Ben pulled his knapsack and six-pack from behind the seat, nudging me towards an opening through the woods. “Get the other bag, I leads your sister through the wilderness,” he called out to Chris. “Come on, let’s go meet Billy.”
“Billy?”
“Head honcho around here.” I followed him, stepping in the wide tracks of his boots through a swampy patch of ground. A slight incline and the path became drier, the overhang less dense. The woods opened onto a meadow, as softly padded as anything matting the shores of Cooney Arm, and my camp-dreary eyes feasted on the purply blue sepals of the wild crocus springing up in clusters all about. I looked back. Chris was coming through the evergreens, shoulders more hunched beneath his knapsack than that great Titan’s holding the weight of the heavens.
I turned dispiritedly back to the trail.
“Pardon me,” said Chris, marching up from behind. He nudged me aside with a strong arm, walking past with the urgency of a ticket holder late for the first act. He broke into a run and I laughed, running after him. He skidded to a halt at the bottom of a slight dip, then cursed as I plowed into his back, the both of us sinking ankle deep into a muddied trough. Holding on to each other’s arms, we levered ourselves onto drier ground, yelling out warnings to Ben, who was trailing behind. Then we scraped our boots across the gnarled root of an ancient pine and carried on walking, the leafy arches of the cottonwood giving way to a cobalt sky. Stretching out before us was a pond, still as glass.
“You could see a duck’s balls on that,” said Ben, coming upon us. “There’s Bill.”He pointed to a small brown head bobbing in the water near the shore and the greyish wooden clump of a beaver dam to the far side. “Best engineers around. Second only to women in changing things to their liking. And works only with their teeth—no claws, no bullying.” He tossed me a wink but the heaviness of his tone belied any frivolities, and, as though knowing it, he clumped ahead through the grass. I followed him up to the top of a small hillock, fairly dry beneath the bared sun. “Catch a breeze up here, chase off flies,” said Ben, and he threw down his knapsack, sitting with a loud ahhhh!
I looked back at Chris standing by the pond, shading his eyes towards the sky as might Father in his boat, searching for signs of weather. He kept standing there, gazing.
“He’s feeling a bit twisted,” said Ben.
“Thanks to me,” I said.
“You spoke the truth.”
Popping a can of beer, he took it to Chris, who was dropping his knapsack on top of a large, flat rock. A few words with Chris and Ben strolled back, leaving Chris sipping his beer and looking at the lake, rippling now from Billy’s nose as he swam towards his lodge.
Shaking my head to Ben’s offer of a beer, I found a place to myself by the side of the knoll and stretched out, using my coat for a pillow. The grass felt softer than Gran’s pillow beneath my head, the scent of pine a laudanum for sleep. I gazed down past my feet, watching Chris sitting motionless, gazing at the pond. I thought to go to him, but a breeze wafted over me with the softness of duck down, stroking my cheek with a blade of grass. I closed my eyes to the rustle of the cottonwoods, the tweedle eedee of a robin, the chattering of a warbler. I drifted with a puff of cloud across the sky. I swam through the greens and pinks spiralling through the reddish dome beneath my closed eyelids. If not for the mosquito brrrr-ing in my ear, I would’ve slept—or perhaps I had, for when I opened my eyes Chris was no longer looking at the pond but hunched over a sketch pad, his knapsack in disarray around him.
With a languorous stretch, I left behind the comfy nest of grass and sat cross-legged beside him. His mouth was curled studiously, the fine hair on the back of his hand catching the sun as he sketched and shaded a meadow. He seemed oblivious to my presence, but tilted his drawing slightly as though hiding it from scrutiny.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “You were right, I shouldn’t have come.”
He grunted.
“Chris, I’m truly sorry—about last night, too.”
“Freaking out over nothing,” he muttered.
“Yup. Damn knife fights—gets me squeamish every time.”
“That’s what you call a knife fight?”
I gave him a sideways look. “What do you know about knife fights?”
“Knife fights, fist fights—seen a few brawls in the backwoods back home.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Jeezes, you’re worse than the freakin’ townies, thinking all we does in the outports is fish.”
“All right, so I missed a few things. Don’t remember you being so brave,” I said, trying for humour, “all them times you bawled your head off wanting to go to Cooney Arm with me and Gran and yet clinging to Mother’s skirts, too scared to leave.”
He tossed his head with a snort. “Cuz Mother was pinching me shoulders, you nit, and pulling me back so’s to stay with her.”
“Yeah, right. Couldn’t have gotten you in that boat with a bucket of candy.”
“You only wanted me to come cuz you were scared of ghosts.”
“Hey!”
“Hey, what! Remembers you now, huddling behind the house, frightened of your own shadow.”
“And who was huddling behind me?” I asked, grateful for the grin chewing the corners of his mouth.
“Cripes, you had me freaked out—playing dead atop of graves all the freaking time. Half the reason I never left home sooner, scared I’d end up living with you.”
It was a deeper fear than that, I thought to say, but curbed my tongue, for perhaps he hadn’t recognized his fear. If I’d learned anything from this camp, it was that fear doesn’t necessarily present itself in well-defined situations; more often it’s that darker shade of red flowing through our veins, tinting our views and no doubt stripping us of the courage to make decisions along the way.
“Ghosts,” Chris was muttering, shaking his head. “You bloody had me convinced.”
“You mean it wasn’t Grandfather Now that convinced you?”
“Foolishness.”
“Foolishness, hell, I mopped up the water from his boots.”
“Leak in the roof.”
“Bloody hell.”
“So, what do they want, then?”
“What do who want?”
“Your ghosts. What do they want?”
“How should I know what they want?”
“They’re your ghosts, you made them up, you should know what they want. Jeezes, Sis, you don’t think they were real, do you?”
“Swear to gawd I’m not making up Grandfather Now. I mopped up the water from his boots. Ask Gran, she don’t lie.”
“I will, I’ll ask her, she’ll laugh, can see her now, laughing.” He twisted sideways, searching through some pencils in his bag, his sketch pad bopping on his knees. The patch of meadow had looped into a pond with a boat sitting on its surface and the lone figure of a man sitting in its centre, looking up at the sun.
“A dream I had last night,” he said as I picked up the pad. “Strange dream. I was Father, sitting in his boat.”
“You were Father?”
“Yeah.”
“What were you doing?”
“Just sitting there, being Father.”
“Well—what was it like then, being Father?”
He gave his quick little shrug. “Same as being me. The water was strange—darkish. Kinda strange darkish.”
“Ah, the darkling sea—where dreams come from.”
Laying his bag aside, he gave in to the lure of the grassy bed beneath him and stretched out, tucking his hands behind his head. “So,” he said through a leisurely yawn, “what did your ghosts look like? And Grandfather Now, what did he look like?—lean back, you’re shading me.”
I leaned back on my elbows, drawing forward my one image of Grandfather Now. I’d never seen him, never even saw a picture of him, there weren’t any. And yet clear as the hills on a sunny day I could see him in heavy, dark clothing, rowing across the arm in his boat, his sou’wester shading
his face, his hands big and gnarled like Father’s as he gripped his oars. It was because Gran couldn’t let go of him, I heard her tell Mother once, that’s why he kept haunting the shore, sitting in Gran’s rocking chair at night, water dripping from his boots— because she, Gran, couldn’t move on without him, needing him to watch over her on those stormy nights.
I thought back to when I was a kid, imagining pretty much the very same thing about the ghosts in the abandoned houses—that they weren’t able to move on and were waiting for the folk who’d lived there to return and reclaim them. I looked to Chris to tell him as much, but his eyes were closed, his face all relaxed as though he were drifting with the clouds.
Leaving him there, I went back up the hill. Ben was sitting with his arms folded across his knees, a can of beer in one hand and shading his eyes with the other as he stared westwards at the distant ridge of the Rocky Mountains and their great granite peaks, bluish in the evening sun. That tireless graven image, which was starting to weary me, was still clinging to his face, connecting him no doubt to whatever foul deed it was that yoked his step to Trapp’s with a loyalty that seemed more weighted now with burden than devotion.
Twisting off an alder branch, I sat beside him, swiping at flies.
Ben swatted at his neck. A dark curl around his ear quivered, a mosquito toppled onto his shoulder.
I fingered the swollen catkins hanging in clusters from the top shoot of the alder branch. “I want out of this camp,” I said quietly. “And I’m not leaving without Chris.”
He took a mouthful of beer. “He won’t leave,” he said, his tone resigned. “You won’t get him to leave.”
“Then fix it. Get him fired. Have Push run him off. Give it a few more days—till pay day—so’s he’s got a good cheque to send home. Then make it so’s we have to leave. He’ll be fine then—once he has some money to send home, and he’ll have another job quick as anything.”
“Sure,” he replied dryly. “I’ll just be somebody else deciding his path—along with you and his mother … You don’t get it,” he said over my huff of impatience. “He’s decided. He decided it without any of us. And it’s for him to figure when he wants out. Not you. Not his mother. Not me—”
“I don’t give a shit who decides it—long as it takes us outta here.” I sprouted to my feet, and brushing off my backside, scurried like a Sunday picnicker away from an anthill. Picking up a long, spindly stick, I sat at the water’s edge, flicking at a lily pad and staring into the protruding eyes of a frog partly submerged behind a rock.
Chris came over beside me, muttering curses about red ants. He fell to his knees beside me, ducking his arms into the pond and splashing water about his neck.
“Size of them feet,” said Ben, joining him and kicking sideways at Chris’s feet. “Wonder they don’t charge you land taxes.”
“Good for paddling,” said Chris.
“Paddling! Jeezes, bud, ever try oars?”
“Dog paddling, b’y. Across the pond.”
Ben laughed, splashing pond water over his arms. “Yeah, dog paddling. That’s about the size of it, born on a wharf and can’t swim.”
“Saved Sis once. Tell him—go on, tell him,” Chris urged, flicking a handful of water at my face. “She walked out over her head. I dog-paddled to her, nudged her. She was saved. Tell him, Sis.”
“Ohh, go get the food, Chrissy.”
“Right, always giving orders. Should’ve left you drowning.” He stood up, nudging Ben as he did so. “Like that,” he said. “I nudged her like that. She managed to get her foot on a rock, and was saved. Should’ve left her there—snottin’ and bawlin’. All right, all right, going, going, cheez!”
Bringing back the food, he began laying it out. “Can’t believe you gave up drawing totally,” he said to Ben. “You were good, man, I always thought you were good.”
“Ahh, I only drew bricks,” said Ben with a wry grin my way.
“Bricks are good, what’s wrong with bricks?”
“I don’t know—ask your sister.”
“Austere,” I said unhappily. “I don’t like austerity.”
I tried to smile at his attempt at lightness, but my heart was heavy.
“And that,” said Ben, “is exactly why I’d draw a brick, a rock, a stick—to keep it separate. Freeing it from other things—like emotion,” he added. His mouth curled as though he’d said a nasty word.
“Austerity creates its own emotion,” I said. “Coldness. Detachment. You’re not freeing anything.”
“Immovable, then. Perhaps I like things immovable at times. Just sits there. Connected to nothing. Nothing touching it.”
I shook my head confusedly. “Why? Why do you like things immovable—and all clearly defined?”
“Perhaps it’s how I anchors myself,” he said quietly, “when I’m too full of feeling.” He shot a westward glance towards the Rockies. “Feel whatever you want when anchored to a mountain. Nothing touches a mountain. Ever touch a mountain? Colder than fuck, nothing but rock. Can’t farm them, can’t milk them, can’t fish them—coldest fucking things out there, mountains—connected to nothing.”
“That’s foolish—mountains are more connected than anything—”
“That’s how I see them.”
“And that’s why you’d draw mountains—because they’re the coldest things out there?”
“Yeah—cold, hard. Don’t sink, don’t bob, don’t flirt or burn. They’re like the old man’s boat anchor—good for one thing only, holding things steady. Holding things in place. Holding me in place while I bobs and curses with whichever wind comes along.”
I shook my head, feeling truly bewildered. “I don’t know what you’re harbouring, Ben Rice,” I said quietly, “but I’ll tell you another thing about your mountain, you’ll have more luck rolling boulders up its side than freeing yourself from whatever this thing is with you and Trapp. Leastways, long as you stay in this hell camp.”
Tossing down the piece of bread I’d been nibbling on, I left them there and started back to the truck with a sense of feeling smothered, of feeling stuck—stuck in this camp, in my silly mothering with Chris, and most frustrating of all, stuck in my drawn-out adolescent relationship with Ben Rice. One thing for sure, after Ben’s strong words about holding fast to mountains so’s to anchor feeling, I was suddenly a whole lot concerned for whatever ills or secrets he was carrying around in his heart—for I was starting to see now just how strongly they were holding him a prisoner unto himself.
THAT THOUGHT was to return to me with the greatest of ironies later that evening. Long shadows darkened the road as we pulled up to the trailers. Chris and Ben headed wearily for their bunks, getting an early night. Cook was wavering by the table inside the cookhouse with weepy eyes and a half tumbler of whisky sloshed over the front of her blouse. “I sneezed and wasted it,” she offered by way of explanation, and gesturing towards the half-finished supper dishes, she shook her head sadly, chins quivering. “Couldn’t finish—damn cough’s back— can you, ach ach, finish?”
Waving her off to bed, I tiredly shoved up my sleeves, refilled the sink with hot water, and started in. I was halfways through when Ben entered, swinging a jug of whisky, and took himself a seat at the table, pouring himself a stout drink. From his glazed eyes and sluggish movements, he’d evidently already taken a few swigs. When it appeared Chris wasn’t coming behind him I kept on scrubbing dishes, too tired for more than a scant nod of greeting yet keenly aware of his sitting there. Cook had used practically every pot and pan in the cupboards, and yet she’d still managed to smother the sink with wet mounds of flour and splatter the stove with grease and gravy.
Ben had started talking, his words a trickle at first and then building into a solid flow. I don’t remember how much he’d already said before I allowed his words entry—betrayal, he repeated the word betrayal, and I stopped clattering the cutlery into the drawer, listening. I gripped the sink, listening. I sat beside him at the table, poured a shot of
whisky and nursed it like a glass of hot milk, listening. For well over an hour he talked.
“Did you think I’d forgotten our supper date that evening, did you think I had forgotten you?” His eyes sharpened onto mine but then fell away as he spoke in low, pained tones about his booked flight to Calgary with Trapp, the tickets already in his pocket as he was inviting me to supper, how he was meeting Ernie, his good friend Ernie, did I remember Ernie? The funny mainlander with the short, shaggy haircut, always balancing beer bottles or wine bottles on his head? Well, it was Ernie they were visiting—that Ben was visiting, for Trapp was only along for the ride; even though Ben warned him off, he insisted on coming because Trapp followed Ben everywhere, and to Trapp’s figuring, a trip across the country was no different than a trip across town.
But it was his deal—Ben’s. Ernie had the connection, and Ben had the cash for this great blow. Coke. Uncut cocaine. A fortune to be made, school loans paid off, trip to Europe planned, a doctorate in engineering waiting upon return. He’d share it with Trapp, not because Trapp was a part of it but because Trapp was his bud, and Trapp went along with him, and there were risks in simply being along for the ride.
He kept looking at me as he spoke those last words. There was an intensity about him, a strong need for me to believe him, to accept this truth of Trapp’s that he didn’t do drugs, that he was simply along for the ride and became more bent on going when he understood the risks Ben was taking, as though he were Ben’s guardian. And he was nervous, Trapp was nervous: he didn’t like flying, he didn’t like drugs, he didn’t like anything about this deal. But in true Trapp fashion he said very little and sat rigid for the five- to six-hour flight, face whiter than the clouds by the time they landed.
When they finally reached Ernie’s small, sparsely furnished flat in downtown Calgary it turned into a hard night of drinking along with a heavy sampling of the coke. Come morning Ben was hungover bad, him and Ernie both. Trapp was nervous and quiet. He’d hardly drunk all evening, and was such a silent, brooding presence in the small room that Ben was wishing he’d left him back on the Rock. It was the next morning, their second in Calgary, that Ernie took them to the restaurant, the designated meeting place. They’d left the apartment an hour early so’s to get some grub, coffee, straighten up a bit. They made plans for that night, their last night in town— a blues bar featuring George Thorogood, best blues-rock act to hit town in years. It would be a wild night; they’d leave the car at home and cab it. Hey, perhaps they’d start the party a bit early, Ernie figured. Soon as they scored they’d head back home, grab showers, more grub, blow a joint or two, pull off a nap, and then boogie. Yeah!
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