Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  She had slept at last and now she felt alive again. That weird business with Nelson-Nilsson felt as if it were behind her. She didn’t want to think about it. She could do all that later, when she was back in the south. Now that she had visited the Distant Early Warning Line, now that she had ticked that box for her mother, she might as well enjoy her last hours in Inuvik. She would be a proper tourist and look around the town. In case she would have to leave in a hurry – she was meant to check out today, and still didn’t know when the next plane would fly – she packed all her things and left her bag inside the door.

  When she came out again Ringnes was splitting logs beside the boiler room. She could see from the steam coiling slowly out of his mouth that the work didn’t trouble him; she had to breathe in little gasps to protect her lungs from the razor-blade air.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘if the airport is open yet?’

  ‘Not yet. Probably later today. Tomorrow for sure.’

  ‘Then do you think I could use your phone to call a taxi? I want to go into town.’

  ‘He quit, did he?’

  ‘Yes . . . He had to drive south. For his interview.’

  Ringnes lifted the axe. ‘That’s funny. Because the passes are still closed. But if you wait in the office for a couple of minutes I’ll run you into town myself. I have to go see about a plane ticket. I’m hoping to fly out tomorrow myself.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  He brought the axe down again, neatly splitting a section of wood. ‘Norway. Home. I could be gone until spring.’

  ‘That’s a long break. Is it business or pleasure?’

  ‘Neither.’ He placed another log on the stump he used as a chopping block. ‘My mother’s not well. I have to go and look after her.’

  Ringnes had an old Ford truck with an upholstered bench that ran the width of the cab. It was a higher ride than Nilsson’s SUV. Driving into town, the trees swept past Fay’s window like the ranks of an army passed in review. She was very hungry. She would eat a big lunch and drink one or two glasses of wine.

  Ringnes drove in silence.

  ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you could drop me at the Mackenzie Hotel. I want to see if they have a room for tonight.’

  Instead of just dropping her off in the parking lot he turned into a space and switched off the engine.

  ‘I should have told you before,’ he said. ‘You’re good to stay tonight as well, if you want. But you’ll have to check out tomorrow morning. We can’t hold the room for you after that.’

  ‘So your engineers are finally going to make it.’

  ‘They’ll fly in from Whitehorse in the morning. I’ll be leaving around then, I hope, but my assistant can look after them. And you too, if you need help.’

  ‘What time do you need me to check out?’

  ‘That’s the other thing I need to tell you. There’s a problem with your credit card.’

  ‘Is there?’ She had put money into her Visa account before she left England so she could use it as a roving ATM card.

  ‘I couldn’t put your number through the night you checked in, but I remembered to try again this morning. It came up declined. So I called the company. They said that your card had been cancelled.’

  ‘Cancelled? Why would it be cancelled?’ She felt herself blush, even though she’d done nothing wrong. And then she remembered. ‘It must be because of unusual activity. Because I’m suddenly using my card in a foreign country, they think someone might have stolen it. They did this to me before once, when I went over to France. I’ll ring them and confirm that it’s me. Then they’ll reactivate it.’

  ‘That’s not it. I called them myself when it came up declined – I kind of went to bat for you.’ For the first time, it occurred to Fay to wonder if he lived alone. ‘They said the card was cancelled, outright. You can’t just reactivate it. You have to go into your bank if you want to get it re-issued. Even then it would take time.’

  ‘Cancelled outright?’

  ‘Yep . . .’ He put both hands on the wheel. ‘The thing is, your bank thinks that you’re dead.’

  She turned away from him and took in the car park. For the first time she noticed the inuksuk which stood by the entrance. It was a crude human figure made from flat slabs of limestone fitted together to suggest arms and legs and a trunk and a head. The Inuit used to construct them as landmarks, she had read, or to help them herd caribou into their killing grounds. Or maybe, perhaps, they built them so as not to feel lonely, maybe even just for fun: it’s not like you could build a proper snowman up here – the snow would be much too cold and dry for that. It would just blow away on you. Not like back in Greenwich Park, herself and her mother, rolling balls of wet, sticky snow into big creaking boulders.

  Fay and her mother used to have accounts at the same bank. After her mother’s final stroke, two months before, Fay had filled in a lot of forms to close her mother’s accounts and transfer what money there was to her own. It was supposed to be paying for this trip, her first real escape after twenty-five years of nursing her crippled mother. Perhaps she’d put down the wrong number somewhere. Or perhaps the bank had mixed them up.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I still have some cash. I’ll pay you in dollars and sort the card out later.’

  He looked uncomfortable. ‘Don’t worry about that. You keep your cash for now. Without a card, you’re going to need it.’

  ‘I can pay you,’ she insisted. ‘To be perfectly honest, I’m not really dead.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’

  ‘I’m not a fraud, either.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  She reached for the door handle. ‘I’ll sort out the card. I won’t leave you out of pocket.’

  He started the engine. Now he seemed, if anything, a little embarrassed. ‘I know you won’t. The fact is, that room you’re in is paid for anyway. The engineering firm put a retainer on every chalet in the place. So whether you pay me or not, I’m still looked after. You’re not even on the register.’

  She thought about that and decided to be amused. ‘So what you’re saying is that I’m not really here.’

  She climbed down from the cab, and paused in the half-opened door.

  ‘Yep. But enjoy the rest of your stay.’

  It was Friday afternoon in Inuvik, Friday night in London. Fay’s bank would not reopen until Monday. She must wait until then to come back from the dead.

  She went into the restaurant of the Mackenzie Hotel and ordered a steak and a glass of wine then noticed the prices on the menu. While she was waiting for the food she counted her dollars – fifteen hundred and change. Everything here cost a fortune. She needed to go somewhere cheaper to sort herself out.

  The restaurant was empty apart from herself and two middle-aged couples who sat at opposite ends of the room murmuring over their lunch. She could have eaten in the hotel’s busy sports bar, which was loud with voices and the build-up to some hockey game. But the Canadian money felt strange in her fingers. Her cards didn’t work, and her English mobile phone wouldn’t connect to any network up here. She was alone in the world and wanted to enjoy it. The food, when it came, was delicious. She drank another glass of wine and decided to walk down the main street: it was her last chance to explore. There was no wind today (or was it tonight?) so the frost wouldn’t bite her. The town was very small – a handful of streets in a bend of the river – and she already had her bearings. If she got too cold, in her thin London winter clothes, she could always duck into the Eskimo Inn and warm herself a while. There was also the little café where she’d eaten breakfast with Nelson. Or she could walk until her hands and face went numb and then take a taxi back to the chalet, unpack her bags and get some more sleep. It was entirely up to her.

  There was a haze in the air that made haloes round the street lamps. Cars and trucks rumbled past, their
tyres sucking hollow on the packed snow in the street. She saw headlights flare and fade in windscreens, dim faces behind them. Two kids were kissing in the alley between the Eskimo Inn and the government building. The lights of the cars, ebbing and flowing, threw romantic shadows from the banks of dirty snow. There was music too, across the street somewhere. It came from the Mad Trapper Pub, directly opposite.

  If she wanted any cigarettes she would have to buy her own. Perhaps, she thought, I can get some in that bar. There was a perfectly good convenience store just down the street but she decided to ignore it. She would just have a quick look inside the pub.

  She crossed the road, was about to climb the steps to the door of the pub, when she saw Nelson coming towards her down the street. Fay thought: I could dodge up the stairs to the bar to avoid him. But she guessed that he too would be going up those steps. And he must have seen her already, so she couldn’t just turn and walk the other way. There was nothing else for it: she went past the steps and continued towards him. Better to meet him out here in the street.

  When Nelson saw her he slowed. She thought for a moment that he wouldn’t stop. When he did, it was at a safe distance. He looks worried, she thought. And then: Is he frightened of me?

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hi.’

  That should have been it, for the second or third time. They should have stepped politely around each other and continued on their way. But they stood there, face to face, not knowing what to say.

  ‘I’m on my way to see the police,’ he said in the end. ‘To tell them about Bert.’

  How many parts of that statement were lies? Even Fay knew, after only two days in the town, that the police station was back the other way, across from the Mackenzie Hotel. She knew where he’d been going.

  The music rose and fell as the bar door opened and closed. A cigarette appeared on the pub’s darkened porch.

  ‘You should do that. Straighten things out before they get any worse.’

  He stepped aside. He can see that I don’t believe in him. But he doesn’t care: he doesn’t believe in me either. What a good understanding we have.

  A voice called out from the darkness above. ‘Hey, Nelson? That you down there?’

  He looked up into the shadow. ‘Mike?’

  ‘You coming in here?’

  Nelson glanced at Fay. ‘I guess.’

  ‘You found Bert yet? I asked a couple of people, but they haven’t seen him either.’

  ‘No. No sign of him.’

  ‘Really . . . That’s too bad . . . Well, come on up and have a beer and we’ll talk it over. You should probably go tell the cops.’

  ‘I’ll be up in a minute. I’m just saying goodbye to someone.’

  A cigarette meteored past them and hit the ice in a shower of sparks. The door opened and closed and they were alone again.

  Fay looked at the cigarette butt. It lay there six feet away, still lit, but unable to melt the ice and put itself out. The ice is so cold, she thought, that it won’t let it die yet.

  ‘Well,’ said Nelson, ‘goodbye.’

  He offered her his hand. She ignored it. ‘That man up there. Mike. You know him well?’

  ‘Sort of . . . I met him in the bar my first night in town. He’s a local guy. He thought I looked like Bert.’

  ‘He knows your brother too.’

  ‘Mike is into history books. He said Bert and him used to talk about the old days.’

  ‘So he knows you, and he knows your brother?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Maybe we should go in for a drink.’

  Nelson stopped inside the door and studied the scene that had once again been set for him. He smelled beer and whisky, saw soft lights, dark wood, the gleaming taps and bottles. He could make sense of his life, if he wished, as a regression of bars. After a while you no longer went to the places where the young people went. You no longer talked to the kind of women who you knew deserved better. You looked for the sort of places where you recognized your friends, including the ones you’d never met before, and you avoided the pool table to keep out of fights. He no longer expected anything from any given night other than what he had experienced a thousand times before. If you were lucky, you got what you paid for.

  But this place still had something about it. It was the only pub in the whole western Arctic, the last proper bar in the world. Cold and dark waited just outside its walls yet here they all were, men and women, drinking defiance at the end of the road. The people who came here were, for the most part, almost as transient as he was, and no longer young. But to Nelson, in here, they didn’t seem done yet: they still seemed pleased to have made it this far.

  Mike sat alone in the back where it was quiet. He wore his muskrat hat with the earflaps pulled up at right angles to his head. This made him look startled, though his black eyes watched them calmly as they came across the floor. Nelson wondered again how old Mike was: anywhere between forty and seventy, he would have guessed. With some of these locals it was difficult to tell.

  The house band was a four-piece – three men in jeans and checked shirts and a huge lead guitarist with long hair and a kaftan. They played a boogie-woogie instrumental and people started to dance.

  By leaning close and shouting Fay could still get Mike to hear her.

  ‘So what did you and Bert talk about?’

  He was watching the band, one leg crossed over the other, his foot tapping the air. ‘Mostly about recent history – my own life, and my dad’s, and all the other Inuvialuit. And about what I’m doing now.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m a bear monitor. I fly out with the decontamination crews and drive around the sites on a quad bike. If I see a bear I light some firecrackers. If that doesn’t scare it off I might have to shoot it.’

  ‘Sites?’

  ‘Radar sites. The ones they don’t need any more, way out on the tundra. They’re full of PCBs and asbestos and diesel oil and all sorts of crud. The government has to clean them up to protect the environment.’

  There it is, she thought. Click click click, like the meshing of gears. But she asked the question anyway. ‘What radar sites?’

  ‘Distant Early Warning. The type of radar they use now has a much longer range, so they don’t need so many ground stations to join the line together. So now they’re dismantling the stations they don’t need any more. My dad helped to build the DEW Line back in the fifties. Now I’m taking it down again.’

  First the clock. Then her grandfather’s name. Now the Distant Early Warning. What other threads of her life had Bert Nilsson been holding?

  ‘My grandfather was up here in the fifties. He also helped to set up the DEW Line. Don’t you think that’s a coincidence?’

  ‘Not really. If you were up here in the fifties then chances are you had something do with the DEW Line. It was the only game in town.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The DEW Line changed everything up here. It was the first time Ottawa really gave a damn about the Arctic. Before that they just left it to the fur traders and missionaries.’

  ‘But back in the fifties they were scared of the Russians?’

  He laughed. ‘The Russians? Who cares about them? It was the Americans they were worried about. First they built the Alaska highway across our territory in World War Two, because of the Japs in the Aleutian Islands. Then at the end of the war they sent planes to photograph the Canadian Arctic, hoping to find new islands that they could claim for themselves. After that they starting pushing for the DEW Line to be built on our soil to watch for Russian bombers. At that point Ottawa finally woke up and realized that the Americans had more of a presence up here than Canada did. And that the people who actually lived here didn’t give a damn if we were Ameri­can or Canadian. So Ottawa made sure we got jobs building the DEW Line and started paying for health an
d welfare and education. Meantime the price of furs had gone to hell, so people moved off the land and started living in settlements for the schools and health and welfare. That was that. Welcome to Canada.’

  ‘The police were up here though, weren’t they? Before the DEW Line?’

  ‘Yeah. They were here. Mounties, missionaries and the Hudson Bay Company. Three different ways to get fucked.’

  ‘Not a patriot, then.’

  He drew himself up in his chair and saluted. ‘Au contraire. Sworn to defend the realm. Canadian Rangers. Spare-time reservist. I get twelve days’ pay a year, a World War Two Lee–Enfield rifle and two hundred rounds of free ammo. All I have to do is watch for strange activity when I’m out on the land.’

  ‘Ever see any?’

  ‘All the time.’ He was watching a young woman approach them through the crowd. ‘Never any Russians though.’

  When Nelson came back from a trip to the bar a young woman had joined Fay and Mike. She looked to be somewhere in her thirties and had jet-black hair tied back in a ponytail. To Nelson, the tooth she was missing made her seem even prettier.

  ‘You look like your brother,’ she told him.

  Her name was Rose. She was pleasantly drunk. When she talked she’d reach across the table and put her hand on his forearm. She wanted him to know what a nice guy his brother was. She hadn’t known that Bert was missing, though he hadn’t been in touch lately. She really hoped he’d be okay. ‘He could have just taken a plane somewhere. Sometimes he had to go away.’