by Kirk Landers
When the after-dinner chores were done, Pender poured the wine, and they spread a poncho on the edge of the overlook and watched the light disappear in the western sky. There would be no light show in the sky tonight thanks to the overcast, but the loons began their mournful calls soon after dark, and they stayed to listen. Chaos wedged himself between them, providing warmth and humor to their repose.
“Gabe,” she said quietly, trying not to disturb the spell that hung over the lake.
“Mmm,” he replied.
“Can I say something? About you?”
“When did you ever need my permission to say something about me?” He laughed a little when he said it.
“I’ve seen a fair amount of sadness lately—my daughter coming home from a broken marriage, my sometimes lover trying to deal with his wife dying every day by inches, friends dealing with cancer. But I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone as sad as you are. Do you know that? I think you’re grieving.”
“Over my divorce?” Pender was skeptical.
“No. Everything. Your country, your marriage, your job. Everything you believe in has crumbled. You’re grieving.”
Pender considered this for a while. “Okay. So?”
Annette shrugged. “So recognize it. Deal with it. And try not to kill anyone before it passes.”
“Good idea,” said Pender.
They were silent for several minutes.
“I need to head back pretty soon,” she said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I need to go back tomorrow.”
Pender nodded.
“You’re welcome to come with me.”
He sighed.
“What?” asked Annette.
“I don’t think that would work.”
She was visibly shocked. “What? Why? I thought we had something here.”
“I feel disconnected when I’m with people. Like an alien.”
“With me?”
“Not here, but in town, yeah,” said Pender. “Around your daughter, your friends, people on the street. I mean, I know how to fit in. I know how to act so everyone is okay with me. But it’s not me. It’s me pretending to be someone other people like.”
She wanted to ask him something but she couldn’t think what.
“I’m just lost,” said Pender. “I have trouble sleeping because all my dreams are nightmares where I can’t touch what I see. Anything I want is just beyond reach. I just kind of float, and everything else is a distant planet.”
“Me too?” Annette asked.
Pender nodded his head yes.
“You were faking it all this time?”
“No. We connected. I can’t get enough of you. But it wouldn’t work back in civilization. I need space. I have to work through things. It’s better if I stay out here.”
Annette pursed her lips and looked away.
“Think about it,” he said. “It would be hard for your daughter, you coming out of the wilderness with some crazy old man in tow, trying to adjust to someone who has trouble talking.”
“You underestimate Christy.”
“Anyone would feel invaded. And I’m not in a place where I can deal with being anyone’s burden.”
Annette was quiet for a long while. “What are you going to do?”
“What I started out to do. Maybe go back to Kahshahpiwi Creek and enjoy it this time. Maybe go from there over to Kawnipi, then to McKenzie and do those crazy portages through Cache and Baptism to French Lake. That’s supposed to be the toughest trip in the park. I’ll never be in better shape for a trek like that.”
“So you end up at French Lake. My front door.”
“Worried?”
“I’d like you to come. Now or then.”
“You sure?”
“Of course. We’ve exchanged body fluids. Just call the office when you get in and I’ll come pick you up.”
“I’d like to, but only if I get my head on straight. No promises, okay?”
Annette shrugged mutely. The time for voicing her thoughts had passed. They sat in silence in the thick blackness of an overcast night. When the chill set in, they retired to the tent. Pender’s hand found hers as they walked. She thought it was the offering of a wounded man, an apology, a statement of caring. She accepted his hand and squeezed back. In the tent, she put her arms around him and held him close, their cheeks and torsos flush, offering him her warmth as if he were a wounded bird.
21
Gus and Bill came back to the island after they scored a couple of fat walleye, Bill relieved because they were out of food. This trip had gone way past crazy. It had started out as a challenge for Bill: find a solo canoeist with a half day’s head start in a labyrinthine wilderness and put the fear of God in him, let him know not to mess with people. It would have made a great war story. But it was personal with Gus, and after the guy damn near broke his leg, it got more personal than that.
Bill took the fish to the fire ring and started the meal preparations while Gus limped along the shoreline, stopping every few steps to scan the creek with his binoculars.
After their encounter with the crazy old man, they made their way back through the creek system to the big lake and camped at the mouth of the creek so Gus’s wounds could heal. He still limped a little when he walked and he had an ugly bruise on his shin, but he could have paddled home yesterday. They stayed, even with their food supplies gone, even though they were overdue at home, because Gus wanted payback. He figured the crazy old man who took a hatchet to his shin would be coming back this way, and he wanted to greet the man when he did.
When Bill called him to dinner, Gus put down the binoculars and trudged over to the campfire.
“I’m heading back tomorrow, no matter what,” Bill told him. “I’m going back. Period.”
Gus argued for one more day. Bill refused. Their families would be concerned. Gus’s obsession was just as crazy as the old tripper.
“Okay,” Gus finally conceded. “But we don’t take off ’til nine. Just in case.”
“Then what, Gus? What are you going to do?”
“We’ll catch him in open water and capsize him,” Gus said.
“You want to drown him? Are you crazy?”
“He knows what he’s doing. He can get to shore with his boat and a paddle. He’ll lose some gear, but he should. He deserves to suffer.”
“What if he drowns?”
“Well, fuck him.”
Bill shook his head. “I’m not in it for murder.”
“Okay, we’ll hang around to make sure he makes shore. With a boat and a paddle.”
They argued off and on until dark and turned in without resolving anything.
* * *
Dawn came soft and dim to Quetico, high clouds sifting the sunlight, the air deathly still, the water as flat as a mirror. It was quiet and eerie. And sad.
Annette stood on her promontory, letting the serenity of the lake and the forest soak into her senses, ignoring the chill of the morning dew. She felt forlorn and wistful. Sleep had come hard last night. Her dreams were filled with visions of Pender, from now and from long ago. The visions were a slide show of contrasts, the fierce young Pender arguing about a literary interpretation in their Modern American Authors class, the gentle young Pender embracing her in arms as warm as a womb, the predator Pender who crippled a canoe tripper with a hatchet, the broken man weeping over a lost country and a lost life.
She should have invited him to her home with more enthusiasm, she thought. He feels so unwanted already. Why would he accept such a tentative offer? Now he wasn’t going to come, even after his trip. She was sure of it. She could see him just moving on, catching a bus or train to somewhere, a boat or a plane to somewhere else. The reality of it brought tears to her eyes.
Pender glanced up from his fire-starting work and saw her dab at her eyes with a shirt sleeve. Smoke curled off the damp twigs as flames from the pine needles and dry tinder spread to larger pieces. He moved clear of the smoke, watched to
make sure the bigger pieces caught fire. He shifted to the table structure and blended pancake mix with water, put the last of his maple syrup on the fireplace to warm, and readied the coffee-making operation.
After he put the water on to boil, he joined Annette. Chaos leaped to his feet and shadowed him.
“You have a new best friend, I see,” said Annette, her voice a little hoarse at first, nodding at Chaos, who sat at Pender’s side, looking up at both of them, canine smile on his face.
“It’s my reward for feeding and bathing him.”
Annette looked back to the lake.
“You seem upset,” Pender said.
Annette’s chin trembled slightly. She dabbed away a tear and composed herself, determined not to play the brokenhearted woman role.
“I’m upset that we’re leaving today. And I’m upset that it doesn’t mean anything to you, but to me it feels like college all over again—us going our own ways, facing another forty years of emptiness. Except I don’t have forty years, and neither do you.”
She waited for him to respond, but he didn’t.
“Why are we doing this? We already know how this works out. You’re the one. I always knew it. I knew it when we were together and I knew it when you left and I knew it all the years I was married because I never stopped wondering what it would have been like with you. Even at the best times in my life, I was thinking about you. When my kids were born. When my business turned the corner. When the girls graduated. You were always there in my thoughts. Why couldn’t it be you sharing this moment with me?”
She stepped in front of him, made him look her in the eye. “And you feel the same way about me. You said so. You never stopped thinking of me. You remembered that horrible breakup line. Why are we doing this?”
“You said you had to get home,” said Pender.
“You know what I mean.” She fought back tears. “We’re splitting up again. You aren’t going to call me when you get to French Lake. You’re just going to leave. Catch a train to the coast, go to Europe or something—isn’t that what you said?”
“I said that before. We didn’t even know if we’d like each other back then. Yesterday I told you I’d call when I got out. I’m going to.” He said it with resolution, even though he had spent the night wondering if he should call her when he got to French Lake, if he should even go to French Lake. He could take out at Lerome Lake and walk into Atikokan, swap his canoe for a ride to Fort Frances or Thunder Bay, maybe head for Montreal or Prince Edward Island or maybe Stockholm and spend the winter there.
“Besides,” he said, “you didn’t sound all that sure about wanting me to stop in.”
“I wasn’t,” Annette admitted. “It’s hard. It’s taking a chance. Maybe Christy won’t like you, or maybe you won’t like her. Maybe it blows up in our faces. But if we don’t try, it fails for sure. We don’t get to do this again. Let’s get it right this time.”
“I absolutely promise I’ll call from French Lake. And I keep my word.”
“That’s not enough. We need to go home together or something will go wrong. You’ll break a leg on a portage or I’ll be out when you call or something. We need to paddle out of here together.”
Pender was quiet for a long time. “Jesus, I have such a bad feeling about that.”
“I have a worse one about you not coming now.”
He thought for a while. “Let’s compromise. I’ll paddle with you today. We’ll camp tonight and talk about it while we finish my wine. You’ll be able to make French Lake tomorrow, and I can get to Kawnipi if I don’t go with you. I need to think about it. I had some things I set out to do, things I may never get another chance at. I didn’t expect us to love each other like this, you know?”
Annette nodded. She put her arms around him and pulled herself to him with arms made of water. She laid her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, trying to conjure colors into her visions of gray.
They lingered around the dying fire, talking quietly, sipping coffee. She asked him about his most memorable trips in Quetico. He remembered his first one with the same clarity he remembered the first time he and she embraced. He talked about a trip during the blistering heat wave of the late nineties, the one that created a blackout across eastern Canada and the U.S., him bushwhacking into no-name lakes in hundred-degree heat. He talked about long trips and short ones, rain and sun, wind and stillness. But, he said, this would be the trip he’d most remember. What the heck, he said, it was forty years in the making. Then he asked her the same question, saying no fair using this trip as the winner.
Annette smiled. There had been so many, especially with the girls when they were young, and her first canoe trip, and her first solo. “But in terms of purely enjoying the park and coming away a different person for it,” she said, “I think it might be my first guiding job. Canadian Shield Outfitters hired me to take a group of women on an all-girls trip. We flew into Clay Lake and came out through the Falls Route. They were from the Twin Cities and didn’t have much experience. They practiced paddling before they came up here, thank goodness, but it was still an adventure coming through the rivers. Especially Greenwood. The water was high and a little fast, there were blowdowns to negotiate, and Greenwood is so twisty that even a skilled canoeist has trouble doing the turns without crashing into the banks.”
Pender nodded appreciatively. You never forgot Greenwood Creek, so serpentine that you could have compass headings of north, east, south and west every kilometer.
“Our group did a lot of banging into river banks, and when we got into the water to pull the canoes over downed trees, we were standing in cold, dark water up to our chests. None of them had never experienced anything remotely like that. They were asking if there were snakes in the water or biting fish. I’m thinking the whole time, what courage they have to be doing this. You know? Their normal lives were air-conditioned offices and shopping malls and going to dinner in nice restaurants, but here they were, up to their necks in bog water.
“We had such a great time on that trip. They thought I was the queen of the wilderness. They called me Daniela Boone. We all had nicknames by the time we got out of the rivers into Kawnipi. And they were dead tired. That’s a tough first day for anyone. We came into Kawnipi with the afternoon winds blowing up a surf, and even though we had paddled twenty hard miles already, we had to dig like crazy to get to a campsite. Those ladies did it without a whimper. We laughed and told jokes and traded stories as we set up camp and made our meal. The rest of the trip was easy. We had good weather, no crowds, and the falls were gorgeous because the water was high.”
She stopped and glanced at Pender to see if he was bored. He was staring at her, his eyes warm and happy.
“I learned so much from those ladies. About courage, about trying new things, about what women could do if they put their minds to it. I’ve thought about them and that trip many times over the years. I think it helped me become who I am.”
Pender nodded. “I’ll bet those ladies still remember you and learned something from you too.”
“If this trip is so great, why aren’t you more eager to come calling?” Annette asked.
“I told you why.”
“It feels like you just can’t get that interested in an old woman.”
He blinked. “I don’t think of you as an old woman. I don’t see an old woman when I look at you. You’re the first woman I’ve been interested in sexually in . . .” He paused. “It’s been a long time.”
“I find that hard to believe,” she said. “I saw the pictures. There were gorgeous women everywhere you went. There’s no way you’d prefer an older woman to one of them.”
“I can’t help you conceive something you can’t see,” he answered. “I’m sixty years old, for Christ’s sake. I have a thing for you and that’s it. You’re still the beautiful woman I was in love with all those years ago, but stronger and tougher and smarter.”
“God, Pender, you say all the right things. Except for, you kn
ow . . .” A small, ironic grin played at her lips. “So you’re going alone into the wilderness, like Jesus.”
He laughed. “I’m no rabbi.”
* * *
Bill took down the tent, stuffed the sleeping bags in their sacks, rolled the sleep pads until all the air was out, and secured them. He packed the packs and loaded the canoe, all the while eyeing the western sky nervously. It was too quiet. Even though there was no tell-tale sign in the sky, he could sense it. Weather was coming.
“How about it, Gus. Let’s get a move on before the storm hits.”
“What storm?” Gus yelled back. He was on the western point of the island, scanning the water for signs of the guy who had ruined their trip. He had been there since they rolled out of the tent.
Gus looked at his watch. “Fifteen minutes,” he yelled. “A deal’s a deal.”
Bill shook his head and muttered to himself. His boyhood friend and lifelong fishing buddy had completely obsessed on that nut. They were already three days overdue at home, and there was going to be hell to pay for that—from his wife and his boss.
Bill sat on a rock near the canoe to wait the eternity the next fifteen minutes would take. Followed by Gus wanting to stay just fifteen minutes more. Jesus, like taking your kid to an amusement park, except this was way past fun.
* * *
“It feels like a storm is coming,” Pender said as they paddled side by side back to the creek system that would take them out to the big lake.
“Maybe.” Annette looked to the west and southwest. The sky was hard to read. Overcast but not unusually so. The clouds were high and indistinct. The southern sky was the same. So was the eastern sky. The north was behind them, invisible until they turned, but it had been just as nondescript when they launched. Quetico was as still as a cemetery.
They portaged out of Annette’s lake and headed for the creek. Pender broke the silence. “Want to try for Blueberry Island today?”