The Mountain Can Wait

by Sarah Leipciger

  22

  It took Sweet’s crew two nights of unpaid slog to straighten out the mess. Two more planters quit. Tom watched them pack their things in their car, while most of the camp slept, and grind down the gravel road, leaving a hanging pall of grit and dust like a ringing in the ear.

  Working the bleak twilight hours had a way of twisting people’s nerves. They could never get enough sleep; it was too hot in their tents at the height of the day, too light. So they spread blankets on the sand and played their guitars and their card games, swam in the lake, drifted in the canoe, trailing their feet in the cold water. The grunting and cussing from Sweet’s crew had spread to the others and something ugly had settled over everything; when Tom pulled into camp on the second morning, the replant finished, it was with relief. He would give all the planters the night off, stay out of their way.

  He headed to his trailer for a towel and a change of clothes. Nix cut a diagonal line from her cook van and stopped him.

  “You owe me an apology,” she said. “For what you said to me in your truck. That was mean.”

  “I could probably say sorry for a lot more than that, but this isn’t the time.”

  “You’ve hardly said two words to me since we got back from town.”

  He cupped her elbow with his hand and started walking again to his trailer. “I’ve tried. You weren’t interested.”

  “Well I’m interested now.”

  “Have you been paying attention around here? I’ve got a whole crew that wants to kick my ass.”

  “Well maybe I want to kick your ass.”

  “You’ll have to get in line.”

  She stopped a few paces from his trailer. “Some guy called Kevin from the logging company radioed. Said it was important you called.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “He sounded like it was important.”

  Tom knew the fallout wouldn’t end with the checker, and before he picked up his radiophone, he sat quietly in his trailer for a minute, preparing for what was coming. A warning, maybe a probation period. At worst, the loss of the contract and his reputation destroyed.

  He didn’t expect to be told that the police had been in touch. Nothing to panic about, apparently, but they were looking for his son. They’d been given directions to the camp and would be there the following morning. And almost as an afterthought: he was expected, once his personal business was squared away, to come to the office and talk about what the hell was going on with his outfit.

  He turned off the radio and stared at the floor. He thought about Curtis again in Sean’s kitchen, his head between his knees, his shoulders hanging low.

  With movements that were almost automatic, he sifted through his things for a bar of soap and a towel, clean underwear, and a pair of jeans. He cut through the woods to a small patch of beach out of sight of camp, peeled off his work clothes, stiff with sweat and burn ash, and walked briskly into the cold water, rubbing his arms vigorously as the water inched up his calves, his thighs. He dove underneath and rubbed soap into his face and hair. Curtis had never done anything stupid; Tom had always been able to trust him. But the police? Tom went over that last conversation he’d had with Curtis. Curt had been trying to talk to him, and all he could remember now was how hard it had been to get at that valve, how easy it had been to avoid whatever it was Curt was upset about.

  He dove again and spun underwater, tried to undo the knot that was coiling in his chest, and when he surfaced he could hear the planters’ voices chittering over the water from down shore and around the bend. He treaded water for the weightlessness of it; every hair, his diaphragm, his scrotum, floated freely. He paddled to where he knew there was a flat rock just under the surface and sat on it, cleaning the dirt from his ankles, between his toes.

  “Hey. You.”

  Nix was on the sand, her arms crossed above her head in the act of pulling off her t-shirt, the small pot of her stomach stretched flat. He watched her tug her pants off and wade in, shoulders raised to the cold, sculling her fingers along the surface of the water. “I’m sorry I behaved like that back there.”

  “You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.”

  “I acted like such a girl.”

  “You are a girl.”

  “Not that kind of girl.”

  He slid off the rock and she stopped in front of him, touched his hip under the water. The hairs on her arms were standing up in a field of goose bumps and she was shivering. She took her fingers from his hip and hugged her arms around her body.

  “Swim around a bit. You’ll get warm,” he said.

  “What did the Nielson guy want?”

  “He just wants to talk.”

  “You in trouble?”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked across the water and then she looked at him. She frowned.

  “What?”

  She hit the water with a sudden backhand slap, splashing him. He ducked under and spun away, and then stood up, facing the shore. Laughing, she jumped on his back, arms around his neck, and he fell backward to get her off, throwing her into the water. By the time she came up, spluttering, wiping her face, he was trudging out of the lake. She ducked back under and surfaced farther out, and floated on her back, sprayed water from her mouth. “I take it that’s it, then?” she called.

  He wiped the towel quickly down his limbs and across his chest and pulled on his clothes, and rubbed the towel back and forth across his head. His left ear was plugged, so he hopped with his head thrown to that side, hitting his palm flat on the right side of his skull. The warm membrane of water stayed fast to his inner ear and the sound of his breathing piped loudly in his head. By the time he looked back at Nix, she had floated farther out; the profile of her face against the sunny lake was dark and sharp and distant.

  In the morning, Tom took his truck up the camp trail to the turn at the logging road to wait for the police. Sleep the night before had been hard to come by, and now he rolled down the window, leaned back against the seat and put one boot up on the dash, and tried and failed to close his eyes. A nervous scratch came from somewhere in the bush to his left, then a titch and a warble. Then, eerily, nothing. No such thing as absolute silence in the bush, but for a moment it was as close as it got. Then the faraway rumble of an engine. Too heavy to be a car. Up ahead at the bend, a few hundred meters away, he saw the dust first. Then, materializing out of it like some angry bull, the squared chrome nose of a logging truck. Twelve feet wide, fully loaded, bearing down. When it came closer, the driver, high in his cab, saluted. Heavy chains rattled over a towering stack of bucked logs. Tom rolled up his window, the air now thick with yellow dust. Dust in his teeth, the back of his throat. It settled onto the roadside trees, and the truck, and the dashboard where a few seconds before his boot had been. And then, in the grit that still hung all around, quiet again.

  Through the dirty windscreen, he studied the empty road, chewed the skin around the edge of his thumbnail, and listened hard for the approach of the police car. Restless, he got out of the truck and walked along the ditch, kicking plates of dried mud. Pulverizing them. He came to a corrugated culvert and balanced on its ridges, pulled a bouquet of needles off a pine bough, and picked the needles one by one, tossing them into the road as he continued to walk. Fresh sap on his fingers. What had Curtis got himself into that was so important the police were bothering to come way the hell out here?

  Eventually, the sound of a small engine. What came around the bend wasn’t a police car but what looked like a rented vehicle. And the driver was alone. By this time, Tom was sitting on the hood of his truck, his boots on the fender. The car pulled up nose to nose with his truck and he hopped down, walked around to the driver’s side.

  The man who got out was dressed in a short-sleeved dress shirt and suit pants. A loosened tie. Taking Tom’s hand in his large, moist grip, the man smiled. “I gather you’re Tom Berry? Detective Brendon Wythe. I’m late; I know. I took the opportunity this morning to drop in on your m
other.”

  “What’s happened to my kid?”

  The detective waved his palms in front of his chest, as if trying to stop something coming his way. “No! No. They were supposed to tell you. As far as we know, nothing has happened to your son. Ah, hell. I bet you were worrying all night.”

  “You’re not here for nothing.”

  “We’re only trying to track him down. I wanted to come and talk to you in person, see if you know where he is. Or if you can help us find him.” He slapped a mosquito off his arm.

  “What’s he done?”

  “Probably nothing. I need to speak to him in relation to a hit-and-run accident that occurred down in Whistler. Listen, can we sit in the car? I’m getting eaten alive.”

  Tom sat in the passenger seat. “You mind if I roll the window down a bit?”

  “As long as you catch ’em when they get in.” Brendon switched on the air-conditioning, and dust and the smell of plastic blasted from the vents. “So here’s the thing. Little over two weeks ago there was a hit-and-run incident on the highway in Whistler. You know about that?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “It’s all over the news.”

  “Don’t get much of that up here.”

  The detective put both hands on the steering wheel, looked down the road. “Well. A girl was hit. Whoever hit her left her in the dirt, and after a few hours of what I’m told was pretty terrible suffering, she died. The only thing we know about the vehicle that hit her was that it was something high and heavy, like a van or a truck or some kind of SUV.”

  “She a friend of Curt’s or something?”

  “We don’t know. We do know that they were at the same party, night of the incident. We’re talking to everyone who was there, but we haven’t been able to locate Curtis.”

  “I still don’t see why you needed to come up here, for that.”

  “Thing is, he hasn’t been at work since the day of the party. Or home. Nobody down in Whistler knows where he is.”

  Tom shifted in the seat. The air in the car was too cold, and stale.

  “Have you seen him in the last few weeks?”

  “I saw him in town.”

  “Prince George?”

  “Yes. Just over a week ago.” Sean’s kitchen. Dripping tap, a life gone.

  “Where exactly?”

  “He was staying with his friend. But then he was heading back to Whistler. For work.”

  “He hasn’t been at work.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “Is this the type of thing he does? Go off like this without telling anyone?”

  “He hasn’t lived at home for a few years. Maybe he does this sort of thing now.”

  “How was he when you saw him?”

  Incoherent. Sitting on the floor with his head between his knees.

  “Mr. Berry?”

  “It’d be better if you called me Tom.”

  “Did he seem upset? Anything like that?”

  “He was upset about his girlfriend. They broke up. Maybe that’s why he split.”

  “Do you happen to know when that was?”

  “I don’t know. Couple of weeks back.”

  The detective nodded. He had been looking through the front window for most of the conversation, and now he shifted in the seat so that he was facing Tom. “Mr. Berry. What do you think of all this?”

  Tom rubbed the rough hairs on his chin and shook his head. He opened the door and got out and stood looking down the road, his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. The detective got out and stood next to him, crossed his arms and looked down the road, and they stood there as if they were both waiting for someone to come.

  “I think,” said Tom, “that there could be a hundred and one reasons why he took off.”

  “But you can see why we might be interested in talking to him.”

  “Yeah, I can see that.”

  “Any chance you can get away from here for a day or two? Maybe see if he’s staying at home, or has been there? Have a talk with that friend he was staying with? You might have better luck than me.”

  Tom nodded.

  “We’re only trying to eliminate him at this point.”

  “Give me an hour to talk to my foremen.”

  Houseflies picked over open cans of food in the kitchen, and Tom knew that Curtis had been home. Had been hiding. Tom stood at the counter, motionless, boots still on, bag over his shoulder. White fear traveled clean through his body. It rose from his gut to the tips of his ears, turning them hot, and brought with it the truth, straightforward as milk. A mass of maggots butted wetly against each other inside a half-empty can of peaches. He opened the window above the sink and tipped the maggots outside just as Brendon came through the kitchen. He crossed to the back door and looked out the window.

  “You got a nice big yard out there.”

  Tom pulled a plastic bag from under the sink and put the cans in it.

  “You got a daughter too, right?”

  “Erin.”

  “I met her at your mother’s place. She looks like you. Got the red hair.” Brendon’s eyes moved to the bag of cans, then roamed the kitchen.

  “Do you want a cup of coffee?” Tom asked.

  “I would love a cup of coffee.”

  Tom pushed the bag into the garbage under the sink and got the tin of coffee out of the cupboard. He filled the percolator with water and looked out the window to the disused swing set. He dumped three scoops of grounds into the top of the percolator, spilling some onto the counter and the floor. Then, reaching for a spoon in the kitchen that he’d built himself, he opened the wrong drawer.

  “Would you mind at all, while that coffee brews, just having a look to see if he’s been here?” Brendon asked.

  Brendon followed Tom through the living room, where the blanket from Curtis’s bed lay on the floor like a windless flag, and down the hallway to Tom’s closed bedroom door. Inside his room, the double bed was pushed against the wall, the tightly tucked bedding untouched. The only sign of life was from the pulsing red colon on his clock radio.

  “He hasn’t been in here,” Tom said.

  Across the hall, Erin’s room. He pushed her door open against a pile of clothes and stuck his head in. He didn’t know if anything had changed, if Curtis had taken anything or slept in there, because he couldn’t remember the last time he had actually stepped beyond her doorway.

  “This is your daughter’s room?”

  Tom nodded. “You got kids?”

  “Hell no.”

  Tom moved past him in the narrow hallway and checked the bathroom, clean as he’d left it, except for the towel hooked on the back of the door. He looked at Brendon and shrugged, as if he were still unsure. “Nothing wrong with a boy coming home. Only thing you learn from him being here is that he’s been here.”

  Brendon took a deep breath. “You can understand, I need to find out what happened to this girl. No stone unturned, eh?”

  “I can understand that.”

  Curtis’s door, opposite the bathroom, was open. In his room, some clothes on the floor, the curtains drawn, the bedsheet twisted at the foot of the mattress.

  “Would that be his blanket on the floor in the living room?” Brendon asked.

  Tom nodded. They went back through the kitchen and down the basement stairs. When Tom switched on the light, the room felt darker than it normally did, and then he saw that the window at the far end of the basement had been boarded up.

  Brendon stood by the workbench, the shadows on his face elongated by the overhead light. He pushed the hammer on its hook on the wall, watched it swing. “Ditching your job, not getting in touch with anyone—this is the behavior of someone who is running. You can see that, right?”

  Gaps on the shelves by the stairs, where the camping gear was stowed.

  “You could say he’s prone to drop things, I guess. But he’s twenty-two years old, you know?”

  “That about the age you were when you had him?”

&nb
sp; “I was nineteen.”

  “Same age as Lindsay.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl who died.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing. I don’t know what to say about that. Hard to even think about. What about her parents?”

  “You can imagine.”

  “I can.”

  The moment of death—he’d seen it enough times. A buck’s or a bird’s or a dog’s eyes dulled and half open. He’d dreamt it of himself. It was a sigh, an exhale, a pulling from underneath black water. And when it was you, he wondered, was there this thought? My last breath, my last touch. All those thousands and here is my last. When Elka did it to herself, when darkness pulled at the edges of her eyes and her breath began to fade, did she grapple for more? Was she conscious of the end? This girl, alone—there must have come a point when she knew it was happening. She must have been so scared.

  The smell of burnt coffee hung in the kitchen, the room now blue with dusk. Tom sat alone with his elbows on the table and rested his chin on crossed fingers. He stared at the card, propped against the pepper pot, bearing Brendon’s number, the address of his office. Tom would find the boy himself, before they did. Make him turn back before they could catch him from behind.

  With no light on in the kitchen, the blue gradually darkened, and the percolator on the stove, the magnets on the refrigerator, and the two clean cups on the counter first lost color, then definition until everything blended into one plane. Out the window, one star pricked the purple sky, and then twelve and then forty and so on.

  The familiar sound of the front door rubbing against its frame surprised him and he sat up.

  “Curtis?”

  “Nope,” his mother called. Lights switched on in the living room and Samantha’s head appeared in the doorway. “I’ve been calling you for the last hour. Why didn’t you pick up?”

  “The phone didn’t ring.”

  She disappeared, her voice retreating down the hall. “I don’t know what to make of all this, Tom.”