Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  Fatty looked down, scratching his head and breathing deeply. Then he punched off the radio and started the Jeep. He drove almost all the way back to the Marquis in second gear, stumbling and surging up Apple Hill, then coasting down a mirror-slick Corvette Boulevard.

  There were no more words. Only the glug glug of foamy Coke, bottle rolling on the dash.

  † † †

  Ding.

  The elevator doors opened.

  The Crystal Room was silent. In one corner, a bulging couch. In another, a coffee table. Seven silver chairs circled the room’s heart. The elevator rolled up the west wall, empty, bell sounding at intervals.

  “Bad wiring,” Fatty said. “Like me.”

  A row of lit candles flittered. Spiky shadows from hanging spider plants danced on the walls. The air smelled like spiced earth, baked squash, or something.

  “So,” Lor said. “What’s your real last name? Not Core.”

  No answer.

  “I want to know. Your brother, Franklin. Wouldn’t ever tell his last name. Strikes me as kind of psychotic.”

  More silence.

  “Fatty?”

  Lor turned, but he was alone. Candles guttered, shadows twitched. He sat in a silver chair, while the phantom elevator dinged and creaked upward. Where was everybody?

  Patience, he thought. Identify the problems, deal with them one by one. It was all clear now. He had to get out of the damn hotel, away from the bellboy, then hang on until Alistair left town taking the old life with him.

  Lor lit a Lucky Strike.

  “Care for a drink, sir?” someone whispered. “Something to chase the cold?”

  “Shit!” Lor jerked, cigarette spitting ashes, and peered into the shadows. Spied the outlines of a cart and a brimmed hat.

  “What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Don’t forget your journey.”

  The elevator dinged and rolled downward.

  “Something to eat, sir? We’ve got Zwieback, roasted corn, a tureen of pumpkin soup.”

  A doorbell rang.

  “Would you get that?” the bellboy said. “North wall.”

  Lor rose and walked to a large wood-grained door with a brass knob. As soon as it cracked open someone pushed inside, as if expected. It wasn’t Alistair, but a hefty white man in a green hooded jacket.

  “Alvin Ballooni, at your service.” The man unzipped his jacket and hung it on the wall. “Soundman. I run the board.”

  The bell rang again. A thin kid pushed through, seventeen, eighteen, with dark hair and a rain cape. He was carrying a five-string bass, pegs sparkling with frost.

  “Oh, I see you’ve started,” the kid said, spying Ballooni’s jacket. “I’m Jerome, my friends call me Rusty.”

  The new kid sat next to Ballooni. They spooned pumpkin soup out of steamy china bowls and bit into Zwieback, faces flushed with candlelight.

  The bell rang. A grunge girl in toque and flannel, baggy black denims. “Gawd, a real throng,” she said, peering in and blinking.

  “Natasja!” Ballooni called out. “Come over, have some soup, couple of these zwee-bucks. Natasja, from the production company.”

  “Lor Kowalski,” Lor said, offering his hand. His eyes were starting to dry out. How many people were in on this damn thing?

  Natasja grabbed two Zwieback and a cob of corn wrapped in foil, dripping butter. She perched on a chair-back and blinked into the candlelight. The elevator dinged. The doorbell rang. A thirty-ish white woman, with multi-coloured hair extensions and a T-shirt that said Anonymous Was a Woman. Fatty followed with his grocery bag and half a bottle of Coke.

  “Look who I found out in the Jeep,” the woman said. “Had his radio up full blast, twiddling up and down the satellite.”

  “He’s been doing that a lot lately.” Rusty waved.

  “You Lor?” the woman asked. “I’m Dawn Cherry, manager. I’ll book the tour and do logistics.”

  “Cherry?” Lor said. “That Irish?”

  “Old stage name,” she said. “Old act called Coach’s Daughter. Get it?”

  “I do not get it.”

  “It was sad and sulphurous satire.”

  “M-hmmm.” Lor returned his gaze to the room’s centre, where Natasja was reaching into a tub of ice and handing out bottles of Lethbridge Pilsner, which Alvin Ballooni opened with his teeth. These Canadians were....

  He couldn’t think of a single word.

  “Who wants ’em?” Ballooni said, spitting caps.

  “You!” Fatty on the carpet, feet in the air, bicycling and farting. Natasja chortling, butter running down her chin.

  I’m hooking up with the damned circus, Lor thought. Even as a boy he had hated the circus.

  Someone rapped loudly. Lor opened the door, just as the latest guest knocked again with an umbrella top. Alistair, in tall hat and silver scarf, with his wooden pirate’s chest.

  “Lor. Hey man, I guess I’m a little late, looks of things, I mean we seem to have quite an assemblage, a congregation—”

  “Get in here, windbag,” Dawn Cherry said from the circle of silver chairs.

  “Windbag?” Alistair squinted.

  “Yes.” Dawn Cherry turned to Ballooni. “That’s the windbag I was telling you about, back from the West to drag us all north to enchanted places.”

  “You’re not coming,” Alistair said.

  “Nothing new there,” Dawn Cherry said.

  Alistair tapped the wood. “That was never my fault. Hello, Dawn Cherry.” “Wo,” said Fatty, grinning.

  There was a long pause, in which the candles fluttered nervously. Then the elevator opened, a yawn, and closed, a gulp, as if to swallow the silence and transport it north to some enchanted place between the floors.

  Ding, ding.

  † † †

  Alistair stood, like a preacher, inside the silver circle.

  He unrolled his map on the wooden chest and pinned it with a magnifying glass and a Zwieback. “Ahem. Ten years ago, Underwood, Montana. Fatty’s bro’, Franklin, ’twixt his own desires and the influence of this li’l enchanted box,” he pulled it from the chest, “has an inspired idea. He shares it with me ’n Lor, kids at the time, and we get his drift.” He winked. “Lor?” Lor sighed. This was an old routine.

  “He smuggled us all into Canada,” Lor said, as Alistair tapped his umbrella on the map. “Where he suspected we might illuminate for ourselves the mysterious truths of experience. That’s a quote.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that, amigo. We were taking our li’l punk band out of the suburban sprawl and into the wilderness, said wilderness being this very town of Lethbridge, Canada, Franklin’s birthplace, where the lack of context would force us to look into the heart of things, to discover the very pith of life. Lor?”

  Lor was silent. He shuffled away from the throng, toward the coffee table.

  “How do you know if you’re anti-establishment,” Alistair continued, “with the Man hanging around your neck day in day out? No. You have to light out for the territory, drive life into a corner.”

  “Your life is all corners,” Dawn Cherry said. “Without corners you’ve got a vacuum.”

  “Exactly,” Alistair said.

  “I used to have an Auntie Establishment,” said Fatty. “She loved to stick the old vacuum right up—”

  “See, amigos,” Al said. “In the empty wild, with no authentic culture to set the limits, who do you rebel against?—get me?—like, will our energies turn in on themselves? Dissipate? Don’t you want to know?”

  Lor shuffled further, eye suddenly fixed on greens and blues in the table’s grain.

  “What happened to Fatty’s brother?” Ballooni said.

  Alistair’s eyes bugged, then squinted. Dawn Cherry groaned.

  He went mad, Lor thought. And if he could go mad, was there any hope for the rest of them? And where was he now? Because if anyone would still know what to do here, mad or not. . . .

  Alistair rapped the chest-top. “The point is,
Franklin had a good idea that didn’t work out.” He looked around, nodded. “And the main problem was his vision, which was too small. I mean, Lethbridge?—sure, a town north of the ’Nited Snakes, but still, hardly the wilderness we need. And he knew it.”

  Lor crept still further from the silver circle, toward the coffee table.

  “That’s why I propose to continue Franklin’s project,” Alistair continued. “’Cept this time we go all the way, and trek into the real territory, I’m talking the Canadian Arctic here, the islands.” He lit his pipe and blew a fragrant cloud. “How do you keep your punk up there in the white?—’cos I’m talking almost to the North Pole, man. The social means nothing up there, it’s all myth.”

  A pause, punctuated by Fatty munching cracker and Ballooni breathing through clogged nostrils. Lor tugged at his collar. The elevator gave two quick dings.

  Then a whisper in Lor’s ear. “Perhaps, sir, you will get more myth than you bargained for.” The bellboy.

  “‘You are so supremely full of shit, ’Stair,” Dawn Cherry said. “The north ain’t empty. There’s a plenitude of the social up there.”

  “Eskimos and stuff,” said Fatty.

  Dawn Cherry snorted. “You don’t call them Eskimos, you opprobrious twit.”

  “I don’t make up the rules.” Fatty polished off the last drips of Coke and spewed a long sonorous belch.

  “Actually, you do,” Dawn Cherry said. “Lemme school you: the Hare, the Dogrib, the Yellowknife. The, uh, Tutchone . . . .”

  “Them the ones that carve up the soap?” Fatty burped.

  “Christ, Fatty,” Dawn Cherry said.

  “There are many cultures in the North,” the bellboy said from the shadows. “Not only the Inuit, but the Dene, the Aleuts, the Netsilik, the Iglulik, oil workers, government, frost demons, tourists.”

  “Lot of people,” Lor said.

  “Lor?” Dawn Cherry gave him a flinty stare.

  “I myself have returned once from his kingdom, the land of the ice and snow,” the bellboy said. “That is my little box.”

  “That’s his box,” Lor said.

  Natasja blinked. “Who?”

  “Hey superfreak,” Dawn Cherry said to Lor. “You going to join us or just sit there talking to yourself?”

  “You went up north?” Lor said to the shadows. “How far?”

  “Farther than you can imagine.”

  Alistair, who had been smoking and watching with what looked like amusement, rapped the top of the wooden chest. “Actually,” he said, “where we’re going there is, as I promised, no culture at all, because—dig me—it’s a bona fide, notarized, certified wilderness.”

  “A what?” Natasja said, blinking.

  “A deserted island.” Alistair grinned. “Actually.”

  . . . frost demons?

  † † †

  Fatty made a bong. He planted a lighter tube and hollow pen in the plastic Coke bottle, cutting holes with a penknife. Then he covered the lower tube with foil, poked holes for a sieve, and filled the bottle with ice. Dawn Cherry handed him a bag of weed, which he poured out and began to slice with the penknife.

  “So where’s this island?” Ballooni said.

  Alistair grinned and leaned deeper over the map.

  “Right here, amigo, floating in the high Mackenzie.” Alistair paused suddenly and began to tap his finger. “Eh?” He moved to extreme close-up. “What the fuck?”

  Ballooni vented smoke. “It’s not there.”

  “It was there this morning.” Alistair straightened.

  “So you’re going to an island that ain’t even there?” Natasja was at the bong, sucking hard.

  Alistair fell to his knees and peered through the magnifying glass. “Fuck, I know it’s there, saw it just this morning.”

  “Good going, Merlin.” Dawn Cherry wrestled the bong from Natasja. “Perspicacious as Odin himself.”

  The room was clouding. Lor dug at his fingernails and inhaled great thunderheads of weed smoke, which floated over from the silver circle to dump narcotic rain on the coffee table. He needed to move, get out.

  “Bong?” Dawn Cherry called to him.

  He shook his head. No point. The room was a bong.

  “The island does exist,” the bellboy whispered. “You will return there.”

  “Return?” Lor said. “Never been.”

  Alistair dropped the magnifying glass. “Whatever the case, amigos, we journey to Foggy Island, site of a punk festival at which we play the main stage.” He quickly rolled up the map.

  The room hazed, white smoke twitched with seams of darkness. Lor lit a smoke and kneeled over the glass-top, running fingers through the grain’s blue whorls.

  “Here’s your ticket north, sir.” The bellboy dropped a small glinting packet to the floor and vanished in shadow. “Don’t forget the powder.”

  Lor felt a chill at his knees and gazed down, then dropped his smoke. Frost blossomed across the floor. He looked up to see Fatty scoop the glinting packet.

  “Check this.” Fatty held the packet to the light. A tinfoil ball. “Somebody dropped a fat-load of drugs.”

  “Throw it away,” Dawn Cherry said.

  Fatty ignored her, popped it in his pocket. Then unwrapped two half-melted popsicles, bright pink goo stringing from stick to paper.

  Lor rubbed the frost, felt a sting of distant wind chimes on his fingertips. Candlelight sparkled on the spit-shined length of Fatty’s popsicle.

  “Let’s get this straight.” Natasja looked at Alistair. “I’m producing a tour to a place that ain’t even there?”

  “It’s there, ’migette, it’s there, and we could, like, see it if that fucking popsicle wasn’t clouding our spiritual vision.”

  “Lord.” Dawn Cherry snorted. “Your irrational hatred of treats.”

  “So where’s the island?” Natasja said.

  Frost skittled to the corners. A candle laughed. Voices getting distant now, echoes across a prairie night.

  “Here.” Alistair.

  “Where?” Natasja.

  “Nowhere.” Dawn Cherry.

  “Aroooo.” Fatty howling like a coyote.

  Lor reached up to the rim of the glass-top, raised himself, looked down at the table. It was snowing inside—sky raining flakes, drifting up to cling on the underside of the glass.

  “Sometimes a birthday is a dangerous thing.” The bellboy loomed at his ear again, whisper dry as autumn leaves, breath smelling of warm pumpkin.

  Lor tried to pull away his hand, peered into the upside-down world beneath the glass. He rose to one knee and gulped a panoramic snapshot of the Crystal Room, where Natasja stood with hands on hips, where Fatty bounced on the couch, where Ballooni blinked at a broken bong, where Alistair smushed a popsicle in the ash tray, where candles guttered out of control on dancing wicks, and the elevator chattered its doors, burping smoke, dinging over and over.

  These Canadians were just. . . .

  Just. . . .

  Lor inhaled once and fell into the table. For no clear reason, the last thing he imagined was a snowman laughing wickedly, way at the bottom, down in the snowy sky.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Chasing the Devil

  “So, Ted. Why did you pick me?” Seri brushed ashes from her skirt. A few smudged.

  Rooke slithered from the desktop, straightened long legs till he stood over her. “You’re in excellent physical condition. Quite a figure, actually.” He tapped the desk with a finger. “Plus you have a degree in pharmacology, specializing in narcotics.” He licked the finger. “Perfect.”

  “Punks,” Rooke continued. “We are hunting punks.”

  “Hunting them with all the energy and intelligence we possess.” He strode around the desk and dropped into the swivel chair. “Because they cannot fix themselves. Jesus said—”

  “Jesus?”

  “—if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.”

  Seri leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk. “Jesus sai
d, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ Besides, what’s Jesus got to do with anything?”

  His head snapped toward her. His neck cracked. “You know the Bible?”

  “I did a triple degree. Pharmacology, geography, and angelology.”

  Rooke leaned back, massaging his neck. “Well. How ambitious. Then you’ll know the angel religion Ozahism, which teaches that one must judge if one is to find redemption.”

  “Except for my final humanities project, I concentrated more on the pharm and geo. Is that a highly symbolic religion?”

  He glared. “Do you know the teachings of Zaron, in which the symbolic figure of the knife thrower cuts all the bonds of love?”

  “I probably studied it.” Seri looked at her smudgy skirt. “What happened to wu wei, the snow-laden tree that bends but doesn’t break?”

  He pulled a long breath through his nose, glaring at her. “There are many religions, more than you know. I have tried all of them.”

  She laughed. He didn’t.

  Seri was a little rattled. “Okay. All? Did none of them work for you?”

  Rooke looked quickly down, tapped his finger three times on the desk. Then he raised his hand to stroke his beard, his eyes roving inner space. After a few seconds his eyes returned. He bit the inside of his lip, then smiled.

  “Seri, there is work I must do. You are going to help me. We are the hammers of God.” His smile stiffened. “Whoever that is.”

  † † †

  “Never trust a man with too many layers,” Seri’s Great-Grandma Casey would often say, before her death at the age of seventy-three in a rock-climbing accident.

  Granny Finnegan always disagreed. “A bit of mystery and misdirection in a man is never unwelcome. It gives spirit and dimension, puts him somewhere ’twixt hell and heaven.”

  “Hell and heaven?” Grandma Casey said, one rainy Thanksgiving. “Devil of a comment for an ordained minister.”

  Granny Finnegan plucked a bit of turkey from between her teeth. “It’s called the dialectic, dear. Do well to remember it.”

  “Mumbo-jumbo.” Grandma Casey neatly peeled a baked potato. “What do you think, Seri?”

  Serendipity gulped cranberry and shook her head. She was dating a youth pastor at the time, if it could be called dating. They spent much of their time sublimating at the rock-climbing gym. They drank a lot of tea. They kissed three times a week.