“So, congratulations!” Thom raised his beer can. “To the wee one!”
We clinked cans.
“You need to get down here more often. Leave Ange and the kid. Come crash on our couch.”
“It’s not that easy,” I said, smiling. Sitting on the flatbed, we could look down the yards of much of the street, take in people through the lit windows as they busied themselves inside their homes. “One day when you and Veronica have a kid you’ll see what I mean.”
“Who said I want any part in that?” Thom took out a pack of cigarettes and lit a smoke. “Ver been talking to you, or what?”
The construction worker came out to get his lighter from his truck and Thom tried to score some weed off the guy, but he said he didn’t have any. My sense was maybe Thom asked him a little too often.
“If Ver wants a baby she’ll need to find herself some other primo donor,” Thom continued after the construction worker had gone back into the basement. “You can buy sperm on the internet now, can’t you?”
“You try to be miserable.”
“What do I have to offer? Look at me!” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew rings skyward. “I won’t be paying for it either. She better start saving, ’cause that junk ain’t cheap. ’Specially the ‘intellectual’ kind.”
“It’s self-sabotage.”
“God!” He pointed his cigarette at me and shuddered. “What if it was one of my undergrad students? Jesus! She’d want the highfalutin literary stuff. And they’re so hungry, I bet they’re all selling their sperm. Jesus, that’s going to be our world population right there. Oh, sure. I’m going to have to move north. Hey, maybe I’ll come live with you in Kamloops.”
“There is something wrong with you and we all know it, yet none of us are willing to help you. What does that say?” I finished my beer and dropped it at my feet, opening another can.
“I don’t have your straight-and-narrow vision.” There was a hint of a sneer at the corner of his lip. “My mind,” he said, tapping his temple. He gave me a significant look and took a sip of beer.
“You’re not making much sense tonight. And who says I’m on the straight and narrow?”
“Hah! You’re as arrow-straight as they come. Are you kidding me?” Thom laughed long enough that I stopped smiling. “What I’m saying is,” he said, drawing out the words, “my mind doesn’t follow that trajectory — love, marriage, baby. I’d shrink into a little itty-bitty man. I’d become petite.”
“So what do you see when you look at me?” I leered and waited, took a large gulp of beer.
“Atrophy.” He wiggled a pinky at me and chuckled to himself.
“You bastard.”
“Didn’t you used to write little poems?” He was smiling now too, like a kid with a stick.
“You’re basing your future on our sloppy pub-night pillow talk, both of us one wink away from passed out on the floor. It’s pathetic.”
“Hey, at least I still have a hope in hell of achieving enlightenment.”
“They have you on the same circuit,” I said, smirking into my beer. “Is a PhD so different? Don’t you think I know they have a hamster wheel at that university built especially for you? You get on that campus and your little legs are going faster than mine, my friend.”
“Yah, that may be. But didn’t I tell you?” He pulled a thread of tobacco from his lip. “I’m planning on being a monk.”
“No, you didn’t tell me that.” I laughed hard enough that I slopped beer down one pant leg. “You’d make a shitty monk.”
“I’m going to live in a state of perfection.” He tilted his can back and finished the beer, adding it carefully to a wobbly tower of cans next to his chair. “Nirvana.”
“I thought you’d already achieved that.” I smirked at him.
Thom laughed and made a weak attempt to disguise a belch.
“So where do you go to be a monk around here?”
“There’s a place near Mission.”
We talked well into the early morning, until the edges of the clouds turned pink and we were slumped over our chairs trying to grasp at a conversation slipping sideways toward total incoherence. We were talking about politics and great books and greater wars as though we knew anything about those subjects. Thom kept backing me into corners, pointing his finger in my face until I finally surrendered and stumbled up, knocking over my folding chair, and told him to fuck off. I don’t think either of us knew what it was over, but we both knew we’d reached that point in the morning where we hated each other. I found Angie and Veronica inside on the couch under a pile of blankets, talking.
“Are you crying?” Angie said. An arm came up from under an afghan.
“They’re just leaking,” I said, waving her away. There were tears on my cheeks, but it was impossible to tell what from, the booze or the anger. Angie crawled out from beneath the blankets and peered out the window at Thom. “You guys have been drinking all night.”
Veronica stood beside her. “Is he still out there?” She went about puttering in the kitchen and muttering to herself about the sorry mess in her backyard and the neighbourhood waking up to bear witness.
I leaned against the wall as I stumbled down the hallway to the bedroom. “If you wake her up I’ll kill you,” Angie called after me.
Sophie lay in the middle of the bed, chin tilted to the ceiling, mouth open, abandoned to sleep. There was something immensely pleasurable about staring at my sleeping daughter when I was drunk. “You’re so beautiful,” I said as the exquisite little breaths escaped from her mouth.
“Get out of here,” Angie hissed. Her hand came out of the dark and pulled me down the hall.
“When are you guys going to learn you’re not twenty anymore?” Veronica said from the kitchen. “Tea, Ange? What do you need, Wes? Some coffee?”
“He’s a stubborn bastard,” I said, wiping the back of my hand over my weepy eyes. It was certainly the booze.
“So he told you?” Veronica dipped the tea bag in and out of the hot water, steam drifting up around her face.
“Told me what?”
“That he dropped out of his PhD program,” she said. “Hasn’t left the house all week.”
TRAFFIC IS PILED UP along the highway. Sophie is crying, has been crying on and off in howling fits for the past two hours. The wildfire has closed part of the road, with escorts taking convoys of cars down the mountain. No one has moved for twenty minutes. Angie’s been halfway over the front seat, ass in the air, for most of the ride, and we silently agreed to stop talking to each other after the first half hour of arguing. Maybe she’s hot. Maybe she’s bored. Maybe she wants us to stop yelling. Kids hang limply out car windows. People walk along the edge of the highway, stretching their legs, taking their dogs for a piss, lifting their hands to shield their eyes as they stare down the long line of stationary cars. I’ve been sitting here fiddling with the air conditioning and thinking of alternate endings.
“Just leave it on one setting,” Angie says. “Cold is cold.”
I’ve been thinking of more possibilities in which the plane lands safely. And the hawk no longer seems to be serving its purpose. Instead of a weightless exhilaration, what I feel when I think of the hawk is dread, the kind of terror that ricochets through your insides when your foot slips off a steel rail, when you make that critical mistake. The feeling is enough to eject me from the car and out into the highway’s swelter.
“I’m going to take a leak,” I say, slamming the door behind me before I can hear Angie’s reply. I walk quickly down the line of cars, heat hammering me from above, bouncing off the windshields and fenders so I have to squint, my sunglasses sitting useless on the car’s dash, where I threw them after whipping them off to massage the ache gathering between my eyes. I leave the road and cut off into the brush along the side of the highway, wading through waist-high grass and
jumping over a drainage ditch before hitting the trees. Pricks of sweat erupt across my forehead. What are your intentions? It’s a question I thought I had the answer to. I wipe at my wet face. In the forest, I weave through the trees, my breath coming heavy after only a minute. I can feel something in my body, an ugly growth, an extra layer around the middle of something that might be insubstantial now, but is growing.
Once I’m hidden from the road I relieve myself, sending the stream over the side of a tree stump. In here the air is only hot, alive with the noise of insects and forest detritus crackling under my feet. Only now do I smell the fire. I picture the pilot climbing out of the wreck, walking through the burned-out forest back into town, how everything would smell better, taste better. He probably wouldn’t notice the heat. The whole world would look different. What would he do first? Eat a hot dog. Wade out waist-deep into the lake. Would he go back to exactly the way things were? Did he have someone to love? Would he keep flying? Would he keep waiting for summer fires? I wonder if in thirty-three years I will still be that man standing on the highway, squinting at the traffic, badly needing to take a leak but holding it. Suddenly falling off the deep end seems attractive to me. If Thom can fall off the grid, lose his mind without consequence and sit around the house all day reading, then why can’t I? I could go back to university, accomplish what Thom threw away. I’ve seen it happen: bursting into flames. Falling from great heights in a blazing ball of fire. Maybe Thom has it all figured out. When life gets too straight and narrow, throw a wrench into the mix. See what happens. What happens is everyone tiptoes around you, grabs you an extra beer from the fridge, says poor Thom, takes your picture, makes it part of a project.
Through the trees, tail lights brighten along the highway and car engines start at the head of the line. I jog down the middle of the road between the rows of cars, singles or families back in their seats staring straight ahead, hoping to move even if only by a few feet. By the time I reach the car, sweat is trickling down my back. The doors are open and I can hear the wailing before I even get close to the car. Angie is pink-faced in the back seat rocking the screaming child.
“You took the keys with you.” She calls over Sophie’s hoarse shrieking as I get into the front seat. I check my shorts and find them in one of the back pockets. It was autopilot: turning off the car, pocketing the keys as if I was alone. “Shit,” I say, turning the ignition and cranking the air-conditioner. The seatbelt is burning hot. I can tell Angie has been crying. “Sorry, Ange. My head’s not on straight.”
“It’s just Sophie.” Angie fusses over the child, adjusting her clothing, smoothing the sweaty wisps of her hair. “I don’t care about me.”
“I’m not right today,” I say, turning the dial higher, the frigid air making the sweat run cold along my hairline.
For a while, neither of us says anything. Angie’s crying again in the back seat, but not for attention. As soon as a tear hits her cheek she wipes it away quickly with the back of her hand and looks out the window, jutting out her chin. I keep checking in the rearview mirror and the tears keep coming. The tail lights and car engines are a false hope — we haven’t moved a foot. I sit like all the others in their cars, waiting blankly, staring straight ahead.
“We’re not going to make it there before dark,” Angie says.
Up ahead the tail lights glow again, a red wave of light coming down the rows. I put the car in drive. “Are you moving up?”
“I’ll stay back here.” Her head is back on the seat, her pink cheeks turned pale, the colouring of someone who has slept through a year. “I’m stroking her hair.”
We wait another half hour before we are led down the mountain. Our car is near the back of a convoy of fifteen travelling along the highway, ushered by mountain patrol. The forest is charred, burned out like a war zone. Higher up and even through the thick smoke, I can see the bursts of bright flames climbing to crest the mountain peaks.
“Who was it who called this morning?” Angie says, as we round the corner and begin our descent. Her voice is fragile, nearly transparent. She’s distracted by something out the window, the twisted remains of a forest.
“Oh, my supervisor. I’m in the clear.” There’s no reason for the lie. I fiddle with the air again. It’s too cold now.
“That’s a relief.”
Sophie’s calmed with Angie’s fingers through her hair and I’m not hearing much of anything all of sudden, following the route down the side of the mountain, wheels rolling along the smooth pavement. Something switches over in my brain and everything goes quiet. Angie’s stopped crying. All I have to do is follow the line and I’ll find my way out.
THE MOTEL PARKING LOT borders the beach and when we pull into a spot the headlights stretch right across the sand into the water and the reflected neon of the vacancy sign.
“What are you doing?” Angie says, turning to look at me.
“I’m too tired.”
“Why don’t I drive for a while? You can sleep on the way.”
“I want to stay here tonight.”
We unload, leaving Sophie in her seat to dream, making sure one of us is always on our way to or from the car so she’s never alone. Angie sets out Sophie’s pajamas on the floral bedspread, and the playpen next to her side of the bed. In the morning, when we step out of the motel room, the sun will blind us. We’ll spend the day under the willow tree at the edge of the lake and we’ll agree it was a good idea to change our plans.
“Everything in?” I say, poking my head in the door as Angie sets up a spot for diaper-changing. “I’ll bring her in.”
“Don’t wake her up.”
I lean over Sophie in the car, slide my hands beneath her and gently lift her out of the seat, her body drooping over my arms, face turned skyward, mouth hanging open, ready to drink down the night sky. Abandon. Angie stands in the door of the motel watching us, a broken shaft of light stretching across the concrete and hitting our feet. “Don’t wake her up,” she whispers across the parking lot.
“Tell them we’re not coming,” I say.
“Are you sure?”
“Call and tell them Sophie got sick.”
Behind the curtains Angie is on the phone. The motel is illuminated under streetlights and neon, but when I turn toward the lake I’m surrounded by a darkness so immense I can’t wrap my head around it. I tip my head back like Sophie, so far back my mouth hangs open under the black bowl of a bottomless sky, like the black water of a lake over our heads. Abandon. I spin her gently, dipping her head toward the warm sand and back up into the night, bringing her ear to my mouth and whispering, baby, baby, baby. The smell of her makes every minute of my life thus far — shitty or not — worth it.
The air is dry and I can feel my skin shrinking, pulling tight, the moisture sucked from my pores. Standing at the edge of the water, I worry about what’s developing inside of me. Silver grasses along the edge of the highway hide crickets and the heat of the day still radiates, rising now from the concrete. There are remedies for a dull heart.
It takes time for my brain to make sense of the opposite of what it expects. It’s the end of August, with temperatures the hottest anyone’s ever seen and wildfires burning in the backcountry. During the day the mountains circling the lake are gold, tinder-dry, but at night beneath a clear sky and an almost-full moon, the entire valley is white. The mountains look like they’re covered in snow, but the breeze smells like grass, green and sweet.
MOSQUITO CREEK
I CAN HEAR KATE. Her bare feet rubbing through the grass. Her lips leaving the rim of the bottle.
“You’re getting warmer,” she says. She’s flicking her lighter. It won’t catch.
I move slowly in the same direction, waiting for it — open air, tumbling space, anything.
Kate inhales. I can hear the smoke leave her lips. “You’re hot,” she says.
My left foot slides off a
n edge and I stop. Somewhere below, rocks spill and bounce away. I stand still as a rush of wind passes over me. My breathing comes heavy. I think steady as my hands work in and out of fists. I don’t want Kate to see them shaking.
When I pull off the blindfold the entire inlet stretches out in front of me. Everything spills into it — the rivers, the forests, the suburbs, the city. The toes of my left foot hang out over the edge of the cliff. Below, the trains squeak and groan, barely moving along the tracks. Beside the tracks are the grain towers, ugly and grey, connected by pipes twisting like anatomy. The seagulls perch on the towers, fat and stupid and hungry.
I take a step back and turn to Kate. She’s already up from the blanket, coming toward me all antsy with excitement. “My turn,” she says, taking the blindfold and giving me the bottle of Malibu.
I don’t know why we come here, but we’ve been doing it for a while. Kate invented the game. Sometimes we play, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we just smoke or talk or sleep.
The wind tangles Kate’s hair in the blindfold and I pull the strands away to help her tie it around her head.
“How was it?” she asks, arms outstretched.
My heart is beating fast. I spin her once, twice, three times.
“I’ve never been that close,” I say.
~
IN THE SUMMER LYNN CANYON is swamped with tourists. They come in by the busload, gathering white-knuckled on the suspension bridge with their cameras, clutching the rails as they try to get the ultimate shot of the falls. From the bridge it’s a fifty-metre drop into a gorge of rocky ledges and tumbling water — head-splitting stuff, an instant death kinda deal. Standing in the middle of the bridge in flip-flops and a bikini, I let go of the railing and clasp my hands behind my back. A tour group in matching red baseball caps circles me as they angle their cameras, but I focus on the bottom of the canyon and start counting — it’s a test of courage or faith or strength or something. The bridge swings and bounces as people nudge past on their way to the other side. We hucked a watermelon off the bridge once, watched it explode into a billion microscopic particles below. I get to twelve before I have to grip the rail.
Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility Page 18