Through Black Spruce (17 page)

He taps at the keyboard.
I was telling Inini Misko that I drank when you surprised me
.

“Is that his name?” I ask. “I’ve only ever called him Old Man.”

Gordon smiles.
It is not his real name. Just his internet handle
.

“What’s it mean?”

Ojibwe for Red Man
.

What a joker.

“I’m going now,” I say. “Should I ever expect you back to the hotel?”

He looks at me, then away.
If I am allowed
.

I nod my head and walk out.

Butterfoot has an easy way about him. He’s like one of those slackers from the movies, but at least he has a job. I’m finding out he’s a real celebrity, too. He takes me to lunch down by the river, in the old part of town. I’ve noticed in the last while that I’m not in much of a rush to go home anymore. Summer in Montreal. A handsome man to keep me company. My funds will last a few more weeks.

He orders us a bottle of wine, and I choose some ridiculously fancy-sounding salad that, when it comes out, looks like it might feed a child. That’s all right. I’ve not been this thin in ten years and love the way my face is tighter and high cheek-boned again. Suzanne would understand me, my transformation. I was always the older, tougher one, but now I’ve slipped just a little into her world. Her skin.

I have an admission to make. I was often such a bitch with her because I was jealous of her, the way she made friends so easily, the way she fit into clothes so perfectly. Christ. She could put on an extra-large T-shirt, a baseball cap, and baggy jeans and look like she was in an ad for Ralph Lauren. I hated her for that, loved her for that, at least loved watching from afar as the boys, the men, the elders swooned at the sight of her, how the girls flocked to her, the ones out of earshot spitting out their jealousy in little circles until it was their turn to bask in her warmth. All of it so easy. She never seemed to have to work for anything in her life. All of it just appeared at Suzanne’s feet.

Until Gus came along. Funny to think he liked me first. But I didn’t like him, not a lot. Cute? Oh yes. But he was missing something important inside.

Butterfoot and I talk of music. I admit to him I don’t know much. He orders a second bottle of wine and the afternoon spreads out before us in sunshine and sparkling water.

“Did Suzanne ever come to this part of town?” I ask.

“Oh sure,” he says. “We’d have lunch here. Sometimes a lot.” I feel the burn in my throat. I’m gonna ask while my head is still light. “Did you two have a relationship?”

“Do you want the truth, or a lie?”

“You already answered my question.” I light a cigarette, the pretty sheen of the afternoon gone.

He tells me how it didn’t last long, how it feels good to tell the truth now. He tells me how Suzanne and Gus, their relationship seemed over. How everyone in their circle talked about it. He tells me the problems between Suzanne and Gus weren’t for the reasons you’d expect when a guy has a girlfriend who is beautiful and becoming famous. I wait for him to speak again.

“Gus never seemed jealous,” Butterfoot says. “The opposite, actually. He basically ignored Suzanne most of the time. Like I told you, he was running with that Danny guy and some other serious characters. He got a habit, too. At least that’s what they say.”

I look right in his eyes now. “What kind of habit?”

“The stupidest one of all. He started smoking rock. A lot.” He tells me how Gus even started getting all gaunt and dark around the eyes. I watch Butterfoot talk, and I listen as carefully as I know how. “But even before that,” Butterfoot says, “he never paid any attention to Suzanne. She and I, we used to talk about that. One thing led to another. Then she packs up one day and splits to NYC.”

I ask him how long ago that was. I hold down the anger that bubbles just below the surface. Is there nothing I can have that she hasn’t already? He tells me he last saw her a few months ago, when the weather was still cold. “I was heading down to do a show in the Caribbean. She text messaged me that she was in New York for a couple of shoots. I asked if she had time to come down my way but didn’t hear back from her.” He stops and puts out his smoke. “Then I got paranoid that Gus had heard. I never found out.”

A few months ago Butterfoot last talked to her. This is months after she stopped talking to my family, months after we thought she’d already disappeared. Suddenly, she’s closer to me than she’s been in years. I can suddenly believe the worst hasn’t come to her.

The sun is setting, and my head spins. Butterfoot asks if I want to come back to his place.

I almost tell him to piss off, but I swallow it down. I’m drunk. He should have told me about him and Suzanne when I met him. “I’m tired,” I say. “I’m going to go spend some time with Gordon.” Two can play this game.

He pays the tab and, outside the restaurant, flags a cab for me, hands the driver a twenty before I can stop him. He speaks quickly to the driver in French. The directions to my home, my hotel, I guess. We look at each other before I climb in back. His eyes smile, but not his mouth. He leans to me, and without my wanting it to happen, we kiss. He tastes of cigarettes and white wine.

And so I’ve had a small taste of what Suzanne once had. My driver speeds me through the city, and the sun is dropping into night and the lights are coming on and my stomach feels woozy, but I still keep thinking of her. I try to conjure her and what she did here in this city. Yes, I’m jealous. I’ve had a sampling of a life I never thought I wanted or dreamed of. But it tastes of something I know, something beyond the cigarettes.

Gordon’s sleeping on top of his bedspread, all of his clothes on, when I stumble through the door. He startles at my loud entrance.

“I hope you got some beer!” I shout.

He stares at me. I flop on the bed beside him. “Long day, my friend.” I pat him on the shoulder. “Good to see you back. What’s new?” I smile, lean in, and kiss him on the cheek, then push myself up off his chest. I pace the room, see a can of pop on the dresser. “Mind if I drink this?” I open it and take a gulp. What’s come over me? “Cigarette,
s’il vous plaît
.” I hold out my hand and wiggle my fingers.

He shrugs.

I dig through my knapsack and find a crushed pack of Player’s Light. Two left. I offer him the broken one. He takes it, even though I’ve never seen him smoke.

I awake with a start on my own bed, the lights off and the TV on to a late-night news program, all in French, the world’s events only making sense from the pictures. I look over to Gordon on his own bed, stretched out long and lean, handsome in the TV light flashes that are like camera flashes off his thin face. Good profile. Flash of a car bomb in the Middle East. His face is relaxed. He must be asleep. TV flash again. The local weather calls for partly cloudy days. Another bright blip of TV light as the host of the program speaks in harsh tones about what looks like Africa. I look to Gordon again. Yes, he must be asleep, his chest rising and dropping slowly. The flash again of TV light. Oh, such a nice profile. His body on the bed wants me to wrap around it. My body jolts more awake, tingling, my eyes wide open. Two can play this game.

I want to sit up, put my feet on the floor, close the distance between us, and crawl into his bed. My hand moves to him at the thought of it. I imagine my mouth on his smooth torso. His jutting ribs. His scars. I picture being under a blanket with him, our limbs wrapped around each other, not wanting to let go. He wouldn’t let go. It wouldn’t be hard to lift my leg up and off my own bed. First leg would go, the other following easy. Body follows. Bodies follow.

I lift my head from my pillow. I’m going to do it. My chest rises up from the bed, and I feel the tension of my left leg making its move to allow my foot to touch the carpet and carry me to him. That’s when the TV belches a woman in a bikini, purring like a cat, lounging on a lawn chair. All light now, my own body in the harsh white glow. She coyly calls out a number in French, removes her top to expose her melon-round breasts. Makes a kiss to me. I feel caught in her sick aura and look down at myself, my body through the thin T-shirt. Other women appear on the screen, dancing with one another and kissing each other lightly on the cheek, on the lips. Giggling. I look over to Gordon, and he has rolled onto his side, away from me. Now the girls are topless, still giggling, wiggling their fingers tipped with long fake nails to the camera. Is this what men fantasize about when they think of us? My body collapses back onto the bed.

I turn the TV off, my head tired from so much wine, my hormones back into their winter slumber, the ghost light of the television behind my eyelids. I see my sister, walking down what has become a brightly lit runway. She wears a thin gown, so thin it is less than gauze, and she’s more gaunt than I’ve ever seen her. She’s starving herself. I once believed our people could never purposely starve themselves. Our winter world did it for us. Maybe this is one of the great jokes of our people, one of our clan choosing not to eat in order to become skin and bones. What elder would understand it?

My scalp tingles, and my skin’s cold, my body pushing sweat through my pores that makes me colder. I clench my teeth. Is it because I think of my sister so much in one day that this disease returns to threaten my body? Or is it my disease that beckons her to me? The light behind my eyelids dims a little, and my hands shake. A tremor. A warning. No. Not now. Why now?

My body will quake or it will relax. Calm pictures. I need calm pictures in my head. I reach for the corner of my sheet and take it in my mouth. My body begins to tense then loosen then tense harder. I try to stop what’s coming. I allow my head to leave my body and the pain that begins to drill into it.

I float outside the window of our hotel room, float up above Montreal, and stare at the lit buildings against the dark of downtown, the giant white cross of Mont Royal. The city is an island, a twinkling iris below me. I float here at this height, then float higher when the white pain is almost splitting my skull.

The big river, I can see it through the lightning cracks in my head, this river that halves itself in two around the island of Montreal. The water promises to cool. It pulls me down to it. Violent quaking on land is just the rocking of waves when I’m on water. The rivers always call me to them. I float just above the black.

Nighttime. A speeding boat. No running lights. It’s crossing the big river, a dark-haired man at the wheel. Suzanne’s long black hair streams behind her as she stares into the pitch, her eyes watering from wind. When she turns her head to see where she’s come from, lights of the far shore wink, but the wind whips her black hair into her eyes. The wind forces her to turn her head back into it. A weak, thin man huddles beside her in the seat of the fast boat. This is all his fault. Now the two of them are running from the beasts that chase them. Suzanne wants to believe that these beasts can’t swim across big water, that they can’t cross borders. And this is what she is doing. Crossing the border. Crossing with her weak, huddling man in the hopes of making him stronger.

Her boat heads straight for me, and like a loon, I dive into the water. I want to wave to Suzanne as her boat crosses above, its wake gently rocking me. But she won’t see my body down here. She won’t see my raised arm as the swishing propeller passing above leaves a glowing trail in its path.

I wake with a start, drenched in my own sweat, but my mouth is so dry I can’t open it to moan. The blackness of this place is complete, and it takes me long moments to remember where I am. The first waking seconds are panic, but then I hear the rhythmic draw and escape of his breath close and to my left. It is the breathing of a person awake, and calm. The calm breathing of my protector.

19
FLY AGAIN

I chose the evening when at dusk the mosquitoes were so thick I inhaled them with each breath. Even the dogs lay with tails wrapped about their muzzles, and I watched the muscles of their backs twitch like gasping fish to shake the bloodsuckers from burrowing deeper into fur.

I would fly again. I took my old bush plane out of the hangar down the road and gave the motor a little loving and a lot of fuel. I turned it over. I checked the instruments, and I checked the rudder, the flaps, the elevator and ailerons.

My old house outside of Moosonee didn’t need much. I shut down the propane and the water and locked the front and back doors. I’d already collected what I needed, flour and canned food and two axes and rounds for my rifles and my conibear traps. I’d packed my chainsaw and my fishing lines and gill net and blankets and extra fuel and oil.

I saved my money, me, and bought a case of Crown Royal rye. This would have to do. I’d be forced to quit drinking, and this would be good for me. No room for pop, and so I’d drink my whisky straight or with a little river water. I bought two cartons of smokes and two tins of tobacco. I’d have to eventually quit smoking, too.

I cut the cast off my leg by myself, stared at the shrivelled muscle and the sprouts of black hairs that grew in patches up and down it. I wrapped that leg back up with tensor bandages till it could regain more of its strength. If I ever came back, I would come back reborn.

The plane was at her capacity. But she was a good old plane back in the day, despite the fuel lines always wanting to gum up. She would get me again where I needed to go. She sat now on the river by my dock. Many a night I used to take off from the gravel road in front of my house when the pontoons were off. But tonight I would fly from the river. I would leave this town tonight.

I’d watched Marius from afar for weeks. I knew his routine, where he went, when he was with others and when he was alone. I track moose the same way, learn their habits, and startle them when the wind is in my favour. Tonight the wind was in my favour. Marius would leave his girlfriend’s house near Two Bays gas station soon after seven. He’d drive to the beer store from there, making sure he didn’t miss it closing. He’d take a shortcut to his house out by the airfield, a gravel road near the high school. A quiet stretch, only occasionally at this time of night travelled by one of the white schoolteachers, but typically not Wednesdays.

That is where I’d wait in a stand of trees twenty yards from the road. Moosonee is a nothing town. The only way in is by slow train or by plane out to Cochrane or Timmins. I’d be in the bush by the time Marius was dragged to the morgue on the reserve in Moose Factory across the river, and I would be building an autumn shelter hundreds of miles north by the time the RCMP got up here to investigate.

Not a perfect plan. I’d be a prime suspect. But I’d seen enough episodes of
CSI
to know that the rifle I used tonight was not my own and would never be found when I slipped it out the window of my plane into James Bay. I’d made sure to tell my sister and my close friends that I was going into the bush to trap again and to build a new hunt camp. I’d talked about it for weeks. The timing of my departure was not good, and I couldn’t get around that, but this coincidence was circumstantial evidence, and I’d be innocent until proven guilty.

Close to 7
P. M.
the sun was still bright, but I knew Marius would soon be driving his usual route. I’d already tucked the rifle in the space behind the bench seat of my truck, a gift from a white hunter I guided long ago, a gift that I’d never used and no one around here had seen. It was loaded. For a short time I’d considered using my father’s rifle from the Great War but decided against it. The round was a rare one and would give me away.

I’d drunk a mickey of rye to steady my nerves. I’d killed dozens of moose in my life, dozens upon dozens of beaver, fox, marten. I never thought I would kill a man. But Marius was no longer a man. Maybe he never was. He was missing something that the rest of us have. He is what the old ones would call
windigo
. Marius, he needed killing.

My truck’s gas gauge sat on empty. Worrisome, but if I stopped at Two Bays, someone might remember I was there, and even worse I might run into Marius. I couldn’t take the chance. The old war pony was thirsty, but she’d lived her life that way. No other choice but to wind my way down Sesame Street, the usual kids playing in the dirt on the road.

Quiet evening. Quieter than usual, even. The Two Bays School bus that takes tourists out to the dump passed me, and I kept my head tucked low and under my baseball cap.

I drove the straight shot along the river road out to the base, made a left turn, and parked my truck on a path no one used anymore. I had time, smoked a cigarette and kept my eyes peeled for anyone who might be on the road tonight. Not a soul.

I got out, grabbed my rifle, and headed into the bush along the road. The mosquitoes landed on my exposed arms and face. I didn’t even bother to brush them away. I’d marked the place where I’d crouch. Good cover. Nothing but bush behind and to the sides, a clear view of the road on either side. Close enough to the road that I couldn’t miss.

I crouched and waited. Mosquitoes sung high-pitched songs in my ears.

A raven glided in and perched on the telephone wire across the road from me. It knew I was here, twisting its head at an angle to stare at me with its black eye. I lifted my rifle and peered through the scope, placed the crosshairs directly on the black bird’s chest. Good scope. Better than my own. A shame to throw the whole rig out the window of my plane. Maybe I’d keep the scope. No.

My hands, I wished they were made steady from the whisky. I wished I had more with me. But I knew how fast one gets sloppy. I lowered my gun and the raven laughed out at me, then dropped from the wire and found a bit of wind and flapped its wings so that I could hear the rush of air below them.

Amazing how the world changes in four months. Four months ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be here planning to do what I was about to do. Four months ago, snow lay thick on the ground, and the Moose River was still frozen. But the ice eventually thawed, and the dark water below pushed it out to James Bay.

I lit a smoke and glanced at my watch. My hands shook. He’d be coming by soon. I checked the action of my rifle. Round in the chamber. Four in the mag. It wasn’t too late to go home and forget about this, to go back to pretending. I counted his sins against me. I snapped the safety off and listened for the crunch of tires on gravel.

Before I finished my cigarette, I heard a car coming. Big car. I peered out. It was the red of Marius’s new F150 truck. I dropped the cigarette and made a note to myself to pick it up before I left. Evidence.

I raised the rifle and sighted in on the truck, a hundred yards away. Marius was coming, driver side closest to me. I could see that his window was rolled up. Shit. It would be a more difficult shot. He drove slow, looking down at something in his hand, then looking up again at the road. A cell phone? More complications. He was fifty yards away now, and my hands were shaking so that my scope jittered, too.

Control. Breathe. In, out, in, half out. Like my father taught me. Blank mind. Focus on the kill. Hands steadier, I followed the movement of his truck with my rifle, like sighting in on a goose coming in for a landing. The crosshairs were on Marius’s face now. Ugly face. He was laughing to himself, no longer focused on what was in his hands. Sunlight reflecting off his window. Almost. Almost.

I couldn’t do this. Light bright in my scope from reflection. Steady on his head. I wished his window was down. Not yet. Wait. Fifteen yards away, I followed his movement through the scope. Blinding light now, and I could just make out his head in my crosshairs.

I couldn’t do this. The truck passed directly in front, and I followed with the rifle. Finger pressure on trigger and I couldn’t make out his head for the sunlight. Whine in my ears. Mosquitoes biting. I pulled the trigger.

The boom of the rifle in my ear was like the world waking up. Glass shattered, and Marius’s truck veered hard into the ditch. His horn blared, and the truck engine wound up. His foot must have been jammed on the pedal.

Find the hot casing of the ejected cartridge. I needed to pocket it. Think, think! I peered through my scope and saw his head slumped on the steering wheel. The horn continued to blare, the engine screamed as the tires spun in the mud of the ditch. I had done it. Forgive me, whoever you are who forgives. No going back.

I searched for the spent cartridge and found it in the leaves. I had to move quick now. I made my way out of the bush and headed toward my truck fast, peering around me for signs of people. Nobody. But somebody must have heard the awful noise of the engine, the blare of horn.

Cigarette butt! Halfway to my truck, I turned back quick and ran fast as I could with rifle in my hand. I dove onto the ground and searched desperate for it. I rooted through the dead leaves, through the weeds, and finally saw the white of it peering up at me. I grabbed it and made my way back to my truck.

Marius’s engine screamed and then suddenly coughed and went quiet. I only heard the blare of the horn now as I threw the rifle behind my seat, got in, and turned over the motor. One turn. Two. Wouldn’t start. I pumped the gas, tried not to panic, tried not to flood it. The engine caught. I threw her into gear and drove slow as I could onto the road. I couldn’t leave tire marks. Couldn’t leave a trace. This is what I could control. What I couldn’t was anybody else driving or walking this road. I reached for my cigarettes in my shirt pocket, but my hand shook too bad. Nobody yet. The sound of the horn faded to quiet, just the rattle of my truck on gravel.

I turned off the gravel road and onto the river road. A couple walked hand in hand. I glanced over to them as I passed, but they were deep in conversation. Down the road further, I saw lots of people out now, hanging around outside Taska’s. Kids. A few of the old drunks. I tried not to look at any of them, tried to keep my speed slow, made the turn onto Sesame Street that would eventually get me to the dump road. A couple of cars passed me. I nodded to Eddie who drives the town maintenance truck. He nodded back. Shit.

The long stretch past the dump seemed to take forever, but I didn’t pass anyone. I peered down the turnoff to the dump and saw the yellow school bus full of tourists searching for bears. A couple of miles down, I turned off to my house, removed from the rest of town by trees and creeks and bush.

I wanted to lock up my truck, but I never do that. I left it open and grabbed the rifle, held it close to my chest. I walked down to my plane tied off at the dock. If there were traces of gunpowder in the truck, that was fine. I was known as a hunter here. The house was clean. Locked. Everything I needed was in my plane. I climbed in and held the steering wheel, tried to calm the shake of my hands.

I’d killed a man. I couldn’t think about that now. Many months for that when I landed. I went through the checks in my head. Ignition on. Throttle on the dash ready to be pushed in. I turned the motor over, and my plane roared to life. I eased the throttle and climbed out, untied the ropes from the dock. I had my canoe tied to the pontoons. I had everything I’d need to survive in the bush.

I climbed back in and upped the throttle and left the dock. I aimed the plane into the wind and opened up the throttle to a roar and adjusted my flaps to fifteen degrees, full fine pitch for the propeller. I bumped along the river, the plane vibrating. When I lifted off the water, she hummed. Within a minute I was flying again, turning away from Moosonee and the sparkling water of the Moose River, fighting the urge to fly over Marius’s truck, turning my plane north.

I adjusted the pitch of the blades and the prop bit the air. I looked once more down at my town and then looked forward and flew out over the muskeg.

I tried to settle in my seat and gripped the wheel tight. My plane bumped up on a wind current. Flying was second nature, a part of me. Don’t think of Marius right now. Instead, I remembered after the beating. Remembered him trying to burn down my house. Remembered my bear. My bear. She did not deserve that end.

I hadn’t seen the country from above for years, but some things you don’t forget. The rivers snaked and glittered across the flats that stretch out for hundreds of miles to the Arctic. I saw the white flocks of snow geese grounded and moulting on their feeding place below, the late sun glancing off their feathers. In an hour the dusk would set in, and so I had to stay focused. It would be too difficult to land on water for the first time in years in the dark. If worst came to worst, I’d set down for the night on a good stretch of creek or river and then find my hiding spot tomorrow.

Still, there was the matter of the rifle. I couldn’t be caught with it. It was a pretty gun, solid and accurate. What a waste. But it had to go. It was the one concrete thing that tied me to Marius’s murder. Murder. I was a murderer now. I had murdered another human. My head buzzed. Eddie the maintenance man saw me on the road, but he was a drinker, and he hated the cops. Adrenaline was losing its grip on me. I had a headache, and I wanted a sip of whisky. A cigarette. I peered behind me at the pile of gear on the backseat. I reached from the vibration of the wheel to my shirt pocket for my smokes. I saw the case of whisky almost close enough to reach. I could almost taste the burn of it on my tongue, in my stomach.

I lit a cigarette and peered over at the rifle in the blanket beside me. Down below nothing but muskeg. At the Attawapiskat River, I’d fly east over the bay to my chosen place. Akimiski Island. That big island out in the bay. No man is an island, but islands were good for hiding. Flying with one hand, I reached for the rifle and rested the stock in my lap. Swamp and creek lay far below me. It was no stretch at all to think no human had ever set foot on that ground.

I pushed the door open against the wind with my elbow, the plane filling with the commotion. With my right hand I forced the rifle outside, making sure as I let go that it fell clear of the pontoon. The wind’s howl dropped to a loud whine again when I closed the door, and I imagined the rifle plummeting to earth, barrel first, plunging deep into the mud and water like an arrow or a knife, burying itself forever.