The Mountain Can Wait (7 page)

That night
when Curtis pulled into the drive and saw his dad flipping meat on the barbecue, he felt guilty for living so far away. It could have been that he was being sentimental over the dog, or Tonya, or it could have been the way his dad looked at that moment: tired, thinner across the shoulders. With enough years in the bag, even a guy as tough and cold and capable as his dad could dull at the edges. He wore the same plaid coat he'd been wearing for years. Even the same barbecue, more than twenty years old, looked after so attentively it was as good and clean as new. His dad had always been great at looking after things that were inanimate. Curtis wanted to put his arms around him and smell what was always there, motor oil and cheap drugstore soap. But his dad was not a guy you put your arms around, or who put his arms around you.

His second night home, after dinner with his dad, Curtis met up with Sean in a bar and they sat at the Pac-Man table in the back and ordered a pitcher. Sean wore the Canucks hat that he'd been wearing since his recovery from the accident in his uncle's truck, the black peak curved and tattered at the edges. His hair curled up over the hem, like weeds claiming something abandoned. He poured the beer and pulled two cigarettes out of his pack and lit one, then lit the other with the first.

“I joined the IWA,” he said, passing a cigarette to Curtis. He pushed a quarter into the slot by his knee and began to play Pac-Man. “Move your glass.”

Curtis nodded. “A union man, eh? What about all that talk of moving down with me?”

Sean's lip curled, his eyes on the screen. “It's all ski bunnies and boarder dudes down there. I don't want to waste my paycheck on resort rent.” His shoulder jerked with the control stick.

“You sound like my dad.”

“There's worse people to sound like than him.”

Curtis looked across the room to a pair of old boys drinking together at the bar. Looked as though they'd worked in forestry their whole lives, felling or processing or just heavy-load trucking. He watched Sean's game. “That pink ghost is right on your ass,” he said.

After finishing two pitchers, they drove into the center of town for something to eat. They parked on Caribou and walked toward Tenth, past the bars and clubs letting out for the night. Packs roamed the sidewalk, some people his age, most younger. He recognized a few, a girl his sister knew, her face hardened by the cigarette between her lips.

Sean must have seen some kind of look on his face because he said, “You fucken asshole. How many hours you spend getting pissed out of your head in these bars?” He pushed Curtis off the curb.

Around the corner, a crowd in the street. Whooping and jeering. In the center, two boys wrestled, one with his shirt torn, his chest and neck flushed red. He took a dull-knuckled punch to the jaw.

“Aw, shit,” Sean said. “I know that kid.”

“The one getting his ass kicked or the other one?”

“I'll break it up.”

“Leave it. It'll burn out in a minute.”

“I'll break it up.” Sean elbowed through the crowd and people booed. The two boys were locked together on the ground and Sean got his hands under the arms of the one on top and pried him loose. The boy spun around and took a drunken swing at Sean, knocking his hat off. Someone else jumped in and he and Sean each held a boy in a bear hug around the shoulders, the boys lunging and spitting. A girl was crying; others mewed. Eventually, the crowd dissolved.

Sean grinned at Curtis, shaking his head. Without his hat, there was his scar, tracking from his right ear and diagonally across his forehead, parting his hair. Curtis retrieved Sean's hat, dusted it off, and handed it to him. Sean flipped it onto his head by the peak, hiding the scar, a flipped truck, wheels spinning in the stars.

Later, they ate pizza on the swings in their old schoolyard under the hazy purple and white shift of northern lights, which had materialized sometime in the night without their noticing.

May had started out rainy, but by the end of the month, when he returned to Whistler from his dad's, relieved to be back, the weather dried and the sun was out all the time, the mountains clear against the sky. Curtis didn't think life could get any better, and then Tonya delivered her fucken great big news, and soon after that she cut him off completely. In the days that followed, he rode by her house a few times and saw her on her bike in the village once. She had seen him too—he was sure of it. The curve of her cheek was turned toward him just a little as she passed.

He called his dad at the camp, his dad's voice through the radiophone distant and his words hard to understand. Asked him if maybe he could come up to the bush for a few weeks to work.

“What's going on?” his dad asked.

“Just need to get out of here.”

“That girl dumped you?”

Curtis clicked his tongue against the back of his teeth, unable to answer.

“You can't just leave your job.”

“I found out she was pregnant. Got rid of it without telling me.”

There was nothing but static, and Curtis imagined his dad chewing on his thumb, trying to think of something to say.

“Be glad she made the right choice, then,” he said, the last word distorted by crackle.

Curtis put down the phone and sat on the edge of his bed and rolled a joint. He licked the paper and smoothed it with his thumb, shaking. Too many folds at the seal, a shit job. His dad had a real knack for reminding him what a mistake he was.

And then one night in June his friends filled his apartment, drinking beer, passing joints, playing video games. He settled into the couch and the smoke and pinched a deep drag from the joint that came his way, and he looked around the room at the people who surrounded him, people he knew only because he had made the decision to come to this place. Good people, all gathered in the apartment he worked and paid for, in the warmth that came from the oil he paid for. He could have gone anywhere but chose to come here. He bought the jeans he was wearing, and the bike that hung in the hallway, and the food in the fridge.

They all hitched rides to a party that was hot and dark and pumping. Curtis swallowed two ecstasy pills walking up to the front door and pushed his way through to the back deck, where people talked over the noise, where it looked as if the mountain held up the sky. He recognized a few guys who worked the lift and broke into their conversation, waiting, his stomach fluttering, for the drug to rise in him. He checked his back pocket for the battered mint tin he carried. It held another pill and two well-rolled joints.

In the kitchen, someone yelled for shots, and someone else produced a ski with six full shot glasses cemented to it. Curtis stood in line with five others and they drank in unison, and he coughed the hard taste of tequila off the back of his tongue.

Down in a basement bedroom, he found his roommate, Pete, sitting on the floor with a few English girls they knew. Pete was halfway through one of his self-deprecating stories and they were laughing into their laps as if it were the first time they'd heard it. Curtis sat among them and his legs turned to velvet. He rubbed his thighs. One of the girls gripped his shoulder and massaged it. He smiled at her and closed his eyes and listened to the music in Pete's voice. When he grew restless, he climbed the soft-carpeted stairs and placed himself close in the corner of the main room to dance. A DJ stood behind a table, her hands hovering over two spinning records, and behind her lights projected onto the wall, morphing with the music. He danced with his eyes closed, sometimes pressing his palms on the two cool walls at his shoulders. This was exactly where he wanted to be. Smiles shining and bouncing off smiles, okay for lips to touch strange lips. It was a false love, but who the fuck cared? Euphoria came up in him like carbonation and he pushed harder against the walls and stopped dancing just so he could feel the oxygen rushing cleanly down his throat and into his lungs. He opened his eyes and fingered the tin in his back pocket and there was Pete, kissing someone. No, he wasn't kissing her at all, just talking into her ear. His hand was on her back, between her shoulder blades, and he stood still while she continued to dance. Curtis closed his eyes again and danced and imagined that Pete and the girl were kissing, rubbing, licking. In fact, the whole room was in on it. He convinced himself of this, but when he opened his eyes, Pete was gone. No one was kissing. The girl was still there. Her hair was long and brown and tied back neatly with an elastic, a cord of hair looped and plastered wetly to the nape of her neck.

He forgot about the other people in the room and danced for hours, sometimes under the weight of a friend holding him tightly, but mostly alone. Depending on which way the music flowed, Tonya would come into his head, and he pressed against the walls and cast her off. But then one track weaved into another and her voice was sewn up in its layers, repeating,
There was this thing, alive.
In those days after she told him, he was like—it was so clear to him now—he was like a heap of junk jammed in the back of her closet. He knew how these things went; he'd lost interest in other girls enough times. The flick of a switch to something a lot like revulsion. He knew what was happening, but he stuck to her, like dirt. Because there was that time in the park one night when they'd held on to each other for what seemed like hours. Of course there were stars. Billions of the tricksy fuckers. And there was the open-faced moon shining on the mountains. It was bone cold but still they stood there wrapped together, no words. So he held on like scum, like mold. Eventually she told him he was too much. They'd broken it anyway and she couldn't give him what he needed.

He reached into his back pocket for his tin and swallowed the third pill, bitter on his tongue, and went looking for beer in the kitchen. Found one floating in ice water in the sink. The dancing girl Pete had been talking to was next to him and asked him for a sip of his beer. She had eyes like a husky dog, one frozen blue and the other brown, and wore a silky t-shirt, and a skirt, and white high-top sneakers. The fronts of her calves were bruised like a little kid's.

She passed his beer back to him. “It's too cold.”

“How can beer be too cold?”

“It hurts my teeth.”

The third pill brought him back up, but not to the place he'd been before. He went looking for his friends and found some, like night ships, in a bedroom fogged with smoke. He sat cross-legged on the floor and dropped his arms loosely in his lap and listened to the resonance of familiar voices, a wheezy laugh. He asked for the time and was told it was 2 a.m. Pete passed him a plastic bottle of water and he drank, his lips trembling against the rim, hardly connecting with it, the plastic crackling under the pads of his fingers. A hair was caught deep in his throat. He passed back the bottle.

“No, have some more.”

“It's got hair in it.”

“It hasn't, you fuckwit.”

“I don't want it.”

So then a mug half filled with something black was put in his hands. It tasted woody and too sweet and coated his teeth like powder. This wasn't the place he wanted to be anymore. He wandered from room to room, up to a closed door at the very top level of the house. On the other side of the door there was deep, slow-pulse music and unrecognizable faces that rotated toward him like moons. All along he had been looking for Tonya.

He left the party without telling anyone and walked home under gathering clouds. In his room, he emptied his backpack onto his bed, then folded his blanket into it, a woolly hat, gloves, and a raincoat. A bottle of water. His movements were whispered, fluid, the drug still pulsing gently against him from within, against the backs of his eyes, against his inner ear. He pulled his bike down off its hook on the wall and found the front tire flat, and reached for the pump that should have been stowed in a bracket on the frame. It wasn't there, so he went back to look where he'd emptied his bag onto his bed. He couldn't find the pump in Pete's room, or the hall closet, or anywhere else, so he sat on the couch and swayed to music in his head. Pictured the road rushing under his front tire, the lines of the road like the grooves of a record spinning under the needle. Fuck it: he needed to be on the move. If he couldn't ride his bike he would drive.

When he returned home that night, he moved through the house with actions that were articulate and careful, as if he were balancing a plate on his head. He checked to see if Pete was home and was relieved to find that he was not. He went into the bathroom, careful not to turn on the light, and pissed for a long time. He stood by the sink and drank a glass of water and dried the glass with a hand towel, and when he put the glass on the edge of the basin it clattered into the sink but didn't break. He left it there. He lay in bed with his shoes on and could feel the ecstasy in his blood, still. If he closed his eyes, they popped open as if attached to strings. He listened to the rain, relaxed his face, and realized only then that he had been grinding his teeth. By the time morning came, blue, bright, and torturous, he had not moved a muscle.

It was
the last hunting trip Curtis had been asked to go on. It was just the three of them: Curtis, his sister, and his dad. He was seventeen at the time; she was twelve and twice the shot. They stayed at a cabin somewhere high in the mountains east of Mackenzie and the weather stayed cold the whole week. Cold enough that as they started out each morning the dry leaves on the ground were frost white and his fingers ached in his gloves. There were flurries of light snow that, in the shade, stuck to the ground. The cabin was nothing more than a log shack with a corrugated tin lean-to at the side for storing wood. On the peak above the door hung the bleached skull of a moose, antlers spread open like palms. Inside, a couple of hard bunks and a wood-burning stove, a table, a countertop for preparing food, and an aluminum sink with cold running water from a nearby creek.

His dad woke them up before dawn each morning and they drank sweet, milky coffee around the table, the cabin smelling of gas from the camp stove. Then they headed out on quad bikes, breaking frost over rough trails to a navy-blue lake on a high plateau between several mountain peaks. They held binoculars to their eyes, scanning the rocky cliffs and pale scree faces for billies. On the first day they saw a bunch of deer and scrabbling marmots and at least one fox, but no goats. Erin was disappointed and their dad was impossible to read as usual, but Curtis was relieved. He didn't like killing things. In his life he had shot a few pheasants and squirrels, which was no big deal, and one deer, which he'd fucked up. He hit it broadside and the poor bastard staggered off into the trees, squawking. His dad ran after it and took aim and put it down. Came back shaking his head. “Never take the shot until it's right,” he said. “You should know that.”

They didn't see any goats the second day, or the third, and Erin started to complain. She wanted to shoot something. His dad put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a shake.

“Half the fun is getting so cold and tired your bones hurt. You've got to earn your kill. You think the goats are going to advertise themselves?”

“No.”

“Have a little patience.”

“But I'm excited.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Curtis watched them, his sister's head on their dad's shoulder, hunters in arms. They walked together to the lake's edge and skipped stones. Curtis decided that if he had to, he would kill a goat.

It wasn't until the end of the week that they spotted goats on the mountain. There were four or five of them. A few does, a kid, and a billy. Erin saw them first and passed the binoculars to their dad for approval. He slapped her shoulder, told her she had eagle eyes. They tightened their packs over their shoulders and started to hike up the mountain. Only a few hundred meters up his dad found one of the trails that the goats had broken to the lake, so the going was relatively easy. Steep but clear. They climbed in dense trees for the first two hours and then came out onto scrub and rock, squat pines that grew only to their shoulders. Out of the trees, the wind blew cold and hard. Snow started to fall and then turned to rain. The trail followed rock face and cliff, at some points so narrow and close to the edge that his toes ached with the anticipation of falling. Here, he would have liked to trade the rifle that hung from his shoulder for a bag of weed and his bike. He fell behind the other two, then found them sitting under a rocky outcrop, eating sandwiches and drinking hot chocolate from a steaming thermos. It seemed to him that they stopped talking as soon as he arrived.

From the outcrop, they left the trail and headed diagonally up a steep slope, crashing through old silvered timber and wind-toughened thistle. His dad seemed to know exactly where he was going—how that was possible Curtis didn't know. They couldn't see shit, only the slopes ahead, or back across the valley toward the lake. Eventually they came around a bend in the land, and up above, on a rocky, bushy cliff face, were the goats. About three hundred meters up the cliff, one of the does stood eating, and fifty meters above her, the billy was sitting on a rock, possibly asleep. Massive. Big as a bear. Curtis had no idea they could get that big.

“Should we give Erin a pop at him?” his dad whispered, winking at Curtis.

“I guess.” Of course the first shot would be hers.

Erin was bristling. She took off her bag and squinted up at the billy, hands on her hips. Curtis slid the rifle off his shoulder and handed it to his dad. He raised the scope to his eye and pointed the gun up the mountain and stood there not moving. He lowered the gun and looked at Erin.

“It's too steep to get a good angle. We'll traverse to higher ground.” He handed her the rifle and she proudly slung it over her shoulder. “Be quiet as you go,” he said, and tossed her bag to Curtis as he turned to follow her up the mountain. The throw was short, and the bag landed at Curtis's feet. He picked it up and attached it to his own, and then caught up to them as they climbed through crags and shrubs. The wind blew painfully. They stopped at a table of rock where the land leveled out, and again his dad took the rifle and scoped their position.

“This is good,” he said, passing the rifle back to Erin. “Now where are you aiming for?”

“Just at the top of the shoulder, sort of behind it. The heart.”

“Yep. You can't get him while he's bedded down like that. Wait for him to stand up and turn a quarter. We've got the unfair advantage and we owe it to him to kill him right. No distress or pain.”

“What if I miss?”

“Don't think that way. Look.” He pointed. “He's less than a hundred meters away. Imagine it in your head first, and believe it's going to happen the way you want it to. You're a hell of a shot.”

“I could still miss.”

“You won't. But if you do, then we haul ass up there and finish it.” He nodded at Curtis.

Erin got down on her knees and held out her arms for the rifle. Their dad stood a little behind her, watched as she flipped off the safety, brought the gun up to her face. It looked bulky in her arms, almost funny, and Curtis wanted to laugh but didn't dare. And she held it with confidence; she held it steady. Curtis watched his dad watching Erin, Erin watching the goat. Nobody said anything. The wind blew against his neck, sweaty from the hike, and he shivered. When the billy finally stood, Erin rose up taller and lifted the rifle, secured it in her arms, and then settled into a solid squat. Curtis's dad watched her go through each step, nodding.

“Bring the scope to your eye,” he whispered. “Don't lean into it.”

She did this and pointed the barrel up the cliff, her other eye squeezed tight. Curtis stood back, looking from the goat to his sister and back to the goat.

The shot popped cleanly through the air, and almost at the same time a cloud of white dust burst from the rock under the goat's feet. The billy took off and so did the doe, and another doe came bounding from behind an outcrop, and before Erin had the safety back on, they were all gone.

“That sucked,” she said. A crescent of blood was welling on the inside curve of her right brow.

Curtis pointed at her eye, a smile tripping across his face.

“What?” She touched the cut and then looked at the blood on her fingers.

“You scoped yourself,” he said.

Two days later, their last day on the mountain, they still hadn't shot anything. They were on the same cliff, at a higher elevation, stalking the same billy. This time Curtis held the scope to his eye and watched the goat through it. The billy stood on a rock two hundred meters above Curtis's position, the bulk of his body turned stubbornly away. Curtis would kill this animal. He would. Would cut its heart out and eat it, if that's what it took to belong. The billy stood motionless. Today the sky was blue and there was little wind, and they'd hiked with their shirtsleeves rolled up. The billy turned to the side and Curtis pictured the trajectory of the bullet and he squeezed the trigger, and for a moment after the rifle recoiled into his shoulder he heard nothing. There was a puff of fur and the billy fell onto his back and rolled from the rock, all four legs in the air. He teetered on the precipice of the next outcrop down and then dropped and landed on the shelf below, and fell again from that one and gained momentum as his limp body flopped mercilessly down the cliff, dropping farther and farther until it looked as though he was going to fall off the edge of the world. He seemed to come to rest at last but then rolled and fell again, the blood patch from the gunshot wound growing bigger across his fur as his beaten body tumbled. Curtis looked away.

“Great shot,” their dad said, suddenly close and slapping him on the back. “Perfect shot.”

“Lucky shot,” said Erin.

“Come on,” said their dad. He picked up the bags and the rifle. “Let's go get him. Did you pack your knife?”

Curtis shook his head. “I can't.”

“You can't what?”

“Rip his skin off and cut him all up. I don't want to see it.” Blank eyes like holes, tongue hanging out between worn yellow teeth.

His dad looked confused. “You've done this before.”

“Didn't you see the way he fell?”

“He was already dead. You shot him right.”

“I don't want to hack at him and rip his guts out. You guys go.”

Now his dad was angry. “That's not the deal here, Curt. Kill the animal, quarter it in the field, carry the meat home, and eat it. You don't leave it on the side of the mountain to rot.”

“I wouldn't want to take the pleasure away from you.”

“We're going to make sausages,” Erin said.

“Shut up,” said Curtis. He sat down and folded his arms over his bag.

His dad stood over him. “You really going to just sit there?” he said. He waited for an answer, and when none came, he looked out across the valley, chewing on his top lip. “You don't start something like this unless you're prepared to finish it.”

“I guess I wasn't thinking that far ahead.”

“I guess you weren't.”