Eye Lake

by Tristan Hughes

  And then she started crying.

  I couldn’t understand why it was such a big deal, but I decided I’d better start teaching Bobby about hooks and stuff as soon as I could.

  The Tamarack dorm has twelve rooms – six facing the lake, six facing the woods – and I’ve stayed in every one of them. Sometimes I’ve stayed in a different room every night of the week as if I was on holiday and staying in different hotels along the way, the same as when me and Dad drove to Toronto once. And I could’ve stayed in all the other rooms in all the other dorms if I’d wanted to because Buddy was right: nobody was going to visit the Poplars any time soon.

  It’d seemed like a good plan when they’d built it. A wilderness conference centre is what they called it: somewhere for business people to come and talk and get a good wholesome taste of bush living. Except they didn’t much enjoy the taste of bush living in the winter – so that was seven months out of the year gone – and they didn’t much like the taste of the bugs either – so that was at least another three months gone. And two months a year isn’t going to keep any place open. Buddy bought it for nothing and whatever plans he had for it I didn’t know them, just that he wanted the buildings looked after. Maybe he was thinking of a fishing camp, but now the waters of the lake were falling that wasn’t going to be such a great plan. We hadn’t had much luck with things in Crooked River the last thirty years or so.

  Mostly when I moved rooms I picked the ones facing the woods. There was something about having the lake outside the window – especially at night – that spooked me. The sound of the loons calling across the water and the cry of the trains from far away and the way you’d sometimes be able to see the trees in the bays, sticking up out of the surface in the moonlight like thin bony fingers – all that’d start me thinking and then I knew I’d not be sleeping any time soon. So maybe it was a bit stupid that I picked one of those rooms to lie down in after meeting Sarah and Bobby.

  I don’t know how long I lay there but I drifted off and eventually it must have got dark because when I woke up I couldn’t see anything except a star or two reflected off the lake. And I was glad that I couldn’t see much because I’d already seen plenty in my sleep. In it I was as young as Bobby and the phantom shad had hooked me through the hand and dragged me down into the lake, and into the sunken forest. When I hit bottom I started walking along these underwater trails, beneath the trees, with the weeds hanging off their branches like leaves and swaying about in the water as if it was wind. The shad was sort of leading me along on its hooks and I could see its eyes looking at me, except that they’d multiplied and turned into the eyes of the watchers – white and bloodshot and staring. And one of them was George McKenzie and another one was Clarence. Then I came to the castle and the weeds were hanging off its walls too, like ivy on old houses, and the windows were as dark as drop-offs on the edges of reefs. When the door began to open I tried to step backwards but I couldn’t and when it’d opened all the way there were George and Clarence staring at me and beckoning me in. I looked up but there was no sign of the surface and in the window of the tower I saw my dad rocking back and forth on a chair with his head in his hands and little bubbles coming out of his mouth. I kept trying to turn around and go back but the shad kept pulling me towards the door. And then there was a knocking sound and it sounded so loud I thought my head would explode with it, but as I woke up I realized it was only a normal knocking sound coming from my door.

  When I opened it I found Sarah there, standing in the night, slapping her ears and neck to keep the bugs off. Her hair was so black it was like her face was just floating there in the darkness.

  ‘Can I come in?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  We stood inside behind the closed door and she kept looking down at the floor and then up at me.

  ‘Look, Eli, I just wanted to say I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s not nothing. I don’t know what’s got into me recently.’

  ‘But you were right,’ I said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About that lure.’

  ‘What about it?’ she asked, as if she’d forgotten it already. I wished I could.

  ‘About Bobby not having it,’ I said. ‘You know, it’s not so special – I reckon I’m going to throw it away anyhow. Bobby shouldn’t have it. It’s better to start out with a bent pin or something...’

  ‘I don’t care about the frigging lure, Eli … I’m sorry, I’m sorry … I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

  And then she was crying again. I didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Do you want a glass of milk?’ I asked.

  She was crying for quite a long time, sitting at the table in the kitchen, sobbing and then trying to talk and then sobbing again. I couldn’t figure out what she was saying exactly but mostly it was about how she wasn’t this kind of person. She said that a lot: ‘I’m not this kind of person, Eli. I hate being like this.’ Sometimes when she was sobbing she’d put her face in her hands like my dad in the tower and you could see the fly bites on her neck, all red and sore-looking like her face.

  When I gave her the glass of milk she stared at it as if it were the nectar of the gods. That’s what Virgil used to say when he had a beer sometimes: ‘Ah, the nectar of the gods.’ And then she looked at me in a funny kind of way and said: ‘You’re one of the few really decent people I know, Eli. Do you know that?’ I didn’t.

  When she got up to go she thanked me for listening and being so helpful and understanding. But I’d hardly said anything.

  And I’d hardly understood anything neither. Most people in Crooked River thought I didn’t understand much of anything except for fishing.

  After she was gone I went and put the phantom shad straight in the garbage and sat down at the table trying not to think of anything at all, except how I wished I had a TV out here because I knew I wasn’t going to be sleeping much.

  Happy 100th, Crooked River

  The next morning I decided to walk into Crooked River and have a talk with Mr. Haney and Gracie McKenzie over at the museum. It was only a few miles from the Poplars into town – down an old dirt road – but I took my time about it, dawdling my way along in the sunshine. The warmth felt good on my skin and the clearness of the sky was a big relief to me after the night before. There was a sweet smell drifting out of the woods from the wild strawberry plants coming through, and the leaves were all coming out too. There’s a sadness about the woods in the winter, all naked and spindly and see-through in the snow except for the pines and spruces, a sorrowful black-and-whiteness like the X-ray of a sick person. And then suddenly it’s gone. Everything here gets going fast – the bugs and animals come rushing out, the plants and leaves push through in a hurry, the whole bunch of them trying to cram their living into the short summer.

  When I got to the outskirts I saw they’d put a placard up beside the town sign. Happy 100th, it said. The sign itself said Crooked River: Population 2,851. They hadn’t got around to changing it for a couple of years now. Maybe they were hoping things would pick up a bit first.

  Happy 100th. I’d forgotten it was the town’s birthday. As I walked past I noticed the placard had already started curling up at the edges.

  On Main Street, Billy pulled up beside me in his new truck. Its front wheel sank into a big pothole like a partridge fluffing itself down in the dirt. There were a bunch more holes in the street this year and the other cars and trucks were weaving their way around them as if their drivers were drunk. It was a good thing Main was wide enough for about ten cars and trucks to weave down it at once – even though there were never more than one or two, and quite often none at all.

  ‘Hey there, Eli,’ Billy said, leaning out the window. ‘How’s she going?’

 
; ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Whatcha been up to out there in the boonies?’ With his new moustache it was hard to work out the look on his face.

  ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Some fishing.’

  ‘Just some, eh,’ he said. There was a sort of winking in the way Billy spoke to me; there always had been, as if I needed special signals to help me catch up with him. ‘Don’t you worry, I’m not going to tell Buddy what you get up to out there.’

  I’d known Billy since we were both kids, since we were both babies. I was Population 5,671 and Billy was Population 5,670. He beat me by two days, which made Buddy happy – to have a Bryce get somewhere first. They used to make a big fuss back then about the first baby born in the year and Buddy still had the photo of Billy in the hospital – cut out from the Crooked River Progress – on the wall of his house. No. 1. 1972, said the caption beneath it. In my house we never made such a big deal about me having got born.

  To tell the truth I don’t think I liked Billy that much even when we were babies, if babies can be picky like that. But what can you do? You don’t get any choice who you get born near and grow up with, not in a town like Crooked River where there’s a whole lot of miles of nothing on either side of you. And after that amount of time knowing someone, you’re pretty much something for ever – even if that something isn’t exactly friends.

  ‘So … ’ he said with a little nod, pushing himself up in his seat some. He was kind of short, and wiry too – like his dad.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Just fishing, eh.’ He sounded the same way he used to sound when he got worried I was playing with his toys.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Well, I’ll be seeing you about then, Eli,’ Billy said, revving his engine and pulling out of the pothole.

  ‘Hey,’ he called back to me. ‘You should sign up for the 3B’s Bass Classic this year.’

  But before I could answer he was already careering his way down the street, between the potholes, kicking up a cloud of reddish dust behind him.

  ‘So what do you think then, Eli?’ Mr. Haney asked me. He was standing outside the museum with his hands on his hips, admiring a new poster above the entrance. CENTENNIAL, it said. 1901–2001. It looked like I was pretty much the only person in town who’d forgotten it was its birthday.

  Inside the kids from the school had drawn a bunch of pictures on the wall. Up above them they’d written in big letters, Crooked River: The Little Town Who Could.

  One of the pictures was of Clarence, looking strange in crayon and standing beside the blue squiggle of the Crooked River. There was a canoe pulled up behind him on the bank and he was holding a paddle in his hand. ‘The arrival of the town’s first white settler,’ the children had written below him. He was in another picture too, holding a handsaw and standing beside his hotel on O’Callaghan Street. The Pioneer Hotel – Our First Building. Further on there was a young Buddy driving into town in front of a boxcar loaded with iron ore. The First Iron Ore From Red Rock Mine.

  ‘Welcome to the new art gallery, Eli,’ Gracie croaked, not sounding quite as impressed with it as Mr. Haney. She was sitting in her glass-walled office smoking a cigarette, even though you weren’t supposed to smoke in the museum. She looked a lot older than she was; she’d started looking older than she was when George went missing. In between puffs she sometimes took a gulp of oxygen from a mask attached to a canister beneath her desk. ‘Who knows, maybe we’ll get a set of swings and some playdough for our next exhibit.’

  ‘It’s been great to have the whole community involved in our celebrations,’ Mr. Haney said to me, looking sideways in Gracie’s direction. Mr. Haney used the word ‘community’ a lot when he spoke.

  ‘Jesus, Tom. I’d thought you’d finished up with the speeches yesterday.’

  ‘I was just telling Eli how gratifying it is to have the community all pitch in … ’

  Gracie stubbed her cigarette into a white bowl and looked out the window. She’d been working at the museum since I was a kid. Mr. Haney was a bit of a newcomer: he’d been there only ten years.

  What I’d wanted to do was tell them about finding Clarence’s castle – it seemed like something the museum should know – but now I wasn’t so sure. From where I stood it seemed like the museum had it all figured out about Clarence already: the first this and the first that, Crooked River Population 1. The kids had given him wide crayon smiles as if he was just as happy as could be, as if putting Crooked River onto a map was what he’d wanted to do the whole time. It looked like he was really looking forward to the birthday party and blowing out the hundred candles.

  But it hadn’t all been like that. His face in the photo didn’t look like that at all. And when I thought of it my circle of tempers – which is what Dr. Gashinski used to call it – began to spin and I forgot how good the sun had felt and everything started to feel as black and white as the photo, as sorrowfully black and white as winter.

  ‘So to what do we owe the pleasure?’ Mr. Haney called down to me. He was standing on a chair tying some balloons up over the door.

  ‘Of what?’ I asked.

  ‘Of your company, Eli.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to see … ’ I glanced around for something I might have come to see, even though I’d already seen pretty much everything in the museum before. There was an iron drill in one corner and a board covered in old front pages from the Crooked River Progress. In another there was a bunch of rusty-looking knives, a wood stove and a cupboard full of tin pots and pans. An Old-Timer’s Kitchen, the sign beside it said. The stove had sat for years in our basement on O’Callaghan Street before Nana gave it to the museum; it seemed like if something sat for long enough in a basement in Crooked River then it’d become historical and find its way here.

  I took so long about deciding that Mr. Haney must’ve thought I needed helping out.

  ‘Ah, the murals,’ he said. ‘You came to see the murals.’

  I looked at Mr. Haney for another second or two.

  ‘The paintings,’ he said. ‘The paintings on the wall.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘There’s some of your grandfather, you know.’

  ‘I reckon he’s probably figured that out, Tom,’ Gracie piped up. ‘So how’s life treating you out at the Poplars then, Eli?’

  Gracie had always kept an eye out for me because George and me used to be best friends.

  ‘Pretty good,’ I said, even though at that moment nothing felt that good. I wished I could just talk to Gracie on her own and tell her about the castle. She knew about it. She’d known Dad and Nana and Virgil and I’m sure they’d talked about it. Having something to tell about and nobody to tell it to suddenly seemed a terrible thing.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to help with these balloons,’ Mr. Haney said. He was wobbling on the chair. Every winter he got a bit fatter – the opposite of the animals, who came out in the spring scrawny and thin.

  ‘Jesus, Tom. Eli doesn’t want to be messing about in here. If you want to turn this place into a kindergarten you can do it on your own.’

  Normally I would’ve been happy to help but right then I didn’t want to do anything except go home. To my old home. Number one O’Callaghan Street.

  Back outside, Main Street was its wide and empty self: in Crooked River, it’s not just the tarmac that has holes in it. There are holes in the line of storefronts that run along it too. Some of them are just fronts anyway: tall rectangles of board that’ve been there for years where nobody’s bothered to pull them down or put closed signs on. Gil’s Radio Electric. O’Brian Services. Bob Moffatt Supply Ltd. In other places there’s nothing at all, only empty lots overgrown with weeds and brush. Sometimes I think the street looks kind of like a hillbilly’s grin: trying to be welcoming but with some of its teeth rotting and others missing altogether. And behi
nd, the pale green gums of the woods.

  Maybe Buddy’s right about it. Maybe number one O’Callaghan Street isn’t fit for living in anymore. But I still like visiting it. If you don’t regard it too close – at where the paint is peeling off and the windowsills are sagging and stuff like that – it looks almost the same as it’s always looked. The fence still goes around the big garden, with the crabapple tree in the middle and the pile of rotting boards that used to be Clarence’s hotel on the far side. The porch still sits facing into the garden and the chimney from the wood stoves in the basement and living room still pokes out of the roof, tilting to the side the same as it has for a good few years now.

  Winter had been hard on the place this year and the porch was falling through pretty badly. Some of the floorboards were so rotten my foot went right through when I stepped inside the door. I pulled it out and went to lie down on the old settee. It was getting on the mouldy side and there was fluff coming out where a squirrel or something had gotten in and started chewing on it.

  They’d probably be asking to have it in the museum before long.

  When I was a kid Nana would let me sleep on the porch settee sometimes. I loved lying there and just listening. You could hear the frogs and the crickets and occasionally Jake Ottertale or Jim Clement muttering to themselves as they zigzagged down the sidewalk to the Red Rock Inn. And sometimes Jim would stop over for a drink or two with Virgil, and they’d sit on the porch talking while I lay there listening.

  But my favourite thing was the sounds of the trains. You could hear some of them being shunted on the tracks at the end of the road near the roundhouse, creaking and groaning like stiff old men getting out of their chairs. But best of all were the ones that went straight through. You’d hear them a ways out to begin with, their horns making an echoey lonely loon cry in the dark, and then you’d start to feel them coming too: a low, distant rumbling, like a tremor, gently shuddering and juddering the windows, getting slowly bigger and bigger, until the settee and the pictures on the walls and the whole frame of the porch were quaking and the whole night was clanging and whooshing and banging. And then it’d be past. The sound and the shaking would shuffle back into the dark and I’d lie there feeling like I’d been tucked in. The next night there’d be another train and knowing that made me feel happy and safe and ready to go to sleep.