by Nadia Bozak
“Clear as crystal,” I said back, adding in something about how I should’ve stayed home with Bellyache if I wanted someone busting my goddamn balls.
That shut us both up and so we sat there quietly and listened to the rain. Rolled cigarettes and smoked.
“I heard you singing that song,” Dave told me after some silence. “I heard you coming. I know that song. Bob Crater wrote that song. I heard Metal Patient do a cover of it that was pretty decent.”
Fixed my eyes on him, keen old spikes of focus. Leaned in real close.
“And how do you know about Bob goddamn Crater a way out here in butt-fuck nowhere?”
“Christ,” Dave said. “You’ve got breath like an asshole.” He wiped my spit from his face with the back of his hand. “And just so you know, Bob Crater don’t mean jack shit to me.”
My eyes stayed slit. How was it the only person I’d met outside of Black Dew Seat, out there in the middle of the cold black bush, spoke so easy about what so far I’d thought belonged to me and Slava O’Right alone?
“No more of that,” Dave said.
“What?”
“Goddamn talking. No more. Not with me.”
“Fine,” I said. Dave, he just looked straight on ahead and said nothing.
Stared hard at his profile, his lashes flickering like some kind of insect wings. Wanted to carve my name right across his high forehead just because he was such an asshole.
“Bozak,” I said after a long lot of rain.
Dave went on staring into the straight-ahead.
“It’s Bozak,” I told him again.
“What’s Bozak?” Dave asked.
Silence. And then: “Bozak is Bozak.”
That was it then. Our introduction.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When the rain eased up Dave got to patching his canoe. Me, I stood there and watched him go at the boat’s scabby guts with reams of duct tape, blobs of brown glue, and a staple gun, this being the weapon he’d had concealed in his jacket. He looked up at me and nodded at the knife hanging from my belt. Paused, held hard on his eyes, and then I unsnapped the holder, pulled it out of its sheath, and passed it over. He took it by the bone handle, eyed the blade. Angled it against the light.
“One tough motherfucker of a knife you have here.”
“Sure is.”
Wanted to say how it was Pickles’s knife before me, and some Indian hunter before him, and that the history of it was goddamn sketchy and the things it had seen and work it had done made that thing a monster. Stood and watched Dave scrape dried brown glue away from the edges of a blistered patch.
Dave gave back the knife, blade down. Jammed his hands into his jacket pockets and leaned back.
“I’m gonna burn this rat bastard when I’m through,” he said, nodding toward the canoe.
“Burn it?”
A hand held out as if for the canoe to sniff, I took a step toward it. Knelt down at the bow and ran mitted fingers over the keel seam, tracing the patches and bandages that held the canoe together and kept the thing. Behind me I felt him watching all my movements.
“That’s right. When I’m done with it, I’m going to set it on fire and then watch the fucker burn.”
“Whatever,” I said, “just as long as it’s after I get to the Muskrat.”
Dave and me, we carried the canoe to the shore and then went back for our gear and carried this down too. Was going to ask Dave if it was really just cassettes he kept locked up in that case, but then shut up about it. A smuggler, maybe, the case full of contraband he would trade for cash once he got south and across the border. Wondered too if he knew the O’Rights—if maybe he had some stake in their racket. Down at the water we lined the bottom of the canoe with fir bows, loaded the duffel on top, and then covered the works with Dave’s tarp. We shoved off just as it was getting time for supper: Dave in the bow, me back of him in the stern. The battered racing canoe slid us across the calm lake water, and the sun, having burned its way through the clouds of bad luck, was coming through a wash of milky blood just behind us, back there in the western sky. And so together, through that wet-dirt dead-water universe, we paddled on.
* * *
Into a hammering headwind we went hard, bones all bruised, skin turned to sinew, our straight course tripped up and broken apart. It felt good to sweat, and our paddles worked themselves into a charging togetherness that outdid the lake and the wind and proved we were nothing if not a rugged pair of contenders. Watching the back of Dave, I saw his hair ripped up by the wind, saw too the hook of his nose as he bent low into his stroke. Like a follower, I was paddling not just toward the south, but toward him, after him whose strokes outdid my own even before I made them. That was something I knew I would come to hate: being cursed with catching up, trailing on after his dust, making some rocker remember that I was right there behind him. So it was I named that lake after me and him, Dog Leash. Hard we went, stopping not for water or to rest, desperate to make up for those hours spent holed up out of the rain. But then our paddles moved slowly and slow and slower still, and it was all the canoe could do to drag itself along. Dave lifted his paddle, and with it pointed toward the eastern shore, and in that direction we went.
Evening came with a tiger-red sun. We coasted along below a bald stretch of escarpment, paddles touched the rock bottom, smooth and flat like concrete poured black, and we took it slow, scouting for a clearing. The eastern shore was edged with thick forest that backed onto the rocky rise, and there it thinned out, leaving only rugged conifers clawing, almost crawling along the edge of rock face. We beached the boat and hauled the gear up the rock. Then Dave staggered up the slope with the canoe on his shoulders, then camouflaged it with the tarp.
On that plateau, up above Dog Leash Lake, I saw the water had gone to sleep beneath the sun. The sky was licked with cloud above the silhouette of forest lining the opposing shore and the treetops that fenced the sky. Dave was just climbing down from a big old fir tree where he’d been looking out, not at the lay of what was coming ahead, but at what was coming up behind us. We set up camp before night sealed the earth for good, and worked without a word or a look between us. Dave dragged a fallen birch into the clearing, and chopped and split its trunk for a fire. Cut and gathered fir boughs for our beds and also some dried-out birch for kindling. Lashed Dave’s paddles to a tree and stashed my pack in the bushes where the rain would not get at it. Pot and provisions I brought over to the side of Dave’s glowing fire, set well back from the edge of the plateau where no one would see it. Neither of us pitched a tent for neither of us had one. Then the sun finally went out and the world turned black.
Above the fire that Dave built I set up a trivet. Tried to find somewhere inside me the energy to get water from down there where the lake was. Dave sat across from me looking depressed and all shrunk up, his hands punched into his jacket pockets. He stoked the fire and kept his eyes low. We were sullen, almost shy. The call of a loon came out from across the lake. That and the crackle of flames were the only reminders of some life left out there. Moon and stars were washed out. A black and empty night on Dog Leash Lake, and he just sat there, not moving except to poke the embers of the fire.
So I got up and went down to the water and left him alone in the darkness. Could not see the hands in front of me, and I could not tell from sight when pot and canteen were filled. Standing there with what seemed like no ground beneath and no sky above, a world without any kind of volume or depth, well, I felt as good as fallen off the earth.
Imagined Dave drowning me in shallow water when I’d bent over to drink or wash just because he hated the back of me. Thought he might like to tear apart my duffel and kick at my ribs as I lay there just sleeping. And then he’d glide off across the midnight moonlit waters. In his hair-triggered eyes there was a certain shine that I thought made this Indian, this Dave, seem as unpredictable as he was unfriendly. C
limbed back up the slope with these small footsteps so as not to spill the water and also so as not to make too much sound with the spurs I wore. The fire up there was my only guide, that blood spot rising out of the dark like it was a real live sun in the night.
Dave was all hunched up in the firelight. We shared food, drank thin coffee, rolled cigarettes, and smoked in silence, looking all the while into the eyes of our fire. And then Dave took out a flask, swigged and passed his leathered forearm across his mouth. He tossed it then around the fire, low hand, so it skidded along the dirt and hit me in the left boot. Looked over at Dave but his eyes they were pierced in the firelight, and so I just undid the cap and poured a gush of what he had down my throat. Whisky. Gave Dave back the liquor by the same way it had come.
Birchbark, curling and snapping before the flames turned it into fire, made it so each time Dave’s jaw twitched, I fancied I could hear it. He was rubbing something between thumb and forefinger, something flat, not quite white, made of pearl or plaster or bone. And as he rubbed, he listened tight, but there nothing to hear apart from the long silence of the night. Watching him, I really could not think of a time I had felt worse. Thought instead of plain old Dave, how he ought to be called something metallic and evil-sounding, which is likely what he wanted, something like Gash or Gore, Venym, Vyctym or Vex. Or maybe something more Indian, like Dave Long-Lost, Dave Like-Lightning, Dave Running-away-from-Home, Dave Riding-a-Dead-Horse. But I just kept going back to Dave Bashed-up-Boat.
On a blanket of fir boughs just feet from the fire, I laid down my sleeping bag, took off my boots, and used them for a pillow. After some minutes I heard Dave stand up. Did not look over, me being sure my eyes would flash out flat silver in the night. Listened as he dammed the fire. Then he went and tied my sack of provisions to his, and cached them in a tree. Lifted the canoe, crawled beneath it, and pulled it down over himself like his own private coffin.
And I just thought, fuck you, canoe. And fuck you, coffin, too.
Tried to sleep, but couldn’t, my brain circulating all these goddamn whispers and warnings, and with them came pictures of Pickles’s twisted mouth and Slava’s green marble eyes and the way Dave had looked on the shore, his back turned. So I got up and I pulled out Pickles’s hunting knife and I cut down my fingernails. Hunched over, shoulders shivered and ached, and my chest feeling all caved in under the pain of the blade. There was mud and dirt and blood under those nails, and it would not come out, just kept getting worse, so I scraped and cut and pared away at those nails of mine and they seemed not only to get bloodier and dirtier but to bleed dirt. My nails, they punished and tortured me, and so did my back, breaking as it was from carting Pickles’s big old boots all over the goddamn province.
Thought about tomorrow’s dawn, about paddling behind Dave for days and hours and sunsets and sunrises more, for 100 more kilometres until we escaped this empty goddamn land and got onto the Muskrat—shoulders wearing away and sockets burning, kneecaps gone to cement, and palms sprouting fresh crops of blisters. It’d be all hellish portages, all rapids to run, and a whole lot of worry that the boat would at anytime give out, and then Dave would just leave me there, standing stranded on the bank of the Muskrat, waiting for some horny hunter to come along. It was nothing, that first night with Dave, but feeling sorry, and that’s the way I fell asleep. On my back, in the cold, long way from no home, with the nails freshly cut and bled, and the heart I had like that too.
* * *
Dave didn’t sleep much. Still dark, and he was up and creeping around. Sleeping with my eyes not quite shut, in the glow of char I saw his shadow and I saw that all Dave needed to complete the look of ambush was a knife between his teeth. He stopped when his left boot stepped on a piece of my hair coiled up in the dirt and he stayed very still, looking down at me. His boot so close to my poor old head that I could smell the sweat coming from his socks. He was thinking about taking off and leaving me there. And me thinking how it really would be ten times worse with him gone. Through the blur of lashes, I watched Dave turn away and go back to the canoe where he’d slept for maybe as little as four hours. Could see him in the light of the three-quarter moon that had come out from the cloud cover. Dave carried his pack and the suitcase out of the bushes and then out came his bashed-up boat. Trees rustled like he was the wind. He found his flashlight and ran its yellow cast along the belly of the canoe. With his fingers he smoothed out the bandages and patchwork scattered along the body, pressed down on the seams and, seeing that maybe his rough-hewn craft was holding, he thumped the bow and then switched out the light. Then Dave did this: he lit a match and held it to the body of the boat, just long enough to leave a burn mark. He lit another match and held it to the peeling bark of a paper birch. It didn’t take long for the tree to catch fire. Leaned back with his hands in his pockets and the hood of his Rotting Christ sweatshirt pulled up over his head, watching the spreading flames.
So I sat up then and I said to Dave he’d better put out the fire and we’d better get going since both of us were up. Dave didn’t turn around. He just spat at the fire that was dying out now anyway, for the rain had drenched the skin of that old tree such that the flames could not really soak in long enough to do much damage.
“Got any water left in your canteen?”
“Not for that,” I said. “Get your own water if you’re just going to waste it.”
Dave shrugged and spat, and then he took off his jacket and used it to smother the flames.
He was on the shore when I got my gear down there. Hands jammed in his pockets, and a red bandanna folded into a band and tied low around his head so that his brows were almost covered. He really did look to me more thrasher than rocker, and I thought how the kids in Black Dew Seat would have thought him pretty decent, despite being a long-haired Indian. They would jump him most likely, just to see him fight, expecting him to be able to dish it out and take it, to have a thirst for blood that was twice as keen as most. Dave’s leather jacket was like mine, only better, for his had studs on the shoulders and there was a Metallica patch on the back, down at the bottom. Mine had The Goddamns in peeling white paint, straight across the shoulders. Back in Black Dew Seat I took a lot of abuse for that. They didn’t know what it was, and so it had no right being there in the North. ac/dc and Ozzy were alright, they fit in with snowmobiles, playing hockey in tight jeans, pissing beer in the snow. But The Goddamns were something else, and the way I carried the name on my back and scrawled it on my arms sometimes and on T-shirts with a black marker, well, that showed that I really didn’t give a shit about anything, ruining my clothes and my own skin like that. Kids said I was just making that shit up—there were no Goddamns, others were saying it sounds like a real pussy kind of name. They said Slayer’s a tough name, Cannibal Corpse, even Led Zep, but Goddamns sounded old and lame. Without the legendary Goddamns, there just wouldn’t be Slayer or Scapegoat or anyone else, and all it would take for them to like the Goddamns was for Metallica to wear a goddamn Goddamns T-shirt, and if they did that, I’d call them for the posers they really were. Goddamn those BDS kids—meanest kids on earth.
Bent down, the water’s edge lapping the toes of my boots, I drank in Dog Leash, splashed it on my face, and wet my swollen eyes. Dave looked over as I was wiping down with the corner of the ragged T-shirt that hung out from the leather jacket and almost down to my knees and smelled like an old man’s armpit. He looked at me, spat into the lake water, and said something about shit, something else about piss, a couple fucks laid out in between. Me, I was about to say what-the-fuck to that, but Dave had more words and got them out first.
“Come light this wind’ll be bruising,” he said, all calm, his voice dead and flat and without any kind of emotion. “We’ll finish this here lake—”
“Dog Leash,” I said.
“What?”
“Dog Leash Lake. This lake.”
“How’d you figure on that?”
&nb
sp; “Nameless, so I named it myself. Now it’s Dog Leash.”
Dave, he just cleared his throat and then started over, his voice tighter.
“We’ll finish this here lake before the wind’s any worse. Then portage to the next lake—unless, that is, you’ve already named it?”
“No,” I said looking out at the water, just like Dave was doing. “Maybe I’ll let you have the next one.”
Dave turned away and then I followed him back up to the plateau, and together we carried the canoe through the darkness down to the water where we loaded up and paddled off into the night.
CHAPTER EIGHT
That lake had a beginning we could not remember, and it had nothing like an end, or not one that we could see, no matter how narrow we made our eyes. Morning passed calm. Wind changed mid-afternoon. Fucked us up—the water got real choppy and it slopped over the sides of the boat, soaking jeans and boots, the gear not covered tight with tarps. Me, I struggled against the wind and also to keep up with Dave as he plugged away up ahead. He seemed fit and strong, and he made the fight against that goddamn wind look almost easy. But then I could not see the expression on his face, so I imagined that I was the only one of us with hot tears clouding the eyes.
Got blown right off course, realizing we’d gone kilometres due east, cutting the lake on something like a horizontal radius, instead of paving through it by a vertical drop as had been the plan. Looking up, Dave saw the sun was beside us when it should have been at our backs. We stopped in the middle of the water, Dave all swearing and twisting his fists around the neck of his paddle. Dave Bashed-up-Boat cursed the sun and the wind, and I just sat there when he said to me all this filthy stuff for leading us so far off course. Me, I looked east while Dave was spitting out those words, and the wind blew hair across my face so I could smell the spray paint in it.