White Heat (24 page)

    'Not
this time.'

    Mike
sounded disappointed. 'Only I thought it might be the election posters.' Mike
explained that Simeonie Inukpuk had asked him to look out for a consignment of
posters he was having printed and air-freighted up from Ottawa.

    Derek
said: 'I think I'm missing something here. We got kids taking drugs, we got
kids killing themselves because they don't see any future. And Simeonie's
making
posters?'

    Mike said:
'He didn't make them, he's having them shipped up.'

    Derek
realized this line of discussion wasn't going anywhere. There was a pause.

    Mike
said: 'But that's not what you called about, right?'

    'No.'

    Derek
said he was signing off his report into Joe Inukpuk's suicide and needed to
clarify a couple of things with the young man's stepmother.

    'Just
routine stuff. Only, between us, eh? I don't want to upset the blood family.'

    Phone
call over, Derek put on the kettle and checked his emails and the fax machine,
but nothing whatsoever had happened in the period he'd been away. It was only
when he was going back to the kitchen to make his brew that he noticed a piece
of paper lying on the floor: a copy of his official report into Andy Taylor's
disappearance. The coroner had signed it and faxed it back for filing with his
English spelling mistakes corrected. He threw it on his desk, thinking the
coroner ought to try out Inuktitut sometime.

    Fetching
his tea he went and sat in his office chair, letting his mind wander, leafing
through the week's
Circular
and noting down the editorial number. Should
he call them to suggest an interview or write a short news piece and fax it to
them? Figuring he'd sit on it for a couple of days, until he'd got his breath
back from patrol, he finished his tea, went outside and took Piecrust for a
quick spin around Kuujuaq, looking for, but not finding, any loose dogs. Then
he made his way to the store and stocked up on groceries.

    Back
in his apartment he realized how exhausted he was and went directly to bed
without bothering to get himself any supper. He was woken by the sound of
knocking and, glancing over at his bedside clock, saw with a thump that it was
mid-morning and he'd overslept by hours. The knocking continued. Whoever it was
wouldn't go away. He felt a thin needle of irritation somewhere at the back of
his head. Why wasn't Stevie on it? Then he remembered that he'd given his
constable the day off.

    Swinging
himself out of bed, he pulled on his uniform, slapped cold water over his face
and made a cursory attempt to smooth his hair, shouting for whoever it was to
wait, and thinking it was almost certainly some busybody or other wanting to
know why he hadn't opened up yet.

    He
loped across the office and unlocked the front porch. At first he thought he
was experiencing some kind of flashback, a result, perhaps, of the recent
surfeit of mai tais. But no, there she was, standing on the steps smiling at
him.

    Misha.

    She
was wearing a fox-trim parka with the zip partially open, revealing the supple
curves of her breasts. For an instant he thought he might buckle or burst out
crying or in some other way humiliate himself. In the year since he'd seen her,
she'd grown more beautiful. Her face was like a spring sun halo, otherworldly
in its perfection. There was only one word to describe her: astonishing.

    'I
catch you at a bad time?' Her voice, inflected with remnants of what always
seemed to him to be a dozen accents, stole over him like a spring breeze full
of ice crystals and he had to look away, instantly and hopelessly aroused.

    For a
second the whole awful, cringe-making business of Agent Palakakika flashed into
his mind and he had to swallow hard to make it go away. Misha moved towards him
and he held the door open as she walked through. For a moment they simply
looked at one another. The strength of his feeling floored him. He knew he
should be angry with her, but he didn't have it in him. He felt like a hopeless
teenager.

    When
she offered a hand, he took it without thinking and as she pulled him into her
he could feel her breath on his lips and his heart in his mouth. It was
suddenly clear to him that the months of torturing himself over the Dane no
longer mattered in the least. She was here, with him.

    'You
living in the apartment now?'

    He
nodded, feeling himself blush. The second summer they were together, they had
moved out of the apartment into a more spacious house. Derek had retreated back
to the apartment not long after Misha left.

    Walking
across the office to the apartment entrance, she said, 'You can bring my bag.'

    And
so, in the hours and days that followed Derek Palliser emptied himself of
lemming swarms and suicides. He told Stevie to take the week off. He forgot the
Dane and Copenhagen. He forgot Agent Whatever and the urgency of letting the
Arctic Circular
know about his research. He even forgot to ask himself
whether the timing of Misha's arrival was purely coincidental. And three or
four times, when the radio beeped, and the phone rang, he forgot that anyone
was trying to reach him.

    Edie
went to her meat store to check Andy Taylor's bones were still in the two old
pemmican tins where she'd put them and to chip off a couple of shards of
iceberg. Then she went inside with the tin containing the cut marked bones and
the ice and poured herself a large glass of Canadian Mist on the rocks. She
took out the skull fragment and slid her pinky into the bullet hole. She poured
herself another drink, picked up a pen lying on the table and pushed it through
the hole. As she followed the angle of it upwards with her finger, a series of
thoughts came into her mind. The fragment was from the bone around the crown
which could only mean that the shot had come from above. The angle of the pen
gave a degree nearly perpendicular to the skull itself. She thought back to the
low-lying land around Bone Beach, as she now thought of the place, and turned
the fragment of skull around in her hand, but she couldn't figure out how the
shot could have hit the skull from such a wide angle. Was it possible that Andy
Taylor had been shot from the air?

    It
was past midnight when she went back out to the meat store with Andy Taylor's
bones, but it could have been any time; the sky never darkened now and the sun
never set. A raven flew past. Edie idly followed its progress, wondering why
Derek Palliser had not answered her radio calls. No particular reason for him
to be avoiding her, except that he'd done it before, during the Ida Brown case.
Something in the man resisted action until it was forced upon him. What was the
animal they always said had its head in the sand? Ostrich, that was it. Derek
Palliser was an ostrich.

    She,
on the other hand, had to resist the impulse to rush at everything. Once she
went out with her father, Peter, and her mother, Maggie, for a few days' ice
fishing. She must have been very young, four or five, but she could still
remember it as though it had happened a week ago. The weather was calm, and the
sun was shining, but it was so cold her tear ducts filled with ice pebbles.
They caught three char, then her mother went inside the tent to lay out the
sleeping skins. She didn't know where her father was. Maybe he'd gone to
collect sweet water. She was playing on the ice when her eye was drawn to
something shining. Driven, perhaps, by the smell of the char, a young jar seal
had come up through the ice hole and was looking about, its chin resting on the
surface of the ice, the water droplets in its fur catching the sun. Without a
second thought, Edie picked up her father's harpoon and threw it, embedding the
barb in the seal's side. The animal dived, pulling the weapon and its rope down
with it. Edie remembered seeing the rope whip by her and grabbing for it. She
clung on, spinning along the ice so fast she had no time even to cry out. Down
she went, into the water under the ice. For a long time she seemed to be
buried, then, blood humming in her head, her mother's screams reached her from
somewhere distant.

    'You're
a good hunter,' her mother said, afterwards. 'But until you learn
anuqsusaarniq,
to wait patiently, you will never be a great one.'

    Another
raven landed on a drying rack and pecked at a sealskin. It made her think about
the raven on the back of the twenty dollar bill, the Trickster Raven of the
Haida Indian legend, sitting in the Haida canoe, his wing on the steering
rudder. It was the Trickster Raven who was steering her back to her old,
reckless, hard-drinking self. Where had that old version of Edie ever got her?
By her mid-twenties, she'd already drunk away her hunting career and was well
on the way to drinking away her life. It was Joe who'd saved her, Joe who had
taken the rudder from the Raven and given it back to her. 'I hate it when you
drink because you won't come out and hunt with me,' he'd said. Simple, true,
like a spear to the heart. Not long after that, she'd stopped drinking.

    Joe
had given her back her life and she had given him what? Now she wondered if
that death wish she had carried was infectious, some terrible, unintended
legacy she'd passed on to her stepson.

    The
bird rose up from the drying rack and flapped off to the south. Edie went back
inside and poured another double shot of Canadian Mist, flipped on the DVD and
used the remote to skip to the scene in
Safety Last!
where Harold Lloyd
climbs the outer wall of the department store. How many times had she sat
through that scene since her father first put her in front of a movie
projector? But still she got a kick out of it, Harold in his boater and his
glasses ascending the sheer wall of rock, the world below him gradually
shrinking away. It made you want to cry with the sheer fragile pleasure of
being alive.

    She
poured herself another shot, and closed her eyes to make the feeling last. When
she opened them, she thought she saw the
puikaktuq
staring in at the
window.

    When
she woke on the sofa later that morning, Harold Lloyd was still climbing his
walls. She reached out for the remote and shut the power. Her tongue felt like
an angry walrus and her head thrummed. She took herself to the bathroom and
threw up in the toilet.

    At
the end of the day, she took herself directly home from school, mugged up and
pulled down the blinds. From the meat store she took out the two cans
containing Andy Taylor's bones and brought them inside.

    
If
you've got something to tell me,
she said to the bones,
now would be a
good time.
She waited, but the bones remained silent. Those few facts she
knew about the
qalunaat's
death seemed like an ice pack in formation,
fragmented, insubstantial and unable to bear any weight. But she remembered the
lesson of the seal at the ice-fishing hole.
Anuqsusaarniq.
Patience.

    The
following day she struggled through her classes with a hangover, then went
home, and was frying
tunusitaq,
caribou guts, for her supper when Sammy
breezed in, blowing the ice crystals from his nose.

    'Great
smell.'

    'You
always did have good timing, Sammy Inukpuk.'

    He
chuckled. 'I brought a half-sack.' He'd come to make his peace with beer, as he
always did.

    They
sat on the sofa watching TV and drinking, just like old times.

    He
said: 'The reason I came . . .'

    'Oh,'
she said, disappointed and not even trying to hide it. 'And here was me
thinking you liked my company.'

    
He
flashed her a look that said,
Stop right there, sister, you abandoned me,
remember?

    He
said, 'I wanted to tell you, so you didn't get it from someone else: I'm
guiding a trip, a couple of
qalunaat,
tourists. They wanna go eider
hunting.'

    'You
taking them down to Goose Fiord?' Best eider hunting on Ellesmere there.

    'Maybe.'
Sammy blushed and fixed his gaze on the TV. To his credit he'd always been a
lousy liar.

    'I
get it,' she said. 'You're going to Craig.'

    He
nodded, a little shamefaced, and Edie felt a thickening in her throat. Now she
understood why he'd come. The council of Elders usually divvied up the guiding
jobs and in the past, it had always been understood that Edie would have first
pick of any involving Craig Island. She and Joe knew the place better than
anyone in Autisaq, with the exception perhaps of Old Man Koperkuj, but Simeonie
had cut her out and given the job to her ex-husband. Sammy was here to get her
blessing and, maybe, her forgiveness. She patted his thigh.