Eye Lake

by Tristan Hughes

  ‘“Jim,” he said. “Put them rabbits down and give us a hand with this bear, would you?”

  ‘So it was Clarence and me who ended up lugging that cub over to the platform. By the time we got it there you could hear the rumble and shake of the approaching train and the tracks were beginning to hum.

  ‘“It’s been a great pleasure to make your acquaintance,” said Clarence, his voice raised against the noise.

  ‘“Yeah, yeah, and you,” replied the circus man, grimacing and clutching his forehead with one hand while he shook Clarence’s with the other.

  ‘“If you’re ever in these parts again you’d be most welcome. I can assure you I’d do everything in my power to make you happy here,” said Clarence, and he was looking sideways at her then.

  ‘“Why thank you,” she said. “That’s very kind of you.”

  ‘When they went to shake hands you never would have seen it if you weren’t looking close: a piece of paper showing white against the pink of her palm, that was in his palm then, and went straight into his pocket. It happened in less than a blink of an eye, but I was sure I recognized that piece of paper – it was the invitation he’d given her on the beach. And then the train had arrived and in all the steam and commotion I hardly noticed them climb up into the red caboose.

  ‘Clarence and me waited on the platform for the train to pull off again. It started slow and as it picked up speed, I kind of got the idea he didn’t want me there and I began to skulk back towards where I’d left the rabbits. I’d only gone fifty yards or so when the train rounded the curve in the tracks and snaked into the green of the bush. And as the red of the caboose disappeared I heard it, as plain as day: a sort of short, anguished bellow coming from Clarence’s lips. He sounded just like the mother bear.’

  That was how Jim told the story of the famous picnic, one night as he and Virgil sat on the porch and I lay there, listening. I think Virgil wanted him to stay: he’d sure poured him plenty of whiskey as he’d been talking. But then Nana came to the door into the porch and said I had to get my sleep and if they wanted to carry on jawing they’d have to take it over to the Red Rock Inn.

  ‘We’ll have to finish this conversation another time, Jim,’ Virgil said.

  ‘Sure thing,’ said Jim.

  And then Jim walked out into the dark humming night. He’d only taken a few steps before Virgil called out to him through the screen windows.

  ‘How soon after that did he start on his castle, Jim?’

  ‘Pretty soon. The next week or so, I reckon. But I couldn’t be sure on that front, Virgil – he didn’t announce it or nothing and we never even knew what he was up to properly for about a year.’

  ‘Thank you, Jim. We’ll continue this another time. Soon.’

  ‘Any time,’ said Jim, and there was just his voice coming from the darkness. ‘Any time you like, Virgil.’

  After his footsteps had gone Virgil stayed on the porch a while, staring out into the night. Then he finished off his glass of whiskey and said goodnight and left me alone on the porch, listening to the chirruping of the frogs and the thrumming of the crickets, sounding like steel cables pulled too tight. For a while I couldn’t close my eyes because every time I did I’d see Clarence there, going around and around and around on the looping river until it made my head hurt – thinking of the forever of it. But then at last he was gone and I laid my head down on the couch and waited for the night trains to sing me loudly to sleep.

  And I wished they still could’ve sung me to sleep, like they used to. Because when I looked down over the edge of the beach, which had become a cliff now, lapped by thin air, I could feel my circle of tempers beginning to turn again, and their faces and voices – Virgil’s, Jim’s, Nana’s, all of them – were spinning around in my head like a whirlpool, as if someone had pulled a plug in the bottom of the empty lake and they were being sucked down into it like water, like the water that was already gone.

  The End of the World

  The next time I saw George it was Halloween. At first I didn’t think I would. Usually on Halloween he’d come over early in the morning and stalk around our kitchen, talking about his plans: what houses we should go to, which people would have the most candy, what route to take – that kind of stuff. But when I got up and looked out the window there was nobody about. Across the road the McKenzies’ fence stood tall and silent and there was no face between the thin gaps in the boards. Pressing my fingers against the glass I could feel the sharp, almost hurtful, cold of a frost outside and realized the trees were all coated in white.

  The smell of warm sugar was drifting up from the kitchen and when I went downstairs I found Nana pouring hot syrup out of a pot onto a baking tray. She was shaping it into fish and moose and bears and other, stranger, creatures I didn’t recognize for certain: witches and goblins, things like that, from her old country. When I was younger she’d told me stories about them but I never remembered the stories properly – except one about a giant slube who ate the whole world.

  ‘My little one,’ she said, turning around as I walked into the kitchen. ‘Would you like to taste?’

  She offered me a spoonful of the warm syrup. It was sweet and delicious. Strands of it dripped down onto my chin. Then she carried on shaping it into her strange creatures and put them on a windowsill to cool and harden. This was the candy the trick-or-treaters got at number one O’Callaghan Street.

  After a while I decided I’d go over and try to find George. Virgil and Dad had both told me to stay away from there for a while, but I was worried I’d have to spend the whole of Halloween just with Billy if George didn’t come out. Outside in the garden I found the rainwater had frozen in the bucket I kept frogs and toads in during the summer. We used to hunt for them back then; the frogs in the daytime and the toads at night, with flashlights. I never knew where they went in the fall and winter. Mrs. Arnold said in school that some animals were warm-blooded and others cold-blooded but what difference that made was a mystery to me and it still never explained where the frogs and toads went. I always pictured them in some hidden place – a cave or a deep tunnel under the ground, with long icicles hanging from the ceiling – huge piles of frogs and toads, their bodies frozen stiff in sleep and frosted white, their skin as crystal-smooth as Nana’s candy animals, and inside their guts and veins turned into a solid, icy tangle. And when I got to George’s house and saw the curtains on his window closed I suddenly pictured him inside, freezing and curled up asleep – the same as the hidden frogs and toads. I was going to throw a stone at his window then, to wake him, but I could hear shouting coming from behind the fence and so turned back.

  Outside the gate to our garden a ball of ice hit me on the side of my head and I turned around to find Billy grinning at me from the sidewalk. He’d been scraping the frozen surface of a puddle with a shovel.

  ‘This is even better than snow,’ he said.

  ‘That really hurt,’ I told him.

  ‘Don’t be such a baby,’ he crowed. ‘Baaa baaa, Eli the baby. Come on. My mom says you should come over.’

  ‘I have to help my nana making candy,’ I told him.

  ‘No, you don’t. I just been at yours and she says it’s fine.’

  Over at the Bryces’ place they were going through huge mountains of candy that Buddy must have had delivered from Thunder Bay. Brenda was at the table sorting out mixtures of them and putting them into pink paper bags. There were chocolate drops, pieces of red licorice, wine gums … everything you could think of.

  ‘Well hello there, Eli,’ she said smiling. Brenda was always smiling. Whatever anyone said or did she would always smile.

  ‘The same of each, Brenda, the same of each … ’ whistled Buddy, who was sitting at the head of the table beaming, looking pleased with himself like he was the King of Big Rock Candy Mountain. ‘The same for everyone.’

  N
ot that it was going to be the same for everyone. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Billy grabbing handfuls of candy out of the bags and stuffing them into his cheeks and pockets. When Brenda saw him she just smiled. ‘Now, Billy, there’s no need for that, is there? There’s plenty to go around.’ Billy carried on as if he hadn’t heard her.

  ‘Now then, Eli, would you like to try some of these?’ Brenda asked me, lifting a few chocolate drops off the mountain. She always spoke real slow to me. And she always sounded sorry for me too, as if I’d just had a puppy die or something.

  ‘So, what are you dressing as tonight, then?’ Buddy asked from the head of the table.

  ‘Spider-Man.’

  ‘Spider-Man!’ Billy spluttered. Some of the licorice he’d stuffed into his cheeks came flying out onto the table and lay there half-chewed. ‘Spider-Man,’ he repeated with a shake of his head. ‘That’s so crappy.’

  ‘Billy, you shouldn’t say things like that to Eli,’ Brenda said with a smile.

  ‘But it’s true, Mom. Spider-Man is so crappy.’

  ‘It’s an interesting choice, Eli – an interesting choice, certainly,’ Buddy said. ‘Billy’s going to be a pirate.’ He said this proudly, as if he were saying prime minister or astronaut or something.

  Later on Billy let me know that he had all sorts of plans for the evening, most of which involved throwing eggs at people’s houses. He showed me a bag he’d stolen out of the fridge and stashed under his bed. He said he was going to go as far as Eye Lake to throw them at the shackers’ places. I said I didn’t want to go. I didn’t even like thinking about Eye Lake at night back then, especially near the shackers’ places. Except I couldn’t tell Billy that. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘Scaredy-Man!’

  I don’t remember exactly where I spent the rest of that day – maybe I was at the baseball diamond or the gravel pit – only that I must’ve been outside because I remember watching flocks of geese go by above me in their swaying Vs. Their honking sounded sad and lonely somehow. It was an end-of-fall sound, the sound of everything leaving us behind for the winter. Above the geese, clouds had started drifting across the sky: thick, low-hanging, yellowy-grey clouds. And then the air beneath them went real still and the wood smoke rose up in straight lines from the chimneys until its grey seemed to bulge and spread against the surface of some invisible barrier and mix into the yellowy-grey of the clouds. The sky felt closer, heavier, like a giant lid being placed down on us from above. The first snow of the year began to fall as the last light of the day began to fail.

  By then I was back at O’Callaghan Street, because I remember watching the flakes land against the kitchen windows and slide down the glass as Nana fussed over my costume. The top was fine – it was from the Marvel company and Dad had let me sign the order form in my own shaky letters – and so was the mask; it covered your whole head and neck and had a round hole at the front for your eyes and nose, like a balaclava. The problem was the bottoms. When I’d put them on they’d ripped at the back and Nana was trying to put a few stitches in to hold the rip together until she could fix it properly. It would have been an easy job, except that I was refusing to take them off. I don’t know why I was being such a pain in the neck – Spider-Man was always good to his nana. I started blubbering every time she tried to pull the bottoms down.

  There was a knock at the door then and I was dreading it being Billy and him seeing me blubbering and spotting the hole in my pants and saying how crappy Spider-Man was. But it wasn’t Billy. It was George. He was wearing an old deerstalker hat and a tweed jacket and pants. ‘I’m a detective,’ he told me and Nana.

  ‘Don’t you look nice,’ Nana said.

  Virgil poked his head into the kitchen from the living room, where he was listening to his records. ‘I thought I recognized that voice,’ he said, sounding a bit surprised. He looked at George.

  ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ he said.

  George smiled.

  Before we headed out trick-or-treating Nana made me put on a pair of snow pants and a jacket, so the hole didn’t matter anymore.

  Out in the garden I saw that a thin layer of snow had already settled on top of the ice in my frog bucket. I asked George where he’d been earlier.

  ‘My dad said I was too allergic to go out,’ he said. ‘But then my mom said I was fine to go out, especially on Halloween. They had a big discussion about it. My dad said I could go out for a bit.’

  We didn’t get more than a few yards down the sidewalk before Billy appeared. He was wearing an eyepatch and a bright red scarf. There was a big golden hoop hanging from his ear. He looked George up and down and was going to say something but he didn’t. Instead he told George about his plans to go out to Eye Lake and throw eggs at the shackers’ places. George hadn’t been anywhere for almost a month. I knew he was going to say yes and I knew I’d have to go then.

  We took the street behind Main. The only cars on it were old, broken-down ones, parked up at the backs of the out-of-business stores. In the gaps between the stores, across the empty lots, we caught glimpses of other groups of trick-or-treaters, making their way in straggles up Main beneath the street lights. Here and there one of the lights would be broken and they’d disappear into the shadows and the falling snow. We went past the museum and the school until we reached where the train tracks curved away into the woods. There were piles of old railroad sleepers heaped beside the tracks and the settling snow gave them strange shapes, like Nana’s candy creatures. After passing the town sign, we slipped onto the dirt road to Eye Lake and the lights of the town vanished right away as though they’d never been there in the first place. It was almost completely dark now and none of us spoke. Beneath our feet the road was frozen solid and the only sound was the occasional crunch when one of our boots shattered the ice of a puddle – but even this was muffled by the falling snow.

  After a while my eyes got a bit more used to the dark and I could make out the pines and spruces looming up above me on either side, a deeper black against the blackness of the cloudy night. And then eventually the black edges began to thin and one big patch of darkness opened up in front of us. We’d reached Eye Lake.

  Billy had hung back behind us on the road, but as soon as we reached the boat launch he shoved ahead to the front and we followed him along the strand of sand on the shore. There was a crust of ice beginning to form at the edges of the lake and the snow was settling on top of it. I was glad of that. I thought maybe the watchers wouldn’t be able to see us now that the ice and snow was like a lid that closed their eyes.

  And then at last we made it to the Earl’s shack.

  You could only see it at first because of the thin slivers of light that leaked through the drawn curtains of the windows. But slowly the shape of the cabin itself became visible: a squat ugly shadow, cowering in the dark like one of the toads we hunted for at night in the summer. Billy placed himself carefully behind the low-hanging branches of a pine tree and opened his bag of eggs. He gave George and me two each.

  ‘Aim for the windows,’ he whispered. He sounded horribly gleeful.

  Billy threw first, and then me and George together. I guess one or two of them must have hit because before long the door latch clicked open. We crouched further down behind the branches and watched. A line of light fell out of the door onto the ground in front of the cabin, which was covered in a dusting of snow.

  ‘Who’s there?’ came the Earl’s voice from behind the door. ‘Who is that?’ His accent seemed out of place out there in the night, in the falling snow, like some strange twittering bird blown off its course into the wrong place.

  The line of light began to grow, widening out from the opening door into a triangle that spread just to the side of us on the snow. At its source, standing under the door frame, was the Earl, dressed in a tweed woollen suit like George’s. He was wearing his glasses, the ones with the small thick circles
for lenses. He took several steps forward and stood there in the snow, flailing with his hands at the flakes in front of his face as if they were a swarm of mosquitoes.

  ‘I know you’re there,’ he called out. ‘I know perfectly well that you’re there.’

  George started to shuffle backwards, towards the lake, but Billy and me stayed put. I think Billy knew the Earl wouldn’t be able to catch us. And I already knew for certain he wouldn’t. I remembered the first time I’d seen him, when he’d stood with his arms spread out before him and said about this being his Bermuda Triangle. I hadn’t really understood what he meant back then but now here it was, the triangle, drawn on the ground in front of him. He could walk to its edges but he couldn’t pass beyond them.

  Billy threw another egg. It landed just inside the open door.

  ‘Your parents will find out about this. I can assure you of that.’

  The next one hit the door jamb.

  ‘Look,’ said the Earl, ‘will you please just leave me be?’ He was standing right at the boundary of the light and we could see the two small discs of his lenses glimmering in front of his eyes. There were droplets of water on them from where the snowflakes had melted.

  ‘Come on,’ I whispered to Billy. ‘That’s enough. Let’s leave him be.’

  The next one hit him plum on the forehead. Some of the yolk stuck to the thinning bangs of his hair while the rest slid down over his nose and glasses. He made a halfhearted attempt to wipe it off with his sleeve but that only smeared it and in the end he turned sadly around and walked back towards the door. The triangle of light disappeared as he closed it behind him. I could feel something wet dripping over the cuff of my mitten onto my wrist and it was only then I realized that I’d crushed my second egg in my hand.

  ‘Let’s leave him be,’ I said.

  Billy wanted to go on to the next cabin, further along the shore, but I’d had enough. I never wanted to throw another egg as long as I lived. George was standing by the lake rooting around in the piles of driftwood there, and when Billy told him his plans I thought he’d want to go too, just to see what was there, just to explore. But he said he couldn’t. He said he wasn’t allowed out late because of his allergies. Billy got in a big huff.