Consumption (29 page)

“Did you hit your head at any point?”

“Not that I remember.”

Pauloosie shrugged.

Balthazar rolled up his sleeves and washed his hands. He had the old man lie down on a stretcher and he positioned a bright lamp to shine on his face. He cleaned the exposed muscle and fat with sterile water. He tried to identify the cut ends of the muscle belly, looking for edges to rejoin. Dog teeth are pointed but they are not really very sharp: the wound was a scramble. Every other stitch he placed had to come out again. Steadily, layer by layer, Balthazar worked, consulting a manual of facial anatomy beside him. It took hours.

He had nearly finished when he lifted up the sterile drape covering the old man’s face and asked him how he was.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Emo said.

“About seeing a plastic surgeon?”

“I don’t want the girl to go.”

“Which girl?”

“My daughter. She should stay here. We’ll take care of her.”

Balthazar looked over at Pauloosie.

“Attatatiak …”
the boy said.

“That’s my decision.”

“Okay, sir, don’t worry about anything, nobody’s going anywhere.”

“I’m sorry for changing my mind like this. But we’ll lose her anyway, if she goes south for that long.”

“Okey-dokey… just about done, here.”

“Everything is all right, Grandfather,” Pauloosie said.

When Balthazar pulled the last drape from Emo’s face half an hour later, the old man lay quite still with his eyes closed. He appeared to be asleep—or worse—and Balthazar and Pauloosie were both starting to panic when he opened his eyes.

“How are you feeling, sir?”

“Nahmuktah,”
Emo answered.

“He’s okay, he says,” Pauloosie said.

“Excellent. Well, there isn’t much else to do here. We’ll give you a tetanus shot, and in about a week we’ll take out the stitches. If there
is any sign of infection, like increasing pain or fever or discharge, you should come back, of course…”

Pauloosie could not take his eyes off his grandfather’s face. Balthazar had done a fine job, but neither the nurse nor Pauloosie knew what to say. The scars were long, it was true, but the man’s face had been flayed open, and now he appeared nearly normal, albeit swollen and bruised, with fine nylon stitches running in jagged lines across his face.

Emo looked at himself in the mirror above the sink and pronounced it satisfactory.
“Koyenamee,”
he said to the doctor.

“You’re welcome,” Balthazar said.

The old man and his grandson left. Emo did not speak Kablunuktitut again.

Pauloosie stood with his friend Pierre Karlik on the ice with Emo’s dogs, who clambered around them. Pauloosie fed them seal meat, which they gobbled down in great eager mouthfuls. The lead, Kanyak, held back from the meat, and stood alongside Pauloosie’s leg, stiff and dignified and solemn. She did not climb up on him as the others had, nor did she shrink from him. The side of her chest lightly touched his knee. He did not trust himself to speak. Karlik asked Pauloosie again if every musher in town had turned the dogs down and Pauloosie nodded yes. They were too closely bonded to the old man. They would likely not accept another leader, and Kanyak herself was too old to be worth bending to a new owner. And there was the matter of their neglect and undernourishment. And the mauling. Even before Pauloosie had approached the first owner, a consensus had been reached.

Karlik reached into the komatik they had towed out with them behind his snowmobile.

“Not just yet,” Pauloosie said.

At Okpatayauk’s apartment, the door opened and closed steadily, admitting Penny, Simionie, Mariano Kringyurak, and finally, Pauloosie. Okpatayauk had spent the afternoon on the phone, asking everyone who had been involved in the committee—excepting those who had subsequently taken a job with the mine—if they would come by his apartment that night. He was deliberately mysterious about the urgency of the meeting. This, he found, was a useful tactic in reigniting the fading interest of his friends.

“In two months, the annual general meeting of the Kivalliq Mining Commission will be held,” he announced when they were all assembled in his living room. “This is the regulatory agency that oversees all mining activity in this part of the Arctic, including the Back River mine.” He paused and let everyone take a sip of their pops.

“By statute, these meetings have to be open to the public. Last year I attended it, and was one of four people there. Yvo Nautsiaq showed up because he heard there would be drinks. The other two I think were ringers the mine owners sent for some reason. They had suits on, anyway, and wore galoshes. I haven’t seen them in town again.

“I’ve learned something about the relationship between the mine owners and the Ikhirahlo Group that might turn out to be a bombshell. I want everyone here to start encouraging all their friends to show up at the meeting. It’ll be held in the hotel. Tell people there will be snacks.”

Waiting in the line by the cashier at the Quick Stop to buy tea, Pauloosie saw Billy Tootoo and Clive Akpalik, who told him there was a party that night. It had been months since he had spoken at any length with anyone his own age. After he paid for his tea he tucked it into his jacket pocket and joined the boys.

They walked over squeaking snow to the house of a friend, the son of one of the men who ran a dog team, Frank Kapoyee. The father was fastidious with his dogs, Pauloosie knew, and had to be appalled at how his son lived. There was one piece of furniture in the house, a chesterfield with cigarette burns so thick that the thing functioned better as a testimonial to the effectiveness of modern fire retardants than as a source of back support. The stuffing protruded out of it in a dozen places, and the springs had been bent back to avoid snagging on clothing. People sat on the curling-up linoleum floor under a pall of purple cigarette smoke so acrid and substantial that the windows had been opened and minus-forty air blew through the house and everyone shivered. They were all drinking, sharing bottles of Seagram’s Five Star purchased from the bootlegger. In the kitchen three men and a woman were hot-knifing hash.

Pauloosie wandered through the house looking for some place to stand where he would feel comfortable. He ended up in the kitchen, watching the hash smokers at their solemn ritual. When the toilet paper tube was handed to him he stepped up to the stove and watched fascinated as the tips of the knives grew red. Tim Kaput nodded to him and took one knife and touched it to a spot of hash. Then he squeezed the tips of the knives together as Pauloosie sucked in through the toilet paper tube. The smoke seared its way into his lungs and after a long, hyperinflated pause he whooped out a lungful of blue smoke and staggered backwards, coughing and shivering with the combined effects of the draught and the sensation that his lungs had just sloughed off most of their lining. Cindy Adams looked at him in a concerned manner as his face bulged and grew purple. Then she took the toilet paper tube from his hand. “That might be enough for you,” she said huskily and took her place at the stove.

Pauloosie stood back gratefully. By the time he took his third step he was so stoned he no longer understood why his chest throbbed with pain. By the fourth, he would have been unable to describe
what that sensation was. Or what his chest was, exactly. He felt like a duck paddling his feet in a pond filled with Jell-O, and being propelled through the house by an unseen Jell-O current. He looked at Cindy, who was leaning back from the stove now, and grinning at him. “Quack, quack,” he said.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” she replied.

He rose up above himself and lay over the room, his enlarging back against the ceiling. He watched himself circle through the house, smiling vapidly and happily.

And then he was wandering outside, unable to remember why he had come out in the first place, and unable to find the house party again. It was only good fortune that he hadn’t bothered to take off his parka at the party, and now he pulled it tight around his shoulders. He wandered up to the government workers’ apartment building, where he found Penny’s name on the buzzer. He pressed it. It was midnight. Normally he would have been asleep for three hours, as she had been by now, in preparation for an early morning on the ice with his dogs.

Penny ignored the first few minutes of buzzing, interpreting it as another late-night attempt to exchange a soapstone carving for bootlegger-destined money. Then she rolled out of her bed, stepped over her rifle case and backpack, and stabbed the intercom.

“Go away!” she barked.

“Hello,” he whispered.

There was a long pause.

“What?” she asked. She stared at the intercom, understanding that she wanted to wake up but not certain why.

“Are you going?” He breathed in and out a few times. “Out on the land in the morning?”

Pauloosie was down there, where he could be studied by anyone. She did not want that, could not have him viewed that way. “Come up,” she whispered and buzzed the door open.

He wound his way up the staircase and peered down each darkened hallway in turn until, on the fourth floor, he spied her open door.

There were no other open doors, though Penny did not know how many cocked ears had listened to their exchange, how faithfully their voices were transmitted through every piece of particleboard in the building, how every insomniac and alienated Kablunauk had laid there listening.

She pulled him in and shut her door. He stood in her kitchen and she saw that he was not himself. She made him tea and sat him down at her table.

“You’re really stoned, aren’t you?” she asked, gazing into his red eyes.

“I’m tired, but I feel really good,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey, tell me something.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been thinking about going out on the tundra for a long time. Maybe a year.”

“Really?” She stirred her tea, trying to decide how much of what he was saying was hashish related.

“Do you think it would be possible to carry enough gear to do that? What would you take?”

“Uh… you’d have to have really good hunting to pull it off. You’d want to cache enough seal meat for the dogs. And in the summer you’d need a heavy char run. You wouldn’t be able to carry enough store-bought food to last. You’d be better off carrying a fishnet and lots of ammunition. Maybe take a twelve gauge, for the spring geese.”

“That’s what I’m thinking too. You’d have to be stingy with the lamp fuel.”

“Really? Do you mean this? Do you think you really might do this?”

“I think I have a choice here, we have a choice, about which way we’ll head.”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

“I figured you would, was why I came here.”

“Are you going out on the land tomorrow?”

“Yes. First thing.”

“We better get some sleep then.”

When a high-pressure system hangs over the land in mid-winter, and the air stops moving, it becomes very cold. Eventually a low-pressure system will move in to raise the wind and the temperature, but for a time—sometimes for weeks—it is as if the air itself has hardened and sits on the rock and ice like frozen glass pressed against one’s eyes. The leads in the ice freeze over and new ones are not formed. The ice is not pushed apart by wind and waves. Those who need to travel leap at the opportunity and snowmobiles and dog teams charge out across the ice, confident for once that they are not likely to pitch forward into the sea the moment their attention wavers.