Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  † † †

  From the Trapper’s Pub windows the air itself was visible. The woman with emerald eyes called it arctic haze. Blue-white and beautiful, but made of pollutants, which somehow seemed appropriate to Lor.

  The witch folded her delicate hands on the table and laughed, a sound like pale green liquid. “Did you know? I saw your brother, five years ago.” Alistair leaned in. “Franklin?”

  “He passed through and begged me to exorcise him. Said he was possessed by a fallen angel. Personally, I thought it was the other way ’round.”

  Fatty whistled.

  “So whatjya do?” Alistair said.

  She paused. “That’s his story.”

  “Tell it.”

  “Not yours.” The witch shook her head. Smiled again. “I can help you all. With everything. Come to my place.” She brushed thick red hair over her shoulder. “But Alistair, dear, your brothers will need cheering. One at wit’s end, the other with the vacant look of a coming porn stud.”

  Alistair grinned. “You’d know.”

  She twinkled emerald eyes. “We have lived many lives.”

  “Come on, winchie, tell us the story of Franklin.”

  She tapped a finger on the tabletop. “Do you know what paranoia is, Alistair Grimes? The belief that all things are connected—one great, complicated, causal, weblike story.”

  “So, ’migette. The story?”

  “No,” she said. Then two deep blinks. “Lor. Let’s go.”

  † † †

  Like most arctic dwellings, the witch’s house was built on stilts sunk into the permafrost. But the siding was woven of many branches, giving it the appearance of a nest or eyrie, or perhaps a beaver lodge from a children’s book. The chimney vented smoke.

  “Dana. ’Migette.” Alistair pointed a long finger. “Explain.”

  At the end of the snowy lane a minivan idled next to a Beamer, both snuffling exhaust.

  “Clients,” said the witch. “Fetching herbal concoctions from my little store. Perhaps crystals. A book of chants.”

  Alistair pulled his hat deep over his eyes.

  Dana clapped her delicate hands. “Even a witch needs to make a living. You don’t have to come in. Go have tea across the street. Right next to that corner store. Check out the ancient porn.”

  “Ours?” A slight gargle in Alistair’s voice.

  Fatty stopped the truck. The witch pinched Lor’s shoulder.

  “We won’t be long,” she said. “Come with me Lor. Don’t be shy.”

  Alistair pushed up his hat to check his watch. “Shit, dudes, we’re running late, got to hit that festival soon.”

  The witch seized him by the brim. “Relax. Slow and easy, like I taught you.” She laughed. “Try the chamomile and hops tea.”

  Alistair stared across the street, then at the minivan, then across the street again. His eyes lit, as if with some wicked scheme.

  “Okay sweetheart.” He grinned. “That corner store there. Would they have paint?”

  † † †

  The witch’s kitchen smelled of forest. A potpourri hummed on the fridge, whispered sweet fragrance. Plants hung at levels, some almost to the floor, leaves brightened by flourescents. The whole room had a misty green complexion. A woven basket of fruit on the table, mainly pomegranates.

  “How do you get this exotic fruit up here?” Lor picked up a mango, turned it in his hand.

  “You wouldn’t believe me. Sit. Try to relax.”

  She reached to insert her finger in a fern’s wet potting dirt. By the flourescent light Lor noticed her light white beard, a delicate sprinkling of acne. It zoomed him back to high school, when he had suspected such qualities to be indications of extreme horniness. Hormonal hieroglyphs, he’d called them, not that anyone ever laughed or proved him right.

  He crossed his leg.

  She sat across the table. “Tell me your troubles.”

  He looked down and just stared at her hands, the fine fingers, the bird-bone knuckles and black nails.

  “You’re an atheist, aren’t you?”

  Lor nodded.

  “Well. Take your time.” She drew a nutcracker from her pocket and conjured a bag of pecans. She smiled. She had braces.

  Crack! He watched those fingers squeeze and pluck the nut-meat. Her hands knew just the faultlines. So skilled. And she seemed so distant, such a stranger. Not like he would ever see her again, right?

  So what the hell, he spilled, spilled to the rhythm of cracking nuts, right from the Weird in Underwood to the Weirder in Lethbridge, and the whole time his inner voice argued and argued, this confession is horseshit, this witch stuff is senseless, but what else was left, and what made sense in this winter wasteland anyway?

  The witch laughed when he was done. “It’s very simple, Lor.”

  He poked under his shirt and fingered his belly-button. “Can I have a nut?”

  “Of course.”

  He reached. Lint on his finger, right next to the wound he kept reopening.

  She smiled. “The world has four corners. At each point is an ancient city. Their names are Gorias, Murias, Finias, and Falias. The last hotel of ruined Falias lies just north of here. Do you believe in this?”

  “No.” He cracked hard.

  “Good. Do you read?”

  “A little.”

  “In the Twilight Language of Faerie, entire libraries can be condensed to a single symbol, then hidden in the cracks of the world. Rock, rivers, trees. You’ve been reading the world, Lor. A book of magicks.”

  “Uh-huh.” He ruined nut after nut, cracking too hard, unable to extract much meat from the fragments.

  “Have you heard a voice?”

  A node of pecan stuck in his throat. Slowly, against his own wishes, he nodded.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know.” He laughed grimly. “A devil.”

  “The devil exists only in a world that has forgotten the goddess. Do you have a particular animal you feel an affinity for? Maybe a bird?”

  “No.”

  “Bet you do. Give me your hand.”

  She took it in her own fine fingers, turned it gently to look at the cut on his finger. Then she nodded. It made Lor angry, to see such kind wisdom, such insight—it wasn’t real, could never be. Still, as her black fingernail traced his palm, he felt a real tingle fire up to his elbow, and glanced again at her invisible beard.

  “I. . . .”

  “Yes,” she said. “Take back your hand.”

  He rested his fingers on the jagged pile of pecan.

  She stood and opened a drawer, drew out a small braided whip. He pulled his hand from the table and stuffed it in his pocket to feel the reassuring lump of the powder pouch.

  “Start,” she said, “by visualizing the wisest person you know.”

  He gulped, thought of Franklin.

  She flicked a lighter and lit the end of the whip.

  “It’s not a whip, Lor. It’s a braid of sage.” She blew out the flame and fanned the smoke with a white feather, toward her heart, over her head, down her arms. “Close your eyes.”

  He breathed sweet sage smoke, felt the heat simmer down his torso.

  “Count your breaths. Ten, nine, eight. . . .”

  He felt heavy.

  “Now,” she said. “When you are completely relaxed, visualize the goddess. She sits on a stone dais in a summer meadow full of poppies.”

  He thought of the witch’s fingers.

  “Her robe is pure red, her hair pure sunlight.”

  He thought of the witch’s green eyes.

  “She is surrounded by birds and animals. They come to her without fear.”

  He thought of Franklin. Then of a waitress he had slept with his very first night in Lethbridge, so many years ago. What was her name?

  “See if you feel an attraction to any of the birds or animals. Does one speak to you?”

  Guess he never did know her name. He thought of a dewy spider web between the fenceboards o
f his childhood home. Then of Alistair’s white hat.

  “And she releases beams of healing light, into your heart.”

  Alistair’s grey hat floating in the river.

  “Now Lor.” He felt light hands on his shoulders. “If you have performed this visualization mindfully, you are ready for a ghostwalk. To find your animal spirit, if you will, and the answers you seek.”

  She smelled like lilacs and lemon juice.

  “When you’re ready, open your eyes. Drink the glassful in front of you. A concoction of poppy, lime blossom, and clover. With pure snow. When you’re ready. Then walk through the kitchen, through the solarium, out the back door to the woods.”

  He nodded.

  “Only one rule, Lor. One ancient rule: don’t leave the path.”

  He nodded again. That knot of pecan in his throat seemed to be growing. He opened his eyes. The witch was gone.

  Taking a deep breath, he reached for the glass of pale green liquid and kicked it back. It was bitter. He wiped his lips, stood, floated through the kitchen into the solarium. Music played softly, some Celtic tune about a tower and frozen skies. Dense greenery quivered in the moonlight—misty ferns, snake plants stretching, apple trees bearing real baby apples. A white rabbit scampered across the rug, weaving between clay pots. Lor carried on, through the back door, down the steps to the well-trod path. Then off the path. Of course he wasn’t going to stay on the path, he was still a punk after all, damn that witch.

  Beneath a trembling aspen he unzipped to piss in the snow, free hand gripping the pouch of dust. Each squirt of pee sounded like the cooing of a dove. Suddenly the potion hit his bloodstream, and it was all he could do to get himself zipped up again, before the tree itself unzipped its bark, and an ocean of hungry pith gobbled forth to paint the world.

  † † †

  A mist rises from the ground to water the snow. Ice constellations bend moonbeams. Smoky light drifts. As Lor walks a frozen river, the dark heavens slowly whiten, while black stars fall to splash the sky and storm seaward.

  No, not the sky. The riverbed. He is upside down, walking the underside of the river, its frozen ceiling, and the stars are river stones beneath him.

  Crack! The ice breaks, and he is swimming, carried by the river’s rush. The water is emerald and warm as summer wind.

  He tumbles down rapids, tangled with winking lights, glass globes, tinsel strings—an entire flotilla of Christmas decorations. Ahead a giant spruce grows at the river’s centre, its lower boughs spastic with the rush of smashing ornaments, which crack and whip and snarl its base in a growing pile of fractured glass.

  “That’s right, Kenny. Into my parlour.” A voice from the treetop. “Look up.”

  Lor crashes through the heaping shrapnel at the tree’s base. Glass slices his arm, while a string of lights tangle round his neck and wiggle upward to burrow, winking, in his ears. He hits the tree headfirst, pushed upward by the river’s force, hands clawing fragrance from bark. The lights unsnag and fall away, hitting the river in a series of sizzles as one by one each bulb pops and darkens.

  Lor grabs for the branches and chins up. His feet dangle. Water fattens his shoes. He climbs beneath a prickly overhang, pulls himself through the wickerwork toward the tree’s heart. His fingernails dig, bend back, start to peel from skin. Hundreds of feet above the river, he slips and falls. But the tree snags his hair. He jerks up, scalp yanking from skull, and bobs like a hanged man.

  “Up here, Kenny.”

  The branches curl, hug him until his spine cracks and his eyes water. Bark grows beneath his skin; he tastes the knot and the gnarl.

  Then he’s inside, cruising the tree’s bones. The core is enormous, full of clouds. He senses rings: year within year of bug whispers, the scent of green melody. Each secret cone and crow’s joke, each drop of spring.

  “Up here, Kenny Ken Ken. Come see me, we’ll kick the stars from the sky.”

  Lor flies up at the sweet spot of light. He sees speckled stars, crows roosting on the horns of a hunter’s moon. The sky begins to foam.

  Not the sky.

  The river.

  Again.

  Splash!

  The water is neither warm nor cold. He is rushing with a rainbow’s exhaust, lemondrop threads lacing blue infusions, violet ice and whippersnap whites.

  “Ke-nneeey. Up heeeere.” The voice gargles.

  Lor bubbles up through the ice-hole and squirts across the river. He spits cold water and lies gasping, suddenly anxious for his pouch of dust. He tries to check his pocket, but his hand is too numb.

  “It’s there, Kenny. But where is the rest of it? Where is your guitar?”

  Lor raises his head. He scans the trees, but sees only twigs like finger bones.

  “Where is your guitar?” the voice continues. “For you have painted your heart with part of mine.”

  Painted . . . what the fuck? That sounds important, but it’s nonsense.

  “Where are you?” Lor croaks.

  “Wherever you wish,” says the voice. “For who can escape what he desires?”

  Lor sniffs the cold air, smells frying fish. His eye follows footprints to the riverbank, to the back of an enormous figure, cloaked, crouching at a fire.

  “Welcome, Kenny.”

  Lor eyes the branches. No magpie.

  “It’s my voice,” says the visitor, stroking a white rabbit.

  “No.”

  “Yes. You’ve given my spirit flesh, Kenny. Flesh, finally. I thank you.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Oh, you have. I can’t thank you enough.”

  Lor longs to jump back through the ice-hole and swim away. He stays on his knees, breathing hard.

  The visitor reaches a stick to the fire. “Come eat some fish. Renew your strength, or you will never finish this journey.”

  Sparks burst. A delicious aroma fills Lor’s nose. His mouth waters, but he doubts that anything in these woods can be wholesome to eat. His finger-prick throbs, a crimson cloud of pain outside his body.

  “No,” he says.

  “You think me completely heartless? Have a little faith, Kenny. Take. Eat.”

  Slowly, painfully, each hand forward pressing his finger to greater pain, Lor crawls across the ice, following the footprints. Round and round the fire, breathing the broil of fish.

  “Eat, Kenny. Eat.”

  Lor eats. The fish is delightful, zested with orange and sweet herbs. The bones warm his hand.

  “Good.” The visitor strokes snow where the rabbit has disappeared.

  As Lor’s strength returns, his muscles numb and slacken. His lungs slow, his brain dims, he begins to shiver. But it’s okay, because all he can feel is his wounded finger.

  “You can’t touch me yet, Kenny. I am only spirit here.”

  “I don’t want to touch you.” Surprised that his lips and tongue still work.

  “But you will.” The laugh. “Oh, how you will touch me.”

  The rabbit reappears, grey this time, one eye closed in a prolonged wink.

  “I’ll run all the way to the North Pole.” Lor’s voice is thick.

  “Good. I have all the time in the world, Kenny. And none, if you take my meaning.”

  Somewhere in the distance Lor feels his teeth clench.

  “See you real soon.” The visitor taps the rabbit’s head. “Don’t forget to bring your guitar, your painted heart. . . .”

  “Fuck you and your voice and your flesh and your fucking—”

  Heart?

  † † †

  Lor blinked. He was in the solarium between plants, the white rabbit lazy in his lap. The song skipping, a haunting voice and melody. Wait. That was the same song that Fatty’s radio—

  Where once was Falias?

  Does still her tower rise?

  Silent old hotel stretching to the frozen skies. . . .

  He jumped up, spilling the rabbit, knocking over the snake plant.

  “Dana?”

  No one in t
he kitchen. A few green drops left in the glass.

  Through the window he saw Alistair, standing in the snow, grinning, holding a spray can of paint. Lor pushed open the door.

  “Step it up, amigo. Like, we’re going to be late for the festival here ’cos of your little tête-à-tête.”

  “Alistair. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Yeah, dude. That’s more like it.”

  “Someone is chasing me, it’s all clear now, I can feel it. Somebody is after us, old friend, someone—”

  “Woaah! ’Migo. Like, when did you become Mr. Superstition?”

  “Let’s go, man.” Lor clattered down the steps. “Where’s Fatty? I swear, I know it now. It’s real. Al, we got to run.”

  Alistair dropped the spray can in the snow. “Hell-o. What have you done with the real Lor?”

  Lor reached to wipe his lips.

  “Dude. You’ve bloodied your mouth.” Alistair demonstrated, smeared red paint across his own.

  The world dusted with indigo. Even the sound of Fatty’s truck was blue.

  “Fatty.” Lor beckoned with a fist.

  The truck surged forward and skidded inches from their feet, open door swinging, borrowed gear rattling. Lor shoved Alistair into the front seat and dove beside him.

  Fatty fumbled between their tangled knees. “I can’t get a good grip on the stick shift.”

  “Go!” Lor grabbed him by the throat. Fatty peeled, then hammered the brakes. Lor jerked forward and smashed his glasses on the dash.

  The witch, a sudden apparition on the road, dropped her arms. “Did you stay on the path?”

  “Yes!” Lor screamed.

  “Just drive,” said Alistair.

  Lor looked down at his busted glasses, then up at the blurry world.

  The last thing he saw was the minivan and the Beamer on the drive, both painted across the doors with Al’s spidery red script: Fuckrs Go Home. Then he knew. Alistair was all wrong about ice, and you could travel everywhere in the wide world and never really go anywhere, and you could turn thirty or forty or eighty and never gain a smitch of wisdom, and no matter how far you fled you would always end up gnawed and homesick for some home you’d never been to.

  Lor clutched his gut.

  “Foggy Island.” Alistair ducked his head. “Where it all comes together. You’re still in, right, Lor, still with us?”