by Patrick Lane
Behind the books were three black cardboard folders held together with faded red strings. There were two pottery jars, one with pens in it and the other with thin brushes. Art had told him some of the brushes were made of wolf and deer and others made of scraped feathers. There were even some that were nothing more than sticks frayed at the end as if they’d been chewed. Beside them was a dish with a damp pool of black ink covered by a chamois, and there were a water glass and other, smaller jars, but what was in them Joel didn’t know. Art had told him that Wang Po made drawings in the folders with the pens and brushes. One of the pictures had been pinned crooked to the wall above the table. The drawing was of a girl. She didn’t look grown-up enough to be a woman.
Art had told him the drawing was Wang Po’s new wife in Shanghai.
“Wang Po is saving his money so he can bring her here,” Art said. “The drawings are who he imagines. They’ve never met.”
Joel asked how Wang Po could have a wife as young as the one in the drawing and Art told him the marriage was arranged. “He sends money to the family. When he’s paid the bride price in full he’ll give them the passage money and they’ll send her here.”
To Joel the cook was old, a man with a wispy beard, shapeless clothes and slippers, and black, black eyes. Those eyes of Wang Po’s had lights dancing in them, tiny flashes, winter water.
The woman was only a few lines of ink. It didn’t show her feet, just a dress hanging down, her hands inside long sleeves. In the picture she was standing sideways and looking back over her shoulder. Art told him the drawing was beautiful. Joel didn’t know how Art saw things. To Joel the picture was sad, the woman lost, someone Wang Po had made up, not someone real.
But maybe that’s what beautiful was to the first-aid man and maybe to Wang Po too. Maybe to be beautiful you had to be lost. Joel wished it was a photograph, a real picture where you could see what she was instead of lines of ink on paper. Everything in the drawing was black and grey and white except for a thin red line running down a seam on the side of her dress where an edge of cloth was folded over. Wang Po told him the woman in the picture was as young as wind that rises to melt snow in the wrong season. Joel didn’t know what he meant. The only wind he knew that did that was the chinook, a warm wind that blew over the mountains from the ocean and melted the winter snow out on the plains.
Remembering the picture Wang Po drew made Joel think of Alice again and how she’d be awake now, the light streaming across the top of the sky above the mountains. Joel had stared through the pig-wire window a lot of mornings and each time she started to open her eyes he’d duck his head and listen to her feet on the creaking one-by-six boards as she went to the bucket in the corner to pee. It near drove him crazy to hear her pissing.
Thinking of it he felt like the little hunchback kid who used to live behind the post office in Nakusp with his crazy mother. The boy’s father had died in the war. He was a funny-looking kid with crooked, bony hands and a humped back. His tiny knuckles were sharp as blades. He loved punching fists. No matter if there was blood running down his wrists and his skin cut to ribbons, he never stopped. Joel felt like him some nights, his head hunched into his narrow shoulders, his fists clenched tight, but why he felt like that he didn’t know.
What Joel remembered most from the times he’d seen Alice wake was her smell. It was warm like when a young animal in a barn rises from the straw at dawn. The first time he smelled her he’d had to press himself hard against the wall to keep from falling. He’d wanted so bad to look at her and maybe see her take off her nightshirt, the thin cotton slipping up over her head.
Her smell drove him as crazy as Myrna’s did.
But he couldn’t go there again now that it was almost light. Someone would see him for sure. Other trucks were starting to move, lamps going on inside some of the cabins. The sky above the mountains was a faded bruise.
There was a world he wanted to hold on to but he didn’t know how to hold on to anything.
Joel picked up the first-aid kit Wang Po had handed him at the cookhouse door. Art was ahead of him, staggering as he walked the road across from the bunkhouses. He turned up onto the trail Joel had taken earlier in the night and not the worn path that led down to his river cabin. Joel knew Art was going back to check on Irene McAllister.
A frog creaked small and lonely from the bog behind the bunkhouses. Joel clicked his tongue and the frog stopped croaking and everything got quieter. He stepped through the broken grass in the ditch and moved into the trees. Art wouldn’t want him tagging along up to McAllister’s so he moved with each tree, each rock and stump, keeping just far enough behind so Art wouldn’t see him.
A lamp came on in a shack they passed, a pale face staring between two ragged curtains at the night. There was a muffled groan in a cabin, then silence, a child crying quietly in another, then nothing. It was the fading dark of Saturday morning and most people were buried in their beds, sleeping off going to the bar in Blue River, or lying in the dark thinking about getting up, their sullen, watchful kids wanting breakfast, mothers and wives angry over what happened the night before, men gulping down air with their heavy snores, dreamless and still as snakes in a drought. The Friday liquor train had given most people reason enough to slumber or to seethe.
Joel came around a stump and saw Art kneeling by the creek. The first-aid man was cupping water and thin gravel from a pool and rubbing it into his face. As Joel set down the first-aid kit it fell over and Art reached out and pulled the kit toward him, the corner of it wet.
“I know where you’re going,” Joel said.
Art ignored him as he lifted another handful of rough sand and water into his face and scoured his skin.
“Wang Po told me to make sure you went to your cabin.”
Art fell back on his heels.
Joel said, “Why do you have to go back there?”
Art stood slowly and pulled his shirt out of his pants, drying his face on the tails. His eyes looked like something dead had been dragged through them.
“Go to the bunkhouse and get some sleep, Joel.”
“Wang Po said.”
“Wang Po’s got nothing to do with this.”
“You’re going up there to see that Irene McAllister.”
Art rolled his head to the side and looked at him.
“I was outside before when you fixed her up,” said Joel. “I was walking the trail is all. I heard what happened, what she said in there. I know she cut herself.”
“Jim’ll send you broken down the line if he finds out you know about that,” said Art. “What were you doing listening at Jim’s trailer?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t lie,” said Art, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. His hands hung between his legs like broken leaves. He seemed to struggle for a moment and then he rolled his shoulders and took another heavy breath. “You spend too damned much time looking in windows and listening outside doors. It’s going to get you in trouble some night,” he said, rubbing his eyes against his sleeve.
“What about Ernie Reiner?” Joel said. “Sometimes he’s up at McAllister’s trailer too.”
“Ernie goes up there?”
“I’ve seen him go in there. Jim knows him.”
“Jesus,” said Art. “I knew they hang around together, but up at the trailer? Reiner?”
“Yup,” said Joel and then, because Art looked so stricken, asked, “Are you okay?”
Art leaned out from the tree’s shadow and almost fell. For a moment he looked bewildered, staring at Joel as if seeing him for the first time.
“What’re you doing here anyway?”
“Wang Po told me to take you home,” said Joel.
“No,” said Art, staring off into the trees. “I should’ve done something.”
Art was looking far away again. It was like he was there and wasn’t. “But you did,” Joel said.
“The only thing I did was nothing.”
“I don’t understand.�
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The branch Art had been holding swung away. He picked up the kit and walked slowly across the narrow bridge, the planks bowing a little under him.
“Go home, kid.” Saying that, Art looked around as if trying to understand where he was.
Joel stared at Art’s confusion. He’d seen it before, but this time it was worse than ever. Again, Art said to Joel, this time quieter, “Go home, please.”
Joel stood by the pool and watched Art go up the path. Each step the first-aid man took seemed to take a long time. Joel waited until Art disappeared into the dark.
ART LOOKED UP THROUGH THE TREES rising around him. The stars had faded, Venus low in the south, a single faint light steady above the nameless mountains. The sky had touched upon a pale blue the day would never know again. Only the last of night could touch it. Art felt sometimes he could drink such light, could empty the sky of its colour.
He stepped around a boulder, stumbled over a root, and fell to his knees, his kit skittering down the trail. He knelt there, his hands bracing him against the dirt, and then slowly got up and brushed away the fir needles, grit, and dust on his legs. Small, terrible creatures crawled in his belly, more terrible ones in his head. They wouldn’t stop eating him. He wiped at the sweat on his face, his sleeve coming away wet as he carefully got up, picked up the kit, and began to walk again.
He could hear Joel’s feet on the path behind him. He swore again, but who or what he cursed he didn’t know. The kid should be tired out from the long hours he spent balanced on the cedar round at the lean-to back of Rotmensens’ store, let alone the hours in Wang Po’s room listening to God knows what. Did the kid never sleep? And what was his plan for Myrna Turfoot? If she wasn’t in trouble now, she would be. The girl wasn’t slow, she was different. One thing, she was alive in ways another girl might take years to figure out. If it was his own daughter he’d kick Joel’s ass all the way to Mad River Junction and then drown him.
And Art was surprised Reiner and his cronies hadn’t caught Joel watching the Indian girl. They had to be stupid not to know. Where did they imagine Joel went when he crawled out of bed in the night? Yet Joel was pretty smart about what he did around Reiner and the others. Art knew that. Joel would make sure no one was awake or around before heading up to the lean-to. Art didn’t like to think about what they’d do if they found out about Joel peering in at Alice. Especially Reiner. He tormented the kid enough as it was. He’d have a field day if he found out the kid looked in her window. The boy’s life was misery enough.
A wisp of woodsmoke slipped past his nose, some morning fire in a shack back in the bush, early coffee burbling. The opium from Wang Po’s had drifted away. He was no good without it. He needed a drink, a pipe even, and though he’d sworn to give it up, morphine, a needle. That or, God knows, sleep, but he wasn’t sure of sleep. He wasn’t sure he knew what sleep was anymore. There were the nightly ravings, the noise as he thrashed on the bed, the cat staring as he woke himself up with his shouting.
He’d dreamed the war again when he was down at the cookhouse and now he wondered if he’d talked too much while he was smoking that black rice and guessed maybe he had. He hoped he hadn’t talked too much about those days. Hell, he didn’t even know the kid was there until he was leaving. God knows what he heard him say. The bloody war.
He tried to imagine a loneliness so great it would make a woman pick up a man’s hunting knife and cut herself with it. Whoever Irene McAllister was, she thought she’d lost it all. But Art thought again there was no end to losing. He hoped what he’d done for her was enough, the stitches, the penicillin. That drug had saved a lot of men.
Booze. Morphine. Opium. They were the drugs that saved his own life back in the war.
Were they saving him now? He didn’t know.
What was his life that he should save it?
The knife she’d used had probably been dirty. Jim had skinned and gutted moose and bear with it. Short of boiling the blade for an hour there was no way it could have been clean.
But Art wouldn’t let her get sick.
There in that narrow trailer all by herself day after night after day. What kind of fear did she have in her to keep herself hidden away? No matter the rare moments when she was seen at the store. It was as if Jim tied her up or something. He wouldn’t put it past McAllister doing that, but he figured Jim didn’t need to. She was just too frightened, Art figured. Or was her hiding in there all she knew how to do?
By God, the first sign of something going wrong Art would have her out of that trailer and down to the hospital in Kamloops. And fuck Jim McAllister if he tried to stop him. Fuck Claude too.
“No one’s going to die,” he said. And then, as if to the river, the valley, and the mountains surrounding him, he cried, “This village, this mill, these people.”
He stopped and turned in a circle, shocked by the sound he’d made. He was sure it was an animal that’d cried out, not him.
But it wasn’t an animal. It was him. He had made the noise.
He bit his lip and tasted wet iron, slick on his tongue. He kicked at a loose rock and it caromed off a boulder, clicked against a tree, and vanished into the tangle of saskatoon brush. He turned past a clump of stunted alders and stopped dead at the sudden, musty scent of bear. The rank smell reached into him like a knife pushed deep in meat. He choked, took a step back, and stopped at a hump of root pushed out from a stump.
The bear was close.
He stood and waited till he could breathe. His mind was still tangled by the hours at the cookhouse. He cupped his hands to his cheeks and tried to hold himself steady. He couldn’t tell where the bear was, higher up the slope in the trees or off in the scrub. The stench hung over him in a pall. His boot pressed on the root, the other tense in the dirt, ready to stand his ground or cut down through the trees and brush, but he knew if it came to him running the bear would catch him before he took ten steps. He touched a spruce branch, the needles prickling his fingers. His skin was alive.
And the kid behind him?
What about Joel?
He licked at what wasn’t a breeze, his own breath, in and out, a slick whisper sliding across his dry teeth as he stared into the dark.
There was what seemed a great fir stump off the trail between two alders.
It hadn’t been there before.
The tree closest to the hulk trembled, leaves ashiver.
There wasn’t, was, nothing, something, there.
The bear.
Aahhhhh, huh huh huff, broke the quiet.
And silence moved.
Art stared at the great shadow among shadows, the huge heavy shoulders, the wet glint of a single tiny eye.
Grizzly.
The bear moved its great head slow and looked long at him as if to weigh him somehow and then, done, it turned away knowing what it needed to know of him, turned away not in disdain, but as if to have acknowledged his presence.
As if.
An impossible quiet going among the trees, its bulk weightless upon broken needles, dry leaves, and cones.
And gone.
Art listened to his heart.
* * *
—
JOEL CAME AROUND THE BEND behind the trailer and crouched down in the flattened bear stink by the chokecherry, the same bush he’d hidden behind before. He’d seen the grizzly. Art coming along the path must’ve made the bear move off. The huge animal had looked at him as it passed below him in the trees. For a moment it was like the bear breathed him in. He heard the suck of air as the bear sniffed him. He’d seen grizzlies before down on the Lake, but never one here and in the village too.
Joel crouched low, ahead of him the trailer in cedar shade, no light in the window back here. But the kerosene lamp was glowing in the front.
Art was standing by the bottom step, the kit hanging from the end of his arm. For a moment Joel thought the first-aid man had passed out standing up, but then Art lifted his free arm and banged on the aluminum siding the way a ti
red child would who wanted shelter. Not loud, but loud enough so anyone inside would hear. For sure, someone had to be in there. Joel knew Jim McAllister wouldn’t have left the lamp on if he’d gone out, no matter Irene’s troubles. There was no sound from inside the trailer and Art rapped at the siding again.
Joel looked down the path along the trailer to the other shed Jim had built to keep his pickup truck out of the weather. The truck was a ’54 Ford F-100 with an eight-foot box, the wax polish burnished by a tender scour with a soft cloth. It had to be Jim’s pride, the truck. He’d kept it clean for what use he had of it like any other man who had a truck that new. But it wasn’t in the shed now, it was parked skewed in the narrow driveway. What had he seen when he was standing on the round behind the store? Two men in a truck. It had passed by the front of the store, the headlights off, heading up the hill to the high road. But he’d only glimpsed it. It could’ve been McAllister’s truck, but his wasn’t the only black truck. The planer-man had one and he knew of a couple of others in and around the village.
Joel heard a single, sudden noise inside the trailer, and then a quieter one followed by boots rattling on a plywood floor. The footsteps came down the trailer, hollow, pounding, and then Jim McAllister opened the door and appeared in the joy-shack doorway.
Art took three steps back as Jim leaned out.
“What do you want, Art?” Jim’s voice slow and quiet.
“I’ve come to see to Irene.”
Jim just stood there.
It seemed to take all he had in him to say, “I got to see if she’s okay.”
“There’s no need,” said Jim.
“There is, though, Jim. I got to check out those dressings and make sure they’re all okay.”
“She isn’t here no more.”