“You don’t need a lawyer at the moment,” Seri said. Rooke gave the spider a shake.
“Her name’s Dawn Cherry,” Frump said, snapping a finger. “What a disrespectful joke to every decent Canadian.”
Dawn Cherry leaned back, continued to snatch and flick lint from her pants. “You won’t intimidate me.” Her jaw stiff.
Rooke set the nail clippers between his teeth and peeled the pictures from his pocket. He shuffled with one hand, held a snapshot at arm’s length. “Do you manage these people?”
“If you can call it that,” she said.
Rooke chattered the nail clippers to the side of his mouth. He shuffled another picture out. Seri saw fire, blur, a man with silvery hair holding a broken violin.
“How well do you know this man?” Rooke said.
Dawn Cherry folded her arms. Rooke continued to hold the photo, fingers twitching, other hand shaking the spider.
Seri cleared her throat. Obviously, they needed a bit of work on protocol and method. She’d see to it.
“Tell us.” Rooke’s voice was frayed to a hiss. “Where have these musicians gone?”
“Musicians,” Dawn Cherry snorted.
“See,” Rooke said. “We share a disdain, an unease.” He jittered the picture, moved it closer to her face. “You had a personal relationship with this man.”
She dug lint from fabric, flicked.
Rooke continued. “A personal relationship. You’ve been infected.”
“No!” Dawn Cherry reached forward and snatched the remaining pictures. She sorted them, clutched one, threw the rest to the floor. She held up the picture: some kid with natty dreads holding a lighter to a flag.
“This,” she said. “This is my partner. And one of my lovers.”
Rooke palmed and rattled the spider, ready to roll dice.
“And the third,” Dawn Cherry continued. “Lor. He’s the leader.”
“No.” Rooke flipped the picture in his own hand, the silver-haired man. “Don’t let the one in this picture beguile you. Where he leads, others follow.” He pressed the picture, till its edges almost touched.
Seri sniffed. There was something deeply personal here. But it was off the map, a faint glimmering both obscured and brightened by haze. She noted it, filed it for future reference.
“You’re after the wrong person.” Dawn Cherry held up her picture. “This kid’s brother is the original leader.”
“His brother is dead.” Rooke dropped the photo, watched it flutter to the floor. He opened his fist and picked the dizzy spider, held it up to the light.
Then he drew the nail clippers from his teeth, and gently, deliberately, almost lovingly, clipped a spider leg.
Seri jerked and accidentally knocked the broken fiddle. Frump stood in the corner, snapping his fingers. Dawn Cherry bobbed back and forth, picking lint.
“I don’t . . .” she said. “I. . . .”
“Just an interview, Ms. Cherry.” Rooke’s voice seeped back from whisper.
“How do you know my name?”
Seri chewed her tongue. Dear Lord, Rooke was good. Still needed some work as far as protocol, but she’d rein him in. Right now, things were humming.
Snip. Another leg.
“Who are you?” Dawn Cherry said. “What right do you have to question me?”
Rooke remained silent.
Snip.
“Special branch of CSIS,” Seri said.
“I don’t know anything,” Dawn Cherry said, rocking. “Alistair’s ideas are completely off the wall. Quixotic. I never understood him. Never.”
Rooke tightened, clipper frozen over another leg.
Dawn Cherry rocked. “They’ve renewed some old project, Christ sakes, some old journey or something, some nonsense about—”
Rooke dropped the clipper. His hand shook around the spider.
“You were never part of this project.” He whispered, but his voice was back, all the undertones. “Not in either incarnation. Yet you are not fully innocent, either.” He leaned closer.
“You.” He reached for her with the spider. “Have much to learn.” Placed it gently on her collar. “About love.”
Dawn Cherry shrieked, swiped at the morbid boutonnière. It fell and landed on the picture of Alistair, then brushed itself in a slow circle on its remaining legs. Frump began to snap his fingers uncontrollably.
Seri took a step back. She made a note to herself: it was going to take some extra work to focus Rooke’s tactics, shape that demonic energy.
“Where did the musicians go?” Rooke said.
Dawn Cherry gripped the sides of her chair, looking down. “Who are you? What do you know about me?”
Rooke smiled. “Look at me. Dawn.”
She stared up, eyes wet, nose running. Leaned forward.
“Oh my God.” She jerked back. “Oh my God.”
† † †
Rooke slammed the back door of the union hall. Dawn bloodied the sky.
“Ted.” Seri jogged to keep up. “Slow down. We need to crunch this information.”
Rooke stopped. He knelt and cleared a patch in the snow, then removed the pictures from his coat. He shuffled them, removed one, wordlessly handed the rest to Seri.
“Thanks,” she muttered. “What’s your feeling on this Foggy Island? A real place?”
Rooke stared at the picture, the silver-haired man with violin.
“Seri.” He carefully curled the edges of the picture and placed it in the snow. “Help me.”
She remembered Rooke’s clever website, his snare. He was the spider. And now the flies turned out to be old friends, or was this just more symbol? Might be a jurisdiction problem here, a mandate conflict. She needed to pause, crunch this info, get some ancillary. Yet the hairs bristled on her arm, the way they used to on those rare occasions when Greg the youth pastor had forgotten himself and kissed her deeply.
Rooke struck a match and lit the picture of the man with silvery hair. It flared and poured inky smoke.
Seri kneeled. “Okay, listen. We’ll start by following this lead north. We’ll collate and analyze on the fly. I’ll drive; you tell me everything you know, and we’ll profile these subversives.”
Again her stomach twinged. She’d have to carefully delineate between the real subversives and Rooke’s demonic symbols. This would take all her philosophy: the clarity and precision of Augustine.
“North.” Rooke leaned forward and breathed in the smoke. Then coughed a cloud of frost and carbon. “To Attarib’s country.”
Seri stood, shivering. Could she loosen up her rage for certainty, burn a prophet’s faith as fuel? Defer the answers with the patience of Job? She considered angels named and unnamed. How many danced on the point of a needle? How many watched her now?
Yes, Attarib. Ruler of the ice and snow. First among winter angels.
Last riddle of the day.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Unzippings
Lor motored north with a small entourage of strippers who, according to their winks and hints, quite possibly shared his manager in more ways than one. Three Caucasian dancers with an act called The Penalty Box and a schtick involving referee outfits and whistles. Three peelers with the dubious names Carrie Fraser, Vandy-Anne Hellemond, and Dawn Koharskee.
“Another Dawn?” Lor said.
“We used to know a Third. Dawn Ho.” Carrie giggled.
“Not funny,” said Vandy-Anne.
Canadians. Lor tightened his seatbelt.
The van hummed, Carrie the pilot, Dawn riding shotgun and twiddling radio nobs in search of classical, Vandy-Anne next to Lor in reading glasses, flipping through a current bestseller on obscure Canadian puns. Sometimes she unfolded her legs across his lap and switched the bestseller for her investment dossier or a battered copy of Hamlet. Lor pulled his seatbelt tight and watched the landscape grow hairier with trees and shrubs, as if the country aged before his eyes. He carried no baggage. Just a bank card, bag of glitter, guitar case, and memorie
s.
Sometimes he talked.
“What are your real names?” he said, as the van travelled the narrow highway north of Edmonton, flexed all along the coiled banks of Crooked River.
Carrie laughed. “Everyone always wants our real names.”
“A rose by any other name,” said Vandy-Anne.
“Would be as thorny.” Dawn rustled in the glovebox and found a pack of mint gum.
Vandy-Anne put down Hamlet and peeled off her glasses. “How fast you going, Care?”
“One-fifty.”
Vandy-Anne nodded. “You know, Lor, in most religions a name gives one power over the named. You think we’re going to offer you that?”
“You a Christian?” Lor said.
She smiled. Sadly, it seemed. Then replaced her glasses and opened Hamlet. After a spell she looked up. “The world is too full of unexpected joys for there to be no spirit world. But the world is too full of horrors for there to be a single god in control of everything.”
“Argument from design,” Carrie chirped from the pilot seat. “Dawnny, what do you think?”
“This gum,” Dawn said. “Hard as rock.”
Sometimes, after they had all booked into a hotel, Lor would go to watch his companions work. They danced at almost every dot on the map: Spirit River, Seventown, Little Smoky. At Sexsmith they didn’t bother to enumerate the obvious jokes, for which Lor was curiously glad. He spent most evenings peering into his ginger ale, foot tapping on his guitar case, much to the amusement of his new friends.
“For a punk you’re pretty shy,” Vandy-Anne said, over pizza at a dusty taproom in Black Fly Creek. “Peel a few layers, what do you get.” Lor drained his ginger ale, fifth of the night.
“Finished with Hamlet?” She touched his hand lightly.
“Almost,” he lied.
The next day he was bolder. “Have you worked this territory before?”
“More times than I care to count.” Vandy-Anne pointed out the van window. “I know every bluff, every tree.”
“Can you name them?”
She smiled. “Ironically, we just skirted No Name Ridge. Believe it?”
Lor took off her shoe, lightly rolled her toes. “And that?”
“Toad Hill. Beyond it, Khahago Creek. Oooh.” Her toe cracked; she put back her head. “Khahago is Cree for raven. They’ve been here for over twelve thousand years.”
“Who?”
Late that night they crossed the Peace River at Devil’s Elbow, to a clump of small islands nesting a clutch of hamlets. Lor couldn’t believe the names: Gipsy Creek, Merlin, Valhalla, Faust.
“We hit every one,” Carrie said, stretching, clever knees guiding the wheel.
“Well, except.” Dawn fiddled the radio nob, finding only static.
“Except what?” Lor said.
“Crazy Lake,” Dawn said. “As you approach it gets darker, sounds muffle. You hear voices. Haunted town. We won’t dance there for all the tea in China.”
They all laughed, but Lor knew she wasn’t kidding. His fingers softened around Vandy-Anne’s slender foot. He held with both hands.
The hamlets were a snowball’s throw from each other. Four days’ combined travel lasted exactly fifteen minutes. In Faust they had a day off, with nothing much to do but watch TV. Dawn and Carrie went to the hotel lounge to try and drum up mint juleps and other rare drinks, while Lor and Vandy-Anne brought a sixer of ginger ale to her room.
“The secret to this town’s name is rather unappealing.” She stretched on the bed. “E.T. Faust was a locomotive engineer, and there was no Mephistopheles in his story. See? Sometimes it’s better not to know.” Lor sat on the chair, smiled, sipped.
“The next town is Atikameg,” she said. “Don’t know the explanation for the name. An English mispronunciation, I heard.”
Atikameg? Sounded like an angel’s name to Lor. He looked at Vandy-Anne, and suddenly felt sickened by his own attraction to her. One of those feelings he sometimes had at breakfast with a lover, when everything abruptly tasted wrong, out of context, the flesh aware of its own futility.
“It’s okay,” she whispered.
He set the ginger ale on the radiator and bowed his head. Her breathing sounded so lovely.
“Lor.” Vandy-Anne rose to sitting. “I’ll tell you my name if you give me something of equal value in return.”
“Yes,” he said, and stood to go to his own room.
North of Devil’s Elbow his fingertips began to feel numb. One night in Fort Lamneth, in a tiny bar carpeted with must and old smoke, he sat with Vandy-Anne to watch the last two acts. She gently stroked his fingers, turned his palm upward and mapped the lines. But when she spoke, he saw himself across a vast deserted space swished by wind and shadows, and her voice was lost.
After that, he remained aloof and noncommital. His speech and gestures stiffened. He lost his rhythms, all the while desperate to be warm and kind. The harder he tried to connect, the frostier he became, until he could only watch himself fail, as the space between them waxed to awkwardness. Night after night they travelled. Moonlight whitened the van, and Vandy-Anne grew distant by small turns, till the conversation waned to a sliver, and she curled up her legs and set them across his lap no more.
† † †
Afternoon darkened the Caribou Mountains. No one spoke for miles. Finally Dawn unbuckled and pressed her nose against the windshield.
“Is there a serious lack of light up here, or what?”
“’Tis the season,” Carrie said.
Dawn sat back. “Where is this Bat Lake?”
“Smack in the middle of the Thickwood Hills. Three hours.”
“Wow.” Dawn swiped at the windshield. “Never been this far north. Bat Lake an okay town?”
Lor caught Vandy-Anne staring at him, over reading glasses. She frowned, returned her eyes to the open page. He looked down.
That night he stared back. A damp and tiny pub called the Fangoo, its timbers shipwrecked at the mossy heart of Bat Lake Inn. He sat at a pine table smelling of freshly cut pencil crayons and sucked in heavy sub-bass, ignoring rednecks yelling across the oval bar, flickers from a widescreen hockey game. His ginger ale remained unsipped, as he eyed each of his three companions in turn. Smoke thickened. His glasses grimed. The dancers doubled, skinny-dipped through hazy wavelets. He stared. He clutched his pockets.
“What the fuck you doing?” Carrie yelled in his ear.
Vandy-Anne crawled onstage to Max Webster’s “Beyond the Moon,” blanket ruffling, lights hollowing smoke.
“What?” He kept his eyes trained. Noticed that Vandy-Anne was wearing her reading glasses.
Carrie sat on the table. “You’re a fucking pervert.”
He felt a rush of sadness. Kept his eyes trained. Vandy-Anne looked at him from the stage, fixed him through her glasses. No smile.
“Look at me,” Carrie said.
He didn’t.
“Lor.”
He got up, looked stupidly at the stamp on his hand. She grabbed him by the shirt and reeled him in, nearly burning his neck with her cigarette’s cherry.
“Lor. What are you doing?”
“Watching the show.”
She released him, then stalked off shaking her head. Lor glanced once to the stage, but Vandy-Anne was engaging a patron. The glasses were gone. He picked up his guitar and headed for the door, feeling like the night was frayed along the seams, his jeans were out of style, and he was leaving the high school prom he never even attended.
† † †
His room was freezing.
They opened the door slowly. He sat up in bed, noticed Vandy-Anne’s knuckles, white on the knob.
“What do you think you were doing in there?” Dawn said.
He lay back.
“We don’t want you to watch us any more,” Carrie added.
A long pause, swell of old TV music.
“You invite me every night.” Lor shivered.
Carrie laughed bitterly. “We
ll, not anymore, sweetie.”
She was echoed by canned laughter. Lor pressed himself down into the mattress, finding it hard to breathe. He stared at the ceiling, noticed the textures of stipple, like tiny nipples. Dawn said something. Lor’s attention lapsed—he missed it.
“Why am I so different,” he said. “Than all the other guys in there? Staring at you.”
Dawn snorted. “Some of them are honest.”
Weather report on TV, something about more snowfall. The room dipped to the left. Lor’s legs elongated. The mattress softened beneath him, cold sheets.
“I,” he said. “Are those breasts real?”
“Oh man.” Dawn sat on the bed. Lor almost slid off onto the floor, tumbled up into the stipple.
“What do you care what’s real or not?” Carrie said.
“I need to hear your stories,” he heard himself say.
Dawn popped up off the bed. He felt springs coiling deep beneath him.
“Man,” Dawn said. “Didn’t you turn out to be an asshole. And we liked you.”
“Just goes to show,” Carrie said.
Wait, Lor thought. Please. It’s just. I. . . .
“I paid my cover charge,” he said. “Four-fifty, like everyone else.”
Carrie laughed her bitter laugh. “Four-fifty.”
“Asshole,” Dawn whispered, almost a question.
They marched out, flicking off the lights. The mercury dipped.
Lor lay in the darkness, dappled with TV images, tears beading one eyelash. Canned laughter welled behind the screen, washed out in loudening waves. He clutched the remote, squashed the volume until the sound softened, softened, dwindled to silence.
He turned over and was shocked to see Vandy-Anne still sitting in the motel chair. She wore a heavy wool Mackinaw coat spattered with colourful patterns and stared at him through reading glasses. His heart clumped as he sniffed her strong cold perfume. She said nothing. They watched each other for minutes, until the TV went blank. The radiator clanked. Lor sat up, shivering.
Finally she removed her glasses, folded them neatly, dressed them in a zipped coverlet. Then unbuckled her Mackinaw and placed it around Lor’s shoulders.
“They’re real,” she said, and headed for the door.
Lor stared after her, until the walls liquified and spilled all over the rug, and his bed floated on the swell and slowly turned toward the window. He awoke later facing the dim noonday sun.
Arctic Smoke Page 17