The Mountain Can Wait (4 page)

Curtis loved
riding his bike when he was stoned. The smooth and empty road stroked the contours of the mountain, the land rising up to the right, sloping down to the left. It was beautiful and inevitable the way the road was embedded in the rock, as if it had always been there and would always be.

And he loved riding in the dark, in this dark, this mountain, Whistler dark. No streetlights and, tonight, no moon. Just the stars arching from one end of the sky to the other, rising up from the mountain. He knew this stretch of road well enough that he could ride it with his eyes closed. He tried this, hands-free, and nearly swerved into the ditch. Laughing, he got hold of the handlebars again and straightened himself out. Tonight he could take a bite out of the wind.

And fuck, he loved Tonya. Really, really loved her. Back at his place, after she'd called and he was pulling on his coat, his roommates said he was a pussy. But what they didn't get was that hanging out with her was just as easy as hanging out with them. The first time they went riding together, she picked him up at his place at five in the morning. She secured his bike to the rack on top of her car with bungee cords while he buttered four pieces of toast and filled a thermos with coffee. She drove him down the mountain past Squamish, where the sky was just beginning to lighten above Paul Ridge and the sheer, gray rock face of the Chief was still draped in darkness, black striations like tears. They turned onto a dirt road and parked next to a culvert. When Curtis opened his door, he was hit with the sound of screaming—the throaty, circling calls of seagulls.

“Is there a creek nearby?” he asked Tonya.

She was standing on the frame of the open back door, untying her bike, the terraced muscles of her calves and thighs jumping. She peered at him from underneath her raised arm and smiled.

They rode their bikes a few hundred meters up a single-track trail to where the forest opened onto a gravel creek bed. Seagulls swooned and dove here, fat on hundreds of blood-pink salmon carcasses, all the glossy, openmouthed dead that had traveled upriver from the sea against current, waterfall, and bear claw. These were the ones that had made it, spawned, and then died in the same waters where they had hatched. Curtis and Tonya yelled to each other over the bird noise and the boiling white water. Holding her nose against the smell, she picked up a half-eaten salmon by its tail and flung it at him. They rode all that cold morning until the autumn sun heated their backs and they ate lunch on a rocky outcrop overlooking Howe Sound. Later, in the backseat of her car, he went down on her to the sound of screaming gulls.

When winter came, they skied together. She didn't get high very often but wasn't afraid to hotbox the gondola with him and his friends. She knew the backcountry better than any of them but didn't make a big deal of it, the way most guys he knew would.

And she never asked him to define what was going on between them. She'd rather talk about the white room, where the powder was so deep and so fine it sprayed up soft walls as you skied through it, tasting the crystals, breathing them, ice melting on your tongue. He just wanted to be with this girl all the time.

He pedaled slowly through the skateboard park near Tonya's house, the place where they first met. He, hungover and asleep, curled up like a baby in the smooth concrete half-pipe, his head on a pillow of autumn leaves. She, with her board under her arm, kicking him awake.

He now rode his bike to the lip of the big bowl in the center of the park, braked with his front wheel cushioning the edge, and crossed his forearms over his handlebars, peering down the slope. He considered dropping into the bowl. But the problem with eating hash—and he knew this when he ate it, what, an hour ago?—was that it was like going through a door at the back of a room and finding a smaller room, with another door. And then going through that door to another, even smaller room, thinking it was the last. But then there was always another door. Another room. Yada yada yada.

He was too baked. He got off and pushed his bike across the wet grass toward the woods at the far end of the park, looking for the gap that led to Tonya's street. But the darkness had swallowed the opening, or the trees had grown over it. He pushed his bike up and down the tree line, peering into the woods that were somehow darker than the whole of the night. He thought he found the place and pushed his bike blindly through the entwined arms of spiky pines, needles in his face, getting the bike no farther in than the saddle.

The air pressed coldly on his shoulders. Maybe he should have stayed home. His head was full of sand. When she asked him to come over he should have said no, made her wait. Eight months before, he'd never even heard of her. And now he said her name to himself probably fifty times a day. Now he was being paranoid. No. Paranoia was just good defense against the truth. Groping around in the dark, like an idiot—that was the truth.

Her porch light was on and there she was on the front steps, one arm around her knees. She was smoking a cigarette, exhaling into the cold night. His pulse knocked against his throat.

“You're pie-eyed,” she said.

“I couldn't find the fucken gap in the trees.”

“The what?”

“The path, through the thing.” He pointed over his shoulder.

“Okay.”

She put on a movie and made him a cup of coffee, and sat curled in a blanket at the other end of the couch. In the dark, blue television light reeled across her night-black hair and her skin, which, in the daylight, was pale toffee. The colors of her Filipino mother. It hurt, how perfect she was. When the movie ended, she asked him if he wanted something to eat.

He yawned and stretched and looked at his watch: 2 a.m. “Nah.” He rubbed his eyes and leaned his body across her legs and rested his chin on her shoulder, stroked her thigh. “You're still awake.”

“Been waiting for you to snap out of it.” She moved so that his head fell against the back of the couch.

He lay there, cheek pressed into the rough warmth where her body had been.

She pointed the remote at the TV and the screen went blank, and the room hummed. She felt along the wall for the light switch and flipped it, and the light in the room was ugly. Then she looked at him, and her eyes moved from his to the top of his head, and back again. “I had an abortion,” she said.

“An abortion.”

“In Vancouver, when you went up to your dad's. I wasn't going to say anything, but you have a right to know. For a few weeks, there was this thing, alive.” Her face had the look of someone wading through some minor but essential job, like cleaning out a drain.

“How many weeks?” he asked.

“Are you fucking serious?”

She allowed him to sleep in her bed, and at first she responded when he reached across to her, kissing him deeply. When her breath quickened, he slid his hand under her shirt. Unhooked the clasp on her bra. She gripped the inside of his thigh but then pulled her mouth away and turned her back.

“I feel like we've lost the right,” she said, her voice thick.

He lay awake until the grayness of morning picked out things in her room that he'd never noticed before: a trophy on top of the bookshelf, the closet door off its hinge, a small, aluminum garbage can. While she slept, he moved smoothly and quietly from the bed, pulled on his clothes in the hallway, and left.

The paved
road ended on a seam where dirt began somewhere outside Fort St. James, and Tom adjusted to the bump and jar of the logging road, damp today from an early morning rain. The smell of water-pocked dust struck the back of his nose where it met his throat, and the taste was as good as home. The roads were cut up badly from the year's heavy winter and he swerved the truck to avoid the biggest potholes, thick with spring mud. In this place, the colors of the world were reduced to the deep green of the conifers and whatever shade of blue or white the sky happened to be, and the brown of these roads that cut their way, deeper and deeper every season, into the bush. Nothing changed here, the pines moving past kilometer after kilometer, the low-lying foliage closest to the road coated white brown with dust. Patches of dense natural forest, and then ordered, soldierlike spans of planted stock.

The uniformity of this place had a way of lulling a person into something like a dream. Once, when Tom was working as camp manager for another outfit, he lost a spare tire along one of these roads; it had bounced off the back of his flatbed during a fuel run and he hadn't noticed until he got back to camp. He could have lost it anywhere during the hundred-klick journey. He asked one of the planters to help him find it and they drove at a crawl, Tom looking out his window into the ditch and the other guy covering the passenger's side. After an hour they were losing the light and the guy Tom had brought with him had given up, dozed with his head against the window. They'd been working since five in the morning and it was now coming up to ten o'clock. After a full day's work, the road became hypnotic, nothing changing, no buildings or intersections to mark the distance. Nothing to watch out for. There was only the kilometer signage, small white signs dinged and battered, placed five kilometers apart, marking the distance from where the dirt road started so drivers could radio one another where they were on the narrow roads, heading deeper into the bush or returning with a load of timber back to the yards in town. Without this system, the only warning you'd get from an oncoming logging truck would be a rumble and a cloud of dust, and then it would be on top of you.

It was only a tire, and they could have taken the cost of it out of his paycheck. But he couldn't stand the waste and having made a careless mistake. The longer he drove, the harder it was to turn back, because maybe the tire would be around the next bend. Once or twice, he thought he saw a moose stepping out of the trees, but it was only his fatigue and the crawling shadow created by his headlights. The bush could play tricks like that, could easily fool you into seeing a thing that wasn't there.

He was getting closer to camp now, less than an hour away, and Carolina's smell was still on his skin, the smoke from their fire in his hair and on his jacket. Up ahead, the hump of a black bear on all fours marked a silhouette against the road. By the time Tom got to where the bear had been, all he saw of it was its round rump bounding into the bush, disappearing like a stone into water.

A voice he recognized called its position over the radio. “Two oh seven. Empty.”

Tom picked up his handset. “Mr. Sweet,” he said.

“Yes, boss,” came the lisped reply, followed by laughter.

“See you in camp.”

“Roger that, chief.”

The approach to Takla Lake was a rough and winding trail just big enough for a vehicle to pass through, alder branches slapping the windows. Tom pulled into camp and saw that the cook van was already parked at the far end of the clearing, and there was Nix, back in camp for her second year, sitting on the tailgate, smoking. She watched him drive up and saluted with her cigarette when he rolled down his window.

“How long you been here?” he asked. “I thought you were coming up with Matt and Roland.”

She shrugged. “They had to sort something out. Some mix-up with a water pipe?”

“You mean the shower pipe?” he asked.

“Dunno, chief. Something about a pipe.” She wore sunglasses and had a red bandanna tied over her short, dark hair.

Tom looked across the calm, black surface of Takla Lake to the Skeena Mountains on its western shore. This crooked finger of water was connected to two other lakes, Stuart and Trembleur. Two hundred years before, the mountains would have seen the first Europeans canoe up from Simon Fraser's post on Stuart Lake to kill for pelts. Less than a hundred years would go by before they came looking for gold, and now it was timber. Generations of men had spilled sweat and blood into this land to feed their families and build their homes, but you wouldn't know it looking across the water to the mountains, with the three o'clock sun hovering above them.

Tom parked his trailer at the tree line at the back of the clearing, farthest from the lake. He put on his heavy jacket and joined Nix back at the cook van. He scanned the area. They'd set up the same as every year: mess tent by the cook van, and next to that a dry room so they could air their gear when it rained. Between the mess tent and the cook van they'd place the water tank and pump and an area for washing dishes.

The round, black ghosts of previous years' fire pits still marked the middle of the clearing, like small moon craters. The planters would set up their tents among the trees at the north end of the camp, close to the water but protected from the wind. By the entrance road Tom would put the shitters and showers, the showers fed by cold water pumped up from the lake.

“You ready for the new season, cook?” Tom asked, sitting next to Nix on the tailgate.

“I can't believe I'm back here cooking for these savages. You get out here and it's like you never left. I had another job lined up, you know, in a real kitchen. In the city. Cooking for people who eat with clean hands and don't go apeshit when you feed them lentils. I didn't plan on coming back to this.”

“Nobody ever does.”

“Except you.”

He smiled. “Why didn't you take the restaurant job?”

“You pay better.”

“You aren't going to cook anything funny this year, are you? None of that rabbit food?”

She leaned into him and drove her elbow into his ribs.

Tired of waiting for his foremen to arrive, Tom searched through Nix's food supply, balancing bread, cheese, and an apple in the crook of his arm. He heard the sound of wheels crunching over gravel and prepared himself for the circus of Daryl Sweet; it was like going into combat. Sweet parked his truck alongside the cook van and rolled down his window, draping his arm over the door, his swarm of blond curls tied back from his face. Two veteran planters, a guy and a girl, jumped out of the back of his truck—half the number that Sweet had promised to bring to help set up camp. They unloaded their bags and planting equipment and waved coolly at Tom. Made jokes to Nix about her vegetarian cooking. They wore the garb of the tree planter: army surplus pants, dirty sneakers, gray woolen shirts and fleece. Steel-toed boots hung from the backs of their bags. The girl—her name was Penny—had dipped her blond dreadlocks into pink dye so that her hair looked like candy floss.

This wasn't their first time in the bush, but after a year away, they came back with clothes that were soft and clean, and with fresh hair and unbitten skin. Almost all the planters were on their summer breaks from university, and planting trees was how they paid their tuition. The grime would settle back into their skin soon enough, though, and they'd be comparing the consistency of their bush shits within the week. They collected their things and headed toward the trees at the north end of the clearing.

“Go forth, my children!” Sweet called to them, his palm flat against the outside of his door. “Grab the finest tent pitches for yourselves! Be rapacious! For in two days' time this place will be crawling with rats and rodents and other vermin of the vilest kind! And should you yield so much as one ounce of goodwill unto them, they will tear you from limb to limb, rip your tent pegs from the ground, and stick them so far up your asses you shall be eating them for breakfast!” He hopped out of his truck.

Nix rolled her eyes.

“Dudes,” Sweet said, still with the hint of a childhood lisp. “What do you think of this fat bastard?” He pointed to a green Kona mountain bike strapped to the top of his truck and grinned at Nix. “Do you like it?”

“I have to wonder what dark and sickening deeds you get up to to be able to afford all the shit you have,” she said, and stood up, brushing the dust off the backs of her thighs.

“What happened to the other two people you were meant to bring?” Tom asked.

“You know how hard it is, chief, to coerce these minions into doing extra work? We're lucky we got these two.”

“But you offered what I said?”

“Of course I did.”

“Hundred a day?”

Sweet put his palm on his chest and nodded.

Tom looked at his watch. “You know anything about this issue with the shower rig?”

“Not a problem, boss. I spoke to Roland and Matt before we left and they were smoothing it all out with the rental place. They gave them the wrong pump. I think Roland tried calling you at home last night.”

Last night, swimming with Carolina in the deep blue of her tent. He was annoyed with himself now for missing the call.

“You know how far behind they are?”

“They had to wait for the rental place to open this morning. They're maybe two hours away? Double that if Matt's driving. But lose that look of discombobulation, chief! We take good care of you, don't we?” Suddenly Sweet's arm was around Tom's shoulders, squeezing, and then it was gone as quickly as it had come, a lizard's tongue. He was now unfastening his bike from the roof rack. “I trust you brought your ride this year, boss? And I don't mean your hot teacher,” he said over his shoulder, heaving his bike down with one arm. He rolled the bike over to where Tom stood. “You want to take it for a spin?”

Tom shook his head. “You might as well grab your planters and dig holes for the latrine. We'll use this time while we wait.”

“Boss? No. I don't do shit holes.”

“They aren't shit holes until someone shits in them. Go and dig.”

Later, under a cobalt sky rimmed with orange where it met the mountain ridge, the tired crew settled around the fire that Tom had built. It had been a good day.

Matt and Roland had turned up in good time with two truckloads of gear, and in spite of the shortage of hands, they'd all managed to raise the large mess tent and dry room, place the latrines, and run the wiring to the generator. Nix's cook van was set up, and tomorrow Tom would run the pipe for the water supply from the lake. The first reefer of trees had been dropped a few klicks down the road, and they'd go out there in the afternoon to rope silver tarps to the trees, building a large, cool cache to protect the hundreds of boxes of pine and spruce seedlings. Tom settled into the log he was leaning against and removed his boots. He stretched his stockinged feet toward the fire and opened his toes to the dry heat. Penny with the dreadlocks chewed sunflower seeds from a large plastic bag and spit the shells into the soft, rolling flame. She offered Tom the joint that had been going slowly around the circle, then pulled it back as Tom shook his head.

“I forgot, chief. You don't partake.”

Matt, short and bullish, moved from the other side of the fire to sit with Tom. Smiling, he rubbed at the bristles of his beard. “How's that fine girl of yours?” he asked. His voice, as always, was like steam being released from high pressure. He swatted with his beefy hand at a cloud of mosquitoes that hung at his forehead.

“Erin?”

“No, no. Your woman. The professor.” He kicked a log in the fire, pushed the coals with the heel of his boot.

Tom shook his head and smiled, watched the flames.

“What the hell do you and the professor talk about, anyway?” Sweet piped up from the other side of the fire pit. He sat up taller and raised his can of beer above his head as if he were about to make a toast. “Can't you guys just see the chief? Glass of Shiraz in one hand, discussing feminist avant-garde poets and how, like, powerfully they convey their feelings of inequality and oppression in a misogynistic society.”

“Name us one femme poet, you fucking show pony,” said Nix, pointing a burning stick at him.

Sweet took a long gulp from his beer can. “You keep messing with me, girl, and you'll wake up in your little kitchen van one morning to find bacon bits mixed in with the granola.”

“So you can't name one, then,” she said.

“Watch it.”