White Heat (17 page)

    The
men of the family went to Craig together to build the cairn and settle the
body, leaving the women to content themselves with a church service after the
event. On the morning of the service the weather was undecided, the sun taking
refuge in a sky patched with high cirrus. By the time the opening tune of the
breakfast show crackled through the radio, Edie had been up hours already.
She'd showered, then oiled and plaited her hair, tying the plaits at the back
with rick-rack and a ribbon sewn from Arctic hare. Though she had no appetite,
she made herself eat a breakfast of tea and seal blubber, then she donned her
best outfit, a dress of embroidered knitted musk ox, her sealskin parka and
kamiks, stood back and looked in the mirror. The wind had weathered her face -
she didn't look twenty-five any more - and the events of the past weeks showed
in her eyes if you looked hard enough, but she passed muster. In her
traditional garb you wouldn't even know she had a
qalunaat
for a father.
The small, slightly fierce woman staring back at her looked one hundred per
cent Inuit and she liked it that way.

    Mid-morning
she walked up to the church alone. Neither Minnie nor Willa wanted her there,
but she'd decided to go anyway and stand somewhere at the back where she
wouldn't be noticed. They couldn't deny her that.

    A big
crowd of familiar faces had already gathered. Most of the aunts, uncles and
cousins returned her greeting. A few held back. There was still a feeling among
some that if Edie hadn't sent Joe out with Andy Taylor he'd still be alive. She
understood the feeling, shared it almost. People had forgotten it was Sammy who
had first put Joe and Andy Taylor together and Sammy obviously hadn't seen fit
to remind them. Not that it would have made much difference.

    He
now stood with Minnie and Willa, each doing their best to put on the united
front they had spectacularly failed to achieve when Joe was alive. Although
when it came to family solidarity, Edie could hardly claim the high moral
ground. Hadn't she abandoned Joe and Willa when she'd left Sammy? Willa
certainly thought so.

    The
vicar waffled on. Land of Snow, blah blah. He'd arrived in Ellesmere from
Iqaluit three years ago and hadn't yet noticed that above the 76th parallel
snow didn't count for much. Up here, it was all about ice. Locals often said
the difference between Inuit and southerners was that southerners thought of
ice as frozen water, whereas Inuit knew that water was merely melted ice. Edie
resolved to have a chat with the man about it sometime.

    She
waited until the sermon was in full flow then slipped away. Starting back home,
she'd reached the steps up to her house when an idea suddenly came to mind and
she turned and made her way back towards the Town Hall. Inside, the offices
were deserted. Everyone had been given the morning off to attend the church
service. She used Joe's old keys to open the comms room, radioed the police
detachment at Kuujuaq and was acknowledged by a weary- sounding voice.

    'Oh,
Edie, it's you.' Derek seemed cheered. 'Simeonie let you use the radio?'

    'Joe
worked the comms room's rota, remember? I put his keys on my key ring. For a
rainy day. Derek, I was wondering, did you speak to Fairfax?'

    She
heard Derek take a deep breath and shift about in his chair.

    'Man
didn't have anything to add.' He sounded evasive. She wondered if he was lying
and, if so, why.

    'Did
you ask him about Felix Wagner?'

    'Why would
Fairfax know the other guy?'

    'Wagner.
I don't know. It's just a feeling.'

    'The
lab results on Joe were pretty conclusive. The mayor wants a line drawn under
the whole business as quickly as possible.'

    'In
good time for the start of his re-election campaign.'

    Derek
sighed. She'd got him on the defensive. 'Look, we flew right across Craig
twice. If Taylor had been alive, we'd have seen him from the air.'

    The
weary sound had crept back into Derek Palliser's voice. Sometimes she wished
she could just shake the man. Banish the degree of his cynicism, his
indifference to the world, to himself.

    'What's
your interest in this guy anyway?' he said. 'I thought you hated him.'

    Edie
ignored the jibe. 'You mean you didn't land?'

    'There
was no need.'

    'I
thought you said a band of low cloud came down?'

    Did
he imagine she'd forgotten the conversation they'd had the night after Joe
died? He was underestimating her, which was unlike him, and it bugged her all
the more for it.

    'Man,
you have a nerve, Edie, you know that? In any case, Simeonie sent Martie out
after, remember?'

    For
an instant, her hackles rose, then a little burr of shame blossomed on her face
and tears begin to run hot down her cheeks. She bit her lip hard so he wouldn't
know she was crying. Ever since she'd found Joe on the bed, she'd had a hard
time keeping control of her emotions.

    'Edie,
I know you're upset,' he said. His voice was emollient, soft. 'Isn't it best
for everyone if we just put all this behind us, get back to normal?'

    She
hooted with what she hoped was the right amount of impatience. 'Oh yeah, I
forgot, let's celebrate our marvellous community and pretend it's not full of
fuck-ups and drunks and high school drop-outs.' She took a deep breath and
gathered herself. 'Derek, you ever consider where your lemming brain might be
driving you?' They cut off the call.

    Too
agitated to settle, she took herself to the stretch of shore-fast ice where she
kept her dogs tied, quietened them down, clipped on their tracings and set the
komatik running, with Bonehead trotting along freestyle by her side. Like most
people, she still kept a dog team for those trips, especially across the
mountains and into the interior, where the going was too rough for snowbies or
just for when she wanted to feel closer to the land.

    Plus
this way, she could sneak out without anyone hearing her.

    She
had a feeling of wrongness, nothing she could put a finger on, but unsettling
all the same; something told her that from now on she had to be careful. It
wasn't just the way the deaths of the
qalunaat
had been hastily swept
away, it was the ease with which everyone seemed prepared to accept Joe's
suicide. She felt in her bones that there was some kind of connection she didn't
understand yet between the death of Felix Wagner, the disappearance of Andy
Taylor and Joe's suicide. It was just all too much of a coincidence. Simeonie
sensed that too, she thought. That was why he was so keen to keep a lid on the
thing.

    The
day had decided to clear now and the sun had hauled itself as high as it was
going to in the southern sky: perfect mirage weather. Edie tied up the dogs,
made a note to herself to watch out on the return trip, and walked over to the
snow porch of Martie's cabin.

    The
woman had never been able to settle in the new government prefabs. If she'd
wanted central heating, she said, she'd have gone to live in a volcano. She'd
built the cabin herself one summer from a pile of two-by-fours a construction
team working on the mayor's office left behind. She'd double-walled it and Edie
had helped stuff the cavity with a mixture of moss and musk-ox hair. A primus
sat in one corner, an old coal-fire stove, a hangover from the fur time, in the
other. Caribou skins lined the floor and walls and made the place cosy. Very
unusually for an Inuk, Martie lived alone.

    A
thick stench of cheap whisky filled the tiny living area and there were mugs
lying on the table that were too clean inside to have been used for tea. Edie
called out and Martie appeared from behind the curtain marking off her sleeping
room, looking like a musk ox in a bad mood.

    'Oh,
it's only you, you crazy little bear.' She waved her favourite niece to a seat
and shuffled to the kitchenette. 'Shit, I could use a brew,' she said, lighting
the primus and sticking a pan of water over the flame. 'What are you doing here
anyway? Aren't you missing Joe's service?'

    Martie
hadn't shown up at the church, which wasn't much of a surprise since she didn't
wholly approve of Christianity, one of the many things she and Edie had in
common. Growing up, Edie had taken comfort in Martie's reassurances that to be
different was OK.

    The
water in the pan began to boil. Martie picked up the two mugs on the table and,
reaching up to a shelf, she pulled down a large bottle of Canadian Mist. As she
watched her aunt pouring a large slug into one of the mugs, Edie found herself
hit by a terrible and familiar need. Not a drop of booze had passed her lips in
two years, but not a day had gone by when she didn't miss it. Sitting here,
now, with her aunt, she was suddenly struck by an absolute conviction that she
could not go on a moment longer without a little taste. Martie noticed the
direction of her gaze.

    'Aw,
shit, Edie.'

    'Martie,
they're burying Joe.'

    Her
aunt gave her a look, then poured a shot of Mist into the second mug.

    'I
wanted to ask you about the S&R over in Craig.' As

    Derek
had reminded her, Simeonie had sent Martie out a couple of days after his own
recce.

    'We
didn't see zip.' Martie lit a cigarette. 'I was all for landing, but we had
instructions.'

    Edie
looked up in surprise. Martie caught her expression,

    'What?
Simeonie's instructions: fly-over only.'

    Edie
took a big gulp of boozy tea. The whisky felt good, warm and homely, like a
cuddle, only simpler and purer. Two years of sobriety gone in an instant. Right
now she didn't regret it.

    'Martie,
see how bizarre that is? You're sent out to look for someone who could have
been sheltering in an ice cave or fallen down a crevasse. How you going to find
that person without even landing the plane?'

    Martie
shrugged and offered her niece a top-up.

    'Listen,
Little Bear, I just do my job.'

    Edie recalled
the time, many years before, when she'd done just this, turned up without
warning at Martie's door, though for other reasons. She and Sammy had been
drinking all day, all evening. Willa and Joe were in bed. A fight had broken
out, she could no longer remember what it was about, except that it was about
what it was always about - the booze. It had got pretty nasty. At one point
she'd picked up her gun and Sammy had picked up his. They'd stood staring at
one another, guns in hand. It was ridiculous, looking back on it, like a scene
from a Buster Keaton movie. Just as she was wondering what to do next, the
boys' door creaked open and Joe's face peered out, Willa behind him. It still
pained her to think about what those boys had witnessed. Edie had grabbed her
parka then and fled out here, to her aunt's cabin. Martie had made her a large
flask of tea and some caribou soup, locked her in the cabin and left her there
for three days to sober up and cool down.

    Now,
Edie drank her refill down with what even she recognized was unseemly haste.
This time the whisky just felt normal.

    The
return journey to Autisaq went smoothly and Edie got back for her three o'clock
class. She decided to give a lesson about the Time of the Kidnappings. She
liked to capitalize the name, give it an authority it didn't possess in any of
the history textbooks.

    The
first
qalunaat
to kidnap Inuit had been the British adventurer, Martin
Frobisher, who brought one unfortunate Inuk back with him to London in 1571.
The Inuk man died shortly after, but this didn't dissuade other
qalunaat
explorers
from following suit, dragging numberless Inuit back first to Europe, then to
North America, for exhibition or to be given away as gifts to expedition
sponsors and other notables. The Inuit almost always died from western diseases
within months of arrival and the families they left behind often starved. It
got so bad that several European states felt obliged to ban the practice. When
she'd finished speaking, Pauloosie Allakarialak piped up:

    'Why
did they take people from their families?'

    'What's
your view?'

    Pauloosie
hesitated before venturing, 'Because they could?'

    She
smiled. Eight years he'd been at the school and she was finally getting through
to him.

    After
school, she swung by the Northern Store looking for something good to eat.
She'd lost her appetite since Joe's death. Perhaps it was the booze, but she
felt something in her had changed since returning from Martie's. For the first
time in weeks, she no longer felt guilty and defeated. On the contrary, she was
angry.