Be careful what you wish for, my mother liked to tell me, as if wishes must carry at least a clear inch of pain within them. For years, this was all I desired: to be with Tessa in a car almost like this—a quiet back road, with me at the wheel, Tessa’s trembling hand resting lightly on my shoulder. Now, my arms ached from the effort of holding a steering wheel. The cut on my finger had opened again, stinging a slick thread of blood. My right knee jiggled uncontrollably and my foot arched painfully as I navigated accelerator and brake pedals. No wonder my mother was such a menace on the road. Driving hurt.
How long could we manage with no guarantee of escape? We might simply be weaving between the same logging roads again and again. The thought might have crossed both our minds moments before we hit what would turn out to be the last blind curve and the road opened into a dry patched lane of gravel and dirt, more groomed than anything we’d come upon before. The dead trees thinned to scrub. A tight breeze ruffled the dust beyond us as we eased into one last series of gentle switchbacks and knew we were heading downward for sure. Glimpses of a familiar sky appeared, still burdened and beleaguered, yet a harsh welcome glint. Both of us held an image of the road to the refuse station, a route we knew in our bones, and we began to relax. We could almost see the intersection ahead where, with Bryan, we’d drop off Jackie before turning right toward town. But when we finally—too fast—did come to a level stretch, we were on a far better road, one Tessa and I didn’t recognize or anticipate, a road that appeared to head for a vast green plain. It was as if the world had inverted itself, and as if to emphasize that point, we were suddenly enveloped in mist, real rain, shushing across the filthy windshield, blinding me. I hit the brakes too late and too hard, and the car rolled onto that swell of endless perfect lawn even as a new wave of heavier rain tippled over us. I couldn’t stop the car now, not even when Tessa leaned across and yanked the hand brake. The car pressed forward, out of our control, hydroplaning over that flawless field. We floated through an impossible rain, in one graceful twirl after another until Tessa flew, a ragdoll weight, out of her seat and landed twisted across me, her head settling against my chest.
Not for the first time, I wondered if I was already dead, in a version of heaven not even Uncle Lud could dream up. The two of us inverted, Tessa gazed down at me and with her bandaged hand touched my cheek.
“Your face,” she said, suddenly tearing up.
“It’s okay,” I said, holding her tighter. “It’s okay.”
Still, it would take me several more long beats to recognize the intermittent showers as coming from sprinklers, the vast green lawn as a golf course, and, ever so slowly, even the irate figure running in our direction, and know for certain I was telling Tessa the truth: we were safe.
• • •
We had heard about the Scotsman and his private golf course, the clever network of expensive irrigation, that velvet sod. We had heard about the Scotsman, an introvert, obsessed by a game he played alone. He had wolfhounds. My mother had met one when the animal wandered away. But until we saw him approaching, a lean, livid man, flanked by a pair of equally lean wolfhounds, we had never given him much thought. Any curses he’d been about to heap on Tessa and me burbled away once he got a good look at us. His mouth gaped open then.
“Can ye walk?” he asked, his brogue purling with concern.
I had to laugh because the Scotsman sounded like none other than Alexander McAfee, the BBC fox who had so enchanted Uncle Lud.
“I mean,” he continued, “if ye could get yerselves . . .”
Tessa, too, began to silently shake and for an altered moment I supposed my laughter was infectious.
“The poor little gull,” the fox was saying. Was he wringing his hands? I couldn’t quite tell. The light had gone dim again, the whole car shivering. A siren rounded, circling closer and closer.
“The poor little gull,” the fox repeated.
Those hills are full of gulls, Hana broke in.
No, no, I protested, no, not this one, as doors flew open around us and Tessa was lifted out of my arms.
BEAUTY + DESPAIR
A POEM BY THE DEVIL
You cannot equate them, no formula makes sense.
So reconcile, please, the absence of solutions.
Days of computation will always return
a wound that never heals,
a wound littered with blank dust, wormed gravel,
with particles of shivered glass and, worse,
a reeking emptiness that you can subtract
or multiply to kingdom come
and never satisfy the infernal problem.
The end of the world comes not all at once
but in gasps. How grand is that?
Your real tragedy is that you can dream only
a single, shared ending, neat sums in a line
like tree after tree waiting for the saw,
the flame, or the wretched bloom
of a wheedling insect staking claim
on a girl breathing light, alone.
IN HIS WAKE: INFERENCE, INTERPRETATION
On that long July evening, Jackie’s mother and Tessa’s surprisingly sober sister made the rounds, with three of Jackie’s sisters filling the car’s backseat. The Health Centre had no news for them, and in the wake of the fires, the lumber camp had closed, its managers blotto and disagreeable down at the Peak and Pine. The women were pulling up Lamplight Hill, where my mother was keeping vigil over Uncle Lud and fuming at my absence when they were nearly run off the road by Trudy, arriving with news of her own.
Bryan had spent a frantic hour combing town for the orange Matador before returning to search the hills east of Flacker’s and, not incidentally, dodge the crews arriving to deal with the new outbreak, that chemical reek. The Flacker Fire, it would be called, all blame placed on the missing Flacker’s head (his meth lab, his still). It wouldn’t take long for a dozen people to say they foresaw the inevitability, for warrants to be issued, Flacker declared the bogeyman of this terrible fire season. People would forget the fire had started well before that afternoon. Bryan could not stop to savor his success. He vaulted his own considerable fears and went to Trudy, who was fielding a rash of local calls in the midst of the fire brigade’s own crises.
Blood along the highway.
A car flipped upside down on the Scotsman’s golf course.
A concussed child.
The town’s only two aid cars idled at the Flacker fire, waiting fruitlessly for survivors. Over the incoming radio static, Trudy gazed at soot-covered Bryan and ordered the aid cars back just as one last call arrived.
A shooting on the dead-end curve of Tripcott Road.
“That’s your place, isn’t it?” my cousin asked Bryan, who was stunned to find himself nodding.
“Hey, Kenny,” she called out to the frazzled chief in the inner office. “Going now.” She pushed her chair away from the desk and radio and without a backward glance, pushed past Bryan and out the door.
“And Jackie?” her mother asked hopefully as Trudy broke the news to my mother: Tessa and me on our way to the Health Centre; Marcus Nagle ahead of us; Albie Porchier wrangling with the police on behalf of Ursie.
“And Jackie?” her mother tried again.
Not even Trudy was ready to shake her head. She shrugged.
“Nothing yet,” she hedged.
By late the next evening, the wind had all but ceased to exist. The original fire swept farther north and was slowly, painfully contained. Still, the Flacker Fire burned in place for weeks, as if that damned soul refused to give up the Earth. Every bit of venom he’d spewed burbled back in scorching impotence as the fire tried to singe the sky, make one everlasting mark on the heavens.
Flacker was clearly dead, although it seemed to take ages to find the remains and verify. At first, no one knew what had happened to Cassie
Magnuson and the little Magnuson kids and belated worry about them fueled search efforts until Cassie Magnuson was arrested for shoplifting a few towns over and the little Magnuson kids were sent, at last, to live with a grandmother who turned out to be loving and anguished on her own account.
When finally the areas up around the logging camps were declared safe, a search-and-rescue team made a desultory attempt to find Jackie and Hana Swann. No one believed they were out there. The police were positive Jackie had simply run off with her new friend, a gal most agreed now was nothing more than a troublemaking transient. Even Jackie’s logging bosses suggested the two had planned and plotted an adventure well away from our small town. They might not have believed, but everyone who knew Jackie were certain she would never run away. Tessa, Bryan, Ursie, and I knew. We knew, too, that we’d failed her, failed, failed, failed to save one we loved.
Search and Rescue did unearth the remains of a jeep with two male bodies inside, not far down from the ledge that had almost claimed Tessa and me, and a few hardened old hearts leapt painfully at that news.
“What the hell were they doing up there in the fire?” GF Nagle’s grandfather bellowed around town.
Mitchell Flacker hadn’t a clue. He didn’t even have Markus to interrogate. The single bullet Ursie fired had, of course, unerringly found its mark. Even the judge, considering the evidence, the damaged house and Tessa’s bruised body, agreed it was in self-defense and marveled that Ursie was able to stop a moose of a man with that single shot.
Uncle Lud did not die that night or even the night after. For ten long days, he lingered in the twilight sleep he and I briefly shared, yet while I woke, safely back in my own bed still dreaming I held Tessa in my arms, Lud traveled on. And I sat with him. Me and my mother and Trudy and—and Tessa, too. She was still sporting all kinds of new scars, but ready now to hold my hand while we waited.
Uncle Lud died on the afternoon my mother buried one last feline victim in her animal boneyard. He died while Jackie’s sisters insisted endlessly to the police that Jackie had not run away, that she would not run away, that she did not do drugs or sell herself, that she was a good, hardworking girl who had gone missing. He died as Trevor Nowicki and my father finally reached the edge of town, not knowing what they’d find as they proceeded homeward and for once, flat afraid.
He died while the rescued Magnuson kids tumbled from cot to cot, unable to calm after their rescue. Within four safe walls, in new pajamas and beds with pillows, after devouring elbow macaroni and cheese piled high on real plates, they were dazed by the sudden fullness of their existence and had already begun to believe that everything they’d known before this place had been a kind of fantasy in which, barefoot and vulnerable, they’d been carried from an ogre’s palace, hidden in a giant’s burlap sack.
Uncle Lud shouldn’t have known about all that. But he did; I was sure he did. Just as I was sure he saved two boys from Snow Woman and heard Keven Seven instructing Ursie in dark arts. I imagined Uncle Lud in his final hours ascending his own mountain path, standing one last vigil as the Man Who Came Out of a Door in the Mountain arrived in his sights, shadowing that creature until the rock slipped back into place behind him, at least for a while. Then, Uncle Lud might have turned and faced an altogether different landscape, another sort of brilliant path finally visible.
“There is,” Leila Chen wrote me in one of her last e-mails, “a clear connection between physics and poetry (as you well know, Leo Kreutzer) and it is this: both are links between the visible world and its vast invisible counterpart.”
Quoting from a preface in the Physics Online, she wrote:
“Some estimates are that the universe is 70% dark energy, 25% dark matter, and only 5% of the universe is visible matter or energy.”
You see, Leo Kreutzer, the world is mostly composed of that which acts only in reaction-to, not that which simply acts. Inference, Leo Kreutzer, and Interpretation, these are what matters and both are provinces of poetry and physics. Perhaps, one day, you will turn to poetry. I foresee that, like me, you might have some small skill in that arena.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The story here was sparked by outrage over the ongoing murders and disappearances of aboriginal women along Highway 16, the so-called Highway of Tears, in northern British Columbia, a situation that needs as much light as can be shined upon it—and energy and solutions. The story veered into a more fanciful narrative after a dinner party discussion of good and evil (thank you, Tom Jay and Candy and Michael Gohn). My extreme gratitude is owed to the indefatigable Gail Hochman, who read and read and read for me with grace, honesty, and generosity; and to Maggie Riggs, my insightful editor; also Debra Magpie Earling, Germaine Harun, and my dear Peter Scovil, all of whom I’ve hypnotized into believing I’m smarter and better than I truly am and so are the best of listeners. I’m also indebted to Kent Meyers, who gave the novel a valuable reading at a crucial point, and Duncan Scovil, reader extraordinaire, who read, listened to, and discussed the book with me more than anyone should have. To Alistair Scovil, well, hell, Ali . . . there isn’t a book big enough to acknowledge or thank you, love.
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