The Mountain Can Wait (3 page)

He waited around until late into the night, when the tables filled up and smoke colored the room blue. He showed her picture to everyone.

He fell asleep on the flight home the following morning, waking just as the snow-covered Rockies unfolded silently under the plane. From thousands of feet up he could see how the mountains had been formed, could imagine the thrust of the earth's crust as it rose into the sky, creating these tidy ridges repeating and interconnected like the veins in a leaf. In his life and the lives of his kids, and in the lives of their kids, the mountains would mark no time. They were unflappable, a quiet comfort. They would always be there.

Erin was six when she fell through the ice one afternoon during those weeks between winter and spring. When the wind blew a certain way and there was a turn to the air that suggested new growth in a world where the ground was still frozen and the tree branches black and without bud. Curtis had wanted to go snowshoeing but Erin complained that it was too cold, and snowshoeing too hard, so Tom dressed her up and covered her face with a scarf and pulled her behind him on the wooden toboggan. The sky had been clear for days and the going was easy, the old snow glazed over with an icy crust. He was sweating under his coat. Under the trees, the snow was pocked with drip holes. They moved slowly through the bush, making their way to Black Pond, where they'd skate and drink the hot chocolate he carried in a thermos. They left after lunch and got to the pond at three, the forest shadows long and well-defined across the ice. Tom let go of the toboggan and stretched his tired shoulders. Curtis was lacing up his skates and Tom was taking off his coat to remove a sweater when Erin jumped onto the ice, running and skidding in her boots. She disappeared around a corner where the bank curved and the heavy boughs of a tall fir reached out over the pond, and there was no sound for a moment, just Curtis pulling at his laces and complaining about cold fingers, the whump of a load of snow falling from a tree branch to the ground. Then came the sharp crack. Tom went out onto the ice calling Erin's name, and when he came around the fir tree, he saw her floundering in a jagged hole of the blackest water. Water so black that it swallowed the arm of sunlight that crossed it. With the force of her panic, her head dunked under, and when she came up she was choking from the cold water she'd taken into her throat. Tom dropped onto his stomach and inched toward the hole, the ice wheezing and clicking under his weight. She waved her arms above the water. Her eyes rolled like a trapped animal's and she was panting.

“You have to breathe, Erin,” he said. “Slow down and breathe.” He called for Curtis to bring the toboggan. “I'm going to get you, but you have to breathe.”

Her eyes were on him, black as the water. Her small mouth stretched back in a grimace as she raked and gulped for air. He moved closer but could feel the surface of the pond bowing under his weight. Freezing water seeped onto his chest and he knew he wouldn't be able to get any closer.

“Breathe slowly, Erin, calm down. Good girl. Get yourself to the edge where you fell in. That ice held you before; it'll hold now. Get your arms up over the edge.”

Curtis was behind him with the toboggan. “You'll be okay, Erin,” he yelled, the words scared, tight.

She dog-paddled to the far edge of the hole and grabbed at it. Jags of ice fell away and bobbed and slushed in the water and the hole grew bigger. She screamed and coughed and cried.

“No, Erin. Turn around and come to this edge. The ice is stronger here, towards me. Hurry.”

She turned and paddled and got her arms up over the edge of the hole and it held her.

Tom pushed the curled end of the toboggan toward her. “Wrap your arms around it.”

She was calmer now, blue-lipped. She wrapped her wet arms around the toboggan and he pulled. He moved her a few inches out of the water but then she let go, slipping back into the hole.

“I can't,” she said, her voice slurred.

“You can.”

“Too hard.”

“It's not. You try harder, now. Get both arms right around it and hold your hands together.”

“I can't.”

“There's no time. Come on, now, both arms right around it.”

She tried again and slipped once more, this time up to her neck. She got her arms back over the edge and laid her head on them.

Tom started to shiver, was wearing only his cotton shirt. He closed his eyes. Okay, he thought, okay. He breathed in deeply as if to make himself lighter and spread his legs to distribute his weight, and shuffled closer and closer until his face was inches from hers. The ice moaned under him. She'd been in the water for at least three minutes and now she had no strength; all her blood had rushed to the middle of her body, leaving her limbs heavy and numb.

“Get her out,” Curtis yelled, his voice wet.

“Shut the hell up.”

“I can't feel my body,” Erin said, her voice small, the words without beginning or end, one long word.

Without thinking too much more about it, he plunged his hands into the water and grabbed her under her arms, heaving her out and rolling away from the hole in one swift movement. Sliding in his boots, he carried her to the other end of the pond.

He took off her clothes and also his shirt, pulled her against his skin, and wrapped his coat over them both. He held her like that until her lips turned pink and then dressed her in his own and Curtis's dry clothes and bundled her onto the toboggan. They covered the distance back to the house in an hour, and while Curtis loaded the fireplace, Tom again undressed himself and Erin and wrapped their bodies together in blankets. He lay with her close to the fire, her cold skin pressed into his, and imagined his body heat radiating through her. She shivered for more than an hour, and when that subsided she was mostly still, shaking periodically as if her body, now warm, moved with nightmares of a remembered cold. Curtis was asleep on the couch and Erin slept too; Tom rocked with the rhythm of her breathing, unsure of how to move away. He wasn't in the habit of holding his children.

Heading down
the road with his camp trailer hitched securely to his truck, Tom glanced out the window toward his mother's house. Samantha had waited in the driveway while he packed the last of his things into the truck, but after a loose-fingered wave, Erin had gone into the house. Now they were both gone and the front door was shut. Samantha would be offering Erin coffee, or something to eat, and then would help her unpack her clothes in his old bedroom, where she always stayed when he went north for the planting season.

He turned onto the Hart Highway and rolled down the window to let in the brisk spring air and the sweet-sour wood-chip smell of the lumberyards. He'd left two hours later than he'd told Carolina he would, had wasted the morning trying to speak to the right Nielson Logging guy on the phone. They'd made last-minute changes to some of the cutblocks he'd been contracted to plant, and he had to wait for them to fax him the new block maps before he could leave. He was heading up a day early, so he and Carolina could camp one night together.

After three hours of driving, he stopped in Hook Lake for a coffee, a sandwich, and a piss at the gas station—the last place that he could fill up with diesel for a hundred kilometers. He checked the connection of his trailer hitch and then carried on north. Gold flashes of the McLeod River ribboned through the pine trees to the west, and after another hour he came to his turn on the left, a winding dirt road to the campground. He parked next to Carolina's Honda in the small lot by the ranger's office and collected a lightweight backpack, his sleeping bag, and a wool coat from his truck. Three separate trails branched off the parking lot and he started on the one that led to Crossbow Creek, a three-kilometer hike to Carolina's favorite site. A cloud bank settled in front of the sun just as the trail took him into the trees and the temperature dropped. For the next few weeks up at the Takla camp, where he'd be heading the next day, the milk would be frozen in the mornings and the planters would have to hack through a layer of ice just to wet their cereal. The morning dew would be frosted until at least June. He went back to his truck to retrieve his quilted blanket and draped it over his shoulders. Carolina would laugh at him when she saw him coming and call him an old man.

Her light-blue, two-man tent stood alone at the campsite, pitched on a flat patch of rough grass close to the tumbling creek. A hearty fire burned a few meters away from the tent in a blackened, stone-lined pit. Tom dropped his stuff by the tent but kept the blanket and stood by the side of the creek. The water roiled deeply with spring runoff and there was the tumble of smooth stones passing over each other, like whispers.

A tussling, crackling racket echoed in the woods. Carolina came into the clearing dragging half of a dead tree and dropped it by the fire. Tom pulled his blanket tightly around his shoulders and watched her. Her round cheeks were flushed; a green wool toque covered most of her shaggy hair.

“Sounds like there's an elephant tramping around in them woods,” he said, winking.

“Be a man and put the ax to that log.”

“I'm sorry I'm so late.”

She shrugged, made a noncommittal noise from the back of her throat. “I like it here, just me and this here creek and my book.” When she got close he could smell the woodsmoke in her hat, her hair. Wrapping his blanket around them both, he put his face to her neck and smelled her.

She had brought two rump steaks, a bag of chips, chocolate, apples. Instant coffee and beers, which were cooling against a rock in the creek, and a twenty-six-ounce bottle of rum.

“What about breakfast?” he joked.

“I thought you were leaving at the crack of.”

“But I'll still be hungry, woman. I expect you to be up and frying the bacon.”

She elbowed him in the gut. “Then I hope you enjoy sleeping alone in your little blanket tonight.”

He dug his hands under her layers of fleece and wool and warmed them against her skin.

At ten o'clock, the dusty purple of the northern sunset still hung low in the sky. She grilled the steaks over the fire and they ate them with chips and beer. She had cooked them perfectly, holding the meat over the flames just long enough to blacken the surface, leaving the bulk of it pretty much raw. He eyed her piece as she neatly tucked into it with a camping knife, hoping she'd leave some for him, but she ate it all. When they were finished, she sat between his legs and leaned her back against him, and they moved on to the chocolate and rum, passing the bottle back and forth.

Sniffing the bottle rim, he said, “It tastes like flowers.”

She twisted around and licked the underside of his top lip.

They drank a quarter of the bottle and he stumbled into the bush to take a piss, shivering and feeling his way in the dark. This was how they were together, secret nights under darkness, enough food for one, maybe two meals. Always the necessity for blankets, bug spray, pocketknives, and candles. During the long winter months, when she wasn't teaching at the university, he sometimes took her to a cabin that belonged to a guy he knew from town, and she would read her books in a chair by the window.

They met because she popped a flat tire on her neglected bike, riding out of town along River Road. Through the window of his truck, he saw a woman in boots and a blue dress pushing a bike, with a deflated inner tube around her neck. She had a secondhand patch kit in her bag, one she had been given by an old boyfriend. She opened the grimy plastic box and handed the contents to Tom one by one. All it contained was a crumpled aluminum tube of rubber solution gone hard, a worn piece of chalk, a soft square of sandpaper, and a tire lever. But not a single patch.

“It's just too easy,” she said to Tom, as he loaded her bike onto the bed of his truck.

He looked at her.

“No patches in the kit. You would understand if you'd met my ex.”

She was fifteen years younger than him, and he was impressed, and always pleased, by her ability to point out stuff like that, the meaning of a small strip of rubber. She could see how things connected; she once told him she believed there was something on the other side of life that held it all together, like a river. And if you let yourself go along with it, you would never be afraid, or baffled, or alone. He wasn't sure what to make of all that, but as far as he could tell, she was never any of those things.

They ran into each other a few weeks after he first drove her and her flat tire home.

“Still taking your chances with that thing, eh?” he said, nodding at the same bike. He had come out of the drugstore, and she was there on the corner, straddling the bike with one foot on the road. A sun-shower had just fallen, freeing the smell of concrete from hot summer pavement.

“Indeed I am,” she said, smiling as though she was happy to see him too. “Yep.” She patted the handlebars.

He shifted his weight from left foot to right, stroked his chin, and puckered his lips, mock-serious. He hunched down on his knees and squinted at the bike's components. “Could use a new chain. Chain rings and sprockets need to go too. Your brake pads are shot to hell, the cables…Tires are bald. You could kill yourself riding this here cycle.”

She shrugged. “Still here.”

He looked at his watch. “Have you got some time today?”

He took her to Canadian Tire to buy new parts and then back to her place, the rented ground floor of a house near the university. She pulled at the grass and dandelions on the lawn and drank bottles of Kokanee while he stripped her bike frame and fit the new parts. She told him about her family back in Montreal, her work at the university. Told him—and at first he thought she was joking, but she wasn't—about how she'd been married at twenty, divorced at twenty-one.

He took his time, was meticulous, quiet, and replied to her questions and comments using only his eyebrows and a smile. After the sun went down, after he'd finished with the bike, he left dark smudges of bike grease on her skin.

Inside the tent, they made a nest out of blankets, thermal mats, and sleeping bags. They turned to each other, and like always, he wanted every part of her at once. She was much smaller than he was, and healthy and plump. Her skin was soft but her hands strong and articulate. When they first met, she used to joke that someone as old as he (forty!) couldn't be so well muscled, unwrinkled. His retaliation was to pinch the soft flesh at her hips, the mound of her belly.

Tonight, thickheaded from the rum, he lost his balance in her and in the shadowy confines of the tent. He slept without stirring and woke at the birdcall of dawn. And then he began to feel a familiar haunting, a pull from outside. She seemed to sense this, and before the morning poured itself into the sky completely, like milk into a glass bowl, she tried to abduct parts of him. Sucking his bottom lip into her mouth, walking her fingers, sentry-like, over the square frame of his hip, down the slope of his waist, and up and over his back. Locking his leg between her thighs. She nuzzled her face in his neck and they both fell back to sleep. When he woke up an hour later, the light coming through the blue tent gave him the illusion of being underwater in a swimming pool. He leaned over her and kissed the line of her collarbone. She swam up out of sleep, and he began to put his clothes on, shivering without the sleeping bag, away from her body. As he pulled on his wool socks, she placed her hand flat on his back.

He unzipped the tent flap and laced up his boots. They were cold and stiff and frosted with dew. First he went over to the trees and pissed, stretched and yawned. He collected the pot from where it sat next to the now ash-heaped fire pit and filled it at the creek.

He started up the fire again and boiled water for coffee. There was only one mug so he brought it to her in the tent, and then sat by the fire while she got dressed. In the daylight, the edges of things—trees, stones, the flames in the fire pit—that had been soft the night before were now hardened and better defined. He listened to the water and the distant crashes of the woods while she shuffled around in the tent. He calculated what time he would be in Takla Lake if he left within the hour. It was two hours from here up to Fort St. James, then at least another three hours to their camp at Takla. Most of this was on unpaved logging roads. His foremen were meeting him at camp before dark that night; they had two days to set up before the planters arrived.

She came out then and started packing her things into a large backpack.

“Can you get your stuff so I can take down this tent?” she asked. “You're carrying it back to my car, by the way.”

“Come here,” he said. “Sit down for a minute.”

“No. Got stuff to do.”

“Carolina, come and sit down for one minute.”

“Here,” she said, walking over to him with the mug in her grip, crunching the hard ground. “Is there any left in the pot?”

He grabbed her around the waist and pulled her into his lap. He stuck his hands under her sweater and pinched her.

“Fuck off, Tom!” She pushed at him to get away but he didn't let go.

“Just sit with me while I drink my coffee.” He loosened his grip and she got up. She went back to the tent and his things came flying out of the opening. She started pulling pegs out of the ground, fed the poles out through the nylon. He watched with a lazy smile and heckled her for packing up the tent haphazardly. When she was done, she came over to him and straddled him at the waist, pushed him down so that he was lying on his back. She brought her face within an inch of his, her eyes a wet, blue blur. She pulled back and was in focus, her face distorted by all the things, he knew, that she was well within her rights to say.

“I have to look after myself,” she said. She kissed his chin.

“I know.”

“Because you're like a disease.”

“Nothing deadly, I hope.”

She punched him hard in the ribs and rolled off. Where her face had been a moment before there was now only pale, empty sky.