White Heat

by Melanie McGrath

  'I guess Sammy told you we couldn't get much sense out of him.' Robert turned to Edie. 'He'll be OK. I've given him something to help him sleep. We'll put him in one of the obs rooms.'

  Edie suddenly felt very calm. 'No. I want him to wake up in his own bed. In my house.'

  Sammy and Robert exchanged looks. Sammy shrugged.

  The nurse raised his eyebrows. 'I don't think that's a good idea. He needs to be monitored.'

  Edie gave the nurse a pleading look and said nothing. She had to teach in the morning but she could be back to look after him by the early afternoon.

  'It's OK,' Sammy said finally. 'I'll stay with him while his stepmother's at school.'

  Edie flashed him a thank you.

  Robert put on a frail smile and said, 'Well, OK, then, if you really must.'

  It was only when she'd completed the school register later that morning Edie realized she hadn't marked anyone present. At lunchtime she considered returning home to check on Joe then decided to leave it till after the end of the school day. If Joe was asleep she wouldn't want to wake him and if he was awake, she wouldn't want him to see how torn up she was. Their first encounter was going to be difficult, she knew. He'd be blaming himself for losing Taylor and she'd be blaming herself for letting the two of them go out on the land together.

  The afternoon dragged and by the time the bell finally rang to signal the end of the school day the events of the previous twelve hours already seemed murky and a little unreal. Edie went to her locker, packed her things in her daypack and walked up to the store, thinking to take Joe some of the caribou hamburger he particularly liked and a packet of his favourite tangerine Tang.

  Reaching the snow porch she called out softly, but got no reply. She took off her shitkickers, wondering whether she should have spent a few dollars more and bought ribs instead of hamburger.

  There were some empty cans lying on the floor beside the sofa. The air was thick and unnaturally still. She felt a small nip of irritation that Sammy had left the house.

  The door to Joe's room was shut; he was probably still sleeping. She listened and heard nothing except the creak of the plastic cladding at the front of the house where the sun was heating it, and the rustle of her fingers around the bag of hamburger meat.

  She put the shopping down on the worktop in the kitchen then noticed that there was a residual smell of blood in the air so she grabbed the hamburger, put it in the fridge and returned to the living room. The smell followed her. In that instant, she felt a raw thump, a terrifying wrench. The smell of blood wasn't coming from the kitchen at all. It was coming from Joe's room.

  The door gave way under the pressure of her hand. Inside the curtains were drawn and it took her a few seconds to adjust to the poor light. Joe's Xbox was lying on the floor and beside it there was a half-empty can of Dr Pepper. Out of habit, she picked up the can, intending to leave it on the bedside table so that Joe wouldn't knock it over when he got up, but at the same time she knew: something was terribly wrong.

  Joe Inukpuk was lying in bed, his legs slightly bent at the knees, his face obscured by the comforter. As she walked towards him she felt something underfoot. She put the can down on the bedside table, lifted her right leg and plucked the remains of a pill from the sole of her sock. Lifting her gaze, she reached out to put the fragments on the bedside table. Time peeled away.

  She looked at the figure lying in the bed and knew there must be no more excuses. Taking a breath, she threw the eiderdown aside.

  Joe's eyes were closed and his mouth hung slightly open. She might have mistaken him for being asleep were it not for the fact that there was blood thickening on his lips and chin and, where the skin was in contact with the pillow, his face was already beginning to blacken.

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  Derek Palliser was doing his best to ignore his creeping nausea. He was never at ease on a plane; small planes in particular got to him. Whenever he was flying, as he was now, he couldn't help recalling the fate of his old friend, Lott Palmer. In twenty-three years' experience piloting Twin Otters above the 60th parallel Palmer had come down twice and both times lived to tell the tale. The third time, he was cruising just beneath the cloud line off the coast of Cornwallis Island, when a freak katabatic wind reached down, picked up the plane and tossed it a thousand metres through the clouds towards the ice. Lott managed to wrest enough control of the thing to land it in one piece. He radioed for help and a ski plane was dispatched from Resolute. The plane arrived at the scene just in time to see a spear of lightning swoop out from the cloud and punch Lott Palmer and his plane to kingdom come. When the rescuers landed they found nothing but a small ball of blackened tin burning a hole in the ice.

  If he didn't have pressing business when he reached his destination, Derek liked to pop a Xanax to help him cope with the chopping and bumping that went with flying tiny planes through blowy, unpredictable Arctic conditions. But today he was flying clean. He'd been woken some time after seven by a radio call from Simeonie Inukpuk. An unexpected blizzard had swept across Craig Island and a man was missing. A qalunaat. The missing man had been travelling with Joe Inukpuk when they'd been separated in a whiteout. With the only available plane in Autisaq grounded on account of the pilot, Martie Kiglatuk, being too drunk to fly, Simeonie needed Derek to conduct a search and rescue from Kuujuaq. He and the police pilot, Pol Tilluq, were to fly over Craig looking for signs of the missing man. It was just possible that he'd managed to find somewhere to shelter and was still alive.

  It had taken Pol a couple of hours to ready the plane and check the forecast but by nine thirty that morning they were in the air and heading east towards the target area. Pol Tilluq was among the most competent pilots in the region: visibility was good and, despite his fear of flying, Derek knew he was in capable hands.

  Simeonie had faxed over the expedition questionnaire Joe and Edie had completed before taking their parties out on the land. It was mostly a box-ticking exercise that all guides on Ellesmere were required to fill out, giving details of the proposed route, the equipment taken, the number of days the expedition was expected to last. Derek took it out now. Reading made his nausea worse, but he pressed on all the same, knowing that the more he understood about the expedition, the more likely it was that he and Pol would find the missing man. The trip looked like a pretty routine entry-level tourist caper. To anyone experienced in High Arctic travel, like Joe Inukpuk, Craig Island was relatively unchallenging. Guides often took visitors out there. The routes across the ice pan were well-established and the terrain was pretty soft; no glaciers, sheer cliffs or moraine slips. To someone unfamiliar with High Arctic conditions, though, Craig would be extremely forbidding. The advice the guides gave in the event their clients got separated was always to stay put and wait for help. Their best hope was that Taylor had holed up somewhere safe and was doing just that. If he'd been stupid enough to try to get himself off the island, he'd almost certainly be dead by now, and the odds on finding his body would be about the same as discovering leprechauns living in the lemming shed.

  They flew over Cape Storm and continued east towards South Cape. Before long the roads and buildings of Autisaq appeared, tiny pixels on an otherwise blank screen. They'd offered to pick up Robert Patma and take him with them in case they found Taylor in need of urgent medical attention, but the weather forecast was predicting low cloud and the mayor thought it best not to waste time while conditions were still clear. If they found Taylor, it would be easy enough to fly directly back to Autisaq and get him looked at there.

  Pol turned the plane south towards the low coast of Cape Sparbo. Ahead, across the solid ice field of Jones Sound, loomed the purple ellipse of Craig Island. At this height, it looked like nothing so much as a plum in a bowl of cream, but in reality it was two banks of sloped cliffs divided by an icy plateau about twenty kilometres wide. The west coast was lower and quieter, the east rockier, bifurcated with finger fiords in the north and in the south, sm
all glaciers that tongued out into the sea. The coasts had very distinct weather patterns. It could be blowing a blizzard in the east and still be perfectly sunny in the west. The region of fiords in the northeast was different still, which was how it was that, while Joe and Taylor were being battered by two-hundred-kilometre-an-hour winds, Edie and Fairfax had been able to snowmobile back to Autisaq in almost perfect conditions.

  The two men had planned to make their way systematically across the island, flying east-west until they reached the southern fringe. They had already agreed that, if they spotted any sign of life on Craig, Pol would try to make a landing on the ice-covered plateau above the cliffs and Derek would go out on the land and investigate. They were carrying a snowbie, a sled and a first-aid kit and Derek had brought the police-issue sat phone.

  For over an hour they flew in long lines across the terrain at an altitude of five hundred metres but they saw only a few birds and, once, on the western coast, a bear moving over the shore-fast ice. There was no sign of the man or of the two snowmobiles. They had covered most of the island when the low cloud predicted by the weather forecast suddenly came over, blocking the view. Pol shook his head.

  'No way we'll get under that, D,' he said.

  Until the cloud cleared there was no point carrying on. Reluctantly, Derek radioed in to Autisaq and let them know they were temporarily calling off the S&R and instructed Pol to head south for Taluritut. The policeman's plan was to drop in on the Devon Island Science Station while they waited for the cloud on Craig to clear.

  For a number of years a team from NASA and an eccentric not-for-profit outfit known as Space Intelligences Research had, among other things, been actively testing prototype landing vehicles for future expeditions to Mars at the science station on Taluritut's north coast. As the most senior member of the two-man Ellesmere native police, Derek had jurisdiction in the area and it was his job to keep a friendly but nonetheless watchful eye on them. The team usually flew in during March and Derek tried to make a habit of calling in on them within the first couple of weeks of their arrival, but this year he'd been too busy. He figured on chatting to the station director, Professor Jim DeSouza, a while, checking out some cool space buggies and grabbing a bite to eat before taking off for Craig once more.

  DeSouza himself came out to the landing strip to greet them. A genial, fiercely intelligent and, Palliser suspected, ambitious man, DeSouza had taken over the running of the station a couple of years ago. Though Derek hadn't had much to do with him, he liked what he'd seen so far. He was less standoffish than most of the qalunaat posted up here and seemed particularly keen to understand the perspectives of local people. At the same time he never overcompensated by pretending to hang on your every word, the way that some bleeding-heart qalunaat did. He was confident, easy in his skin.

  The professor checked his watch.

  'Don't think I don't notice you two always arrive at mealtimes,' DeSouza said, clapping Derek and Pol on the back.

  They sat inside a cosy modular unit and ate burgers and French fries. DeSouza seemed strained, less his usual avuncular self, Derek thought, but it wasn't until dessert came that he understood why. A stream of funding had just dried up, DeSouza explained, and the station had been warned to prepare itself to undergo a NASA review, which was often a polite precursor to the axe.

  'These days the focus is off pure exploration and much more on resource acquisition and bio-sustainability,' he explained. 'We're all out of a job unless we can come up with some new direction.'

  'By bio-sustainability you mean life, right?' Derek asked. He saw in DeSouza an ally for his scientific research.

  DeSouza nodded. 'They want us to find them a planet we can escape to once this one's all burned up. You gotta love those guys.' He gave a laugh that was as sharp as a scalpel.

  'That so crazy?' Derek said.

  DeSouza pushed aside the remains of his dessert. 'Not necessarily,' he said. 'But you're missing the point.'

  'We got a few distractions going on,' Derek said. It wasn't like the professor to be so spiky.

  DeSouza checked himself and offered to fetch some coffee. Derek asked for tea.

  'Oh, I forgot,' DeSouza said. 'The Brits really got to you people.' He shook his head, raised a pinkie. 'Tea,' he said, in a British accent.

  He returned with the drinks and put them down on the table.

  'You guys are police, so you do police work, right?'

  Derek and Pol glanced at one another. The professor really was a little off-kilter.

  'When they let us,' Derek said.

  DeSouza's eyes lit up. 'That's just it, see, that's exactly it. I'm a scientist. I'm a damned good scientist. If I'd wanted to be a politician or some kind of policy goon I woulda been. All my life, from being a small kid, I just wanted to do science. But the fucking politicians, the funding agencies, the think tanks, all those fucking wastes of space out there, they make it impossible. The things we could do, the things we'd know, if they only left us alone.'

  'I hear that,' Derek nodded. He flashed Pol a look that said, Let's get the hell out of here.

  Less than an hour and a half after they'd touched down, they were back in the air and heading for Craig, but the island was still shrouded in low cloud and Derek decided there was nothing for it but to carry on to Autisaq and wait for it to clear. Upbringing and experience had taught him not to feel frustrated by the vagaries of the weather; it was what it was. In any case, no one had seen Taylor alive in three days and the likelihood was that he was gone. An hour or a month wouldn't make much difference.

  As they were beginning their descent into the settlement, Derek's gaze happened to land on graffiti someone had scratched in one corner of the passenger window glass. He hadn't noticed it before.

  D Palacer is a dick-sucking prick.

  He tried not to let it bother him. Every policeman had enemies. Among a certain crowd he was still seen as some kind of collaborator. And there were plenty of folk up here who didn't see the need for a legal system at all, considered it just another southern import. They didn't want to know that more often than not Derek kept the southern legal system off their backs.

  He licked his finger and rubbed it across the engraving. The dampened letters faded momentarily, gradually resuming their previous form as they dried. He reached in his pocket for his Leatherman, glanced over at Pol to make sure he wasn't being watched, flipped open the hoof pick attachment, made a few adjustments to the lettering, scratched out the middle section and read the sentence back to himself.

  D's Palace is brick.

  After that, he put away the Leatherman, closed his eyes and braced himself for landing.

  Simeonie Inukpuk was waiting for them in the tiny terminal building, looking like a hare who's just realized he's gone down a fox hole by mistake. Derek met the expectant shine in his eyes with a shake of his head. He took out his pack of Lucky Strikes and offered the mayor a cigarette.

  Derek said: 'We got round most of the island before the cloud came down, but there were no tracks, nothing. Till that cloud clears it's impossible.'

  'Ajurnamat, that really is too bad,' Simeonie grumbled. He sucked on his cigarette.

  Derek said: 'I'd like to talk to Joe; maybe he can give us a better idea of where he last saw Taylor.'

  Simeonie grunted. 'We'd all like to talk to Joe.'

  The news of the young man's death hit Derek like a musk- ox charge to the spleen. For a while he just stood rooted to the spot, shaking his head, mumbling 'Ah no, ah Jesus, no,' helpless in the maw of some terrible stupefaction. Of all the young men. Joe Inukpuk was a beacon of hope in what was otherwise a fog of drink, boredom, unwanted pregnancies, low expectation and educational underachievement. He took out another cigarette, lit it, sucked up the smoke and tried to gather his thoughts.

  'How's the family holding up?'

  Simeonie shrugged as if to say, How do you think?

  'The body's at the nursing station.'

  Derek crushed the rem
ains of his smoke under his boot and told Pol to radio Kuujuaq detachment and update Stevie. Then he followed Simeonie to the nursing station.

  He was aware that the number of suicides in Nunavut and Nunavik, the two principal Inuit districts of Eastern Canada, had doubled in the last decade. Inuit were now eleven times more likely to kill themselves than their fellow Canadians living in the south. Eighty-three per cent of suicides were of young people under thirty and eighty-five per cent of them male. Down in the south, it was often assumed that the majority of suicides north of the 60th happened when the suicide was drunk, but this was just another way in which the south absolved itself from responsibility for the fate of its northern peoples. Sure, the Arctic had its share of boozers, but the connection with suicide was much looser than the sociologists, politicians, health advisors and policy makers imagined. Take Joe. Derek knew the boy well enough to know he barely drank: he'd seen what drink had done to his parents.

  He followed Simeonie up the steps to the station, hauled off his snow boots, and swung open the inner door. As he went in he saw Edie Kiglatuk sitting at one end of the waiting room. She looked up and acknowledged him but without her customary smile. On the opposite side of the waiting room sat the boy's blood family. Joe's mother Minnie had fallen asleep with her head resting on Willa's shoulder. Derek went over to offer his condolences. As he drew near he could see that Minnie was sleeping off the results of a heavy drinking spree and Sammy had a glazed look on his face. The smell of weed drifted up from the bench on which they all were sitting. Derek said how sorry he was.

  'I was sitting with him.' Sammy's voice was subdued but there was something hysterical lurking just below the surface. 'I was sitting with him but then I went to tell his mother he was safe. Safe! Can you believe? When I left he was sleeping, you know? I had no idea he was going to do anything, no idea at all.' His body lurched forward and his voice broke.