Specimen & Other Stories (9 page)

I withdrew to the side of the amplifier. On
other occasions before this, I’d noticed that if you approached it
too closely from the front, the amplifier would start to squeal
with feedback. Jimi liked that sort of thing, but Maggie didn’t. I
stroked the Bassman with my Reiki technique but it wouldn’t
behave.

Up on stage, thinking maybe it was her end
of things that had gone awry, Ms. Atwood tried to adjust the
microphone at the end of the coat hanger. The electrical tape
peeled off and the microphone fell with an amplified
thunk
to the lectern. I heard titters and sighs from the peanut gallery
as I vaulted up onto the stage and went to her rescue. I wrapped
the microphone back into place with some extra tape and hissed at
her to stick to the poetry and leave the sound system to me, at
which point I realized my harsh words were being amplified for all
to hear. More titters and sympathetic groans of outrage from the
gallery. I slunk back to my post beside the Bassman.

To reduce an epic story to a haiku, hell
hath no fury like a feedback-prone amplifier. Maybe all those old
Marconi tubes, even as they teetered on the verge of electronic
Alzheimer’s, still harbored some kind of primordial intelligence
like the computer Hal in the movie 2001. And in the heart of its
circuits the Bassman probably suspected it’d been pressed into
service, not to hasten the revolution via rock ’n’ roll, but to
propagate mere poetry without the force of power chords and killer
riffs.

No matter how I cajoled him, Bassman
wouldn’t behave. He growled and howled, drowning out every word Ms.
Atwood tried to share with her audience. I twirled his dials and
flicked his switches, punched and kicked him, and rocked him back
and forth. Bassman would not be controlled, so in the end he had to
be silenced. I pulled the plug.

Ms. Atwood looked at me, as if to say, are
we done now? I shrugged helplessly, feeling like the village idiot
in a room full of professors, students and Faculty wives. In a less
evolved society they probably would have brought out the tar and
feathers for a brief intermission, but I was fortunate to have been
born in genteel times, and was allowed to slink back to my seat
without anyone throwing more than dirty looks my way.

The rest of the poetry reading was rather
uncomfortable, like watching a blind person walk barefoot through a
room littered with broken glass. Ms. Atwood, still the trooper in a
situation that only electro-shock or several years of scream
therapy would likely erase from her memory, soldiered on. She read
her poetry just like they must have done in the old days, her naked
voice against the crowd, while back in the upper reaches of the
peanut gallery, people asked her to speak up, please, they couldn’t
hear her. And she would say, I’m sorry but I’m speaking as loudly
as I can, and then she would cough to clear her throat and in a
thin reed-like voice, she would continue to read her poetry.

There was a lot of applause when it was
over. Mostly relief, I felt, but there was admiration too, the kind
we reserve for marathon runners who come straggling in at the end
of the race, wobbling and half-blind with fatigue, garnering
applause not because they have beat anyone’s time but because they
have, against all apparent odds, finished the job they set out to
do.

As the crowd evacuated the lecture hall, I
dismantled my equipment and humped it out through a side door to
the car, studiously avoiding the eyes of anyone who crossed my
path. There was a wine and cheese reception in the salon down the
hall in Ms. Atwood’s honor, and although I had played a significant
part in making this a memorable evening, I humbly felt that it was
not the place for me to make an appearance and draw any undue
attention. I walked out to the Bug, released the hand brake and
coasted out of the parking lot. Once I was safely out of earshot I
switched on the ignition and descended into the wintry night,
swallowed up in the bowels of my quiet provincial town.

For awhile on campus I was quite notorious
for the role I’d played that night at the aptly-named Memorial
Hall. Several of my crueler fellow graduate students, doubtlessly
honing the skills with which they would later denigrate their
associates in competing for tenure, took to calling me The Bassman.
And each time this elicited raised eyebrows among fresh company,
someone would tell the story of how I’d ruined Margaret Atwood’s
poetry reading.

The irony was that they barely knew a
fraction of the story, but I was in no mood to provide more hoist
for my own petard. Eventually I tired of this teasing and, like a
lion tormented by dogs, in one pivotal week around the time of the
Winter Solstice, announced my withdrawal from graduate school and
burned the manuscript of my porn novel in a desolate section of the
New Brunswick backwoods.

Since then, I’ve had many occasions to
reflect upon my freshman-like approach to graduate-level
responsibilities those many years ago. Still, it’s spilled milk
under the bridge, and no amount of groveling would suffice to earn
Ms. Atwood’s forgiveness. To broach the subject with her now, even
via an abject letter of apology, might precipitate a flashback, the
magnitude of which could plunge her into who knows what state of
psychological imbalance. Worse still, she might write vilifying
letters to the Canada Council and every publisher she knows,
nipping in the bud any hopes I might have had to forge my own
literary career. No, if I’ve learned one thing after all these
years, it’s best to fly under the radar.

~~~~~~~~~

Gulls swept past the barren headland of Cape
Chidley, dipping and whirling, their sharp cries chorusing on the
wind. Only seabirds occupied this granite crag where meager patches
of lichen clung to its summit. At the base of the cliff a hundred
feet below, a cold surf slapped the rocky beach. Further to the
west, Hudson Bay lay captive in the embrace of an Arctic sea. To
the east, Greenland unloaded icebergs into the frigid Atlantic.

Rising from the depths, a German U-boat
arrived in Canadian territorial waters, armed for war. It was 1942
and the Battle of the Atlantic was in full tide.

~~~

The U-boat’s control room was cramped and
odorous, dominated by the smell of diesel fuel and human sweat. On
a bulkhead was a humidity-wrinkled photo held in place with
electrician’s tape. It showed a U-boat in harbor, crew lined up on
deck, flag draped from the conning tower.

A helmsman sat at his console, maintaining
plane and rudder control. A green phosphorous sonar screen cast a
dim light on his face. The engines’ steady throb was punctuated by
the sonar’s
ping
at 2-second intervals. Now and again, an
air valve let out an oily sigh of tedium and tension.

A few feet away, Kapitan Wolff and Leutnant
Richter stood at a plotting table under an overhead lamp. Between
them lay plotting instruments atop a map of eastern Canada.

Richter was in his twenties, in a white
shirt with a lieutenant’s insignia on his epaulets. Wolff was in
his thirties, bearded, in a wrinkled blue shirt with rolled-up
sleeves. His hair hadn’t been cut in a while. Dark crescents under
his eyes were a testament to insomnia.

“Another half an hour, we’ll be there,”
Wolff said.

“Cape Chidley.” Richter tapped his finger on
the northern tip of the Labrador Peninsula. “Why up here, rather
than further down the coast?”

“The meteorologists at Naval Command say
it’s ideal for monitoring weather patterns. Cold air masses from
the north pass directly over this cape, diverging into the Atlantic
off Newfoundland.”

“And into the sea lanes of Allied convoys
bound for England…”

“Right. Given accurate readings on
temperature, barometric pressure and wind from here, they could
predict the weather in the shipping lanes days in advance.”

“Advising us when and where to attack…”

“Us, and every other U-boat in the North
Atlantic. This mission could be the deciding factor in choking off
England’s supply line.”

“If it’s so important, why so little time to
accomplish our mission?”

Wolff shrugged. “Ask Naval Command.”

“Two days. Not much time to set up the
meteorological station and the radio, test them and make our
rendezvous.”

“No choice. If we want to get re-supplied,
we need to be south of Greenland by 1800 hours on Thursday. We miss
the boat, we’re on our own.”

“Let’s hope there’re no complications. The
Canadians don’t have military posts this far north, do they?”

“According to our intelligence, the place is
completely uninhabited.”

~~~

A kilometer south of Cape Chidley, on the
western shore facing Ungava Bay, a cove offered shelter from the
wind. A small fire burned in the lee of a caribou-skin tent where a
Naskapi family went about their activities.

The man Agatak, his face as weathered as a
used moccasin, was sharpening a spear tip. He wore leather pants,
sealskin boots and a leather shirt with a short fur collar. His
head was bowed in concentration as he manipulated a rasp against a
metal spear head.

The woman Nuna was repairing a pair of
boots. Her hair hung in shiny folds over her shoulders. Like her
husband and children, she wore the same sexless leather pants,
boots and shirt.

Their teenage son Shogan was securing an
arrowhead to a shaft with a length of copper wire. Their little
girl Kanti played with a rag doll. A baby slept in a makeshift
backpack near Nuna, only its flat face visible beneath a ruffle of
fox fur.

Nuna looked at Agatak. “We need food.”

“We’ll go soon,” Agatak said. “With the sun
out, there’ll be seals on the beach.”

~~~

Kapitan Wolff stood aside as the periscope
tube, slick with grease, rose with a hiss. He snapped the handles
into place and put his sallow eyes to the viewfinder.

The periscope lens revealed a rocky headland
a kilometer away, range-finding crosshairs superimposed on an empty
beach. Wolff did a 360-degree sweep – seeing open sea all around –
and returned to the barren headland, where seabirds were the only
sign of life.

He slapped the handles back into place and
thumbed a switch. The periscope tube hissed back into the floor.
“Blow main ballast. Stand by to surface.”

There was a loud hiss of compressed air.
“Main ballast blown,” Richter said.

Wolff picked up a microphone. “Gun crew on
deck. Shore crew, prepare to launch.”

A three-man gun crew clambered from a hatch
on the forward desk, removed the deck gun’s muzzle cap, and opened
the waterproof locker that held a ready supply of 88-mm shells.

A four-man shore crew emerged from the same
hatch, dragging a yellow rubber dinghy onto deck. Two of the shore
crew went about inflating it with an air hose and getting it into
the water. The two other men grappled with a pair of crates passed
up from below. One bore the words “
Meteorologie Einheit
”
stenciled on it, the other “
Radioapparat
”.

From the conning tower, Wolff and Richter
surveyed the headland through binoculars. “What do you think?”
Wolff said.

“Looks ideal,” Richter said.

“And just as we expected – uninhabited.”

On the foredeck, radio technician Hoffmann
with a 3-meter antenna in hand watched the crates being loaded into
the dinghy. He was older than most U-boat crew, early forties, with
a balding head and wire-rim glasses.

Wolff called down from the conning tower.
“Soon as you’re ready, Emil. Let’s get it set up and win this
war.”

Hoffmann gave him a casual salute. “Jawohl,
Kapitan.”

~~~

Shogan climbed into the kayak. Agatak pushed
it off the beach and climbed aboard. He settled into his seat and
they thrust off with two-bladed paddles. Kanti waved goodbye from
the water’s edge. Beside the tent, Nuna was still sewing, the baby
asleep at her side.

Agatak and Shogan paddled down the shore.
Three hundred yards away, a herd of seals lay on the beach, their
skins sleek and shiny in the sun. Agatak and Shogan beached behind
some rocks a hundred yards from the seals. Agatak carried a spear,
Shogan his bow and arrow.

“I’ll crawl up the beach,” Agatak said. “You
circle around.”

Shogan headed inland. Agatak threaded his
way through the rocks, then dropped to hands and knees and crawled
towards the herd.

Having climbed the ridge above the beach,
Shogan drew an arrow from his quiver and fit it to his bowstring.
He took aim and shot. The arrow buried itself in the neck of a
seal. The seal jerked its head back and bellowed, trying to bite
the protruding arrow shaft. The entire herd of 20 seals surged en
masse to the water.

Agatak jumped up and ran after them,
overtaking the wounded seal in shallow water. He threw his spear,
striking the seal in its back. The seal bellowed with pain and made
a last thrust for deeper water. Agatak seized the rope that had
unraveled behind his spear and quickly took in the slack, wrapping
coils around his arm.

The seal thrashed, unable to break free, as
Agatak dug in his heels. Shogan arrived. He drew his machete and
hacked at the seal’s neck. The seal lunged at him with a snarl,
teeth bared. Shogan dodged away, then slashed again. Spewing blood,
the seal shrieked its last. Shogan caught hold of the rope and they
dragged the seal up onto the beach.

~~~

Sergeant Krause and his three men – Henckel,
Schmidt and Voormann – paddled the rubber dinghy shoreward. Each
had an MP38 sub-machinegun slung over his shoulder. Hoffmann sat
amidships atop the radio crate, antenna in hand.