That Savage Water

by Matthew R. Loney

  Horizon to horizon across the domed expanse of sky, the contrails left by the aircraft would last for an hour at most, gradually fattening outward into a uniform haze fine as gauze. They would hover in the sunset, tangling with the treetops and hydro pylons, their bellies singed red and purple.

  More of them than usual – Jan thought, as the truck crested the hill at the Pine Lake turnoff. It was awesome to think how many people were in the air circling the globe, how many of us flew to where we could never get to by land. The vapor trails came and went with the kind of regularity that contrasted with their transience.

  The truck pitched and swayed over the dirt track, the rusty suspension releasing the chassis up over the potholes. He’d picked up a few jobs along this road in previous months. Mostly game hunters who’d returned from the bush to find their tires deflated by the cold. Every so often the eight-seater from Ijiraliq would fishtail into the ditch. The Inuit were hearty Christians and made the sixty-four-kilometre journey into Rankin every Sunday for the service. His last call from dispatch had relayed that the jeep he was driving to now wasn’t local. It would be hard to tell what he was in for. Locals knew to keep watch out for the random herds of musk oxen and rogue polar bears. Those unfamiliar with the North could easily become distracted by the inferior state of the roads. He’d been first on the scene after a family of campers had T-boned a male ox last spring.

  I’ve also pulled a body, frozen solid, from the water – Jan boasted to Connor – Shit, I had to wrap my chain around the guy’s middle and haul him out with all his fishing buddies looking on. The ice just hasn’t held this season. In all, around fourteen huts have fallen through.

  Terry flew cargo down in the Antarctic – Connor said – You can land a plane on only eight feet of ice.

  I’m telling you, this melt’s a strange one. Once it gets going, there’s no stopping.

  Connor hooked Jan around the waist, gripping his own forearms in a secure lock. The smell of cigarette on Jan’s skin was comforting as a campfire.

  The bears can’t hunt their usual territory. That’s why they’re wandering down.

  Bears wander regardless – Jan turned his head – Try putting a fence around nature.

  What happens if they’re boxed in. They attack?

  Sure, if they’re threatened. You corner any predator, he’ll attack.

  Connor was typical of the men Jan found himself involved with. They carried a hunk of iron around inside them that Jan felt useful trying to suss out and then repair like a surgeon removing a bullet. It never ended the way Jan believed it could but he made the best of a difficult situation. Rankin was small enough that he knew to take what he could get when he could get it.

  Whenever Connor was in town, the two men met in the far room of the Siniktarvik Motel. The owner, an aging Inuit hunter named Anawak, stayed put in the souvenir shop attached to the reception. The shop was a depleted rack of postcards, an array of polar bear snow globes on a melamine shelf above a thawed-out ice cream freezer. Anawak’s cataracts prevented him from seeing who came and went from the parking space at the far end. For years he’d only asked that Jan pay upfront.

  Jan spotted the jeep in the ditch about a kilometre down the road – a dark rectangle tilted against the brightness of the snow. Though the ridge was slight, in the flatness any altitude meant an impressive view of the surrounding tundra. Jan could just make out the darkened figure propped against the vehicle, but the sight of something swinging in his side-view drew his attention from the road. He slowed the pickup and pulled to the side of the gravel.

  Not long after he’d met Jan, Connor thought he’d heard the sound of a truck down the lane and had convinced himself Jan had somehow driven down to Winnipeg to see him. Connor ran to the opening at the far end of the tunnel of leaves where the lane met the county road. The fence of poplars that bordered their property bent and rattled their leaves, just starting to yellow in the fading daylight. Somewhere out in the acres of forest that backed onto their yard, a wolf howled. It wasn’t yet dusk so the sound signalled a kill – a coon or a rabbit, Connor thought, even an elk or one of the neighbour’s unlucky pups that had wandered too far from its territory.

  As the sound of the truck grew near, he’d felt his heart quicken. There was something about both of his worlds approaching each other, like alien planets on a near-miss collision course that gave him the same feeling he’d felt during flight school. The attack of pressure in his chest he’d wanted to rely on, what he saw and felt inside, not the attitude indicator or altimeter spiraling down in the cut-engine chaos of free-fall.

  It must be difficult living in a world of so many odours tacked onto tree trunks – Connor thought, as the district’s garbage truck rumbled past – How easy to misplace yourself.

  In the far corner of the yard near the row of pears and blackberry bushes, his son Riley bounced on the trampoline. He fell into a rhythm as Connor walked back to him that hinted at something constant.

  Dad, how sensitive is a girl’s crotch? – Riley landed on his knees and sprang upward, back into the air.

  Not very.

  Not at all?

  I didn’t say that. Why?

  Someone kicked Carla in the crotch at school. She came home early – Riley bent his knees when he landed to gain more height on the following bounce. His arms flew outward, his sock feet impacting the taut surface with padded thwacks that reverberated into the creaking springs.

  She wasn’t really hurt but Mom still had to go pick her up. Is it the same as when a boy gets kicked?

  No, it’s not the same – Connor said – Who told you that?

  Riley landed hard and flew high into the air. For a moment the boy was perfectly framed against what was left of the blue day. His smile as he soared was less what Connor noticed than the vapor trail of the 747 arching across the purpling sky behind him.

  What that fall must have felt like – Jan thought, circling around to the back of the truck. Twenty-three thousand feet of deafening noise, the stubborn, arctic air refusing to enter the boy’s lungs. The surface of the earth below crisscrossed with snow-capped trees and the dark moraines of glacial till that had been carried down from the extending ice cap millennia earlier.

  Jan fastened the hook of the metal hoist to the rig with the rusty clip. Attached, the winch line bowed with gravity from the top of the boom, a heavy sag that mirrored the curve of the cigarette foil he’d crumpled and tossed to the snow. It felt good to love someone as guarded as Connor. To engage the mechanics of having to open up for someone else to examine, to exhibit all the vulnerabilities that had taken him so long to pack inside himself. It seemed counterproductive, but his emotional distance was one of Connor’s flaws he felt he benefitted from.

  Jan knew about Riley and Connor’s youngest, Carla. He’d seen the unnamed wife smiling awkwardly in the backgrounds of the photographs Connor had shown him when they’d first met in the motel. But it was never a question of needing more than that. The simpler things were kept, the easier it was. For both of them.

  Lighting a smoke, Jan walked back along the side of the truck to the hood. The jeep below must have hit an ice patch coming down the hill and veered off as it tried to regain control.

  The driver was a dark stationary point against the snow a little to the right, and Jan couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman by the distance. He’d finish the smoke and then drive down to pull the truck free of the ditch. It wasn’t much to offer the world, but this was a respectable service and it made him feel useful to offer something other people couldn’t.

  The dark point stood in the distance and suddenly reached out for the vehicle. Jan saw the point slip and fall, landing in the snow like a period dropping to the bottom of a phrase. It lay there for a moment, stunned perhaps, and then strangely it began to slide away from the car out onto the expanse of snow that reached out to the horizon.

  Is the guy crawling somewhere? – Jan though
t, flicking the cigarette butt and squinting to focus on the vehicle.

  The point suddenly grew a tail of red as it slid. Unlike the airplane’s contrails that scarred the sky so precisely, this red one blotched and zagged across the ice as it drifted outward. It was then Jan saw the movement of the bear. Camouflaged perfectly against the brightness, its white bulk tugged the point away from the car, leaving a long red smear that grew in length as the animal pulled the body.

  Without thinking, Jan yelled out at the creature. His voice broke the vacuum of the air around him in a holler that morphed into a cry, filling the gigantic space with the kind of electricity that follows a gunshot.

  Jan could see the bear stop in its tracks, its invisible form drawn like a transparent ghost laid over the white snow background. Jan had seen enough of them hunting for seals on the slick ledges of icebergs to know what one of their muzzles looked like covered in blood. The chill of the outside didn’t subside when Jan jumped behind the wheel and sped down the hill towards the vehicle.

  Connor’s granddad had told him that in 1974, when Connor had been just two years old, an iceberg the size of a warehouse had drifted into the shallow waters of Rankin Inlet. Larger than any of the dwellings on shore, it parked in the bay for almost a half year, melting slowly, changing shape as elegantly as an ice sculpture at a wedding. The villagers who’d come down to the shore to study it soon noticed a thick gash streaked through the middle of it. They conversed in small groups on the pebble beach, the women wrapped in blankets, the men in rubber boots skipping stones out to hit it. The ripples that broke the iceberg’s giant reflection in the cold, dark water of the inlet quickly soothed over and mended.

  They’ve found people in icebergs before – one of them guessed – Mammoth hunters frozen since the last ice age.

  But the dark spot was too extensive to be a single human. It spread out on a diagonal across the whole thing, bisecting the turquoise and cobalt stress lines and disappearing beneath the black of the waterline.

  A woman holding a baby guessed it might be the frozen remains of a polar bear, but another quickly dismissed that possibility since he was a hunter and knew the bears were eaten by their comrades when they died or else sunk to the ocean floor to be devoured by microbes. They would have to wait. As the daylight increased, the warm breeze licked at the mountain twenty sun-filled hours all summer long.

  One of the older men first recognized it, the circular leaf roundel of the Royal Canadian Air Force. He confirmed with a few of his friends whose opinion he knew counted for something: The fuselage of a F4F Wildcat, completely intact but for the tip of the left wing.

  The men pondered a while and then surmised that after running out of fuel the pilot had crashed onto an ice shelf sometime during the end of the war. After three decades of snow had compressed into ice, the chunk had broken off the shelf and floated the entire plane in its crystal case into Rankin. When the melt would allow, the villagers would drag the plane free of the ice and tow it to shore.

  Do you think the pilot froze too? – a child with a maroon scarf wondered.

  I hope there’s something valuable inside – said another.

  Connor remembered the story as being one that his granddad had enjoyed telling him time and again. As a kid, Connor couldn’t get enough of it. He had pictured the iceberg in the moonlight as a towering black void with a tail fin. Once, he’d even dreamt he’d swum out, climbed to the top of it and stared at the pilot’s pale, frozen face. He’d woken and wondered what other gifts might be delivered by icebergs.

  Connor dried his hair and then the mirror with the motel’s bleach-roughened towel. There was something about the look of the man staring back at him in the fog-wiped reflection that made him move the fingers of his right hand to his mouth and chew their nails to the quick. He hated the habit but it did something to soften the purr of anxiety that had started in the pit of his gut since Jan had called him from the police station. Jan’s pickup was just pulling into the space in front of the motel room when Connor finally left the bathroom. He pulled on his boxers and huddled behind the door out of the cold as Jan stepped in. His lips were drawn into his mouth and he brought his cigarette inside without a second thought.

  The police said they would try to follow the trail – Jan said – but the males move quickly. There’s no use going out to hunt for the body.

  Jan stood with the smoking cigarette down at his side. He felt strange suddenly being indoors now, a sense of confinement that began to work its way across his body like the surface of a lake whose water was beginning to freeze.

  That’s a really shitty thing – Connor said – Do you want to go out and grab a beer or something? Do you want to sit?

  Yeah, thanks – Jan took a drag from his smoke and sat on the edge of the mattress – I mean, I’ve heard of them getting at people before. Just didn’t think I’d see it.

  Still holding his damp towel, Connor sat on the bed beside Jan. It made Connor uncomfortable watching another man in the moments following something like this. Selfishly, it was more that he didn’t like how he looked trying to comfort someone than it was that the other was suffering. Those were the parts of people Connor didn’t really care to know about and he stared in silence at bed sheets and their pairs of legs lined up in a row. His bare thighs were the kind of pale that reminded him of when he was a boy and at summer’s end his crotch would be white in the shape of his swim trunks. He imagined the polar bear’s jaw clamping onto the leg’s large muscle, tearing off a chunk with a sudden twist of its massive head.

  You destroyed your fingers – Jan said – What were you aiming for? Bone?

  Must have been – Connor studied the nubs of his nails – Just an old habit rearing. Do you feel better at least? It’s a wake-up, I guess. That’s what hits you most.

  I saw it from the hill – Jan said – the thing eating the guy alive out there. And I was watching it while it happened, thinking it was something different.

  You did what you could so don’t feel bad. Take a shower if you want – Connor wrapped his arm around Jan, pulling his body closer – I’ll join you in a minute if you want me to take your mind off it.

  Although Connor wanted the normal, impish Jan back, the perturbed look in the man’s eyes sparked something inside Connor as close to the pain of love as he’d ever felt. It was a feeling like red smithereens landing inside of him, hot iron. His hand rasped the whiskers on Jan’s chin as he moved his face in to kiss him.

  Jan’s body tightened – Stop, I just need a moment…

  Come here then – Connor pulled Jan down to the bed.

  The iron feeling had started to sear through him, a metal poker with a blazing orange tip. It was as though he’d been encased in ice his entire life and whatever was inside him had melted through it, exposing its nerve to the air.

  Give it a break – Jan said – Not now. I said I need a minute.

  Connor felt the force of Jan’s hands push back against his shoulders but the burning feeling wouldn’t let him stop finding contact with Jan’s skin.

  …Christ, Connor – Jan growled.

  Connor moved his body on top of Jan’s, pinning him to the bed with the force of his kisses. The more contact he made, the less painful the iron felt. Touching Jan felt like relief, like ice pressed on a burn. His fingers felt around Jan’s crotch for the fly of his pants.

  Jan suddenly brought the cap of his knee into impact with Connor’s groin, a collision that felt soft and solid at the same time. The other man’s reaction began as a sharp intake of air that changed into a series of whimpering moans as Connor rolled his body off him and curled at the corner of the bed.

  That love could feel as sickening as a kick in the crotch, as a breath that refused to pull its way down into the lungs, was the newest of the sensations Connor lay there trying to make sense of. He opened his eyes again when he felt the blast of cold hit his face, in time to see Jan’s silhouette pause at the open door
of the room.

  I’m sorry – Jan said – Man, I’m sorry.

  And in a moment, he was gone.

  THE VAGRANT BORDERS OF KASHMIR

  Diesel fumes spin from exhaust pipes, vaporous tails in the hot morning air. Autos weave past on the street below already lifting sharp odours of cabbage, market peels, baskets woven from wet grasses. Blistering sun pulls sweat to my forehead, that feeling of being lost I always tried for as a kid and only finally succeeded at. Veneer of sand blown from the beach spread over asphalt. Through the palm trees the ocean rolls, spraying salt into the whole nostril mix of things.

  Panaji Hotel rooftop waiting for breakfast with Ari.

  Goa.

  Ari leans over the concrete railing, peers down at the growling traffic. Shoulders brown as the milk coffee at my lips, tan still glistening with edges of red from yesterday’s hike to the hill temple. Climbed together in the heat of the day with one water bottle to share until the top, sweat that dripped from his upper lip onto the plastic opening, handing it to me. Now standing beside a nest of electrical wires pinned to the corner of the building, he says – An army truck down there’s unloading bags of onions – turns to the table – What are your plans after this?

  Probably head to some smaller beaches for a while. Couple of months maybe. Then Mumbai, Jodhpur, Agra, Kathmandu. Tibet, if money doesn’t run out.

  And Alexis?

  Don’t know. I’ll stay with her most likely. At least until she’s better. You really have to go? Bonderam festival starts in a week. Shame not to go all together, we’d have fun for sure…

  No, Cam. Can’t do that. Manobhava is only initiating disciples for another three days. If I leave tonight, I can just make it to Jaipur in time. A train from here to Mumbai, Mumbai to Bhopal, and should be a few hours to spare when I get to Jaipur.