When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  She didn’t say anything but took them farther down the road. She stopped in front of an abandoned log cabin, the wood old and peeling, cracked in places. The roof shingles were spongy and black, covered in sodden moss and dead leaves, the yard overrun with grasses chest-high, thistles, and mullein.

  “Spooky place,” said Paul.

  “That’s where I was born.”

  “Oh.” He smiled weakly. “I’m sure it looked great back in the day.”

  She sat rigidly, staring at the house. “My father built it. Don’t know that he was ever proud of it.”

  “So they were forced to move here?”

  “Maybe force isn’t the right word,” she said irritably. “This was all that was offered, and all that most people could afford. If you had money, you had other choices.” Gina put the Pathfinder into reverse, backed out of the crumbling driveway, and gunned the vehicle back to the main road. She was leaning her head toward the window with an absent, joyless expression, forehead grazing the vibrating glass.

  “So, where to now?” he asked, trying to keep things light. “Was there a school you went to here? Church?”

  “Let’s head back to camp.”

  Gina spent the rest of the afternoon constructing a sweat lodge near the confluence of Basket Creek and the Immitoin. She formed a circle from rocks and logs, placing them several metres from the riverbank, in a gravelly spot among the willows. She’d cut a few saplings, but not enough, and they wouldn’t stay upright in the stony ground. Once he figured out what she was trying to do, Paul went to grab a few spare pieces of rebar, a coil of wire, and the hammer. When he returned, she’d dug a shallow pit inside the circle. While Paul pounded rebar, Gina disappeared and came back with a blue tarp crumpled into an unwieldy ball.

  “Sorry about bugging you earlier—saying lake instead of reservoir,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

  She was wiring saplings to the rebar posts to make a square frame for the tarp. “It’s all right,” she said without looking up. “To be honest, I kind of force myself to think that: reservoir, not lake. I mean, it was forty years ago, before I was born. It’s Bishop I remember, not the farm. It’s like a discipline, using the right word.”

  “I had a friend—well, a participant—kind of like you,” Paul said slowly. “Xi. He was into parkour—like street gymnastics.” She nodded understanding. “He never accepted his surroundings at face value, not a wall, or a pillar or a set of stairs. Everything had more than one purpose, one meaning—even if no one else could see it.”

  She shrugged disagreeably. “Sounds very rosy. Optimistic.”

  “I suppose—never thought of it like that.”

  “My way’s more like picking at scabs.” She mostly worked in silence after that, except to show him how they would wire the saplings to the rebar to make a square frame over the circle or deliver the hot rocks from the fire to the pit. The frame they made was sturdy but not tall. “We’ll have to crawl in, but the inside will heat up faster,” she said. The tarp draped easily over the frame and was large enough that it touched the ground on all sides. They weighed it down with large round stones and left two flaps, one where the hot rocks would go into the pit and another for the entrance. She gathered firewood and boughs to store under the tarp to keep it dry until night. A lot of sweat to make a sweat lodge, he thought.

  At midnight, when they’d finished the count, he rushed through his paperwork, feeling distracted, nervous without knowing why. Gina went to her trailer and returned, bringing with her matches, newspaper, a shovel, and a plastic basin filled with coarse, dark rocks. A bath towel hung over her shoulder. She had gathered the stones, she explained, while at the camp on Branch 65. They were igneous, mostly basalt or blends of diorite and granodiorite. “Good sauna rocks,” she said. River stones, she explained, could store moisture inside them for hundreds of years and might explode in the fire.

  “So you planned to do a sweat here, what, weeks ago?” he asked.

  She laughed. “I collect a few rocks from every camp I work and keep them in my trailer.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Souvenirs.” She borrowed his headlamp and disappeared.

  Once he’d finished the data, he began to putter—stacking a few unwashed dishes, organizing folders—but finally stopped, took a breath, and grabbed his towel. He took the lantern with him, cut the generator, and walked through the woods. A small fire burned outside the sweat lodge. Gina, already undressed and wrapped in her towel, prodded the embers with her shovel. They quietly watched the rocks heat up. She shovelled up a stone, and he parted the tarp for her so she could drop the glowing rock into the pit, one arm against her body to support her towel as she held the shovel. She brought three more rocks over. “It’s ready,” she said. “Go on in.” He slipped out of the firelight and quickly stripped down, swore at the cold wind off the river, and wrapped the towel around his hips. He ducked under the entrance flap and left the lantern behind. It was still warming up inside, not at its peak. Gina followed, put her headlamp in a corner where her clothes were stacked, and covered it with a shirt so that it cast a dim orange light. “You haven’t poured the water yet,” she said and lifted the basin over the hot stones. With an explosive crackle and sputter, steam billowed around them.

  The sweat lodge was small and cave-like, humid and smoky. The logs they sat on were damp, caked in dirt, sand, and charcoal that smudged and stained their towels. Neither of them had big enough towels to safely leave alone; his wanted to fall away from his hips, while hers rode up around her thighs. He and Gina sat across from each other low to the ground, their legs awkwardly extended, their left knees meeting in the centre of the lodge and brushing against each other. The stones glowed, and sweat began to bead across his shoulders and back.

  “Not bad,” she said. “I’ve made worse. A beer would really top this off.”

  “I should have brought one for you.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t like me that much when I drink.”

  She poured more water, one arm across her to keep the towel in place, and dipped her other hand in the basin. Steam washed its moist heat over them. The fire crackled outside, sounding near or distant as the breeze shifted. The perpetual noise of the river tumbled around and over the stillness inside.

  “I smell like clove oil,” she said. “It’s awful.”

  “It’s probably just in your nose,” he said. “I lost my sense of smell a few weeks back.” The spot where their legs touched became tacky with sweat, and he wondered if he should pull away. She threw small boughs of cedar on the hot stones and they smoked and hissed, filled the space with a resinous, bitter fragrance.

  He said, “Can I ask about your bruises?”

  “If I can ask about your—what did you call them—health issues,” she shot back, her mischievous grin somehow hard and unyielding.

  “Where to start,” he said.

  “Exactly.” She sat up and awkwardly stepped over his legs. “We need more rocks.”

  “I can go.”

  “It’s all right.” She went out, and he heard the sound of the fire being disturbed, the snap of coals. A metallic sound of metal on stone, and a moment later, the shovel appeared and slid three more rocks into the pit. He took the basin and poured the water. The steam nearly scalded his face and lungs, tasting of soot and minerals and acrid cedar. She returned and struggled under the low tarp, her towel covered in charcoal, mud, and dirt, slipping off her breasts and bunching around her hips.

  “Oh, fuck it,” she muttered. She stepped over him, naked, spread the towel on the wood, and took her place across from him, her legs slightly bent and beaded with sweat, her hands on her knees. She tilted her head back and breathed deeply. The heat and steam married the unclean smells of their bodies: the intimate funk of armpits and groins, the watery clove-tainted musk of the sweat on their backs and chests and limbs. Gina smiled at him, eyes unreadable in the shadows.

  He fidgeted with his towel, shifting on h
is rough wooden seat, intensely flustered, nearly angry. What did she want, exactly? Their friendship was too new, definitely not ready for her nakedness to feel companionable in a hippy sort of way, which was maybe all she intended. Or was this where everything had been heading, beginning from the first sapling she’d cut this afternoon? He’d forgotten how to read signs, had tuned out the signals: he’d learned to shut down that instinctive part of himself. A conversation should have been taking place between two bodies, but his body neither spoke nor listened. Before, everything would have unfolded naturally—which didn’t mean sex necessarily, he wasn’t certain what was happening here—but he would have been able to acknowledge arousal, choose to act on it or not. He was confronted by expectations, and his body shrank from them.

  “You asked me—listen, I should tell you,” he said and without any preamble described his cancer and surgery. Possible nerve damage, vesicles, incontinence, impotence, the sound of each word, the clinical language, meant to discourage, push away. He ended with Christine, his bungled academic career, as though they also made things impossible. “I don’t have much to offer. Even assuming you wanted, in the first place—maybe I’m being a loser here . . .”

  She said, “A lot of people pick this kind of work, you know, because they want to run away, live like monks.”

  “I sort of have to live like a monk,” he said. “In some ways.”

  “You came here to mope,” she said. “Am I interrupting your moping?” She’d sat up straight, pushing her chest toward him, the aureoles of her breasts coppery in the muted lamplight.

  “Well, a little.” He looked her up and down deliberately. “But don’t worry about it.” Her laugh was soft, guarded.

  “You know, I could have just moped at home,” he said. “I mean, I was. So I came here, to do something useful.”

  “You came to mope. It feels more manly to go somewhere else and do it. Otherwise you just sit in front of the television and feel pathetic.” Now she pulled back, knees against her chest, arms wrapped around her legs. “I met my ex-husband in a tree-planting camp. Billy Wentz. A true Lambert local.”

  “You’re kidding,” Paul said, brightening a little. “He must know Hardy.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Billy was one of the last children born in Lambert before the flood. His grandfather was one of the first loggers in the valley, an important man. That shouldn’t matter, just like it shouldn’t matter I’m really from Bishop, not my parents’ farm. But it does. So many times, I’ve watched him sit in front of the campfire, piss-drunk, just staring at the flames and bitching about the mill, or the missed payments on his truck, or what he shoulda been, coulda been.”

  “You’re both bitter. A bitter couple.”

  “Anyways,” she said. “What I was getting to. I met Billy in the bush, and now I come here to get away from him.”

  They were mostly silent for the rest of the sweat, the heat drawing the air from their lungs in long sighs. Whenever he opened his eyes, hers would be closed. He studied her body again, the darkness around it. A protest rose up from his chest, a desperate sense that they were both wrong about something, only he didn’t know what.

  12

  Gina drove back to town after the morning count. “My mother and Billy probably passed Shane back and forth all week. I’ll be in shit for that.”

  She left him her phone number for when he went to Shellycoat. “Or pass through, if that’s the case,” she said. He offered to pay her for her help, which made things even more uncomfortable. He wanted to tell her that he’d stayed up most of the night turning things over in his mind, that he’d tossed and twisted, nearly in tears, humiliated and lonely. But why the hell would she want to hear any of that?

  When she was gone, he took the laundry he’d stashed in a cardboard box and washed it in the river, which was ice cold and beautifully limpid. The clouds had lifted to reveal new snow on the mountaintops. The hills ran yellow and crimson with changing huckleberry, false azalea, and mountain ash. He took the fish scope and explored Basket Creek. There were more redds, each one a patch of gravel more long than wide, plowed and turned by the female’s tail, and lighter in colour than the algae-covered rocks around it. Males hovered in side channels, weary and resting. If he remained perfectly still, they brushed the scope’s Plexiglas with their spotted and haloed sides. He imagined the first movie projectors, or the first person to look through Edison’s kinetoscope: his intimate and startling encounter with light and motion, his primitive response.

  Across the river, something moved on the hillside among the fall colours, a black bear foraging for berries. He and Gina had stripped all the bushes along the trails to the creek for their own breakfasts, and he was glad now they’d done so and left no food for animals. Later, a bull elk on the other side of the Immitoin lowered its antlered head to drink, and the rutting beasts bugled uncannily all through the night.

  On a morning when he counted only twenty-four fish heading downstream, the female Hardy had shot appeared in the upstream trap. The missing chunk of flesh where the bullet entered still gaped, not quite healed. This time he put her in the anesthetic so that he could look at her on the measuring table. Most of her fins were tattered, her flanks scratched by branches or claws. But she had some weight to her: she had not spawned yet. She was the only female heading upriver that day. “You’d better hope someone saved you a male or two.” He recorded her number and returned her to the creek, and watched until she recovered and swam away. He never saw her come back down, though maybe she simply remained in Basket Creek until he and the fence were gone. It was possible she had to go farther than the others to find the place she needed.

  The next day, sparse, slow flakes of snow fell. He drove to the Flumes one last time. Ideas and plans flickered insubstantially in his mind, and he hoped a return to the mill site would make them more real. As he went to turn down the narrow skid road to the bench, he saw a vehicle parked below on the landing. It took him a moment to recognize Hardy’s truck. He thought about turning around, or driving on, but instead he pulled off to one side and cut the engine. He closed his door quietly and crept into the brush, keeping the truck in sight. Something moved near the crumbled foundations of the old mill, and he crouched behind a fir. Hardy waded through the dead grass, cloaked in a torn rubber parka, a fishing rod and a green plastic tackle box in his hands. He walked slowly past the axles and gears and sheets of metal, a slight limp in his left leg, and when he disappeared down the steep trail to the riverbank, Paul followed and watched him from the edge of the landing.

  Hardy sat on a short log at the edge of the water, near where Paul had stood when Jory launched his kayak. A corroded metal band girdled the wood, and black-stained divots marked where nails had been. A piece of the flumes, maybe. The old man wasn’t using a dry or wet fly, and the hook was bare. He didn’t stand up to cast his line, didn’t have much technique at all. The plastic bobber dropped into the water at Hardy’s feet, and it took nearly a full minute before the current caught the line and pulled it taut.

  The rapids had diminished somewhat, the boulders of the Flumes standing stark and dry above the water. The bobber drifted playfully through the whirlpools, then vanished downstream. Hardy reeled in the line, so slowly it didn’t appear to be happening and let it back out, as if the fishing line were a finger that traced the contours of a material he owned, a familiar-textured thing like a favourite coffee mug or a beach pebble kept in a pocket.

  He grew restless around camp, filled with a need to move, to do something. This had been a good refuge, and in many ways he didn’t want to leave. But there was no real way forward here. According to Dixon’s Gold, the word immitoin—from either the Shuswap, Kuntaxa, or Sinixt language, it didn’t say—meant “sheltered place.” Before Dixon and the white settlers, the valley was mostly abandoned by late autumn. The different tribes and nations that had gathered for the salmon runs, or for the deer and elk, would have returned south to the more temperate Columbia River vall
eys or the Okanagan. This was a place to hunt and fish, to gather and collect, but not to dwell.

  He read and re-read the newspaper clipping he’d kept from Gina’s cook trailer. Even though it was a false image, the idea of a house or an entire town resting below the water had lodged in his mind. The people who’d been relocated—were they like Gina, harbouring bitterness? Or like Hardy, bewildered and half mad from loss? He certainly wouldn’t be the first ethnographer to study people who’d been displaced, not by a long shot—but maybe that was a good thing. Or maybe this was just classic Paul, grabbing another idea out of thin air.

  Deeper signs of autumn came: geese overhead, silhouettes in the narrow corridor of sky. Crossbills, jays, and finches appeared in the trees and shrubs by his camper, and he startled spruce grouse from hiding spots when he walked to the river. Frost hung on the fence and weirs in the mornings, and he could see his breath as he scrubbed the fence free of an astonishing palette of leaves: elderberry, alder, ash, cottonwood, red osier dogwood, birch, and willow. The Immitoin became sapped of light, the snow creeping farther down the mountains. At certain moments, he felt as if he’d already fallen in love and moved past heartbreak into an old, time-worn sadness.

  He was sad, which, as Gina pointed out, was what he’d been going for the whole time. Yes, he’d come to the Immitoin to feel sorry for himself—maybe he should have savoured it more, really committed himself to being miserable and get it out of his system. But it was getting a bit late for that.