And here he was again, searching for someone who didn’t want to be found. A wind came up from the stillness and the tops of the pines swayed eighty feet in the blue, rearranging the stretched patches of sunlight where he stood. Deep in the murk he saw the shadow of a bear stand and turn and roll away, but there was no disturbance in the underbrush and he knew it was only a shadow. His need for it to be her.
The evening meal had been cleared up by the time he found his way back to camp. He begged a sandwich and a piece of lemon cake from one of the cooks, who peeled carrots over the sink and asked Tom for details of the chase. He took his food to the rec car and ate in front of the television, ruts of static running through the picture, one eye on his food and the other on the news. Something about a hit-and-run death in another part of the province and the expectation of a record-breaking winter, and he wondered why they even tried to predict a thing like that in June.
16
It took eight days for the crew to finish the contract up in Minaret. They boarded the diesel train early in the morning, and while there was never any chance of Old Mrs. returning, Tom watched the trees for her rolling black back and, like before, was shown the shadow of the bear, but never the bear itself. He said good-bye and hoped against common sense that her death had come quickly.
They got back to Takla Lake just as the evening campfires were being lit, and he found Roland and Sweet eating chocolate cake and swigging rum from the bottle in the back of Sweet’s truck. Licking their fingers, they told him that the new reefer had arrived, but the seedlings were still partially frozen and couldn’t be planted.
There were three separate fires that night, and Tom went to each one and told the planters that after five weeks in the bush, they would head to town tomorrow for a few days off, give the seedlings a chance to thaw. He warned them not to get too drunk and antagonize the locals, and reminded them that when they weren’t in the bush, it wasn’t okay to drop their pants and piss wherever they liked. Now everyone was in a good mood. Tom sat at a table at the back of the mess tent and wrote out paychecks for whatever amount they wanted out of what they’d earned so far.
“A thousand, please, chief.” This came from Luis, drinking from a can of Coke.
Tom put down his pen and looked at him. “A thousand? You sure?”
Luis gazed at him through his thick glasses.
“Most people just want a few hundred bucks to get drunk and do laundry.”
Luis shrugged. “Don’t sweat it, Mom.”
Later, Nix sat at the table in Tom’s trailer drinking a mug of coffee and whiskey. She asked him about Minaret and he told her about the bear. She asked him why he cared so much about a bear, and why he did stupid things like risk getting bitten for that hawk, and he said it was a hell of a thing to leave an animal to die. He didn’t tell her that the problem wasn’t the bear. The problem was that he was getting tired of fixing what wasn’t his to fix.
“I think you went to the other camp to get away from me,” she said. “To forget about what we did.”
“You could be right.”
“Did it work?”
“No.”
Her hands were warm on his skin, warm from the mug she’d been holding. Warm on his face and his chest. The first kiss tasted like coffee but after that it was only her. He needed to be in control, but like before, she seemed to be writing the terms of the thing and he was maneuvered up and down the bunk, her grip on his ankles, his wrists, his hips. She used her teeth, bit his lip and he tasted blood. He tried to pinch her in retaliation but couldn’t find enough fat to get a grip.
Afterward, he lay with his head on her belly, his arms draped loosely along her sides. With eyes half closed, he listened to the coffee and whiskey passing through her gut and was melted, buzzing, disturbed by his own lack of decency and willpower.
“When I was little,” she said, “like three or four or whatever, my dad used to take showers just after I went to bed. I loved that. I loved hearing the sound of the water falling into the tub. I guess I could pretend it was raining, you know, so I felt all cozy in my bed. And sometimes, even better, he’d play the piano. You say tomato, I say tomahto; you say potato, I say potahto. I think he only knew a couple songs. We had this massive house with two living rooms and his piano was tucked away in this dinky little side bit off the bathroom. Not much bigger than a walk-in closet.” She inhaled deeply. “My parents fought a lot.”
Tom nestled his cheek deeper into her stomach.
“Now you go,” she said, the words rumbling deeply through her body. She drew lines in his hair at the nape of his neck.
“Hm?”
“It’s your turn.”
“To do what?”
“Tell me a story.”
He turned his face to the other side, eyes wide-open now. The carpet under the cupboards was curling up from the floor.
“This is what people do, Tom. They fuck each other and then talk about personal shit.”
He moaned. “Really?”
“Tell me something from when you were a kid.”
“Like what?”
“You haven’t been a stick-in-the-mud all your life. You must have been fun once.”
He pushed himself off of her and fell to the side, leaned back on the bunk. He reached for his underwear from the floor and pulled it on. “I don’t know what you want me to tell you. Life was pretty normal for me as a kid. My mom is tough as hell, brought me up alone. Pretty much left me to it when I was growing up. What else. I always had a dog? Is that what you want to know?”
“What about your dad?”
“You want to know about Albert, eh?” He rubbed his hand flat across his chest. “Women always want to know about Albert. He was around a bit. Not enough to make it count, I guess.” He looked at her sideways and she was turned to him, propped up on one elbow, waiting for more. “I’ve got a lot to thank him for, though. He taught me to hunt, how to recognize my ass from my elbow. He wasn’t a bad guy. Just not the type to stay in one spot. I think he ended up in Saskatchewan or someplace.”
“When did you last see him?”
Tom scratched the hairs at his jaw, chewed his thumb. “I was about fifteen.” He rolled away from her, onto his side. Hoped she would want to sleep in her own tent.
After a few minutes of silence, she jabbed his back with her elbow. “By the way,” she said, “first time we did this you told me it was never going to happen again.”
He looked over his shoulder at her. “You complaining?”
“No. But does this mean I get more? I want more.”
“Now?”
“Fuck, ya.”
First thing Tom did when he got into town was go to the grocery store and buy the fixings for pizza. Ingredients for the dough, ham and a can of pineapple chunks, peppers. He bought ice cream and chocolate syrup that was meant to harden as soon as it hit the cold. He took all this home and put it away, and checked that everything was secure in the house after it had been empty for five weeks. It was as he’d left it, the only thing out of place being the lack of dog.
He mixed the flour and salt and yeast for the dough and left it covered with a damp cloth to rise. When it was ready, he knocked it back and wrapped it tightly in cellophane and put it in the fridge. The local newspaper showed the movie listings and he sat at the kitchen table with the entertainment page folded open, phoned Erin at Samantha’s, and went down the list with her. He didn’t know any of the titles or the actors starring in them so he let Erin choose.
The movie was mindless and he fell asleep partway through and stayed that way until she elbowed him awake at the closing credits.
“I’ve got some food at the house,” he said as they walked back to his truck. “I thought you could sleep at home tonight.”
“I’m meeting friends.”
“Now?” He looked at his watch. “It’s almost nine.”
“Congrats. You can tell the time.”
“Varmint.” He pushed her sideways, and
they walked quietly to the corner. “Which friends?” he asked, crossing his arm in front of her as she stepped off the curb while a car passed.
“I wasn’t going to get hit,” she said. “Jesus.”
“Who are you meeting?”
“Just people from school.”
“I guess you guys go to bars these days, eh?”
They were at the truck now. She grabbed the tailgate with both hands and hopped up on the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“Let me ride in the back.”
“No.”
“Why.”
“Because I said so.”
Something close to a roar rattled at the back of her throat as she pulled the passenger door shut and crossed her arms. “You’re faking it,” she said, looking out the window.
“I’m faking what?” He pulled out into the road.
“When you do something like not let me ride in the back of the truck. You’re pretending to give a shit.”
They were in the middle of an intersection, waiting to turn left, and he watched car after car go by until the opposite traffic stopped and he had enough time to make the turn. He thought about what he could say and decided that, given the way she misunderstood just about everything he did, there was pretty much nothing in the world that could answer a thing like that.
At home, he rolled out the pizza dough and covered it with the toppings he’d picked for her. He ate at the kitchen table, finishing the pizza and leaving the ice cream untouched in the freezer, and went to bed.
A ringing phone pulled him up through the haze of sleep and left him searching for a sense of where he was. The red numbers next to his head told him 3 a.m. He let the phone ring until the machine clicked on but whoever it was hung up and rang again. He walked down the dark hall with the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes.
“Who is this?” He leaned his shoulder against the wall.
“It’s Nix.”
“It’s three in the morning.”
“Sweet’s got us all in a bit of trouble.”
She explained, her voice slow and thick, that a bunch of people had gotten into a fight in the bar and Sweet threw a beer bottle onto the dance floor, and it hit a girl. A few of them had been taken to the police station and things got a bit rowdy and now the others were in the drunk tank for the night and she needed a ride home.
“Can’t you get a taxi?”
“You really want me to get a taxi?”
She was slumped in a metal chair with one heel tucked on the seat and her other leg stretched out arrogantly in front of the police reception desk. Tom addressed the man behind the desk first.
“You’ve got some of my employees in the tank. Anybody hurt?”
Nix rose from her chair and hung from Tom’s shoulder. “I told you he was coming,” she said.
The officer looked at Tom. “I gather you’re the chief?”
Tom rubbed his hand up and down his face, tried to shrug Nix’s weight from his arm, but she held on tight. “Do you know what happened?”
The man watched Nix, amused, and then looked at Tom. “I can’t tell you what happened exactly, but my colleagues tell me one of your guys thought it would be smart to throw a glass bottle onto a dance floor. You can imagine all hell broke loose, so we’re keeping the young men overnight. Let them cool off.”
“He didn’t think it would be smart,” said Nix. “That’s a gross insinuation.”
“You can take her home now, please.”
The low, pale light in the eastern sky filled Tom’s rearview mirror as Nix slept in the truck on the way back to the planters’ hotel. When he turned off the engine, she sat forward and leaned her head against the dash, then slowly turned her face to him and smiled sadly. “Is it that early I can hear the birds?” she said.
“I’ll walk you in.”
She sat up and rubbed her face and looked out the window, frowned. “Here? Can’t I come home with you?”
“I’ve got my girl at home.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“Nix, how bad was it tonight? What happened to the girl he hit?”
She yawned and stretched and leaned her head against the window, spoke with her eyes closed. “I think she cut her foot and her redneck Prince George boyfriends went apeshit. Those cops were only pissed off because Sweet embarrassed them. You can’t throw someone in the drunk tank for being more intelligent than you.”
“You think he’s so intelligent?”
“I think he’s a reprobate. You’re pretty smart, though.”
“Hate to break it to you, but I’m one of those Prince George rednecks.”
“Your neck is beautiful.”
“I’ll walk you in now.”
“No. I’m coming home with you.”
He got out and went around to her side and opened the door. He held out his hand and she ignored it, turned her back to him, and curled into a tight ball. Her body shook as if she were crying, but what he heard was a low, stuttering giggle. He reached across and gripped her shoulder and tried to turn her around, but she resisted, clung to the upholstery and curled into a tighter ball.
Tom stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest and waited. “You’re embarrassing yourself,” he said.
She stopped shaking, slowly unfurled, like some kind of dawn flower, and looked at him as if he were a stranger. Keeping her eyes on his face, she stepped down from the truck and quietly clicked the door shut and then turned toward the hotel entrance.
“I’ll see you up to your room,” he said, catching her arm.
But she shrugged her shoulder against him and pulled away, and yanked on the door. It was locked.
“Try your key,” Tom said.
Swaying, she dug into her back pocket and took out a hotel key. She missed the lock with her first attempt and then guided the key slowly in with both hands. White-knuckled, she tried, and failed, to turn it.
“Here. Let me,” Tom said, and reached for the key.
She pulled it out of the lock and held it up like a tiny sword. “You try and open that door for me, I will make you choke on this fucking thing.”
He backed away and watched her until she unlocked the door. She pushed through it without looking back, and he was left for the second time that night wondering what he should have said.
In the morning a woman sat behind the desk at the police station and told Tom that his people had been released without charge. He drove to the hotel and, in the first room he looked, found LJ and Beautiful T sitting opposite each other on one of the beds, playing cards. On the other bed were arms and legs and twisted blanket.
LJ’s hair was dripping and she wore a towel, and the air in the room was humid and blue with cigarette smoke.
“Good night?” he asked.
LJ turned her head to him slowly. “A typical bash.”
“You know where Sweet and those guys are?”
“In jail, aren’t they?”
“They were released this morning.”
She shrugged and turned back to her cards.
The hallway was cold and dark and smelled like stale beer and pot. The sticky carpet sucked at his boots. Tom looked through the doorways that were left open, but the silence, the lack of Sweet’s monologue, could only mean that they weren’t back yet.
He waited in the lobby, sitting on the edge of a single brown sofa by the window. Across from him, a cigarette vending machine glowed pale yellow. The street was mainly empty. When Sweet eventually came through the doors, he walked past Tom without seeing him and bent in front of the cigarette machine. He stood up, rummaged for coins in his back pocket, and swayed a little as he counted the money in his palm before slotting it into the machine. He pressed a button but no pack of cigarettes dropped, so he nudged the machine with his boot, hit the side of it with a flat hand, and stood as if he were considering something. He collected the hair at his neck in his fist, strangling the curls.
“Hey, Sweet.”
“What?�
� He didn’t turn.
“Hey.”
Sweet looked over his shoulder at Tom, snickered. “Chief. You’re like a little tree elf hiding over there.” He gave the machine another kick and strode over and stood by the couch. His hair had fallen over his eyes again and he flipped it back. “Fucker took my money.” His t-shirt was stretched at the collar and torn and spotted with brown blood, as if it had dripped from his nose. The knuckles on both of his hands were raw, bloody, and swollen.
“What happened last night?”
“We’ve just been discussing everything over breakfast, going over it with a…ah, shit.” He snapped his fingers by his temple; his face tightened, then relaxed. “With a fine-tooth comb. Yes! A fine-tooth comb. We’ve just been going over it and I’ve come to, what with the frivolity and the ganja and the beer. And the tequila. I mean I’m not a violent person by nature, but at some point in a man’s life, things have got to get physical, right? There’s bound to be damage to his psyche if the brute is never released from its cage.”
Tom relaxed into the couch, crossed his arms loosely between his legs, and looked up at him.
Sweet shifted his arms, as if he didn’t know where to rest them, and settled on hooking his thumbs in his front pockets.
“Why throw the bottle?”
“Can you think of a better way to start a fight in this shithole town?”
The Mountain Can Wait Page 11