Immortal North Two, page 2
Dave watched the leaking blood that the towel had slowed, unslow.
“I saw a bear.” Incredibly Jacob said it again and he may as well request that epitaph for his headstone.
The trapper dropped the bloodied towel and clasped his hands together and they turned white and looked like he was trying hard to restrain something, perhaps struggling very hard to not go down a particular route that a certain part of himself had a proclivity to travel. He looked like he was about to lose some inner battle.
“Stop!” the peacekeeper interceded, his arms outstretched to them both. “Stop.” This time quieter to de-escalate even himself.
Jacob was looking back and forth between the two pairs of eyes locked on him. He wanted to ask for proof. Proof of the body. That the bullet matched his calibre. That’s not an unreasonable request and he knew that and of course any court of law would require the same. Could be he finally saw evidence enough across the room from him. Whether he was looking at pure hate, pure loss. Whether he realized his next words were likely to pull a hair trigger to those double-barrelled boreholes of violence fixed on him. He must have got the satisfactory proof he was reluctantly seeking—slow to get there but he got there—because he stopped turning his head from one man to the other, stopped his requests to see the body, stopped shaking his head, and just hung it.
The trapper looked away from Jacob and his vision caught the bear cloak and he didn’t stay there long. Looked to Dave and for more than one reason was repelled by him also. Saw a chaotic room of broken pictures in broken frames and dishevelled books and lost trinkets and each in turn he averted his gaze ’cause he saw nothing worth seeing. He just closed them, tried to, the cut eye not heeding his will. The towel once again pressed to his head. He looked like he had just finished last in some modern game of blood sport, or first in a high-stakes gladiatorial one.
Jacob reached to his inner breast pocket for his flask and unscrewed it and tipped it up and with pathetic patience he waited long enough for the last few sorry drops to drain out from the bottom. Touched his tongue to the metal rim for those clinging laggards. His desert just begun, he should have saved that paltry hydration to slake coming toils. Murderer chimed in his head. He had made no eye contact, so when he asked for a drink it was only addressed to the general room.
The room didn’t answer.
Like the all-consuming anger that had impelled the trapper to rope a man’s neck and hang him from the rafters, like the state of mystical love the trapper recently glimpsed and which had its honeyed spell broken by the immediacy of threat made keen by his own cut skin, the intense feelings of his returned anger receded and his rage was defused. This morning’s prelude to violence was silenced by the futility of playing on—nothing brings the boy back.
The trapper sat in a room with an innocent man he’d almost killed, with the proof that his boy had been, and with the man who’d done it, who was also the reason his own head stung and bled. The trapper sat there in a plethora of pain in this cabin of shambles.
Life always generously offers a thousand ways to die, and bleeding, scarred and rather wasted looking, it appeared that the trapper had sampled his options before finally electing to just drown in mistakes. But he must have preferred to do so without the company of these violators of his and his boy’s woodland sanctuary, because he asked them to leave. His first words echoed Dave’s and sounded nearly as hoarse. “It’s over,” the trapper said. “It’s over. It ends here.” Then looking between the two of them so as not to look at either of them and in a dead stare, “I want you to leave.”
When Dave and Jacob heard that, they thought he meant leave his cabin. Later they’d come to believe that that particular request may have meant something else entirely.
Jacob could have apologized and it did look like he was going to say something. But what does it really matter? What’s done is done. Walk into the empty arena where the sand is caked in blood and say sorry, then listen to its lonely echo off the empty bleachers. How much good is that? Good for nothing. Save those words so ineffective at remedy or repair that they could only be taken as further insult. Jacob got up from the chair and made for the door in silence. Dave followed. Saw his shirt and jacket on the floor by the door, his boots. He took them to the porch and into the winter outside.
The trapper put on a coat and didn’t zip it and followed them out. Everyone walking haggardly into the morning sun and a world disrespectfully bright. As if in the moments preceding one’s death, the only question to ask: Don’t the birds know I’m going to die?
Dave limping with his twisted ankle. For the first time he saw the big hole in the ground he’d earlier only heard being dug for him. Heard that soil being pitched up out of the earth and landing with the flat sound of some bedevilled metronome counting off the time he had left in this world. Though he couldn’t now hear that metronome, of course it still ticked. Tick. Tick. Dave looking at the mounded soil beside the pit that would have covered him over. The grave looked about six feet deep. He just shuddered.
“Wait.” The trapper said that then went to the shed.
He returned with a pillowcase and handed it to Dave. Dave saw the missing batteries and bullets taken from their cabin. The trapper’s face didn’t allude to whether he was trying to right some wrong by returning the theft, or if he knew that without the batteries they’d have no other way to power their satellite phone and call in a plane for a pickup. After the earthquake of murder, the small theft of these personal goods was tremorless. Dave closed the pillowcase. He looked into ruined eyes haunting a harrowed face. He didn’t see hatred, didn’t see spite. But he didn’t see goodwill either.
Dave wanted to say something but he wasn’t sure what. Sorry—but it wasn’t his fault. Take care of yourself—sounded stupid and cliché and those words inadequate for a man who had just lost a son and would now be alone in the wilderness. It’ll be okay—maybe it wouldn’t be. Thanks for not killing me. That’s all he came up with and none of them were any good and had he spoken them, their own indelicacy coming out of his throat ought to justify that bruised blue ring around his neck. Sometimes words are useless. He restrained an impulse to offer his hand. Sometimes gestures are useless. They stood a pace away on level ground but unequal footing. Dave was about to turn away.
Then he said, “My name’s Dave.”
They looked at each other.
Dave walked over to Jacob. They left, Dave with a hobble to his step and Jacob with a ringing in his ear.
The trapper watched them go then listened until he heard their silence. Then kept listening. He hadn’t slept in over a day and the last sleep he’d had was short and restless. He was several versions of unwell: exhausted, malnourished, bereaved, spiritually lost, physically injured. He turned for the cabin. He passed the empty grave. Its appeal was not lost on him. Saw his son’s compound bow on the porch. Fixed his eyes for the bedroom and tried to pay little attention to anything else and so left snowy boot tracks over the floor and stamped tread marks into the wax pools left by spent candles and he shattered glass already sharded and incidentally kicked assorted treasured shambles. Something broke. But it was just his meaning for life recently held frailly in place by thin threads of vengeance. The noose loop lay on the floor with its long tail still strung over the rafter and as he passed it he pulled the rope and its tail-end slithered up over the beam then came down, landing with a flat sound in a limp and messy coil. He had stopped pressing the towel to his face before they all left the cabin, and blood from his eye had trickled to his chin and dripped to the snow where he had stood, dotting his route to the bedroom. A perfect bloodspot trail so barbarous fate could track him down and finish him off. He wiped his bleeding head and saw the big red swatch on his arm and knew his wounds required immediate attention. He didn’t give them that. In that nightmare morning with his distraught mind swelling with loss, he just lay down.
It was morning when the trapper went to bed and he didn’t even stir until the latest hours of the night and when he stirred he never fully waked. A sickness in the calamity of his dreaming mind. Battles waged and lost. Voices in his skull—some new, some old—fighting for territory; some holding their ground, others giving it up. That mental combat would at times manifest in his body when a leg or arm would twitch or kick or punch in a violent hypnic jerk.
Inside the trapper was a smaller trapper. He had crawled into a small hole that he’d dug into a wall of his mind. A larger trapper tried to reason with him, tell him it’s okay. Hey, it’s over. The little guy like a soldier still out there in the jungle not knowing the war had ended. Your loyalty is admirable, the bigger trapper said to the smaller, but the battle’s over. Come on out of that foxhole, soldier. Let’s go. He informs him of the bodies, of the peace treaty.
But the little guy questions his loyalty ’cause he signed up to fight forever. He swore he’d always be there for them. For him and for her. He pledged it, vowed it. Let the ground rot him away and it would only show that word etched into the lengths of his bones. Forever. The little man asks with venom in his voice, Is forever over? His greased sarcasm slips through his clenched teeth. His commitment to fighting for wife and son will never diminish and his loyalty is not open to refutation however clearly the facts are presented against his beliefs—in fact, for him, his valour is sized in proportion to holding improbable beliefs. More loyal if your convictions don’t falter while facing an abundance of counterevidence. That’s what he was taught, that’s how he was indoctrinated. His essence is family and to that edifice he pledged his enduring loyalty. Any argument to shift him off his foundations sounds to him as reasonable as theories on the dryness of water, the coldness of heat. Pure nonsense.
The big trapper tries again anyways. Look around, he says, it’s over. The cabin’s empty. He peers at the little guy in his hole. They’re gone, man, he says to him. You’ll just be guarding a past that doesn’t need to be caretaken. The big trapper outstretches his hand, makes a beckoning motion. Come with me, we’ll face the future together. It’ll be okay. We’ll go slow.
That small soldier isn’t budging.
Please. Just come on already, it can’t be undone. We have to keep swimming or we’ll drown. We’ll starve and wither in the past.
But now that smaller trapper sees the big one for who he is. He was trained early to recognize defectors, traitors—those who used to fight shoulder to shoulder beside him, now gone to the other side. He was told that in the fog of war former friends may become enemies, to trust no one—not even himself—and that the first casualty of war is the truth. Stay vigilant. He knew this day would come and here it is.
The bigger trapper with the outstretched hand. Come on, bud.
Then from that foxhole the little guy does lean out—maybe some words got through to him—leans out a bit, just his face catching a bit of mental moonlight, only so far to better direct his aim and like a little hooded cobra he spits in the bigger man’s eyes then reaches out just far enough to bat that hand away. He tucks back into his hole and two short thuds echo. His heels digging in.
Kindness didn’t work so the big man tries to be tough with him, uses stronger language. Then the big man gets aggressive, levels threats and curses. But his back already up against a wall, the hostile behaviour only makes junior entirely convinced he’s facing an enemy, and he volleys back some strong language of his own; for his small size, his voice is not. It echoes off the skull of the man in bed with enough tumult they stir him half-awake. He turns in bed in an anxious haze. Then back again to anguished sleep.
It’s a dark corner of the mind where that little guy is holed up so you wouldn’t see his eyes narrow, but neither would you if there was light, as the eyes of this soldier of loyalty sworn to defend the present from constant insurrection, temptation, and threat are always narrow. You wouldn’t hear him chamber a round ’cause his gun is always loaded when enemies move among you. The little guy is very crafty and fits in tight places and when nobody was looking he’d infiltrated the rest of the mind and wired himself up to it all—the reach of the past now to be found in all kinds of places. If forcefully extracted, he’d just take it all with him. His finger on the red detonator button, the charge live to self destruction. What’s it gonna be? he asks that slowly. He’s in no rush.
So the bigger man who overplayed his hand backs away. Easy there, he says. What can he do? If he can’t reason or plead or order or outwit, he must accept that if he’s sticking around, that little monster’s occasional demands, however delusional—for that which no longer is and never again will be—will have to be heard. The bigger trapper leaves him to his small and tortured sovereignty.
Town
She saw him first. That’s a fact and she might tell the story differently but she is no longer around so we’ll just stick to the truth.
Her mother had made her wear that ostentatious pink puffy dress—some might call it a frilly monstrosity or ornately grotesque—for the fall dance, and said to her, “I know you’re just going to go be a little wallflower so I’m going to make my little flower pop.” That azalea’s name was Paula, who later for many years would commonly answer to Gran.
Before this occasion when she had worn a dress it was for church Sundays or religious holiday dinners, and so it wasn’t the case that formal garments were entirely foreign to her. But her wiry body and sorta gangly movements never quite made a natural pairing with any dress. Whether it was the hormonal awkwardness of her first harvest moon dance, or feeling on display in such a loud number, her self-consciousness was coming through in rigid movements that clumsily accented a garment that needed no accent. But the mild embarrassment blended in well with that of many others’, and her blushing flatteringly coloured her fair-skinned cheeks. Young Gran’s smile like Old Gran’s smile modelled charm, and any garment, even had she worn one designed for a coronation and hand embroidered with silver trim and gold lining, should just be trying not to embarrass itself when in the company of that smile.
The small town had come to be because two merging rivers once facilitated the transport of trade goods before the railway was built. The town’s oldest roots grew out of the fur trade. There was farmland to the south and big woods to the north. Social occasions of mostly Christian celebrations drew people from the land like worms coming up to wriggle in the rain, lively affairs indeed.
So Gran would tell the story that he approached her stage left of the punchbowl, and he did. So far so true. But truth is in the details. Shortly before that, she walked her white dress shoes (really just simple ballet flats a half size too small with ornamental pink bows stitched over the toes) around the square perimeter of the plywood dance floor, passing the hay-bale benches covered in blankets, passing chairs and round high-tables to stand between the punchbowl and the entrance. That entryway not made of grand oak doors with brass knockers but just a wide gap under an archway constructed by braced two-by-fours supporting a string of white lights strung up like low roped stars. The same lights hanging over the band in the opposite corner.
Someone leaned against the arch and those bulbs swayed like the nurturing dark was rocking the starlight to sleep. Pretty, just like her dress shoes, because cheap can still be pretty.
When she walked from one side of the dance floor to the other, she knew what she was doing. Ask her about it. But don’t listen to her answer. Just see if she smiles in denial, if those cheeks gracefully lined with life’s indelible markings show proof of love, if those cheeks for a short spell borrow from the memory of that hot azalea mess a pink hue of bashful but most tender denial. Norman, the trapper’s granddad, was one of the tallest young men there and long hair back then wasn’t so common on men. Ask her about that too.
It would have been jazz in the big cities but here it was the fiddle, two guitars, a piano, and a songstress in the far corner playing mid- and faster-tempo folk and country tunes, some of them old and some of them older, not all of them sung in English. Gran was talking to a girlfriend by the punchbowl but looking less at her than towards the entranceway. Must have been a pleasant conversation, as she was smiling.
Norman made his way towards the punchbowl. He had not yet met her and did not now acknowledge her. And though her flamboyant pageantry contributed significantly to the carnival of the night, the flood of women and colours and music all coming at once as some big fantastic smear made it so she was only one of many bright swatches within it. He was shoulder to her head and about to pass her by, maybe for good.
First words they spoke were hers and came without a smile. “Don’t be stepping on my toes, dear.” She was seventeen and figured he was at least a year or two older.
That young man looked down to his dad’s cracked and polished leather shoes, shoes that had not stepped on hers. First thing he ever said to his future beloved: “What?”
Only now did she smile.
Ask him what colour her dress was. He wouldn’t know.
“When you take me to dance. My toes can take it but these shoes are not mine, they are my older sister Jane’s and you’ll have to answer to her not me if you scuff ’em. And she’s the mean one.” Right there she basically set the tone for their next seventy years.
They didn’t dance right off the bat, which could have been due to the hesitation of that young man, who only a few days before had his inauguration into that activity when his mother counted them through some waltz steps. Didn’t look like people were waltzing. At times he broke from conversation to watch not the women dance but the young men.
