 5: The Suave Swine

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