“Screw it, Tom. Stupid bird nearly took my eye out.” She pulled her hood more tightly around her face.
“Not even close.”
The hawk wasn’t scared anymore. She puffed up her chest and kaked.
“I don’t want to do this, chief.”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do?”
“Fuck off.”
“All you need to do is stand there. Be present.”
“You’re going to have to think of something pretty special to make this up to me,” she muttered. She pulled the ties of her hood so tightly that only her eyes and nose were exposed.
“Make yourself big,” Tom said.
He moved closer to where the bird was perched on the boxes, watching him with one orange eye. When he was about three feet away, he stopped. Kept his hands at his sides. There was no point trying to catch the animal; he would wait until she charged him again. She was a beautiful bird, the eye flat and geometric and uncomplicated in its singular purpose. Her weatherproof wings were folded elegantly and efficiently at the side of her body. To be fully equipped for life in body alone, autonomous, to move through this world needing nothing—that was beautiful. He regarded her and she regarded him and when at last she swooped, Tom was ready. He gripped her around her chest and by the back of her head and neck. She was knotted with strength and pressed her body against the force of his hands. Tom’s left grip was full of hot, angry heartbeat; his right hand contained the skull, hard and knobbled like a walnut. Up close, her black, hooked beak appeared fiercely, flawlessly sharp. She nearly fought free a couple of times before Tom made it through the tent flap. He knelt on the ground and, before letting go, imprinted the sensation of this feather and flesh, this pulsing, fighting, wild thing, in his memory. He let her go. At first she hobbled in a stunned kind of way, taking slow, ginger steps. Tom stayed hunched to the ground. She cocked her head and wiggled, shuddered as if in disgust, and then took off in a wide, muscle-flexing arc over the mess tent and the surrounding treetops, her true wingspan now evident in a striped, fluted spread. Tom watched her until she cleared the tall pines and disappeared back to where she belonged, and in the quiet he could hear his own heart drumming behind his ears, trying to break out.
“Okeydokey, David Suzuki. I’m going back to bed,” Nix said. She had pulled back her hood and was rubbing her hair up off her forehead. She bit her lower lip and stared at him for a long time, and he knew, if he wanted to, he could go with her.
He thought about what that might be like, his mouth on that bit of skin between the bottom of her top and the waistline of her jeans. Her fingers on the back of his neck. “Thanks for your help,” he said, and watched her go.
He would deal with Matt’s truck first. It was at least a three-, four-hour job. Walking back to his trailer for his tools, though, he found that the urgency of the day’s work leaked away with every step. He looked again across the lake to the mountains. The light had moved and sharpened since he had woken up; the peaks shone starkly in the sun, closer. A few pieces of food and a bottle of water in his pack, a paddle across the lake. He could be back by four o’clock and still have enough daylight to do the truck. The shower pipe would have to wait. So would the trip to the outpost for toilet paper. They would have to ration their shit tickets. Served them right.
Matt’s cedarwood canoe rested upside down at the end of the beach, beaded with dew. Rivulets of water sweat across the glossy surface when Tom pulled it up on its side. He flipped the canoe over his head and walked it down to the water, breathing the sappy smell of varnished cedar. A minuscule red spider oscillated on a single silk thread hanging from the bow thwart, just at Tom’s eye level.
As he paddled away from the shore, the boat cleaved neatly through the water as if he were the first person ever to canoe here.
Nix was something else. She had given him a hard-on just by rubbing the hair from her face. But he wouldn’t do that to Carolina. Even out here, where distance and the scarcity of hot water and electricity separated this life from that. Because if he did, he would bring it back to Carolina and she would be left with it on her skin, like oil. Even if she never knew it. He dipped the blade into the water silently, and on the recovery of each stroke, drops landed on his legs, soaking coolly into his jeans. White-blue morning sky and black water that smelled like rain, and this small cedar canoe nodding, nodding. The paddle ran smoothly along the gunnel, and he turned his thoughts to the shuuk, shuuk of the paddle shaft drawing against the canoe with each stroke, and the pull of the blade through deep water, and the silky, rhythmic lapping of the canoe. In the middle of the lake he stopped paddling and watched the black water breathing. The breeze, stronger here, pushed him northward. To the left of his bow, a trout broke the lake’s surface with arched spine.
Tom reached the far shore and cruised the bow up onto a small, stony beach just big enough for the canoe. He pulled the canoe out of the water so that it was beached nearly to the stern, and dug his compass out of the top compartment of his pack to take a reading of where camp was across the lake in relation to where he now stood. When he made his descent, he would need to come down roughly at this spot; he didn’t want to go scrambling up and down the shore looking for the canoe. He tied the painter with a bowline knot to a slender alder and hung the compass around his neck. Carolina had given it to him; it was a good, solid compass. Waterproof, smashproof. He tightened the straps on his pack so that the bag fit snugly against his body. The trees grew densely down the mountain and ended here like a wall; he pushed through a web of bushy young pines and stiff alder branches and clambered in tentatively, unsure whether or not this mountain would let him in today. The ascent began almost immediately and was so steep in some places that Tom was pulling himself upward by root and rock. The pace he set was fast, and though it hurt, and though he was tired, his breathing and the movement of his limbs arranged themselves into a solid, working rhythm that propelled him forward. This was the place.
The slope flattened and he followed the undulation to a lichen-covered boulder, where he stopped to rest. He took off his fleece, rolled it into a ball, and stuffed it into his pack. Mosquitoes bounced off him languidly—so many more now because he wasn’t moving—and he puffed them away from his face, swished his hand above his head like the tail of a horse. Mosquitoes drove some people to tear at their own hair, run in circles swearing, taking it personally—but it was no use getting worked up about it. They were a fixture in all this and it was only blood they wanted, and it would always be this way. He watched one of them deftly work its probe under the skin of his forearm, its abdomen swelling a deep burgundy as it drank.
Fragments of thought lit up and then were gone, like fireflies: The Erin dream. Curtis telling him about this new girl. Beer bottles in the dirt. The last time he saw Carolina, disappointed, her face surrounded by sky. Nix stretching her arms above her head.
He ate half an apple and moved farther up the mountain. Sweat dampened his hair, salted his skin, and the effort of the climb bit chunks out of the things that were bothering him. The breeze off the lake blew softly through the pines, the fir, the gentle sound brushing, muffling everything. Far off, the hollow echo of the woodpecker’s knock; in Tom’s ear, his own breath and the constant hum of mosquito. There were signs of animals that kept well hidden: bear scat, fox prints, the chit chit chit of some tree-dwelling vermin. He concentrated on the terrain under his feet, anticipated the peak. He stopped and turned to see if there was a view of the lake, if he could gauge how far he had gone in—what was it, an hour? Two hours? The bush—mainly pine but dotted with mountain hemlock and spruce—was too dense to see anything other than the far-off glint of sunshine on water. He leaned against pitted stone and opened his water bottle, took a long swig, and screwed the cap back on. He snorted at mosquitoes, pincered a fat one, and rolled its sticky carcass into a ball, his own blood left on his fingers. The alpine couldn’t be too far off now. The tree
s were sparse there and he would be able to see right across the water to camp. But the going was rough. His boots often got caught in the scrub. Branches and irksome thornbushes hooked his bootlaces and his jeans. He hadn’t worked his body this hard in a long time and he welcomed the burning tug along the muscles of his arms and legs.
A vein of moisture—slimy rock and moss—cut across his path and he followed it until he came to water trickling over a deep stone groove. He followed the trickle until it widened to a brook running fast and white, the last of the spring runoff. He drank, splashing the ice-cold water over his neck and face. This mountain water was like blood in the body, nourishing the body, flushing it out. This was something he would mention to Carolina. She might really dig that. Or not: she might think he was trying too hard.
Soon enough the trees began to thin and the ground became clear of low-lying plants and shrubs. The pitch leveled off and eventually Tom was scrambling across a plateau of dry, thin dirt and lichen and rock. Patches of purple and pink, yellow and white alpine flowers grew in hardy little clumps between the seams of silvery-green rock. Whitebark pine and larch trees clung to life here too, tenacious on the rocky slopes, with tough, withered roots bent like fingers gripping a ledge. He looked out across the lake and could see his camp, the cream-white mess tent.
From here the peak was less than an hour’s climb. He drank some of the water from his bottle and stood facing the wind. His skin was soon dry and his wet t-shirt cold; he pulled his fleece back on and scrambled the rest of the way to the top.
The peak was a bald, rocky flat that sloped down to bowl toward the west side of the mountain. To the north the ridge dipped and flattened to form a carpeted valley with the next peak, and to the south it dropped dramatically into a series of steep draws. There were blackflies and noseeums, but other than that, there was only the wind. Because this was just the right kind of place to run into a grizzly—good roaming territory and few bloodsuckers—he whooped and whistled to announce his presence, avoid a surprise meeting. He sat down and relaxed his arms across his knees, threw back his head, and closed his eyes. He tried to think of nothing but the wind, and of the air filling his lungs, and of the blood keeping him warm. He ached a little, felt a little bit old. The skin on his knuckles and at the base of his fingernails had been scraped back by rocks. His fingernails were full of earth. He inspected the deep lines of his palms and the tanned, roughened, marked backs of his hands, and considered how he had come to this place. Powered here under his own engine, with his own fuel. The people he had allowed to enter him. And his children. His children? Like letting his heart and his lungs go walking off without him. Couldn’t quit them, even if he wanted to. And sometimes he wanted to. More than anything. He looked out across the lake to the camp and the old mountains rolling away like a song beyond it. It’s good to be here, he thought.
His knees objected with cautious, wobbly jolts on the descent. When clear spots opened up in the trees, giving sight to landmarks across the water, he took compass readings and kept himself generally on a course that would lead back to the canoe. The descent took an hour, and when the lake came into view at level ground, he was not at the little beach where he’d left the canoe. He edged through a tightly packed clump of alders, ferns, and huckleberry onto a thin band of dark mud at the water’s edge. Leaning out, he looked to the north and south but couldn’t see the boat. He shrugged his bag off his shoulders and hung it from a branch, and then stripped down entirely and walked out until the water reached his knees. His feet sank into mud; he thought briefly of leeches. He did a shallow dive into the dark, lapping water, and the cold took his breath away. A burn tingled across his collarbone, licked down his arms and legs. When he surfaced he called out a loud whoop that echoed in the forest. With his head up, he took several hard strokes into deeper water so he could get a wider view of the shore. He dove deeply and opened his eyes to a reddish murk, pulled hard breaststrokes, spun around, and surfaced again to face the shore. From here he could see that the little beach with the canoe was only a few hundred meters to the north. He coasted out deeper into the lake, taking mouthfuls of the mineral-rich water and spraying it out again. It tasted like pine, like iron, a little like blood. Relishing the silky freedom of being naked, he spun and did somersaults and shot down as deep as he could to where it was darker and colder and the pressure on his ears made them tick. He spun and spun and his stomach flopped so much that it brought a laugh from his belly to his lips.
That night, Roland and Matt and Sweet built a bonfire next to the lake and fed it until it raged, and all the planters gathered around and watched as the smoke billowed and blacked out the stars. Tom held a mug of black coffee and watched the flames from the steps of his trailer, and he watched Nix walk across the clearing toward him. Without a word, she sat next to him and passed him a plastic container full of berries she’d gathered from the side of the road. Soft, red-capped thimbleberries, blueberries, sweet strawberries no bigger than a thumbnail. Sweet threw strips of wax-coated cardboard from the seedling boxes into the fire, which would ignite with white flame, then send shreds of black drift into the air, landing like fallout. Tom thought about Nix’s leg next to his, the bounce of firelight in her face.
And later on, while he hunched toward the mirror in his trailer, working a strawberry seed out of his back teeth with his tongue, someone knocked lightly at his door. He knew it was her. He opened the door and looked past her to the fire that by this time had died down, the silhouettes of a dozen bodies around it still. A banjo sounded, and faraway laughter. Nix put her hand on his chest and pushed him back, ducked into the trailer, and slid onto the long seat. She brought with her the smell of the fire, and drummed her fingers on the table, the tips pink from picking berries.
He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Look at this,” she said, holding both wrists out to him, belly white and marked with burns. “Oven scars. It’s that tiny hovel you make me work in.”
“You should be more careful.”
She looked around the small space, picked up a short spirit level from the table, and turned it in her hands. “What do you need this for out here?” She held the small green window of liquid up to her eye.
“I don’t.”
“So why do you have it?”
“It was in my toolbox.”
She lined the spirit level against the wall. “Your trailer is uneven.”
“There something you needed?” he asked.
“What is it with you, chief? This whole wolf thing you do.”
He shook his head and laughed.
“You just…disappear, and then you show up, and then, poof, gone again. You’re always alone.”
“I’m hardly ever alone.”
“But you’d like to be.”
He shrugged, fiddled with the stub of a pencil in his pocket, a box of matches on the counter. He strung together some other words but his voice sounded as if it were coming out of someone else’s mouth.
She awkwardly pushed herself up from the table, struggling to swing her knees out, and came around to where he was and kissed him. She was a good shot. With one hand she cupped his jaw; the other was on the back of his head. Physically, she was different from Carolina in every way. Where Carolina was soft, Nix was hard. Where Carolina’s body swooped or gave, Nix’s angled, pushed. He stopped thinking about Carolina and moved to the weight of Nix’s small tits in his mouth, the strength in her arms, her legs, the mechanics of her ribs rolling under her skin, her clit like a thimbleberry. He thought about the heat coming off her, even after it was over and he was wondering how he was going to get her to leave.
14
The old, boxy diesel train, comprised of one small coach and two flatbeds loaded with seedling boxes, departed early in the morning from the Takla Landing outpost and chugged slowly up the lake’s eastern shore. The train meandered past the northern tip of the lake and along the wide valley floor of the Driftwood Riv
er, heading north until the tracks wound their way westward past mountains whose names Tom didn’t know, Tatlatui Provincial Park somewhere to the east, the bush so dense and untraveled that the open windows of the coach caught the odd tree branch, snapping the brittle ones off. The loudest sound was the rolling cachungcachung of the train’s weight going over the ties, like the heartbeat of some sleeping bull moose.
A few days had passed since the night in the trailer with Nix, and Tom, Matt, and Matt’s crew were cramped together in the coach; the planters were at the windows, staring into the heart of the bush and joking about losing their minds the deeper they went. Their destination was a logging camp in the seat of the mountains, where the only roads were the potholed dirt tracks that led from the small camp to the cutblocks, and the felled trees were lifted out by helicopter. They would be there for a week.
Dozing, Tom thought about Erin and the steam train. This was in the time after Elka left, when he still believed he might find her and bring her home; when, for the sake of his kids, he wanted so much to see her that he mistook strangers for his wife. Erin was two years old and the fair was in town. A kiddie train steamed and whistled round and round a track by the riverbank for fifty cents a go, and he and Erin sat in the caboose, his knees up to his chin. The wind was up, and as they were coming past the small wooden platform of the station for the second or third time, he watched a folding chair tumble past the hot dog stand, past the candy floss drum that spun rags of pink sugar into the wind. The chair came to rest at the feet of a woman who, for one glance, was Elka. Slim, with dark waist-length hair that blew across her face. She wore a red skirt that was blowing too, and as she bent over to right the chair, he turned in the small awkward seat and strained his neck to see her, but the little train continued its cycle and he was looking at the river. When they came around once more, the train stopped at the platform and Erin said, “Again.” Tom passed two more quarters to the conductor and settled into his knees and didn’t look for the woman in the red skirt because damned if he was going to be fooled by need.
The Mountain Can Wait Page 9