29

THEY WERE IN IT TOGETHER NOW, DAVID THOUGHT, AND SO when Max made a big deal of passing up yet another place to park the Cadillac, David didn’t ask what Max was doing. Now they’d drive up a spur off the main road from Highway 12, or what had been the old Gunflint Trail, and then, where the road met a lake, Max would look this way and that, the water tantalizingly close, and beautiful, blue and mirror smooth, and he’d shake his head, and turn around and drive out again, and it all seemed like nonsense, but Janie, sitting in the back, her head perched between the seats, didn’t ask why they tried one launching sight after another, here in white pine, and birch in full autumn gold along shore, and the gravel crackling under the car and spitting musically off the hubcaps, and here, just now, Max not seeming to give a shit if the paint got chipped, which he always had made noise about before, or the windshield broken, or something dented, which had always made David feel worthless, that his father cared more about his shiny cars, or his gear or whatever, and not one of them mentioned the men at the motel, though Max, David suspected, knew David had not only seen them but had maybe even heard all of it, and not come to his aid, but that was forgiven for his silence here, for not bringing up how Max had brought out the worst in those men, and finally, now, turning left once again, they drove due north, the sun brilliant on their right, and here was a huge erratic, a boulder the glacier had left, many millennia ago, and when Max approached it, the road turning in a hairpin around it, Max smiled broadly, and there was an authentic, happy moment, when Max saw that others had parked their cars behind the erratic, three cedars growing off it, one on each side and one at the top, and Max threw the car in park, and they got out and stretched, having been hours in the car.

Max walked back up the road, in the direction they’d come, and David knew what Max saw, that the erratic, some ten, fifteen feet high and thirty feet wide, blocked the view of the car from the road, and Max walked farther out, and when he came back this time, he scuffed over their fresh tracks, all the way up to the car, and then rubbing his hands together, and taking a cheerful swing at David to muss up his hair, said, “We’re here!” Janie understanding this as a signal that she could run down to the water, while David and Max lifted the canoe off the top of the car.

“See, it’s light!” Max said, almost as if an apology, and David said, “That’s great, it is light.”

It wasn’t exactly, but David was so caught up in being away from all that ugliness that it felt light, and he swung it expertly off the top of the car, Max watching, he’d been ready to help with it, but here David had it himself, and Max, also, given the circumstances, wasn’t going to do his usual, run things. Bark out commands as he had in the past.

“Sixty-six pounds,” he said. “A Grumman eighteen-footer’d weigh about eighty-five, ninety.”

David carefully navigated the path down toward the lake, Max behind him.

“Sure you got it?”

“I got it,” David said.

Janie stood to the side when David stepped over the rocks, all granite onshore, and more, smaller erratics, and here some columnar basalt.

He swung the canoe around so he was holding it with both gunnels against his chest; then, leaning forward, he set it on his upraised knee, his right foot fixed on a stone, and with his leg braced like that, David turned the canoe right side up, eased the stern down to the water, and sliding the glossy length of it over his jeans-covered knee, worked the gunnels through his hands until he set the bow down, lightly, on the rocks.

Janie was going to step into the canoe when David tossed his arm out, stopping her.

“Best way to learn how to use these things is on the water, but I’ll tell you, okay?”

Janie nodded. Max was walking toward them, the Duluth pack on his back, and other gear hung off his arms awkwardly.

There was something in the light that was reassuring, even a new start, and they all felt it, and that the bad thing had happened already, the dark energy that had been there all along was spent on someone else, was spent somewhere else, and they were almost giddy with it.

“You look like a hat rack,” Janie said to Max.

All three of them laughed. David just loved Janie then. All over again.

Where’d the kid think of this stuff?

“I feel like a . . . hat rack,” Max said, laughing and shrugging the gear off.

All three of them went back up to the car, the light coming on brighter, and they made trips down to the canoe, and packed what they didn’t take in the trunk, and the wind blew in off the lake, but had in it the quality of the sunlight.

And for just this time they were happy. Max suggested they dump the itinerary altogether and just head out north, northwest, they could handle whatever came up, and they’d just wing it, do exactly what they wanted to.

They’d push through just as much country as they wanted to, how was that?

David said that was fine, and since it was almost eleven, they ate, and David didn’t mind the Velveeta; in fact, out in the bright, sharp air, it tasted wonderful, the day itself like that, here, though none of them could have named it then, this moment of grace, for the mind registers it as something unearned, and so one doesn’t speak of it, because to do so is to start all over again that balancing, and weighing, Is this enough, Am I happy, Why am I here, Why am I doing this, because in this moment, especially one like this, there is something of eternity, and in Max’s dumping the itinerary there was something unformed, but having infinite potential.

A promise of something new, a gift.

They could, from this spot, go in any of ten directions, and from those directions, over living water, cross pine-backed islands, or peninsulas, and they knew that if time permitted, they could take this water all the way to Hudson’s Bay, an unfathomable distance, and all now in near readiness, the canoe, almost like some magical transport, and in their bodies, the knowledge that here, now, they would carry themselves out, and as far as they knew, all that existed out there other, but was already becoming them, and this moment the physical form of what was already becoming myth, their trip, this moving out into, not the ordered geometries of cities, and all that one did in them, but something close to the skin, something that would write itself on their bodies, though only David knew about the blisters, the aching knees, the sunburn, windburn, and the rhythm that the canoe brought to it all, or how the islands were more than that, were, strangely, oases, were like markers in cities, like time, like minds, like life itself.

And there was this in the moment: perfection.

That was what held them there, sitting on the rocks onshore, after they’d eaten, the sun in the trees, and a red-tailed hawk circling like some lost soul over the broad, untrammeled vastness.

Alone, here, one could be anything.

And together? They had an identity the father was not about to speak, for fear it would be rejected. Family, again. And, too, speaking it would bring out the cajoling, and criticizing, which was his concern, masked by fear, bring out his own warped self, created in the forge of yet another family, which in turn had formed his.

And the boy, maybe, for a time, would not have to be older than he was, would not have to, moment by moment, manufacture a personality to show to the world. But here, since he knew this life better than his father, or sister, he felt awkward. He knew far more than his father did, was the expert here.

Yet even given that, he should not be the one to start it, perhaps only to help it work.

And did he really want that? For things to work out? Something in him had said absolutely not, but here, in this moment, he really did ask himself, What if? (What if he let Max in, if he were like this? As Max was now.)

And the girl, she could stop clowning. Stop working so hard, stop humiliating herself to save the others, she was so tired from it, it was killing her, she had dark circles under her eyes, a girl of seven, going on eight, but with a very sharp mind, but loved for the clown she’d made herself out to be, the act becoming so ingrained it had become indistinguishable from herself.

So they sat, the cool, sharp wind on their faces, and the lake shucked up wave after wave against the red canoe, and they did not want to start it, any one of them, because they all knew, with the first word, the first gesture, their postlapsarian life would begin again, that life of opposites, and of friction, of disappointments, yet of moments of joy, and even, at times, moments like this.

Coming with stillness, and a sense that just now, just here, of all places, and of all times, here was everything, was perfection, just now.

David, wanting the moment to last, just . . . so much as seconds longer, without speaking, pointed to the silver-green backs of sunfish, golden bellied and dappled green, that schooled offshore.

Janie tossed them a piece of bread, and the water was broken with the feeding fish.

“All right,” Max said, and just like that, they were back in the everyday world.

But it was right that Max had done it; had gotten them moving, had spoken first.

“You got the stern, right?” David said to Max. “You want me to show you a few strokes?”

“Hey, you put the paddle into the water and pull it back. It’s a no-brainer. I mean—”

“Fine,” David said.

He’d known, even down in Minneapolis, it would be like this. But Max would see soon enough. He, David, wouldn’t be the one to spoil the spell here.

“So you’re in first,” David said.

He could see that this made no sense to Max, but Max wasn’t going to show himself to be ignorant, and so he stepped into the canoe, and as all beginners do, when the canoe rocked, he stretched up, hands over his shoulders, and David had to shout, “Hands on the gunnels, low over your feet! Stay low when you spin around! Okay?”

Max nodded, but David could tell he was irritated.

But he’d had to raise his voice. He had Janie sit on the bow, to pin the canoe in place, and David hefted the Duluth pack in, a terrible weight with the canned stew and frozen steaks and gear, and Max’s kit. Lifting the pack over the gunnel, a good seventy pounds, his back burned, and he spun the pack over the center thwart and into the bottom of the canoe with a loud, hollow clunking.

He set a cushion down in front of the pack and over the thwart, then slid the extra paddle against the hull. Then came his day pack, stuffed full, behind the bow seat, and the tent and overfly and bags.

“Now what?” Janie said.

David stood at the bow and handed Janie in. She grabbed the gunnels, smiling to herself at how easy it was, and how she’d gotten it. Balancing if she stayed low.

“Am I gonna get to paddle?” she said.

David could see Max, behind her, was thinking not.

“Of course,” David said.

Janie sat on the cushion, her back up against the Duluth pack.

“Hey, this is nice,” she said.

David looked over her head at Max.

“Anything else?”

They had already discussed how they’d find the car. The spur they’d taken was numbered: 85 S. They could canoe south later, however they wanted, leave the canoe, and take 12 east, and get the car that way. Drive back to pick up the canoe whenever.

The canoe, weighted so heavy in the rear, lifted at the bow.

The canoe had floatation compartments fore and aft, and Max had said you could remove them, to really cut the weight, but they’d want them now.

His hands on his hips, David stood looking north.

He was thinking they’d forgotten something, that was for sure, you just never knew what, until you were three days out on the water, and by that time it usually didn’t matter, anyway.

Rain gear, cold gear, food, matches, extra paddle, tent and dining fly, first-aid stuff, emergency gear, soap, iodine tablets. Sleeping bags.

Location of the car.

Gloves, unlined leather, but . . . hey, it was almost sixty out, and it would be above freezing at night.

Warm hat—a stocking hat, he’d forgotten that.

His new knife with the compass in the handle he had strapped to his calf, under his jeans. Wearing it, he felt both some actor in a silly drama and like the real thing.

“Okay,” he said. “Ready?”

Janie nodded apprehensively, while Max, in back, tried hard to look like he knew what he was doing.

David grunted lifting the bow, then giving a hard shove, the cedar hull grating on the coarse sand, heaved the canoe out, swiveling expertly over the bow deck, braced on his forearms and bringing his legs in just in front of the bow seat, while the canoe drifted out onto the lake backward, into deep water.

David, sitting, picked up his paddle.

“Hard on your left,” he called back over his shoulder to Max, who gave an almost herculean stroke, digging in with his paddle so deeply he went down over the gunnel, the canoe listing on its side— Goddammit fuck all! David thought to himself—the goddamn canoe, even with as much weight as they had in it, was tipsy, due to the hull—and he threw his weight opposite to counter, shouting at the same time, “Hey! Stop! Get down!”

The canoe settled, and David craned his head over his shoulder, Max glowering at him.

“Let’s see what you did,” he said.

Max started to dig in again, and David said, “Stop!”

Max obliged. The canoe was drifting slightly, a northwesterly carrying it by a point of land. David turned to face across the lake a moment. He knew today would be the hardest, the potential ruin of the whole trip.

He had to keep his feelings out of his voice, because here he was angry with Max.

“Listen,” and then he said the magic word, or the word that cost him almost everything.

“Dad,” he said.

Max turned away suddenly, and then David did, too.

Hey, David thought to himself, this awful burning in his throat. My God.

And Max said, “Okay, Davey”—which diminutive he hadn’t used in years—“you tell me how to do it.”

And like that, David did.

“If you’re going to sit, put one leg out, cock the other under you, and pull against the center of the canoe—up the leg that’s stuck out. Okay?”

Max did that, and David—carefully, and kneeling—made long, slow strokes on the opposite side, and in the opposite direction, backstroking, until they came around one hundred eighty degrees.

David switched sides then, and calling over his shoulder for Max to as well, gave his first real pull, up the canoe’s centerline, to port, his right hand on the grip of the paddle, and drawing with his left, then again, the water gurgling alongside the canoe, and like that, they eased away from shore, and David put off telling Max about the strokes, and kneeling instead of sitting, and instead paddled quickly, two strokes for each of Max’s, to keep the canoe on point, which was at first exhausting, but then there came that silence he found in running, and with the light on the water, a million blue diamonds in all that green, and an island, their first, miles up the lake, he labored, something close to song in him.