Love for a Deaf Rebel - Derrick King (top 100 novels .txt) 📗

think he is looking for a special name.”

“What’s wrong with Bowen Island Pub? What would you name it?”

“I don’t know, but Bowen Island Pub sounds too ordinary.”

Pearl didn’t enter the contest. A few weeks later, the name of the pub was announced: Bowen Island Pub. No one had entered it, so the pub saved itself the prize expense.

Pearl was furious. “You didn’t want me to win!”

“I wanted you to win. That’s why I wanted you to enter a special name. I didn’t say you couldn’t enter Bowen Island Pub.”

“You want me to lose! You hold me under your thumb!”

I groped under the truck seat for something to read while waiting in the ferry lineup, and I found a copy of Cosmopolitan. The quiz Rate Your Husband’s Sexual IQ had been filled out. I was stunned to see that Pearl had ticked the boxes for “I suspect he has homosexual relations” and “I know he masturbates.” I thought about what I had seen.

Sex with Pearl had been affectionate but little more, partly because it was usually in positions where we could see each other’s faces. I couldn’t see how our sex life could lead her to think I was having sex with men. Worse, seeing her first husband in a gay bar was her only justification for abandoning him; if she now thought I was gay, then maybe he wasn’t gay. Not everyone in a gay bar is gay; not everyone in a straight bar is straight. I didn’t tell Pearl I had gay colleagues and friends, and sometimes we drank in a gay bar near my office.

“Sometimes, I become so frustrated with hearies that I want to cry. My elbow hurt, so I saw the doctor. She sent me to a specialist, but I went to the wrong office. I wrote a note to the receptionist to call the doctor to get the directions. She handed me the telephone!” Pearl slapped her forehead in frustration. “So I went next door, and that receptionist called for me.”

The report said Pearl had repetitive stress injury and needed to change her work or have surgery to relocate the nerve in her elbow.

“I want that surgery. If my elbow gets worse, I won’t be able to sign. I will get sick leave. Then I want to stop the Pill and have a baby. I want a child at the table to talk to you and sign to me. Then I want to quit.”

“We need time. If you quit now, we won’t be able to finish the house. Do you want a baby to crawl in the dust on plywood?”

“My parents were twenty when I was born. I’m thirty-three! A woman can’t wait like a man. Think of ideas. Rent the basement and the other side of the house for storage, or borrow money to finish them and rent them for living. A baby will not come for nine months. Then I will sell jade.”

“No one rents damp storage, and we have two mortgages already. My mother was thirty-four when she had me and forty-two when she had my sister. We need two salaries for a year to finish this half of the house.”

“Don’t tell me Frank has stopped me from having a baby. He can go to hell! Jodi is pregnant. What is your goal?”

“To enjoy our life and finish the house, then have a family. Let’s do this: you have the operation and take recovery time off work. You work for a year while I finish my MBA. Then, I get a better job. We have a baby, and you quit. Can you get lighter work after the operation?”

“No. All deafies at the post office sort mail. I have decided to stop the Pill. What do you say about that?”

Disagreeing was not an option because I had no way of knowing whether Pearl took the pills; now I wondered if she had already stopped. It dawned on me that neither of us now trusted each other; so much had changed so quickly.

“OK.”

Pearl was elated. “This is my only chance to have a child. I know it.” She kissed me.

Although I loved Pearl, I knew something wasn’t right. It was wrong to lie to her, but I decided to try to delay making her pregnant until our situation improved. Our sex life would have to suffer—Pearl’s questionnaire response “I know he masturbates” would be prophetic.

Pearl stopped taking the Pill and had the elbow operation, an outpatient procedure. She was granted leave while she had physiotherapy for two months. I did the chores while she recovered. She began to sign, “Swim, swim!” to her belly after we made love.

Mothergoat had three kids: two bucks and, at last, a doe. We named the doe Scapegoat, put her in her own pen, and bottle-fed her, so she became as affectionate as a dog.

As I climbed into the truck on my way to the Fraser Valley Livestock Auction to buy piglets for the year’s pork, Pearl signed, “Buy a duck for the garden.”

I returned with three piglets and a dozen ducklings. I put the piglets in the sty and made a cat-proof cage for the ducklings.

Pearl was livid. “I wanted a duck in the garden, not ducklings in a box!”

“Ducklings cost almost nothing, and you can’t buy one duck. In two months, you can pick one, and we’ll eat the others.”

“You ignore me!”

Pearl ignored me for the rest of the day and slept on her edge of the bed that night.

Her increasing volatility did nothing to kindle the flames of passion, but this was fine with me now: it meant another night when she wouldn’t become pregnant. And she couldn’t get pregnant during her periods and on MBA nights twice a week when I slept on my sister’s floor. I was playing Vatican Roulette. Because Pearl never initiated sex, it was easy to avoid making love on fertile days, and when it could not be avoided, covert coitus interruptus was my frustrating friend.

My MBA class was interrupted by a knock on the door. A woman called me into the corridor.

“Your wife’s had an accident. She’s in Lions Gate Hospital. She broke her foot.”

I drove to the hospital. When I arrived in the emergency room, Pearl was sitting in a chair in whitewashed overalls with her left foot in a gumboot and her right foot in a sock on a stool.

“How do you feel? What happened?”

“I feel … mellow. I had a painkiller shot. I was trying to pour the food into the trough, but the piglets kept pushing. I kicked one on the head, and I broke my toe.”

Pearl told me she had used our emergency autodialer, and the ambulance, police, and volunteer fire department had all arrived to find her hopping around the house on one foot.

The other patients stared at us. I couldn’t help but laugh. I was in a pinstriped suit, while she looked like a hillbilly, and we were talking in sign language.

“She kicked a pig,” I said, as if only the kicking was unusual.

Crows soon discovered the pig trough and ate the feed which the piglets did not immediately consume, so we made a scarecrow. We soon found crows perched on our scarecrow.

“Can you shoot the crows?” signed Pearl.

“I will ask Laurent for permission.”

Laurent was parked at his usual spot, where his presence calmed traffic. I explained our crow problem.

“I hate the filthy scavengers. Shoot one—no one’s going to report one shot. You only need one because the best scarecrow is a dead crow. Would you eat at a restaurant with a corpse at the table?”

At evening chore time, I brought my rifle with me. Crows roosted in the trees and on the scarecrow, waiting for their banquet. I fed the piglets last. Then I leaned against the barn, ready to fire, but the crows did not move. I walked inside the barn and stood behind the open door, but the crows did not move. I climbed to the hayloft, found a knothole facing the sty, and peered through it. A few minutes later, the crows flew down to the trough. I fired through the hole. All but one crow took flight. The casualty staggered onto the electric fence and lay twitching with each electric pulse, like Galvani’s frog.

We had no more problems with crows.

“It’s the middle of summer,” signed Pearl. “We need a holiday. We could buy a camper. It can pay for itself, and we can also use it to sleep downtown.”

We bought a mildewed, wood-frame camper with no shower or toilet, and we cleaned it up. A few days later, when Pearl arrived home from work, she was delighted to find me inside it preparing a propane-cooked dinner under its battery-powered lights.

I soon learned we needed to buy booster springs, extra-wide truck mirrors, and tie-down bars. If we had known the expense of modifying our truck, we would not have bought the camper. To save money, I had a tie-down bar installed only in the front.

Alan and Rose relieved our chores for a week while we drove north to visit Pearl’s other uncle and her grandparents. The heavy camper on the back of the light pickup made driving hard work. Our tempers flared as the overloaded truck swayed on the highway.

I turned on the stereo. Pearl turned the volume all the way up. She closed her eyes and listened to Sultans of Swing while Whisky cowered behind us at the deafening blast. When the song was over, I reduced the volume.

“I dreamed I was dancing,” Pearl signed, as she turned the volume all the way up and blocked the control with her hand.

I turned the stereo off.

“Why did you do that? I want to listen. I can’t watch TV because there are no TV stations here. It’s my right to listen!”

“I will turn on the stereo. Turn it up until you can hear it.”

Pearl turned the volume until it was all the way up.

I turned it off. “I don’t want to become deaf or have an accident.”

A patrol car’s lights flashed, so I pulled over. I rolled down the window as the policeman approached. Whisky barked as Pearl held him back.

“Your license, registration, and insurance, please,” said the constable. “I clocked you at fifteen over the limit going down the hill.”

I opened my document wallet and handed it to him; my Reserve Police ID card was opposite my driver’s license. The constable returned my wallet, made small talk, and drove away.

“No ticket! Before I quit the reserve police, I got a replacement card. I handed in the new one when I quit, and I kept this old one because policemen don’t ticket policemen.”

Pearl seemed unnerved by my subterfuge.

At the end of each day’s driving ordeal, we looked for a clearing at the end of a dirt road, and we hid from the world. We never stayed in public campgrounds. For security, we kept my shotgun under the mattress, which was legal in those days. I mixed margaritas from the icebox; Pearl cooked dinner on the propane stove; we played with Whisky; we panned for gold in the Cariboo creeks. After dinner, Pearl read Cosmopolitan and Silent News while I read books and listened to the plaintive call of loons. Fortunately for covert family planning, it wasn’t easy to have sex in the low cab-over bed.

The highlight of our trip was our visit to Fort St. John to see more of her relatives, sleeping in our camper in their driveways. All were happy to see Pearl’s life going well.

Her maternal grandfather was one of the first farmers in the area and a fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist. He was the co-founder of the World Invitational Gold Panning Championships, the Dorse Prosser Adventist Elementary School, and the Fort St. John North Peace Museum. He showed us the museum, and his home had even more settlers’ artifacts. As a going-away present, he gave us the oak hand-cranked telephone, which had hung on his kitchen wall for thirty years to communicate with friends and family twenty km away.

Her uncle Karl’s living room displayed a framed copy of the 1979 entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for the “Jade boulder Karl discovered in 1977 in Watson Lake. It weighs 63,307 pounds.” A green boulder stood next to a rock saw and piles of jade pieces in his back yard. He gave us a fist-sized piece. Karl told us that he had been prospecting and carving Yukon jade and selling it to Alaska Highway tourists for years. Pearl reminded him that she was keen to