The Mountain Can Wait (12 page)

“I'm sorry if it seems that way to you.”

Curtis closed and opened his eyes slowly, snickered.

“What is it?”

Curtis licked his lips; his tongue smacked dryly. “The energy in here is much better now that you've got your head into some mechanical snag.”

“Nothing here to do with mechanics. This is straight-up plumbing. Doesn't get much simpler either. I can't believe you guys just left this.”

“Whatever.”

“Sean,” Tom called. “How about it?”

Sean poked his head into the kitchen. “You need a washer?”

“Yes.”

Sean blinked and looked hard down at the floor, frowning, squinting, his lips hung loosely open. He spoke in a voice that sounded as if he were trying to recall a dream. “I can see a bag of them, in my head.” He brought his hand to his hat and pulled at the visor. “I can see the bag so clearly. Where the fuck is it? It's somewhere.” He turned from the doorway and walked away, mumbling.

“You guys need to get out of this slack house, go for a walk,” Tom said, shaking his head. He selected the right Phillips head, a pair of grips, and pliers. He laid them out on the gold-flecked counter next to the sink. He unscrewed the head of the tap to get at the copper valve underneath. “Pass me that cloth.”

It looked as though Curtis had fallen asleep. But then he leaned over, picked up the cloth, and passed it up.

Tom wrapped the cloth around the tap's spout and clamped over it with the grips. He tightened the pliers around the valve head and began to wrench it loose.

“I think I killed someone.”

The valve head was stuck fast. It wouldn't budge.

“Dad.”

He squeezed harder with both hands, put his whole weight behind the pliers.

“Dad.”

He let go, lay the pliers gently in the sink. He turned and leaned against the counter and looked down at his son, still on the floor. “What do you mean?” He sat down and faced Curtis. “You must be the first guy in history to care this much about an abortion. You're young; enjoy it.”

Curtis looked at him, his face pinched and confused. He shook his head. “No.”

Tom studied the boy's face. The older he got, the more he looked like his mother. When Curtis was born, Elka couldn't hold him straightaway. The labor had been difficult, lasted close to two days. In the end, they cut her with a tool that looked like garden shears and used forceps, like a set of salad tongs, yanking the kid unceremoniously into the world by his skull. They took ages stitching her up, and so the mewling pink thing (are they meant to be this small? he asked) was put into his arms. A matronly voice at his shoulder advised him to unbutton his shirt. “They want to be against your skin,” the voice said. In a world incomprehensible, he did as he was told, pressed the warm, wet creature, its sticky skin like putty, to his chest. He was struck by the swampiness of the thing; a mugginess and odor rose from the baby that was utterly unexpected. The baby opened its mouth in a sort of grimace, and he was surprised to see that it had no teeth. Its motions were slow and fluid, as if it didn't realize it had left the womb, and it pushed the backs of its hands to the side of its face and slowly wagged its wrinkled fingers. As if, already, this was a game of make-believe, and here was a squid. The crevices in its skin were filled with a white paste; there was a dollop of it swirled with blood on the top of its head. The fingers were long, abnormally long, he thought (until Erin was born, and he learned it was just a matter of proportion). The tips under the nails were a deep burgundy. There was nothing else in the world to compare this to—it was something you couldn't prepare for. At the beginning, even holding him in that irretrievable moment, Tom didn't want him.

“It was an accident, Dad. There was no one there, and then there just…was.”

“These things happen, Curt. It was her decision.”

Curtis looked up at him, a weight tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Tom chewed the tough skin at the side of his thumbnail, tasting the lube oil. “I'm not going to get into some sort of thing with you here, not in the state you're in. You're not even making any sense. You need to get back home and to your job and forget about this girl.” He stood and took the pliers out of the sink, a solid, cold weight in his hand. He rewrapped the cloth around the spout and took hold of it again with the grips, and took another shot at the valve with the pliers. He kept pressure on it until a growl rose from his throat and the valve popped. He exhaled.

Curtis was slumped on the floor as though he was under a weight he didn't believe he could lift. It was her, all over again, sitting on the floor against the bed that night of the bathtub. It wasn't right, not fair on Curtis that this was all he was left with from the woman who had given him life. Because she had been more than this shadow. It occurred to him for the first time that Curtis might be sick. That all the time he'd been watching his daughter, Elka's illness had been creeping up on his son.

“What the fuck do I do, Dad?”

“There's nothing you can do. She already went ahead and did it. Think about what you do have control over, and concentrate on that—you can't let this bring you down to a place where you can't get up again.”

Curtis regarded him as if there was some obvious joke being told and he'd missed the punch line. It was a look he was used to getting from Erin. So, both of his kids thought he was a jackass. He could tell Curtis now what it had been like, when Elka pissed on that little stick in a locked bathroom and came out crying. How suddenly the thing they had together went from rolling around in the backseat of his truck (then whispering, entangled, until the sun came up) to looking for an apartment he could afford and driving all over town collecting secondhand chairs and dishes and whatnot to furnish the place. But right now, Curt wasn't in the mood to listen. Tom went at the valve again, dug out the washer head, like a miniature tire, and inspected it. The rubber was too hard to bend and crumbled around the edges.

“Sean, you located those washers yet?” he called.

Sean came in and pressed a plastic bag into Tom's outstretched palm, and sat next to Curtis on the floor. Tom dug through the bag for a new washer of the right size, found one, and slid it into the bottom of the valve. He fit the valve back into the body of the tap, then tightened it with pliers.

“Thanks for doing this,” said Sean.

“No sweat,” said Tom. He fixed the handle into place and drove the screw tightly into the top, turning it until it wouldn't turn anymore.

In the weeks after Curtis was born, Tom often dreamt of survival, like some sort of ancestral echo, like hearing a wolf call. Climb the mountain, follow valley, pebbled riverbed, and game trail until you reach the place where a person didn't have to think of anything else, didn't have to speak a word, only had to look after himself. Where he could take back what he'd lost the day his son was born—no, the day he met Elka, this girl with a forest of long brown hair, bony, frantic fingers, and a tiny glass gem piercing her nose. At seventeen, she had left her island home and was working at the pizzeria near his high school.

“Where are you from?” he asked two weeks after he'd first noticed her. It was his last day of school and he was a week away from starting full-time at the mill.

“Aguanish,” she said. She was living at the YMCA.

“Why'd you come all the way up here?”

“Because it's nothing like Aguanish.”

Later in the day, he picked her up from the pizzeria and took her fishing. He packed the back of his mom's car with blankets, a bag of chips, peanut butter cookies, and a stolen bottle of rum. He asked her how long she was going to stay in town and she told him she'd stay until she wanted to leave. He told her he was working to save money for a truck with enough room for his bike, his hunting rifle, a canoe, and his tent. They talked by the river until the northern lights domed the sky, shifting purple and white like liquid running down glass. It was the first time she'd seen them, and she rolled herself into the blanket and lay back in the grass, and pulled him down beside her. She reached behind her head and unfastened a clip from her hair and pressed it into his hand. It was digging into her head, she said—“Hold it for me or I'll forget it.” On the clip was a small Haida salmon, carved from wood.

He admired her courage to leave home with nothing, and survive pretty much hand to mouth. All she'd brought from home was a small bag of clothes and some tapes and a portable tape player, which didn't play. He tried to fix it for her but couldn't. She was already pregnant by the time he learned that it wasn't courage but fear and depression that drove her to leave—that she wasn't on a journey; she was just running.

And only a year after meeting her, when his new baby cried in the night, Tom dreamt of shrugging that life from his shoulders like a wet coat and taking off with his rifle, some paraffin oil, and a good knife. Because he hadn't learned yet—the thing in the bathtub hadn't happened yet—that it would be his job, and a worthy job, to take care of this child for as long as he needed it. He hadn't learned yet that the mountain could wait.

The four-day
break had been enough time for the seedlings to thaw, and the planters rolled back into camp with clean socks, new rolls of duct tape, batteries, chocolate. The season wasn't new anymore, and some kind of rhythm fell into place over the next several days in camp. Sweet, it seemed, had been cowed enough by what had happened in town to keep his mouth closed and work. The frosty mornings were finished, and now came hot, dry days of blue sky and little wind. Tom spent his time walking the blocks and dividing maps and taking the fuel bins to be filled at the outpost. He spent the evenings repairing the vehicles, battered by ditched roads that were either rutted with mud or clogged with dust. If there was time, he swam, and before bed he sat quietly at the fires and listened to the conversation and the music. There was word of an eagle nesting somewhere up the Old Driftwood road, west of the river. Both Roland and Sweet had seen it, and if Sweet could be believed, it had followed his truck a few klicks up the road. Tom drove out there at sunrise to see if he could spot it, but the bird stayed hidden.

Early one morning, while Tom drove to Roland's new block, the checker's voice came over the radio, asking him to meet her at the three-hundred-kilometer mark on the Sitlika road. When he got there, half an hour later, she was waiting in her truck. He parked across the road and went to her window.

“I hope this isn't too much out of your way,” she said. She was without hat today and wore her pale hair in a braid that hugged her skull from the top of her head to her neck. She fiddled with her side-view mirror, adjusting it by the smallest fractions. The engine was off but she kept one hand on the wheel. “I was on my way to one of Daryl's blocks and I didn't know where you were going to be today.”

“What do you need?”

She looked up at the sky through her windshield, squinting. “Weatherman says it's only going to keep getting hotter and drier. We'd like you to move to fire hours.”

“In June? You're not going to see any fires up here now.”

“It hasn't rained for two weeks and there's none expected.”

He stared at her.

“You guys were lucky last time, but your planters smoke like truckers. I've seen them dropping their butts all over the place.” She cupped her hand to her mouth and flared her fingers and, with eyes wide, made a little explosion noise.

“We don't know how that fire started.”

“Regardless. We don't want the seedlings to be handled in the middle of the day when it's baking. Your planters carry too many in their bags as it is. Don't want them drying out.” She started her engine. “We'll need you off the blocks by ten. That makes it a, what, 2 a.m. start?”

“I'll talk it over with my foremen and we'll decide what time to start.”

“But you'll want to get full shifts in.”

“I'll talk to my foremen.”

Tom arrived back in camp as the crews were returning. He'd told his foremen to wrap it up early so the planters could sleep before their first predawn shift. Some people lounged by the lake, its surface dead calm and milky, but most hid in their tents. Tom took up his maps and sat in the mess tent, studied what was left to cover on the blocks farthest from camp. This move to fire hours was an act of distrust, and it was a message. He had thought the brush fire was long forgotten, but now this, and with the checker hanging around more than he'd ever seen before. If he didn't leave things on more than perfect terms with Nielson, his outfit would be worth half of what he had hoped to get.

Matt's canoe rested on its side on the beach, half in the lake, a few inches of cloudy water pooled in the hull. Tom flipped it over to drain it and then launched it with both hands on the gunnels at the stern. He paddled a few strokes and turned the canoe south, the shore on his left. The pulse of the water was almost imperceptible. Beyond camp the bush was thick and came right to the water, broken every now and then by small, pebbly beaches and sandbars. Twenty minutes of steady paddling brought him to an inlet where the water was glass. He lay the paddle at his feet and let out the broken chunk of cinder block that Matt used as an anchor, took off his shirt, and made a pillow of it at the stern. He lay back and crossed his arms over his face and settled his back into the flat bottom of the hull. The sun pressed his body down into the boat, which moved only with his breathing. Or it could have been the motion of the water; it was hard to tell. Birdsong wove with a buzz and creak that echoed over the water from the woods.

Curtis had asked him if he could come up and work, and Tom should have told him yes. Or should've taken him that day from Sean's, kept him close. No reason not to have just hauled him up from where he sat, utterly beaten, on the kitchen floor.

Tom shifted his weight, his back hot and sticking to the varnished cedar of the canoe, tried to close his mind, if only for a while. He looked up to the cloudless sky, at the blue that could somehow be flat as paper and unfathomable at the same time. Some small bird flew so quickly past his line of vision, he wasn't even sure it had been there. Maybe he should have said more to the boy, opened him up like some piece of machinery and taken the wires out. Switched a cable from one power source to another, eliminated all the possibilities until he found the fault, and maybe then he would have figured him out. But he had done the thing that came most naturally to him—played down whatever it was Curtis was upset about because that's how he, Tom, would have wanted to be treated. Sometimes it was hard to remember that other people didn't go by the rules you set for yourself.

He gave up on the idea of solitude for now and rose from the bottom of the boat, hoisted the wet anchor rope, and took up the paddle.

As he came around the last bend in the shoreline before camp, he saw the checker standing alone by the water, one arm crossed over her body and the other elbow resting on it; she was smoking a cigarette. Even from the water Tom could see impatience in the way she was standing, in the stiff way she bent her arm to bring the cigarette to her lips. It was almost six o'clock. The shadows fell long across the clearing and no one was around. Music drifted anonymously from somewhere in the surrounding bush, but other than that the only sound was the gentle suck of water on the stony shore, the buzz of a horsefly, his paddle. He brought the canoe right to the shore and let the bow drift up onto the sand before he hopped out. He pulled the boat out of the water completely and bent to get his shirt, pulled it over his head. The checker came over to him, her mouth screwed tightly.

“You take off like this often?” she said.

He watched her, waited for her to continue.

She looked at her watch. “I was hoping to be lounging in a cool bath by now.”

“Did I miss something? Did we agree to meet up later?”

“I told you I was checking a whole bunch of blocks today. I thought you'd assume we were meeting.”

“A whole bunch, eh? How'd we do?”

“Not so good.”

He turned the canoe over, resting it on its gunnels, and lay the paddle next to it.

“I'll show you.”

He followed her to her truck, which was parked at an angle just at the camp entrance, blocking it. She shook a cigarette out of a crushed pack from her back pocket and offered one to him, stopped walking to dig a lighter out of her front pocket, and then cupped her hand over the cigarette to light it. He waited a few steps ahead, tempted to remind her about what she'd said, the thing about his planters smoking like truckers. She exhaled and continued walking, her boots kicking dust.

“Those blocks down the Sitlika and Driftwood—those gnarly ones. Those were the first ones you planted in May. Is that correct?”

“Yep. Most of those have been checked, though. A few were done while I was out at Minaret, but my foremen do solid checks.”

At the truck, Tom leaned with his elbows on the hood while the checker opened the door and stretched inside, retrieving a pile of dusty maps from the passenger seat. She nudged him out of the way and opened one of the maps flat on the hood.

“I'm afraid you've been misled. The whole place is a disaster. I found whole acres of J roots.” She jabbed at blocked-off sections of the map with her finger, nail painted orange and lines of dirt in the knuckles. “Microsites ignored, the whole back section of a draw left unplanted. Why weren't you on this?” She slapped a mosquito dead against her neck.

“I told you. My foremen do their own checks. That's their job.”

“Are you seriously passing the buck?” She wiped her forehead with the heel of her hand, drawing a pale smudge of dirt across it.

He leaned over the hood and looked at the places she had indicated, and spread the map smooth with his palms. “My foremen run their crews better when they're left to it.”

“Oh really?”

“People don't learn anything if you're always on their backs.”

“How profound.”

“It's not. It's simple.”

“Well. Your little system has failed you because this is beyond the pale. Frankly, I've never seen anything this bad.”

“If it's what you say it is, then yeah, it's bad. I won't deny that. But it can be fixed.”

She studied him, working her lips back and forth, and then gestured for him to follow her to the back of the truck, which was covered by a blue tarp. She lifted it gingerly, as if she were rolling back a shroud. Piled in the back of the flatbed were dozens of seedling bundles, still wrapped in cellophane. They were mangled, bent, dried out, black with the soil that would have covered them in whatever deep hole they'd been stashed. Tom rubbed his fingers over his mouth, down the sweat of his neck to his collarbone.

“This is straight-up theft,” she said. “Some asshole got paid to plant these trees, not chuck them in a hole.” She waved her hand around her ears, warding off mosquitoes.

“Exactly which block did you find these on?” His mouth was dry.

She went back to the map, pointed to a section along the Driftwood. It was one of Sweet's blocks. Without his own maps Tom couldn't be sure, but it looked as though all the problems had occurred on Sweet's land.

“We don't want to get ahead of ourselves here,” she said, “but the company may see this as reason enough to end the contract now. They'd be within their rights to boot you out of this camp and transfer what remains of the trees and the land to another outfit.”

He walked away from the truck and stood in the road, his back to her, then turned and gave her a long look. “This is my second season with you guys. Haven't set a foot wrong till now.”

She raised her eyebrows and folded her map precisely, smoothing down the creases. “Not entirely accurate.”

He kicked the dirt, slapped the dust off his thighs.

“Of course it's not up to me,” she said. “I'm only giving you the worst case. But you know what these guys are like. Loads of competition for this contract. They've got crews lined up who've bid lower than you.” She stepped up into her truck and closed the door heavily, rested her elbow on the window frame.

Tom gestured toward the back of the truck with a cocked thumb. “Any of those salvageable?”

“Doubt it. Have a look.”

She stayed in the truck while he inspected the bundles. Most were completely dried out, but a few looked as though they might make it if they were planted right away. He stacked them carefully by the side of the road and approached her window.

“So you'll start the replant tonight, then,” she said. “All those bits I showed you. Every tree needs to be dug up and every one of those plugs needs to be straightened.” She looked out her front window and turned on the ignition. “You will start tonight, right?”

He nodded.

The truck lurched forward in a half turn, then stopped, reversed. She backed up too far into the ditch and her wheels spun in the loose dirt. He went around to the back of the truck and pushed until she popped out, then watched as the truck bounced over a deep puddle bed that was caked and dry.