The Snowfly (31 page)

I went to his place several times, but each time the guards refused me entry. The only choices were to try to sneak in or go in with Luc and his crew, and I decided the latter was the more sensible course of action. Luc didn't ask me to share the chores around the cabin, but I did and my life soon settled into a routine built on hard work. Like a lot of bush folks, Luc Brokendog survived by being able to do many things well. He reminded me of Staley. We cut wood every day. Sometimes we drove up to the mines close to Elliot Lake and hauled barrels of trash marked caustic to a dumping area northwest of town. Some days we went to Spanish or Blind River to buy bits and pieces of hardware, or groceries.

A week turned into two. Blisters began to harden to calluses, a workingman's scales. We saw neither Pierrette nor June, who slipped away that first day. Just Luc and me, monks on a work farm among deciduous trees and flying carnivores.

Once a week we drove across the TransCan highway to the Ojibwa reserve and got into a sweat lodge built of willow and covered with dark plastic and tarps. Outside the lodge, which was shaped like a turtle's back, there was a wall of stones, waist-high, built in a circle. The fire was in the ring. Hot stones were brought into the dark lodge and dropped into a tub of water, raising plumes of steam.

One evening I bought lamb chops and fixings in town and cooked them in a black skillet over an open fire outdoors. Luc ate an entire jar of mint jelly.

“No need for you to pay from now on,” he announced after our dinner. “You're a help.”

Like virtually all the Indians I had met, Luc lived on the edge, acquiring most of what he got by work and barter.

“You think Bolt will call?” I asked.

“He will or he won't.”

“What's on tomorrow?”

“Had enough work,” he said. “You'll see.”

Early the next morning we drove north then west, parked his truck, and walked a couple of miles through the woods. We eventually reached a river with raucous white water where a dozen Indians were setting up camp. We smelled wood fires long before we found the camp. “What's all this?” I asked.

“Indi'n fishin',” Luc said.

It was done with nets. Eventually there were nearly a hundred people strung out along the river. The nets were weighted, cast out, retrieved by hand. There was no distinction for species. Only size counted. I saw two brook trout that would go ten pounds, true greenbacks with vermiculated markings on their backs.

“They're huge,” I told Luc.

“There's bigger hereabouts,” he said.

June came to camp the second night. We had numerous fires and a lot of smoke rising and hanging over the camp like fog. Insects everywhere: blackflies, mosquitoes, chiggers, deerflies, all bloodsuckers and meat eaters. The Indians talked and laughed and laughed more, social beings freed of conventions and stereotypical expectations. The fish were gutted, split, and laid across makeshift sawhorses over smoking fires, like sooty bats in repose.

Whiskey arrived in brown crock jugs and clear Mason jars and was passed around. Children ran around shouting, giddy with freedom. Dogs skulked. A black bear approached the smoking fish at sundown and was driven off with stones.

A cow moose was found upriver from the encampment, shot, butchered, and shared with the group. Everything we were doing was illegal.

On the third night June and I sat by the river. I looked for Pierrette but didn't see her.

“Luc says you work hard,” she said.

“Your people work hard all the time.”

“It's that or we don't make it,” she said.

“What about the mines?”

“When there was work in Elliot Lake, they mostly brought in outsiders. The owners don't want to waste the money on training. They brought in all the skills they needed. Economics, they said. Indians are used to this.”

“Pierrette works for the mine.”

“Most of us don't look like her,” June said.

There was no rancor in her voice. It was a simple statement of fact.

 

•••

 

It was a Sunday. Luc had been out and when he came back, he told me Bolt wanted his crew.

“Will we see Bolt?”

He nodded. “He'll come out with us, show us what he wants us to do, and come back at the end to check how we done. If we don't do it right, we won't get paid.”

The crew consisted of three Indians, Luc, and me. We drove Luc's truck north and were ushered through the gate with the cat and dollar-sign emblem before sunrise the next morning. From there we drove several miles on a smooth, narrow road bedded with reddish green gravel before stopping at the shell of an A-frame built on the tip of a peninsula that split a fast river in half. We ate moose jerky and drank lukewarm coffee from thermoses.

Bolt arrived in a pickup truck. It had once been dark green but was now patched with Bondo and various splashes of dull gray primer. Lockwood Bolt was not what I expected. He wore leather hunting boots up to his knees, heavy trousers, and a faded red-and-black-checked Mackinaw over a stained T-shirt. He was balding, but wisps of white hair stuck out to the side. He had a huge belly that protruded and pushed his belt down. His eyes were bloodshot and his nose and cheeks red, showing a lattice of blue veins.

There were no greetings. Two of the other men began to unload boxes from the back of the pickup. Cans of hash. A sack of potatoes. Canned vegetables. Supplies. Bolt walked slowly to the edge over the river. “Beevs been busy,” he announced. “Upstream they've got four solid dams and five more in the works. I figure a week.” He stood there for a while, breathing laboriously, then shuffled back to his truck. “Week tomorrow. I'm gonna be down to Tarana for a few days. Draw gear from Butch.”

Luc stepped up to me as Bolt got into his truck and drove slowly away.

“How you pictured him?” Luc asked.

“Not at all.”

Luc grinned. “Hard to believe he's got all that dough, but he's smart enough and mean enough to get whatever he wants. Truth is, he didn't find anything. What he did was nose around and find out what other fellas had discovered, then he quick-like filed claims in the middle of them. Called a doughnut and he was the center. See, Bolt never had an original thought, but he knows a good thing. Ping over there has a nose for moose.” He nodded toward one of the Indians in our crew. “When nobody can find 'em at all, Ping can. And if others can find 'em, Ping goes right to the biggest bull every time. Bolt's the same way with money.”

“You sound like you admire him.”

“I know he's good for his word. He's just a bush bastard like the rest of us, but he seen him an angle and played it. And I think he knows now what all this done to us.”

“So he wants to close down what's left?”

“It won't happen.”

“Pierrette says he has evidence.”

“She's a woman with a good job and she doesn't want to lose it. She's trying to balance her purse and her heart, eh?”

“Do you think this place is poisoned?” If they knew the water and land were dangerous, why didn't they move? Or raise a ruckus in Ottawa? I ­didn't understand their complacency.

Luc grunted. “We'll see.”

I had seen beaver dams around home, but had never really examined one. From a distance they looked sloppily made, walls barely holding water back; up close they were engineering marvels, veritable fortresses made by creatures with brains the size of pecans. There were five of us and it took endless hours to break the dams and free the water. Luc's companions worked the way we had worked at the fish camp, silently, without complaining. At night we repaired to the A-frame, ate, and slept. I had never worked so hard in my life and I understood that, while I would eventually move on, this was their life. It was summer and we worked the week straight through, sixteen-hour days. My hands were raw, my muscles and joints numb. The river water was in the midforties and for three straight days there was a relentless cold rain. We were in the water and wet and frigid, but we worked on, troubled by insects beyond description.

It seemed a miracle when we finished midday on Monday. We all collapsed where we were.

“Where's Bolt's house?” I asked.

Luc looked at me for a long time. “Back down the road we come in on. Three miles, then left.”

“Security?”

“Only what you seen at the front gates.”

He gripped my arm when I started to get up. “It's your business,” he said. “But I brought you in here.”

His message was clear. If I caused a problem, Luc and the others would lose work. I realized that, as much as I wanted to find M. J. Key's works, I could not jeopardize the people who had unexpectedly become my friends. I was not that much of a jerk.

Bolt arrived at sunrise on Tuesday. A warm front had ridden up the jet stream from the southern U.S. and collided with the cool Canadian air. The air was warming and wispy blue fog clung by tendrils to the dark river valley below. Luc and Bolt went down to the river and disappeared into the fog. They did not come back until noon. The sun was up by then, the fog burned off, the air still, mosquitoes sailing around us.

“Fair work, fair wages,” Bolt announced as he walked over to us. To me he said, “You the one looking for books?”

I glanced toward Luc, who remained impassive. “Yes, sir,” I told Bolt.

He shook hands with Luc. “See you next year.”

Luc nodded.

“You ride with me,” Bolt said. It was not a request.

I watched the others disappear down the gravel road in Luc's truck, raising a lingering rooster tail of stone dust.

Bolt's house was made of logs creosoted black. It was a simple house made to look larger by an open verandah around three sides. It was in the woods at the base of the hill. There was no view.

“Were you expectin' the house of a country squire?” Bolt asked.

I didn't answer. Like Bolt himself, it was nothing like I had expected.

“I built a log shack here in 1946. It's the kitchen now. I wandered to hell and back through these hills. No geology to speak of, but I got hold of a Geiger counter, which was rarer than a virgin in those days. I had a boat with a little outboard and I used to run her up the Serpent from the big lake, all the way up to the Elliot area. I settled up this way, but eventually I found the ore down along the river. An Ojibwa trapper I knew told me of a place where deer and moose bred monsters. Two, three heads, eight legs. I asked him if it was holy ground. He said it was more like the devil's. Exposed ore, right in the open. I staked claim and the rest is history. Who the hell told the likes of you about my books?”

It was a different story than Pierrette had told but not surprising. We all revise our own histories, some more than others.

“It was in a newspaper in London.”

“The only reason I got fences is to keep the likes of you out. Dig into a body's life. None-a your bloody business. You didn't answer my question.”

“
Times of London.
”

He grunted. “Why the interest? I may not be book educated, but I ­didn't get where I am by being stupid.”

“M. J. Key,” I said.

“Whiskey?” he asked. He went to a cabinet, took out a bottle and two tin cups with handles, and poured a dollop of Bell's in each. “What's so special about this Key fellow?”

How to explain it? “He's to fishing what you are to mining.”

Bolt handed me a cup. He looked amused. “Son, I don't know the first damn thing about mining. I know how to find rocks. It's up to somebody else to claw it out of the ground.” He sampled his drink and smacked his lips. “You still haven't said what your interest is. You looking to buy? Excuse me, but you don't look like you can afford your next squeeze, son.”

“I just want to read.”

He was caught off guard. “The hell you say?”

“That's the truth.”

He took another slug of whiskey. “If I had the books by this fellow Key, you'd be welcome to them, but I don't have 'em.”

“But you did buy them.”

“I did. It was just an investment. I have business representatives in London and Toronto. When there's a chance to make money, they let me know. I didn't have the collection a month and somebody wanted something by this Key fellow you mentioned. I sold it and made one hell of a profit. It was good business.”

I felt weary and looked for a chair. “You have the collection, but not Key's books?”

“Are you okay, son?”

“I'm just tired.”

He chuckled. “Don't surprise me. Bustin' beaver dams'll pop a strong man's balls, Luc says you work like an Indian.”

I couldn't believe this. Key had been sold again, like some potentate's crown jewels.

“Can you tell me who bought the Key books?”

“Hell, I've got no idea. I didn't sell them all. Just one. The price was too good to refuse. It was all done through some Jew in New York.”

“I'd sure like to talk to the buyer and know which one was bought.”

“I can do that for you. Luc says you're crashin' at his place. I'll get word to you there.”

I nodded dumbly.

When he finished his drink, he plunked the cup down. “Got work to do,” he said. “You can find your way out, I assume. The books that weren't sold are all in New York and I can fix it for you to see them, if you want.”

“Thanks.” I had a strong hunch that it was the manuscript that had been removed. There was nothing else in the collection I wanted to see.

I walked and hitchhiked and didn't reach Luc's until the next morning just after daybreak. Luc was already at the woodpile. He didn't ask how things had gone and I didn't volunteer. I went into the cabin and straight to bed.

When I awoke, I wasn't sure if the sun was coming up or going down, but it turned out to be morning and June was sitting across from the bed patching one of her brother's shirts.