The Mountain Can Wait (18 page)

“Oh,” Tom said, and rubbed the back of his neck. “I'm actually just trying to find Curtis. I thought Sean might be here.”

“He's supposed to be.” He looked past Tom and down the road. “His dinner's ready, at least.”

“Hey, you're eating. I'll come back.”

“Don't be ridiculous. He'll be five minutes. You hungry?”

He led Tom into the living room. A room with thick carpets, warmly lit by standing lamps that were reflected in the expansive glass of the front wall. He told Tom to sit down on the couch. Tom sat, looked at his watch.

“He really will be here any minute,” Sean's father said. “You want a beer?”

“A glass of water would be fine.”

Sean's father disappeared behind a wall that was covered in photographs in mismatching frames. Somewhere a clock ticked and the house smelled of Sean's dinner. Tom had forgotten to take off his shoes.

Sean's father came back in and put a wooden coaster on the coffee table and put Tom's glass on it. A wedge of lemon was caught under the ice. He sat down opposite.

“So how long's it been?” he said. “A decade?”

“At least.” Tom drank and rested the glass on his knee so it wouldn't drip on the carpet.

Sean's father looked at the clock on the wall and then to the floor and back at Tom. “Things going okay with Curtis?”

Tom drew a line in the condensation on his glass. “Seems he's been ditching work. I want to know where he's got to before I head back out to the bush.”

“Ah. You're still working up there.”

“For my sins.”

“It's good work.”

“It suits me, I guess.”

The sound of an engine came up the road and stopped in front of the house. Sean's father smiled at him as though a promise had been kept.

Tom listened to father and son talking in the hallway and stood up. Sean came into the living room and they shook hands and Sean avoided looking Tom in the eye. His father came in a moment later carrying two bottles of beer by the necks, like a brace of geese. He told them to sit while he put dinner on the table in the kitchen. Sean sat in the chair his father had just occupied and took a long gulp from his bottle, and Tom perched on the edge of the couch.

“You going to tell me what you know?” he asked Sean.

“You know some police detective came to see me?”

“I do, but listen: I need to know where he is.”

“He was so messed up.”

“Do you have any idea what happened? He tell you anything?”

“I don't know nothing. When he stayed over, all he wanted to do”—Sean looked over his shoulder and looked back at Tom, and spoke in a coarse whisper—“all he wanted to do was get baked.”

“He didn't say anything?”

“He didn't say nothing. He just toked and watched TV and washed his fucken Suburban, like, four times. I've never seen him like that.”

“Sean? I need to find him now. Don't cover for him.”

“He was fucked, okay? If I knew where he was, I would tell you.”

On the insistence of Sean's father, Tom shared their meal of sausages, beans, and bread at the long glass table in their kitchen. Sean and his father spoke of things immaterial to Tom and it seemed obvious to all three of them that the meal was best got through as quickly as possible.

Tom was pulling his keys out of his back pocket when he heard the sound of the phone ringing through the empty house. He fumbled to get the house key in the lock and then left the door wide-open.

“You all right there, Tom?” It was Brendon.

“Just got home.”

“Listen, we've found Curtis's Suburban in Nanaimo. People are telling us it's been there about four, five days. Does Curtis know anyone in Nanaimo?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Anywhere around there? Gabriola Island?”

“He could. I wouldn't know.”

“Ladysmith? Qualicum? I'm just trying to ring some bells here.”

“Curt has a lot of friends. He could be any of those places.”

“Or none of them.”

“That's true too.”

“Would you agree now that your son is possibly trying to evade us?”

“You won't get me to agree to that, sir.”

“But you can see how bad it looks.”

“What I can see is that a decision has already been made about my kid and so whatever happens between now and the time he surfaces is going to look differently to me than it does to you.”

There was a pause. Tom's ears felt hot.

“You'll get in touch if you hear anything,” said Brendon, his voice flat.

“I will.”

So Curtis had gone to Aguanish. It made sense, Tom figured, as if Curtis were running home to his mother, as if some covert quality belonging to the island had been imprinted on him when he was taken there as a baby. The police wouldn't need more than a day or two to figure it out for themselves. He had to go now.

Tom filled the tank on the way out of town and drove directly southward, the lit and unchanging road slipping like sand under his hood. Bugs illuminated ghostly white for an instant, and then were gone. He drove through the night without stopping until he got to Lytton, a few hours north of Vancouver. The town was all dark windows, dream light, and chittering birds calling up the morning. He parked his truck at the top of a weedy dead-end lane overlooking the Fraser River and took a piss in the tall, dew-wet grass, and stood yawning and stretching his arms, watching the dark water flow south, like molten metal. This was the water that started with a trickle and spilled from the western flanks of the Rockies, meandering northwest, by some fault of topography, to Prince George. There the Fraser turned south and converged with another great river, where its water was used by the mills, and then continued south through valley and gorge, used along the way for irrigation, for transport, for power.

When Tom turned back, there was a buck in the road, its big, wet eyes on him. New, fleshy antlers white with fuzz, ears pricked and twitching, one foreleg raised politely. It regarded him for a moment and then bounded silently a few meters along the embankment, disappearing over the lip.

He watched the spot where the deer had passed from view, the tall grass still swaying, and it occurred to him how inexcusable it was, the thing his son had done—it was a feeling of plunging in after a bit of time had passed. Unanswerable. Somewhere along the line, he had failed this boy. The bridge of his nose stung painfully and the sting radiated across his eyes. He smelled something like ammonia.

He drove into the morning rush of a city that locked him in. He made his way slowly through the east end of Vancouver, like chewing gristle. The streets were papered, signs peeling off lampposts and walls. Vans were stopped in the middle of the road; guys unloaded boxes of fruit and pallets of bread into the open doorways of stores, and couriers on slick road bikes threaded the traffic, their city.

Tom crawled through the center of town in a daze, falling into stitches of sleep at every red light. He inched across the Lions Gate Bridge, thinking that this wasn't the first time he'd gone to Aguanish chasing Curtis. He thought about what happened the night before Elka took him there, when Curt was still small enough to sleep in the crook of his arm. And he thought about the land in Smithers. The hunter's cabin that stood on its southern border. The hand tools he was going to use to rebuild it. The well still drew water and the original, warped glass still filled some of the windowpanes. He knew a couple of guys from the mill who would have been willing to help with the heavy lifting, but mostly he'd planned to use winches and pulleys. He was going to put in a stone fireplace and a woodstove, and that broad desk under the bedroom window if Carolina had wanted it. There would have been enough room there for Curtis and Erin to come and stay whenever they could find the time.

His breath caught and he gripped the steering wheel with both hands, watched these things slip away, like getting one shot on the bear before it took off. All he had was a weak trail of blood in a darkening forest.

“I don't
normally go to parties,” Bobbie said, bludgeoning mustard seeds with her pestle and mortar. It had been four days since Curtis arrived. “On the whole, merrymaking irritates me and the food at these shindigs is always too rich, rots my gut. But Dan has suggested we join the shrimp hunt tonight, and I thought it might amuse you.”

Dan drove them to the north end of the island, where they parked next to a jumble of trucks and vans at the edge of a wooded cliff, then toed a steep, rocky track down to a small beach, the quiet elbow of a cove. Curtis supported Bobbie's weight over the rocks; Dan carried a cooler and a couple of long-shafted nets. On the beach, a bonfire sparked and blew black ash and warmly lit the faces that seemed to float bodiless around it in the darkness, faces that belonged somewhere else, a place where people were content and unafraid. A circle of bongo drums lay in the sand like some archaeological find. A few meters down the beach there was a tent and tables and chairs. Paper lanterns hung from the tent ropes and barefoot children chased one another in and out of the soft pink and yellow light, their mouths greasy with food. A man with long, weathered dreadlocks sat in the sand, playing guitar, a sleeping baby strapped to his back. Bobbie planted herself in a chair and someone brought her a drink and a plate of food.

“Come with me,” Dan said, draping his arm around Curtis's shoulders.

Now, nearly midnight, he was knee deep in calm water, shining a flashlight into the murky spaces within a cluster of underwater rocks, trying to catch out the shrimp by the light reflecting off their eyes. At first, searching the water with the yellow beam, Curtis saw nothing. But then there they were: two tiny red orbs, like a spider bite. After an hour of silent work, Dan went back to the fire with his bucket full, while Curtis had landed only a small catch—ten or twelve glassy shrimp curled sadly in the bottom of his pail. But the task was hard to resist. The light penetrated the water in a marbly, shifting kind of way that reminded him of a lullaby. Something cloudy, half remembered. Motes of algae, caught in the light's beam, were suspended in the water. For a few minutes he would forget what he was doing, but then he'd spot the eyes, glowing pinpricks in the shadows under a rocky nub, and he'd strike with the net. But the difficulty was judging where, exactly, the shrimp was. There was a trick to the way the light refracted in the water, and most of the time he misjudged the distance and jabbed uselessly at the sand, making little explosions of it. The process had sounded so easy when Dan explained it to him, but nothing—the water, the light, the shrimp—was behaving as he'd expected.

When the cold ache in his feet started to climb up through his calves, he walked back toward the fire on the wet packed sand where the tide was going out. The impressions his feet made were marked out with the glowing-green sparkle of phosphorescence, and he ran in circles, making starbursts out of his tracks. A dark-haired girl stood ankle deep in the water doing some sort of dance, expertly swinging two ropes that were alight at the ends, the fire drawing concentric orange tracers onto the black night. He stopped to watch and fell into the rhythm of those ropes the same way he'd fallen into the shrimping, catching firelit glimpses of her strong shoulders, her calves, and when she stopped and put out her fire and spoke to him, he couldn't at first understand what she was saying. What he saw was a face gleaming with sweat that shone like the phosphorescence in the sand.

They took two seats together at the tent and drank sweet red wine from the bottle, and continued to drink well after the hour that Dan took Bobbie home. Her name was Michelle. She was hanging out on the island for the summer, picking fruit on a farm. Too bad he didn't come the week before, she said, because he'd missed the car burning festival. She pinched a tuft of her hair, put it under his nose, and told him to take a whiff of the burnt upholstery and rubber smell that still lingered there.

He walked her home along the main road and then down a gravel path through a stand of alders, their peeling white arms like signposts. They stumbled across loose planks that bridged a deep gash of running water and passed through an apple orchard on the southern border of the farm, the apples just emerging where the blossoms had dropped, small and hard as nuts. In the gray light of 5 a.m., the trees were also gray, and Curtis imagined they would come into color only when the apples grew. He plucked one and dropped it in his pocket.

They lay shoulder to shoulder in her twin bed and smoked hash from a greasy glass pipe until his head felt heavy as a planet. He took in the room. A gauzy orange material hung in front of the window. A poster on the ceiling showed a circle of people holding hands in the forest. On the floor by the bed, a dirty plate. Her hands crawled over his stomach, and when he kissed her, his mouth was dry and also thickly coated with something gelatinous. She straddled him and danced her hands above her head, sculpting the air, swaying her hips while her rib cage spread open like a fan. How easily those delicate bones would shatter. Her nipples and the dark hair under her arms stood out blackly, and so did the wine stain that bruised her lips. She leaned in to kiss him again and there was the smell of burning rubber, and his vomit came up fast, first as a mouthful of spit, then as bile on the floor.

“Oh,” she said, and went away, then came back with a glass of water.

Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose onto his knees and he felt white. After wiping what he could off the floor with his t-shirt, he limped back to Bobbie's in the hard light of morning and collapsed, shivering, in his tent.

The wool,
Bobbie told Curtis later, when he climbed out of his tent, shaky and pale, was for a hat. She was knitting him a hat. Once the wool had dried in the sun, she collected it in a frizzy bundle. Now she took it to her spinning wheel, which stood in the corner of the living room, next to the fireplace. She pinched a twist of wool between her fingers and pumped the pedal, and began to feed it onto a spool.

“This is going to be a guilt hat,” she announced. “To make up for all the grandmothering I've never done. Nothing but guilt, in the dyeing and the spinning, and the knit. That should cover a decade. I suppose I should do one for your sister too. Just have to wait for some personal crisis to drive her here. How old is she again?”

“Seventeen.”

“Should be coming soon, then.”

Playing with her, Curtis asked, “Why not just buy the wool?”

“Ha.” She told him where he could find a saw. “Make a nice healthy shape out of that Rainier cherry,” she said. “If it dies, Dan will never forgive me. His grandfather planted it back in the day when there were only six families living on this island. Also, your mother's placenta is buried underneath it.”

“Are you serious?”

“What? About Dan's grandfather?”

Curtis laughed. “I thought you couldn't prune trees in summer.”

“Get out of my hair, boy.”

Curtis leaned against the stepladder and studied the tree. He had no idea what he was doing so he started hacking at the lowest branches first, the ones that stuck out from the main body. The dense wood was hard to cut, and after just a few strokes with the saw his hands and arms were feathered with pink juice. A bank of cloud covered the sun and he thought about the work he'd done for his dad two summers before, out by Terrace. His dad's company had been contracted to exterminate an aspen grove that was growing on land that had been slotted for a spruce farm. The grove must have spanned more than a hundred acres. The crew worked in pairs, Curtis with his dad, moving like ghosts through the slender, white-trunked aspens, the trees so close together in some places that it felt as if the two of them were barred in. Couldn't see beyond the thousands of trees, few thicker than a man's arm, the world speckled with the flutter of silver-dollar leaves. The tool that Curtis carried was like a wrench, but with a double-clawed blade at its head, so that when he drew it around the circumference of a trunk, it stripped off an inch-high band, revealing the clean, green-white flesh beneath. His dad explained the principle to him: that an aspen grove, considered in silviculture to be a weed, was a collection of suckers all growing from one far-reaching root.

“She's just one big mother,” his dad had said. “Largest organism on earth, or one of them, at least. The root system can go for miles; it can survive for thousands of years. And if there's a fire, she just hangs tight underground and, when the earth is ready, sends up her shoots again. More trees than there were before the burn. Tough little bastard, this tree. If we just cut them down one by one, mother would send up ten times as many suckers. Stripping the bark like this, we choke off the food supply to the roots, while they're still busy sending water up to the tree. Eventually, the system will exhaust itself. It takes about a year, but they'll all go.”

“So basically, we're killing the mother,” said Curtis.

“Yup,” Tom said. “Straight to the roots. Waste of time if you do it any other way.”

That was the kind of thing his dad said, without sentiment—straight to the roots. But that was Tom Berry all over: practical, emotionless, maybe even a little ruthless. It didn't bother him at all that they were choking these trees to death, the roots maybe hundreds of years old. The thing Curtis remembered most about this work was how, after only a few hours, the white flesh under the stripped bark bruised red, like a bite in an apple. Like evidence, or an awareness of the slow choke that would end with weakness and collapse at the point where the wounds were first cut.

Tom set off for Bobbie's house. The walk would do him good; he could stretch his legs and think about what he was going to say to Curtis. Because he hadn't figured it out yet. The whole way down from Prince George, he mulled over just about everything except how he was going to do this. Maybe, for once, the right words would just happen and he would be understood.

The weather was scatty. Sun in the morning, then dumps of rain from low clouds, then sun again, steam rising from wet wood. The air was oppressive. Tom threw his bag over one shoulder and then the other, walking with his head down, kicking stones. For three or four undulations of road he considered telling Curtis some kind of false story, just to get him to leave. And then take him to the police station. No. Curtis would never trust him again. What Tom would do was talk sense into him. Curtis would have to believe that going back was the right thing to do. Because they had to walk off this island together, and he couldn't drag him. Couldn't carry him either.

Curtis hauled the cut branches and stacked them against the back of the house, and then raked into piles the leaves and cherries and sticks that had fallen, until the ground under the tree was clean of any debris. He stuffed the piles into a garbage bag and took that around to the back of the house too, then stood away from the tree and cocked his head to the side to try to make it seem more symmetrical. He went inside and got a wooden bowl from the kitchen and filled it with cherries from the branches that he'd cut.

It had rained heavily while he was working, but now the sun was out, sending a ladder of light across the wet grass. He sat on the front steps with the bowl resting on his knees and slowly ate, sucking the flesh until each pit was bone clean, and then spitting the pits into the grass.

What if he went back? Who would that help? When he was younger, he used to make up stories about his mother's leaving. Someone took her, and kept her for years until she turned up frozen in that snowbank. It was comic-book aliens who erased her memory, or the circus, the navy. Or some other kid who wanted her for himself. And for a while he thought that his dad probably sent her off because she'd loved him the wrong way, or too much. In the version Curtis held when he was young, his mother was the kind of person who told you that she loved you, every day. She held your hand, and kept the stuff you made at school. Curtis's dad had never kept things like report cards or photos or letters. At Sean's place, his mom used to stick his crappy artwork to the fridge with magnets shaped like food. Photos everywhere. The house Curtis grew up in was empty walls and a bare mantelpiece. A dusty set of the Scholastic Canadian encyclopedia from 1970-something was on the bookshelf in the living room, along with a stack of topo maps. The shelf in his dad's closet (Curtis had once gone looking for something—anything—interesting) held spare blankets, neatly folded.

But the spring he turned thirteen, while rummaging in the garage for his baseball mitt, he found a box. Inside, a collection of photos wrapped carefully in cloth, a few of his parents together, but mostly they were of her, in shadow and out of focus. At the bottom of the box was a summer shirt. The silky material was flowery and so thin that when he pressed it between his thumb and finger, it was as if it didn't exist at all. The buttons were like pearls. He stuck his nose to the cloth but it smelled only of the cardboard box. There was a barrette, a cheap metal clasp with a wooden fish glued to it. This too had been wrapped in a piece of cloth. And tucked down the side of the box: yellowing paper folded neatly into a rigid square, a note. Four sad words scrawled in blue ballpoint.
You'll do it better.
Curtis imagined his dad trying to preserve these things gently with his boxy hands, always, always with lines of grease on the knuckles and around the clipped fingernails.

And if someone came along now and offered to tell Curtis everything—where she went and what she did and whether or not she thought of them at all before she died—he would refuse. Because in his experience, once someone you loved was inexplicably gone, after a while it felt as though the truth would be worse than the stories you told yourself.

Bobbie's gate looked exactly as Tom remembered it: in utter disrepair and half consumed by the crooked arms of a blackberry bush. He opened the gate and shimmied past the thorns and was relieved to see the old house undisturbed. No telling when the police might turn up. He didn't know how long they had.

He stood at the base of the porch steps and first called out Bobbie's name, then Curtis's. When no one answered, he climbed the steps and rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. He waited, and then pushed open the screen door and poked his head in the dark front room, calling hello. Inside, there was the feeling that someone had just left. A breeze came through the open kitchen window. On the dining table, white smoke rose and curled from a bowl of some smoldering dried herb. He went back out to the porch and sat on the top step. At his feet there was a bowl nearly empty but for a few sulky cherries floating in juice. He toed the bowl away from the edge of the step with his boot. The rumble of an engine approached the gate and he stood up, cocked an ear toward the road, and stood there, clenched, until the sound subsided and was gone.

“Dad?” Curtis was standing on the other side of the screen door, both palms pressed into the mesh. A shadow over his face. He pushed open the door but didn't step out. Tom turned, unsure of what to do with his hands. Standing here in front of him was a different kid. Hair greasy and falling over his eyes, his eyes rimmed and tired, his skin bloodless. Not even two weeks since he last saw him but the boy was skinnier; his chin and the hollows of his cheeks were roughened with wiry black growth.

“Look what you've done to yourself,” Tom said.

Curtis stepped onto the porch and suddenly his arms were around Tom and here was this trembling boy. Curtis held on to him as if he were sinking and Tom put his hands on the boy's shoulders and pushed him back so he could see his son's face.

“Was it you? Did you hit that girl?”

Curtis looked down.

“Did you?”

“I tried to tell you at Sean's. You remember? You were fixing a tap.” He moved away.

Tom reached out and Curtis moved farther into the house, letting the screen door slam shut. Tom followed him in and over to the couch, where he sat next to him. He wanted to touch his son but didn't, and through the cushion between them could feel his convulsive shuddering.

“It's okay here, you know,” Curtis said. He fiddled his hands together in his lap, cracked his knuckles. “Bobbie said I could stay as long as I wanted.”

“Where is she?”

“She's not like you said. She's knitting me a hat.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Is that how you're playing it?” Tom put his hand on the back of Curtis's neck and held it firmly, feeling the tension there. “I can make this better.”

“How the fuck you going to do that? You don't even know what this is.” Curtis looked at him, the whites of his eyes stark. “She's inside my head.”

Tom nodded. “Mine too.”

They sat quietly. Curtis held his head in both hands, gripping his hair. Tom stared into the cold fireplace.

Eventually Curtis spoke. “How come you never told me I was here before? When I was a baby?” His voice shook.

“Curt.”

In the darkening room, the flaking plaster on the wall opposite where they sat looked like a snow angel. Other than on the night Curtis was born, Tom hadn't had much to do with the baby, this alien, lamblike thing with a neck so delicate you could break it just by looking. He was completely afraid of the boy. But then, the night before Elka took off with the baby, Tom found Curtis alone in the bathtub, braying on his back, pumping his mottled fists in the cold water where she'd left him. Clouds of yellow baby shit floated around his head, which was turned to the side, his mouth partially submerged and spitting. Tom picked him up, and the back of Curtis's neck, just under the curve of his skull, was blotched a raging purple.

Elka was sitting on the bedroom floor in the dark, her back against the bed. Tom turned on the light and searched the dresser for a clean diaper, warm pajamas. He carried Curtis in the crook of his arm back into the bathroom and laid him on a towel. Curtis hollered with all of his red body. Tom emptied the tub and turned on the hot water and waited for it to steam, and cleaned the tub with bleach powder. Then he filled it with warm water and lowered the baby in, supporting Curtis's head and neck with his forearm, the way he'd seen Elka do. And then she appeared next to him, on her knees, gripping the edge of the tub as if she were trying not to fall.

“Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to let the stroller roll into traffic,” she said. She was crying now, her upper lip wet. “Or…maybe just let him sink under the water.”

“Elka?”

“Sometimes I think about it.”

He held her in bed all that night, and in the morning put in for a few days off at the mill. After trying to get her to eat breakfast, he left her for twenty minutes to pick up his mother, and when they got back, Elka and Curtis were gone.

So he drove. Methodically up and down streets, to the river. He checked parks, restaurants, the movie theater. He sat up in the kitchen until four in the morning, drinking coffee, and woke at seven with his head on the table and an almighty crick in his neck. She called two days later, from an Aguanish pay phone. When he got to the island the following afternoon, his heart beating three meters outside his body, he held his baby tight and whispered fiercely into his ear,
you're mine.

“It wasn't a nice story to tell,” Tom said now, his hand still on Curtis's neck. “I never wanted you to know how bad she could get.”