Hummingbird

by Tristan Hughes

  Lamar got up and went into the house. When he came out a few moments later he followed the direction Eva had taken, until he reached the tracks. He checked in both directions and, when he was sure he couldn’t see her, he walked back and sat at the table. He’d sat there for a while before he suddenly jumped up and flung it over onto the grass. He kicked it. He stomped on it. He snapped off three of its legs. Then he went back into the house. The next time Oskar saw him coming out the door he was carrying a can of gas.

  ‘Which way did she run?’ I asked.

  ‘She ran to my place.’

  I looked down the tracks.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That she went to your place.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said. ‘I know because she stole my boat.’

  Into The Wind

  Oskar and I got up to go fetch the canoe from behind our shed.

  ‘You should wait for your dad to get back,’ he said, kicking an iron ore pellet across the tracks like a shy child. Behind us the pillars of smoke from Butterfly Creek were dispersing into a yellow-brown haze.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘That’s fair enough,’ he said.

  ‘It was me who showed her where it was.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  We carried the canoe down to the water.

  ‘Can we set out now,’ I asked.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. He took off his baseball cap and ran the back of his hand over his black eyebrows and forehead. He was sweating. The paddle was shaking in his hand.

  All morning there’d been no wind. The moment we got into the canoe one picked up from the north and started blowing into our faces. There was a joke around Crooked River about how it was hard to get lost in a canoe because whichever direction you needed to go in, that’s where the wind would be coming from. By the time we got close to the two small islands the waves were already beginning to rise. An eagle stood on one of the islands and watched us approach. He was a familiar fixture; we often left our fish guts out there for him. He eyed us reproachfully as we passed slowly by without stopping.

  We passed everything slowly by. For a while it seemed like each of the three bigger islands was paddling along with us, it took us so long to get past them. Out on the main body of the lake the waves had risen higher and some were tipped with white. The undulations of the northern shoreline appeared as fixed and out-of-reach as Tantalus’s supper while we tilted up and down from crest to trough like children on a see-saw, Oskar sweating in the stern, me heaving and flailing in the bow. It took us a long time to reach the leech pond.

  There, cocooned in the bush, the water was almost still. The gusts that found their way through the trunks and branches riffled it here and there, as though an invisible hand were caressing an animal’s fur. We pulled up quietly on the shore to rest.

  Oskar sat down beside the remains of the fire we’d built to dry me out after I’d fallen in because of the beaver’s tail. The coals and ash looked as historical as the coals and ash in the barrel stove at the prison site. Above them, Oskar’s face seemed like it had been seeped in a wash of their reflected shades and colours. Around the darkness of his hair his skin appeared grey and tired. And for the first time I really saw him as old and knew he was old and had a true intimation of what old really was. His chest was heaving thinly beneath the flannel of his shirt and it took him a while before he could get his breath to speak.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘maybe you’d best take this next bit on your own. I’m all out of puff. You can pick me up on the way back.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. I wanted to say I was sorry I’d made him come this far.

  We both looked down into the ash of the old fire. The wind flickered through the tops of the trees; somewhere over by the prison a hawk tipped its wings into an up-draught and rose high above them. It called once and then glided silently away. This could be a lonely place.

  ‘You’ll find her,’ Oskar said. ‘You’ll find her just fine.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  I’d got back up and grabbed hold of my paddle and was just about to leave when he spoke again. He didn’t lift his eyes from the ash of the fire.

  ‘Maybe it’s better this way,’ he said. I didn’t say anything. He took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair.

  ‘I’ve not been so lucky,’ he said sadly. ‘It seems like I always ended up finding dead people.’

  Second Skins

  Oskar’s boat was where we’d left it before, where the creek petered out. By the time I set out through the bush the sun was high in the south and the wind had switched to the west. Within the cover of the trees you could barely feel either of them.

  The summer forest is the hardest to find your way in, the hardest to see in. When I was a child my mother had occasionally taken me with her when she went to search for shed antlers. She never looked for them in the summer. She’d wait until all the leaves had fallen or else until the snow had melted and they hadn’t yet come out. The difference between August and late October or May was the difference between a window with the blinds open and one with them shut.

  I remember how intently she searched and how confidently she moved, as if she was seeing and marking everything in the forest at once and didn’t ever doubt the direction in which her strides were taking her. She knew the bush. She knew it better than almost anybody. And I could feel that knowledge. In that grey-green place, breathing in the mineral damp of moss and the strange sweetness of the dead leaves, I had felt it. If she got too far ahead of me I’d search through the trees for the colour of her hair, as if it were a will-o-the-wisp leading me towards a place where I could never be lost.

  I was useless at finding anything. Keep an eye out for stuff that looks like bone, my mother had told me. And I had. I’d looked and looked until it was as if the pale trunks and branches of the birch and poplar trees were all bone, as though the forest were the remains of an enormous and long-dead animal and we were wandering through its bare and endless ribs.

  Once, by chance, I’d discovered the skin of a garter snake. It was so fragile and translucent that at first it felt as though I’d discovered some wondrous and airy jewel, and then my mother had told me what it was and I’d let it fall to the ground and begun blubbering and wailing.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she’d asked.

  ‘It lost its skin,’ I’d wailed. I’d pictured a terrible nakedness; a fleshy red tube writhing on the earth.

  ‘But there’s another one beneath,’ she’d said, gently brushing my hot cheek with her cool fingers. ‘It grows a new one before it gets rid of its old one.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise?’

  This time I travelled recklessly and impatiently, thinking of bones and skin and things that had been cast away. I crashed through branches and stumbled over windfall, paying no attention, leaving no signs. I was like a panicked animal, an explorer gone berserk. I was surprised when the trees began to thin in front of me and I caught the tell-tale flash of light on water. It was Hummingbird Lake. I was surprised again when I got closer to the shoreline and discovered Eva sitting out on the small island.

  The first thing I noticed was her hair. It was her real hair, and appeared to be cropped even shorter than when I’d seen it before. Here and there I could see patches of the same rubbed, raw skin as there was on her neck. I was standing amongst some cedars and (whether it was because of them or not, I didn’t know) she didn’t seem able to see me. While I was watching she stood up and walked slowly to the water’s edge, paused for a second, and then began to wade in. She was wearing an incredibly old-fashioned style of dress, almost an historical one; it had two big pockets at the front and looked like something the old woman who lived in the shoe might have worn, or the ladies who’d taught a young Mrs Schneider to make homesteaders.

  She walked in all the way to her waist and then paused again. Her eyes were fixed on a point above me and the tr
ees. There was something oddly relaxed in her expression, languid even. It reminded me of an illustration I’d seen of an opium den in one of the ancient western novels we’d inherited from my grandfather. The dress, which I’d expected to balloon up to the surface, stayed completely under the water.

  She began moving again, until the water was almost up to her shoulders, and then paused once more. She tilted her head sideways, to the left, as if she might any second rest her head on the surface of the lake, as though it was a pillow. There was a longer pause this time. I could see a raven circling above the island but couldn’t hear its wings; close to my foot the throat of a green frog was mutely swelling and shrinking. Nothing was making a sound. And then Eva turned suddenly around, walked back to the island, and sat down. After ten or so minutes she got back up and did the exact same thing.

  All the while I remained as still as a heron on the shore. I couldn’t move or speak or cry out. Everything was quiet. I was caught in a kind of paralysis; it was like what happened to me near the swamp house, when everything went silent, except this time it was in my limbs as well as my ears and tongue. And perhaps the worst of it was the stunned and almost lethargic acceptance. Part of me wanted to stay absolutely still while the world skipped forward – perversely welcoming the relief of everything, however bad, having at least happened.

  There wasn’t a third time. Maybe there wouldn’t have been one in any case, I don’t know, I only know that before there could be I was wading into the lake. A few feet out the bottom dropped right off and I had to swim. I didn’t think once of what was below me.

  As I heaved myself onto the shore of the island Eva didn’t stand up, or even properly acknowledge I was there. She had that look in her eyes as if she was drunk. Twice she tried to say something and her lips twitched open and closed like a sea creature trying to catch something in the current. If she’d managed to speak she would have slurred. Gently, without saying a word, I reached over and took two stones out of the pockets of her dress. They were heavy and wet. Then I sat down beside her.

  On the shore opposite us a squirrel was ferrying a pinecone between two rocks. It kept hiding it behind one rock and then scurrying back, grabbing it, and hiding it behind the other one.

  ‘Jesus H Christ, squirrel – make up your frigging mind!’ Eva said.

  She reached out and grabbed something from behind a log. A cloud of green death bulged out into the air and stung my eyes. Her eyes had cleared.

  ‘Well,’ she said after a few moments, ‘that could’ve gone much better.’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said.

  ‘How’d you know I’d be here?’

  ‘I just did.’

  She stubbed her cigarette out into a clump of moss. There were bug bites all over her hands. They were all over her neck and face too.

  ‘What happened after I left?’ she said. ‘Was Lamar looking for me?’

  ‘Lamar burnt the boat.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘And the lighthouse.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘And the Oldsmobile.’

  ‘Jesus H Christ.’

  I didn’t mention the cabin.

  Eva lit a second green death and looked out across the lake. The sun was high in the south and the water was spangled with light. The bugs skittering across its surface winked in and out of view. Sometimes it was hard to tell if they were moving on water or on light.

  ‘I don’t know if I could,’ she said.

  I didn’t ask what it was she didn’t know.

  ‘Part of me thinks this should have been the place. Part of me is always going to think that. Does that make sense?’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said, even though I wasn’t sure it did. I wasn’t sure if I really understood any of this. But that was okay. There were shapes and pieces. And that would have to be enough.

  ‘We should get going,’ I said.

  After Eva had finished her second cigarette she went around to the other side of the island and began wading into the lake. A few feet in she turned back to me.

  ‘If you go this way it never gets deeper than your knees,’ she said.

  Green Thoughts In Green Shades

  In the bush it’s not when everything appears unfamiliar that you have to worry: you know you’re lost when everything looks the same.

  I’d seen the same tree about ten times and passed over the same ridge as many. Each patch of bog and clump of cattails seemed familiar. If mosquitoes had individual voices then I was getting to know each one of them. I stopped beside the uplifted roots of a fallen tree. ‘I think we’re lost,’ I said. It was late in the afternoon and I was tired and hungry. We’d been walking for hours.

  ‘No kidding,’ Eva said. ‘What happened to all your broken branches and signs?’

  ‘I can’t see them.’

  ‘They’re not much good if you can’t see them. It’s just a waste of a branch.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The tree might’ve needed that branch. What about moss and stuff? You can get your direction from that, can’t you?’

  ‘Not really.’ There was moss everywhere on the forest floor, in every direction. Eva seemed happy to be lost. Ever since we’d left the lake she’d seemed happy.

  ‘Why Zachary Taylor,’ she crooned in her southern accent, ‘I suppose we’ll have to wait for the stars to guide us.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Can you please shut up!’

  ‘My, my, who’s got ants in their pants. You should consider yourself lucky: I think I’ve got every other frigging bug in mine.’

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  Eva sat down on the moss and leaned back against the roots of the fallen tree. ‘Fine. You navigate away there, Mr Pathfinder,’ she said. ‘I’m having a rest.’

  I kept searching for landmarks but when everything begins to look the same nothing is an anything-mark. I felt like one of my father’s explorers. The exhilaration of lostness had become the pure animal panic of it. Part of me wanted to run wildly through the bush and not stop until my legs gave out. I would wander through it endlessly, desperate and ragged and windigo-eyed.

  ‘This is how it usually goes in my father’s notebooks,’ I thought, and then realised I’d said.

  ‘What books?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘You know, Zachary, there’s really only one question you have to ask yourself in this position.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked, a bit dizzy and tight-chested.

  ‘What would Gunther have done?’

  ‘But Gunther–’ I began and then kept my mouth shut. Slowly, my panic began to subside and my closed mouth became a smile. ‘What would he have done?’ I asked.

  I ended up sitting on the moss beside her. We sat there for what seemed like a long time. Sometimes we spoke, sometimes we didn’t. At one point I remember a woodpecker – one of the big, pileated ones – landed on the fallen tree. He looked in our direction and, astonished to find us there, screeched and flew away, disappearing through the woods in swift, swooping rises and glides.

  ‘Thank you,’ Eva said.

  There was still plenty of light left in the day. We’d been sitting for long enough for the rest of the woods to get used to us. The squirrel in the nearby tree had stopped chiding. Some small brown birds had perched in the branches. A mouse or a vole or a shrew ran past my feet – I couldn’t tell which. And I wondered if this summer world was so very different from the world under the snow that Judith had told me about. I wondered if whatever lived in it spent their time there imagining that other, summer world; if they missed it; if the melting away of the snow and the arrival of the full, unobstructed beams of the sun was a revelation to them – the shapes and pieces made whole – or just like the turning of the leaves, simply a sign of the changing seasons. A thing could become another thing but still stay the same. A place could too. It was quiet and I wasn’t scared anymore. Sometimes the best thing you can do when you’re lost is stay still
.

  ‘Why do you like ruins?’ I asked Eva.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. And then after a while she said, ‘I guess because they show there’s always an afterwards.’

  It was so quiet and green under the branches of the trees. It was peaceful and calm. It would be okay if we couldn’t find our way out. It would be fine if nobody found us.

  ‘What really happened to your mom, Zack?’

  ‘My mother killed herself,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know why.’

  The Long Day

  ‘You’ve been walking in circles.’

  My eyes opened onto Oskar’s face. He was looking down at me and at first I was most surprised by the angle – since as far back as I could remember we’d either been the same height or I’d been taller.

  ‘I left markers, I left signs,’ I croaked. I was embarrassed to be lost in front of him. He didn’t look quite so old as he had when I’d left him earlier.

  ‘Not much good if you can’t see them.’

  ‘That’s what I told him,’ Eva chimed in. She was standing behind him. I didn’t know how long the pair of them had been watching me while my eyes had been shut.

  ‘You were sleeping,’ Eva said.

  ‘I was just resting my eyes.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘If resting your eyes is sleeping then that’s what you were doing.’

  Oskar was silent as we followed him through the bush. When we got to the boat he ushered us into it with his hand. He pulled the engine cord and set off down the creek without a word. I could tell he was pleased.

  ‘Why’s he not speaking?’ Eva asked me over the splutter of the engine.

  ‘It’s a Finnish thing,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  On our way back Eva reached over and dipped her fingers into the surface of the water. They left a tiny rooster tail of spray in their wake, which flew backwards and splashed into my face. It was cool and soft like a mist or drizzle. The sun was just beginning to edge down towards the horizon. We were close to an equinox. It felt like we were in a day that wouldn’t end.