White Heat (15 page)

    'You
think something happened out on Craig, the two men got into some kind of
argument and it got out of control?'

    Patma
met Derek's eye. 'No, no, that's crazy . . .'He looked at the body bag,
considering, then checked there was no one standing at the door. 'Well, it's
possible, I suppose,' he said. 'And there is something else. I didn't like to
say anything to the family. A couple of days ago I was on the computer. Joe's
the only one who ever used it, except me. I found a website in the history,
seems Joe had been there a lot, so I clicked on it, just out of curiosity, and
some virtual poker thing came up. It asked for a password and I couldn't get
in. Joe was always really keen to help me out with the admin and I just used to
leave him to it. . .'

    Suddenly
a great deal of shouting came from the waiting room. Derek strode to the door,
swung it open and saw Edie standing near the exit. Sammy was beside her. From
what Derek could see, he was trying to restrain Minnie, who was screaming at
Edie and swinging fists at her.

    'Keep
her away from me,' Edie was saying.

    Minnie
lunged again and was held back by Sammy. Derek looked around for Willa and saw
him still sitting in his seat, a look of contempt on his face.

    'That
bitch took my husband and now she's taken my son,' Minnie shrieked. She
staggered for a moment then collapsed into Sammy's arms.

    'Damn,
Sammy, keep your crazy ex-wife off me,' Edie spat.

    Derek
made to stand between them. 'C'mon,' addressing himself to Edie. 'I'll take you
home.'

    They reached
the front door to Edie's house in silence and took off their outerwear.

    Derek
said: 'You want some tea?'

    'Uh
nuh.'

    'Listen,
Edie, I need to look in Joe's room,' Derek said. 'You don't mind staying out
here?'

    'Actually,
Derek, I do.'

    He
didn't have the heart to argue with her. So long as she remained in the
doorway, she could look, he said. He stepped inside the room, a typical young
man's bedroom, full of the flotsam and jetsam of a life beginning to be explored.
It broke his heart to think that, of all the young men he knew, Joe Inukpuk was
the one to decide he had nothing to live for. He noticed that someone had taken
the bedcovers.

    'Sammy,'
Edie explained. 'They were stained. He took them away.'

    'I'm
sorry,' Derek said. 'This must be very tough.'

    Edie
didn't reply. He had the sense she was trying to hold herself in.

    'Did
you find any foils, from the tablets?'

    'I
didn't think to look,' she said quietly.

    He
moved towards the bed and pulled open the little drawer in the bedside cabinet.
There, wedged between a notebook and the edge of the drawer, were fifteen
blister packs, stamped with the Vicodin trademark, all empty and neatly piled
in criss-cross formation. He drew out a pair of vinyl gloves, took out the
notebook and flicked through it, hoping to find some explanatory note, but it
just seemed full of nursing details, technicalities about dressings and saline
drips.

    'Think
you can face talking about it?' he asked.

    They
sat on the sofa cradling mugs of hot tea.

    'I'm
wondering, did he say anything yesterday? Any clue as to how he was feeling?'

    Edie
was quiet for a moment, running the question though her head, he imagined. He
noticed that her hair had come unbraided, as though she'd been picking at it.
For some reason it moved him. He felt slightly agitated, aroused maybe, and had
to tell himself to shape up.

    'Not
really. I mean, by the time I saw him he'd taken a Xanax. Me and Sammy had to
help him walk back here from the nursing station. He was kind of out of it.
When Sammy and I... when we were together, Joe and Willa had bunk beds in that
room. They practically grew up in there.' Edie stared ahead, trying to gather
her feelings, the tears streaming down her face like meltwater. 'Now it just
looks like an empty box.'

    'Robert
said Joe was pretty cut up about losing that Wagner guy.'

    'What
he was sore about was that no one .. .' She glared at Derek.'... no one wanted
to investigate it.' Edie punched her chest with a tiny fist. 'Goddammit.' She
held her hand over her mouth and nose as though hoping to stifle her breath.
'You know, this was my fault,' she said. 'I shouldn't ever have left Joe with
that asshole.' Derek waited for her sobbing to die down.

    'Edie,
you know anything about gambling?'

    'What,
Joe?' She snorted. 'Ridiculous.' Her voice became sharp, wary. 'Who said that?'

    'He
belonged to some online site.'

    'That's
crazy, he was saving for school.' She looked exhausted. 'No, no, I can't
believe that.'

    He
thought about asking whether Joe and Andy Taylor could have got into a fight
but, conscious of the pain he would cause, held back. In any case, it was a
futile question. Until Taylor had been found everything was just speculation.

    'Have
you eaten?'

    She
waved him away. 'Not hungry.'

    'You
should eat.'

    He
went over to the kitchen and looked in the fridge.

    But
by the time he had gathered together a few crackers, she was asleep on the sofa.
He picked her up and put her to bed. It was late now and he didn't want to
leave her to wake up on her own, so he lay on the sofa and closed his eyes.
After an hour or so, with sleep still eluding him, he sat up, switched on the
lamp and looked around the room for something to occupy his mind. Eventually
his eyes alighted on a DVD sitting beside the TV. He picked it up and turned
the cover over. Charlie Chaplin in
The Gold Rush.
He slotted the disc
into the player and sat back. In a while he heard a soft sound coming from
behind and Edie appeared and came and sat with him on the sofa. He took her
hands in his. Without saying anything, she leaned her head on his shoulder.
They sat like that, in silence, for what seemed like the longest time, watching
Charlie in the log cabin as it pendulumed from the cliff side to the abyss.

    By
eight the next morning he and Pol were back out flying over Craig but after a
few hours the low cloud reappeared and they still had nothing.

    Back
in Autisaq Derek paid visits to Joe's family and took formal statements from
everyone who had seen him on his return from Craig. Early evening, with one
final statement to do, he dropped in on Edie and found her staring at a bowl of
caribou liver soup.

    'I
feel like I'm trapped under the ice,' she said. 'I can
see
out, but I
can't
get
out.' She pushed away the soup. 'It's just so difficult to
take in.'

    Derek
took her hand and squeezed it. When Misha had left him, he'd found a website
listing Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief: denial and isolation, anger,
bargaining, depression and acceptance. Since Misha had gone, he'd worked
through the first three and found himself stuck in the depressive phase. Edie
had only just started out. He felt for her. It would be a long journey.

    By
nine that evening, he was at the terminal building beside the airstrip with
Pol. The mayor was seeing them off.

    'You'll
be reporting the
qalunaat
missing, presumed dead,' he said to Derek.
'Lost in the blizzard.'

    'Unless
any evidence emerges to the contrary.'

    'He
should never have gone off like that on his own.'

    Derek
tried not to look surprised. 'Are we sure that's what happened?'

    Simeonie
gave a little snort, as though he found the question absurd. 'You know, kids
like Joe, young Inuit men and women, they deserve a shot at proper employment.'
His voice had taken on a chummy, avuncular tone Derek found sickening. 'If this
whole tragedy tells us anything it's that Autisaq needs to be brought into the
twenty-first century. Jobs, technology, enterprise. We need our young people to
aspire to more than massaging the egos of
qalunaat.'

    They
flew low over Derek and Misha's old house and turned towards the landing strip.
Pol put on his headphones, spoke briefly to whoever was on shift in the control
room, took out his gum and stuck it above the altimeter, ready for the next
flight. The settlement lights sparkled like ice crystals caught in a flashlight
beam.

    Pol
said: 'No place like home.'

    Derek
said: 'No place at all.'

    The
plane bump-landed onto the strip and they slid across the gravel, coming to a
halt beside the control and cargo building. They filled in the necessary flight
papers in the terminal building and made for their snowbies. Derek didn't
notice Pol waving him off until the pilot was half way down the path leading
away from the strip towards the mayor's office. He tipped Pol a loose salute in
return.

    'See
you tomorrow evening?'

    Derek
gave an exaggerated shrug.

    'The
party at Joadamie Allak's?

    Derek
hesitated, trying to recall when he had been invited, then realized he hadn't.
He made as if to remember and gave the thumbs-up, watched the pilot's shrinking
back for a moment, then set off in the opposite direction.

    As he
reached the spur leading to the police detachment he spotted a husky sniffing
around under the school building, coat blank and featureless, ribs like lead
pipes. No way to know whose it was. An instant later he saw another, trotting
blithely along the path to the garbage dump, past the telegraph pole and the
sign about keeping dogs tied at all times. A sudden flare of anxiety rose up
from his gut. He'd been in Kuujuaq ten minutes and already he felt like a lab
monkey strapped to an electric chair.

    Derek
took off his snow boots, pushed open the door to the detachment office and went
to his apartment at the back. He made himself a cup of instant ramen noodles
and went to bed.

    When he
appeared the following morning, Stevie was already sitting at his desk. The
familiar bleeps and pips of World of Warcraft sailed over. Seeing Derek, he
flipped out of the game into a boss screen.

    'Tea,
D?' Stevie said, adopting a perky air.

    Derek
decided to let last night's dog business, as well as the game, drop for the
moment. Right now there were more important things to attend to. He intended to
spend the rest of the day writing a preliminary report into Taylor's
disappearance and Joe's apparent suicide. The samples from Joe's room would
have to go off to the path lab and it was also his job to call Ottawa to try to
trace Taylor's next of kin.

    Simeonie
Inukpuk had agreed to send out another search and recovery team but until they
found a body, Andy Taylor would have to remain on the official missing list. He
emailed a quick update to Ottawa, then started to work on his report.

    There
was no doubt in his mind that Joe had killed himself. Derek knew better than
most how such impulses were sown then slowly cultivated. He'd developed his
understanding as a teen at residential school in the south, where they'd kept
him on a diet of potatoes and gravy and beaten first the Cree and then the
Inuktitut out of him. Looking back, he realized only a very healthy investment
in masturbation had prevented him from tying his sheets together, sneaking out
to the football pitch at night and stringing himself up from the goal post. He
knew other kids, less well-versed in the pleasure principle, who had gone down
like catapulted dovekies. Three over one particularly dark summer: Ben
Fleetfoot, found floating in the lake, pockets full of ice-hockey pucks he'd
stolen from the gym; Holbrook Brown, who'd had to be pulled from the bathtub
with the red water pouring from his body like summer melt, and Katryn Great
Elk, who'd raided the sick bay and swallowed as many pills as she could find.

    What
was less certain was why. Derek flipped a packet of Lucky Strikes from his
shirt pocket, turned over the perky 'Welcome to This No-Smoking Office' sign
hanging on the door, lit a cigarette and tried to put himself in Joe's shoes.
Looked at one way, everything in the boy's background and circumstances had him
down as a suicide waiting to happen: the guilt he was carrying about not being
able to save Felix Wagner, compounded by the loss of Andy Taylor; the tangle of
loyalties he felt towards the various factions of his family; and what seemed
to be a gambling habit. A mixture of shame, guilt and hypothermia coupled with
easy access to drugs could well have amounted to an insurmountable force in the
boy's mind, propelling him in a moment of confusion into taking his own life.