Inukshuk

by Gregory Spatz

  “OK, OK. It’s easy enough for me to misread things, too, you know. If you can believe.”

  Silence. Breathing on the other end of the line. “How bad, then? . . . What’s he got?”

  “Like I said, he was passed out on the floor and pretty well delirious. We figured drugs.”

  “Shit. Let me see. I e-mailed him that check list. Hang on a second.”

  “Some weird-looking sore on his neck, too. Like a bite or something.”

  “That’s for sure indicated. Here, hang on. . . .” There was a sound of notebook pages turning. “Severe exhaustion and general disorientation, despondence—yes. Corkscrew hairs . . .”

  “Corkscrew what?”

  “Don’t ask. OK, here it is. . . .”

  As Devon read aloud, Franklin’s attention faded in and out. It was too much to absorb. He watched his hands on the sink edge, furred wrists, hairless curve of knuckles, indentation on the left ring finger almost gone. Saw the ghosted reflection of his face in the sink window looking up, outline smudged and blurry. Why? he thought. How could little T elect to do this to himself? “‘Humans, other primates, bats, guinea pigs, and some fish are among the only animals known to lack the enzymes for synthesizing their own vitamin C–converting glucose to ascorbic acid.... Therefore, they can only obtain vitamin C through their diet.’” Again his attention faded and he was remembering Thomas, facedown on the floor. His terror, watching the boy’s breaths come and go shallowly, thinking at first that the blue around his lips and mouth might be from poor circulation—something he’d read recently, some bulletin about a rash of teen deaths resulting from prescription painkillers and methadone and this being one of the last, fatal signs—before noticing the pen uncapped on the floor. The blue on the page beside and half underneath him. He’d rolled him to be sure, tapping lightly on the cheeks. Noted the dried blood caked around his nostrils and on his upper lip. What was it Thomas had said the day before yesterday—that was something else, Dad . . . not related . . . having nosebleeds lately . . . ?

  Devon continued: “‘Functionally most relevant for collagen synthesis . . . pathologic manifestations of C deficiency noted in collagen-containing tissues . . . skin, cartilage, dentine . . . so, bleeding gums, blackened overgrown gums. Hemorrhagic sores. Body aches.’” Enough. He turned from his window reflection, crossing arms over his chest. Pictured Moira, on her way down the front steps. Her curt backward wave as she slipped behind the wheel of her Escalade, then rubbing hands together as her engine warmed, blowing him kisses. You should count yourself lucky.

  “There’s more,” Devon concluded. “But that’s the basic idea. Man, I got this information specifically for the little ratface, to scare sense into him. You should see some of these pictures, Dad.”

  “Actually, I don’t think I have to.”

  “Right . . .”

  “Listen, though.” What was he going to say? Words of wisdom and consolation? Who was he fooling. Here he’d failed or been duped and aced out entirely by almost every person he knew or loved. He jingled change in his pocket. “I owe you an apology. . . .”

  “You most definitely do not. I should’ve said something. I figured if he was still going on about it to where it sounded at all serious, I’d get Mom’s opinion—you know, ask her involvement when I visited next month. She’s usually the one who can get Thomas’s number best. I figured I’d start there.”

  “You figured right, I’d say. But it was never your job, raising Thomas.”

  Devon said nothing immediately, but Franklin knew him well enough to picture the slow head shake and the look of concentration creasing and uncreasing his eyebrows as his thoughts shifted from speculative to combative to faintly amused. “True, true, Dad. But you can’t exactly do it alone. Speaking of which . . . you mentioned a, uh, friend there. I think that was the word you used. At some ungodly early hour of the morning?”

  “I did.”

  “Any more to share on the subject?”

  “No.”

  “Permission to ask a question?”

  “One.”

  “Do we expect to see more of her?”

  “That’s two questions. But the answer is no, probably not. And yes, it is a she.”

  “Not ambiguous at all, Dad.”

  “Well, the situation isn’t ambiguous or complicated, actually. She’s married, as am I, more or less.”

  “A one-night stand?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, either. Rather the opposite.”

  “OK. I admit. I’m stumped.”

  From here, the conversation wound back to Thomas, and Devon’s recommended course of action for the present—massive amounts of citrus, C supplements, gooseberry, pomegranate, fresh meat and vegetables; close, constant monitoring; if things looked worse in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, get to the hospital. Within a week or two, he should be back to normal. “But keep him away from the notebooks, Dad. The whole thing started because he wanted to make his art more real or something—experience it for himself firsthand ? I don’t know. If it were up to me, I’d burn the things. Little bro’ll probably start eating lead filings next.”

  “Burn what?”

  “The story notebook things, whatever he calls them.”

  “Never.”

  “Your call.”

  “Anyway, I should check in with him and quit stealing your precious beauty rest. . . .”

  He laughed. “Remember how you used to always call me that—Sleep Stealer? It’s payback, at last.”

  “What?”

  “You said if I were ever to have a Native Indian name, that’d be it—Sleep Stealer—because of how I used to get you guys up all hours of the night, sneaking around.”

  “When did I ever say that?”

  “Only like all the time, Dad.”

  “Once, maybe.”

  “All the time.”

  WHEN THOMAS WOKE NEXT, the seal-hat woman and his father were gone and he was in his bed, alone, sure of the events that seemed to have come before only because of the scraped rawness at the back of his throat and a faint medicinal taste in his mouth still. Hours must have passed. Midmorning maybe, judging from the light outside his window. The house was silent. Jill, he thought. He had to see her soon. Tell her it was done, the experiment, and something else he’d dreamed or decided. What? He didn’t remember. Outside, a raven hopped under the cottonwood tree in their side yard, whacking its bill at the snowy ground. So he had not gone to school today. Ah, bliss. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, his father was beside him, asleep as well in the papasan chair he must have dragged up from the living room. “Hey,” Thomas said, and waited for his father’s eyes to open. “Hey, Dad.” No response. There was a bowl of soup or chowder on his nightstand, not steaming anymore but smelling strongly enough of tomatoes and curry that he decided it must have been the thing that had awakened him. He rolled upright and moved to the edge of the bed and was about to lift and drink from the bowl, when his father woke up. Blinked at him.

  “Chief,” he said. He rubbed his eyes. “You’re up, then.”

  Thomas grinned.

  “Thought we’d lost you,” his father said. The way he said it, Thomas knew they’d never truly been that worried. You didn’t say to someone who’d actually gone to the brink and back that you were afraid they’d been lost. You asked them things like Who’s the prime minister? and How many fingers am I holding up?

  “Nah. I thought about it. But where would I have gone?”

  His father’s eyes flared and shot wide, and for a second Thomas thought, Oh no, more yelling, until he understood. “But why, though? Why in the world wouldn’t you at least have said something . . . warned me? I mean”—his voice broke, and his eyes moved up and past Thomas to something on the ceiling behind him—“scurvy . . .”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “Wasn’t it, though? I’m just.... I mean, look at you.”

  “It’s OK, Dad. Really.”

 
From the story myths his mother told, he knew that to resist a radical, evil transformation, you were supposed to grab hold of the person responsible for saving you and hang on—wait for the fairies or demons or wicked elves stalking and surrounding you with their suck-you-under-the-ground evil mojo to finish the paranormal processional and go away again; fold yourself in a black-skinned robe sometimes, or a sack, not to be tempted, and just blindly hang on. Don’t look. Let yourself be turned from one thing to another and another—horse, raven, eel, wildcat, seal—until finally the transfigurations were done and you stepped out of darkness: yourself again. He could do that now—collapse at his father’s side and hang on. Ask him to please hide them a little longer and stop things from changing. Press his face to those familiar bones and hear the thump and squish of his circulation; try to force back some version of the world they’d had to abandon when she’d abandoned them and gone north. But those were all stories and myths. Not real. No more real anymore than Franklin or Crozier, Work, Hoar, or any of the 128 vanished crewmen of the Erebus and Terror.

  THE WIND WAS BACK. Icy this time, and Franklin stood at his classroom window, hearing it whistle through the eaves and against the window glass, watching the exhaust from the boiler room vent across the quad catch and whip jaggedly before dissipating. The heat blown up at him from the radiator in front of the window was a nice illusion, he thought—nice tenuous protective buffer like the glass he looked through, tenuous necessary protective buffer, but the truth was that wind out there. Twenty, thirty minutes you might be able to stand it without full protection before muscles would begin to rigidify and blood stop circulating. Step outside for a cigarette and a walk, you might die. This was the real truth of life on the prairies, and everything else was illusion, theater.

  He turned and went back to his desk. Pulled up his chair and opened the bottom left-hand drawer for his lunch—apple, cheese sandwich, Snickers bar. The usual. For a moment, as he had at the start of every meal or snack since the day of the big discovery, he had to think of Thomas and to register the very discouraging combination of dread, regret, frustration, and distrust now haloing all food-centered activity for them. Because Franklin had failed so miserably, nearly let his own kid rot his body to pieces, and because, despite this, he still had to more or less entrust the boy to take care of himself. He wouldn’t and couldn’t stand by every second of the day making sure he didn’t find some new, crazy-brilliant way to destroy himself, and making sure he kept up on all his supplements. Wrong and infantilizing. But wrong, too, to ignore what had happened or to ignore his own complicity in how it had evolved.

  At first, he thought the man in the doorway must be some kind of apparition—some leftover phantom projection from his morning’s work on the poem. He was the seal-man exactly, or his hunter, or both: Slavic-handsome, baby-faced despite graying hair, eyes as earnest as an old-time balladeer’s. The mustache was wrong—too blond and ostentatiously swooping or cowboyish, meant to offset the rest of the appearance, Franklin supposed. Somebody’s parent here to talk about issues, but whose and why? The next round of parent-teacher conferences wasn’t for another month or more. All he could think of right off, and with some alarm, was the two Doukhobor Freedomite kids from his senior seminar. So maybe this guy was here to strip and make some kind of silent protest about Franklin’s immoral reading list. Liberate Franklin from his worldly goods? Set the file cabinets on fire? No, he’d heard the stories and knew you never got this much warning with Doukhobors: By the time you saw one naked, gasoline in hand, it was already too late. And then he understood. Of course. Davis Malloy. Jeremy Malloy’s biological father. The eyes were hypnotically lush and dark. Jeremy’s exactly. He was here to settle the score.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Depends,” the man said. “You John Franklin?”

  Consciously or not, wild animal or not, he was ignoring all of Moira’s advice on how to deal with him. He looked directly into Malloy’s eyes and stood from behind his desk. “Yes, and you must be Davis Malloy,” he said.

  The man nodded. Did not ask how Franklin happened to know his name. They’ve decided you’re an abomination and a menace to the school, she’d said. His father’s way of handling things would be more personal, primal....

  “I am acquainted with your wife. Ex-wife. She’d said you might show up, pay me a visit.”

  “Moira Francis,” the man said. Franklin couldn’t read any emotion from the way he said it.

  “First off, let me apologize for what happened with your son the other day. It was all”—he considered the best words for it—“so sudden and out of hand, I guess. Out of control. I take full responsibility for my actions there. And Jeremy”—he shook his head—“I know Jeremy was quite upset, but I also thought, by the end of it, he seemed pretty agreeable to the disciplinary consequences, and ready to accept his own role in what had gone down. So.”

  Malloy shrugged, holding up swollen, twisted fingers, the bones of which did not seem to fit within the skin. Arthritis? “Well, see, that’s the thing. No one ever consulted me about any of it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “No one asked.” Some sort of internal tremor was causing Malloy’s hair to quiver and Franklin realized that whatever words came next would be the ones he’d stewed on, lost sleep over, rehearsed the last several days. He’d need to be careful how he replied if he wished to avoid a fistfight. “Because as an educator, you, of all people, should know when to leave well enough alone. Boys can settle their own differences and learn from it if we leave them alone. . . .”

  “Even if four or five of them at once decide it’s fun and games to gang up on one smaller one, beat up on him, give him a nosebleed—you say just go ahead and let that play itself out?”

  Malloy smirked and shook his head. Glanced down a moment. “Nah, I’m not saying. Kids have fun, hey? Part of the natural socializing. Some of it’s not so nice. Some are in the pack; some aren’t. Not saying it’s right or fair, just . . . you should know when to leave well enough alone.”

  And here it was again, the irrational impulse he didn’t understand and couldn’t control. To hell with avoiding a fight. He came around from behind his desk and went across the room to be within inches of Malloy, close enough to smell the wood smoke in his hair and the cold outside air caught in his jacket.

  “If you had an issue with how your son was disciplined, you needed to have shown up for the conference with Vice Principal Legere last week. This isn’t some kind of vigilante matter you can take up on your own terms, and frankly, I’m not that interested in how you think I should or shouldn’t do my job. I’m going to count to ten, and if you’re not out of this room and well on your way down that hall by the end of it, I will call security and have you written up for hostile intrusion. You will not be allowed on this campus again. If you want to talk to me further about anything regarding your son, you can make an appointment with Legere and I’ll be glad to continue. Do you understand?”

  Still smirking, Malloy took a step back. “Sure thing, teach.”

  “Good,” Franklin said, and moved to be within inches of him again. “One.”

  “You can count—”

  “I can and will. Two.”

  Malloy turned and walked. Hunched his shoulders and seemed to gather his arms around himself. Kept walking. There wouldn’t be much left of whatever identity Moira had forged for herself those years ago as his lover and common-law wife, but maybe something—some earliest, liminal version of her young self—might remain. He tried to picture it. Couldn’t. Remembered her on the stairs, her peculiar insistence, and wondered which part of that, if anything, might have to do with Davis Malloy. Nothing, probably. He’d never know.

  “Three,” Franklin called after him. Silly, counting out a grown-up, and yet somehow right. Appropriate—anyway, it seemed to be working. “Four. Five . . .”

  Only after he’d turned and gone back to his desk and sat staring at the clock, hearing the wind in the
eaves and against the windows again, gusting, whining, did he wonder what in the world he’d done. That close. Davis Malloy could have come unhinged; Franklin would have responded likewise. He couldn’t stop picturing Malloy’s hands and wondering what it would have been like to fight him. Imagined knuckles breaking, fingers grabbing, pincerlike. Kept pushing the images back and seeing them again, wondering, too, what it might have to do with Jeremy—with who Jeremy was and how Jeremy had mistreated Thomas. Another mystery.

  This was not something to tell Jane about, ever probably, and yet he wanted to. It was his first instinct. Call her, hear her voice, tell her the whole thing—Jeremy, Moira, Thomas with his scurvy—make it all real, make it end. “No,” he said aloud. And again, “No. Can’t.” And saying it, though he wasn’t there yet, he felt ahead of him, for the first time solidly enough to believe it, the crucial psychic dividing line separating past and future, separating Jane forever from him, and knew he’d soon enough have to step over it. With that, he remembered a poem he’d begun for her years earlier and never finished, one he’d promised for their third or fourth anniversary, half-written and started back into any number of times since, about her chest of socks at the foot of their bed, woolen, cotton, synthetic hose, each a pair chosen by her and worn on specific days of her life. Mated and balled in wads, they comprised a private patchwork, multicolored log of her time on earth—her time with him anyway. Stepped through, walked on, loved or ignored, each given shape by her, marked, and eventually abandoned. He remembered the poem’s opening lines with their plays on the words soul, chest, feet, divine, and the final couplet he’d always aimed for but never reached, referencing his and Jane’s customary sign-off—Without—and remembering this, he knew suddenly just how to finish it, leaving the final couplet open and unrhymed. He jotted a few words to remind himself for later—tonight. And when he was done, maybe then he’d call. He wouldn’t share the poem, or talk to her about coming home—wouldn’t talk much at all, if he could help it. He’d get Thomas on the line and stick around long enough to be sure they were really speaking. The boy needed it. She probably needed it, as well. You have a mother still, he’d say, afterward. You always will. You understand that, right? It’s not the same as when you were younger, sure, but she’ll always be there, and always want what’s best for you. Things could be a lot worse. Because whatever was next for them, most important would be keeping Thomas in the center and equally connected with both of them. Staying as neutral as possible toward Jane so Thomas didn’t have to choose a side. Any residual feelings could go into words . . . more and better....