by Matt Rader
He felt he should be able to describe their faces in his mind, the shapes of their eyes, the angles of their jaws. He knew these people were his parents but their images had gone vacant. And then his memory drifted off and he saw Anders holding a camera then Anders by the sea with the smoke of the coastal mills growing into the sky across the strait. He looked at his father, asleep now in the bed. Somehow, Joe felt, this dying body erased the past; made it so Anders’ body had always been this body and Joe knew that for a long time this would be the only body he remembered.
Then he went out again and dialled his wife’s number from the phone on the kitchen wall.
“Hello?” Megan said.
For a moment Joe said nothing, waited for Megan’s breathing to ease and the focus of her attention to settle. There was a speed in her breath that suggested something other and important happening right before her, wherever she was at that moment. Something Joe was not part of and knew nothing about. This is how things were then between them, dark and unknowable. He hadn’t heard her voice in three weeks. He knew she might not be alone.
He waited a moment longer.
“Hello?” she said again.
“Joe?” she said, “Are you there?”
Joe listened through the line into the place where her voice came from.
“Are you alone?” he said. He hadn’t wanted to ask and he was ashamed of himself for saying what he was thinking and then he was ashamed for thinking it.
“Joe?” she said. Her voice was fine and open but afraid.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“Are you eating?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And Anders?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing now.”
He spoke softly. He wanted her to hear that it was okay. He wanted to believe it was okay and in this way make it so.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Is he in pain?”
“No,” he said and then, “Yes.” He felt trapped.
“How can I help?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Joe, it’s me.”
“Where’s your sense of humour?” he said. Then he asked again, “Are you alone?”
He could hear her breathing and he felt he understood that breathing, knew what it meant. “No,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
There was a long pause then, a gap, full of a feeling Joe recognized as foolishness mixed with guilt. Regret, he might say, but of the present, as if he were already seeing himself from some point in the future. He’d pushed her away, he’d told himself, but now he knew he’d been mistaken. It was himself he’d pushed away.
“It’s me,” she said. Her voice was hopeful and sad and confused, but only one of these at a time.
“You’re not alone,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Maybe.”
“Come home.”
“I can’t,” he said.
But even as he said it he knew it was a lie and already he could see himself in bed with Megan on Saturday evening. Could see her long back turned towards him in their bed as they fell into sleep somehow together. Could feel the hot tears on his face. He’d not been to Easter mass in twenty-five years but he knew too, in that moment on the phone with his wife, that he’d wake in the morning after that first reunited night together and drive alone down the mountain and cross the river to attend the sacrament and receive Communion and that he’d do it again, coming down the sides of other mountains and crossing other rivers, every year after for the rest of his life.
“I’m not your father,” she said.
“I know,” he whispered but she couldn’t hear him.
He was alone in himself.
“I’ll let you go,” she said, finally, after a few moments of breathing. Her voice was kind and full of longing and bewilderment and a hard acceptance that Joe wouldn’t let her help. There was anger commensurate to her love, and resentment for how she needed Joe, needed him to let her help, to let her touch him and take some of the pain that cocooned him into her own body, needed him to come home and reset the balance of her life, needed him just as he didn’t need or want her, couldn’t accept her help. Joe heard it all in the sound of emptiness between them and he understood then, in the force of Megan’s feelings, that love is violent in its favour for the beloved against the world and thereby perverse and transcendent, though didn’t know it mattered and for this reason he didn’t speak and let her hang before she hung up the phone in silence.
In the room with his father that night, the emptiness of his father’s future crowded the room.
Then, in that emptiness, Joe was eighteen again and the old pointer Anders had taught to hunt had fallen ill and shit the porch where she slept. A blue morning in February on an island acreage where Anders had stayed for a time with a woman whose name Joe couldn’t remember. It was not quite Lent. There was low fog and chill. There was the stench and the dog trying to eat that stench and to clean herself in her confusion. There was Anders stupefied and furious and unable, going to the gun cabinet and then stomping back to the porch empty-handed. And there was Anders as he kicked the dog down the steps.
Standing in the doorway behind Anders in his memory, Joe recognized just how acutely he’d taken on his father’s anger in that moment and made it his own. He’d been disgusted and relieved by his father’s failure to shoot the dog, and then disgusted at his own relief, and he’d felt, he suddenly understood, as his father had felt, and it was as though he’d kicked the dog himself. Being there again, he knew that anger had always been Anders’ first response to grief and that his grief was a force that reached out from the unknowable in him, through his leg and shuddered in the flesh of the dog and in the wild of that animal and made them both, the animal and the father, skulk away from each other in shame. Knowing this made it so when Joe went to collect the sick and injured dog who cowered, shitting blood, behind the woodshed he was not as afraid as he had been, when he was eighteen, of what came next.
There are so many deaths, Joe thought. There’s the unnameable and unmistakable death enunciated, peacefully, in the last effort of the lungs. There’s the death of your name spoken for the last time on Earth, read perhaps in its catalogued distance from flesh, an accidental recording in forgotten city archives, or scrawled on the inside cover of a crumbling book. And the death you live through: the death of your future, the death of the knowledge of your going on, which comes early and becomes a deep blue background to your life.
As much as Joe tried, he couldn’t sweep these thoughts away. And then other thoughts came and he began to ask himself questions and tell himself a story as he lay supine on the hard wooden floor, breathing, a story about himself and his father that included that dog and his father weeping in secret later that evening and through the years they didn’t know each other because his father left him as a boy to become a mystery alive in his absence, a force in the steel of the north, and how as a man with his father he remained a boy until there was almost no anger left and his father was dying. It was enough that Joe didn’t forget the story and in this way his forgiveness could be ratified and complete.
Anders wheezed and coughed. His arms and legs were tight and thin with pain and terror, his skin yellow and his belly swollen as if full of an air that wouldn’t leave him. Before Joe closed his eyes to sleep he pushed morphine through the shunt in Anders’ arm and watched his father’s body relax a small amount, the drug easing him to sleep. For a few moments, Joe held Anders’ hand. He didn’t try to tell his father anything with his mind or with his heart. Slowly the moon was going big through the window, yellow and silver and red. He didn’t read a story that night.
In the morning, Joe stoked the fire back to life and made coffee. Anders couldn’t walk so Joe lifted him in his arms and neither went shy. Then he let his father down on the step so Anders’ feet could touch the ground. The sky had opened its eyes and sun came down through the
wet trees and touched Joe and Anders so they both felt inexplicably well and whole. Anders had wanted to see that sky, its clean blue. On the beach, the sea water retreated in rivulets between the barnacled rocks. There were four more vials of morphine in bedroom.
“You’re a good boy,” Anders told Joe as they stood in the doorway.
AT THE LAKE
BILLY HELD THE GIRL’S wrists against the black rock and Jonathan shuffled her underwear down her thighs. Jonathan had undressed his girlfriend just this way twice on the old mattress in her parents’ basement and once in the tall grass beside the river, so it didn’t seem as strange or awkward as he might have imagined. The girl’s legs were tight but she did not kick and when he pulled the panties under her heels Jonathan felt an exciting openness come into being before him.
Below the bluff the black lake was still and full of the early night sky. Billy was saying things to the girl in a low voice but she didn’t talk back. They were alone beneath the arbutus trees in the evening, miles from town, and Jonathan knew at once that no one could hear them and that if they shouted their voices would be amplified in the dark mountain valley.
When they were done, Jonathan buttoned up his pants while Billy helped the girl, who they called Susan, to her feet. Jonathan saw how small she was standing next to his friend who was Jonathan’s height and wore size-ten shoes like himself. She wrapped herself in her arms and at first glared then would not look at either boy. For a moment Jonathan thought she wouldn’t follow them through the woods to the car parked on the logging road beyond, but then she began to walk and Jonathan could feel her stepping through the darkness behind him.
Jonathan drove and Billy sat in the back with the girl.
“Have a drink,” Billy said offering her the bottle of whisky he’d taken from his father’s cabinet.
Jonathan watched in the rearview mirror. The girl was right behind him and he could only see part of her. The part nearest Billy.
“Susan,” Billy said softly, “have a drink.”
He waved the bottle in her face. The car stank of whisky. Jonathan held his hand up to his nose and smelled her on himself. Then she took the bottle from Billy and drank.
“Give it back,” Billy said but the girl clutched it and looked out the window.
Billy waited.
“Susan,” he said, “Give it back.”
Billy was perched forward and leaning towards her.
But the girl made no move. She was pressed against the door so Jonathan could see only her hip and one part of her leg.
Billy relaxed back into his seat and turned towards the window. Outside the black trees flashed by in a long corridor of blackness, the night sky shaled with clouds and sky and clouds. Their hearts were full then with the sound of the car engine and the silence between them and the headlights on the road before them and the deep illusion of moving. Then Billy reached across and wrenched the bottle away from the girl.
They dropped her at a house at the edge of town. There were two big maples coming into leaf in the front yard. The boys watched the girl walk between the two trees and up the steps of the house to the porch. Her bare legs looked wobbly but she no longer held herself with her arms. She looked back only once just before she opened the door. Her hair was long and straight and Jonathan knew he would see her again but he did not know when or where and he hoped it would not be for many years and that he would not recognize her at the time but only later when he had travelled a good distance from that moment.
Billy climbed between the seats and sat next to Jonathan.
Jonathan felt his heart in his ears. He wanted to know if Billy had liked it but he did not know how to ask or how his friend could answer or how he would know the truth of whatever Billy might say. In the darkness of the car, on the black asphalt, with the whole black lake of the sky above them, Jonathan had no words and without them could not know even what he wanted to know.
Billy looked at his friend and opened his mouth then closed it and was quiet. The street was quiet and in the house where the girl had disappeared there were no lights.
ALONE MOUNTAIN
HIGH SUMMER, 1918. ALONE MOUNTAIN, Vancouver Island. The sun weeps fiery light through the canopy onto the forest floor. See the man face down in the dirt. Red hair. Starved slender so his dungarees hang loosely off his thighs and hips. A red bandana tied neatly around his neck. Ammunition boots, battered and ripped at the toe cap, the soles flapping open at the heel. Nothing moves except the fleas on his skin. One hand stretches out above his head. The other, splayed to his right, grips a small rifle. The jungle empty now of birds. Blood spreads across his back into his linen shirt and from his outstretched hand into the fir needles and earth.
The last echo of the rifle report is a silence that rings in the dark trees and mountains and in the ripples where the trout wait and let the water run over them. He might have been murdered this day at the Second Battle of the Marne where the Germans have retreated behind Fère-en- Tardenois to complete a last ditch rail link that’ll mean nothing to the outcome of the war. But he was not. He died with deer flies in the temperate jungle. They walk now across his pallid skin and drink at his eyes.
Ten paces above the dead man, Dan Campbell opens the magazine and fumbles with the shells. He is in wool trousers and a cotton shirt rolled to the elbows. Trembling. Ears full of his own heart. His hands are clammy wet. Sweat rolls down his face into his eyes.
He hears muffled shouts from a couple hundred yards up mountain—the force of shouts really: his ears are too sensitive, too full of the rifle blast, to hear properly. He feels them—the shouts—in the back of his mind. The other constables, Devitt and Johnson. They’ve heard the shot. Must have. The clarity of a single rifle blast and its echo. Its summons. The two men struggle through the thick bush towards him—huckleberries measled with fruit; swordferns and bracken ferns and Queen Anne’s lace to their waists; devil’s club as tall as men, wide vans of leaf arsenelled with tiny, detachable fangs. They don’t know what they’ll find: Campbell dead; an ambush. Campbell should call back but his voice is stoppered.
His braces hang at his hips.
Mouth dry, half-open.
A film over his tongue.
The ridiculous, godforsaken silver star on his chest. He runs his hands through his thinning hair. He needs to think.
He drops the bullets he has unconsciously unloaded from his rifle. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
The bullets sound brightly against each other and against the rocks on the path. They roll away towards the body.
He needs to think.
WHEN HE THINKS, IT’S winter a year earlier. He has two women at gunpoint on a road outside the capital. One’s ugly and the other has a sore above her eye. They’re prostitutes and he believes this, and his badge, will protect him. They’ll never tell, he thinks, never trust police against police. He has debts and this is the last best option. He makes the one with the sore give the ugly one her money.
He can’t look either of them in the eye so he looks at their ears and the women think he is mad. They’re only an arm’s length away and he’s absorbed in their heady perfume. He can’t describe it. It makes him sick. The one with the sore empties her wallet into the ugly one’s hands. Both women are wearing brown leather gloves. His own hands are bare and numb. He envies the gloves and this envy makes him ashamed then angry, shame’s spokesman and attorney.
The sky is a woolly grey that seems to come closer than the horizon. Everything is grey: the frost-sick road, the pale water in the gorge, the bare birch trees with their pewter trunks. Only the blotchy red of the women’s faces look alive to him. He cannot see his own face, red at the cheeks and white along the jaw. The three breathe into the space between them and their breath turns to mist and is gone. With one hand he holds the pistol on the ugly one. With the other he reaches for the money.
The ugly one drops the coins. They ring on the cold road and roll away. The women run.
One by one h
e pick up the coins.
HE STOPS THINKING WHEN Devitt comes through the curtain of bush onto the trail, hatless now, a rill of blood running down his face into his moustache, arms diseased with devil’s club.
“Self-defence,” Campbell says. He throws his hands up in the air, palms facing Devitt.
Devitt looks down the hill at the body. He knows who it is by the hair colour and the slender frame. Devitt has been chasing him a long time now, a year at least, and at first he feels surprise and then bitterness that Campbell got to him first. He wipes the blood from his forehead with the back of his hand and then looks at it with mild curiosity. He hates the jungle.
“He swung on me,” Campbell says.
The sun splashes Campbell’s face as he speaks and his eyes glow very bright. Campbell looks desperate and panicked. Devitt has never cared for men like Campbell, they are too unpredictable, too reluctant to be wholly who they really are. They act out of desperation and tell themselves this mitigates their actions. They are pathetic. They have no sense of humour, can’t see how absurd it is to do anything at all. He doesn’t know yet how this is the end for him and Campbell both, how they will see each other once again in a rooming house on Hastings Street in 1935 and they will not speak, having lost everything except their shame. He would never have had Campbell in his crew if he’d been given a choice. Campbell was a sportsman. The best shot among them.
Devitt takes a tin from his vest pocket. Inside is stocked with tightly rolled cigarettes. He lights one with a match and hands it to Campbell. “Relax,” he says.
A second later Johnson comes out on the trail, red-faced and scratched too across his cheek. A thin line of blood wells there above his beard. A short man, square-shouldered, the face of a brick, he breathes through his mouth. His nose is bent sideways from a moment in the war he will not talk about. It can’t be used. He carries a rifle and is dressed in wool pants and a wool waistcoat. These are too hot for this day.