Inukshuk (3 page)

“Look, I saw what happened, OK?” Franklin said. “What you and your friends here were up to, that was not a game. A nosebleed and a wedgie, or whatever you call it . . . So, why don't we start from the beginning and you can explain for Vice Principal Legere here exactly how things got out of hand and exactly how—”

“He was trying to kill me.”

“Who—what?”

“You tried to kill me!”

“No, Malloy. The fact is, no, I did not.” He tried to keep his voice as level and neutral as possible. Not quite apologetic, but certainly warmer than he felt. “You made an attempt to escape, which I prevented. Now, why don't we . . .”

Malloy lowered his head onto the table. His shoulders shook, but no sounds followed. Franklin couldn't say for sure if he was faking it.

“What?” Franklin began. “For real?”

No response.

“Differing perceptions,
absolutement,
” Legere said, patting a hand on the conference table and smiling. Winked once in Franklin's direction, maybe, though it didn't have to mean anything. “I, for one, think we do not gain so much pressing further without parents present. Perhaps we can take five minutes break now, until one or two arrive, yes?” He peered over the top of Franklin's head and seemed to be humming to himself a moment as he sought his next, exact words. “Jeremy can compose himself in the interim and then we talk.” Twelve years as vice principal of this new little outpost, composite high school, twenty-plus years in Alberta generally, and still he talked like a displaced Frog. Franklin tried not to picture, as he usually did, Legere standing at a mirror, oiling his hair and pursing his lips at his reflection as he practiced saying things aloud in his
outrageous accent
in order to preserve it.

He nodded. “Sure,” he said. He pushed back from the table. “I have class next period.”

“This we know, Mr. Franklin.”

Outside again by the east entryway closest to Legere's office, he stood rolling in his fingertips the cigarette bummed off Dorrie Weiss there at the reception desk (he wasn't smoking again, not really, just this one to cope, calm the nerves), but not lighting up yet, testing his resolve, eyeing his watch and savoring the last moments before caving into addiction. Ordinarily, fourth period, if he was caught up with everything workwise, he'd be sweating on one of the treadmills or rowing machines at the gym or, weather permitting, jogging around the outside track or on the school cross-country trail. Perfect day for that, he thought, though he was glad, too, for the excuse not to run—considered it, even, according to some inverse logic, exactly the justification for the cigarette he hadn't yet lit: because if you're going to miss a day, may as well
really
miss. He listened to the wind whistling in the eaves and the sounds of traffic out on the main road blown first toward him and then away with the ceaseless clatter and clang of the halyard striking the school flagpole somewhere just out of his sight, the flag itself snapping riotously. Just over fifteen minutes remaining until the start of fifth period and his first of three back-to-back classes: honors ninth, core tenth, and the senior seminar, his plum, Classic Canadian Lit. This week's story, one of his favorites—“The Painted Door”: early twentieth-century agrarian prairie life, marriage, betrayal, and death by freezing.

Enter the next surprise of the day. Moira. He hadn't seen her in going on three years and resisted believing, at first, it was really her, not another phantom look-alike approaching from across the lot—scattered-seeming, fast-paced gait, bent forward slightly as if to accommodate for an ungainly height; expression of fixed but unspecified glumness, mostly (he guessed) the unintended consequence of long cheekbones and downward-turning mouth; high-priced, high-end clothing worn as if she'd just flung them on, designer jeans tucked into soft low-heeled boots, candy-cane red sweater, fur cap, and white scarf around her neck. He stood straighter. Felt his skin prickle and his vision sharpen. It was her all right.

“Moira!” He couldn't stop himself—the sound in his voice, already something too deprived and insistent.

“Oh my gosh, John? Is that you really? What are you doing? I mean . . . how . . . what in the world are you doing
here
? Everyone's asked about you; you know, since you quit the group, it's never been the same. Just last week, Ravi was asking if anyone ever saw or heard of you! Oh my gosh! How are you and . . . was it Jane?” She held her palms to her face a moment and looked at him pitifully enough—with sincere-enough seeming pity, that is (or some strong kindred sentiment anyway)—he was reminded all over again how difficult it was ever apprehending what she knew, what she didn't, what she intended. With that, some of the embarrassing things he'd said to her their last afternoon together: . . .
call it a crush. Sure. Devastated infatuation, more like . . . I know people would say it's a matter of transference, projection, what have you, of course, because of my trouble with Jane; still . . . you and I, it's like our souls are mated at some higher ontological plane, like we . . . such longing, it's like....
Had he really said all that? Best not to remember for the moment.

“Jane, yes. She's gone. Been a couple of years.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I
had
heard that I guess, yes. From . . . somewhere, I can't think where. What a mess, those days! All the cheating and lying and everyone's marriages busting up. The horrible zeitgeist of the new millennia. Thank
God
that's over!”

“Yes.” He exhaled, shook his head, but said nothing further.
Zeitgeist
. One of those words you didn't hear every day in Central Alberta conversation. He reminded himself how it'd always been this way with her: always the tendency to overemote, always enough real feeling behind the—he didn't want to call it pretentiousness, but it was, almost . . . some form of calculated playacting anyway—he could choose to see past it. “And you! What about—?”

“But you're OK now? Still writing?”

They'd spoken at once.

He nodded, smoothed the cigarette between his fingers. “I'm hanging in. Better than ever, really. And yes, pretty productive. Closing in on a finished manuscript. The old Sule Skerry project; I'm sure you remember.” Four, five months ago, he would have boasted to her about the poems that had been taken for publication at an East
Coast quarterly—older ones, completely revised and revamped. But the novelty of publication acceptance had mostly worn off. He was tired of hearing himself find ways to mention it, and then pretending not to have wanted the attention. Besides, she'd know those poems by name—might even quote him a line or two in appreciation. Of all people, she would understand the significance for him, having placed them so well, finally having risen to the rank of most of the rest of the Bowness group, but she'd know, too, they were not exactly new work. Well, it was something to save for later. “Jane and I . . .” He waved a hand. “That was in the pipeline for some time, as you know. I guess you'd say we hit the point where we stopped being able to see the best in each other. Conflicting ideals and priorities—radically conflicting, actually. Maybe that's the long and short of it.” He shrugged broadly. “Probably all my fault. No divorce yet. She's north with that CEAP group around Inuvik for now. Part of a nonprofit mission, monitoring climate change and. . . .”

“Yikes. That's . . .”

“Yes. The Arctic. More or less.”

“John. What ever did you
do
to that poor woman?”

He laughed. Watched her push back the hair that had blown across her face, strands catching against her mouth. “Would that I could claim that much influence. . . .”

“I'm so sorry.”

He shrugged. “All for the best, I'm sure.” And like that, he was lying to her—stowing his feelings in a layer of bravado anyway, and posing himself as someone better or more cavalier. More casually self-deprecating.
Pipeline
. A marriage didn't have a pipeline; an oil company did. Jane was gone, plain and simple.
Call it an extended leave of absence
, she'd said.
Call it my pilgrimage to save the world. Call it what you have to.

He rolled the cigarette a final time between his thumb and fingers and lit up. Drew deeply and waited for the first rush of pleasure to tingle his nerve endings, perk up his blood; sweet momentary lapse of self from self. Closed his eyes and drew again.

“So what brings you out here?” he asked.

“My son.”

“Right! I always forget you have kids.”

“Kid.”

“Right. Sorry. Kid. How old?”

“Fifteen.”

And then he knew: bussing in from the Turner Valley. Of course—
Malloy,
that would be her first husband's last name—but the likeness was now unmistakable. Her second husband was Stringer, Springer, something like that—Rick—and her own name she'd preserved for herself through all of that, Moira Francis. Briefly, he tried to remember anything he could about all this—her past, her life story: first husband, high school sweetheart, common-law, never officially married, left her with the two-year-old; second husband, lawyer whose words occasionally crossed with and sparked her own in poems, handsome, doggedly logical, older than she was and loyal to a flaw, but on his own terms. Brought back to mind, as well, the picture of her home life he had formulated based around these and other details. The boy he'd always envisioned (if he pictured him at all) as Devon, younger, dark-haired, with eyes like hers, the unknown portions of his face filled in reflexively from the only guy in his own high school class he knew to have married straight out of school, a wrestler and track jock named Brett. Rick (also more or less reflexively) he'd modeled on the lawyer from
Primal Fear
, always in a dress coat and on his way somewhere, seldom flustered. All of it, he knew now (and had always known, though he'd lacked the specific details by which to correct or amend it), completely wrong.

“Not Jeremy Malloy?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes. I . . .”

“Listen,” he said. “Let's walk.”

“Like old times?”

“Sure. Sort of. Old times.”

He drew on the cigarette a few more times and flipped away the remaining half of it—there, resisted, mostly—as he crunched his way along next to her across the lot to the football field.

“So, you should know this. I'll just be straight up about it. Jeremy
and I had a bit of an altercation today, which began, actually, with other behavior I'll tell you about in just a second here,” he said. He kept his gaze from her, staring forward at the half-melted dirty snow crust and bare, sand-patterned pavement, wind pushing back his hair and causing his eyes to water. Like old times, he thought, yes: how they'd walk and walk, never touch; talk about poems and poets, sex, marriage, anything at all really, except the obvious longing between them, and never anything of a too-practical nature from their daily lives that might allow reality (or the truth of their intentions?) to intrude. First only monthly, in connection with the poetry-group meetings in Bowness, and later, more often—weekly, biweekly Sunday afternoons, always the same trails and pathways and the same meeting point, same loop over the footbridges and along the river. How long? Years. Two at least. More. Too jumbled to say. In college, he'd scorned friends of his who'd had these protracted, undefined, semiromantic friendships with women or other men that seemed to go on and on—never understood the necessity of not knowing and deliberately keeping yourself from knowing, month after month, as feelings deepened and turned septic. Tragic. And there he was, letting the same scenario consume his attention, not as a college student, but as a married adult. How foolish was that? The counterpoint of subjects and scenery—wet pines, snowy pines, mud, maples flaming with color, yellow-leafed cottonwoods, ice on the Bow River—and their perfectly matched strides, always moving in a rhythm that felt to him at once specifically theirs alone, and greater than the two of them, so their talk seemed inconsequential, part of some ongoing music sustained by the planet, and yet specifically, privately their own: He wanted that back of course, all of it—the connectedness and ease and the talk, the smell of her, sound of her laugh, sound of her voice addressing him—but felt, too, more or less convinced it was impossible. Wasn't entirely sure how much of it had ever existed. Maybe only in his own head.

“What now? What did Jeremy do?”

“Well, apparently I tried to kill him. That's what he'll tell you anyway. For starters.”

“You
what
?”

“He ran. I was escorting him back inside after breaking up a bit of a . . . seems he was instigating a bit of a gang—I don't want to say
beating,
but it was something in that vein—which I happened to catch them in the middle of, but too late to stop anything. . . .”

“I have to say . . . can I just say right now how really
weird
it is you're all of a sudden talking to me about my
son
? I mean, who ever would have thought?”

“Kind of comes with the job description. . . .”

“Why, though . . . I mean—what are you
doing
here? I thought you were so ensconced back at that lovely place—what was it called, your school there in Calgary?”

“It's a longish story.”

“Jane?”

“Jane, sure, and about a quarter of a million dollars I thought wouldn't be so bad to cash in on while the oil barons are paying.”

“And now here you are in the boonies, dealing with bad boys like my Jeremy, probably wishing you'd never laid eyes on the place.”