The High-Rise in Fort Fierce

by Paul Carlucci

  In the woods, it was late enough in the fall for the sun to be down. Kurt steered by starlight and neither of them spoke until the truck rolled to a stop at a seemingly random spot along the quad trail. When the interior light snapped on, Percy could see his uncle, who was not as composed as he’d thought. Rather, his hairless cheeks sagged and he chewed his lower lip and his eyes were red behind a few strands of greasy black hair.

  “Come on,” said Kurt, letting go of the steering wheel, sweaty stripes where his fingers had been.

  Percy’s feet sank into the moss carpeting the sides of the trail. He bounced, like an astronaut abandoned on a strange planet, toward the bed of the truck where his uncle, already there, lowered the tailgate and winced when the hinges squealed.

  “Grab those bottles,” Kurt said, pulling on a pair of work gloves.

  Percy focused on the soppy beer case with its garish logo. He tried to ignore the boots and legs his uncle took hold of, lost his grip on, and grabbed again by the cuffs of the jeans, before tugging, yanking, hauling the load over the lip of the tailgate. The truck shook and groaned as it let the body go. Together, with Kurt dragging the body by its legs, they lumbered off-trail and a long way into the sparse woods and thriving moss.

  Percy imagined bugs wriggling under the moss. A twig snapped in the gloom. Wolves loped through the trees. There was an awful stink, must’ve been a bear nearby, its brown snout tipping upward to inhale their sweat, breath, and fear.

  Off behind a curtain of autumn leaves, the river crashed and smashed its way over a cliff. Percy and his uncle emerged from the woods on a towering terrace of shale-like rock. The river hurtled towards them and then, when it seemed close enough to sweep them away, it plunged over the cliff face, a ghostly mist rising up from the darkness below.

  Kurt dropped the legs. Careful not to touch himself with his gory gloves, he dabbed at his forehead with his exposed wrist. He looked around and pointed at the ground by their feet. “Smash a couple bottles right there. But not too many. It’s gotta look like he carried them here himself. Maybe two in his hands and two in the pockets of his jeans. Understand? And careful with the glass. Don’t cut yourself.”

  Percy nodded. His head felt like it was suspended in water. He slid one bottle out of the case and weighed it against his palm. It was practically nothing, but the sound it made was immense, a cackling shatter that ripped through the steady groan of the waterfall. He exchanged looks with Kurt, who shrugged. Percy shattered another.

  Kurt said, “Throw the other two over the side.”

  The bottles vanished into the misty black.

  “Okay,” said his uncle. “Okay, this works.” He bent down to retrieve his load. Grunting, he hauled it across the terrace, towards the edge. “You don’t have to look at him, son. But I do. Just for a second, I think. Okay?”

  Percy nodded, torn between running back through the woods or staring as his uncle fumbled with the bungee cord they’d used to lash a pillowcase over his father’s head. Either option seemed loaded with the same dose of terror, the mangled ruins of his father or the looming shadows of the predatory bush.

  Paralyzed, Percy watched without blinking. His uncle hoisted his father into a slack sitting position near the lip of the cliff. Years later, he wouldn’t remember if Kurt removed the pillowcase gradually to manage his own fear, or if the slow-motion effect was the result of a dream state only Percy experienced.

  The stars were out, and his father’s face and throat glistened with blood. It was a wrinkled and leathery throat, tired looking, exhausted and sucked on by an interior force, maybe a cigarette suspended in the larynx, burning endlessly, his Adam’s apple like a doorknob in a trampled paper bag. Then there was his chin, the wispy, sort of scabby hairs of his goatee, a disturbing slackness to the way it hung. Percy pictured his uncle reaching for the hammer. His dad’s slack, fatty face. The sound. It was less comical than the shovel. It was damp, heavy, serious.

  Percy’s paralysis broke. He turned and ran into the woods, a fit in his throat, in his mouth, and the moss treacherous underfoot, the shadows ghostly and sharp as the moon rose up and up and up. Several times he lost his footing. Finally he tripped over a stump, floating, for a second, with his arms stretched out in front of him. Then he crashed into the forest floor, sinking into the moss, the feel of the stuff against his closed eyelids, like a kiss.

  Kurt found him, carried him back to the truck like an injured puppy. They said nothing as he reversed down the quad trail, the doors locked and the brake lights casting a red glow into the woods.

  Back on the reserve, the house pipes shuddered and moaned as water gushed onto Percy’s filthy hands. He scrubbed at his skin and the dirt lodged under his nails.

  There were no tribal police, so RCMP investigators, bleary-eyed and irritated, arrived from Fort Fierce and listened to the story of the abusive, drunken husband who beat his wife to death with a shovel in front of their kids, and who then ran off into the night, beers in his hands and stuffed in his pockets, even as the wife’s brother gave up chase to tend to the boys. They nodded, scribbled notes, took the body away.

  Years later, a human skull would be found way downriver, by the mouth of Little Raven Lake. Forensic examination would generate a few headlines in the Northerner, but when a DNA match couldn’t be found, the story lost traction and was told only by tour guides to tourists.

  III

  The three of them had only just sat down around Percy’s tiny, tobacco-scattered kitchen table when Linda, crossing her legs and lighting another smoke, asked Monster for blow. An eight ball. Monster looked back and forth between them. He shrugged, reached into his fanny pack, and pulled out a bag of coke and a digital scale. Everyone was tense and quiet as he weighed it out.

  “You know the problem with Indian chicks,” Monster said when he was done. He took a wad of cash from Linda and tossed her coke into the centre of the table. “Youse never have any curves unless youse are fat.” He snorted and slapped Percy on the back before leaving.

  Coke made Percy anxious. He coiled up on the extreme edge of his chair and struggled to follow Linda’s manic stories of hitchhiking to Fort Smith last summer and sneaking into a barn on acid so she could come down with the horses, and the way the arresting officer gave her ass a squeeze before pushing her into her cell, and how she’d met so many people she could already tell how much she had in common with Percy, he a strong, quiet Dene man in the last land the whites hadn’t completely consumed (but almost!) and she a red pussy-power paragon on a territorial mission to rouse her brothers and sisters, and come closer, take off your shirt, push your fingers against me here and he could not cum despite pulverizing the vinyl floor for two hours, only stopping to huff more blow, one of them upending a chair in the process, until all the drugs were gone and he reluctantly unveiled a large bottle of vintage scotch given to him five years before, when his uncle picked him up from the South Mackenzie Penitentiary after he’d done ten months for assault. To new beginnings, his uncle said. Save the bottle until you’re sure you got one.

  And this is what he said to Linda, who he’d met only that evening and miraculously lured to his apartment, despite the heated competition from the pissers at the bar: “To new beginnings,” he said, holding the bottle between them, his eyes bulging at her sprawled branchlike across the kitchen floor, sweat beading on her thighs and soaking the hair plastered against his cheeks.

  The booze took the edge off, but not quickly, and Percy, his muscles relaxing, his arms snuggling Linda’s minuscule waist, slipped into a twitchy sleep of gruesome nightmares he forgot even as their plots unravelled.

  The sound that woke him was the stove, he was sure, banging into the wall, and maybe the hinges of the door squealing. Percy unglued his eyes. He saw Monster in the kitchen. Naked. Neck bulging and surrounded by tribal tattoos. His tiger-striped gitch hung from the leg of the fallen chair. His bare white ass, hairless and powerful, fully flexed, thighs like ship hulls. Bucking, thrusting, poundi
ng. The stove smashed against the wall from the force of his fuck, and Linda’s legs were thrown around his hips like weeds from the bottom of the lake.

  Percy turned away, past the twelve-pack on the counter and out the window, through which it was impossible to tell the time, day or night, just a continual darkness that only lifted a few hours each afternoon. There were tears in his eyes, but he didn’t know why he was crying. Because he’d crushed on Linda? Because he missed his first day of work since getting the job four years ago? He worked for the town’s operations department. He had sick days. But still, he felt like shit, which was maybe because he’d guzzled the scotch he’d been saving since his release, ever vigilant for this fabled new beginning.

  “Sorry,” said Linda. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

  He opened his eyes. Monster was gone and the toppled chair had been set right. The kitchen sparkled. He stood up and pulled on his T-shirt. Linda sat at the table, which had been wiped clean. A cigarette burned in the otherwise empty ashtray. Two small lines had been cut on a CD case. She drank a beer. Her face was a cluster of twitching muscles. She blinked and looked away.

  “And I shouldn’t have done that, either,” she added. “Like, with him. It was wrong. Obviously. I just get so messed up sometimes. Fucked-up things seem normal.”

  She scraped the chair legs back and got him a beer from the fridge, motioned to the other chair with a delicate flick of her chin.

  “Join me for a beer?” she asked, and Percy didn’t go to work the next day either.

  IV

  She sobered up and moved in and wore baggy sweaters, a red wool scarf, and oversized jeans. On weekends, the kettle whistled seven or eight times a day. She told Percy that green tea fought cancer, so even if she still smoked it was better than nothing. She started giving talks at the library. They were small at first, just her and the librarians, who she mocked when she got back home: the ginger-haired South African in Christmas sweaters who stole fearful glances from behind the card catalogue as Linda declared that even innocent whites would have to forfeit their land when treaties were finally honoured; the balding library-science student who slipped continually into sleep, the great grizzled slab of his cheek sliding slowly down his palm until he jerked awake again.

  At first, after that episode with Monster, she slept on the couch, and there were a couple awkward collisions in the kitchen at night. He was helping her, that was all. It wouldn’t be romantic. That opportunity was gone. Once, Percy walked in on her squatting over the toilet and flipping through a newspaper. Another time, she hogged the shower for an hour, and when he finally came in to yell at her, she drew back the curtain and presented herself with water streaming between her breasts and bubbling through her pubic hair. Then she started sleeping in his bed.

  They’d have his brother Jimmy over some nights, order pizza, and Linda would talk politics relentlessly. This was not the Northwest Territories. It was Denedeh. It was Treaty Eight and Treaty Eleven and what did that mean, anyway? Nothing. It meant nothing. The terms were vague, the promises were broken, the whole thing was just another land grab perpetrated by the federal government, and fuck them, because they’d done it the way they’d always done it, assuming one Native person was the same as another—just look at that stupid Inukshuk at the entrance to town. These people couldn’t distinguish one group from another, and they came north looking to negotiate with chiefs, and when they couldn’t find any chiefs powerful enough to sell the land, they made a few up. Then they set about conning them with money and religion, and everything was in English, and all of it written down in bewildering documents, and all these years later, where were their hospitals? Where were their schools? Some groups farther north had forced the government back to the table, but what was the deal with the Dene around Fort Fierce? Why were they so placid?

  “Let’s picket one of the mines,” she said, bending over and trailing her hair in the pizza.

  “Fuck yes,” said Jimmy, who looked worse and worse every time Percy saw him. His thumb-smear of a face hovered over the kitchen table. His lips were peeling. His eyes were red. His nostrils looked wet, inflamed. A collection of empty beer bottles built up around his elbow, and Percy waited for Linda to finally say something about bringing booze into the apartment. But she didn’t. Which was annoying.

  “Land,” said Linda, raising her voice over the speed metal thumping from Monster’s apartment next door. “It’s fucking fundamental.”

  Jimmy nodded dumbly, his eyes following as she eddied around the kitchen. “Always about land,” he said. “Always, always.”

  Percy squinted. He impatiently drummed his fingers on the table. Next door, the music blasted louder and louder. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to be Jimmy, all the rumours that followed him around, a bunch of them conjured up when the drunk tank was overcrowded, probably by Jimmy himself, like he’d kicked his ex-girlfriend when she was pregnant, like he’d been caught masturbating in the woods by the river. All this bullshit, like Jimmy himself, sidled in and out of Percy’s life without warning. Boom, here was Jimmy, pissed up to the rafters, free pizza stuck in his teeth, hitting on his older brother’s woman even as Percy sat and watched.

  “Christ,” said Percy, but neither of them heard him, so he reached across to the fridge and helped himself to one of Jimmy’s beers.

  “What the fuck, Percy?” Linda abandoned her monologue and loomed over him, arms akimbo.

  “What?” Jimmy giggled. “Why? You on the wagon, Percy?” He squealed and clapped his hands. “You? ”

  Percy sighed, knocked a smoke out of his pack and lit it up. He looked at Linda and shrugged, held her eyes for a long second, until her nostrils flared and her eyebrows collapsed.

  She cocked a thumb over her shoulder at the wall adjoining Monster’s apartment. “Aren’t you going to tell that cracker to turn the fucking music down? It’s Tuesday night. Don’t you have to work in the morning?”

  He slugged from his beer and left it on the table. His knuckles were white as he beat his fist on Monster’s door. He pressed his ear against the wood, waiting to hear the the chain lock rattle under the bass line. The rest was all overdriven speakers. Half-heartedly, he hammer-fisted the door one more time, his ear still pressed against it. He was about to give up and go home when the hinges yelped and the door opened and he stumbled inside the apartment, right into Monster’s bare, heaving chest.

  “The fuck? Percy! The fuck are you—?”

  Monster closed his thick, veiny fingers around the nape of Percy’s shirt and jerked him into the apartment, slammed the door and shoved Percy against it, slapped him hard across the face with the calloused palm of his other hand. Percy flinched. A bottle crashed into the wall above his head and showered him in beer and broken glass.

  Somewhere along the way, he’d become afraid of fighting. But still. He threw a fist into Monster’s mid-section, hoping to hit his solar plexus, where some guy in the penitentiary gym said you could stop a man from breathing if you poked him in just the right spot.

  A meaningless hit. Monster’s body was granite. He returned fire into Percy’s stomach, folding him over his forearm, spinning around, and shaking him off onto the throw rug in the middle of the living room. Percy blinked and sucked air through his teeth, couldn’t get anything into his lungs. Details hailed down from all directions: Norman Franklin sitting on the couch, jaw clenched, a drug-blitzed look in his eyes and behind that a whole lot of fear; an eighties movie on the TV, that one with the boxy robot that fights crime; the coffee table scattered with drugs and money and paraphernalia; some teenage girl with little blonde pigtails bent over a mirror, a straw between her thumb and forefinger; and then Monster looming with a potted plant held over his head, laughing, spiking the thing into his stomach and folding him like a spring-loaded beach chair, soil flying into every corner of the room.

  “Jesus fuck, Percy, man.” Monster, hands on his knees, huffing air. “You come by here like that again, fuck, bud
dy, you better bring that squaw bitch with you, make up for the interruption, brother.” He straightened himself and exhaled like he’d just finished a long jog. He shook his head and fell into the couch beside the teenager, who looked at him defensively and quickly bent over the coffee table and snorted another line. “Now get the fuck out,” he said, turning his attention to the television.

  It took Percy a minute to collect himself: his breathing, his legs, his self-awareness. He stood up and his feet were way below his ankles. He teetered and swayed toward the door.

  “Wait!” Monster shouted over the din. “Wait, bro! Wait, man. Were you ... were you looking to grab something?”

  Back home, Jimmy and Linda were sitting at the table, their hands extended into the middle, a few inches apart, but not looking at each other. Percy leaned against the door frame, his face wet and sticky from blood and beer, dirt in his teeth from the plant. They didn’t hear him at first. The music was still thumping. He sighed and hobbled to the sink.

  “Jesus,” Jimmy said, but it was Linda at his side, cooing over his blood, the smell of beer faintly on her breath.

  V

  Over the years living in Franklin Place, maybe three of them now, Percy developed a cough. It came and went, a half-ton plough ripping up his throat.

  “Pretty sure I seen Uncle Kurt coughing like that before shit caught up to him,” Jimmy said on his next visit, almost two months later.

  He’d come at three in the afternoon, a gentle knock on the door. Percy spied him through the peephole, watched him pinch his nose and clear his throat, look up the hall and down the other end. Surprise flashed across his face when Percy answered the door in jogging pants and a torn hoodie, his words stolen by that dry, dragging cough.