When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  “Might be worse than going to jail or a hospital,” said Davis. “Can’t imagine he’s got a lot of money.”

  The cops nodded at him, looking for agreement, so Paul obliged them, still unhappy. Did they expect him to feel sorry for the old loon?

  “Hey,” said Lazeroff suddenly. “You mind taking us down to the fence? I’m curious for a look.”

  At the creek, Davis appraised the equipment in the measuring station as if he were shopping at a rummage sale, holding up the Floy tag gun and vials of clove oil, his eyebrows narrowing and then rising, his lips pursed. “Huh,” he muttered indifferently when he finished. Lazeroff, meanwhile, stood at the edge of the fence, the water touching his boots. When he spoke, which he did with a low, almost wistful voice, he pointed out every aspect of the stream—the straight riffle, the curve upstream that created a pool along the far bank.

  “You call this a job?” he said. “This is a vacation.”

  Paul grimaced. “You aren’t here at night.”

  “You getting bushed yet?” said Davis. He grinned at Lazeroff.

  The constable laughed. “Oh, it’s too early. Give the man another few weeks until the cold and the rain hit, with nothing but a pack of cards to keep him company.”

  Lazeroff gave him more assurances before leaving. “Pop into the station when you come into town,” he said. “I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

  For a long time after they’d gone, Paul paced the camp. The cops made the old man sound harmless, an object of pity. Not much sympathy for an outsider—didn’t he know madness was par for the course out here? Apparently he’d soon be half-mad himself.

  7

  He decided to head to Shellycoat the next morning. Food and clean clothes were running low. And it might be best, he thought, to get the trip over with, not have it lurking in the back of his mind all week. When they’d talked about being bushed and coming into town, the younger cop had given him a wink. Oh, yes: women. That’s what Davis had implied. Go see some coffee shop girls, cashiers, women jogging in their shorts and yoga pants along the lakefront. That built-up tension, the blue-balled bush man. But what he felt was slightly anxious. He certainly wasn’t starved for people’s company. They were dropping by camp on a regular basis, for Christ’s sake.

  While he drove, he kept the CB volume turned up and set to channel 5. A trucker’s voice came through the radio’s static. “Empty, twenty-eight on the Immitoin.” Paul looked for one of the orange kilometre markers so he could call his location. That was how to do it, according to Tanner. Empty when driving up the road, or north, and loaded when heading south toward town.

  He passed Hardy’s cabin without realizing where he was, and as he looked back in his rear-view mirror, a logging truck swung around the corner, the semi’s grill staring him down. “Fuck,” he shouted and tapped on his brakes, too hard, and fishtailed through a water bar, the nose of his vehicle slamming down hard, then skyward. He jerked to the right, his tires plowing through the soft shoulder as the truck slid past him. The driver gave him a long, angry blast on the horn. Paul cranked the wheel again and skidded back onto the road. Jesus H. Christ, he breathed.

  “Hey, Fred.” An irritated voice crackled over the CB. “Some cocksucker in a Pathfinder doesn’t have a radio, heading your way.”

  “Okey-doke.” The accent sounded Russian. “Empty, twenty-eight.”

  His face burning, Paul waited until he saw the next marker. “Loaded pickup, twenty-nine,” he mumbled into the receiver. He pulled close to the shoulder and slowed down. A few moments later, another logging truck rattled around the corner, a cloud of dust billowing up beside it. The driver lifted two fingers off the wheel in greeting, a smirk on the broad, red-cheeked face.

  “Fuck you too,” said Paul under his breath as he sped up again. A few hundred metres later, where a power line right-of-way crossed the road, he pulled over. Thimbleberry, bracken fern, and dogsbane, all caked with dust, hung in rows above the ditch. He walked around to the passenger side and dropped his pants. With a few swift movements, he ripped off his damp incontinence pad and flung it into the weeds.

  He swung by the police station, his first stop. Behind his desk, under the fluorescents, the constable looked dumpy and bored. Paul asked if there had been any confrontation with the old man. “Didn’t wave a gun at me, if that’s what you mean,” Lazeroff said. “Caught him at a lucid moment. Says he’ll come by and apologize if you’d like. Told him that probably wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “Or wanted,” said Paul. “Thanks.”

  The constable changed the subject and asked him if he’d seen anything out of the ordinary—besides Hardy, of course. They still didn’t know how Caleb Ready ended up in the river. “I haven’t really explored, to be honest,” Paul said. “Should I?”

  “Well, yeah, for your own sake. It’s beautiful country.” Lazeroff chuckled. “No need to poke around on our account.”

  “That drowned man,” Paul said. “Did he leave a note? At his house, I mean?”

  “Cottage.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Summer cottage by the marina, just up from the dam. He didn’t live here year-round,” Lazeroff said. “There wasn’t a note.”

  He left and found a coffee shop with Wi-Fi, deciding to sit outside and soak up the small town buzz. He was enjoying himself far more than he’d expected, which maybe wasn’t saying much. The late summer heat of Shellycoat was different than the coast, tailor-made for sitting outside. Smells didn’t come and go on an ephemeral ocean breeze but hovered in the still air and accumulated in richness: deli meat, bagels and mustard, coffee and fresh bread. Mountain bikes leaned against the ornate metalwork railings, a line of men and women in cycling shorts queued up at the coffee counter, brown and grey mud drying on their calves and black apricot-shaped bums. They looked to be all ages, anywhere from twenty to fifty, all of them hard and lean with tanned and veiny arms. On the curb near Paul, two men in khaki uniforms spread maps and clipboards on the hoods of a truck marked with a Monashee Power logo, their travel mugs perched at angles on the gleaming metal.

  He checked his e-mail, sent a quick reply to his parents to say he was all right, the river was beautiful, so were the fish, sorry he’d be out of touch for the next while. Most of the incoming messages he could ignore, put off, or delete. Like the one from Dr. Elias Tamba.

  Hope your convalescence is going well. I took the liberty of checking for a specialist in your area and, of course, found no one and nothing. In fact, I would recommend avoiding any type of serious injury or disease during your stay, as apparently the local hospital, thanks to recent government cuts, has been reduced to something slightly better than an emergency outpost.

  I’m obliged to ask about your plans for the future (your silence is understandable, of course, but this needs to be addressed sooner rather than later). Requisite questions: Are you registered for the next semester? Have you modified your dissertation, or considered a new direction you may want to take?

  He gnawed softly on one knuckle. Tamba’s stiff attempts at camaraderie grated. All he could picture was Tamba’s smug smile and Christine. Did he need to reply to this right now? No. If the question was whether he’d drop out or not, Tamba probably knew the answer better than he did.

  Driving back, the back seat loaded with clean laundry and groceries, he watched the monolith of the dam rise up like a mirage and shimmer under sunlight. The smell of dried grasses, hay in a field, filtered through the open window, along with the truncated notes of crows and blackbirds. An osprey perched on a telephone pole and then launched itself over the water. Cars and trucks were parked along the reservoir, and families trudged up dirt paths from the water, arms loaded with rumpled towels and empty coolers, their bathing suits wet with the last swim of the year.

  At Hardy’s driveway, he slowed to peek at the cabin. On the deck, a single straight-backed wooden chair faced the river, and the cabin, for all its dull-wooded wear, looked like a tourist’s dream, t
he cozy summer cottage. Then something moved on the far corner of the deck, and there was Hardy. The old man leaned against the railing, staring down at the dark pool, at the eddy gathering whatever the current sent down.

  8

  In the dream, the woman was mostly Anneke, the student he’d met at the Skinnskatteberg pub, but he also recognized Christine’s elfin figure. The smile, broad, sweet, and somewhat naive, was distinctly Naomi’s. He wanted to kiss that smile, drawn to the memory of its silly warmth, but the shifty mouth eluded him, there and not there on the blond, plump-cheeked face of the giggling Swede.

  Much of the dream was a true recollection: they’d stumbled outside to a dark spot behind the building, where the streetlight didn’t reach. Snowflakes like drunks keeling over. Whenever she laughed, Anneke would press her head against his chest, and she was always laughing. “Very high on the Ecstasy,” she told him. He’d taken a mix of pills she and her friends had given him and they’d made him drink too much aquavit. He leaned against the wall of the building, her forehead butted against his collarbone and her breath gathered in the folds of his coat. He kept bringing her hand down to the fly of his jeans until she unzipped and pulled him free into the cold air. Her hand kept rhythm while she laughed and muttered things into his chest. Her teeth latched on to his sweater and yanked. Time jumped around. Or a moment disappeared in a blackout. He heard the crunch of her knees pressing into fresh snow, white flakes streaking past as though he were driving fast through a winter storm on a pitch-black, unmarked highway. She was up again, her teeth back into his sweater, close to the neck, and now his middle and ring fingers worked against and inside her, cotton brushing against his knuckles. “You don’t stop,” she warned him, and he hadn’t in real life, but in the dream he was racing off down the highway, careening wildly, and then awake.

  Most of him was awake. “So do you miss morning hard-ons?” Tanner had joked the day he left, and yes, Paul did miss them, especially after a dream like that.

  Two days had passed since his visit to Shellycoat, which he decided he hadn’t, after all, enjoyed. There’d been too much stimulus, too much awareness of his own body: the discomfort of searching for a bathroom, the self-consciousness of being a stranger. Not a tourist, just a stranger. And then, after being surrounded by people—the half-sincere smiles of cashiers and grocery clerks, music, and the café smells—the return to camp’s solitude was too abrupt, too absolute. The sunset, the red and purple light playing across the river until it faded into a dark shale grey, made him all teary.

  Yesterday, he napped by the Immitoin all afternoon, lost in its ceaseless tumbling sounds. A small brown lizard had paused among dead leaves, and a dipper perched on its boulder and bobbed like the coiled spring of some benevolent toy. The hills across the river, their peaks elusive in the hazy atmosphere, stretching back over the horizon, flashed bits of yellow and orange along its crest where bushes had dried from the summer heat. Sometimes the river created the disturbing illusion of voices—a child’s cry, a woman murmuring, a friend shouting from across the way—but the babble eventually won him over and lulled him.

  He finished up the morning count and sat outside the trailer, drinking tea and contemplating how to ration his food, the best way to wash and dry his clothes at camp while the good weather lasted—any possible way to stretch his time away from town. Tanner had supplied a solar shower, a black rubber bladder that hung from a tree near the creek where it could absorb the sun’s heat all day. It beat showering once a week at the community recreation centre. If he was careful, he could go maybe ten days between trips. So, two, maybe three, more visits to Shellycoat. That, of course, raised the question of what he would do after his final trip out, when the contract ended in mid-October, but he couldn’t even attempt to answer that one yet.

  Someone was driving up the mainline: a bad muffler, probably a pickup or an old model SUV. He heard a cranked stereo, heavy bass, and a rattle of loose wood and nails as the vehicle thumped over the bridge, and his heart sank. Tanner had said this place was quiet: it got more traffic than a city park. A few moments later, a rusted-out Jeep coasted down into the rec site, a stubby red kayak bungeed to the roof, the driver’s window open, hip hop blaring. The driver had his arm out the window, whooping as he rolled his truck beside Paul’s Pathfinder, his fist raised. He stared at the camper and at Paul, and his arm retracted. He turned off the stereo, and the door opened with a loud creak and pop, flakes of rust falling to the ground. He looked about twenty, sporting his cap backward on top of unruly blond hair, a surfer T-shirt and board shorts hanging off a toned and muscular body.

  “What the fuck,” he said, shuffling around in small circles. He pulled out his phone and started texting angrily.

  “There’s no signal,” Paul said.

  “Don’t I know it.” He tapped at the phone in disgust. Finally his glance returned to Paul. “Hey. Sorry, dude.”

  “That’s all right.” Paul still sat watching him from his lawn chair, both irritated and slightly amused. He didn’t know much about kayaks, and this one looked strange: short, tapered front and back, very space-agey, like a squashed UFO. Massive, a decal said in sizzling letters.

  “You see some guys earlier? Two trucks kinda like mine, kayaks on the roof?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “Fuckers.” He threw his arms up in the air.

  “Maybe you’re early.”

  “No, bro, I’m fucking late. Like always. And nobody’s been here waiting? Aw, man. They bailed on me. Fuckers.”

  “Sorry, what’s the story here?” Paul asked, fairly sure he didn’t care.

  “We were supposed to drop half our trucks here and head up to the Flumes with the rest. We launch about ten K up the river, and we finish at the mouth of Basket Creek,” he explained when Paul raised his eyebrows.

  “Well, nobody’s driven by this morning. Not even logging trucks.” Paul sifted tea leaves through his teeth and spat. He pictured the rec site packed with beat-up trucks and shirtless teenaged dudes swilling beer. His idea of hell.

  “They’re probably hungover. Slept in. Shit. I was so hyped for this.” His voice went up in pitch, somewhere between a teenager’s whine and an adult’s resigned disgust. Paul, reminded of the impatient and cocky Tran Minh, suppressed a smile.

  “It’s my first day off in, like, two weeks. Supposed to be our last big hurrah on the river for the year. You know?” He glanced over his shoulder to where the trails headed toward the water. “I guess I could just do some park-and-play action,” he said to himself, a little subdued.

  “Park and play?” Paul asked.

  “You know, just session one spot close to the car.”

  “Here?”

  “No. The Flumes. Big set of rapids.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the type of thing you do by yourself.”

  The young man shrugged, his grin slightly sour and mocking. His body was always in motion, a twitch of the leg or finger tapping against his shorts. “Hang on a sec,” he muttered. He jogged toward the river, disappearing down a path.

  He was gone a long time. Paul stood and circled the truck. The boat’s weird shape kept drawing his attention. He’d rented sea kayaks a few times in Vancouver. Those kayaks were sleek, built to slip across the surface with the least possible resistance. This craft demanded to be bashed around, it wanted dangerous places and an aggressive paddler. He was, he admitted, curious to see what this thing could do.

  The young man returned, his hair and shirt soaked. He must have dunked his head to cool his temper. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’m doing it. I’ll walk all the way back up for my Jeep afterwards if I have to.”

  “I’ll drive you,” said Paul.

  “What?”

  “I’ll drive you. Leave the Jeep here.”

  They took it slow the first few hundred metres up the road, the kayak wrapped in blankets in the back. “Sorry I was freaking out back there,” said the young man. “My name’s Jory.”

  “
Paul,” he said. “I’d be pissed off too.” He wasn’t entirely sure why he was driving the young man up to the Flumes or wherever. Maybe just to get this guy out of his camp, or maybe this was the push he needed to finally break away from the safety of his trailer and explore.

  “So you a fisherman?”

  “Not really. Counting fish, though.”

  “I wondered, but I figured that couldn’t be right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The guy that’s normally here always has someone with him—his wife, I guess.”

  “Well, I’m single. Thanks for pointing that out.”

  “What I mean is, don’t you need two people to keep up with the tagging and measuring?”

  Paul looked over, surprised. “You know a lot about this project.”

  “My dad used to work for Monashee Power. Knows all the biologists around here.”

  “Retired?”

  “Sorta.” Jory grimaced. “He’s into pottery now. Yeah, don’t ask.”

  “So the spawning run—it’s pretty big?”

  “Big enough, especially when it’s midnight and raining and your hands are going numb from the cold. No way a guy can do that shit alone and not lose his mind.”

  “Huh.”

  “Didn’t know that?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Your boss is a bit of a dick, yo.”

  Paul was starting to think the same thing.

  The road sloped upward and they climbed until on his right, across from the river, the mountains rose into view, craggy and snow-covered along their cathedral-like tops. For the first time he saw the magnitude of the range as it stretched to the north and south, the layers of peaks stacked westward, blue shapes blended into the sky. The river had disappeared behind a patchwork of clear-cuts, slash piles, and dense plantations of young spruce and larch.