Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  “Last winter the ice in the bay where I come from didn’t freeze up until February,” Agnes said. “That’s months later than in the old days, months, not weeks. The temperature of the sea up there is rising faster than almost anywhere in the world. Twelve people fell through the ice last winter and had to be rescued, including my youngest uncle. Hunters can’t get to their cabins because the ice isn’t safe to travel on and they can’t get out on the land. My cousin Eli’s involved in a project placing sensors into the ice and on the runners of sleds as a warning system that will alert people when and where the ice gets thin. Better adapt than die, he says, and better we all work together. In the past, scientists came up, including my own father, who’s a Scottish ornithologist. Like the rest of them, he looked around, did his thing, and took off. That’s what I liked about Alan from the first time I met him, he kept coming back, he listened to what the elders had to say about the weather, and he was better than most about sharing his data.”

  Caleb shifted from foot to foot.

  “Kappiasuvunga. That means, I am afraid, in my mother’s language,” Agnes said. “Once there was a man who studied the ice. He and his team of researchers and students, including me, drilled deep into glaciers. We brought up ice cores, a record of ice over thousands of years, but what we observed of the recent past was troubling. When this man told the world what he feared, other people became so afraid they threatened to bomb the place where he worked and kill him. So he vanished, leaving everything behind. Meanwhile, people’s behaviour didn’t change and weather patterns grew more violent and unpredictable. Even in the place he’d fled to, this man’s fear grew. Other people’s fear grew elsewhere as the ice kept melting. So he began to wonder, Is there something we can do to save the ice? He reached out to others who love the snow and ice as much as he does and know how much we need it —”

  Caleb was aware of her lips, the sand grains on Agnes’s cheek. “You’re talking about him. Alan Wells.” He’d felt her love that day, as they stood together beside a grove of wind-battered spruce trees, staring out over the white, still sea, how love of the ice was like blood to her.

  “If you want to find out if what I’ve said is true, you’ll need to search for him under a different name. It’s Milan Wells.”

  Well, now. It was like encountering the same person only they were wearing a different skin. Bomb threats. People had tried to kill him. Which was a shocking discovery, though if Agnes thought the news would elicit his sympathy, she was wrong.

  “I’ve thought and thought about what Alan proposed —” Agnes said.

  “Not just him but you!” Caleb shouted, gas can sloshing at his side.

  “Maybe there would be an application, a spraying program workable on a local scale, that might specifically target the ice and not need to be global or so intrusive. I hoped for something, I wanted to believe, but I’ve come to think the desire for such a thing, his desire, even his fear, it’s corrupting. In reaching out to these men, in whatever way, there’s still a risk —. One of my aunts said to me, Don’t act out of despair. Caleb, where are you going with that gas can?”

  A path led away across the flat rocks. He couldn’t stop himself from turning back once more.

  “How bad is it out there?”

  “Out where?”

  “Across the bay, everywhere else.” He needed to know and no one seemed able to tell him.

  “I came from Nain, not from down south. I took the ferry past Rigolet and Hopedale, hitched a ride from St. Anthony to Gander, picked up the rental car there. It’s not going to be so good on the other side now, is it, where Fernand went through, though up north we still have smoke in our eyes from all the forest fires that won’t stop burning in Quebec, and the sun when it shines is bronze like bog myrtle in the fall.”

  Not long before the power went out at his great-aunt’s, the weather channel had announced another hurricane forming in the Caribbean. Where was that one now? Maybe what he wanted to know was, Is it so bad out there as to be unimaginable?

  Caleb took off at a run. There was a path around the perimeter fencing and from there another track led off through the mounds of rust-stained rock scraped by ancient ice and wind and bared by fire. Out of the northwest, from the direction of Tom’s Neck, something tiny and moving — human? — caught his eye.

  The gas can, an awkward weight, tugged at his side. The ground underfoot was still wet and puddled with mud, and protruding rocks were there to be tripped over. His own steps shuddered loud. The wind had shifted into the south so that he was running into it, not a wild wind, yet strong enough to pummel his ears. Rolling banks of cumulus cloud filled the sky, a window of blue among them. A squall cloud hung veil-like in the distance, taunting him. Already his stomach was cramping.

  Anger remained a pulse, alongside exhaustion. His mother’s voice rose, all the times she’d tried to warn him about what Alan Wells was up to. Her fear, her suspicions. He’s not to be trusted. He should have listened to her. Yes. Caleb spat and spat again.

  When the weight of the gas can felt like it would pull his shoulder out of its socket, Caleb slung the can into his other hand. A tawny fox, ahead on the path, bottle-brush tail straight out, bolted at the thud of his steps and the tattered breaths he couldn’t quiet. There was no sound of Agnes behind him, which didn’t mean she wasn’t back there, and he was leaving a trail of footsteps it would be impossible to miss.

  Coming over a rise, Caleb plunged to a stop. The musk caught him, then the sight. A caribou stag stood in the path, one branch-like rack of antler rising from his head. Caleb knew this stag. In winter, he’d seen the same creature from the road, near Shallow Bay, feeding among the rocks, shaggy and white-coated, ribs showing, notable because of the single antler, only a scar where the other had been. Now the stag was in his brownish summer coat, not yet moulting. There were others close by, caribou brought to the island in the years before his mother was born. Now there were fewer all the time, coyotes hunting them, the lichen they ate growing ever more slowly. Caleb sensed their presence, but it was the stag who held him in the mutual, nearly unbearable pressure of seeing and being seen.

  He shook himself out and, grabbing the can again, charged forward, a pair of coyotes out there too, trotting along another path.

  At each fork, Caleb bore to the southeast. Off on his right appeared a clearing where the Green brothers had been cutting wood, trimming the hewn trunks before teepeeing them to dry. There were more trees around him now, juniper and black spruce and tamarack. The next fork led to Frenchman’s Pond where the old man had taught himself and the girl to swim, the water’s taste as sweet and dense as tea.

  That way led to Martin Green’s cabin, Martin who like his uncle Charlie now worked out west in the oil. Crane operator, he was. His cousin Danny was training to pilot an oil tanker, one of those that travelled up and down the coast between the eastern oil platforms. That’s where the work and the money were. For now. Burning oil spewed carbon into the air. On and on the ever-more-tumultuous weather ran through all of them.

  Past a tangle of raspberry cane, through another stand of alders, there at last was the spare wooden frame of the old man’s cabin, which Caleb had helped Pat Green and the old man build, with its view across another plain of rock and out to sea. No lights shone inside. The curtains remained drawn. No smoke rose from the chimney. What was being asked of him? To see through space and time, to feel all the pain he could in a world stripped of illusion? Was pain the price of clarity? What lay on the other side of pain?

  Muscles spasming, Caleb swore at himself, fingers so numb it became a feat to unlatch the circle of interlocking teeth on the gas can’s black plastic cap.

  The cabin was the place where the old man kept his most prized equipment, the multiple screens, the tall metal storage units, secure behind the locked door, and data too, backed up no doubt, but the equipment housed all his secret plans, and the cabin itself was made of wood.

  On the bridge, Caleb sloshed ga
soline against the boards of the walls. The doorknob, which he didn’t try, was rusty from exposure to salt winds and no doubt the wood was damp after all the rain the hurricane had dumped on them. He would circle the cabin first. The smell of the gas swilling around him made him gag, but the old man would see the flames and for a brief, victorious moment he — Caleb Borders — he, too, would be seen.

  He was around back of the house, sloshing a stream of gasoline over that wall, slopping gasoline all over himself as well, when someone knocked him to his knees from behind and sent him sprawling. An arm, not his, righted the toppled container that glugged gasoline into the spongy ground. Caleb struggled to break free of the grip that pressed his chest to the earth, catching a glimpse of blue coverall as a knee dug into his back. Hard hands clasped his wrists and pulled his shoulders tight. He yelled.

  He heard the old man’s voice. “It’s become aggravating how much you keep interfering with my plans, Caleb.”

  “I’m messing with your plans?” At that, the old man, who had reserves of muscular strength Caleb seemed not to have, gave him a blow hard enough to stun him, and held him down while binding his wrists with something that felt like cloth.

  He couldn’t believe this, the old man was actually gagging him with more of the ripped sheet, tightening the cloth in a knot behind his head, so close that each flex of the man’s body, each taut heave of purpose and huff of breath felt like an echo of his own.

  “It won’t be for too long,” the old man said, patting Caleb on the shoulder as he hauled him upright and pushed him towards a spruce tree, then, with two neat kicks that made Caleb’s knees buckle once more, lowered him to the ground. With another strip of sheet, the old man tied him to the trunk.

  . . .

  Over rocks and mud they ran, Ella loping ahead, tongue at a rakish loll, Frank behind Miranda until she lost the sound of him and turned to find him doubled over, voice barely audible between gasps. I need a break. He seemed close to stumbling, and Miranda, too, was breathless enough that it was hard to speak. Pulling a jar of water out of her knapsack, she passed it over and Frank drank in grateful gulps.

  In the mud ahead of them a single set of boot treads imprinted themselves over quad tracks laid the day before, footprints that, Miranda was certain as she knelt over them, belonged to her father. So he had gone to the cabin as he’d told her. Yet there were no other tracks, so where were the men from the plane whom Caleb had insisted her father was meeting — Frank’s father and uncle, according to Frank, who were supposed to be signing a deal to back her own father’s research into cooling the Earth with a haze of tiny droplets. A stop-gap measure, she thought her father had said, yet Caleb had told her the men were in it to make money, and he’d called them ruthless. She had no idea how to square the circle if there was a circle to be squared. Was her father deceiving her, or lost in a sea of self-contradictions? He’d spoken on the phone to someone who’d flown in and knew who Agnes Watson and Arun Mudalnayake were. Arun was supposed to have come to the island but was stuck in Boston, Agnes might be somewhere nearby, which left Anna; where was she?

  Whatever they were up to, the ARIEL project that Frank had described, based on something someone had outlined to him in a letter, she and Frank and Caleb, too, would have to live with the consequences: even worse weather, more droughts or floods, altered winds. In the aftermath, however far-fetched all this was, they’d be here, picking up the pieces.

  Yet what she really wanted to explain to Frank, who’d thrown himself into a patch of crowberries, was how the world kept expanding. Perilously, necessarily, and he was part of this magnificent yet terrifying alteration, the surging, the unravelling, whatever it was.

  “Miranda?” Frank stared up at the shifting clouds. “Did I tell you my father’s offered me a seat on his Mars expedition? If things get bad around here. All of this is like a huge gamble to him, if the Earth thing works, great, if it doesn’t, the chosen few will be whisked away to a place where there’s no breathable air and there was, like, water a million years ago, where we won’t be able to go outside and there’s no way back. Doesn’t that sound fabulous? Want me to ask him if you can come, too?” When Ella licked his sweaty face, Frank pushed her away with bursts of breath. “You want me to ask him about dogs? Take my word for it, Ella, you don’t want to go there.”

  He was on his feet again, loose-limbed in his jeans and bedraggled sweater, one of Miranda’s knitted hats clamped on his head. Now he was telling her how, for his eleventh birthday his father had organized a paintball party, sent out all the invitations before Frank knew a thing, and, on the day of the party, when Frank refused to go, his father had grown so angry Frank was convinced he was going to throw him down the stairs.

  They were jogging. Even now, Frank said, his father was looking to buy out another airline and start another discount subsidiary — as a democratizing venture. He gave a hard laugh. “As if already having a footprint big enough to leave a mark on the geological record isn’t enough, it has to be the biggest footprint possible because insatiability is all he can imagine. Even if it brings on a firestorm, he’s convinced he’ll survive it. Or else he’s just desperate to be loved.”

  He stumbled once more to a halt. “But I’m giving you the wrong impression. I’m leaving out his phenomenal animal magnetism. You’ll see. Everyone flocks to him. He used to play stadiums with thousands and thousands of people cheering. I’ve seen the videos, the total adulation. His generosity. He wants to give me everything he didn’t have as a kid but the deal is I have to be masochistically grateful, and when I’m not it slays him because he’s such a narcissist. He taught me how to sail, we’d go out on one of his boats together or wander along the shore of this island he owns, searching for the green flash that happens sometimes, you must know, when the sun sets over the ocean —”

  “Have you seen it?”

  Frank held out a hand. “You’re my green flash, Miranda. You’re my accidental. Maybe we don’t need to go anywhere. We stop right now and hang out here, just the two of us.”

  When she slipped her gloved hand into his, the new and thrilling electricity jolted through her. It caught at her too, the desperate desire to let everything else fall away. She squeezed again. “Later. First we have to find out what they’re up to.”

  And here was a path forking off to the right, through tamarack and spruce, leading into the hills, and there in the soft dirt — following the lead of Ella’s nose, Miranda knelt over a confusion of footprints, coming from the fork and continuing along the path ahead. “What if they’ve already done whatever they’re doing and we’re too late?” she cried with a rush of helplessness.

  “We’ll still find a way to stop them,” said Frank. He seemed both young and old as, with a touch of his hand to her back, he was the one reassuring her.

  The cabin stood on a plain of rock, trees and solar panels at the rear. The building was unassumingly small and grey, a cottage Miranda might have called it once, the place for which her father had half-abandoned her. Out on the bridge a woman in a yellow rain jacket paced. Anna Turi, yes, it was surely Anna’s willowy frame and ardent stare. Anna stiffened at the sight of them. Her alarm seemed at first to be concern, as if they were running towards her bearing news of disaster from somewhere else, only as they drew closer, they transformed into the danger, and when they came stumbling up to the cabin’s front steps, she threw out her arms to stop them.

  “You can’t go in there, Miranda,” Anna said fiercely.

  “Anna, I have to speak to my father.”

  Sweaty and red-cheeked, Frank plunged under one of Anna’s outstretched arms, Ella scrambling after him onto the bridge.

  “Please let me through,” Miranda cried. What could she possibly say to convince wide-eyed Anna, her father’s collaborator, who no doubt had the strength if she wanted to pin Miranda in place, to let her pass? Yet a pained tenderness seized Anna’s face and, with a waver, she dropped her arms.

  On the bridge, the smell o
f gasoline billowed up from the planks as Frank fought the rusty door handle. Of course the door would be locked. Would they have to break through a window to reach their own fathers? What would they find? But when Frank gave the door one more shove, the handle released, practically throwing them inside.

  In the dim room, where the flowered curtains had barely been opened, four men sat around a wooden table. At the rear, her father shifted silently at their tumbled entrance. But it was the man to his right, with the shock of white-blonde hair, broad-shouldered, signing something with a stylus on an electronic pad, who seized Miranda’s attention, who seemed to occupy so much space that he obliterated the other men with him.

  Roy Hansen’s large features were surrounded by dark troughs of skin. Unshaven, his bristled cheeks in no way detracted from his handsomeness. Where was he in Frank, or Frank in him? Miranda strained to find something. The lips. The air of bold ardour. Airline magnate, carbon pirate, Roy seemed both invincible and intensely childlike, more childlike than Frank, and the combination was mesmerizing and uncanny.

  “Don’t sign anything,” Frank shouted. At his lunge through the dimness towards the table, such an ordinary table, his father thrust himself to his feet, taller than Frank and blistering with outrage.

  “What the hell?”

  By the door, Miranda knew herself to be invisible to all but her own father’s slitted gaze. All eyes were on Frank reaching for the computer pad, only the man in a red nylon jacket, his back to Miranda, grabbed the pad before Frank could and clutched it like a birthday present to his chest. On the far side of the table, a man with receding, slicked-back hair and a thick stare hidden behind glasses looked ready to pounce. Towering above them all, Frank’s father ordered Frank to remove his hat. Before Frank could do a thing, his father surged forward and ripped the wool hat from Frank’s head. The next moment he was smothering Frank in his arms.

  Fury still seemed to pour from Roy Hansen, only it couldn’t simply be fury. “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead.” He was shaking Frank as if Frank were a doll in his grip, and Frank, whose black hair lay plastered damp against his forehead, whose chest still shuddered from their run, seemed at first to go limp in his father’s hands.