Oskar had already started playing. He put down a ten of diamonds and I put down a seven instead of my ten of clubs. I was flustered and guilty. I didn’t know what to say about the episode with Eva and the train. And I didn’t know what to tell him about where we’d been and what had really happened. That we’d been on a wild goose chase? That we’d found the un-named water body and given it a name? That she’d been diving for bones?
‘I don’t know why she likes doing that,’ I said. ‘She does a lot of stuff I don’t know the reasons for.’
Oskar played a seven and picked up a couple of points. Then I played a six and he got thirty-one with an ace and took another two points. Once we’d counted our hands he finally spoke.
‘You know I don’t trap out that way, don’t you? That place has never been lucky. Bad luck is bad luck – there’s no point getting too close to it if you don’t need to.’
I didn’t know how he knew we’d been up north of the prison site.
‘She wanted to look there,’ I said. ‘I don’t even know what she was expecting to find.’
‘Sometimes people need to look for things they don’t even want to find.’
After we’d finished a couple of games, Oskar walked across the room and pulled a bottle of Crown Royale out from beneath his bed and poured himself a glass. It was the first time I’d actually seen him drink. It was a piece of decorum he shared with many of the older drunks in town – not to drink in front of children or churches. He must have decided I was old enough now not to qualify.
‘You want a glass?’ he asked, sitting back down.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Don’t go telling your old man.’
‘I won’t.’
I’d never had alcohol before. I had a glass. He had the rest of the bottle.
But it was me who ended up the drunker.
‘You said never,’ I slurred after I’d finished my glass. I felt warm and cocooned. I felt like I could look at everything head on in the eye. ‘You said it had never been lucky.’
‘What had never been lucky?’
‘That place,’ I said emphatically, gesturing with my hands and accidently knocking one of my counters off the table. I was my father’s son – perhaps it was inevitable I’d prove to be a clumsy drunk. ‘Why never?’
Oskar looked down at his knee for a second or two, as though he were consulting it on some grave issue.
‘You remember what you asked me before?’
‘It seems like I’ve been asking you a bunch of stuff lately,’ I bellowed. The volume of my voice didn’t feel entirely under my control.
‘You asked if any of them escaped.’
‘Any of who escaped?’
‘The prisoners.’
His name wasn’t Gunther. It was Johann. He was one of the prisoners Oskar played cards with. He remembered playing with them one particular night. It was the first week of November and they’d been there for almost a year. (Oskar said when they’d first arrived they’d talked to him about Christmas and how the war would be over and won by then and they’d be home. ‘You’ll be the one in here,’ they’d joked. The second year they didn’t talk or joke about it at all.) Outside a flurry of snow had fallen and then quickly melted. But by midnight it’d started turning cold fast. He’d noticed it on his hands and ears when he’d stepped outside for a cigarette. He’d started rubbing his palms together to keep them warm.
‘Here, take these,’ said Johann, who’d joined him outside for a smoke. He’d handed him a pair of black woollen gloves.
Once they were back inside they’d played for about another hour. Half way through a game of gin rummy Johann had thrown down his hand and stood abruptly up from the table.
‘This is what we’ve done,’ he’d said in English. ‘Given up.’ And then he’d turned and left.
‘I didn’t get a chance to give them back,’ said Oskar.
By one in the morning it was cold enough for the puddles in the camp to have frozen over. Oskar remembered the sound of his boots crunching through them as he headed home. By the time he’d got back to his cabin there was a skin of ice covering a half drunk cup of coffee on his table.
The next morning began with a bright, hard frost. It took the sun a good few hours to clear it and in the shaded part of the woods it didn’t clear at all. The lake was swathed in a heavy mist when he went back to the camp to return the gloves. It was giving up the very last dregs of the summer and fall’s heat. Soon enough it’d be turning to ice.
But when he got there Johann was gone. Nobody had seen him since the night before. There weren’t even any guards to notice he wasn’t there; they were both drunk in town. The others prisoners weren’t happy that he’d escaped. They were worried. It was already getting cold again and they knew enough about where they were to know the chances of him getting anywhere on foot were slim to zero. They spent most of the day out looking for him themselves and in the afternoon they found a small patch of blood beside some trees they’d been cutting for fuel.
At first no-one could work out what’d happened. Nobody had shot him – there hadn’t been any guards. And there wasn’t even a fence or barbed wire to get over. It didn’t make any sense. But it didn’t take long to figure things out. Oskar just followed the blood trail. He’d obviously cut his leg or foot on a Swedish saw somebody had left leaning against a tree stump. It was dumb luck. And yet he’d kept on going.
Oskar said he didn’t know why he’d agreed to track him. He guessed it was because he’d given him the gloves. It felt like he had a responsibility to find him somehow.
He’d blood-tracked him for a few hours, until it began to get dark.
‘It was like going after a deer,’ he said. ‘Like that one from last year.
I began to suspect then that it hadn’t ended well for Johann.
The previous fall Oskar had taken me deer hunting for the first time. We’d gone to an area east of the lake, where a logging company had clear-cut a patch of the forest two years before. The cut stretched jaggedly on either side of a rough winter road, which was corded with logs where it passed over the lowest, swampiest ground. Here and there the tops of small ridges had been left uncut, breaking up the slashed, brushy ground into a series of narrow, wooded islands. It had been a damp, cold morning, with flurries of sleet in the air, prefiguring the snow that had been promising for weeks but hadn’t yet fallen. The whole landscape, as if in preparation for it, seemed to have been drained into a gaunt spectrum that ranged from wet black to grey. Even the green of the conifers looked grey.
We’d stood by the road to load our guns.
‘I’ll take the cut on this side of the road,’ Oskar had said. ‘And you take it on that side. Look for their tracks and their crap and what they eat. And when you’re trying to spot them, don’t go looking for a deer.’
The bafflement must have shown on my face.
‘I mean, don’t go looking for a deer just standing there square in the open. It doesn’t happen that way too much. You probably won’t even see the whole thing, not to start with anyways. Look for shapes and pieces first – an ear, or a tail, or a bit of antler.’
‘And don’t get lost,’ he added, as he turned and started walking into the cut. He’d gone about ten feet before he turned back again.
‘And don’t shoot me neither,’ he said.
I’d gone about half a mile when I saw an eye. It was at the very edge of the cut and it’d probably been looking at me for a while before I started looking at it. And once I’d seen the eye the rest of it sort of just slowly materialised into a deer, like I was putting together a jigsaw made of mist. My hands were trembling and I didn’t breathe right and when I shot it disappeared. It was as though it’d never been there, as though I’d fired at a ghost. I waited until eventually Oskar appeared. I told him what’d happened.
‘Where was it?’ he asked. ‘When you shot?’
Without the deer there the bush looked all the same.
‘Over ther
e, I think,’ I said. ‘I think I missed him. I’m pretty sure I missed him.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Oskar.
For half an hour we looked. And then, a long way from where I thought it had been, lost in that tangled ocean of grey, Oskar found a speck of blood.
‘You wounded him,’ he said.
And all the excitement I’d felt that morning had suddenly turned into an awful, sick heaviness that sank onto the bottom of my stomach.
‘What do we do?’ I croaked.
‘We find him,’ Oskar said.
It took Oskar an hour to track it, with me following forlornly in his wake. Every few hundred yards he’d turn up some new evidence of how badly I’d shot. He began finding splinters of bone as well as blood.
‘You hit him in the leg,’ he said. I wished I’d never pulled the trigger.
Eventually, we found it in a swale between a wooded ridge and a beaver pond. It was too weak to run any further on its three good legs. Oskar finished it with a single shot and it fell on the grass. When we got up close I could see its tongue lolling out of its mouth and the steam coming off its hide, like a final exhalation of breath, and it was as though I’d swallowed every ounce of grey in the world and I slumped down miserably onto the grass beside it.
Oskar handed me his knife.
‘Now you got to gut it,’ he said. ‘And next time don’t shoot if you don’t think you’re going to kill it clean.’
Oskar said he’d gone back first thing the next morning and found the prisoner within a couple of hours.
‘How far did he get?’ I asked.
‘About ten miles,’ he said.
‘And where did you find him?’
He said he’d followed the bank of the same creek Eva and I must have taken in his boat. And where the creek had begun to get shallow and rocky the trail had switched into the woods. Oskar said he’d eventually come to a small lake and that was where he’d found him. He was sitting on the shoreline, facing the east like some poet or dreamer waiting for the sunrise. The cut from the saw wasn’t so bad, Oskar said. It was the cold that’d killed him. He must have been waiting for the sun to come up and warm him. And there it was, sewn right onto the back of his prisoner jacket: that big red circle, as if the sun had played a trick and snuck up behind him instead.
‘But I still gave them back,’ Oskar said.
‘Gave what back?’
‘His gloves,’ he said. ‘I put them back on his hands right there and then, before I started dragging him back to the camp.’
Outside Oskar’s cabin the day had moved on more quickly than I’d thought. On my walk home I discovered the shadow beneath the Toad had shifted right around. Across the bay the trees on the islands were beginning to turn that rich and vivid green the falling sun brings out. And whether it was the whiskey or the elapsed time or even, oddly, the sadness of Oskar’s story, I found my spirits not quite so low as before. It was like the deer, I thought: you only ever saw shapes and pieces – even of people – and it was pointless worrying about ever seeing the whole thing.
At dinner that evening I tried to stay as quiet as possible. I wasn’t sure whether I’d have control of the volume of my voice back again and I didn’t want my father to know I’d been drinking. Not that there was a huge risk of my voice betraying me. We were dealing mainly in single words and phrases. ‘It’ll be a beautiful sunset,’ my father had said twice, before stumbling to an awkward halt. We hadn’t really spoken to each other properly since the trip to the swamp house. The meatloaf on the table and the skin on my father’s face looked a similar colour to the world the morning I’d shot my deer: a kind of universal grey.
Both of us kept looking hopefully out the window. My father tried to pull a piece of curtain aside and the rail came down. But it was too late. Mrs Schneider wasn’t swimming. Neither was Judith.
My father spent several minutes shifting cutlery vigorously back and forth from one side of his plate to the other. At one point he leapt up to tidy away the fallen curtain rail and ended up polishing a non-existent smudge on the glass of the window, all the while glancing forlornly out of it as if he hadn’t quite given up on spotting an arm or a leg breaking the surface of the water. The sun had turned its first shade of red and the colour seemed to bounce off the lake and up into his grey cheeks.
‘We don’t have to keep going back there,’ he suddenly blurted.
I nodded. We’d only gone there one time since we’d moved but that didn’t seem important.
‘She wouldn’t mind.’
I nodded again.
The skin on his face seemed to have become several shades redder. And I was glad. It was good to see the blood back in them. He tucked decisively into his meatloaf as if a great weight had been lifted from him.
After he’d finished eating he said, ‘You know, Mrs Schneider’s snap peas are getting pretty high.’
We looked out towards her back garden. He was right. They were.
‘They are,’ I said.
‘We don’t have to,’ he repeated.
As I was finishing my own meatloaf he looked out at the lake. ‘It is a beautiful sunset,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it something,’ he said, turning towards me and breaking out into a wide and unexpected smile.
‘And I bethought me of the playful Hare,’ he said.
‘Hare?’ I said.
‘From the leech poem,’ he said.
I wasn’t entirely sure what a hare might have to do with anything. But it was good to see him this way, with the reddening light warming his cheeks and colouring the lenses of his glasses. Outside the sky really was quite something. It was beautiful, as he’d said it was. But I wasn’t really looking at it. All I could look at was the key to the truck that was hanging from the gun rack. The sun had almost set and I’d come to pretty much the very opposite conclusion my father had.
Shapes and Pieces
It seemed to take a great age for the sun to finally go down, and then another one for my father to put aside his book (which was about ancient pottery, I was glad to see) and go to bed. I waited until the sound of his nightly struggles with his slightly too short bed-frame subsided before heading out.
Because there was no official crossing, my father had always parked our truck on the other side of the tracks, in a space he’d cleared at the side of the logging road. As I was crossing I caught side of the tell-tale glow from one of Eva’s cigarettes. It was over by the culvert and without thinking I began walking towards it. About fifty or so yards away I spotted another light through a gap in the trees. This was different. It came from a small flame.
At first I thought it must be from a campfire but it was a single flame – there were no others. A closer look revealed it to be from a lamp. In the small, wavering circle of its light, I could make out the figure of Lamar. He was still hammering away at his new building. The flame from the lamp illuminated his neck and face from below, making him look like a blacksmith at his forge. The moths were flickering so thickly around the circle of light it was as if he was working in a snowstorm. Eva must have been watching him from among the bulrushes.
I took a few strides further and then stopped. A feeling had come upon me that none of the signs Lamar had put up around his property had ever once inspired: a feeling of trespass. It felt as though I’d stumbled upon some mysterious rite or ritual, I had no place being.
In comparison to the light of the cigarette and the lamp, the headlights of the truck looked huge and monstrous. It felt as though the entire lake must have been lit up by them. It seemed impossible they wouldn’t rush directly towards my father’s bedroom window, crashing through it in a blinding flash and waking him instantly. It was only after I’d managed to get a good kilometre down the logging road that my heartbeat began to slow.
I’d never driven at night. In fact, I’d never driven by myself before because I didn’t have a licence yet. I’d never stolen my father’s truck before, for that matter. To begin with it was all I could do to work out the
high and low beams and get used to the empty seat next to me. Everything appeared exaggerated – the distances, my speed, the darkness of the night, the brightness of the headlights. Even the tiny clicking of the moths and bugs hitting the windscreen sounded as loud as hail. I concentrated so intently on the visible strip of road in front of me, and went so slowly, it was as if I was creeping along a tunnel on my hands and knees. But, by the time I’d reached the highway, I’d relaxed enough to begin looking about me.
Apart from a couple of logging trucks which thundered past, lit up like mobile villages, nobody else was on the road. The lines slipped by beneath me and I started searching the edges and ditches for the reflected eyes of animals. This had always been a favourite game of ours when we’d driven at night. It had been a great thrill to spot a pair of them, call out your first guess of what it might be, and then see if you were right. Except part of the thrill of this game, I now remembered, had been the ones you passed by without ever quite knowing. They could be anything you wanted.
I was beginning to enjoy driving by myself – there was something soothing, lulling even, about the sleek, black, curving emptiness of the tarmac, about the lines slipping by – when all too soon I’d arrived. I’d almost forgotten what it was I was going there to do.
It was different at night. The moment I stepped out of the truck I could hear frogs calling. The leaves of the saplings on the track rustled as I brushed past them. Somewhere nearby a loon was keening. It was noisy out. The dark was full of sound.
For a brief moment it was as though the night had pushed back the swamp. Its surface was nearly invisible. You could only make out the vague shapes of the trees, with their gaunt trunks and pale twiggy fingers. But, gradually, what little light there was from the sliver of the moon, revealed it. I was standing right at its edge. The house was below my feet, its outline dimly reflected in the coldly still and slick surface of the water. I could smell the lilacs my father had planted. I could see the space where he’d taken down the bathroom; my eyes seemed to probe involuntarily at its absence like a tongue at the gum beneath a missing tooth.
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