When Is a Man

by Aaron Shepard

  Lazeroff called from the riverbank, a hundred miles away.

  Another voice, higher pitched, cut through the roar and hiss ahead of him, once, and then again. Paul shouted back, a wordless yell, and slowly, as though he were trying to pull himself out of a dark, sucking vacuum, inched onto the top of the boulder. His cheek against the cold rock, he blindly stretched a leg out over the torrent in the narrow channel between stones. Nothing but moist air, too wet, water cascading over his boot. The inside of his thigh strained and stretched as he lifted his leg higher. Finally the side of his foot hit a ledge and held.

  He raised himself up—the trees and river lurched back into focus, the nauseating expanse of the sky threatened to topple him—and pivoted his other foot until he faced the other boulder in a split-legged crouch, suspended over the river. He transferred his weight to the leading leg and pushed off with the other. Both knees smacked against rock as he landed face and chest first. He gripped the side of the boulder with his thighs, blood in his mouth. Water surged against his boots as he scooted along the boulder’s ridge, dizzy and trembling.

  On the downstream side of the rock, a tiny eddy curled away from the rage of the main current and calmed, until each pebble beneath the surface was clear and vivid. His eyes clung to that one strangely tranquil spot as he forced himself onward. A shallow, limpid, yet mysterious place—it hid its essence in plain sight.

  He reached the edge and blindly swung his arm where he’d seen Jory slip between the rocks. His hand grabbed at air. He raised himself up and peered over. Only endless water funnelling darkly through the breach. Nothing in the rapids downstream, nothing in the logs and sticks piled against the upstream side. It had all been a trick, a joke played out of boredom and anger, revenge for every time he’d listened under the stairs—there was no way Jory had really been here.

  8

  The two of them returned to the Immitoin the next morning. Gina was staying with Sonya. Jory’s father was somewhere along the river with the Search and Rescue team, while his mother waited in Bishop, where police and volunteers coordinated the search effort from the old fire hall. A helicopter thudded overhead as he and Lazeroff drove.

  “You sleep any?” Lazeroff asked. Travel mugs rattled in the plastic holders, the fire hall coffee half finished and forgotten.

  Paul took a while answering. “No.” Their faces mirrored each other, sallow and bruised. A chill had dogged him all night. Everything outside the vehicle floated, a cold, sickly sort of beauty. They drove a police SUV—this time, the logging trucks pulled over for them. Cars and trucks were parked along the side of the road, volunteers combing the river. Someone radioed: “Cliff, we’re here. You want us to wait?”

  Lazeroff slowly picked up the receiver. “Go ahead and start. We’re right behind you.”

  At the top of Hardy’s driveway were two police cars, a Search and Rescue truck, and a gathering of men. The odds of finding Jory there were good, but with the river so high and wild right now, not a sure thing. The body could still be tumbling in the Flumes, or caught on a sweeper near Basket Creek. Maybe he’d drifted past already.

  A muffled crack came from outside. Three volunteers hid behind one of the cars. A cop ran up the driveway, head low. Lazeroff jerked the vehicle halfway into the ditch and jumped out. Paul followed, staggering as the road’s soft shoulder crumbled under his feet. The cop—it was the young guy from last autumn, Davis—had his gun drawn.

  “He’s shooting at us,” he said, astonished.

  “Sure it wasn’t for himself?” Lazeroff asked.

  “The ricochet whistled past me.”

  “He’s frightened.”

  “Barry’s behind the woodshed.”

  “Tell him not to fire.” They ducked and loped to where the volunteers were huddled.

  “He was yelling before he shot,” one of the men said eagerly. “Couldn’t make it out.”

  Another added, “Kai. That’s what he said.”

  “What the hell does that mean,” Lazeroff muttered.

  “Yelled it a bunch of times. Sounded like a crow.”

  “I’m going down there.” Lazeroff stood. His hands were empty, his gun holstered. Paul sat on the ground, his head near the wheel well, breathing in the smell of dried mud and warm rubber. “Hardy,” he heard Lazeroff call. The men were silent, straining to listen. He rubbed his eyes. Thrushes called their single, reedy note back and forth and wrens grated and buzzed in the underbrush. Someone next to him lit a cigarette, the sharp flick of the lighter close to Paul’s ear. Wisps of acrid smoke, a raven calling from across the river.

  “We’re good,” Davis was saying. Paul struggled to his feet, leaning against the car door. He heard boots scuffling on gravel, a struggle. Lazeroff and the third cop had Hardy in cuffs and were dragging him by his arms while he pulled and strained toward his house. He threw his head back and howled, snuffled for breath, and howled again. The old man was shockingly thin and dirty, his eyes lost within dark sockets, a filthy beard. He saw Paul and suddenly pulled toward him. The cops yanked him back, and he howled one final time as they shoved him in the back of Davis’s cruiser.

  Lazeroff was covered in sweat as he turned to the crowd of volunteers. “Okay. Sounds like the body was here. Early this morning.” Lazeroff hesitated. “Hardy pushed it back into the current.”

  A collective gasp—the sound grated on Paul’s nerves. He felt suddenly and irrationally protective of Hardy. “Why the hell would he do that?” a volunteer asked indignantly.

  Lazeroff rubbed his forehead angrily. “How would I know? Might as well radio up to the Flumes, tell them to call it off. Everyone get down to Spry Creek or Bishop.”

  Davis and the third cop went to drive Hardy into town. “Get him fed,” Lazeroff told them. He walked with Paul down the driveway. “The place looks like hell inside,” he said quietly. “Not a crumb to eat.”

  They checked his truck and found the battery dead and a flat tire that had been chewed by rodents or porcupines, probably during that last cold snap before spring.

  “He’s never had trouble getting through the winter before,” Lazeroff said.

  No more food packages from the Wentzes. Elsie probably believed her bread and soups and roasted chickens were still being delivered. She would have said something to Gina otherwise. Maybe Hardy had lost his mind just enough that he didn’t phone anyone for help, was rotting away in dementia. Paul remembered the old man’s fear that morning, Billy’s face when they passed each other on the road. Maybe they’d punished Hardy for speaking to Paul. Because Paul wouldn’t stay out of people’s lives, as Billy had warned him to do.

  “He thought we were coming to arrest him. Kai—he was shouting that at me too.” Lazeroff stopped at the front door and rubbed at his eyes. “Makes no sense.”

  Through the window, Paul could see old newspapers strewn on the kitchen table, a torn-open bag of millet or birdseed on the counter. Paul’s stomach lurched, and he wrapped his arms tightly across his chest, shivering. It was like the sun couldn’t reach him. “Kai’s a name. I know who that is.”

  Lazeroff studied him for a moment, then shook his head. “Later,” he said. “Tell me later. You look done for the day.”

  Two days later, they gave up on the river and lowered the reservoir. The simple act of opening the McCulloch Dam’s floodgates was a massive exercise in engineering, hydrology, communication, and cooperation. It required the coordinated efforts of governments, scientists, and hydroelectric corporations from the Immitoin, Kettle, Columbia, and Kootenay Rivers, all the way down to Roosevelt Lake and the Grand Coulee Dam in the States. The Waneta, Hugh Keenleyside, Revelstoke, and Mica Dams closed most of their gates and let their reservoirs fill, as did the Duncan, Brilliant, and both Bonnington Falls Dams on the Kootenay River. Below these dams, biologists and their technicians salvaged rainbow trout eggs from redds suddenly left high and dry. They filled plastic laundry baskets with gravel and buried the eggs inside, then lowered the surrogate nests into
deeper waters. All of this done to maintain the balance of the Columbia River system and its floodplains, while the Immitoin poured itself through the McCulloch Dam.

  The drawdown lasted two days. Finally, a search team found Jory among the old wharf pilings near Bishop. Paul and Lazeroff were flying over the reservoir at the time, covering the opposite side. Lazeroff made the pilot take them over Lambert—a gift to Paul, who wouldn’t have thought to ask, his mind in a bleak, swirling fog. The pilot tilted the helicopter to give him the best possible view as they hovered over a handful of summer cottages built on high ground. Below the high water mark, preserved in a skeletal state and exposed now by the drawdown, lay the crumbled foundations of houses, the traces of concrete walls where the packing sheds had stood, rusted scraps of tin roofing, the black stubs of old fence posts and cut trees. Near the cottages, scattered and abandoned among stands of fir and pine, stood the collapsed remnants of split-rail fencing, overgrown garden plots, and hay sheds, and scattered rows of what were unmistakably fruit trees, ancient and mossy and being swallowed by the natural forest.

  Paul, because of the effort being made on his behalf, tried desperately to take in the sight of the drowned village, as if he could grasp all that the remains of Lambert signified in a brief glance. Finally, Lazeroff tapped the pilot on the shoulder and they banked north. A moment later someone radioed to say Jory’s body had been recovered. The static in the headphones was bad—for a moment, he thought they’d said “restored.”

  There was a multitude of polite requests and suggestions as to where Jory’s ashes should be scattered. His parents, both stunned and touched by Shellycoat’s apparent affection for their son, acquiesced to the snowboarders, the kayakers, and the co-owners of Jory’s shop. His father went to his potter’s wheel and kiln, fired a series of small clay urns, and divided the ashes. The managers of the ski hill reserved an urn for a memorial at the lodge, while his friends planned trips to his favourite backcountry runs, the ridges and peaks where he’d gained his small piece of fame. The remaining urns were for Jory’s family and Sonya.

  Paul and Gina had been taking care of her, as had Jory’s parents, bringing food and staying with her in the apartment. She was flying out east to stay with her own parents for a while. The morning before she left, Paul went upstairs and found her sitting on the couch, a map of the Immitoin Valley spread on the coffee table. “When will you be back?” Paul asked.

  “A month or so.” She didn’t look up from the map, and her dull hair hung in front of her eyes. “I got accepted,” she mumbled. “University of Toronto.”

  “Well. Congrats.” He hadn’t known she’d applied for university. Had she told Jory?

  “But I’ll be here for most of the summer,” she added.

  “I’m glad.”

  She rubbed at her face with her sleeve. “We were going to break up.”

  “I know.” A clay urn, he suddenly noticed, was in her lap, and despite all the help friends and family had given her, the apartment was a mess of dirty dishes and towels heaped on counters. “Can I help with anything? Can you make rent?”

  She didn’t need money, but there was a place she wanted to go in July when she came back. She pointed to the map. You followed the Immitoin way past Basket Creek and the Flumes to where the logging road ended. A trail led to alpine meadows and a series of small lakes. “He took me hiking there—it was like our first date.” She asked if Paul and Gina would take her there to scatter her portion of the ashes.

  She was bent into herself, crying now. He awkwardly stretched his arm over the coffee table and squeezed her shoulder, thinking the right thing would be to go sit next to her, offer comfort, but his memories of the winter held him back. It was strange to think, but he’d needed to need her. Despite it being pointless and disturbing and just plain misguided, desire had been a way of riding out his past until it smoothed into the present. They’d come together, he and Jory and Sonya, at a temporary but necessary place where Paul could live his wrong-headedness for a while and enjoy these unlikely friendships before they drifted apart. In two or three years, he and Sonya would hardly know each other, and that was the way of things.

  The fuggy, fried-egg smell in the A&W was strangely comforting. Elmer was stirring a packet of cane sugar into his tea, managing not to look out of place, while Lazeroff dutifully picked away at his breakfast sandwich. The constable had no particular love for the food, Paul realized. It was a prairie sort of loyalty (he didn’t know why the prairies came to mind) to an atmosphere that had changed little since the seventies, that resisted contemporary gestures toward luxury and leisure, the foaminess of coffee shops, their vanilla and hazelnut frills. A loyalty to the old men in their denim jackets, their baseball caps advertising excavation services and chainsaws.

  “You talk to any of these guys yet?” Lazeroff gestured at the other tables.

  “I’ll get to it,” Paul said. “Our list is pretty big.” Jory’s death and the earlier town hall meeting had pushed his research into the public consciousness. Life had become busy, scarcely giving him time to think or grieve except in the quietest hours of the night. Strangers phoned to talk about the past, and Monashee Power had proposed that Paul, with Elmer’s help, create a comprehensive website about the reservoir: the history of the communities and the dam, rare photos, video interviews with the displaced. If the funding came together, the contract could easily run a year or two in tandem with Paul’s dissertation.

  “They want me to interview Hardy again,” he said. As far as he knew, the old man wasn’t leaving the psych ward in Trail anytime soon.

  “Who does?”

  “Monashee.”

  “Jesus,” Lazeroff said. “He’s in no shape for that. Most days he still thinks it’s 1965.”

  “Did Jory look anything like Kai Soules?” Elmer asked dubiously. “Same age, I suppose.”

  “There was enough resemblance, I think, to bring back Hardy’s shock at seeing Kai in the pool all those years ago,” Lazeroff said.

  “But he didn’t see him,” Paul said. “His father did—that’s what he told me. I’d say it’s the shock of killing Kai Soules.”

  That was how he figured it. He imagined Kai alone on the riverbank, downstream from the flumes, completely out of his element, timidly prodding each passing log as though it were a sleeping beast. Some of his friends have already gone over to Caleb Ready and Monashee Power, and the only reason he hasn’t left yet is because he’s scared to tell the Wallaces. He lives with them in Lambert, and at the bunkhouse downstream from the mill, and he’s been under Hardy’s wing the whole summer. Now that his parents have left for Kamloops, the Wallaces are the closest thing to family he has. So when Hardy charges over, rips the peavey from his hand, he figures it’s nothing, he’s just doing a lousy job again. All the foremen have rotten tempers, but they get over it quick. And then Hardy shoves him, hard. Kai topples backward off the bank into the water between logs.

  Hardy thrusts the peavey like a man spearing a fish, metal striking bone. He forces Kai under, and pins him there until a cluster of felled timber sweeps over and takes the boy with the current. Maybe Cyril has been watching the whole time, and this will bind the two men even more strongly than the memory of Lambert and everything else they will lose.

  Suppose it was true that Hardy was Marcus’s son. Which was the greater tragedy, that Hardy knew, or that he didn’t? Did he unwittingly murder his nephew out of frustration, a self-righteous rage at Kai and Arthur’s betrayal? Or was it simply too terrible a wound for his mind to handle, to be abandoned by his own blood?

  “Considering all the accidents that happened in those logging camps,” Elmer said, “I doubt we’ll ever know the absolute truth.”

  “Someone knows,” Paul said. “Half the Dalton Creek crew could have witnessed his death. Maybe if we ask around at the Barber Chair.”

  “You’ve been in there,” Elmer said. “Did you honestly get the sense those men would give up that kind of secret?”


  “Or any secret, for that matter,” he admitted. “Doesn’t bode well for our project, does it?”

  “Not to be a pessimist,” said Lazeroff, “but even if you got to the bottom of the Kai mess, would it change anything for Hardy? I doubt it.”

  “He’ll be home eventually, right?” Paul asked.

  Lazeroff shrugged grimly.

  Elmer changed the subject. “So what do you need us to bring?” he asked the constable.

  “To the party, you mean?” Lazeroff’s wife had made the invitation cards by hand, thick, soft paper with dried flowers and stamped with pastoral scenes and fish in faded blue ink. Very confusing, or maybe she had a strange sense of humour. “Depends if you’re willing to eat pyrahi, golupsti—oh, and steak. Mostly it’s steak and cake,” Lazeroff said. “Bring more beer, how about.”

  “No retirement gifts?”

  “Accepted in the form of fishing lures.” Lazeroff smiled and, inexplicably, patted his belly. “Otherwise, please don’t.”

  “And what happens after you ride into the sunset?” Paul asked.

  “I’m going fishing, obviously. All goddamn summer.”

  “What about the grow op?”

  “Someone will keep an eye on it, see if anyone returns. But it still won’t prove any connection to Ready’s death.”

  “They won’t come back,” Paul said. “The mill’s open again, Billy doesn’t need to take that risk.”

  Lazeroff’s eyebrows raised, though his face remained tellingly blank.

  “You know it was them.”

  “I don’t know, otherwise—well, that’s how these things go. They can drag out for years, so buckle up for the long ride or forget about it.” Lazeroff paused to wipe his hands on a napkin and emphatically tossed it on the table. “And live your life in the meantime.”

  Two evenings ago, Paul had bumped into Billy in the grocery store. Billy’s jacket was stained with chain oil, the cuffs of his jeans blackened by mud, and he swaggered as he pushed a cart filled with jugs of milk, white bread, and deli meat. He wore his layer of sawdust the way other men wore expensive watches. He glared at Paul with heavy eyelids, his jumpy rage tempered by fatigue and restored pride. Cocky too—Hardy was institutionalized, and he was still a free man. As he passed Paul, he said over his shoulder, “Hey, thanks for gettin’ Shane to that dentist appointment.”