The Back of the Turtle

by Thomas King

  Dorian watched the spectacle for the first hour, before he hit the mute button and effectively turned the images into a screen saver. He wouldn’t have guessed it, but watching the spill without the sound was quite soothing. He found himself drifting along with the effluence as it was flushed out of the holding ponds, and finding an unexpected peace in the chaos of the moment.

  Nothing to be done about the spills. Shit happens. It would happen again. The Athabasca would shove the toxins into the Mackenzie, and the Mackenzie would dump everything into the Arctic. The river wasn’t that pristine to begin with. For much of the last century, sawmills and farms along the way had been dumping furans, chlorinated dioxins, and phosphorus into the watershed. The river would eventually clean itself.

  That’s what rivers did.

  Still, the spill was a public relations nightmare and an economic annoyance. Domidion would be mauled in the media. Every past misstep that the corporation had made would be dug up and dragged naked through the streets. Stock prices, which were already unacceptably low, would go into temporary free fall, and any bonuses were now at the bottom of the Athabasca.

  Along with the heavy metals from the tailing ponds.

  All this before lawyers got their hands on the matter. Dorian had no idea what the legal ramifications might be, but he could hear a herd of class-action lawsuits stampeding over the horizon.

  He had spent much of the day fielding questions from managers of large pension funds who were heavily invested in the corporation.

  Yes, Dorian agreed, it was unfortunate, but now was not the right time to panic.

  No, he had insisted, now was not the time to sell.

  In between calls, Dorian would glance at the flat-screen. He had expected that the media would have come up with new and more dramatic images of the spill. But they hadn’t.

  Excellent. No fresh logs for the fire.

  In a week, no more than two, the shock factor would wear off, the hysterics would run their course, and it would be time for a reasoned and civilized conversation.

  Until then, it was Dorian’s job to hold the blaze in check until it burned itself out.

  WINTER arrived at a little after four, carrying a small box.

  “Your new phone,” she said. “We were able to retrieve all the information from the old one.”

  “What about the limo?”

  “Zebras,” said Winter. “A number of other corporations were affected as well.”

  Dorian was momentarily cheered as he imagined an angry pack of Bay Street barons standing at city curbs, trying to wave down cabs.

  “What the hell is Security doing?”

  “Everything they can.”

  Dorian turned the sound back on. Dramatic music filled his office. “You see that?” he said. “You see that?”

  “I do.”

  “I want us to go on the offensive.”

  “Sir?”

  “With the spill.” Dorian hit the mute button. “I don’t want us running for cover on this. I don’t want us looking guilty, because we’re not.”

  “It is our facility.”

  “Yes,” said Dorian, “of course it is. But the occasional spill is the price we pay for cheap energy, and I think we should say this.”

  “Public Relations has suggested that we keep a low profile for the time being.”

  “No,” said Dorian. “I think that’s the wrong approach. We don’t apologize. We educate.”

  “Educate?”

  “You remember the shooting at that elementary school?”

  “Sandy Hook, in Newtown, Connecticut.”

  “That’s the one. How many people were killed?”

  Winter closed her eyes for a moment. “Twenty children and six adults.”

  “Terrible,” said Dorian. “And who got blamed?”

  “The man who did the killing.”

  “No.” Dorian could feel his calm slipping. “Everyone blamed the National Rifle Association and their policies on gun control. There was a huge outcry against guns.”

  “Yes,” said Winter, “there was.”

  “And what did the head of the NRA do?”

  “Wayne LaPierre.”

  “Yes,” said Dorian. “He stood up in front of television cameras and had the courage to say that we needed more guns, that only a good guy with a gun could stop a bad man with a gun.”

  “According to the accepted studies,” said Winter, “that’s inaccurate.”

  “Inaccurate?” Dorian was shouting now. “Of course it’s inaccurate. It’s crap. Guns don’t make the world safer. What did that ER doctor find?”

  “Art Kellermann at Emory University.”

  “That’s the one. Didn’t he determine that guns in homes were thirty times more likely to be involved in the death of a member of the household than be involved in self-defence.”

  “Forty-three times.”

  “And yet LaPierre stood up with a straight face and said America needed more guns. You see where I’m going with this?”

  “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.”

  “Exactly. Winston Churchill, right?”

  “Joseph Goebbels.”

  “I should do an interview.” Dorian sat back and took control of his breathing. “With that woman from En Garde.”

  “Manisha Khan.”

  “Let’s set it up.”

  Winter adjusted her glasses. “We’ve received the psychological evaluation on Dr. Quinn.”

  “And?”

  “No flags,” said Winter. “Everything was inside the box.”

  “What about the writing on the walls?”

  “Evidently Dr. Quinn was creating a list of man-made disasters.”

  “And that didn’t strike our boys in white as odd?”

  “They thought it eccentric,” said Winter, “but evidently lots of people make lists.”

  Ms. Khan would be a formidable opponent. She’d want to squeeze concessions out of him. Responsibility. Sorrow. Remorse. A firm purpose of amendment. And she would get none of that. She’d be expecting a repentant company executive to walk onto her show, but what would arrive at the studio would be a corporate warrior, armed and ready. No retreat, no negotiation, no fear. Tell the truth. That’s what Ms. Khan’s viewing audience would hear. North America needs oil. The price of freedom is energy.

  “Parliament is going to hold hearings,” said Winter.

  “Then we have nothing to worry about,” said Dorian. “Do you know the fatal flaw of democracy?”

  “People?”

  “Democracy offers its enemies the means by which to destroy it.” Dorian pushed back from his desk. “Anything else?”

  “Your wife called,” said Winter. “She’d like to talk with you when you have a chance.”

  “She wants to buy a house in Orlando,” said Dorian. “As if Alberta isn’t enough of a problem.”

  “And Dr. Toshi’s office called again.”

  Dorian checked the television. Incredible. The networks were going to wear those images out. What the hell had happened to investigative journalism in the country?

  “Look at that, Winter.” Dorian stabbed a finger at the flat-screen. “Where’s the pride?”

  “Sir?”

  “Strength,” said Dorian. “That’s what we need now. Strength and firm resolve.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m going to the gym.”

  Dorian flexed his abdominals and squeezed the muscles in his upper arms and shoulders. The more he thought about taking the offensive, the more he liked it.

  “If anyone wants me, they can find me there.”

  Why be a lamb when you could be a lion? He tried to recall what John Wayne had said in one of his movies. Something about never apologizing, that it was a sign of weakness.

  Good enough for the Duke, good enough for him.

  55

  BY THE TIME GABRIEL GOT BACK TO THE TRAILER, THE FOG was breaking apart along the horizon and patches of blue were push
ing through. He eased himself into the rocking chair and stared out at the cedars.

  So, he had finally found the house where his mother and sister had lived, where his nephew had been born. He had stood on the porch and waited for some fragment of emotion to overtake him.

  Rage, sorrow, loss.

  And all he had felt was the chill of a low-pressure system and a freshening wind off the ocean.

  Soldier emerged from the trees and limped to the deck.

  “The prodigal son,” said Gabriel. “The return of the native.”

  Soldier lay down by Gabriel’s feet, turning his back to the man.

  “You’re a fine one to complain. I’m not the one who ran off.”

  MINNEAPOLIS had been a world away from Lethbridge. Gabriel had never seen so many buildings, so much traffic. Joe had found a two-bedroom apartment near the University of Minnesota campus.

  “When are Mum and Little coming?”

  Gabriel hadn’t cared for Minneapolis. He missed the open sky of the prairies. He missed the people on the reserve at Standoff. He even missed the wind.

  That first weekend in the city, they had had breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall café called Al’s, where you sat on stools at a long counter. Breakfast was good, especially the hash browns, and afterwards Joe had taken Gabriel for a walk on the campus.

  “Place has over twenty libraries.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yeah, it does,” said his father. “Guy in the Second Precinct has a son who goes to the U, and he told me that.”

  “Twenty libraries?”

  “And there’s an Indian centre over on Franklin. We should go there and pay our respects.”

  “I have a lot of studying to do.”

  “All you do is study.”

  “You want me to have good grades, don’t you?”

  “We can stop by this weekend. I’ve got the Saturday off. Maybe there’s a drum group needs a couple of good singers.”

  They had walked across a bridge and looked down at the Mississippi. The river wasn’t as impressive as Gabriel had thought it would be. It was muddy. That was the first thing he had noticed.

  The water was the colour of mud.

  GABRIEL watched the dog roll over and catch the slanting sun on his belly. With any luck, the evening sky would be crystal, and there would be stars. Gabriel slipped his shoe off and rubbed the dog with his foot.

  “And nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.”

  Soldier let loose a long, deep sigh.

  Late. That was his great sin. He had not acted in time, and it had been a grievous mistake. He knew that now. He should have known it sooner.

  “Do you like poetry?” Gabriel pushed his foot under Soldier’s chin. “Do you like Robert Frost?”

  What else had the old laureate said?

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

  It was a lovely sentiment, but poets tended to overstate emotions, to play at the extremes of elation and depression, never spending much time mucking about in the middle. No one was obligated to take you in. Home wasn’t a place. At best, it was a shifting illusion, a fiction you created to mask the fact that, in the end, you were alone in the world.

  Gabriel wondered if Mara would stay on the reserve for the night or if she would go back to the yellow house. He shouldn’t have walked away like that. He should have stayed. He could have spent more time in his mother’s home.

  Home.

  Maybe Frost was right. After all those years, Rose had come home. The band had taken her in. They had taken his sister in as well.

  THE Minneapolis American Indian Center was a multi-storey concrete and wood structure with dark windows that felt like the open mouths of caves.

  “You see the wood designs in the facade?” Joe had asked Gabriel, as the two of them stood in front of the building. “George Morrison. He’s a Chippewa artist. If we’re lucky, we might meet him.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “It’s where the Indians are.”

  Gabriel was surprised to discover that he liked the overall effect of the patterns that Morrison had created. More than anything, the geometrical shapes reminded him of mathematics.

  “I miss Mum. I miss Little.”

  “So do I,” his father had said. “And they’ll be here in no time.”

  IT had been waiting for him when he returned from India. The blank card with the photograph.

  Little.

  That was what he had always called her. Little. For little sister. The Little he had left had been a twelve-year-old girl. The Little who was smiling at him in the photograph was a grown woman with an infant son.

  Gabriel found the stuffed puppy he had bought years before at the Calgary airport. It was in a plastic bag in a closet. He was pretty sure that babies liked stuffed toys, and he thought that he might buy a stuffed cat as well. Or a hippopotamus, or a penguin, or a duck. But first he needed to find his sister. And his nephew.

  “Hi, Little,” he’d say when his sister opened the door. “I’m back.”

  “Hi, baby,” he’d tell the child. “I’m your uncle. Surprise.”

  THAT Saturday, they went to the Indian Center. Joe introduced himself to a woman at the reception desk and wound up in a conversation with one of the counsellors, a stocky man in a leather vest whose head bobbed about as though it weren’t completely attached to his neck.

  “Welcome to Anishinabe territory,” the man told Joe. “You guys know any Black Lodge tunes?”

  Gabriel was sorry he hadn’t brought a book with him.

  “This is my son,” Joe told the man. “He’s a real good singer.”

  Joe and the man settled into a long conversation about drum groups, and Gabriel wandered off in search of the Chippewa artist.

  He didn’t find him.

  Instead, he found a gymnasium with a basketball game in progress. He leaned against the wall, while the teams raced up and down the floor, shouting, pushing each other, fighting for the ball. Gabriel had never had a strong interest in sports, but as he watched, he imagined that it might be fun to come down to the centre on a weekend and give basketball a try.

  One of the better players looked as though he had just stepped off a movie set. He was lanky with dark skin and a long ponytail tied back with a red leather thong. Gabriel was impressed with the guy’s skill, the way he could slide through traffic, get above the rim for a rebound, sink a shot with another player in his face.

  Gabriel was about to leave to find his father when the guy took a shot from the top of the key. It was short. The ball rattled off the rim and bounced to where Gabriel was standing. He picked the ball up and stepped onto the court.

  “You got a great shot,” Gabriel told him, and tossed the ball back.

  The guy caught the ball, bounced it a couple times, and said, “What the fuck do you want, white boy?”

  When he found his way back to the lobby, Joe was waiting for him.

  “So what do you think of the place?”

  “Great,” Gabriel told his father. “Really great.”

  THE envelope had had no return address, and nothing to indicate who had sent it. The heavy block letters on the envelope weren’t Little’s, and his sister would have written a note. The only clue was the postmark.

  Samaritan Bay.

  Gabriel had gone on the Internet that evening to find the place. And there it was. A small town on the coast, known for its turtle-nesting beach and natural hot springs. There were photographs of the annual turtle festival, photographs of a music festival, photographs of people playing on the beach.

  At first, he hadn’t noticed it. Just a mark on the map. Above the town itself.

  The Smoke River Reserve.

  Joe was from Leech Lake in Minnesota. Gabriel knew that. His father had talked about the place, had told stories of growing up in bogs and swarms of mosquitoes, had talked about brothers and sisters, cousins,
uncles, and aunties. Not with any great longing, but with fondness. Listening to the stories, Gabriel understood that growing up in Leech Lake hadn’t been all that easy, but his father’s attachment to the place and the people had been enduring.

  Rose had had no such attachment to Smoke River. Gabriel had asked his mother about the reserve on more than one occasion.

  “What was Smoke River like?”

  “Smoke River’s got nothing to do with me, and it’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Do we have relations there?”

  “We’ve got nothing there,” his mother had said. “That place doesn’t exist.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It doesn’t exist.”

  Why hadn’t he thought of the reserve sooner? When he discovered that his mother and sister had left Lethbridge, when he discovered that they had packed up and disappeared, why hadn’t he thought of Smoke River?

  “My mother was from the reserve,” Gabriel told the dog. “Did I tell you that?”

  Soldier lay perfectly still in the sun.

  “After my father was killed, they moved back here from Lethbridge and didn’t tell me.”

  Soldier flicked an ear.

  “She was angry with my father for taking the posting in Minneapolis. I guess she was angry with me as well.”

  Soldier opened one eye.

  “You think it was my fault?”

  Soldier opened the other eye.

  “They knew where I was. They could have written. They could have phoned.”

  THE evening of his father’s death, he had called his mother to tell her what happened. He expected that she would be devastated, and perhaps she was, but the voice on the phone had contained no emotion.

  “What do I do?”

  “Bury him.”

  “No, I mean when are you coming down?”

  “Not,” his mother had said.

  “What?”

  “Your father made his decision. You, too.”

  “You have to come for the funeral!”

  “That’s for you to do.”

  By then Gabriel was shouting. “You should have come with us! You were supposed to come with us!”

  There was a long silence when neither of them spoke, when Gabriel wasn’t sure if his mother was still on the phone. “Mum?”