Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  “We’re looking to lease gates at one of the new Greenland airports, talking to the locals, possibly investing in infrastructure, now the ice sheet’s melting and traffic’s ramping up,” Len said, accepting a sliver of ice in his drink. “We’re in, ready for the opening resource and tourism market.” He held up his glass and considered it. “Not a bad way to melt ice.”

  “Are you buying up some of that newly green land, Lennie?” said Tony. “Heard there’s diamonds under it. Got to get in there ahead of the Chinese now things are really warming.”

  Len gave Tony a peculiar look.

  “Warming schwarming,” Tony said loudly. “Okay, clearly there’s some warming going on, at least near the poles, we just don’t know what’s causing it, most likely natural cycles, so we take advantage of it rather than acting like some new apocalyptic religion has taken hold, as is happening with some people.” He poured himself more Scotch and slurped from it.

  Caleb asked the men if they wanted tea. The flames seemed unusually hot and wild. Smoke might be visible from across the cove, but he wasn’t going to think about that. The wind had come round, blowing at them out of the north, a colder wind, pushing smoke at Caleb, making the men cough and forcing them to move. The men didn’t want tea. Bread? The men didn’t want bread either. Len touched his phone, its shape visible through his pocket. The jam was stuffed in another pocket. A lock of hair blew into Len’s eyes. He looked like a boy as he pulled out his phone and took a picture of the fire, which suggested that he was having a fine time despite the knotted muscles of his throat. Len turned to Tony, though he seemed to be speaking as much to the flames.

  “In his last text, Conor said the motel still had power, despite the flooding, and as long as there was power, he was going to hang out in bed and watch porn, so at least he still sounded like himself.”

  “Say there,” Tony said to Caleb. “Have you ever noticed something like a haze over the sky around here? Something that persists, even for a few days?”

  “A haze,” said Caleb cautiously. “Well, now, we get all sorts of clouds out here, many in one day.”

  This time Tony poured Caleb a larger ration of Scotch. The liquid filled Caleb’s mouth with an odour like gasoline, liquefying his limbs and pushing the girl even farther off.

  “What about the weather, say in the last year, been any cooler than usual?”

  “Well, now, last winter was brutal,” Caleb said. And it had been. The storm they’d all thought was Sheila’s Brush, the last big storm of the season, had dumped a metre of snow on them at the end of April then been followed by another sudden snowstorm the second week of May, wind so high Uncle Leo had been pushed off the road in his truck, not knowing where the road was. His cellphone dead, he’d only been rescued when someone saw his antenna sticking out of a snowbank. A week later the weather had turned toxically hot, before temperatures plummeted again.

  Tony gave Len a look both querying and confirming. “Could be they’re doing some private, small-scale regional particulate releasing up here. Under-the-radar field experiments. They mentioned small-scale field experiments in that prospectus, didn’t they?”

  Len swallowed a mouthful of Scotch and nodded. Clouds stretched in yellow bands and every place else Caleb looked the sky was a different blue: milky, slate, azure. The sun had settled into the hills.

  “I have a house —” Caleb began.

  Only Len was saying to Tony, “You know how Roy used to protect me, back in Columbus, when we were boys? He’d beat up other boys, the ones who always shoved me around, but he made me steal for him, like from corner stores, and buy him tickets to ball games, that was the trade-off.”

  “I’m working on a house,” Caleb tried again. Then he said, “I think we should go now.”

  This brought both men swiftly to their feet. Sunlight fell like a fever over the hills on the other side of the cove, where the little white house stood, but on this side shadows were growing. Caleb banked the fire. It felt like men were dancing on top of his brain, while at the edges of his vision trees grew blurry. They were going to lose the beautiful reddening light. Tony, who still held the Laphroig bottle, seemed to have no intention of handing it back. It’s my gift, he said with something like real malice and a gleam of sharp teeth. Then Tony decided he had to piss and told the others to go ahead while he made sure the fire was truly out with a gush of liquid so loud it unnerved Caleb as the embers hissed.

  And here, across the grass that Caleb had cut days before, borrowing the old man’s scythe, was the house, his refuge, his skin. One day, he’d buy a scythe of his own. Unlike this morning, the back door was not swinging open. From this angle, you couldn’t see the damage to the front. Caleb did not want to look across the cove to where in the still-bright light, solar panels would be shining from the roof of the girl’s house. From there, anyone looking in this direction might see him and the men. What was the worst that could happen? If the old man, catching sight of the three of them, came racing over on his quad, in the men’s eyes that would be a grand thing. As long as Caleb got in his pitch to Len first.

  The new clapboard shone. The old back door, sanded and slicked with a new coat of green paint, welcomed them from the top of the new bridge that Caleb had built.

  “This is your headquarters? This?” said Len.

  “This is my house,” Caleb said. “The one I’m renovating and turning into a guesthouse, see, so it will be my livelihood, so I can stay on the island. A boutique inn kind of thing, only a few guests needed, keep my carbon footprint low, but treat them right, give them a unique experience, chance to live close to land and sea in a remote place, eat food grown right here on the premises or gathered in these hills — local meat and fish. Sheep that graze right here, cod hand-caught in these waters. Grow kelp in the ocean as a carbon off-set.”

  At least the Scotch was making the words flow out of him. As they approached, Caleb told Len how Cape House had been built by a wealthy ship’s captain but had fallen into disrepair until Caleb had seen it as his very own mission to bring the place back to life. He wasn’t born here, no, his mother was, her people were from the island, not his father’s. Yet this place was his home, his everything. The light, the pinking clouds above them were perfect.

  “This is where we’re meeting your director?” Len asked as Caleb beckoned the men inside.

  The north wind hit them as soon as they stepped into the kitchen, pouring from the parlour and the dining room where the glassless window frames opened to the relentless sea.

  The kitchen was a work zone of sawhorses and planks and boards and Caleb’s equipment bag. He’d tidied the planks. He told Len how he’d installed a new pump, big expense, but now, when he fired up the generator, beautiful spring water poured from the taps. He kept a jug filled at all times. Do you want to try some, practically an elixir, it is. A burst of happiness surged through him, happiness and hope.

  “But I’m in need of more money to help with the renovations,” Caleb went on. “And recently I experienced a setback, see?” He directed Len and Tony into the wide and beautiful parlour. Uncle Charlie’s old wood stove squatted in a corner. In time he’d buy one of the new ones that burned a single log for hours. Only that morning, he’d been sweeping broken glass from the floor and mopping up the sea’s soaking spray.

  Outside, clouds were massing — the headlands stretched off into the distance, bands of sunlight yellowing their grassy, mossy humps, the rocky shore of the cove ribboning out to the implacable ocean.

  “The storm last night took out my windows, when the air pressure did that crazy drop? I’m doing all this on my own. So I could use an investment from someone who cares about such places, you know, who understands the beauty of living close to the sea. Like yourself.”

  “Me?” Len Hansen drew tight inside his jacket, perplexity gripping his mouth.

  “Yes,” Caleb said. “With an investment, you could come back and be my first guest. Bring a companion. You have to imagine the room wi
th proper windows, all snug and cozy, with a fire going, right, and the view, nothing like it, is there.”

  “You’d have to pay me to come back here,” muttered Tony. He took another slug of whiskey straight from the bottle, lips kissing the rim. “Do you have spreadsheets, cost-benefit analysis, five-year plan? Can’t make a pitch to a capitalist without these things. He’s not a charity.”

  “I can put something together,” said Caleb. “Any amount will help. I’m also planning to start a GoFundMe.”

  “Anyway,” said Tony, “Len’s already here about an investment.”

  “Tony,” said Len with a sharpness that jolted Caleb.

  “He works for the company,” Tony said. “He’s got to know something. We’re supposed to be plying him for information, remember? Have they or have they not done any actual field experiments with this engineered particulate? Will it do what they say it will? They had some pretty pictures and graphs in that online prospectus they sent you but we’re here, in situ, what more can we find out?”

  “Len’s in the airline business, isn’t he,” Tony said to Caleb, before Len could utter a word, “and airlines don’t like colossal storms like Fernand, which has kind of wrecked civilization up and down the east coast, at least temporarily. It’s not good for business, not good that Manhattan’s underwater, or Miami. Len and Roy have pumps running day and night at their headquarters down in Naples, Florida.”

  “We’re moving to Chicago,” said Len.

  “Right, so that’s why they’re interested in what the ARIEL project is up to, spraying the little specks up in the atmosphere to cool things down, ergo you have a way to control the thermostat. Len here works out a deal to provide a fleet of modified jets to do the spraying, and, voila, we’re set, finger on the knob. You’re ready to go, aren’t you, Lennie? Nudge, nudge, maybe there’ll be a cut in it for me.”

  “You would do the spraying?” Caleb said to Len, who suddenly seemed gaunt and full of angles.

  “Keep the technology in the hands of those who know how to employ it best, are nimble, and not beholden to the masses,” said Tony.

  “It would be our contribution to sustaining life as we know it,” said Len.

  “And keeping yourself in business,” said Tony.

  One sunny day two summers ago, July month, a year before his trip out in boat with the girl to see the icebergs and only a few months after Caleb had acquired Cape House from his uncle, he was working out at the house when who should appear but the old man, stepping towards him through the grove of spruce.

  The old man had been out to visit a few times, and even had ideas about how the work should be done. There was a new kind of interior insulation, he’d told Caleb, made of wool, high R-values, fire retardant, moisture absorbing; it wouldn’t be the cheapest, but, if Caleb were interested, he’d help defray the cost.

  Because there was no rain in the forecast, Caleb wanted to get the old clapboard off the exterior walls as soon as possible so that he could nail up a layer of Tyvek wrap. As he worked, he dreamed — these the earliest, most exuberant days of his dreaming. Only the day before he’d seen a caribou doe three times in the vicinity of Cape House, certain it was the same doe, her limbs sliding into his, her presence undoubtedly a form of luck. Before vanishing along the path to the headlands, the old man asked Caleb if he wanted an extra hand the next morning, and Caleb said yes, joyously.

  Bright and early, they rode out together on the quads, their wooden trailers banging behind them, carrying out more of Caleb’s building supplies. The air was calm. Stouts flew at them but not many. When Caleb opened the back door to Cape House, he was startled to find a cardboard box in the entry. The old man told him not to worry, it was his, he’d brought it over earlier by car. It’s fragile so don’t bump into it, please. It’s en route to somewhere else. This was puzzling, yet moments later they were both outside, gathering splintered clapboard into a pile.

  Late morning, the old man glanced at his phone and said, “Do you remember Anna Turi, who visited three years ago? She’s on the noon ferry and will be meeting us here.”

  “Here?”

  Anna, whom Caleb had sometimes heard in internet conversations with the old man, their voices floating through the cabin window as he dropped off a load of wood. Anna, who spoke of equations and grid sizes, to whom he’d once heard the old man say I owe you so much with such rawness it stopped Caleb in his tracks. Well, now, Anna was coming back.

  They drove both quads with their empty trailers down the trail and parked them near the firepit. The old man set off on foot in the direction of the road, leaving Caleb to ponder the mystery of Anna’s reappearance while listening to the shrill whistles of sanderlings on the beach, down a slope and out of sight from where he was. Moments later, a small white van nosed along the lane towards him.

  A figure leaped out of the driver’s side, in a knitted cap and outdoor clothes, waving as if, although they’d met only twice — in the kitchen of the old man’s house and on top of Bunker Hill — Anna remembered exactly who Caleb was.

  From the rear of the van, they unloaded equipment into the trailers: long metal cylinders, like the ones the old man used to inflate the small weather balloon he sent aloft every evening, the gas cylinders that Caleb now picked up and returned for him in Gander. Only these cylinders were bigger. A coil of hose with a nozzle on the end, a large metal spool thickly wound with lime-green tubing thin as a wire, a cardboard box smaller than the one the old man had dropped off at Cape House, a large metal winch, big enough to house the spool, with a handled wheel attached to it. Anna was strong, despite her slightness. Caleb watched her hands move, quick as leaves.

  From Cape House, Anna was going to walk, carrying the box the old man had brought over that morning, while Caleb on his quad followed the old man on his, past Seal Cove with its curve of sand, out through the fields where Caleb’s uncle’s sheep had once grazed. The afternoon sun hung high above them. Whisper clouds tufted and dissolved. So as not to jounce the trailers or leave Anna far behind, they drove slowly. Nevertheless the old man kept glancing over his shoulder.

  Occasional tourists walked the footpath but so rarely they were unlikely to run into anyone. Lobster season had ended so Martin Green would no longer be coming into the cove to check his traps. The person most likely to spot them was the girl, yet when Caleb glanced across the cove there was no sign of her.

  Before they reached the headlands and their cliff-like rise towards the sea, they cut northeast through fields and came at last to Sheep’s Cove, where there had once been a settlement and before that where Beothuk had stopped to forage and light campfires. The weathered ribs of a rotted boat were the only sign of former human habitation. Waves roughed the sea ahead but the air in the grass was calm, protected by the headlands to the northwest and the bare hills to the south. Bakeapples were beginning to ripen. Caleb stooped to pick a few. Ghosts sighed in the grass. Anna set down her burden gently, before searching for something. For what, Caleb asked. Sharp objects, she replied.

  Next thing, the old man was handing each of them a pair of thin white cotton gloves. Like the others, Caleb slipped his on. All this seemed peculiar but, whatever, it was his job.

  With a knife, the old man slit open the smaller cardboard box taken from the back of the van. From it he pulled out something encased in filmy plastic, which, when the old man broke the plastic open, revealed layers of very thin folded fabric. Caleb and Anna were to hold the fabric in their gloved hands, so that it didn’t snag or tear, the material expanding between them as they walked away from each other. All this was as baffling as any task Caleb had yet performed for the old man, including hauling all that computer equipment in to his cabin. Their careful steps felt like a ritual, even though Anna, across from Caleb, kept staring distractedly out to sea. There were no icebergs. It had been a slow summer for them, wind keeping them far offshore. The flat form was a balloon, Caleb realized once it had gained a shape, bigger than the old man’s regular weat
her balloons.

  With Caleb and Anna still holding the fabric’s edges, the old man fastened the nozzle at the end of the hose to the balloon’s narrow end. The hose was connected to the first of the long canisters, which lay on its side in the grass. When the old man turned a valve, gas hissed and entered the fabric.

  Slowly the balloon swelled, the helium inside its skin tugging at Caleb’s hands as the balloon gained the urge to rise. The larger the balloon grew, the smaller he felt, until, released from their hands, the balloon floated as large as a house above their heads.

  Before the balloon was fully expanded, the old man opened the box that Anna had carried with such care and lifted out an object that Caleb recognized immediately. The old man had been tinkering with it in his work shed for months. It resembled nothing so much as a tiny snowblower with a row of very small nozzles on one side. Inside its shell were propeller wings that would spin like those of a fan. A rectangular casing attached to the snowblower housed a circuit board and, the old man said, pointing to another rectangular section, Here’s the pump. Attached to the contraption was the small solar panel that would power it. As Caleb wandered about, the old man and Anna secured the contraption to the base of the balloon so that it dangled, the lime-green tubing attached to the contraption, the spool fitted onto the winch, which would unwind the tubing, and the balloon, into the air.

  Anna fussed with a small notebook computer while the old man took pictures. To Caleb, the whole scene seemed fantastical.

  “Here’s where we show how low-tech and low-cost an intervention might be — and local. Though you’d still want some kind of scientific consortium deploying it, even for regional use, plus some kind of intergovernmental approval. Ideally,” the old man said.

  “I didn’t think any of this was about living in an ideal world,” said Anna, frowning.