Immortal North Two, page 4
Stand! That part of himself commanded himself.
He despised the thought. He stood in vertigo.
Step! That part of himself was relentless and cruel.
The man stepped and hated that also.
Go face the battles of the day. That Frankenstein part was almost smiling, like he’d resurrected the dead. All of them.
The trapper forgot the plan was to get water and he was so cold he just went to the fireplace. Knelt to it and halfway opened the stove door and it squeaked loudly. As if from out of the ashes some skeleton hand had reached out to drag its nails along the chalkboard slate of his black soul. The screech stopped him. He stayed listening to the wake of its silence.
Squeaks like that when you open it too. A part of himself was already on the other side of a painful memory and it extended a hand backwards to help him along. Not just when he does—when he did, I mean. That voice gentler than earlier, whether or not it was the same voice, and maybe there were no distinct selves in the man’s head, just one with subtly distinct pitches and cadences to match varying moods and opinions, or if a distinct self-part, whether working with others or siloed off on its own. So you take things back. Gently. Gently, but firmly. Take things back. A voice like the one he’d use for the boy, or Gran might’ve used at one time for him, or the trapper himself in Gran’s later years had used for her.
The early sun silhouetted the evergreens. Mist brightened by sunrays steamed off the smoking trees like wraiths caught in the morning light. He saw the ghost-mist as proof there were no borders to the spectral past. Inside the cabin his breath-plumes rose undisturbed. He watched them where they hung above in a consortium of apparitions.
Something moved in the trapper’s periphery. The loft, the top of the stairs. He looked. He looked away. Fast. He stared into the empty stove and swallowed hard. He closed the only eye with muscles responsive to his demands. Took a deep breath. Then opened that eye slowly. He looked back to the top of the stairs. Neither he nor what he saw there breathed.
At the top of the steps stood a boy. A grey-blue boy. The trapper blinked and because of his wounded eye it was a wink. The boy winked back. The trapper looked back to the unlit stove. “Imagination,” he whispered to himself. The word smoked. And of however many internal voices this fractured man may have had, what he’d just seen was clear enough that likely none would be entirely convinced of that categorization. He was facing the ashes but his peripheral awareness was like a radar screen, one with a blip on it. A blip high and right where the loft met the stairs. His whole awareness on that blip. Blip to the top step. Blip now halfway down the old wooden stairs that for the first time made no squeak bearing a descending presence. In not wanting to encourage his delusions or validate his dementia, he didn’t look directly at it again. But his hopeful denial wasn’t playing out so well. In a compromise he didn’t turn his head, he just rolled his eyes towards it.
Grey-blue boy. Moving down the stairs. He cornered his eyes to follow that sinking shape.
It stepped silently his way and he could hear his own heart pounding. He knew that sound wasn’t the boy’s steps because to match its pace the boy would have to be running. He thought at first the ghost boy was going to come stand next to him on his right side, but he was angling behind him. That seemed worse. With scared eyes fully cornered, he didn’t turn his head to follow. Still trying to uphold some tacit agreement with himself to not fully acknowledge his own new insanity—new because abducting a man and roping him to a chair then orating a deterministic history of violent millennia before hanging him for accidental manslaughter in which the accused had a plausible defence, could fairly be considered his original insanity.
The grey-blue boy disappeared behind the man. He hoped for good. His eyes on the curled grey ashes in the stove, like the fire had eaten the bones but left the feathers. His palms sweaty. He regained his breath and encouraged his heart to settle. Once in his past he had fought a bear and afterwards he’d looked to his hands to see if they shook and they did not. Now he had his fingers laced to subdue their tremble. The boy had not reappeared.
Calm yourself. Breathe. Breathe again. Imagination.
To his left appeared a boy. Standing there within reach. His body made even lighter by the sun. The luminous opposite of a shadow. The man’s pulse returned to jacked.
The boy wasn’t looking at the man, he faced the stove. Long johns and a long-sleeved shirt. The man’s first thought: They look a little small on you. The empty boy knelt to the stove. The kid was looking into the ashes, kneeling like the man was kneeled, like one a shadow of the other. The man’s hands clasped together. As were the boy’s. The trapper leaned in towards the stove. So followed the boy. The man leaned back and the boy did too.
He’s me. You’re me, the man thought.
Then the boy slowly turned his head. The child’s uncanny gaze stared through him and in doing so raised the small hairs on his nape. The trapper increased his shallow breaths while the boy, looking as if built from one, showed none escaping his blue lips.
For so many reasons, the man turned away from those piercing eyes. From the disbelief his boy was gone, the disbelief he was now here, the guilt and shame and sorrow even more so than the fear of his own insanity, the fear of what the boy might ask and of what he himself might answer, and that staring any longer into those eyes, proof of his paramount paternal failure, he’d have to answer to them. So he cowered his eyes under those feathery ashes, like a bird burying her head in the pit of her wing.
The ghost boy hadn’t moved but the man imagined he did—so now delusions on delusions. Imagined that his little fingers had to the stove reached out and were gripping the handle. And that he’d have to tell him to please let go before gently prying his tiny fingers away, one by one. That’s the worst part, those fingers unwrapping from the stove’s handle not all at once but one by one. Having to ask him to please let go. Please go back to bed, he would have to say.
Why?
Because you can’t come with me, he’d have to tell the boy while very gently prying off the next curled finger.
Why?
Because I made a mistake and now you can’t.
But I want to go with you, the boy would say.
I know. I know. There’s nothing I want more. That’s what I want too. But I made a mistake and now you can’t. He’d say that prying off one more cold and curled finger.
Just take the mistake back. Some mistakes you can.
I want to. But some mistakes you can’t. This mistake I can’t.
Why?
Why. Because life is hard and I’m stupid. That’s why. Please go back to bed little boy. I’m sorry. He’d uncurl another finger.
Can I come crawl in with you? I’m really cold and I dreamt of the bear.
Of the bear?
Yeah of the bear. He was really scary. He was chasing me.
That might split the man in two right there, or rather, quarter him up as he was already halved.
The man would just whisper to his little ghost, his little god: Little boy, you’re breaking my heart. I’m sorry. You can’t come with me. I’m not a father anymore and I barely ever was. I failed you and I’m sorry. Find your mother.
I don’t remember what she looks like.
The man would look around for her picture but the cabin’s state was tornadic ruins, he the source of that storm.
Listen for her.
I don’t remember her voice.
The man himself almost out of voice, out of words. He would use a weak exhale to try and inflate for the boy a last comforting bluff: You’ll be okay.
How do you know?
He’d have by now all the boy’s fingers pried from the stove and be holding that last little finger in his hand. He’d want to wrap that finger up in his fist and just hold it forever. Ask the boy to please go back to bed and please let go, yet it’s the man holding onto him. Just please let go, he’d say. Maybe the man would be crying or the boy would be, or maybe ghosts don’t cry. He’d find out soon. And inevitably the boy would ask him, If I can’t come with you then can you come with me?
The trapper’s loyalty to the past. That inevitable question. He was afraid of his answer. Bit less afraid. Not so afraid. Not afraid at all. Okay, he might say. Yes, he’d say. I’ll come with you.
He still hadn’t looked back to the ghost boy and he waited in patient anguish for the child kneeling beside him who had not spoken, who had not reached for the stove, to do whatever he came to do. And he knew anything the kid did would be alright by him, and anything the kid wanted to say he’d agree to, and anywhere he wanted him to go he would go. Maybe for a prior second he thought he could steel himself enough to tell the boy firmly he had to go back to bed, but now he knew those strong words would never leave his lips—no way would he ever tell the boy to let go. No way not ever. This love was a defenceless love. So be it. I’m yours. Little boy you just hold on as tight as you want. You want me with you then say the words and I’m coming.
He turned from the ashes to the boy and saw the boy’s blue lips. “Are you cold?” he asked him instinctively. He went to take off his jacket and cover the boy, but realized he himself only had long johns and a long-sleeved shirt, and the colour of his own chilled skin wasn’t all that different, and had he looked in the mirror he’d have seen his own lips were nearly as blue. He raised his eyes to the ghost of his son’s.
Long ago the man had dutybound himself as the keeper of holy artifacts and the guardian of stars: a family man. And though he’d failed at that task, that former definition was validated because the boy’s eyes were galactic. The boy’s eyes looked like marbles of self-contained universes. He always thought the boy was smarter than him, and maybe that wisdom had been present in that little head from birth, the way a seed contains the plant. Seeing him there in the room, it was as if the grace of the old dirt he was buried in had aged him into the wisdom he’d always had, now told in his eyes.
From what he saw in them he expected a message of comfort to follow, roles reversed and the boy now paternalistically telling the father to keep on, be strong, that I hope what comes to you in life is kind, but I want you to expect at times it may not be. He expected some timeless and caring words, as that’s the type of message he himself would have imparted to the boy.
The mist outside the window churned in an eddy of the breeze causing the light inside the cabin to glint off a few particles of floating dust that no matter how quiet the room never do seem to fully settle. The kid’s eyes glimmered. The man looking into those whirling universes waiting for his little ghost to speak.
The boy reached a grey-blue finger with smoky skin towards the man. Touched it weightlessly to the side of the man’s cut head. Whether or not it was actually there, the man felt it. Then he lowered the finger to the man’s chest. His head lowered looking down at it. Little wisps like solar flares, nebulous digit, translucent as a thin cloud. The boy swept that finger up the man’s chest to his nose. Then he turned and looked to the stove and so the man followed his gaze because for certain those eyes had things to tell. Quiet grey feathery ash. And whether the ghost boy sunk back into the man’s skull or joined the mist smoking off the trees, or whether he curled up among the breath rising in the cabin or slipped into the soil, when the man turned back to the boy, the boy was gone.
Town
Poker night at the small-town bar. Loretta Lynn was singing from out of the jukebox some future classic and half the men were having their hearts broken and the other half were falling in love. Four tables of six players. Over the course of the evening, players were busted and eventually four tables became three, became two. Finally one table of six, and one player there with a chip stack so high you could only see his rye ’n’ Coke when he lifted it for a drink from behind its little bunker. From the standing crowd of former players and general spectators made up of friends and family, someone whispered that the guy couldn’t lose. “Now Charles can just start pushing all-in whenever he has a half-decent hand and he’d swallow them all up.”
Later into the evening Charles won the game. He collected his prize of two packs of candy licorice, one black one red, a token for a steak ’n’ spud redeemable the following Saturday night, or any Saturday thereafter, and bragging rights until the next weekly game played at the bar. He’d only have use for the Twizzlers, given he was planning to return north by sled to his family’s cabin the next day. He’d give the candy to his little boy, who nobody yet called “the trapper.”
Most people left after the game concluded. The few that lingered talked about the game, that specific one, as well the general theory of poker, exchanging impassioned beliefs on the importance of tells versus an approach founded on pattern recognition and deduction and putting chips behind small but favourable probabilistic odds. Inevitably they took up a deck and moved off to a corner table. This time not a sit ’n’ go tournament, a cash game—buy in as you like, come and go as you please. People smoked in bars back then. The haze would hang above the tables.
Plaid and wool and down jackets on the back of chairs, even one jean jacket, though outside it was brutally cold. A few men sitting and watching behind the players. Nobody was bothering with the jukebox, so the soundtrack of the night was no longer Loretta or Kenny or Dolly or Johnny, just the players’ voices, chips clacking, cards shuffling, ice clinking glass. A couple hours in to this afterparty, Charles started rebuilding another little trove of other peoples’ money. Not plastic poker chips this time—bills and coins, and a wristwatch of moderate value.
Bruce owned the hardware store and said he wasn’t going to play tonight but he’d be dealer. He shuffled and bridged then dealt out two hole cards per each of the five players.
Charles had his green flannel sleeves rolled up. His dad’s hair was long and his son’s was long too. His was cropped short to his head. He reached out over the wood of the table and pulled the two red Bicycle cards towards himself. Squared their edges flush, one card overtop the other, and set his thumb to their closest corners. He brought his right hand over to shield the faces. He went to lift them but he didn’t lift them. He first watched the four other players checking theirs. Watched their eyes. Whether they held their breath or sighed, or were novice enough to pretend to sigh, or advanced enough to admit no change—not just in their facial expression but of their whole body. Watched for any perceptible slumping in their seat or squaring of their shoulders, patterns of how they drank, smoked, talked, blinked, cleared their throat, if their nostrils flared, licked or didn’t lick their lips.
He pried his top card’s corner just enough to see a red Jack. Let it down. Pried the bottom one. Red Jack. Two red Jacks.
Under-the-gun folded his cards with a low spin towards the middle and Bruce collected them and started a pile of discards. The action was to the cut off, the seat immediately right of Charles. That man took a moment. The big blind was a big man and had a sizeable stack of bills and draped over the top, so as to hang facing outwards, was a little gold charm on a thin gold chain.
The big blind addressed the cut off. “Yuri. Those that don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it.”
Yuri didn’t respond to the big blind. He set down a dollar bill. “Call.”
The action was to Charles on the button and he didn’t waste time and took three dollar bills from his stack. “Raise to three dollars.”
The small blind folded.
Peter in the big blind owned one of the lodgings in town, a motel smaller than the hotel whose bar they were now playing poker in. He owned the gas station. He owned two rental properties as well some vacant land. There were a couple people in town who said they liked him, and they were his wife and kid. The cigar in his mouth wasn’t lit, just wet and chewed on. He said, “Gentlemen. It seems fair to let you know ahead of time that this pot, based on the cards Bruce just kindly dealt to me,” he winked at Bruce, insinuating a favouritism that did not exist, “has the potential to get expensive.” He had a gold bracelet on his right wrist and its links were much thicker than that thin chain dangling over his stack. Peter set his thumb to the bottom of his bill pile then drew it upwards crosswise over the bills and they made a small but perceptible flapping sound. “When I looked at these two cards, fellas, the first thing that came to my mind was that if I was in your shoes, that is, if you all were me and I was you, it would be nice if someone would warn me ahead of time. I think that would be an amicable thing to do.” He was looking around the table, even at the players that had folded, and the side of his mouth without the cigar was smiling. His eyes rested on the cut off. “Amicable. It means friendly, Yuri.”
A spectator sitting behind the small blind coughed a short laugh, punching out a tight cloud of smoke.
Peter lifted his money pile and took out from under it a single hundred-dollar bill. He laid it on the table. “Raise to fifteen.”
“I can’t change that,” said Bruce.
“My mistake. Already breaking the bank here.” He picked out a five and a ten from underneath his little gold charm and put them to the table and Bruce pushed the hundred back his way and pulled in the fifteen.
Yuri in the cut off was a logger. When he finished in the black his wife might get a new dress and their daughter some candy or a doll. When he ended the night in the red, he was going back to work anyways. Like most people in town he was a Christian, but he would be leaving materially less of one because a few hands ago, his Hail Mary bluff on the river got called and a little twenty-four-karat Jesus crossed the poker table, walking, as he does, over water, in this case, those puddles condensed at the bases of beer cans, while dragging his gold chain towards a new home.
Peter slid the hundred-dollar bill back to the bottom of his stack while watching Yuri, not the only pair of eyes watching Yuri, waiting for him to fold, call, or raise.
Yuri checked his cards again.
