When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  The banks on either side of the road towered above him, the trees bent into misshapen arcs. Sometimes he would hit an icy patch and fishtail. Mostly it felt like he floated above the road, lost in the vacuum-like roar of the defrost vents and the dashboard glow, the crunch of snow beneath his tires the only thing keeping him grounded.

  Had the old man been worried for Paul’s sake or his own? The Wentzes must have come to dig Hardy out, check on his supplies, bring him more food.

  Gina had made the stew and bread.

  It was bewildering. Everyone he’d talked to, all those interviews, and for what—the slightest tip of the iceberg, the faint beginnings of a truth. And Gina, connected somehow, but to what? Bloody secrets, he thought. The people in this damned valley.

  The Immitoin reservoir appeared before him, a slate-coloured eye in the furrowed white brow of the world. Old cars and tree stumps, broken fence posts, the skeletons of barns, sheds, and houses—all pushing from underneath to give shape and texture to the smooth, rolling dream of snow.

  1

  Paul pursued the old constable, trying to find a rhythm in his own huffing breath, the gentle scrape and hiss of his skis in the grooves of the set tracks. He remembered, from a handful of lessons on Cypress Mountain back in elementary school, the basic mechanics of the diagonal stride: left arm leading with the right foot sliding the slender ski forward, then a smooth transition to the opposite foot and hand. This should have resulted in something more graceful, less lumbering. Somewhere between childhood and now, he’d lost his sense of balance. Leaning too far forward, he broke into a thigh-cramping jog that faded to a shuffle after thirty metres.

  The trail meandered through a patchwork of clear-cuts and sub-alpine forest. Animal tracks crisscrossed the path: moose, deer, snowshoe hare, and something smaller, a weasel or squirrel. Hoarfrost crystals clung to branches, and his skis, a pair of classics Lazeroff had lent him for the duration of winter, grated over shards of ice. He descended back into forest, where lichen-covered firs and veteran larches absorbed every sound. He stopped and unzipped his jacket, the trapped, slightly fetid smell of wool and sweat a comfort, so resonantly himself. His limbs quivered and trembled. Not a sound in the grove except his own heart beating fast, a buzz in his ears, the rasp of crisp air sucked down his throat into the warming bellows of his lungs.

  He caught up to Lazeroff near a signpost that marked the junction of two trails. The constable was leaning on his poles and flexing his legs. As Paul approached, Lazeroff gave him a cheery wave and then continued on, an effortless, steady pace at odds with his heavy build. A hundred metres farther, they arrived at a simple A-frame cabin with aluminum siding: Ziggy’s Hut, named after Sig Tollefson, an outdoorsman who founded Shellycoat’s first Nordic club back in the fifties. The original cabin had been built in 1944, rebuilt and repaired several times since. There were no skis on the rack outside, but smoke drifted from the chimney.

  “Good,” said Lazeroff. “I hate starting my own fire.”

  They went inside and hung their jackets, toques, and mitts on nails driven into the beams. An iron potbellied stove sat in the middle of the hut, surrounded by wooden benches and an ancient-looking church pew. Stacks of firewood lined the walls, peppered with mouse droppings and pitch-gummed clumps of old spider webs. On a simple wooden shelf, rusted tobacco tins held packs of matches and weighed down a map that marked the location of two other warming huts along the trails.

  “Mark us down in the guest registry. They like to keep track of how many use the huts. Helps with government funding.” Lazeroff opened the stove, stirred the fire, and added another piece of wood. From his backpack he pulled a flask of coffee and tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches that he placed on top of the stove.

  “There’s a skier’s lunch,” he said. “Want one?”

  “All right.” Paul flipped through the registry. “Book’s filled up.”

  “This place was packed over the holidays.” Lazeroff gestured to the empty benches. “Always is. Kids come back from college, families bring mulled wine and Christmas treats to the hut—a regular party in here.”

  “Figured you for a snowmobile guy.” Paul sat across from him, holding his hands close to the stove.

  “This is cheaper.” He laughed. “Also, the doctor told me a few years back to get healthier if I wanted to enjoy my retirement.”

  “Good choice.”

  “I’ll get you hooked, you’ll see,” he said. “Speaking of retirement, turns out Caleb Ready had a hobby in his old age—a good old-fashioned prospector.”

  “Come again?”

  Lazeroff grinned. “Not what I pictured either. His wife somehow thought it wasn’t important to tell us. I got a phone call from the storage place outside of town. He had a long-term rental on one of the big lockers, and the lease just ran out. Owner phoned, wondering if I knew the executor of Caleb’s estate. Lots of stuff in there. A compressor and portable sluice machine hooked up to an ATV. Very modern. Plus the standard pans and sieves.”

  “Sounds like an expensive way to pass the time.”

  “Maybe it paid for itself,” Lazeroff said. “But I doubt it. I’ve known some prospectors.”

  “Where was his claim?”

  Lazeroff leaned over the stove and flipped the tinfoil packages over with adept flicks of his fingers. “Don’t know yet. Even his wife didn’t know. His little secret.”

  “Somewhere close to where his truck was parked. Maybe Basket Creek.”

  “We’ll find out as soon as I make some calls. Stove’s damned hot.” Lazeroff grabbed the foil packages and tossed one to Paul. The bread was toasted golden, singed around the crust, stacked with sausage and melted cheese that burned the roof of his mouth.

  “Anyhow.” The constable waved his hand dismissively. “Sounds like your interview with Hardy didn’t go so well.”

  In terms of gathering data, he supposed the interview had gone very well. Hardy hadn’t made much sense at times, but the way he lived and viewed the past said something interesting about the effects of displacement. In the meantime, he was still shaken up by the meeting, its aftermath and implications. He’d blown up at Gina the night he’d returned from Hardy’s. They were in the bedroom, and as she undressed he blurted out, “Wonderful stew, by the way.”

  “Sorry?” He must have looked a little unbalanced, because her jaw dropped. “What are you talking about?”

  “Hardy. The food he gave me—I know it was yours. The care that went into it. This was before Billy and Cyril showed up, by the way, no doubt bearing another creation from Gina’s kitchen, and Hardy thinking for some reason they were going to kill me.”

  “I’ve never made anything for Hardy Wallace.”

  “Who then?” he asked. She said nothing. “It’s none of my business if it’s because of Billy. I get it. I do.” He swallowed. “But why did Cyril lie about not talking to Hardy since the seventies? And why was Hardy scared shitless?”

  “How would I know? I’m sure he wasn’t scared. Their families go way back, almost a hundred years.”

  “You know who else they go way back with? Caleb Ready. The guy who turned up dead.” This little theory he wouldn’t be running past Lazeroff just yet. A more intelligent man wouldn’t have shared it with Gina either, even if he was a bit lunatic at the time.

  She held up both hands, trying to slow him down. “What are you saying, exactly?”

  “I wonder how well you really know Billy—what he might be capable of. You need to stay away from him. You and Shane.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Think—why would they need to lie to me about Hardy?”

  “I don’t know.” She gave him a weary, sad look, as if to say, I sure know how to pick ’em. “Maybe they felt they didn’t owe an outsider the truth.”

  Which stung, even if she wasn’t wrong. “What truth? That they murdered Caleb Ready?”

  By this point, she was already pulling on her clothes, laughing incredulously. “This is too fu
cked up for me, Paul. I have enough to deal with.” She angrily wrestled her shirt over her head, then closed the bedroom door behind her, firmly enough to make the frame moan. She slept on the couch beside her son. Twice that night, Paul had to creep to the bathroom knowing she was still awake, holding her breath in the dark as he tiptoed past. She left before he woke.

  He and Lazeroff finished their lunch and stoked the woodstove for the next group of skiers. Outside the hut, Paul squinted in the bright glare. “I can’t nail that glide.”

  “Think of reggae music.”

  “Reggae?”

  “‘Jammin’.’ ‘Three Little Birds.’ Get that rhythm into your head. And then transfer your weight from hip to hip.” The constable did a comical stutter-step from side to side, humming under his breath. “That’s the glide.”

  Paul laughed. “A Doukhobor cop and Bob Marley, there’s a match. Your wife teach you that?”

  Lazeroff coughed, embarrassed. “We learn a lot from women.”

  “Not quickly enough, in my case. Thanks, by the way. For telling me about Caleb.”

  “Who else?” Lazeroff said. “Trust me, no one at the station gives a shit. Hip to hip. Or you’ll keep shuffling along like an old man.”

  Elsie Hubert came down with a nasty stomach flu and needed taking care of. The timing was good: Gina could take the time and space to cool off. She phoned in the afternoons and they would talk—mostly he would apologize, retract his accusations, and she would sigh and change the subject to Elsie and Shane. At least she was still speaking to him, and didn’t seem to think he was completely insane.

  He’d hit a lull in his research. The remaining participants on his list couldn’t be tracked down, tucked like voles in tunnels beneath the snow, leaving him to blink vacantly from his owl’s post. Since his strange night at Hardy’s, he’d become obsessed with Donald Wallace and the Soules family. He immersed himself in the archives, this time in the oldest records. Now that he knew where to look, there were new discoveries. Donald Wallace had returned home from the Great War with a serious leg injury—that must have been what Hardy was referring to when he said “banged up.” It might also explain why Donald and his wife, Belinda, didn’t have Hardy until many years later. Marcus Soules, meanwhile, had been blind in one eye from a childhood accident and had not gone overseas. Instead, he plied his trade up and down the Arrow Lakes and the Immitoin Valley, managing orchards and helping the families whose sons and husbands had left to fight and often die.

  He and Elmer found a photo of Donald Wallace from the 1920s. Proud, at least the upper half of him: rigid military posture, shoulders pulled back, chin thrust out and slightly upward, thick greying moustache. Then below the belt: hips askew, all the weight on one leg, the other leg at a slightly derelict angle, with his walking stick partially concealed from the camera, his trousers stained from work, the material drooping around the crotch. Behind him, Marcus stood awkwardly in his starched shirt and suspenders, forcing his lean body straight and still, ironing out the back and shoulders that naturally curled toward work and motion.

  Kai Soules was a much more obscure figure than his father, Arthur. A small paragraph in the Shellycoat paper, dated 1965, reported his death on the river. A brief mention of how he’d been battered by rapids and boulders, pierced by sweeping branches. The writer didn’t seem to recognize Kai’s last name, a sign, perhaps, of how removed Shellycoat had become from Lambert and the history of the Immitoin Valley.

  Each night, he waited for Billy to show up. What kept him away? Sometimes, late at night, he heard the guttural engine noises of a truck coasting slowly down the street, and once there was a clumsy shifting of gears, the clutch being ridden—the sounds of a very young, very old, or very drunk driver. Cyril? Billy? Hardy? But nothing ever happened.

  Maybe Gina was sneaking over to Billy’s while pretending to be at her mom’s. The idea didn’t make him jealous—well, it did, but so what? He’d never been convinced she could shake herself free of Billy so easily. And did Paul really offer enough to keep her from returning to her ex now and then? Even the word sneaking presumed too much. He couldn’t force things. But he still wondered how dangerous Billy might be, or how much Gina actually knew.

  2

  A snowboard company from California threw a sponsorship deal at Jory—film roles, the face of their clothing line, endless free swag. To celebrate, he launched from a ten-metre cliff over the ski hill road while two cars passed underneath. His friends filmed it, posted it on the Internet.

  “You’re a bit of a rock star now,” Paul told him, and Jory didn’t deny it. There was the extra attention he received from company reps, from his friends and peers, and girls who came into the store or spotted him at the bar. The more attention he received, the more volatile he became, and the more Sonya hung back from the scene, avoiding the shop and coming home early from the all-night parties and raves.

  In February, three snowmobilers died in the backcountry. There were more than two dozen men in Fiddler’s Bowl at the time, a mix of locals and sledders from Revelstoke, Kelowna, and Calgary. They’d spent the day high-marking, gunning their sleds up a steep slope, cresting the hill and racing back down. When the last rider dropped in, the slope above him broke in a perfect slab, loud as a thunderclap. The avalanche gained momentum, turned into a white cloud, house-sized chunks of snow that snapped trees in half. Seven riders were hit by debris, thrown from their sleds and then buried. The four buried at the fringes of the avalanche were quickly dug out. The other bodies were recovered two days later by the Search and Rescue team.

  The tragedy became fodder for the coffee shops and pubs. But the town had seen this before: people died every winter in their mountains. They were not shocked, though people used the word. Paul would have described it as a deep, communal uneasiness, as though the avalanche had swept past Shellycoat itself and only missed by inches. The deaths even put a chill into Jory and his crew. They scoffed and cracked dark jokes but quietly swore off the backcountry until the snow profile changed. At the same time, a cold snap arrived and the ski resort’s slopes turned icy and unpleasant. The season looked set to end on a dismal note, and Jory took to working longer shifts at the shop and then partying all night.

  One morning, Paul intercepted him on the porch and invited him in for a coffee. At the kitchen table, Jory held up a bruised hand and turned his head to show a cut near the temple. “Banned for two weeks from the bar,” he said. He confessed to growing some pot upstairs, using lights in their bedroom closet. “Don’t worry, it won’t get you in trouble,” he said quickly. “It’s no big deal.” He wanted to give Sonya hours at the store just so he could keep an eye on her, he said. She was acting different, and he didn’t trust these mood swings of hers. Jory glanced upward at the sound of footsteps above them and rubbed his temples. “Shit’s not so good right now.”

  Paul considered how difficult it was to maintain the balance between the domestic life and the life of risk. Relationships complicated your identity, nullifying and remoulding. The narcissism of risk, on the other hand, was so pleasantly streamlined: every time you conquered the impossible, you became more yourself than you were before.

  Late one afternoon, another fight upstairs. When Jory shouted, his voice had heft and musculature, and when he pleaded and begged, it broke into high-pitched fragments of sound. In everything he did, Jory wobbled between boy and man.

  “You’re always talking to the same guy—ten people in the room but always the same fucking guy.”

  “Maybe it’s because he’s your only friend who doesn’t talk to me like I’m your brainless little snowboard bunny.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll pound that so-called friend of mine if he keeps that shit up.”

  This time Paul hadn’t wanted to eavesdrop. He retreated to his bedroom, where their argument was reduced to a muffled din. After that, he rarely went upstairs to visit. He decided to transcribe his interview with Hardy himself and had no other work for Sonya. He abandoned her to
the bleak winter.

  Gina answered Elsie’s phone, as he’d hoped. Her mother’s flu was still pretty bad, and Gina didn’t want to leave the house. The television blared in the background, the unmistakable swelling strings and wooden dialogue of daytime soaps. The noise faded as she walked the phone into the kitchen.

  “I’ve been running the puke bowl all day,” she said in a strained voice. “And in between that, she complains.”

  “About you?”

  “About everything.”

  “Need me to pick up Shane?”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Seriously. I could bring him back here.”

  “Better if he’s here.”

  He swung by Elsie’s anyway and convinced Gina to lend him the car seat. Stubborn. Maybe she was wary of him trying too hard to be the surrogate father. He’d honestly never considered it until now, but being with a single mother might be his only real shot at becoming a dad. Maybe she anticipated being put off by his desperation, unless he’d done that already when he called her ex-husband a murderer. He stopped at the pizza place, bought two mediums. Would this also be considered too eager, an act of bribery?