Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  “Well,” she said to Gran. “Now I’m truly a fundamentalist in motion.”

  “A what?”

  “Fundamentalist in motion. Like you told me all the time when I was a little girl.”

  Gran laughed, grabbed for the peach. “No, Tomato. I said a fundamentalist in your emotions.”

  “Emotions.”

  “Your head,” Gran tapped peach to grey temple, “worries that life is chaos. But your heart refuses to believe it.” She replaced the peach on the hearthstone. “And that’s why you’re leaving.”

  “You can tell?”

  “Oh, Pepper.”

  Mum and Gran drove Seri to the office, for a quick goodbye party. The current branch supervisor, Anselm, loaned Seri an ancient company car, gave her a detailed map and a pair of phone numbers.

  “If you’re driving through Calgary,” he said, “you might give me a call. I’ll be there in a week.”

  Seri drove all the way to Clearbrook with Gran, along to visit an old friend in a retirement home. It was lovely, spending the last hour together. When they were about to part on Clearbrook Road, Gran leaned in through the passenger window.

  “I want you to have this.” She handed Seri a beautiful antique pocket watch. “In case you’re not back for your spring birthday. It belonged to your grandfather, Reverend Finnegan.”

  Seri loved it at once. She waved at Gran, shuffling across the street to the retirement home, then looked down at the gift. Silver, with intricate detail on the casing and a delicate chain. When she glanced up again, her granny was almost at the home door. Seri backed the car quickly, zipped open the window for one more goodbye.

  “Goodbye!” she called.

  Gran turned on the walk and waggled her finger. “Not goodbye,” she chided. “Never goodbye again. Always see you soon.”

  Seri smiled at the old game.

  “See you soon,” she said.

  She drove off, hoping it was true.

  † † †

  The drive into the Prairie Region was uneventful, except for one night in Lethbridge, in that creepy Marquis Hotel with the empty elevator that kept ringing and going up and down. Just below Seri’s window, in the hotel gardens, a coven of children had tended a bonfire all night long, and in its chaotic light performed a puppet show. The fire cracked and sizzled, but the children made no sound at all, and no one came to shoo them home: not parents, not police, not hotel staff. Who would deliberately come to a city filled with such perceptible, distilled weirdness? Seri hoped it was her first and last visit. She rose early Saturday, sped to the city limit on Highway X to Calgary.

  Why did Rooke pick her for this promotion?

  She had liked her old desk job at CSIS. Analysis, collecting, and collating perishable information used for threat and risk assessments in Ottawa, crunching unclassified information, ordering the chaos. The old job was systematic and time sensitive. It had symmetry and closure. It was nine to five, coffee and lunch.

  She stopped at a drugstore in High River, bought sugarless gum and a postcard of three magpies in a willow. She started the Pontiac again, noticed a cough in the engine, noticed the sky: dark cumulonimbus clouds squatting all along the western foothills, rolling north as far as she could see. Looks like snow, she thought. Maybe I should get a hotel just to be safe. She booked into the Bluebird Motel, hoping for the storm to exhaust itself. The blizzard blew in at noon and went into hysterics by evening, convulsing across the prairie and rattling the motel windows all night.

  Unable to sleep through the racket, she read till first light, rotating the Bible and the logic text. In the wee hours after midnight the rotation suddenly struck her as absurd. She was wise enough to know the importance of dialogue between oppositions, what Granny Finnegan called the dialectic. Serendipity’s whole heritage was dialectic, gosh sakes. Both sides of Mum’s family were obsessive and pugnacious in their worldviews, the Finnegans priests, the Caseys engineers. The Hamms were diplomats, alchemists of dialogue. But Seri often struggled to see logic in the Bible or sacrament in the logic. Often she just craved fundamentalist certainty.

  In the morning the highways were still icy, lit with watery sun. The car coughed once and started. Meeting with Rooke at eleven-thirty, boot it and pray. She bit off half a gum stick and wrapped the other half neatly, putting it in her pocket. Who argues with God? No one.

  She said a small prayer and stepped on the accelerator, blowing worries out the tailpipe to mingle with snow, ice, light.

  † † †

  Pierre Anselm Kanashiro was tall and thin as a hickory wand. He had the casual stare of one who travelled often enough to have never really been anywhere, the service’s most itinerant investigator. He dressed in white shirts, bow ties, and black jeans. Claimed to be nondescript to the point of oddity, but knew better. Claimed to belong to the oldest Japanese Canadian family in Newfoundland, but acknowledged with an eye twinkle that you knew better. He was sipping a Tahitian Treat Slurpee, which Serendipity thought a funny thing to do on a snowy day.

  “Well-o, Ms. Hamm,” Anselm said. “Didn’t expect to see you again. That was a good going-away party. Good pumpkin pie.”

  Serendipity watched the tow truck winch the Pontiac. She grinned at the screeches and clanks, delighted to see that engine chained and dragged by something as tactile and mechanical as a tow truck.

  “Why doesn’t the service get some decent cars?” she said.

  “Such-o?”

  “El Camino, Duster, Dart.”

  “You were born in the wrong century,” Anselm said. “You’re an Enlightenment rationalist, eighteenth-century man. Like a sip?”

  Serendipity removed a half stick of gum from her pocket and deftly peeled the paper. “Does anyone know how to reach Rooke?”

  “Nobody’s seen this Rooke in seven years.” Anselm sipped the last of the Tahitian Treat, crushed the cup, and dropped it to the sidewalk. “And nobody really ever saw the man anyway, know what I mean? I’ve wondered whether he’s a figment of our imaginations.”

  Seri chewed hard. “Someone knows something about his secret branch. The letter was totally official.”

  “Mucho strange-o.”

  Serendipity leaned down to pick up the cup.

  “As for T.F. Rooke,” Anselm said, “still alive and working the regions, that is a scenario I can’t even imagine.”

  “I’m not looking for imagination.”

  “Hey, never knew the man.” Anselm twisted his bow tie. “Goodbye Seri. Keep both my phone numbers. Perhaps we meet again.”

  “Wait a minute,” Serendipity said. She checked her antique pocket watch, Gran’s gift, then stuffed it in her pack’s pocket. “Can I borrow another car or something? I’m late.”

  “Sorry, the Pontiac was a personal loan. In terms of official policy you are completely out of my jurisdiction. According to the memo, I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

  “Can you at least give me a ride?”

  “Who are you?” He smiled.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Sorry. Appointment. Could give you bus fare.”

  “Gosh, Anselm. That’s harsh.”

  So she shouldered her pack and walked north on Crowchild Trail, into the storm, toward an address she didn’t know and a promotion she doubted, to knock on the door of a man she hadn’t seen in a century.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ten Bottles of Coke

  Lor stared at the ceiling, dreaming of bellboys. The radiator pinged in polyrhythms. Outside, wind shrieked from torn cloud, littered the streets with snappy branches.

  Oh man, this escape wasn’t working, was it?

  Lethbridge was every bit as weird as Underwood. Lor felt a swell of claustrophobia, walked to the window, pressed his fingertips against the bitten glass.

  I gotta bust out of this snow globe, he thought.

  Minutes later he was clipping down the steps of the Marquis, out into the chill, where supercooled drizzle glazed textures of brick, bark, pavement.
He stopped to catch his breath, lungs freezing. The sky roared down at him. He choked.

  Jesus Christ, how could the horizons pin down that much sky?

  He looked out over London Avenue, and it was wide and long as the Mississippi, chugging toward that endless blue reservoir. He coughed, tried to catch his breath. He needed to walk, get lost in the streets, washed clean, remember? A block to downtown, where he could lose himself to hardy shoppers and vagabonds. But though the streets were strange, they were uncomfortably familiar as well. All the eyes this morning were intimate, lingered on him for long seconds, took the measure of his thirty years. Who were these people?

  Two Japanese electricians with laughter in their eyes, carrying a ladder. Wasn’t Lethbridge a destination for displaced Japanese Canadians in the Second World War? Hutterite women in handmade dresses and polka-dot kerchiefs, ruddy faces, language he didn’t understand. That bum with two hotdogs and one tooth. What was his name again? Skeleton Tim, something. Those girls with the Chicago Bulls caps. Blackfoot Nation. But Blood or Piegan? How would he know?

  They all had a whiff of familiarity. Acquaintances? Somebody’s brother? Old lovers? People who used to come see the band, back when Franklin ruled the local counterculture—strung it together with punkish bon mots, wound it tight with the force of his temperament? Lor wanted to flee the streets. He needed breakfast: settle the stomach, settle the mind.

  He stepped into the Kresge’s. His glasses fogged immediately, but he knew each step to the diner bar, where you could once get two eggs, hash browns, toast, and a small Coke for a dollar ninety-nine.

  “Hi sweetie.” A reedy voice. “Where you been?”

  “Just out.” He shrugged, mounted a stool at the speckled counter, removed his icy glasses. His vision was cloudy, but he noticed whiskey-pored codgers and a bearded Hutterite, Lethbridge archetypes at breakfast. Somewhere an old radio squawked Max Webster’s “Beyond the Moon.”

  “Still a dollar ninety nine?” he said. “Still sub coffee for Coke?”

  Everyone looked at him like he was nuts.

  “What do you think, sweetie, the price is going to go up? Only been ten years. But jeez, that coffee for Coke is gross. This is breakfast.”

  The Hutterite laughed, while a glazed branch screeched on the window glass. Wind whistled over bricks and frost-heaved pavement. A sheen of glittering snow shook from the roof, pixelating the morning air.

  Lor heard sizzle and the smack of a plate. He put his glasses back on, grabbed a chunk of brown toast, dipped into runny egg.

  “What do you mean ten years?” he said, mouth full.

  The waitress turned, leaned into the counter. Lor knew her immediately, the stub nose, the amazing beehive hairdo.

  “Where you been eating?” she said. “Skipping breakfast?”

  “No.” He swallowed thickly, gulped hot coffee to melt the glob in his chest.

  “You getting the band back together?” she said. “He was in a band, Jake, good band.”

  “Jah, nice.” The Hutterite nodded.

  Lor put down the coffee and pushed the plate, fished some coins from his pocket and tossed them to the counter. He stood and stalked to the revolving door.

  “Hey,” she called. “Still have my number? Hey Lorne.”

  He did glance back once, as the door spun him into the cold. The Hutterite was already shovelling into Lor’s unfinished breakfast, while the waitress stared like a moon-drunk fox.

  Lor crossed the street quickly, headed into Stubbs Pharmacy. He could feel Franklin’s presence in these bricks and tiles, sum of the town’s old ghosts. Franklin would know how to outwit the Weird. But the real Franklin was truly vanished.

  “Something for the stomach,” Lor said to the druggist. “And can I get over-the-counter sleeping pills?”

  The druggist handed him a creased white packet with the drugs inside, then cocked her head and fixed him with a single indigo eye.

  “You look familiar,” she said. “Do I know your family?”

  “Don’t have a family.”

  He hustled down icy walks, towards the Marquis, guzzling pink liquid from a plastic bottle. His stomach bunched and knotted.

  Franklin. He’d have some good ideas about what to do. He’d have—

  Lor stopped. He was in front of Danny’s, an independent grocer. Who can explain the vagaries of memory? Here Franklin bet him a cube of hash, bet you can’t drink ten bottles of Coke in a row, ten years past, almost to the day. Lor drank the ten bottles, then squirted puke into this very gutter.

  Slowly he pushed the door and entered to the same old sound of bells, to the same old perfume of sweet tarts and hockey-card gum, to the same old creaking tile. The geometries were all unchanged. Behind the counter, the same ageless face, Danny they called him, though his real name was Kwang Sok, the same cigarette behind the same left ear, perhaps really the same cigarette, ten years unsmoked, the same popbottle glasses, same blowfish eyes, same crinkled eyeskin.

  They looked at each other. Lor could hear his own heartbeat.

  Danny nodded.

  “Ten bottles of Coke,” he said.

  Lor ran from the store. All the way back to the Marquis and up the stairs and into his room, where he gulped two sleeping pills, then four, then waded through the wreckage to collapse into oblivion.

  † † †

  A tapping at the door.

  Lor awoke to a thick tongue and a dark room. He tried to rise, roily with the lingering stupor of sleeping pills.

  The doorknob turned; the door creaked inward. A tall pointed hat poked in, followed by a wide brim and long white face. A scarecrow in a fringed jacket shuffled through the doorway, carrying a wooden chest. He removed his hat, loosing a long tumble of silvery hair gathered in a ponytail.

  “Lor.” A crackly voice, not unfamiliar. “Hey man, it’s certainly been a long, and, if I may hazard a guess here, consequential time since we last spoke, fraught with happenings y’know?” He grinned. White teeth floating in the dark.

  “Don’t speak to . . .” Lor tried to swallow, “. . .ghosts.” He reached for his glasses, knocked over the old clock on the nightstand, breaking its glass. “What are you doing here?”

  “Perhaps a more interesting, a more enchanting question, is what exactly you’re doing here, back in Canada, in small-town Lethbridge, wi’ this storm on top of our heads and nothing to do, really, in terms of both entertainment and the so-called job scenario, and the Man, in the guise of a fat little domestic hoodlum in a city cop’s outfit, at every street corner ’n donut shop breathing down the neck of anyone with hair over the ears or for that matter growing out the ears, or a pierced body part whether that be schlong or nutsack or lip or nipple or clit, or, hell, even shit. . . .”

  “What do you want?” Lor reached down to grab the fallen clock, forgetting its broken glass.

  “You summoned me here,” the scarecrow continued. “By postcard. And I travelled as the crow flies, over seven—”

  “Shit!” Lor dropped the clock, blood dripping from his fingers.

  “Hello . . . .” The figure dropped to a crouch. “Now this is truly fuck-o’d, shipmate, ’cos there’s crushed ice all over the carpet here, and it’s sponging up your blood.”

  Lor closed his eyes. “Still frozen?”

  The scarecrow paused. “This here’s the Crimson Slurpee. Symbol of the small ice, amigo.”

  Lor felt a few beads of narcotic exit his brain. “Small ice?”

  The scarecrow cuffed the busted clock. “Popsicles, frozen dinners, ice jars in basement bars, all that shit that kills your spirit: cellphones, video games, barbecues. . . .”

  Lor threw his legs over the bedside, brain-surfing chemicals.

  The scarecrow opened his wooden chest and removed a bottle. “The cause of the world’s disenchantment is this fucking ’fridgerated life-sapping suburboididity, this small ice.” He took a swig from the bottle and spit it on the ice chips, then flared a match and dropped it.

 
“Yeah.” The ice burned, blue and bleary yellow. Baby wildfire skittled over the carpet.

  “Fire and ice,” the scarecrow said. “Suburban version: Nintendo nights and hemorrhoids after sixty-nine years on the couch watching Brady Bunch re-runs, dig?—fridge stocked with ice from the chain of corner stores that—Ho-lee shit!—are precisely the same wherever you go, right down to the pimple-faced kid mopping the aisle floors in a brown vest just itching to get home and watch some stoopid porn with his buddies Mike and Matt and Mario between periods of Hockey Night in—”

  “Stop!” Lor felt all the narcotic rush to his stomach. He stumbled from the window, head suddenly clear. This can’t be happening, he thought, grabbing heavy curtain. It’s just some creepy Lethbridge dude, some gaffer from the Kresge’s, some hobo, some schizo. It’s Japanese Elvis, Crazy Legs, Falcon Eddy. . . .

  He threw open the curtains and turned.

  “Oh God,” he said.

  “Lor.” The scarecrow threw up his hands.

  “Alistair Grimes.” Lor bit the inside of his cheek.

  Alistair Grimes? Here? His old bandmate, his old life—all coming to roost, and you had to run full speed just to stand still. Lor sat on the floor and put his head in his hands.

  “Jesus Murphy, Lor, see you haven’t lost your taste for smashing guitars.”

  “You sound like Franklin.”

  “Ahhh, Franklin.” Alistair gently stroked the bottle’s neck. “Franklin didn’t go far enough. Now you and I. . . .” He grinned. “We will. I have a plan. I have a proposition.”

  “Get out.” Lor rose to his feet.

  Alistair chuckled, sat back on the chair.

  Lor reached for the broken guitar neck on the floor. Still dizzy, he teetered and fell into the bloody ice.

  “Lor, what’n the fuck—”

  Lor crawled through ice, hands and knees smearing red. He snatched a glass from the carpet and threw it at Alistair, but his aim was whacked. The glass pinged the radiator, cracked. He wobbled to his feet, wiped his hands on his shirt, then headed for the door.