The Last Woman (18 page)

Matt might like the men or he might not; from his face it was impossible to tell. Unlike them, he would not have been drinking – his work would not allow it. Already, he would have set up the camp, cleaned their catch, set supper going. Entering the photo was just another task. His uncle’s gaze, unlike the others, does not meet the camera. It was as if he were only nominally present in the little camp at the edge of the lake, his reality hidden, elsewhere.

By six the next morning, Billy is back at the dock. At six-thirty a sleepy young woman appears, pushing a trolley
that bears a large, old-fashioned picnic hamper and a Styrofoam cooler. “Gerry wanted you to have this, ’case the fish aren’t biting.”

After she leaves, he goes back to planning the day. To Red Rock? No, too little water. Over to the reefs by Snake Island? He has done this often enough in the past: stared over the lake, balancing the weather with his long experience of Nigushi, until an answer pops up. Somehow, he just
knows
where the fish are hiding. But this morning Sealey Bay has an alien look, the light striking off the water with a harsh, tropical directness, and by the time his guests come tramping out the dock, half an hour late, he still has no idea where to take them.

Frank Carpino is well groomed, about seventy. He is wearing a khaki outfit and a wide-brimmed hat he holds in place with one hand as they run out of Sealey Bay. In the seats behind them sit Frank’s son, Giorgio – thick-set, thirtyish – and Jim Patelli, an older man with a jovial, nervously deferential manner. As they drum around the great buttress of the Garden Peninsula, a stippling of the surface indicates the presence of shoals and he slows the boat to a crawl.

Giorgio leans forward from the back seat: “How fast will this thing go?”

Billy tells him he has never driven the boat before.

“Gerry says you’re our most experienced guide.”

“Been away,” Billy shouts over his shoulder.

“Let’s find out then,” Giorgio shouts back. “Open her up.”

“Problem is,” Billy tells him. “There’s reefs around here – a lot closer to the surface than they used to be: could tear the bottom out.”

“Looks all right now,” Giorgio shouts. “Just give us a blast.”

Reluctantly, Billy opens the throttle; the bow lifts a little.

“Hey, don’t be an old lady. Show us what she can do.”

Ahead, he glimpses the slight shift in colouration that indicates another shallows. Ignoring Giorgio, he slows.

“What are you doing?” Giorgio shouts. “What’s the guy doing?”

“I’m sure he knows his job,” Jim Patelli says with a diplomatic laugh.

They cross open water and enter another straits. Rocks he has never seen before rise like the mottled skulls of giants beneath the surface. Whole islands have been joined by the emerging bottom, making larger islands. He finds himself in a dead end. The way ahead, clear a decade before, is a saddle of yellow rock on which he makes out the dark, mounded shape of something dead – possibly a deer. Vultures are waddling around it. At their approach, the huge birds run hopping into the air and beat away across the treetops.

He works the boat around slowly, reversing and creeping forward. He still doesn’t know where he’s going, feels he’s only acting the role of the competent guide. Then the thought of the Vermillion occurs. The river is farther north than Gerald wants him to go, but it has always yielded fish. In forty minutes they are there.

The mouth of the Vermillion is a rock garden, more extensive than he has seen even in the worst of droughts. But the water still flickers around giant boulders, spreading into a diminished pool. And there are fish – blips of white light that hover in the screen of the fish finder. Soon everyone has a line in. The boat tugs on its anchor. The surface dimples with the flow. Through the heat comes the smell of pines.

“This place is no good,” Giorgio announces after a while.

“Patience, Giorgio,” his father says wearily. Billy understands that Giorgio’s father does not need fish to make it a good day. But Giorgio exudes a roiling, angry energy. Men in such a state never catch fish, Billy knows. The fish will have nothing to do with them.

The others have some success: a small pickerel for Frank, two bass for Jim. Giorgio casts in a desultory way, and winds in sullenly, his impatience stilled by the hammer of continual disappointment. It’s he who rummages through the containers until he finds the beer.

Billy suggests they break for lunch, and they ease into a landing spot where the rock drops off as abruptly as a dock. He sets out the lunch things in the clearing above, where a kind of rude table had been made by nailing some boards between cedar trees. They sit in the shade, on folding chairs, eating and drinking and gazing toward the river as it slips around rocks with a steady, soothing hush. The older men talk, but Giorgio sits on the edge of his chair concentrating on his pastrami and cheese sandwich, scowling at a bit he removes from his mouth.

“So you used to be chief,” he says to Billy suddenly. “You know, I don’t get this land claim business. You laid claim to all this, right?”

“That’s right.”

Giorgio shakes his head and goes on chewing. Billy hopes he’ll drop the subject, but after another swig of beer, he adds, “So, like” – he is grinning collusively at the others – “are we supposed to give the whole country back to you?”

“That would be a start,” Billy says.

Giorgio frowns at his joke. The others are listening with a stillness that suggests they are embarrassed, their heads down.

“At least we’re doing something with it. You weren’t doing that much with it, seems to me.”

“Well, we were living off it,” Billy says quietly and at that moment hears the machines. It is as if a door has just opened and the faint clanking of caterpillar treads has entered the place where they sit. Then the door closes and the sound stops. Billy glances around; he can’t believe the others haven’t heard.

“Yah, yah, back to the land and all that,” Giorgio is saying. “But the returns weren’t much, were they, the way you used to live? You got cars now, houses. It’s not right you should want your land back too. You made your trade. If you’d stuck to teepees, maybe I could see it.”

Frank sighs. “Giorgio. This is too nice a day for arguments.”

“Just making conversation, Papa. I think you guys
should concentrate on getting your act together. All your problems. I mean, we give you billions and nothing changes. Welfare corrupts – and I’m not saying just Indians,
anybody
. My father came to this country with nothing and he didn’t ask for a thing. He just got to work.”

“
Giorgio
.”

“Well, you did. You started with nothing. Now you’re a big man. I’m just saying, it’s possible.”

“That’s good to know,” Billy says, getting up; his appetite is gone. He goes back to the boat, pulls up the chain of fish, and begins to clean them on a board. After a while, Frank Carpino arrives to stand nearby. He lights a cigarillo.

“You smoke these things?”

“No, thanks.” He’s sliding his knife along a ribcage, his fingers coated in the watery, slippery blood.

“My son is a bit of a hothead.”

“Well,” Billy says, as his knife emerges near the tail, “I guess it’s the privilege of the young.”

“He’s not as young as he looks. Or acts sometimes.”

Billy understands he is being offered an apology. For a while, they are silent. Billy slips the fillet onto some waxed paper. Then the door opens again and the grumble of heavy machinery slips through. Overhead, in a drift of blue smoke, Frank, apparently oblivious, is saying, “You know, I’ve built things all my life. Condos, apartment buildings, malls, houses – God, the houses – I’ve covered whole counties with houses. We do them on a theme, you know, we give them pretty names, as if they were real places.” Frank takes a long drag on his cigarillo, blows smoke as he
looks around vacantly. The door has closed: the only sound now is the hush of the rapids. “Where I come from, there are houses everywhere. Houses piled on houses. You couldn’t talk in your own kitchen without the neighbours hearing you. In Europe, everywhere you turn there are houses, people – somebody behind every bush – not like this.”

The old man walks off and stands for a while urinating at the base of a cedar, his cigarillo clenched in his teeth, his stream pattering fitfully. Returning, he gazes over the water. “Just to stand here and know it’s wilderness all the way to the north pole – you sort of start to breathe again.”

The next day, Billy sets out for the clear-cuts. Dragging his boat onto bedrock, he walks for some distance down a narrow bay that used to be water, climbs a shallow bank, and reaches the mouth of the trail that winds through the shadowy, sun-pierced bush. On either side, the trunks of virgin white pine thrust up among the lesser trees. Here and there, one of the giants has fallen, its body ridged with fungi or buried in ferns, their filigreed leaves motionless in the heat.

Pausing on the trail, he hears again the clanking of treads – a sound so small and faraway it seems almost a memory. He begins to run toward it – he cannot help himself – over rock ledges, over roots, the pounding of his feet and rasping of his breath masking the sound he is running toward.

The fall after Ann Scott left, he and Matt made plans to go up to Silver Lake. Usually it was the most exciting time of the year for him: the launch of the trapping season, when supplies had to be bought and gear mended, and anticipation of a winter in the bush ran high. All over the Island, families were making their preparations and saying their goodbyes. It might be Christmas or longer before they met again. Every morning saw some new departure: another heavily loaded boat droning out across the placid lake, through the bright mists ignited by the frost, on the first stage of the journey that would take them to the lakes north of Nigushi.

But this year held no pleasure for him. He did not want to go north. Other than Ann Scott, he did not know what he wanted. He was sullen, distracted, and, two days before they were to leave, managed to drive Matt’s canoe onto the rocks.

Matt being Matt, he said nothing. Billy found his uncle’s silence torture – fresh evidence for his conviction that he was no good. Why else would she have left him? He was not strong enough to keep her, not good-looking enough or smart enough or educated enough. There was this thing in him – the expectation that he
would
screw up. It had been there as long as he could remember; it was there when he had to sit in the corner of the classroom with the dunce-cap on his head; it was there in Father McReavy’s livid face that time the priest caught him
drinking the communion wine. This dark, perverse belief in his own inevitable failure – a thing that could drift out of some backwater of his mind and choke him. Ann Scott had left. He had wrecked Matt’s canoe. He had seen the rocks coming up and felt powerless to move the tiller of the outboard; then, running the hull over those jagged teeth, hearing the wood crunch and splinter, he had experienced, for a moment, a bitter satisfaction.

Over the next few days, as Matt repaired the big canoe, Billy’s shame deepened. He stood silently, watching Matt work. He fetched tools. He was tempted to run away. But he sensed there were further depths of shame lurking in that direction, and he stayed.

They were the last boat to leave the Island. Droning at the flat stern, their little outboard pushed them up Nigushi, through the northern islands, down a long bay to the first portage. He set out with the canoe on his shoulders, glad of its weight, of the cut of a thwart into the back of his neck. Just ahead of him, visible under the sloping hull, Matt threaded the narrow trail with a big pack on his back, another balanced on top of that, in a silence that seemed aimed at him.

After two days, they reached the cabin on Silver. Immediately, there was wood to be cut, meat to be hunted, nets to be set – no end of work for which he was also grateful; for plying a bucksaw or digging a new trench for the latrine, he could expend some of his fury. He felt he had no right to this anger, but there it was: a pressure behind his face, a desire, at times, to shout at
Matt (he never did) or fling his axe through the trees (he did once).

Increasingly, the older man irritated him. The way he whistled softly and tunelessly through his front teeth. The way he would stand staring for twenty minutes at a time, lost in some thought he never cared to share, so that Billy was left with the impression that Matt would have preferred to be alone.