A Hard Witching by Jacqueline Baker

who was pretty. But as soon as she’d thought it, she felt bad.
    “What’s she like?”
    “Christ, Lavinia, I don’t know. What do you keep harping on her for all the time?”
    “Just curious, I guess.” Then she added, “He must miss her, living there all by himself.”
    “He goes to see her,” Jack said. “He visits her. All the time.”
    Lavinia wanted to say, “Would you? If it were me, would you visit all the time?” but instead she said, “They didn’t have kids?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    She was about to ask, “Why not?” when Jack said, “Enough, already. I don’t want to talk about her.”
    At the time, she hadn’t thought it an odd thing to say. But later, she’d wondered about the intimacy of what he’d said. Not “I don’t want to talk about it,” but “I don’t want to talk about
her.”
    And she’d felt angry and embarrassed and unreasonably jealous. She knew it was stupid. Still, sometimes she thought about Ray’s wife quite a bit, tried to picture her face, her hair. What shade of blonde? Long hair, or short?
    Later, Lavinia sat wedged between Jack and Ray on the truck seat. Ray spread himself out, knees apart, one arm across the back of the seat behind her. They both reeked of sweat and liquor, but what was worse was that Lavinia could still smell her own rotting odour.
    Jack was driving fast, swerving sometimes in the soft ridge of gravel at the shoulder. Lavinia clutched the edge of the seat, wishing she’d learned how to drive a standard, dizzy and hot, sick with the careening motion, the smell of them all, bumping against each other at every jolt and turn. She wished she had stayed home, but that would not have been possible. Jack was in high spirits when he and Ray returned from Ray’s place that evening, jovial. He would have coaxed, cajoled and, finally, become annoyed with her if she’d refused. Besides, getting out now and then wasn’t so bad. It was just this nausea. And the thirst. She wished she’d brought something to drink. She wished a lot of things.
    Jack fiddled with the radio, found the country station he liked.
    “So,” Ray hollered over the music, leaning in too close to her ear, “ever been to a carnival before?”
    “No,” she said, turning slightly away from the sour yeast smell of his breath.
    “You gonna keep that to yourself, you miser?” Jack eyed the bottle wedged between Ray’s thighs.
    Ray passed it across her, banging his elbow accidentally into her mouth as they hit a pothole. She rubbed her tongue across the inside of her lip, could taste a bit of blood where the skin was ragged.
    “I’ve been to a few,” Ray said, oblivious. “Been to that fair in Saskatoon, too, the big one.”
    Jack took a long drink from the bottle, passed it back to Ray. “You never been out of this county in your life.”
    Lavinia looked at him quickly, thinking, His wife’s in North Battleford. He goes there all the time. You said.
    Ray tried to manoeuvre the bottle to his mouth but kept getting jolted, his arm flailing in mid-air. Rye splashed out on Lavinia’s sleeve. “In sixty-eight,” he hollered. “Before I was married.” He screwed the lid clumsily back onto the bottle. “Was something else.”
    Lavinia shifted her weight on the seat, reached behind to adjust the sharp end of a seat belt clip that was digging into her back. She would have liked to put the belt on, but there was no way to do it without their noticing. She thought, If I have to die, don’t let me die like this. Not in a graceless twist of metal.
    “There was a woman, I swear to God, a woman weighed over nine hundred pounds.”
    Jack laughed and thumped the wheel.
    “And one,” Ray said, encouraged, “half-man, half-woman. She had a beard. And—you know. Everything.”
    Lavinia thought Jack would laugh again, but he just shook his head. “Christ,” he said.
    “And there was this thing,” Ray said. “Hell, I don’t remember what they called it. It was, well, it was