by Peter Unwin
AT THE SUDBURY BUS TERMINAL, Linda snapped awake in time to watch a man with his fly unzippered get on drunk and stinking, listing to starboard and muttering darkly about the end of the world which, he announced, was also sick and tired like him. The bus was a third empty, but despite this indisputable fact he sat beside her. “Today’s my goddamn birthday,” he said apparently to her. “Just got outta the hospital.” He appeared to view this disclosure as an invincible pick-up line for he immediately dropped a paw upon the knee of her right leg.
She wrestled with a desire to smash his face into a pulp, but instead stood up and resituated herself in the gloomy rear of the bus. Some of the passengers had fitted white surgical masks to their faces and stared at her sullenly as she passed, as if everything was her fault. Linda was no longer sure of the protocols. She never had been. Did the wearing of the mask mean the wearer was sick and attempting to protect you? Or was it the other way around? Was she the sick one? The infector? Were they protecting themselves from her? From Linda Prescot née Richardson? Protecting themselves from what was inside of her? God help them if that’s what they were trying to do.
Linda set herself down in the aisle seat next to a woman of considerable age. Skeins of white hair fell from a scarf tied to her head. She was reading a folded paperback edition of Tales of An Empty Cabin, by Grey Owl. Linda warmed to her. Paul owned that book somewhere. They exchanged mute introductions performed with short nods of the head and movements of the mouth that were not smiles but close to smiles, the unspoken promises of equanimity and respect. The woman seemed to be expecting her. Linda couldn’t help herself, “My husband has a copy of that book. But I’ve never read it.”
“Oh,” said the woman. “Look.” She turned the book over to show off the Karsh photo on the back. “He wasn’t a real Native, he was a phony. Like everyone, but he was good looking. My god he was handsome. He looks just the way we want our husbands to look forever.”
“He kind of looks like my husband,” murmured Linda, “except that my husband is older. And doesn’t have as much hair. Plus his hair is blond. Blondish. In fact, he doesn’t look like my husband at all.” She laughed. “In fact, my husband’s going bald and looks nothing like that man.”
The other woman laughed too. “That is very remarkable, for he somewhat resembles my husband. In the details of the face, I mean.” The older woman laughed again. “I am talking now of many, many years ago of course. That man. I met him on a dance floor when the bombs were falling. Oh, they were falling the way the leaves fall here in the autumn time. It was London you see. The Blitz. I was a student. Falling like rain I suppose. Bang bang, boom boom. That is how it was. He said to me, ‘Would you like to dance? Please would you like to dance with me?’ He sounded like a count. For all I knew he was a count, I was seventeen years old. We danced to Al Bowlly on a dance floor in London while the bombs were falling all around us. They put thick curtains over the windows you see. He was Polish, from the borderlands. His English was very good. Better than mine really.”
“He asked you to dance?”
“Yes, I danced with him. He was a pilot. A brave pilot. A fighter pilot. An excellent dancer. He kept a tin of wax in his pocket, for his shoes.”
“You didn’t have a chance.”
“No. No chance at all. He had blue eyes. So it really was not fair. We went back to my room that night. Straight to bed. Everyone did back then. I had a roommate, a Belgian girl. She just picked herself up with a blanket and went into the other room and slept on the floor.”
“It’s not fair about pilots.”
“No, it’s not.”
They sighed together over the grief that airmen had inflicted on women.
“Regula, my name is Regula.”
“Linda.”
“You’re not wearing a mask.”
“No,” said Linda. “Neither are you.”
The woman smiled. “He had blue eyes, my husband, and was very handsome. Still is, at eighty-two. Although I must say that I have become a bit tired of him.” The woman looked out the window and saw the pitch black. “We’ve been married for sixty-four years and I’m getting rather tired of him. He says no all the time. You see? He sits in a chair, his chair, and says no. No I don’t want to do that. No this no that. What is it you want to do? That’s what I ask him. He has no answer. He wants to sit in a chair. I’m not going to be one of those old ladies who sits in a chair and has nothing to do. Can you see yourself doing that?”
Linda shook her head.
“Well exactly. He can sit in a chair if he wants. I was in Toronto visiting someone. A gentleman friend. Widowed. A diplomat. Former diplomat. Though his mind is going now. Still, he has a wonderful laugh. We went bowling.” She fell silent for a moment before adding forcefully, as if speaking to herself. “I’m not going to sit in a silly chair, really.”
They talked effortlessly in the dark in low voices in time to the motion and muffled by the night that pressed the windows. The woman told of her great journeys and migrations, Switzerland, the littleness of things that finally wore her down. The apartment she’d waited four years on a list to live in and how it suffocated her. She felt the great size of her youth and she and her Polish fighter pilot sailed to Canada on a converted cattle boat, the S.S. Columbia, nine days on the Atlantic, up the St. Lawrence, and finally to the towering silos of the Lakehead, Thunder Bay.
“I wanted to go somewhere where there were Natives. Real Natives. Indians and Finns. Finndians.” She laughed. “Don’t ask me why. So Thunder Bay, why not? Oh, it was very exciting, the most exciting thing ever, really. I was so young. I was on a great ship. I saw whales in the St. Lawrence, sunning their backs, turning in the water. Then we got here and the big freighters, the big grain silos, big, everything big, so big.”
She stopped talking and looked out the window. “My second week here, at the Lakehead I mean.” Her voice was barely audible. She cast her eyes to the seat in front of her to a dark spot that she seemed to be familiar with. “I was walking in the woods by myself, I loved to do that, I still do. I heard this howling, it was a bear you see, and I’d never seen a bear before, of course not, and this was such a small bear, it was the size of a dog really, no bigger than a dog, and it was caught in a trap. Oh, my goodness it was crying. They do that, you know. It was crying like a baby. I could see it, the teeth from the trap were in it, the blood was everywhere in the snow, and it was crouched there like a baby crying and crying. It wanted its mother. It must have been there for a long time, I don’t know how long. Terrible. That is the country too,” she said, turning away to hide her face in the boreal black of the night.
They slept fitfully side by side, warm in the company of each other, snuggled in the unfolding miles that sped past through the dark. At Nipigon, the bus turned off the highway, down into the village, and heaved to a noisy stop at a red brick restaurant. Already it teemed with the pre-dawn energy of timber men and mill workers, fuelling up on strong coffee and fragrant scorched meats. The caustic accents of mid-country, white skin, a confident heehaw of laughter and raw talk. The room they sat in was a low-ceilinged angular art deco construction from a different age, the waitress tall, young, gum chewing, her hair in pigtails. She recommended something she called a turkey melt sandwich and leaned in to them and whispered conspiratorially with a grin, “We melt those little suckers right here.”
The two women ate in silence, hungrily, like penitents, and returned to the bus, content in the bodily proximity of each other. They were driven out into the grey morning landscapes of water and rock, the swale of twisted vegetation preceding the straight hundred-metre drops to Superior. On the other side, the vast dark reach of the Nipigon River, crowded with its furred mountains, stretched on forever north to the enormous lake. Sleepily, she remembered Nipigon, their trip there, she and Paul and the lake, the enormous dimensions of it, the haunting beaches made of green sand. Shakespeare Island.
The Katatota. The sense she had then of the unlimited-ness of herself, of her life, of the man she was with who chauffeured her around the great earth and shared her bed. Linda slept and saw the flashing tan legs of a man running and charged with sweat. He strode a desert land holding a jar of water stopping to sprinkle it on the parched earth. She awoke, afraid that she had dreamt this dream before. She had always thought there could be no greater punishment than to dream the same dream night after night.
They arrived with a clank at the Thunder Bay bus terminal and in the glinting steel of buses and hubcaps and the haze of exhaust they took their leave from each other. Linda presented her companion with a pear from Mr. Holderlich’s tree. For a moment the woman held the fruit up to the light, as if examining the properties of a fine claret.
“Thank you, dear. What a pleasure to sit with you. To pass miles with you. There are so many of them, aren’t there? So many miles. I want you to have a marvelous life. A big life filled with big weather and big life. I know you will. You have no choice.” She leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Such a choice is not given to us is it?”
9
THE SLEEPING GIANTS
… when I am in great danger, and on the point of dying, then I shall collect all my family around me, and reveal to them the entire history of my dream. And then they will hold a great feast.
CITED BY JO HANN GEORG KOHL, 1860
SHE LEFT THE BUS TERMINAL in a cab driven by a man of stony aspect with a large cauliflower ear on the right side of his head. A boxer, she thought. With a past. Everyone had a past. Everyone had been beaten up in the ring. “Prince Arthur Hotel,” she announced and he accepted this information from her gloomily and set forth beneath a sky that opened into scattered blue holes through which a more cheerful universe seemed to be going about its way, indifferent to them, to her in particular. They did not speak a word. He drove with a studied casualness paying no attention to the road and allowing his gaze to linger intently on grey buildings, the closed curtains. The streets were empty of people and possessed their own loneliness.
Even before she exited the cab, she saw her husband through the doors, standing restlessly in the ornate amber-coloured lobby of the Prince Arthur, its massive chandelier curved above him like a cluster of stars. She assessed the man without his knowledge, feeling a strange childish excitement in doing so. She saw him move from foot to foot, prey to his restlessness. He stood there, looking half-made like a man waiting for his wife to come out of the bathroom. When he saw her, he snapped and moved swiftly across the floor. “Let’s eat,” he said. “Not here.”
“Shouldn’t we kiss first?”
He laughed foolishly. “You’re right.”
Their lips pressed, only half of them, his own parched by the wind and sun, the hard cracks pressed against her lips. Perfunctory kiss, she thought, like a handshake between people who trusted each other to the end of time. She accepted the polite passion of her husband and was briefly annoyed with it again.
They found a restaurant close to the water, a tacky interior filled with formica and old neon signs and what looked to be a glazed thirty-pound stuffed walleye hanging on the wall. The waitress deposited two cups of strong coffee in front of them. “Special is fish,” she said. “Fish.”
“Where does the fish come from?” Paul demanded. The young woman pointed her finger across the highway to the black water. “Out there,” she said curtly. “Where do you think?”
Paul smiled hugely.
Soon they were gorging on enormous fillets of lake trout that curled over both edges of the plate. They ate passionately and without speaking. She thought that in the week and a half away from her Paul had turned vindictively handsome, something she found oddly annoying. His face gleamed with an intensity she had not seen for some time, tanned and weather-beaten as if a freshened veneer of his self had been blown on to him by the wind. His lips were cracked by sun.
They finished their meal and walked back to the hotel on streets that were uncomfortably empty and garish with shadows that seemingly danced to music that couldn’t be heard. A crowd of people stood outside a makeshift vaccination clinic not saying a word, all of them wearing white masks. A few young men, sullen with drink, directed mean looks at Paul: it seemed they were furious with him for being in a woman’s company.
In the hotel room Linda crossed to the window and stationed herself in front of it, staring out at the long low formation of the Sleeping Giant as it rose up out of the harbour. The mountains and mesas outlined a sleeping god, one that would sleep forever, she thought, with some envy. The ridges glinted in the lapping surface in the light of the moon, or a passing satellite, and she understood that a few elusive cougars still hunted and copulated out there. Paul stood behind her and they stared together from the fifth-floor window at the wild and random mix of dark sky against the city and the great lake. The world was so very big. Beneath them, the Canadian National shunted rolling stock from the Soo Line. The black rail yards skirted up against Cumberland, still furious with trucks hurrying to their destinations. She saw no one at all. The city was empty of people, it seemed, and repopulated by trucks and cars and trains that boomed as they hitched and unhitched. Five thousand acres of sheet roofing and warehouses and hydro pylons stretched in front of them without any walking souls, only crows lifting off and settling down again.
“A lot of crows,” she said.
“Yes, the taunting enigmatic crow. From their mighty flapping wings come thunder and wind, comes lightning. Look at them, they sit out there waiting for the world to be given back to them. Good luck with that.”
Linda was not particularly in the mood for the apocalyptic musings of Paul Prescot.
“Did you miss me horribly?”
He looked at her mystified. “Sorry, were you away?”
Despite herself, she chuckled. He did too. They had for years over this particular gag.
“If you must know, I was at home having criminal sex with Mr. Holderlich. What a filthy beast that man is.”
“It’s all legal now isn’t it? You don’t need to worry.”
“He tied me to a table and took pictures of me. Fed me nothing but pears.” She pulled a pear from the basket only to have Paul snatch it impulsively from her and chomp into it before grabbing her around the shoulders and steering her from the window, pushing his lips to hers, forcing the broken hunks of fruit from his own mouth into her mouth, sloshing pulp between their teeth. Linda thought she was about to choke.
“Jesus,” she gasped, and without warning slapped him across the face hard enough to make her palm burn.
Paul rubbed the side of his face, focusing his fingers on a spot above his jaw line on the left. “Careful. My teeth are bothering me,” he said. His teeth were always bothering him. Linda felt foolish in her brutal naked drama and irritated with him. With herself. Sex, she thought, the desire of the body, her body. It was a joke that God played on men and women. On her in particular.
“Sorry,” she said and was angry with herself for saying it. Her husband tried to embrace her tentatively now and she felt that a dull wall of intimacy had thrown itself up between them again. An old wall made by Scottish rock builders and Presbyterian damnation. She’d had enough of it. There were times she felt her country was made of it. Even herself.
Paul wiped particles of pear flesh from his face and kissed her full on this time. They staggered as one toward the bed, collapsing to a stiff and ostentatiously luxurious mattress set beneath a pine-scented air freshener and the glow of a Mediterranean sunset painting. She cast a rueful look at it on the way down to the bed and witnessed the familiar colours of cosmetic hell. All ye who enter into such a place. Then she was wrestled beneath him; the pressing of his body was warm and familiar and respectful. She had no use for so much respect. She did not collapse on bed sheets or appear unannounced at a man’s door to be respected. She rather vaguely desired t
he hot exhalations from a forest floor, something a little more volcanic. For some reason she thought of a cougar, with its lithe body, roaming the mesas of the Sleeping Giant, desperate for a mate. Sniffing the air for her smell.
They aligned together with her hips hounding his hips, her body seeking his in search of something to press against. Below them, on the black roads of the city, the traffic confounded their turmoil and moaned in a language of its own. The hissing dominion of eighteen-wheel trucks rose softly through the window; all of them loaded with brandy and furs as they rushed away from her, west to the terraced city of Duluth, to the storied peltries that lay beyond Pigeon River.
Linda lay on the bed in a cord of light that shafted into the room. It was warm to her, like the glow from a kerosene lamp that was seeking them out, settling on their limbs. They lay together as man and woman, manwoman, she thought, or the other way around. It felt as if they were welded to each other and she settled into the mix of him and her, her chest against his back, her arm over his. It was what they did best, inhaling together, exhaling together, rather like two valves pumping in unison. It made them work.
Soon Paul rose up from the bed and paced heavily to the window putting his hands on the sill and preparing, it seemed to her, to launch himself like a falcon into the sky. Despite his bulk he looked momentarily lost there at the glass, and uncertain where to throw his gaze, uncertain where he would ever land. Linda lay without motion, aware of her contentedness; needing nothing, hungry for nothing, knowing nothing, at peace with nothing, moving through her mind content to breathe and exist beneath moons that were invisible to her. There were so many gods, she thought. Some of them were in this room. All of them had names she couldn’t pronounce. Her body was content to lie upon a bed. What was it she did next? She didn’t know or need to know. Everything felt to be in place, as if her life had settled into the seats of an auditorium to watch a performance. Behind her eyes, pulsating webs of northern lights seemed to be falling. Animals she didn’t recognize hove their wings in front of her, buzzed furiously and shot away. The wings were woven of bulrushes. Even her most indifferent kiss could turn any one of them into a prince with shapely legs and a gold crown. There would be castles to live in.