Eva plonked herself down on the seat beside Freddie and started talking to him. At first he looked astonished. Then he looked nervous. Then he looked happy. Then he couldn’t shut up. It was quite the transformation.
Within about ten minutes she knew more about him than I ever had. She asked him what a Seventh Day Adventist was. Freddie, sounding more scholarly (sounding more anything) than I’d ever heard him be at school, told her about William Miller and how he’d predicted Jesus would come back to earth on October 22nd 1844.
‘And did he?’
‘Not in the way they were expecting.’
‘What did they do then?’
‘They called it The Great Disappointment.’
‘I guess it must have been.’
I didn’t hear the rest of their conversation. We were five kilometres out of town and even though the track had grown over and there was nothing to be seen from the highway anymore but trees and water and rock, I knew exactly the spot we were passing, just as I knew every single time I passed by it. Eva and Freddie’s lips were still moving, but I couldn’t hear them anymore. Each time I passed the swamp house it was though someone had pressed the mute button on the world.
Then I could hear them again. Freddie was telling Eva how his family had their Sunday on Saturday. We’d gone by the town population sign (which nobody had bothered changing for many years) and the bus was bumping over the tracks and past the old rail trucks and bunkhouses and abandoned machinery. A haze of reddish dust from the mine still hung over Crooked River, especially after breezy days, although sometimes it was hard to distinguish it from rust. Most people in town had two vehicles: one to drive and one to turn slowly orange in the front yard. Your first breath in town usually tasted slightly ferric on the tongue.
As we pulled into the entrance to the school I heard Eva asking Freddie where the town offices were. I leant over my seat and asked what she needed there.
‘I need a map,’ she said, smiling. I was beginning to realise that Eva’s smiles were no indication at all of whether she was pleased or happy or not.
‘Why do you need a map?’
She smiled.
She was smiling when we got out at the school. She was still smiling as she lit a green death and walked right back out of the entrance. She stopped to take a picture of the broken pinball machines sitting in the car park outside of Burky’s Pool Hall and then disappeared around the corner.
Freddie hovered for an extra second or two in front of the doors to watch her before, reluctantly, obeying the call of the bell and returning to the long silence of his school day. Disappointment came in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.
Maps and Exploration
I should have told Eva that if it was a map she was looking for then she was heading in the wrong direction.
Our school was covered in maps. It was as though the geography classroom had gone wild and annexed the entire building. They’d been painted onto the sides of the corridors and made into murals on the walls; they hung in picture frames above our lockers; whenever I looked up I was surprised not to find them on the ceiling. There were maps of the town site and maps of the surrounding country; maps of the way taken by European explorers; maps of the old voyageur routes and the railroad; maps of the survey lines that had made sure we weren’t in Manitoba or Minnesota. I could think of several reasons for this: that Crooked River was incredibly proud to have found its way onto a map; that places obsessed by maps are places that are afraid of falling off maps. But the main reason – the one I tried not to think about – was my father.
In the months and years after my mother died my father had become absorbed in a very specific history: that of the European exploration and settlement of the area we lived in, as well as the land to the north and west of it. It wasn’t the history in which he’d specialised at university (his thesis had been on 19th century Canadian economic history; he’d stayed in the boardroom, so to speak, rather than setting out in the canoe) or one, as far as I knew, he’d taken an undue interest in before. All I really knew was that at some point after she was gone the living room of the swamp house had become cluttered with accounts by Verendrye and Hearne and Mackenzie and Thomson. He’d read them all through the day and the evening. And when I woke up in the morning I’d often find him still sitting there in his chair, as if he’d stared all night at the place on the page where the dark had overtaken him, waiting for it to get light enough for him to see the words again – the words of all those restless men, brought to a halt in the hands of one who for weeks and weeks hardly moved an inch. These days, whenever I step into a museum, or happen to glimpse one of their names on a street sign, I picture their accounts teetering in the stagnant murk of that room, what light there was tinged a mossy green by the swamp. There they loom still, like the ivied columns of long-abandoned temples, hidden in jungles where even the birds are silent.
For a long time I couldn’t figure out what it was he was looking for in those accounts, only that the results of his looking were writ large on the walls of the school. He’d begun to teach a course on exploration and early settlement and each year his class would paint a map on the walls to illustrate what they’d learnt. And written alongside these maps were selected quotations from the explorers and travellers. These were chosen exclusively by my father (they were usually selected from the passages he copied into his grey moleskin notebook) and I’m not sure if anyone else on the faculty had ever bothered to read them that carefully. If they had, they wouldn’t have found the usual commemoration and celebration of civic beginnings and accomplishments. It was as though my father had trawled each account in search of its lowest ebbs, the moments of greatest hardship and despair. The walls of our school told a salutary tale about the dangers of hope and discovery: a careful reading of them would have suggested that if you were to leave your front doorstep you’d most probably freeze to death, or starve, or drown, or worse.
To escape them I got into the habit of avoiding school whenever I justifiably could – during free periods, at recess, any time it was possible. Mostly, I just wandered around town. There weren’t that many places to go, not if you wanted tarmac or snowploughs to make the way easier for you. Sometimes I’d follow the river to the old railway bridge or head west towards the remains of the mine site; sometimes I’d go east and make it as far as the abandoned farm. But a lot of the time I’d simply follow the streets until they came to an abrupt end at the tracks or the edge of the bush.
At the end of one of these streets there used to be a motel called the Red Rock Inn. Back then there’d often be men with red-veined, leathery faces, who wore baseball caps and suspenders for their pants, sitting on the cement steps outside, waiting for the bar to open. Usually, they’d be smoking and whistling songs about the Big Rock Candy Mountain or the Sunny Side of the Street. In those days it seemed like everyone over about sixty only ever sang songs from the depression. I guess bad times, like the devil, had had all the best tunes.
The Red Rock Inn had a stripper on Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays. There’d be a different one every week; they travelled from small town to small town like salesmen and performed three times a day, once during the day and twice at night. Their names were put up in black letters on a yellow sign outside. Miss DVS. Miss Hunter Hayes. Miss Nude Saskatoon. One day – it must have been a Wednesday – instead of the men, I found a woman sitting out on the steps smoking a cigarette. She was wearing a pink plastic coat that came down to her knees.
‘Hey there,’ she said. (I must have been looking at her.)
‘Hey,’ I said.
‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’
‘I’ve got a free period.’
‘Aren’t you the lucky one. My name’s Chloe. Why don’t you sit down,’ she said, patting the step beside her. Chloe must have been her real name because it wasn’t the same as the one on the sign. Normally at this point I would have begun to feel the tensing sensation in the right side of my forehead and tried to
leave, but there was something warm and safe and kind about her and it didn’t even start. Up close I could see her face was covered in a powder which reflected the yellow of the sign, making it look soft and golden, like pollen on water.
Chloe asked me some questions, about school and what my hobbies were and things like that. We’d been sitting there for maybe ten minutes when she got up and said she had to go back in. I realised suddenly I didn’t want her to go. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I found myself asking her if she wanted to come out to our house and visit. I said I’d like her to meet my father; that they had a lot in common and so they’d probably get on pretty great (I’d not actually asked her anything about herself). There was a pleading, desperate tone in my voice.
‘Oh honey, ’she said. ‘That’s sort of sweet but I think maybe you’ve got the wrong idea here. That’s not what I do.’
‘But my father’s lonely,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘I really am. But I’ve been to a hundred of these towns and in my experience a lot of people in them are lonely.’
‘But it’s not his fault,’ I said, and then it all came out; about the reading of the accounts and the sitting in the chair all day and the quotations on the school wall. And then I couldn’t stop myself and I was gabbing about the antlers in the swamp and how he’d thrown them in there and that sometimes he’d go stare into the water where he’d thrown them for hours and hours and that there were days when I was too scared to leave him alone, even for a second, even though sometimes I didn’t want to be around him at all. I just kept telling her things. I didn’t know what’d come over me. I wasn’t used to talking to people at all, let alone ones I didn’t know.
‘Oh honey,’ she said, reaching over and pulling my head into the space between her shoulder and her neck. I hadn’t realised how hot and red my face had become and the plastic of her coat felt wonderfully cool and smooth. ‘I’m so sorry. I won’t lie, I’m not a hundred per cent sure what it is you’re telling me about, but I’ll tell you this in return: you’ve got to try to forget some of that stuff or it’ll eat you up. Listen, sometimes I close my eyes and then open them real fast and try to imagine it’s the first time I’ve been in this world; that it’s as new to me as it was for Adam and Eve. And if I can do that just for a second, just for half a second, then I know everything will be okay.’
It was only then I began to realise how every time my father started a new account by one of his explorers that was exactly what he was hoping to do; that that was exactly where he wanted to get to. But he never ended up there. He ended up in the place on the walls instead.
Chloe had to go back to work but before she went she said, ‘You should try, honey. Promise me you’ll at least try.’
‘I will,’ I said.
And for months afterwards I thought about her and what she’d said. I wanted to do what she’d told me. I wanted nothing more than to feel my cheek against the coolness and smoothness of that plastic coat forever. There were lots of things I didn’t want to remember but I was so young there weren’t enough years to hide them away in yet.
Un-named Water Bodies
‘These “Un-named Water Bodies”,’ Eva said, scratching at the red patch on her neck, behind her ear. She didn’t seem to be in the best of moods. She wasn’t smiling and the patch was at least a millimetre or two bigger than before. You could see it clearly below the line of her bobbed hair, which today was a strawberry blonde. ‘What’s the deal with them?’
‘They probably did have names once,’ I said.
‘So why aren’t they on this frigging map?’
‘I guess they never got around to asking what they were.’
The map Eva had got from the town offices was spread out on a pinewood table. Reading it you could see how the invention of the settlers had been first taxed, and then exhausted, by the sheer number of lakes and rivers and creeks they’d found here. In a better history they would have listened more carefully and used the names they’d been given by the people who already lived here. Sometimes they had, but often they hadn’t. And so they’d gone through their usual repertoire – Loon Lake, Jackfish Lake, Trout Lake, White River, Rushing River, Rainy River – until in the end any old name would do: Big Lake; Less Big Lake; Little Lake; Next River; Next-to-Next River. And then, beyond even these, were the ‘Un-named Water Bodies’.
‘So where are we then, exactly?’
I tried pointing out the spot on the map but the truth was I was distracted by everything else around it. We were in Lamar’s place. I’d never been inside it before. I’d never really expected I would be.
Lamar had about ten no trespassing signs on his land and as far as I knew had never had a single trespasser. Sometimes I’d catch him stalking the edges of his property, waving his fist at some surprised dragonfly or squirrel. He was practising at being a testy curmudgeon, a role – the wildlife aside – he was far too reserved and gentle for. The recluse part he was much better at.
I’d thought his eyebrows were going to jump off his face when Eva had shown me in the door. He had a long nose that seemed to pull the bottom half of his face downwards at the same time as the top half danced this way and that. He nodded at me and I nodded back.
‘You never said…’ he’d mumbled in Eva’s direction.
‘Jesus, Lamar,’ Eva snapped. ‘It’s a human being. He won’t bite or dirty the carpets, I promise.’
He nodded again, as though he’d decided this was the least risky way of communicating all around, and then slunk back into the corner of the room.
It was certainly a big enough room for slinking. It had a high ceiling and a balcony running along one side, with doors leading off it into the rooms on the second floor. Most of the surfaces were the same shiny, almost glowing, orangey wood; the sign of a more expensive class of pine panelling. One wall looked as though it’d got in the way of a stampede. There were three moose heads peering out of it, as well as a couple of bears and five Whitetail bucks. The opposite wall was covered in fish; Walleye, Pike, Bass and Lake Trout. There wasn’t a species in there you couldn’t have caught or hunted within a mile or two of the front door. Lamar didn’t travel. Or so I’d always thought.
In between the fish and the animals was a wall hung with framed photographs. A quick glance revealed that most of them included what was quite clearly a young Eva, together with a man and a woman who I assumed were her parents; a fact confirmed by the presence in several of them of Lamar himself, who was easily recognisably as the man’s brother. As far as I could tell they were mostly holiday snaps. In one of them Eva and her parents were standing at the side of a road beside a blue Oldsmobile, pointing towards a sign I couldn’t quite make out. There was a lighthouse in the background, sat on an outcrop of bare, smooth rock. In another, Lamar and his brother were on the deck of a boat holding fishing rods. A third showed them standing beside a shark, clutching the same rods and grinning, pretending they’d caught it. Eva was sitting on her father’s shoulders. She was holding onto his neck with one hand; with the other she was reaching out towards the shark.
‘So where exactly is Sunset County Outposts,’ she demanded. ‘In relation to here.’
Sunset County Outposts was what Jay Boyette called his fly-in fishing and hunting camps. His hangar and float planes were based out at a lake called Windigoostigan, about five kilometres to the east of us. Eva looked at the spot on the map I’d pointed to and then, quickly and gently, brushed it with her fingertips. Lamar appeared to have moved a few feet closer to us. The two battling halves of his face had settled into a kind of grimace, an uneasy armistice between alarm and resignation.
‘God, stop lurking will you,’ Eva suddenly said. ‘I hate it when you lurk.’
‘I’m sorry…’ Lamar replied. There was a pause, a subtle skip of breath, where an endearment would have been. You could tell he wanted to use one but didn’t know which one to use, or if it’d be okay to use it. The easy, relaxed version of h
im I’d seen in the photographs hadn’t looked this awkward with his niece. I wondered how many times he’d actually seen her since then.
‘Let’s go to my room,’ Eva said.
While most of Lamar’s cabin was full of dead animals, Eva’s room was full of dead places. Its walls were plastered with hundreds of Polaroid pictures, each one a study in abandonment and dereliction. There were decaying fishermen’s shacks from the Maritimes and half a wall of old barns from the south of the province and the prairies, their boards as weathered and grey as elephant skin. There was an outdoor ice rink with poplar saplings growing out of its centre, and a rusty gas pump on the side of a road whose crumbling tarmac was tufted with grass. In one corner I glimpsed the wannigans, in another the mine site at Crooked River. Eva was a collector of ruins.
She was also a collector of other things. Through the half open doors of a dresser I could see a line of white, Styrofoam heads, each one topped with a different wig. I recognised the blonde ponytail from the school bus and the curly brown one from Wannigan Bay and the straight black one from when I’d first seen her. There appeared to be others too but the doors weren’t open wide enough for me to make them out. To begin with I was surprised but, of course, how else had her hair always been changing. And besides, once I’d had a second to think about it, it didn’t seem such a bad or strange thing at all: to be able to change a part of yourself and have a place where you could keep all the different versions. Wasn’t that just metamorphosis?
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