The Back of the Turtle

by Thomas King

  Mara could smell something simmering just inside the door, something hot and spicy. Surely the man hadn’t gone off and left food unattended on the stove. A friend of her grandmother’s had done exactly that. Bobbie Lake had been rendering bear fat when she discovered she was out of cigarettes. A quick trip to town turned into a stop at the Tin Turtle and more than one drink. By the time she got back to the reserve, the bear fat was long gone.

  And so was her trailer.

  Mara tried the door. She hadn’t expected to find it locked, and it wasn’t.

  “Nicholas.”

  Mara had never seen the inside of Crisp’s trailer, and she was surprised by the amount of interior space, which seemed somehow to exceed the exterior dimensions. She had assumed that he would be somewhat disorganized and cluttered in his housekeeping habits, but such was not the case. The place was clean, with none of the mustiness that Mara would have imagined of trailers and single men.

  There were books along one wall, the works arranged alphabetically by author. Some of the titles she recognized: The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga; Eduardo Galeano’s three-volume history, Memory of Fire; Melville’s Moby-Dick; Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis.

  Others were ancient tomes, bound in embossed leather, softened by the centuries.

  Red seemed to be Crisp’s favourite colour. There was a red leather sofa, a red leather chair with a matching ottoman. The table was rose-coloured wood, while the curtains were a crimson variation of a William Morris pattern.

  Mara wouldn’t have imagined the man in this space. Maybe the trailer was his sanctuary, a second skin that Crisp slipped into at the end of each day.

  A pot of what looked to be chili was bubbling on the stove. There was no danger that it would boil over or cook down any time soon. However, it did smell delicious, and now that Mara had come this far, she saw no reason not to go all the way.

  She found a bowl and a spoon. A loaf of heavy multi-grain bread was sitting out on the counter, and she was able to locate the butter with little difficulty. Mara didn’t think that Crisp would mind. He’d probably appreciate that someone had looked in to make sure nothing had burned or caught fire.

  Mara gave the chili a stir and ladled a helping into a bowl. Now that she thought about it, this was probably the same rationale Goldilocks had used to justify her raid on the three bears.

  IT had taken a full day to get to Vancouver, and another four to get to Toronto. Mara hadn’t imagined that any country could be that large. On a whim, she had written down the name of each town and city where the bus had stopped. Hope, Golden, Banff, Calgary, Medicine Hat, Swift Current, Moose Jaw, Regina, Brandon, Winnipeg, Wawa, Sudbury.

  A young woman no older than herself had got on the bus at Gleichen, Alberta, and sat next to her all the way to Winnipeg.

  “Mara.”

  “Celeste.”

  Mara had wanted to tell Celeste that she didn’t need to use so much makeup. There were dried rivulets of mascara on the woman’s cheeks, and the pancake around her eyes had shattered.

  “What’s in Winnipeg?”

  “Boyfriend’s in Gleichen.”

  Celeste smelled of smoke and old sweat. Her hair was black and coarse with red highlights. Her breath tasted of peppermint.

  “You got a boyfriend in Toronto?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s there?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Sometimes that’s best.”

  By the time she reached Toronto, Mara had written the names of over 130 towns in her sketchbook.

  THE chili was somewhat spicier than Mara would have liked, but she finished the bowl and had a second. The bread and butter helped. There was a kettle on the stove. Mara filled it and set it to boil. If Crisp came home in the next while, she’d make him a cup of tea and tell him about her plan. He’d probably want to help, but she didn’t need it. She could manage on her own. She had always managed on her own.

  Mara wandered the trailer with her cup of tea. There were old photographs in old frames, pictures of people at the hot springs, pictures of people on the reserve. Crisp was in some of them, and he didn’t look as though he had aged a day. She found one of a group of young women and was surprised to find her grandmother in the second row.

  Who had taken this? Certainly not Crisp. He wouldn’t have been born yet. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps the man was ageless, a feature of the landscape, such as a tree or a rock, long-lived and constant.

  Mara found a piece of paper and scribbled a note. She rinsed the cup and set it on the rack to dry. She was feeling good now, ready for the task ahead.

  THE bus had been late, had pulled into Toronto at four in the afternoon, and Mara had stepped off the Greyhound into a Southern Ontario heat wave and a city that was melting.

  Before the first week was out, she had found an apartment on Isabella near Church. By the end of the month, she was working at a deli on Queen and had signed up for two workshops at the Ontario College of Art & Design. She watched the bulletin board at the college and came away with a small table easel, a set of cheap brushes, a collection of used oil paints, and a six-pack of canvas boards that had never been opened.

  The rest of that summer and fall had been spent going to every gallery opening she could find, looking at the paintings, studying the techniques, and watching the artists. What they wore. How they moved. What they said.

  Breathless. It had all been breathless.

  And she had wondered if this was how the woman who fell from the sky had felt as she tumbled through space and plummeted to earth.

  Then one day, she looked up, and a year had become fifteen.

  IT took longer than she had expected to raise the trailer hitch off the ball of the pickup. The crank was rusted and stuck, and Mara had to whack it with a piece of wood to break it free. The keys were in the ignition. The motor grunted and complained before it turned over and sent a billow of black smoke into the evening sky.

  She sat in the cab, working the accelerator until the engine evened itself out, and then she pulled it into gear and let it roll forward towards the remaining lights of Samaritan Bay.

  59

  GABRIEL WOKE. HE WAS COLD AND STIFF, AND FOR AN INSTANT he wondered if he might have died when he wasn’t paying attention. But he had simply fallen asleep in the chair on the deck, and what had been evening a short time before was now night. He tried to sit up, only to discover that Soldier had joined him and was lying across his lap.

  It was a crowded arrangement, but not unpleasant.

  Gabriel rubbed the dog’s head and scratched him behind the ears. Soldier’s body was warm, and Gabriel could imagine staying where he was and spending the night under the stars.

  “You want something to eat?”

  As soon as he asked the question, Gabriel realized that he was hungry. Very hungry. Starving in fact. He tried to recall what he had had for lunch, before he remembered that he hadn’t had any lunch at all.

  Breakfast.

  Breakfast with Mara. That was all the food he had had the entire day.

  “If you want to eat, you’re going to have to move.”

  Soldier lifted his head. His eyes were soft and patient. His jowls were draped with drool.

  “Lovely.”

  He should have told Mara, told her who he was and why he was here. Not that it would make any difference.

  Hi, I’m Gabriel Quinn. I killed your family and friends. I killed my sister and her child. I destroyed the river and the forest and all life in the ocean for as far as you can see. Surprise, I’m the author of all that destruction. Are you attracted to me? How about we fall in love, have children, and live happily ever after.

  Soldier barked and rolled off Gabriel’s lap.

  “Happens like that all the time in the movies.”

  Soldier crouched down and began growling under his breath.

  “No, I’m not feeling sorry for myself.”

  And yet he was. Would his life have been any different
if his father hadn’t gone to Minneapolis? Would the family have stayed in Lethbridge and grown old together? What had driven Joe to leave? What had made his mother stay? Why hadn’t he gone home when his father was killed? Why hadn’t he stayed in touch?

  How had he become such a monster?

  Why do we ask the important questions after they’ve been answered?

  GABRIEL opened the refrigerator and took out the boneless chicken thigh. He’d fry it up, turn it into a sandwich.

  “What do you want to eat?”

  Soldier banged into Gabriel’s legs and began turning circles, moaning and groaning and shaking gobs of saliva onto the floor. Gabriel got a can from the cupboard.

  “How about Kidney Surprise?”

  The photograph on the refrigerator door had slipped. Gabriel gently lifted the tape and adjusted the picture. A sister. A nephew. And this glossy piece of paper was all that was left.

  LETHBRIDGE was famous for its winds, but Gabriel had not cared much for the chinooks that rose off the eastern face of the Rockies and levelled everything standing. In the winter, they warmed the land, and this was a welcome relief from the profound cold that settled on the high plains in the dark months.

  “Look at that,” his father would say. “This morning it was twenty below, and now it’s five above.”

  But the chinooks weren’t just a winter phenomenon. They persisted during the spring and the summer, into the fall, and, each time you ventured outside, you had to lean and stand at angles to the land.

  “Gabriel, you go out and play.”

  “It’s too windy, Mum.”

  “Play with your sister,” his mother would say. “Have her show you that flying game she does with her jacket.”

  THE chicken was spongy and coated with a suspicious slick. Gabriel set the thigh next to Soldier’s bowl and went back to the refrigerator in search of something to eat. Eggs, frozen sausage, a withered apple.

  There was always cereal. A meal for all occasions. Milk. Raisins. Gabriel found half a peach at the bottom of the can. Soldier had already finished the Kidney Surprise. The chicken lay untouched on the floor.

  Evidently the dog had standards.

  THE family had had a small house on Lethbridge’s west side. Gabriel’s room was in the basement. It was his space. He was safe there.

  Then one day his sister had come downstairs and marched into his room without knocking.

  “I want to go to the coulees.”

  “You’re not supposed to be in my room.”

  “I want to go to the coulees.”

  “So go.”

  “Mum says I can’t go by myself, that you have to come with.”

  “I have homework.”

  “You always have homework. Caroline says there are pelicans in the coulees.”

  Gabriel had patiently explained that pelicans are ocean birds, and since there wasn’t an ocean within a thousand kilometres, there couldn’t be any pelicans in the coulees.

  Little hadn’t taken logic for an answer.

  “Coulee, coulee, coulee, coulee,” she had chanted, until Gabriel said okay, he’d take her into the coulees this once, and when they didn’t find any pelicans, she could never ask him to do anything ever again.

  GABRIEL had had any number of opportunities to tell Mara who he was. The hot springs, that evening in bed, at breakfast, the moment on the reserve when Mara was hanging the portrait on the door.

  But he hadn’t. Chances were, he wouldn’t. There was no reason. He hadn’t come back to find forgiveness or to start a new life. This wasn’t his home. It had been his mother’s, and, in the end, it had been his sister’s.

  It wasn’t his.

  And what exactly would he say? What would he tell Mara? How would he explain his role in the disaster that killed so many and destroyed so much? Where would he find the justification? “I was curious,” he could offer. “I was curious.”

  Smart. He could blame it on being smart.

  “You want to watch television?”

  Soldier jumped up on the bed and buried his face in a pillow.

  Gabriel put his bowl in the sink. Outside the night was clear, and the moon was full. It lit the tops of the trees and glanced off the breaking waves in the distance. This would be a night for a walk. He wondered if Mara was awake, if she might be interested in such a venture. Walk the beach in the moonlight. Forget about the world. Sit in the sand and wait for the water to come to them.

  And when the time was right, he’d tell her the things he didn’t even want to tell himself.

  “Move over.”

  Instead, Gabriel crawled onto the bed and wrestled the covers away from the dog.

  “IF there are pelicans,” his sister had told him, “then you’ll have to be my slave and do anything I want.”

  “There are no pelicans in the coulees.”

  They had been to the river bottom before with their parents, but this was the first time they had been on their own, and Little was impossible to contain. She raced up and down the trail, hiding in clumps of grass and jumping out to try to scare Gabriel.

  “I saw you in the grass.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  When they reached the big cottonwoods along the Oldman River, his sister signed for him to stop.

  “Eagle!” she shouted.

  “That’s a magpie.”

  “Look, a coyote!”

  “God, Little, that’s a ground squirrel.”

  They spent much of that morning working their way along the bank of the river. There was a large pool with what could have been carp.

  “Are those sharks?”

  “No.”

  They saw a woodpecker, some ducks, and a small black snake. Gabriel showed her where a beaver had started chewing on a tree. By noon, they were hungry and exhausted.

  “Come on,” Gabriel had said. “Let’s go back.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “We have to find the pelicans.”

  “There are no pelicans.”

  “Then what are those?”

  Gabriel searched the sky, but he didn’t see anything.

  “On the water,” his sister had shouted. “On the water.”

  And suddenly, there they were, flying in formation just off the surface of the river. “Pelicans!”

  “Pigeons,” said Gabriel. “Just big pigeons.”

  “Pelicans!”

  “Or they could be … herons.”

  Little had watched the pelicans glide by, and she had reached out with her hand, as though she expected that she could touch them.

  “Pelicans,” she whispered, and she rushed over and threw her arms around Gabriel. “Now you’re my slave.”

  When they got home, Gabriel’s mother took him off to one side.

  “You shouldn’t lie to your sister.”

  “I didn’t lie. They might have been pelicans, and maybe they weren’t.”

  “She loves you.”

  “Sure.”

  Gabriel remembered how his mother had looked at him. “You’re smarter than she is,” she had said, “but she’s got a better heart.”

  GABRIEL couldn’t get to sleep. Soldier was banked against his body and had begun to snore, long, loud snorts that threatened to shake the trailer. Worse, the dog’s damp breath was heavy on the back of his neck.

  He wouldn’t buy Kidney Surprise again.

  The pelicans had been majestic. They had come down the river valley that day as though they owned the world. They hadn’t flushed when they saw Gabriel and Little standing on that sandbar.

  They had held their course.

  Even after they had passed, the birds stayed in a tight grouping, riding the air, until they finally faded and vanished into the vastness of the prairie sky.

  Gabriel adjusted the covers, so that his shoulders weren’t exposed.

  Maybe that’s where he would start. If he decided to tell Mara who he was, he’d begin w
ith the pelicans.

  60

  CRISP COULD FEEL THE FAILING LIGHT GLISTEN ON HIS BACK as he waded ashore. The swim out past the breakwater into the open ocean had been strenuous and exhilarating. And new. No matter how many times he had made the journey, it was always new.

  Already there were signs of resurrection at the edges of the desolation. He had heard the rumours of marine algae and kelp in the sunlit shallows, and there had been a moment, between strokes and breaths, when Crisp imagined that he saw something large rocking gracelessly on the horizon, and he had slowed, rode the waves for a moment, and waited for it to reappear. It was just a swell, no doubt, but he had turned it into a whale he named Fred.

  “Fred, you great heathen,” Crisp had shouted across the water, “welcome home, lad, welcome home!”

  Crisp plodded up the beach through the soft sand, letting the wind and the fading warmth dry his body. It was a fragile beginning, he had to admit, but it was a beginning. First Mara had returned and then Gabriel. The Ruin had pushed life away. Now life was pushing back, filling the vacuum as it has always filled the empty spaces in the world.

  The plankton must have moved in when he wasn’t paying attention. With any luck the small baitfish would begin to appear. Barnacles, urchins, crabs, and then the larger predators. He’d watch for the birds. The seagulls would be first. They always liked to arrive to a party early.

  Perhaps even the turtles would return.

  Crisp found his clothes where he had left them, laid out on a storm-tossed log. How he loved the drama of it all. The uncertainties, the surprises, the tragedies, the foolishness, the sacrifices, the greed.

  People were endlessly amusing. And life? Was there a better game?

  How would it be played today?

  As he pulled his pants on, Crisp caught sight of a shape in the seagrasses, a shape out of place in this realm of liquid lines and soft edges.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “So, whose little lamb are ye?”

  It was a foundation of some sort, pieced together with shells and bones and assorted consumer waste. Crisp walked around the base, examined it from several angles.