Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Given the chance, Caleb still searched the house for clues. Whatever she was hiding, he trusted she wouldn’t have picked a monster. A Labrador trapper, oil-rig worker, man from a Caribbean island, some kind of footloose charmer, who’d dreamed since boyhood of finding a new life in the North. Most often this was what he allowed himself to imagine. But why did her stubbornness never waver, as if she were determined, above all, to be true to some younger, hopeful, even more stubborn version of herself? The girl at least had a mother, even if her mother was dead.

  “He made me slippers,” Caleb said. Sometimes his own mother hugged him so tight he feared his bones would snap.

  “Slippers?”

  “Rabbit-fur slippers and a rabbit-foot charm. He gave them to me, I remember, he slipped them over my feet.”

  “Oh, Caleb, no. We’d moved out of town by then, into the house in the woods. Other people came to help me, those were made for you by someone else.” Her colour had risen, he didn’t know what that meant, only the soft dream he’d harboured, of the man leaning gently over him, whispering oh so tenderly as he slid Caleb’s tiny feet into the warmth of fur, went out like a failed match.

  “Was he Trinidadian? Dominican?”

  “Put down the bottle, Caleb.”

  In the future, he’d make tea for the girl and bring it to her in bed, as his mother had once done for him. There was such pleasure in the long twinning of their lives. That they should go on entwining, it was everything. Outside Cape House, after breakfast, the girl would slip two fingers between her teeth and whistle the strong note that made her dog come running from wherever she was. Beside her hovered the mist of a child. A child. Surely it was possible. He’d be a father, the kind he’d never had. He’d still dream of his missing father but all this would be enough. If she wanted, there’d be room for his mother in the big house, too. A rocking chair in the parlour, where she might sit by the wood stove and stare out to sea for as long as she liked. Drink her whiskey. Caleb would look after her, build walls that were tight and firm and clasped her close, make a home, keep the harsh and changing weather outside.

  “I’m doing this for you,” Caleb shouted as he fled.

  “You’re late,” Tony McIntosh called from the lawn of Teresa Blake’s guesthouse. And Caleb, who had just pulled into the gravel parking spot and stepped out of Della’s rust-coloured car, was very late.

  So many things had happened since he’d last set eyes on the men that Caleb felt ghostly. Everything repeated itself. Len Hansen was pacing across the grass. Rufus, Teresa’s old Lab, who appeared to have moved a body’s length to the west, twitched in his sleep.

  There was no sign of Roy or Anna, which was some relief.

  Tony dragged on his cigarette, down to the filter, the nub glowing like a fiery star. Len paused in his pacing, charged with impatience, as if he wasn’t sure whether to confront Caleb or bolt. He was wearing the shoes he’d had on when Caleb picked the men up from the airport the afternoon before, in the mists of time before the storm had come. Black loafers with tassels. He’ll want boots, Caleb thought, but said nothing.

  This time, when Tony ground his cigarette into the earth, Caleb bent to pick the butt from the grass.

  “So I encountered some unexpected delays, see,” Caleb said, aware that his damp overalls gave off a fetid smell. “It’s that kind of day. But, look, I’ve found us a vehicle.”

  “You’re lucky we waited,” Tony said with an irritable hauteur that made Caleb wonder why he was acting not only like his boss but the boss of all things. Once more Len checked his non-functioning phone, before mentioning that Roy and Anna had driven back to the ferry dock since Roy was determined to find a way off the island as soon as possible. With a glance at the car, Len asked anxiously if there would be walking and Caleb said not much.

  The two men safely ensconced in the back seat, Caleb circled around the harbour, the way he’d just come, past Ruby’s Convenience, where a handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard now read, No Water or Gas. When he asked the men how their dinner had been, hopeful for some good news, both men shrugged — as if the meal, no doubt splendid, had already vaporized.

  A young fellow, Caleb told them, sentenced to hang for stealing a horse, had managed to escape prison, flee England, fetch up on Blaze Island, and live long enough to give the village of Tom’s Neck its name — seeing as how his neck and all his other body parts were spared. As an innkeeper, Caleb would want to tell his guests such stories.

  When his grandmother and sisters were young and power first came to the island, Caleb said, each family had been given a light bulb.

  “One light bulb?” Len seemed stricken by disbelief. “What good is that?”

  Tony, after doing some internal computation, said, “Like, you mean, sixty years ago? There was no electricity here before then? That’s insane.”

  Yet with the power out, and limited gasoline to fuel generators, they might soon be reduced to candles once again.

  When Caleb tried to ply the men for more information about the after-effects of Hurricane Fernand, they could tell him little more than what he knew, the states of emergency declared, how it would take decades to recover, although, Len insisted, that was bound to be an exaggeration.

  “What’s your occupation?” Caleb asked Tony, glancing back to catch a glimpse of the man’s protuberant face as he took the turn that led out of town. He wanted them to think him friendly. He wanted them to confide in him.

  “Professor,” said Tony.

  Caleb had to muffle his surprise.

  “Of economics,” Len chimed in. “Tony’s famous for his articulation of the virtues of neo-liberalism, deregulation, an expert in the petroleum economy. Also once famous because of a blog.”

  “About economics?”

  “The climate,” said Len almost lazily. “Tony’s always been prepared to say necessary things about the, let’s call them, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, introducing doubts when doubts seem useful. Though these days he’s a little more sotto voce about all that.”

  “Realpolitik, realpolitik, that’s how it goes,” said Tony.

  It sounded as if, one way or another, Tony did have some interest in the weather.

  “Len’s the CFO of the company and Roy’s the CEO, in case you haven’t figured that out, and I’m one of their beloved advisers,” Tony added from behind Caleb’s head, “but in a behind-the-scenes kind of way, so keep that between you, us, and the fence post.”

  The company. No one had yet told Caleb what the company was.

  Outside the car, along the winding road to Pummelly, ponds glittered. Steady Pond. Dutchman’s Pond. Nell’s Pond. Tuckamore stumped across the Burnt Hills, where there had once been forests until the trees were cut down for firewood or burned to cinders where they stood.

  “Your PI’s out there in a bunker?” Len asked.

  A bunker? Whoever had said bunker? The only one Caleb knew of had once stood atop Bunker Hill, long before his time.

  “Yes,” he said over his shoulder as Tony muttered about Roy’s bunker, underground in Kansas.

  They were approaching the bare crest of Telephone Hill where the broken cellphone tower listed, cables swinging in the breeze. Though it was hard to miss, Caleb wasn’t about to call the men’s attention to it. His plan was to bring them to Cape House. Then what? Behind him, Len was describing a house with huge plate-glass windows facing the sea. “The landscape’s nothing like this, it’s on a sandbar.”

  “Or was,” said Tony. “Sorry, Len, hoping for the best.”

  Len kept on, “The thing about dating an architect is Conor’s so attentive to environmental specifics, like making sure the walls are resistant to wind thrust, up to 180 miles per hour. I know Fernand was clocked going through the Outer Banks at 200, but the walls are supposed to bend, and the house is up on stilts, to help in floods.”

  “Stilts,” said Tony. “Pardon my ignorance, Len, but, when there’s no flood, how do you get out the front door?”
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  Caleb had got as far in his planning as the part where Len Hansen, obviously keen on architecture — great! — won over by the quality of his renovations and the swoon of a blood-red sunset from the windows of Cape House, offered him all the money he needed to complete his renovation work.

  “What’s that?” Len cried in alarm.

  Past the solitary hulk of the erratic Ghost Rock, they were coming up to Cape House lane. Ahead of them, at the bottom of the road’s slope, the raw edges of pavement gaped around the hole in the road where chunks of upturned tarmac tipped like incisors and water still bustled out to sea.

  “Road’s washed out,” Caleb said.

  “I can see that,” said Len. “But what are we going to do about it?”

  “Oh, we don’t need to go that far,” Caleb said, pulling the car to a halt on the road’s shoulder. He scarcely had to worry about the car being seen and if anyone did spot it, abandoned here at roadside, no one would identify it as his. When he climbed out, the men followed, eager, like released zoo animals.

  Trunk raised, Caleb was stuffing the bottle of Scotch, along with the other supplies, into the reusable shopping bag that Della had helpfully left him, the kind they all used now that Pierce’s supermarket no longer offered plastic ones, when Tony’s acrid breath poured over his cheek.

  “Lookee here. Len, he’s got a Laphroaig. Sweet, how old, let me see.”

  “Later.” Caleb wedged the bag under his arm.

  “What else is in there?” asked Len.

  “Delicacies,” Caleb told him.

  The road would likely remain empty. Nevertheless he wanted them out of sight as soon as possible, anxious that no one stumble across them or even spot them from afar. He had the uncanny sensation of the old man spying on them from somewhere in the hills. Checking up on things, as the old man had said he was doing earlier in Tom’s Neck. What kind of things did the old man want or not want to happen to the men? They were here to learn about islands, he’d said, and whether that was true or not, Caleb was intent on showing them something of the island.

  “This way,” he said.

  “I thought you said it was that way.” Len peered behind them into the Burnt Hills as Caleb set off along rutted Cape House lane. The afternoon was drawing on, the sun settling into the west, whisper clouds rolling and dissolving across the aqua sky. Though he felt Len and Tony exchange a look behind his back, they had no choice but to follow him.

  Almost immediately there were puddles, soon one large enough to engulf the lane’s width.

  In his black loafers, Len halted as if on the shore of an inland sea. Thickets swelled along the lane’s verges. The only way across, if you didn’t wish to walk through the middle of the puddle, as Caleb in his rubber boots had done, was to squelch through the mud at the edge, as Tony, in his low leather boots, was doing.

  “Is the whole path going to be like this?” Len’s forehead knitted in a frown.

  “A touch of rain last night, wasn’t there,” said Caleb. “Lane’s not safe to drive in a car.”

  “Should’ve kept those rubber boots on, Len,” said Tony. “Don’t know why you changed.”

  “I thought we were going in a vehicle. I’m not wearing rubber boots to a business meeting,” snapped Len, who, Caleb noted, had also added a dress shirt and purple tie beneath his sweater.

  “Could’ve carried the shoes. Just sayin’,” said Tony.

  “Is it far?” Len asked, raising his voice across the puddle.

  “Not so far,” said Caleb.

  “Take off your shoes and go barefoot,” said Tony with a nearly malicious grin, watching the spectacle of Len’s hesitation from the safety of the puddle’s far side. “Or maybe that one will carry you.”

  “Me?” said Caleb, stunned by the suggestion. Tony, barely taller than he was, had more weight on him though perhaps less muscle. And — that one?

  Then again, if he did Len Hansen this favour, it was another reason for Len to look kindly on him, even be in his debt. Which was how Caleb came to wade back across the puddle, heft Len onto his back, a stiff weight, Len’s arms nearly choking him as Caleb clutched the man’s sinewy thighs and forded him across.

  On their left appeared a row of weathered longers, the upright spruce poles that enclosed what had once been his uncle Charlie’s potato patch. On the right, more longers surrounded his uncle Leo’s former vegetable garden. Uncle Charlie was out west, Leo said he was too busy with the roadwork during growing season, though it could be he’d also fallen out of the inclination to dig and trench and plant.

  A rabbit, hearing their approach, fled in terror into the bushes. Waves soughed against rocks, invisible beyond Uncle Leo’s overgrown field. When they startled a murder of crows congregated on fence posts, the birds flew up with guttural caws over the field that Caleb himself was resurrecting. At the sound, Len shrieked.

  “Labrador tea.” Caleb held out a sprig and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger to release its piney scent. Here was a small marvel: Len took the sprig and actually sniffed it.

  “What sort of man is your boss?” asked Tony, breathing smoke in the rear.

  “Powerful,” said Caleb after a moment.

  “Like, is he straightforward, clever, does he play games?”

  “All of the above.” Caleb slid a hand into his pocket to touch the crumpled business card.

  “Do we know for certain he’ll be there?” Len stared fitfully up at the sky just as the rare needle of a plane caught sunlight, threading itself through the blue, and, as Caleb watched, everything in Len went rigid as if he’d seen a ghost or wished to turn into an arrow and shoot skyward.

  “He’ll be there later,” said Caleb.

  “Later? How much later?” Tony asked sharply.

  “A couple of hours maybe.” Caleb needed to stall them. His ideal would be for them to arrive at Cape House, which was not far off, as the light and the wind quieted and fading sunlight spread across ocean and sky. He anticipated certain queries, given that Cape House was no bunker and didn’t resemble an office, but he’d say he’d made an arrangement for his boss to meet them there. It was closer. He’d show them around, explain his renovation project. To a man like Len, the money Caleb needed would be less than nothing. After Len was seduced and that deal sown up, they’d wait for the old man to show. Only he wouldn’t. Then it would be up to Caleb to say with a shrug, Unfortunately something must have come up. It was a plan full of holes but the best he’d been able to come up with.

  “How did you get through to him without a phone?” Len asked, at Caleb’s side.

  “Pigeons,” said Caleb.

  “Pigeons?” Tony stopped in his tracks. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Works even when power’s out,” said Caleb, a new recklessness streaking through him. Now, as they came up to the end of the lane and the abandoned firepit, where teenagers used to come and light bonfires, far from the eyes of others, less so now that he was often close by working at Cape House and because there were fewer teenagers all the time, Caleb said, “Here’s where we have a little pause to refresh.”

  The house was a short distance ahead of them, as yet invisible on the other side of a grove of spruce. With every step, he drew closer to the scene of his disastrous encounter with the girl hours before. He wanted to reach Cape House and never get there at all. Near the firepit, a few pieces of driftwood lay about, branches Caleb himself had dragged up from shore, thinking to carve with them or burn them, and these, along with wood from a ragged pile of old fencing gathered at the end of the lane, could be used to start a fire. “It’s an island thing,” Caleb said to the men. “Thought I’d offer you a boil-up.”

  “If it involves the Laphroig, I might be coerced, even if we are en route to a business meeting,” said Tony. “It’s not so warm around here.”

  “I don’t know,” said Len. “Maybe we should keep going. Can you absolutely confirm this meeting’s going to happen?”

  “Laphroig, Lennie,” said
Tony. “A sip, then we’re on our way. Strike while the iron is hot, remember?”

  “I’d simply like to know the location of the iron and how hot it actually is,” said Len.

  Caleb pulled out the bottle. He got a fire going with spruce tips, pieces of bark and sticks and spruce needles scavenged from the ground, Tony McIntosh’s lighter, a splash of Scotch for good luck. Don’t waste the stuff, Tony cried, grabbing the bottle from Caleb. A nice blaze blew up, crackling. Good thing the teenagers, his classmates and others before them, had set out stumps to sit on.

  He handed the men empty jars he’d pinched to use for drinking, and presented a jar of his mother’s bakeapple jam to Len as a gift. Amazing that he’d managed to grab this much, what with his furious mother at his heels as he raced out of the house. As if put out by the lack of gift for him, Tony glared from his stump, and when Caleb asked for the bottle back, Tony said, I’ll serve. While he poured generous dollops into his own jar and Len’s, he slopped only a modest portion into Caleb’s.

  Then again, Caleb never drank. He hadn’t been intending to. This was something else he and the girl shared, that had separated them from the sixteen others in their class at school. Having watched his mother drink herself into darkness sometimes, Caleb had decided that was enough. The girl said she didn’t like the taste of alcohol. Yet, after swirling the liquid that Tony had given him, Caleb slugged it back. A flame caught at the back of his throat, seared a cavity deep inside him. Who cared that Tony was shaking his head; the drink pushed away the past, which was good enough.

  “How about some of that ice?” Tony asked.

  Caleb slammed a sharp rock against the small slab to see if the force would break off slivers.

  “It’s iceberg ice, see.” Which meant it was very hard. Show­ing them its blueish cast, Caleb told them about the icebergs that floated past in summer and sometimes foundered on the shore, breaking into growlers like this one, right by his house. Turned out neither of them had ever seen an iceberg.