Practical Sins for Cold Climates

by Shelley Costa

  She realized after a while that they had left the shoreline, blown by a gentle crosswind, and finally there was nothing familiar at her side. Nothing at all. The canoe rocked sideways. She looked around at the crushing darkness and pulled her paddle in, acutely aware of her own body. It was all she had left—a sense of where she began and ended. Breathless and scared, she jerked around.

  “I’m here,” Decker said. His voice was disembodied, but close.

  In the dark, the world was suddenly a small and intimate place and they were discovering it by canoe, finally finding a good-sized island with a campsite. She held the flashlight while he unloaded the canoe. They didn’t speak. Decker pulled the canoe up out of the water while she unpacked two sleeping bags compacted to the size of small watermelons, and because they were too tired to set up the tent, she agreed to sleep out. She realized with a kind of distant interest that she didn’t care what happened.

  They found a tent site with pine needles an inch thick, and while Decker disappeared into the bushes to pee, she laid out the bags about three feet apart. Let the forest do its worst, at least she was off the water. The wind was soft and high in the treetops. She heard him coming back, his footfalls ranging over leaves and twigs. Then in a moment of new anxiety she pulled the bags closer together by a foot, close enough for grabbing if the night terrors got the better of her, crawled inside one and hunkered down.

  He grunted as he squatted beside her, ran the zipper partway down the bag, and lay down inside. She didn’t hear him zip back up, but didn’t ask. They wished each other a polite good night like strangers leaving the theater, hailing separate cabs.

  14

  In the morning, what she wanted was a nice half-melon dotted with blueberries, French toast sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a mug of Starbucks coffee, any flavor. What she got was a can of succotash. Not even a whole can, since she had to share it with Decker. She eyed the rucksack. At least he hadn’t pulled out the SpaghettiOs.

  And he had given her a spoon of her own. A plain metal camping utensil that stood between her and starvation. When she was done, she rinsed the spoon in the lake, dried it on her torn pants, and stuck it in her pocket. She might have to trust Decker with her life, but she damn well wasn’t about to hand over her spoon.

  Down at the water’s edge, Decker dropped to one knee, scooped up water in his cupped hands, and drank. Then he moved out of the way so she could do the same. Visibility was better, but not by much. The water was cold, gently back blown into half curls. The early morning air was cool. Decker stood next to her, tucking in his shirttails while she drank. It had no taste at all, which made her realize how pure it was.

  Decker raked his hair back with both hands. “They say once you drink the waters of Lake Wendaban, you’ll always return.”

  Not likely. Even if she decided Charles Cable was no killer and he became their next front-list wonder, before she’d come back here she’d buy him a fax machine herself and pay Decker to install it. Her contact with nature consisted of a daily glance at the geraniums in a window box on the brownstone in the middle of her block, and that was plenty.

  Return? She didn’t think so.

  They followed the left shore to an angular bay where the pine forest retreated behind a rocky outcrop. Snaking through the shallows, they wedged the canoe between boulders rising out of the water by the shore, unloaded the gear, and carried the canoe up out of the water. Val climbed over the boulders for a better look at the portage: boulders so big you could damn near stage the next final Rolling Stones tour on them.

  Decker passed her with the canoe overturned on his shoulders, finding footholds in crevices. His shirt dangled behind him, where he’d tied it to a thwart, but he was still wearing a lightweight capilene tee. “So it’s a thousand meters, Val,” he said as he went by, “which is about half a mile to you.” His foot started to slip, but he caught himself, readjusting the canoe with a grunt. “And we’ll each have to double back for another pack, eh?”

  She nearly dislocated her shoulder getting into the straps of the dry bag and settling it on her back, but it seemed to be the heaviest bag and if Decker could carry the canoe she could jolly well handle the worst bag. She had her pride. So she started out, realizing quickly that when she leaned to the left, the bag leaned farther. The damn thing threw her off balance.

  At least the morning was gray and cool.

  To the far right the rock sloped off in the forest, banked by a couple of thirty-foot white pines, where a mound of tangled roots and pine debris offered a softer way over the rock. Steep, she thought, but a nice change from rock hopping. She was practically to the top when she discovered there was nothing in sight to hang onto and both feet started to slide out from under her.

  The weight of the dry bag pressed her face into the dirt as she slid all the way back down, her chest slamming against roots spaced like ladder rungs. She jerked herself onto her back, wheezing noisily for air, thinking she must be the first woman in the history of the world to get beaten up by her own breasts.

  She swatted pine dirt off her lips and dragged her hands over her face, her heart still pounding. It all came, of course, from not being willing to wait out the fog a day ago. No, it all came from being willing to do Peter Hathaway’s damned errand in the first place.

  By the time she got to the other side of the portage, she was winded and shaky, but rather than admit it, she headed back for her second load on legs that looked like a pair she saw on late-night TV in a flick about the undead. Once the gear had all been moved to the end of the portage, she sat on a rock with her hands hanging limply over her knees, and watched Decker load the canoe. When he told her she should get in, all she could muster was the kind of stiff dignity that any cop with a Breathalyzer could see through in a minute.

  They were crossing a small lake, he said, that had no name. What kind of country, she wondered, looking narrowly around, has so damn many lakes it doesn’t even have to name all of them?

  They paddled for nearly an hour at a pace designed to incorporate some rest. When they were close enough to the far shore—and the next portage—to see what was ahead of them, she heard Decker go “hm” in a way that suggested he’d met his first challenge. She squinted. The water was getting very shallow and the far shore seemed brown and reedy. She could see bottom. A few more strokes and the canoe was effectively beached.

  Only they were still a hundred yards from the shore.

  “Damn,” said Decker. “Moose muck.” She heard him sigh, and before she knew what was happening, he eased himself over the side of the canoe and sank up to his thighs in mud.

  With his arms high, he pushed his way past her to the bow, where he grabbed the rope and started to pull, heading slowly for the shore. She felt like a prima donna. Or Hepburn on The African Queen.

  “I’m getting out,” she said, laying aside her paddle, rolling up her sleeves, and giving Decker plenty of time to say something gallant like he wouldn’t hear of it. Only he didn’t.

  “Thanks,” he said, steadying the right side of the bow while Val climbed out the left, the sensation of cold thick mud hitting her all the way up to her crotch. She moved to the stern, where she gripped and pushed the canoe as Decker pulled from the bow.

  Every step was an extraordinary effort, heaving each leg out of a paralysis of mud. It found its way between her toes, it filled the space under her arches, it plastered her pants to her legs. There was something about the suction that was horrifying. She kept herself from getting sick to her stomach by clenching her toes to keep her tennis shoes from being pulled off her feet.

  Finally, after her leg muscles felt like they were hanging in tatters, the rivulet they were following deepened near the shore and they were able to float the canoe well enough to ride the remaining ten yards. Val, letting out a cry that seemed to carry an accumulation of agony from the last twenty year
s, heaved herself into the canoe, nearly tipping it. She sprawled over the seat and the packs.

  “Oh, God,” she said half a dozen times. The canoe stopped moving.

  Decker stood next to her. “Are you all right?”

  She looked at him and shook her head, speechless, flinging her arm toward the mud in what she hoped was conveying something. He smiled at her, his eyes narrow, and then said something about how the wind would dry out their pants pretty quickly, but she really didn’t care.

  The canoe stopped and before long she felt Decker tugging the rucksack out from under her, heard him sloshing nearby, and then nothing. After a while she rolled to her side and saw that he’d tied up the canoe to a couple of aspen saplings growing out of a beaver dam, where he sat firing up the camp stove. Lunchtime. Lunch. A hot lunch. Never had the prospect of food filled her with such mindless joy. He looked so wonderful half-covered with mud, sitting on the sturdy beaver dam making food for her, that she wished she liked him better than she did.

  Decker looked up. “How’s SpaghettiOs?”

  Val sat in her underwear at the end of the moose muck portage washing her pants, bunching up the parts where the mud had caked the worst and scrubbing them against each other. By the end of the portage—which featured three-quarters of a mile of more mud and a plague of mosquitoes—her pants felt like they’d been dipped in plaster of Paris.

  Decker’s solution for himself was to drop his last pack on the ground and dive clothed into the water. She watched the mud swirl up brown from his clothes and disappear into the lake. When her turn came, she made Decker paddle out far enough into the lake that she’d have some privacy—he muttered something about a Victorian novel, but he went—then she stripped down to her underwear, burped up SpaghettiOs, and set about washing her clothes.

  At a sudden sound from behind, she whirled around, and a strapping, blue-eyed young lad singing “Alouette” swung a camp canoe off his head and into the water. He flashed her a dimpled grin and said there were ten fourteen-year-old boys right behind him.

  It was a headwind.

  Her teeth must have stopped chattering about an hour ago, although the noise inside her head was the only sure sign she was still alive since every part of her below the waist had dropped off long ago, and any last reserves of pride had been extinguished at the last portage in a clutch of pubescent boys.

  Clouds like lead had overtaken the sky. Behind them at the horizon there were slashes of bright blue, so maybe people elsewhere on the lake were going about their business in the sunshine. Nowhere looked as bad as it did directly overhead, but the headwind was so strong she couldn’t believe it wouldn’t propel the storm clouds clear into another region. She watched three columns of thunderheads gather and churn.

  Decker was rustling around in the rucksack. “Here, Val,” he said, handing her a red plastic rain poncho. Around them the lake was a dull, silver gray that seemed deeper than ever. He pulled a purple poncho over his head and quickly smoothed the plastic over his legs. He looked like a Druid.

  She slipped on the poncho as they paddled along the shore to a campsite. With a quick look at the sky, Decker moved fast, unloading the canoe, then pulling it up out of the water with her help, and turning it over.

  She felt lobotomized.

  Behind her by about forty feet Decker was shaking the two-man tent and the poles out of the bag. She watched him for a while with a kind of utter detachment, as if what the man was doing had absolutely nothing to do with her, then lost interest and looked away. Finally, she heard a long zip. “Are you coming in?” he asked just as she felt the first raindrop.

  She shook her head slowly, not even knowing what she meant. Only she thought it had something to do with how small and futile and ridiculous she had been feeling all day. What was left of her was just the exquisite solitude of every forgotten thing from the beginning of time. The mote that fell from Adam’s perfect hip. The flake of cerulean blue from under Michelangelo’s nail. She heard Decker toss a bag into the tent and then zip himself inside as he whistled “Waltzing Mathilda.”

  Thunder came toward her in a slow tumble but she didn’t move, not even when the rain was falling straight and hard. She pulled her knees up under the poncho and watched the rain soak the sleeves of her shirt as the temperature dropped. Ten feet away was the overturned canoe, the rain drumming its hull. Maybe she could tuck herself under it, along with the packs and paddles.

  “You could crawl under the canoe,” Decker called. “You’ll stay dry,” she cursed him because now she couldn’t do it or it would look like his idea, “but you won’t be warm.” Val twisted around and could see his shadow in the lantern light of the tent. “Now, I happen to have a change of clothes, a dry sleeping bag, and a Cliff Bar I’ll give you whenever you decide to stop acting like an idiot.”

  Her bangs were so wet they were mixed up with her eyelashes, but it wasn’t until she realized her pants were soaked through to her underwear that she knew she hated Canada, hated Decker and damn near herself for being there. She rushed the tent, unzipped the flap like she was slashing it with a knife, and fell inside at his feet, grunting, inching every last wet bit of her out of the rain. Then she lay there dripping and panting and not giving a damn.

  Decker leaned over her and calmly zipped the flap. Her hands were shaking while she tried to sit up and pull off the plastic poncho. Only the tent was so low even a schnauzer couldn’t stand up in it. “Need some help?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He ignored her. “Put out your arms,” he said. “Go on.”

  She figured it was better to get it over with. She crunched, stuck out her arms, and Decker grabbed the plastic in four different places and worked the poncho over her head. “Hands across the border, and all that.”

  “Just try,” was what she said instead of thank you.

  “The rest is up to you.” He balled up the wet poncho and stuffed it in a corner of the tent.

  Val leaned out of his way, shivering, as he lay back on his side, propped up on an elbow. “Where’s the change of clothes?” She looked around. Lifting himself up slightly, Decker pulled out what he’d been using as a pillow at the head of the sleeping bag. It was his capilene tee and boxers, folded into a neat square. He handed it to her. “This is it?” she said, looking him over, taking in the unbuttoned plaid shirt and the jeans that were slung so low around his hips she should have seen some jockeys if there’d been any. “This is your underwear.”

  Decker looked up from laying out a hand of solitaire. “I said a change of clothes,” he said with a quick smile. “I never said they were clean.”

  Val glared at him. “Turn around.”

  He muttered something.

  She shoved him. “Turn around.”

  “Suit yourself.” In one easy motion Decker turned his back to her, tossing a small towel over his shoulder. “You’ll need this.”

  Val undressed, her teeth chattering, and sank her face gratefully into his towel, needing it more for comfort than anything else. She slithered into the legs of Decker’s boxers, then the shirt, smoothing the front down over her chest with stiff fingers. They felt warm and used and comfortably baggy. She was just about to take the towel to her hair when she stopped and looked around. He had opened up one summer-weight down bag and spread it out on the tent floor, laying over it a second bag like a coverlet. The Coleman lantern was set down near Decker’s head. The light it cast on the back of his neck was puny and greenish and wonderful.

  His shoulder, her arm, the glint of his hair the color of old coins, in the reduced light from the lantern, these were the known world. Down at the dark end of the tent she could barely make out his feet. But it was the sound all around her that was beautiful, the rainwater hitting the nylon like the rustle of a blue taffeta party dress she had worn when she was thirteen. Val heard herself sob and hoped Decker took it for something outside the ten
t.

  He didn’t. “What’s the matter?”

  So she sobbed again, and without answering, crawled under the top down bag. When she felt him turn back over to face her, Val flung her forearm over her eyes, hoping to hell he’d let it go. “I don’t know why we don’t just annex this goddamn country and be done with it,” she blurted, then had to listen to Decker laugh, like she hadn’t meant it.

  She felt him moving around, and she shifted her arm enough to see him set out all her clothing at the bottom of the tent, like they had a chance of being dry by morning. If there was one thing she liked in a man, it was hopeless gestures. Then he settled back next to her and Val lay very still. She could feel him looking her over, his breath on her jaw. “You should dry your hair.”

  Then she heard herself say an extraordinary thing. “You.” She wondered if he could hear her since she could hardly hear herself. “You, Decker,” she said, groggy, turning her face away from him. “Please.” And as she listened to the rain with her eyes closed, she felt him take handfuls of her wet hair in his hands and rub them dry in the towel in time to words she heard over and over, words about a jolly swagman camped by a billabong. And Val could tell before she gave herself over to the sound of the rain that Wade Decker was singing her to sleep.

  15

  Breakfast was B&B Baked Beans, “avec jambon,” the label said, and camp coffee that went down as smooth as sand. While she sat moodily on a rough log with a sleeping bag over her shoulders, Val chewed her coffee and listened to Decker prime the stove for the second time, which flamed with a whoosh when he set a match to the ring.