The Skeleton Tree

by Iain Lawrence

  Frank stuffed the jig into his pocket and started north again. He let the gaff swing by its hook like a walking stick. The stones rolled under our feet, and a sound like rain moved along with us, as thousands of tiny crabs scuttled into hiding places.

  Around the next bend, the beach was scattered with enormous boulders. The waves made a steady roar and rattle as they broke on the beach, and a great chunk of Styrofoam tumbled back and forth. Then the shoreline turned again, and we found ourselves at the mouth of a river. It tumbled out of the forest down a stony waterfall, into a vast pool of salt water. I could see salmon fins and tails slicing through the surface, their bodies gliding like shadows underneath.

  That river would become the edge of our world. There was no point in trying to go farther. To the north was only more of what we’d already seen: more rocks, more forests, more sea and mountain. But I felt happy here. A cool breeze came down from the river, smelling of forest and fish. A rainbow made an arch above the falls, and the water cascaded from ledge to ledge in curls of creamy white. Salmon flung themselves against the waterfall, trying to struggle up the river.

  It didn’t seem possible that they could ever reach the top. But of course they would—or most of them would. They would fight their way right into the mountains, to the exact spot where they had been born, just to lay their eggs before they died. It was a beautiful thing to see, sad and brave at the same time.

  But to Frank it meant nothing. He went straight to the pool, thrust the gaff into the water, and shaded his eyes to peer under the surface.

  Through layers of color and patches of light, hundreds of fish swam around and around. There were so many that Frank could hardly miss, and in a moment he had one speared on the hook. He hauled the salmon out, a shining thing that thrashed so hard he could barely hold on. He swung it around and slammed it down on the stones. Using the gaff as a club, he hit it three times while it twisted on the ground. Blood and scales splattered on his clothes, his face and his hands. But he grinned as he held up the fish, so big that its tail nearly touched the ground. He tossed his hair aside. With sunlight mottled in the trees behind him, with the silver of the fish, it was as though the old photograph of my father had come to life. I remembered my mother smiling at the picture, and I wondered what she was doing right then. I wondered if I would ever get home to see her.

  “Isn’t that a beauty?” said Frank.

  I saw how he strained to hold that heavy fish. “It sure is,” I said. But I didn’t sound enthusiastic, and his smile vanished. He dropped the salmon and started fishing again. It lay stiff at his feet, already not quite so shiny, as though the glistening brightness was part of its life, its spirit. Now it just looked dead, and the scales sparkled on the rocks instead, in a smear of slime and blood.

  Frank didn’t catch another. Maybe the fish were smarter. Or maybe he was trying too hard. He swished the gaff through the water, swearing whenever he missed.

  In my hand the sticks leap and bounce on the drum top. Boom, boom, boom, boom-boom. I have kept the fog away, and I don’t mind if it stays where it is. A whole fleet of ships could be hidden inside it, plowing toward me right now. At any moment they might appear, dragging tendrils of mist from their funnels and masts.

  But I can’t let the fog come closer. I beat harder and faster on the drum, sending the sound rolling across the sea like little peals of thunder.

  Boom, boom, boom-boom.

  In my mind I keep seeing Frank at the fishing pool, bashing at the water. More than six weeks since that day on the river, I can still see the expression on his face as he grew more and more frustrated.

  •••

  It made me sad to watch him. It made me think of my father, who loved to go fishing as a boy but for some reason gave it up. I never saw him with a rod and reel.

  “Did your dad ever take you fishing?” I asked Frank.

  He didn’t know what I’d been thinking. He frowned for a moment, then said, “Sure. All the time. We went fishing and hunting and everything. I wish he was here now. He’d catch a pile of fish. He’d catch them with his bare hands.”

  “Not my dad,” I said, laughing.

  Somehow, even that made Frank angry. He stabbed the gaff into the pool and swore as he slashed it through the water.

  “Let me try,” I said.

  “I can do it better than you,” he told me.

  “Then give me that jigging thing,” I said.

  “You’ll lose it.”

  “Oh, come on,” I told him. “How am I going to lose it?”

  But I lost it. The stones by the pool were slick with salmon blood, and I slipped as I cast out the line. The rusted old bolt flew from my hands.

  Frank heard it hit the water. He looked at the little splash out on the pool, and then at me, and very slowly he stood up. I was afraid he would beat me with the gaff, just the way he had bashed the salmon.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “That was our only hook. Do you have any idea…” Frank held up his hands. The veins in his neck looked like tightened ropes. “If we don’t eat, we’ll die.”

  “I know that,” I told him. “I said I’m sorry.”

  He stepped so close that I could smell seaweed and sweat on his clothes. I stared back at him, frightened. But he only reached out and ripped the loop of wire from my neck, then walked away. He brought out the knife I’d found at the stream and gutted the fish he’d caught. He tied the red wire in a loop through the gaping cheeks of the salmon and hoisted the fish to his shoulder. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  Home. I didn’t like to think of that tiny cabin as home. My home was Vancouver, and I wanted so badly to be there.

  Frank’s silence felt worse than ever as we walked along. I wished he would talk, if only to tell me how stupid I’d been. I wished he would shout. But he didn’t say a single word all the way to the cabin. And then he walked right past it, down the trail to the sandy beach.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “We’ll eat on the beach,” he said.

  “Like a picnic?”

  He grunted. “Yeah, Chrissy. Like a picnic.”

  Well, it was no picnic. We ate seaweed that had just washed ashore, still salty and wet and gritty with sand. Frank used the knife to hack slabs from the salmon carcass and we wolfed them down like cavemen, with blood and juice pouring over our hands and our wrists. We spat out the bones.

  It was cold and awful, but I didn’t want to disappoint Frank. “It’s like sushi,” I said.

  He looked at me, but said nothing.

  “You know what my dad used to say about sushi?” I asked. “ ‘When I was a kid we called it bait.’ ”

  A little glimmer came into Frank’s eyes. He was careful not to smile, not to show emotion. He just nodded, as though at an old joke. But that encouraged me to keep talking. “My dad died a year ago,” I said. “He was killed in an accident.”

  Frank’s expression didn’t change. He looked down the beach, out at the rows of breakers.

  “He was an accountant,” I said. Then, “So what does your dad do?”

  Frank shrugged. “Not much.”

  I wiped my fingers in the sand. “Like what?”

  “He lies around and decomposes.”

  It took me a moment to realize what that meant. And then it seemed a terrible way to put it. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why?” Frank leaned back on his elbows. “Was it your fault?”

  I gave up on pleasant conversation. I watched the waves and thought of my father, remembering strange little things one after the other. When he came home from work he would fling open the door and hold up his hand and say, “Greetings, earthlings!” in a funny voice. When he went away on trips he would always bring back a present for me. But he would pretend that he hadn’t, until he looked into his briefcase with a clown’s look of surprise. “Oh, what’s this in here?” he would say.

  The memories suddenly dissolved when Frank spoke again.

>   “There’s that raven,” he said.

  I saw a shadow flitter across the sand. Then the bird swooped behind us with a whistling sound in his wings. He landed on a log nearby, ruffled his feathers, and strutted back and forth.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The raven scraped his black beak across the wood.

  “Want some fish?”

  I picked up a piece of the carcass. But Frank shouted at me, “No! Don’t give him that.”

  “It’s just the tail,” I said. “We’re not going to eat it.”

  “If you feed that thing, you’ll never get rid of it.”

  “I don’t want to get rid of him.” The fish tail dangled from my hand, all speckled and bright. As it swung from my fingers the raven watched, his head swinging comically.

  “He’ll be a pest,” said Frank.

  “Not to me.” I tossed the tail onto the sand, just below where the raven stood. He made a little warbling sound and watched suspiciously, but he didn’t move until Frank got up and walked away. Then he hopped down and grabbed the salmon, and in the same motion flapped away into the sky.

  As I watched him circle in front of me, a little speck of light appeared above the sea. I heard a rumbling sound, faint and far away.

  I stood up. “An airplane!” I shouted. “Frank, there’s an airplane!”

  He was already looking at the sky, his hands like a visor on his forehead. “Where is it?” he cried.

  The sound grew louder. I saw the dot of light again, already bigger. “There!” I pointed. “Right there.”

  Frank dashed away along the sand, heading for the cabin. I hurried after him in my crummy, floppy shoes, and by the time I reached the cabin he had been in and out already. He stood by the door holding the little flare gun.

  He shook it at me. “Where’s the flare?” he shrieked.

  “In the box,” I told him.

  “Well, it’s gone!”

  The faint rumble had become a throbbing that I could feel in the air. I went past Frank and into the cabin. He had hurled the orange box onto the fire circle, where it lay with its lid cracked in two.

  “Find the flare!” yelled Frank.

  The jet was very close. Frank blundered through the room like a trapped bird, bouncing from wall to wall. He knocked over the table; he toppled the chair; and then he grabbed the signaling mirror from the ashes and barreled outside.

  I ran after him, down the trail toward the skeleton tree. When we reached the clearing, the jet was nearly overhead. I saw the wings and fuselage glaring in the sunlight, a contrail streaming out across the sky.

  I waved at the plane. I jumped up and down and shouted. “Do you think they can see us?” I asked.

  “They’re five miles up, you moron,” said Frank.

  He was aiming the mirror toward the plane, sighting through the clear, round spot in the middle. He was trying to reflect the sun into tiny windows five miles away, and he tilted the mirror this way and that.

  But the jet was already gone. It was moving across the clearing, above the skeleton tree, on toward the forests and the mountains.

  “Could they see the mirror?” I asked. “Frank, do you think—”

  “How would I know?” he snapped. “Don’t be stupid.”

  It felt strange to stand there and watch that airplane fly away, to think of the people inside it. I tried to imagine someone leaping up from a window seat, shouting, “There’s someone in trouble down there! You gotta believe me.”

  But that didn’t seem very likely.

  The plane became a dot again and slowly faded away. The contrail began to break apart, turning red in the high sunset. Seeing it all vanish made me feel at the edge of the world in a different way. All the normal things were still going on, and would go on no matter what happened to Frank and me. There were seven billion people on Earth, and all but a handful were living their lives unchanged, without a thought or a care for us.

  Frank looked so slumped and sad that I felt sorry for him.

  “It might come again,” I said. “Maybe there’s a schedule.”

  “Yeah. Once a century,” said Frank.

  We went together down the trail, together to the cabin. Frank stepped right over all the things from the orange box and collapsed on the bed. He rolled himself up in the foam pad, using it as both a blanket and a mattress.

  “I thought we were taking turns with the bed,” I said.

  “We are,” he said. “When it’s your turn, I’ll tell you.”

  I jammed the door shut as I had the night before. I stuffed everything back in the plastic box except for the flare—which I couldn’t find—and the space blanket—which I hoped would keep me warm. With the cabin guy’s spoon I scraped two marks in the wall, to show that we had lived two days in the cabin. I wondered how many days would have to pass before I’d covered the whole cabin with notches. I imagined myself again as a bearded old man, gouging the last possible mark in the far corner, trying to remember what I was counting.

  Frank watched from the bed, but didn’t say anything.

  I put the spoon on the table, opened the pouch and pulled out the space blanket. It looked and felt like a shiny garbage bag, just one thin layer of plastic that crackled as I spread it out. Disappointed, I pulled it over my feet and legs, up to my chin, and curled myself in the corner.

  I wasn’t as cold as I had been the night before, but I sure wasn’t toasty. I shivered as I tried to sleep, and even that annoyed Frank.

  “Stop crinkling!” he told me.

  I slept off and on until dawn, when a shadow flitted past the slits of light in the cabin wall. Something tapped at the window.

  I couldn’t see anything between the nailed-up boards. The thing scratched at the plastic pane.

  As loud as I dared, I whispered for Frank. The sounds stopped for a moment, then started again.

  “Frank!”

  He spluttered in his sleep, but didn’t wake up. I whispered again.

  And that thing outside began to talk.

  It muttered words I couldn’t understand. Its voice wasn’t human, or at least not alive. Through the window came a croaking hiss, like an old man’s breathing.

  Lousy birds.

  I didn’t care if Frank got angry. I scrambled out of the space blanket and shook him awake.

  “Frank!” I shouted. “Frank!”

  He woke with a gasp, then pushed me away. “Leave me alone,” he said.

  “Something’s trying to get in,” I told him.

  “Oh, Chris.”

  “Just listen!” I said.

  He lay back, glaring up at me. I saw his eyes shifting as he looked up across the ceiling, down toward the floor. “I don’t hear anything,” he said.

  “Well, it’s there,” I told him. “It was pulling at the window. It was—”

  Frank shoved me aside as he got up. He crossed the cabin, pushed open the door and stepped out. I held my breath, expecting that thing to come charging from the forest.

  But whatever had been there was gone. Frank walked around the little cabin, and when he came back I felt about two feet tall, a frightened little kid. He looked at me as though I was a bug.

  “It was there,” I told him. “I heard it, Frank. It talked to me.”

  He flicked his hair. “What did it say?”

  “ ‘Lousy birds.’ ”

  He laughed. He sat on the bed and put on his boots, and he shook his head and laughed again. “You really are a moron. Now come on, let’s go.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “To the river.” He picked up the gaff, put the knife in his pocket. “We have to go every day. We have to get at least a hundred fish.”

  “A hundred?” I said. “Why?”

  “You want to run out of food in the middle of winter?”

  He walked out of the cabin and away through the forest, leaving me staring at the open door. “What do you mean?” I shouted. But he didn’t answer. I pulled on my stupid shoes and ran after him, ye
lling at his back, “We’re not going to be here that long!”

  He didn’t even slow down. He just held up his hand to make a rude gesture.

  “Someone will come and find us,” I said. My voice was swallowed up by those huge old trees and the blankets of moss. I ran to catch up with Frank and tugged at his arm. “You don’t really think we’ll be here all winter, do you?”

  “How should I know?” He pulled away from me. “But the salmon won’t be here.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. But Frank was right. When the last salmon in the pool had made its way over the falls, there would be no more till summer came again.

  Along the cliffs, then along the beach, I trailed a few yards behind Frank. He stopped near the Reepicheep to cut a coil of rope from a big snarl among the logs. He went straight to the pool and started fishing. There were even more salmon than before, their dark backs rising from the water as they swam against the current. In less than a minute Frank had one laid out on the rocks.

  “Come here,” said Frank. “I’ll show you how to clean them.”

  I was happy that he talked to me, and I knelt beside him to watch how he did it. First, he slit the salmon’s belly. Then he cut away the guts and the heart and the liver all at once. He tossed them into the pool, and the seagulls pounced in a shrieking mass.

  Frank rinsed the whole fish in the pool, and the blood and the scales floated away through his fingers.

  “Think you can do that?” he asked.

  “I guess so.”

  We kept fishing all morning. Frank hauled in one fish after another, and soon we had seven laid out in a row. Frank guessed they weighed nearly a hundred pounds altogether. We threaded ropes through their gills and tied them in bunches, then walked back, bent like old prospectors.

  When we reached the cabin Frank didn’t rest. He cut every fish in half down the spine, making slabs of red flesh and shimmering skin. He hung them from the ceiling.

  “How do you know how to do this?” I asked. “I guess your great dad taught you.”

  “Sure. He taught me everything,” said Frank. He used bits of wire to hang the fish, threading the pieces through the scales and skin. “They’ll dry hard, like candy. You don’t need a fire.”