Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385491051
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 1972-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

The slop pail was full; I carried it to the garden to pour the dirty water into the trench. Joe was lying by himself on the dock, face down; when I came to rinse the pail he didn’t move. Anna passed me on the steps, wearing her orange bikini, oiled for her sun ritual.

In the cabin I set the pail under the counter. David was pondering his chin bristles in the mirror; he slid his arm half around me and said in a guttural voice, “Come wiz me to zee outhouse.”

“Not right now,” I said, “I have to do some work.”

He mimed regret. “Ah well,” he said, “some other time.”

I took out my samsonite case and sat down at the table. He leaned over my shoulder. “Where’s old Joe?”

“Down on the dock,” I said.

“He seems out of sorts,” David said, “maybe he has worms; when you get back to the city you should take him to the vet.” And a moment later, “How come you never laugh at my jokes?”

He hung around while I set out the brushes and paper. Finally he said, “Well, Nature calls,” and soft-shoed out the door like the end of a vaudeville act.

I swivelled the caps back onto the paint tubes, I had no intention of working: now they were all out of the way I would search for the will, the deed, the property title. Paul had been certain he was dead, that made me doubt my theory. Perhaps the C.I.A. had done away with him to get the land, Mr. Malmstrom was not quite plausible; but that was preposterous, I couldn’t start suspecting people for no reason.

I rummaged in the cavity under the wall bench, went through the shelves, groped under the beds where the tents were stored. He might have filed the papers in a safety-deposit box, earlier, in a city bank, I’d never find them. Or he might have burned them. At any rate they weren’t here.

Unless they were in among the pages of a book: I checked Goldsmith and Burns, holding them by the spines and shaking, then I thought of his lunatic drawings, the only clue I had that he might not be dead. I’d never gone through all of them. In a way that would be the logical hiding place; he’d always been logical, and madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

I lifted down the stack of drawings and began to look. The paper was thin and soft, like rice paper. First the hands and antlered figures, always with numbers scrawled in the corner, then a larger sheet, a half-moon with four sticks coming out of it, bulbed at the ends. I righted the page, judging by the numbers, and it became a boat with people, the knobs were their heads. It was reassuring to find I could interpret it, it made sense.

But the next one was nothing I could recognize. The body was long, a snake or a fish; it had four limbs or arms and a tail and on the head were two branched horns.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.