A.D. nodded and walked across the room to sit on the floor opposite Wesley, his back to the wall. He shut his one eye and then opened it again. They sat there in silent communion, or at least it seemed that way to A.D., until Wesley swung his feet up on the sofa and fell into a dreamless sleep.
WESLEY slept into the middle of the next day and woke to the sound of the plane taking off across the bay. He lay for a long time without moving, watching patches of sunlight thick with dust slice into the room. Outside a board banged and the wind rose and whistled around the house before howling off toward the southwest. He remembered that wind. It was an autumn wind and it would blow for weeks until the ice came in. It would be a time of preparation. The boats would be hauled and the houses banked and the last of the wood cut. The light would grow dim and sullen and when the snow and ice came there would be nothing to do at all. Not even wait. Perhaps not even remember. He stood up. Someone must have removed his clothes and it was cold enough so that he hurried to dress. Then he went into the kitchen.
Long was frying mackerel and potatoes. Coffee was on and the room was warm from the stove. Wesley poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down.
“I’ll be drifting off,” Long said. “Got my own shack down by the shore and it’ll do.”
“’There’s enough room here for both of us,” Wesley said.
“Not for this child there ain’t. The whole panorama won’t never be the same since you landed, Wesley Hardin. Course, that ain’t true, either. I never seen a day that wasn’t the same on Slab Island. Even yesterday. That was the same. And tomorrow won’t be no different. Now me, I figure to make it through the spring thaw, enough to put out a trap line.”
“I’ll partner with you,” Wesley offered.
Long dropped the mackerel and potatoes onto a plate and shook his head. “I always set my own traps. Sell my own pelts. Chew my own ’baca. Never partnered and never will. Not on the sea. Not on the land. Otherwise what would be the sense? But I’ll plug you enough meat to last the freeze up.”
“I can plug my own meat,” Wesley said.
“You got to put it in the pan,” Long said.
“I can manage that, too.”
Long nodded, his mouth full of food. After he had finished eating, he slung a burlap sack over his shoulder with all his worldly goods inside and went out the door without a word.
Wesley sat in the kitchen until the fire in the stove went out. Then he went outside.
There were no boats out and dark clouds were sliding across the sun. On the other side of town someone was cutting wood with a chain saw and beneath him by the shore a family of Inuit were building a fish rack. He was standing in his socks, wearing only his pants and a thin cotton shirt, and the wind felt raw, almost painful. Beyond the harbor, long dirty swells were rolling in toward the breakwater. No planes would land this day, or the day after, and soon the ice would form and it would be weeks before a plane would come in.
He walked around the house and then went back inside and it was only after he had built a fire again and was sitting at the kitchen table waiting for the kettle to boil that Wesley realized he was for the moment, and perhaps even finally, alone.
Rudolph Wurlitzer
is the author of five novels:
Nog, Flats, Quake, Slow Fade, and most
recently, The Drop Edge of Yonder.
He is equally well-known as a
screenwriter, responsible for the scripts
for Two-Lane Blacktop, Glen and Randa,
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Walker,
and Candy Mountain.
He is also the author of
Hard Travel to Sacred Places,
a travel diary of East Asia.
Presently, he and his wife, photographer
Lynn Davis, split their time between Hudson,
New York, and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.
Slow Fade Page 20