by Mary Lawson
The strange thing was, when he woke up in the morning nothing had changed. His first thought was not about the dead logger, or even death in general, it was about the math exam. It seemed shameful, almost indecent. He tried telling himself that the exam didn’t matter, since he could be dead by lunchtime, but the fact was, he was unlikely to be dead by lunchtime and the exam mattered a lot. He took the textbook downstairs with him to look at over breakfast.
His father was sitting at the kitchen table eating toast and reading The Globe and Mail from the previous Saturday—it still took a couple of days for the papers to make it as far as Struan. He looked up and smiled vaguely as Ian came in. Ian poured himself a bowl of cornflakes and sat down across from him.
“Math, is it?” his father said from behind the paper. He was blotting up toast crumbs with his finger, licking them off and blotting again. Just recently he’d taken to dabbing his finger in the butter first and using the butter to blot up the crumbs. Ian had been disgusted initially, but then he tried it and got hooked, so now both of them did it.
“Yeah.”
“You can either do math or you can’t.” His tone was absentmindedly reassuring.
“Yeah,” Ian said. “Question is which.”
His father lowered the paper and smiled.
He didn’t show any sign of wanting to discuss the events of the night before. There was no trace of the mess in the hall apart from a suggestion of damp on the dark wood floor. Ian’s shoes, carefully cleaned, were standing by the front door. Everything seemed normal. The fact was—Ian saw this suddenly—everything was normal. His father was so familiar with death that it didn’t warrant discussion. It wasn’t a shocking or unusual occurrence, it was a commonplace. Which was the most shocking thing of all.
“I’m off,” Ian said when he finished his cereal.
“Good luck.”
Good luck. Maybe that’s all it was. Maybe the whole of life depended not on how hard you tried, how determined you were, how sensible, how smart: maybe the whole shooting match depended on luck.
There were seven of them taking the exam. Cathy had dropped math at the end of grade twelve—she said it made her sick to her stomach—so at least Ian didn’t have to face her bitterly turned back. Five of the others were standing in the hall outside the classroom when Ian arrived, waiting for Mr. Turner to show up. They all looked jittery. Fats Fitzpatrick was leaning up against the wall, chewing gum so fast his chins wobbled. Ian looked around for Pete but he hadn’t arrived yet.
“How’s it going, Fats?” Ian said. Fats nodded and kept chewing. There was something about him that always cheered Ian up. Maybe it was just the fact that he always looked so oppressed that you were bound to feel on top of things by comparison. His father owned the sawmill and Fitzpatrick’s Hotel and the holiday cottages down by the lake, which made him the richest man in town. Worrying about all that money had made him bad-tempered and mean, especially with his kids. You could tell just by looking at Fats that his father had told him he’d skin him alive if he failed these exams.
Ron Atkinson and Susan Jankowitz were sitting on a table beside the door. They shifted over to make room for Ian. “I’ll be glad when this one’s over,” Ron Atkinson said. “It’s the worst.”
Ian nodded.
Susan Jankowitz said, “It’s okay for you guys. You’re both so brainy.” She was hugging herself with nerves. She was a big-busted girl and the hugging did astonishing things to her breasts. Ma-mas, Pete called them—“Man, would you look at those ma-mas.” They bunched together now and quivered like raccoons in a sack. Ian found it almost impossible to keep his eyes off them. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said. “I know I’m going to fail.”
“You’ll be okay,” Ian said, though she wouldn’t. He caught a disconcerting echo of his father in his own voice, mindlessly reassuring. “Anyone seen Pete?” He leaned forward around Susan’s ma-mas to look down the hall.
Ron said curiously, “What’s he taking the exams for?”
“What are you taking them for?” Ian asked, but it came out ruder than he’d intended, so he added, “What are any of us taking them for?”
Ron said, “Does he want to go to college or something?”
“Why not?” Ian said. Back in public school both he and Pete had skipped a year, while Ron had failed one, so Ron was two full years older than they were but in the same class. He must know how smart Pete was, and yet somehow he didn’t know it. It was incredible the way people managed to hang on to their prejudices even when the evidence that they were wrong was staring them in the face.
“Is he thinking of leaving the reserve? Having a career?”
“Why not?”
Ron shrugged.
“Here comes Mr. Turner,” Susan said. There was still no sign of Pete.
Mr. Turner loped up, a bundle of examination papers clutched to his chest. “My, my, aren’t we all looking bright and eager today,” he said. “Budding Einsteins, every one. Come in, come in.”
He opened the door of the math room and they trooped in behind him. “If you want to sharpen your pencils, do it now. Go to the john, do it now. Say your prayers, do it now. The end is nigh. Judgment day has dawned. I’ve had a look at the paper and you’re all going to fail.” He was grotesquely cheerful.
They milled about for a bit, went to the toilet, came back. They settled reluctantly into their seats. Mr. Turner was ticking off their names on the register.
“Corbiere is missing,” he said. “Anybody seen Corbiere?” He looked at Ian and raised his eyebrows. Ian shook his head.
“He’s got two minutes,” Turner said. “Time, tide, and exams wait for no man. Fitzpatrick, you’re chewing gum. Get rid of it.”
Ian rolled his pencil between his fingers. Come on, come on, he said to Pete inside his head. He admired Pete’s nonchalance, but this was going a bit far. Right now it amounted to added stress, and he had more than enough already.
“No Corbiere,” Mr. Turner said, looking at his watch. “Time’s up.”
He went over to close the door. Pete shambled in.
“You’re late, Corbiere. For two bits I’d shut the door on you. Take your seat.”
Pete nodded at Ian and sat down at his desk. Ian felt a surge of relief mixed with irritation.
“Remember,” Mr. Turner said. “Show your working out. I’ll say it again: show your working out. There are marks for working out. Okay, everybody ready? Turn your papers over…now!”
Ian turned the paper over and looked at the first question. It was a cinch. You could either do math or you couldn’t.
“Why were you late?” he said to Pete afterward.
“I wasn’t late.”
“He could have kicked you out. You know what he’s like.”
“He didn’t though, did he?” Pete said. They were out by the bike racks, around the back of the school. Pete had turned his bike upside down to adjust the chain and was turning the pedal with his hand. The wheel sang as it spun in the late-morning air.
“If you miss an exam, that’s it,” Ian said, resentment stirring. Pete’s attitude was starting to annoy him.
“You worry too much, man.”
With an effort, Ian bit back a retort. Abruptly, it occurred to him that Pete’s behavior might have something to do with the events of the night before—Jim Lightfoot and the logger. He saw his father, spreading the sheet over the silent figure. Gerry Moynihan, whistling through his teeth. Jim would have spent the night—the first of many nights—in a police cell, and there would be some angry people on the reserve.
“Is this something to do with what happened last night?” he said. In all the years of their friendship, all the thousands of hours of fishing, side by side in Pete’s battered old boat, they had never once talked about the tensions between their two communities. The older they got and the more they understood, the less point there seemed to be in talking about it. But now he wanted to know what was going on inside Pete’s head. It seemed to him that of all the kid
s in the class, Pete was the one who had the most to gain by leaving Struan behind, and the exams were his passport.
“Is what something to do with what?” Pete asked.
“Would you cut it out?” Ian said snappishly. “Is the fact that you nearly missed a final exam connected with the fact that Jim Lightfoot was in a fight last night and a man died and Jim is in jail? That’s what I’m asking.”
“Oh, that,” Pete said. He turned his head up toward the sun and closed his eyes, still spinning the bicycle wheel with his hand. “That’s nothin’ to get worked up about, man. That’s just another Indian in jail, accused of somethin’ he didn’t do. Nothin’ new in that. Happens all the time.”
Ian managed—just—not to yell at him, not to say, What are you acting like this with me for? I didn’t do anything! He swallowed the words and studied Pete’s profile in silence.
“What happened last night is nothing to do with you,” he said finally.
“Oh, right,” Pete said.
“It goddamned well isn’t!” Ian said, suddenly enraged by his tone. “You have a choice, whether or not you let yourself get drawn into all that crap! It’s history! Some people are stuck in it, but you have a choice!”
Pete, his eyes still closed, his face still turned to the sun, said, “You know what I like about you, man? You have such a simple view of life.”
Ian cycled home, anger and frustration gnawing at him. He wished he could withdraw from everything—go and live in a cave. He couldn’t imagine how mankind had managed to make such a mess of things. He threw his bike down by the porch, climbed the steps, flung open the door, and found himself staring at a trail of blood on the floor. His heart gave a jolt, but then he saw that relative to the night before it wasn’t much—just smears and splatterings at regular intervals leading from the side door to the waiting room. He peered into the room. Office hours were over for the morning and Margie, the nurse, had gone home for lunch. There was no one there except Fats Fitzpatrick, who was sitting on one of the chairs. His foot, wrapped in something strange—maybe a shirt: there seemed to be a couple of sleeves sticking out of the bundle—was resting in a small puddle of blood.
“You’re bleeding on my floor,” Ian said. He could feel the tension inside him easing already. Any distraction would have been good right now, but Fats in the waiting room was excellent.
“Sorry,” Fats said. “I can’t help it.” His large moon-face was even paler and more doleful than usual, but he’d looked like that when he came out of the exam.
“If you were trying to commit suicide,” Ian said, “it’s your wrist you want, not your foot.”
“I cut it on a tin can,” Fats said.
“No kidding?” Ian said. “How did you manage that?” He dragged one of the other chairs over in front of Fats, took half a dozen National Geographics and Eaton’s catalogs from the pile on the table, put them on the chair, reached down, and lifted Fats’s foot onto the pile.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Fats said. “This has been the worst goddamned day of my life.”
“You sure didn’t waste any time,” Ian said. “We haven’t been out of the exam an hour.” He was watching the foot. Blood was still leaking out, though more slowly. Now it was ruining the magazines. He looked at the door to his father’s office. “You checked that there’s someone in there with him, did you?” he said.
Fats nodded. “What’ll he do? Like, what do you do with a cut?”
“You don’t want to know,” Ian said. “Take my word for it.”
“You’re a real bastard, Christopherson, you know that?”
Ian nodded. “So’s my father. It runs in the family.” The cut was still leaking. He should press on it, direct firm pressure on the wound, but Fats would yell and possibly hit him—he was their star quarterback and could pack quite a punch. Ian got some more magazines and added them to the pile. At least it was just seeping, not spurting. He didn’t fancy jamming his hand into Fats’s meaty groin.
“Will he put stitches in it? I mean, he doesn’t normally do that, does he? He doesn’t stitch every little cut a person comes with.”
“I don’t think that’s a little cut,” Ian said. He went over and tapped on the door to his father’s office. His father said, “Come in.” Ian opened the door and stuck his head around it. Mrs. Jenner was sitting beside his father’s desk with her sleeve rolled up, displaying a monstrously swollen elbow.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “How are you?”
“Hi, Mrs. Jenner. I’m fine, thanks.” He looked at his father and said, “Fairly urgent,” in an undertone, hoping Fats wouldn’t hear. His father nodded. “Okay. Be with you in a minute.”
Ian went back and sat down beside Fats. “So tell me how you managed to cut it on a tin can,” he said. “Was the can on the table at the time? And was it tuna, or beans, or peaches, or what?”
“Piss off,” Fats said.
“It makes a difference to the treatment,” Ian said. “If it was tuna he’ll do one thing, because it’s fish, and if it was beans or peaches he’ll do another. For your sake I hope it was beans or peaches.” He thought for a moment. “The worst one’s corned beef, actually. That’s a real nightmare. Was it corned beef?”
“Piss off.”
He left Fats with his father and went out in the canoe. There’d been an east wind blowing for days, which normally meant rain, but it hadn’t materialized yet. The lake was choppy, little scuds of wind ruffling the water, and he had to work at keeping the canoe steady. The sky was gray on gray—low dark clouds hanging under higher paler ones, the whole lot moving slowly across the sky.
Without thinking, he’d automatically turned west toward Hopeless Inlet. It was where Pete had nearly been pulled out of his boat a year ago and ever since then Pete’s mission in life had been to get even with whatever it was that had grabbed his line. Normally Ian would have joined him, but Pete’s comment still rankled. They seemed to have reached some sort of impasse, and he didn’t know why, or what to do about it.
He turned the canoe into the wind and paddled hard. The cool air felt good on his face—he imagined it filling his lungs, flowing through his whole system. It was hard going though, the wind gusting against the canoe, swinging the bow around. When he reached the mouth of Slow River he turned into it for a rest. Rounded humps of pink granite rose out of the water on either side, forming shields against the wind, and between them the river flowed smooth as syrup. Ian paddled slowly, trying not to disturb the stillness, trying instead to absorb it. He needed to clear his mind of the tangled mess that seemed to occupy it nowadays—exams, death, the future, the past, his father, women, his friend. He craved stillness, the mental equivalent of the river’s flow.
He concentrated on the movement of the water, the small tight whirlpools left by his paddle, the smooth curve of water over rocks beneath the surface, the narrow V-shape fanning out from the bow of the canoe, but thoughts kept crawling back in. He slid the canoe up beside a low bank of rock and climbed out. As soon as he stood up he was battered by the wind again so he sat down on a shelf of rock, low down by the water, and watched the river drifting by, and gave himself over to worrying.
He was getting good at it, that was for sure. If there were an exam in worrying he’d top the class. Earlier he had been looking around his room, wondering which of his possessions he should take with him to college: a few books—Moby-Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, The Catcher in the Rye—his radio, his camera, a photo of himself and Pete holding up a pike, twenty-six pounds, thirty-four inches long, their biggest ever. That had started him worrying about Pete again, and had also made him realize that he didn’t have a photograph of his father without his mother, which had set him thinking about her. He wanted no reminders of her cluttering up his new life.
He wished he could prevent his mother from getting hold of his address, wherever he ended up, but he knew his father would give it to her. She still wrote every week and in three years he had not opened a sing
le letter; they went straight into the wastepaper basket, envelopes intact. Even so, from the envelopes themselves, he knew more about her life than he wanted to know. Her last name was no longer Christopherson, for instance: she had married the geography teacher. And they had moved to Vancouver a year ago. She phoned him on his birthday and at Christmas, and for his father’s sake he didn’t hang up on her, but once he left home he reckoned he would be able to sever that contact as well.
The pain of what she had done no longer filled the whole of him, but what was left was a hot, glowing coal of bitterness that flared up whenever he thought about her. He wanted to get rid of that as well. He wanted to be—to have been—untouched by her betrayal, as if she were nothing to him and never had been. Just a casual visitor who had stopped for a while and then moved on. He had a fantasy that in a few years’ time they would pass on a street somewhere and not recognize each other. That would be good. That was what he was aiming for.
There was something in the water: the movement caught his eye. It was heading directly toward him. It wasn’t until it was about ten feet away that he was able to work out what it was—a water snake, with a frog in its mouth. It kept coming toward him; presumably it thought he was part of the rock. When it reached his feet, it slid the first eighteen inches or so of its length out of the water, drawing a smooth, glistening S-shape on the pale rock, and then, to Ian’s consternation, rested its sleek, dark head—plus frog—on the top of his shoe. Then it yawned hugely and began to eat.
Ian, holding himself rigidly still, watched with fascination and disgust. The frog was headfirst inside the snake’s mouth but very much alive. It was at least twice the diameter of the snake’s head and fought hard, legs thrashing, toes scrabbling for purchase, pulling backward with all its might—he could feel the struggle through the leather upper of his shoe. His impulse was to try to rescue the frog, but he could see the absurdity of that. The frog was the snake’s dinner, after all. And he himself had eaten beef last night.