Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  12

  “YOU HEARD A LYNX,” Starr said to Innis. They were all watching the ghostly players in a Blue Jays game. The warm lazy evening had drawn Innis to the parlor where he’d slipped quietly into the old stuffed chair. The sound of the TV had caught him up, not because he gave a damn about baseball but because it was a summer sound he remembered—a background buzz broken not frequently enough by bursts of roaring, play-by-play voices on humid afternoons and evenings, monotony droning out of cars and houses and the open doors of bars, endless talk and fuss, but summer, and a sickness for home came on him like a faint.

  “What’s a link?” Claire, in white shorts, sat at one end of the sofa fanning herself languidly with a magazine, Starr at the other. There’d been tension in the air ever since they came back from their little trip and they clammed up whenever Innis came near. Russ was at the center of it, Innis was pretty sure, but how deep he didn’t know.

  “A cat, wildcat.” Starr feigned interest in the ball game but it looked halfhearted. “Not big but a long-legged creature. They got tufts coming off their ear tips. Ruffy neck, stubby tail, black tail. I’ve only seen them dead.”

  “How come dead?” Innis said.

  “People trap them. Nice coat, good fur.”

  “I hate trapping,” Claire said. “It’s disgusting to catch animals that way.”

  “There’s worse traps than that,” Starr said. He winked at her but she didn’t notice. He had a cold Friday-night beer in his hand and a glass of rum on the end table. “They’re shy as hell, lynx. Forest fire might force one out. Big feet, good in winter. They’ll run down a fox, follow him slow until he gets tired out. Fox feet dig into snow but the old lynx he just floats along. Then he nails him. But that scream, God yes, strip the skin right off you. My dad used to say it was the devil.”

  “That would describe it all right,” Innis said.

  So this was the cat who’d padded around in the dark winter snow, up at the springs. It had come up that gully and shrieked into Innis’s dream. Between that stupid ball game and the wild sound he’d heard lay some wide dark space where the lynx roamed. But the next morning Innis had gone looking for an animal that might match the sound, not knowing the shape of it, the day hot enough to break a sweat just walking, following the gully into the shore woods. He found almost a different climate down there, more moist and lush than the upper woods, fine damp ferns soft as hair, clearings of high grass amidst spruce and fir the budworm never got to, old grey birches with branches flexing thickly overhead. He tripped on the yellowed shoulder bone of a deer, half-buried. Out of boggy black pools mosquitoes rose like veils. Graceful moosewood were coming up in the shade, slender as bamboo, their tulip leaves fanning sunlight. He jumped down into a streambed and followed its humid, head-high banks, ducking around the arching roots of dead trees the stream had undermined and laid bare, left to fall slowly in wind after wind. By now the spring torrents had been absorbed into black mud but clear pools remained, dimpled with water skaters. Patch grass popped up in mud, mingled with dead leaves where fresh deer hooves sank deep. But no tracks of the animal he searched for, only the busy hands and feet of raccoons he’d seen crossing the back fields at night, their capering, humpbacked gait giving them away. An old bare spruce, with its thick stubs of branches, lay across his path like the spine of a dinosaur. Reduced to a trickle, the stream levelled out and wove through a boggy stretch of fine grass and thin young birches he hadn’t seen up above, their bark a golden brown, thriving in the wet earth. Flowers here and there, the kind that loved muck and moisture, he’d find out their names sometime. Maybe his cannabis would have liked it better down here. Up ahead a thicket of willows, then cattails, vigorous new blades, and the stream tendrilled out into a marsh pond, clouds of algae underwater, a frog plunked before he saw it, silty clouds where he scampered across the bottom. The marsh grass was deep velvet, touched with silver and with red. Blue dragonflies zipped and hovered. He turned back, sick of mosquitoes. A big fir had come down, its underside webby, grey, its torn, dessicated roots rearing up ghoulishly, higher than his head. But that was daytime: he’d lost the terror of the dream, his confused waking. He’d skipped aside to avoid a sink in the marsh grass where the black mud looked lethal: he thrust his walking stick down to the hilt, drew it up slowly. Quicksand? Starr would’ve warned him. Or would he? He thought, What if I sunk out of sight right here, in that spot of suspicious mud, a clean disappearance, complete, mysterious? Who would care? And he’d luxuriated in that prospect, the tragedy of it, how sorry they’d all be, Claire upset, remorseful that she had spurned his attentions. But then he laughed, his tragic vision of himself dissolving into a jungle movie, a guy up to his armpits in quicksand screaming away, and all that shows up is a goddamn boa constrictor or a spider as big as a hamster or a woman too weak to pull him out and the last you see of him is his hand strangling a twig, and then blurp, he’s gone. But there were no snakes to worry about in Cape Breton, and the green spider he’d watched at night outside the kitchen window, though the size of a small plum, its legs mechanically muscular, its droppings on the windowsill the size of BBs, would not likely send you to a Hollywood death. Innis’s own tracks had washed out in the next rain. But was it a lynx he’d been looking for all along? They were beautiful cats. He had seen a picture of one, somewhere.

  “Are they dangerous?” Claire said.

  “They don’t want a damn thing to do with us,” Starr said. “Maybe they know we don’t taste good. Well, not that good.” He gave her a sardonic smile. “Clever and fierce. I heard of one that brought a small buck down, riding its back. It ripped the deer’s throat out but that buck just kept leaping till he fell. Must’ve been starving, to get that desperate. Rabbits is what they feed on, and if the rabbits are scarce, you won’t see a lynx around.”

  Just before the marsh bulrushes, Innis had come upon what had to be a lair, perfect in its mossy dryness, raised comfortably above the wet sod, the tall rotting stump of a fallen tree providing, with its old roots, a safe burrow. Shoulder-high spruce fenced it nicely in, and whatever animal had claimed it could—and had, judging from the slicked-down grass at the edge—nip to the narrow dark brook for a drink. Innis had stepped onto the mossy island. A patch had been recently torn up, as if the creature had raked it, maybe for insects underneath. Scat, black and dry, almost burnt, made him wary: it could be coiled right there inside, the animal that screamed, but he knew now this animal was a domestic creature, a squatter, a homemaker, all it needed was a flamingo in the front yard. The magnificent lynx would never set up house like this, it moved, it ranged out in the night, and in the day it rested, hidden somewhere different, it would never sit there and let you find it.

  “I’d sure like to see one,” Innis said. “But not dead. Not in a trap.”

  Claire was in a quiet mood, staring through the ball game toward somewhere else, her black blouse open where she was touching thoughtfully the moist hollow of her throat. It occurred to Innis like a revelation that she was bored, that she might just up and leave, tomorrow, the next day. What was there to stop her? She was free, freer than he was, and there was Russ to get away from besides. A shiver of panic ran through him: he did not want that to happen, yet what could he do to prevent it? He felt suddenly helpless and young and he hated that feeling, how little he could affect what he cared about, that other people had control of their lives and all he had was what was left over. Women had come to his mother’s apartment for years, her friends hunched around the kitchen table with coffee and cigarettes, and he’d overheard their talk when he wasn’t noticed, heard what they thought of men and what men did to them and he had never felt it would apply to him, those sad, bitter, sometimes humorous grievances. If Starr were to look hard at Claire right now, the distant expression on her face, her lovely legs stretched out, her bare feet wagging slightly to a beat only she was hearing, he’d be a fool to think he could keep her very long. Innis’s mother told a girlfriend once, You know, a good-looking w
oman is never happy with one man. I don’t care how sweet he is to her, she’s going to try somebody else, sometime, and then more than one time.

  Starr groaned as the Blue Jays pitcher grounded into a double play. The game swam across the screen: this was the channel with green faces, on the other one they were red. He looked over at Innis.

  “George Morrison down at the store yesterday, he thought he saw old Moneybag’s Caddy on the road. Last week.”

  “He thought,” Innis said. “Finlay says the old guy isn’t coming down this year.” He didn’t move his eyes from the game. He’d been afraid this might come up sooner or later. Stay cool. Your plants are in the air, leafing, rooting. You will be a man of means. You have prospects.

  “So how did his car get on the road?” Starr said.

  “You asking me? What do I know about him?”

  “His house is across from that cottage you work at. That’s all I know.”

  “What kind of Caddy is it?”

  “Seville.”

  “I’ve seen a Seville or two on the road, one time or another.”

  “Sure, the roads are full of them.”

  “The guy, George, he say what color?”

  “Pretty sure it was black.”

  “How could he tell at night?”

  “I never said it was night, did I? You’re on the road a lot, you might’ve seen it. I’ll ask Innis, I said, he’s back and forth to the priest’s, you know.”

  Claire slipped Innis a little smile. He blushed and leaned toward the TV as if the game suddenly captivated him. On the screen the baseball moved like a tiny planet with its own gauzy moon.

  “Where does he keep this goddamn black Seville anyway?” Innis said.

  “In that little garage. Where else?”

  “Then go check on it, if this concerns you so much, you and George. I don’t care about the old man, or his car either.”

  “Word gets around, you know, people look after each other here, at least the old-timers do. Maybe a ghost took it for a spin.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Plenty of those around here.”

  Starr picked up his rum and, after staring into the glass, drank it down, chasing it with beer. “You said it, b’y.”

  “Starr?” Claire pointed at the players and the shadows that clung to them like ectoplasm. “Can’t you fix that? That’s your job. That’s what you do for people, isn’t it?”

  “It’s the mountain, sweetheart. I can’t fix the mountain.”

  “You’ve been looking at that screen for how long? I’m surprised you’re not blind.”

  “Maybe I am blind. Maybe I’ve got to unblind myself. Eh?” He took a slow swig of beer. “People aren’t getting things fixed so much as they used to, they buy new. TVs are pretty cheap now, if you think about it. When my dad brought a television home in the fifties, it set him back a few dollars, I’ll tell you. Sat in the corner there big as a stove, full of tubes and promises. You could’ve fit a dead body in it. It was hot, you could press your hand to the wood and feel the heat. There wasn’t much to watch but we sat there waiting for something good, it was what we’d all been waiting for, us country folks, some real entertainment, what the hell did we know but fiddles and Scotch music, dancing and getting drunk and shooting the breeze, stories back and forth in the kitchens? Now you don’t have to say a word to each other, you just sit in a room and look stupid, and for the privilege they can try to sell you something. We used to visit. We used to talk.”

  “I haven’t noticed you starved for talk,” Claire said. “And we could always visit. I mean, it’s not as if we’ve worn our welcome out up and down this road. I’ve barely met a soul. Over in Black Rock I knew people. I don’t think they even know I’m over here.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, they all know it. You want to go back there?”

  Claire closed her eyes and dropped her head back against the couch. “You know I don’t, Starr. Just forget it. Please? Let’s talk about weather. God, it’s sticky. Isn’t it, Innis?”

  “It is, Claire, it is. Muggiest day yet.” All she had to do was pick up that phone now and again and listen. Black Rock was only ten miles away, not far for gossip. Through the gauze curtains behind Claire’s head, Innis could make out the top of the lilac bush over which many butterflies were dancing, large yellow ones and brown ones, like flowers blooming and closing again and again, and he couldn’t look away, they were mildly hallucinatory though he knew they were as real as the curtains or the glass or that bush they trembled on.

  “We could go for a swim, Starr, down in that nice cove,” she said, “that nice sandy beach.”

  “It’ll be dark as pitch pretty soon.”

  “What about those bonfires on the beach you told me about? That sounded like fun.”

  “It was fun, but there isn’t any wind. Mosquitoes would drink your blood.”

  “I’m not afraid of mosquitoes. Innis, what about you, do you swim?”

  “Not at night he doesn’t,” Starr said quickly. “And the jellyfish are in.”

  “That water’s pretty damn cold, Claire,” Innis said. He wouldn’t even hint that going to the shore alone with Claire, in the dark, would blow his mind. “I put my hand in it yesterday.” A lie. He’d hardly been to the shore. From the open window he heard the gully brook running louder from last night’s rain.

  “That’s what I like about you two,” Claire said, “a real yen for adventure.”

  “I had the idea you’d had too much adventure,” Starr said.

  “There’s a big difference between adventure and bullshit.”

  “Careful, there’s a minor in the room.”

  “Who? Me?” Innis grinned. Comic distraction. Keep the peace, relieve suspicion, he was good at it, sometimes. Maybe the Captain’s Caddy wouldn’t come up again, a rumor that would drift away like fog. Starr went to the kitchen for a beer. The moment Innis heard the cap hiss, there was a sensation on his bare foot: Claire had brushed him lightly with her toes, not even looking at him, then pulled her leg back just as Starr returned, his eye not on them but on the TV He cursed the score and turned the game off.

  “Hooray,” Claire whispered.

  “What’re you doing in the woods these days, Innis?” Starr said, standing over them. “Those woods, I could go through them in my sleep.”

  “A pheasant almost stopped my heart this afternoon. Came blasting out of the underbrush. Protecting her chicks, I guess, trailing her wing on the ground.” That was the best he could do: his mind wouldn’t leave the feel of Claire’s toes—sly, playful, maddening. “I just look around, pick up a little here and there. Toadstools are out.” He’d seen mushrooms red as lipstick, others with caps the color of lemons he’d heard you could get high on, psychedelic stuff. You know those, Uncle Starr? And the ones that poke out of the moss like little white dicks?

  “Stay away from those,” Claire said. “Poison.”

  “Some you can eat,” Starr said. “You’ll see pale yellow ones later, like scrambled eggs. Chanterelles. Tasty. Don’t die up there, Innis, I don’t want to have to come get you.”

  “You’ll never have to come get me, Starr. I’ll make sure of that.”

  “I could show you a few things. You’re not the only one whose killed time up there, you know. I might surprise you in those woods some day.”

  “If you can find me.”

  “I can find anything. You probably look for those magic mushrooms, eh? The kind that spin your head around?”

  “Not me, Uncle Starr. I don’t know a thing about it.”

  “Don’t call me Uncle Starr. It’s too hot to be anyone’s uncle, yours in particular.” He stared at Claire, took a slow sip of his beer. “All right, Claire, we’ll go for a swim tomorrow. If it doesn’t rain.”

  “Hardly the same thing as a midnight dip. It’s really different under a moon.”

  “There isn’t any moon either.”

  “Does that include me?” Innis said.

  “Does what, the moon?”
>
  “Swimming. Tomorrow.”

  Starr looked at him, nodded slowly. “Everything includes you,” he said. “One way or another.”

  BY MIDDAY THE sky had cleared and Innis let Starr lead the way to the shore, trailing behind, watching Claire, her bare slender legs as she walked ahead of him, a baggy white T-shirt over her swimsuit. What was she up to, touching his foot? He’d thought about her all night, flinging the sheet off him, wishing the lynx would show up and scare her to death, frighten them all in their beds. Starr pointed out a red squirrel on a stump chomping a brown mushroom big as a saucer. “That’s an eating mushroom he’s got all right, but don’t trust an animal. They eat stuff we can’t. Like those red berries there. Birds love them but they’re poison.”

  Claire dropped her striped beach towel and stooped to pick it up, showing the bottom of her swimsuit. Oh, mercy. Innis nearly turned back, he didn’t need this. He was supposed to fix that leaking roof for Father Lesperance, why torture himself looking at this woman he couldn’t touch?

  “Ah, look here!” Starr stepped off the path a few feet and returned with a thin-stalked, pale yellow flower. “Bluebead lily. Later in the summer this’ll have dark blue berries on it, pretty, like beads. Pretty enough to put around your neck, Claire. But they’re not for eating.”