THREE DAYS LATER INNIS was gathering his gear from the attic, setting plants, their soil dry and light, in an old fruit basket he’d found in the toolshed loft, a few more arranged already in a backpack, when he heard the Lada in the sideyard. Starr, and Claire. Damn it. He shut the attic door behind him and edged up to the hall window. They were still in the driveway, playing around, laughing, goofy in a hot sun and a west wind. Starr chased her like a schoolboy, grabbing for her, and she ripped a handful of grass from the ground and tossed it at him, strands blowing back in her hair. Starr stripped off his shirt, his lean torso so white he seemed to Innis shockingly naked, on his shoulders blurry blue tattoos Innis had never seen: frolicking like this, he looked, for a moment, wild, a little crazy. Claire yanked the tails of her red blouse loose and tied them up under her breasts. Innis winced, that bare tummy, that sweet spot he had tasted. Starr, twirling his shirt like a flag, bounded after her, caught her at the waist and she didn’t resist when he kissed her. Disgusted, Innis stepped back. Unhinged by the weather, both of them, nuts. By the end of summer he’d be gone and they could kiss and screw till they were dizzy, any room in the house, he didn’t care, the woods, the fields, the barn. As he released the curtain, Claire glanced up. She froze for a long moment, Starr with his back to her now buttoning up his shirt: like she was in a play, lost in it, and Innis, in the balcony, had brought her up short. Performance over. She frowned, brushing grass from her hair, but gave Innis a furtive wave that might have scolded him for spying, he couldn’t tell.
He stayed in his room, the door shut, until Claire tapped on it and told him they were going out for supper, she and Starr, up to Baddeck and might not be back until tomorrow.
“Why tell me?” Innis said. “I’m not afraid of the dark.” He lay on his bed staring at water stains in the ceiling, tea-colored phantoms, day by day he’d given them dozens of shapes. He had a hard-on that hurt and he wanted to say come on in, please, Miss Claire, that warm breeze, it’s something, isn’t it? Sorry about my big stick here. But he didn’t.
And Claire didn’t answer. He heard her on the stairs, and then they were gone, Starr giving him a cheery goose on the horn, the bastard, that miserable little beep a rabbit wouldn’t run from. Imagination, and caution, and doubt. There were three things to keep a man occupied. Who needed sex?
He had to catch what was left of the afternoon and he headed quickly up the old logging road, anxious to reach the upper woods, looking back when he rested to see who might be on the highway. Someone might drive by and spot him and tell Starr, I saw your nephew ducking into the woods with a big basket on his arm, and a mattock on his shoulder. Now what would he be doing in the trees with that? And Innis would have to come up with a nice lie. I was up there at my pine trees, thinning them a bit, Starr, you want a nice Christmas tree, don’t you? Small stuff, penny lies.
The woods had leafed out, were growing rich again with light and shadow, and the further in he got, the safer he felt, people just didn’t go up here. He nosed the fading blossoms on a tree he didn’t know, white and spicy against the thick dark spruce. Was this the Indian pear Starr had mentioned? Blossoms now, fruit later, so he’d have to watch. He moved on, Claire in his mind for a few strides until he could push her away again. How often in a day did she kiss Starr like that, drawing his face into her hands? Innis had once thought he’d lead her up here by the hand when summer came: he knew places that fairly begged you to lie down in them, thick beds of soft, dry moss. Another fantasy shot to hell. He heard nothing through the wall at night but Claire, her stirrings. Whatever she did with Starr now it was in his room, not hers. But stay cool, take the long view. That’s what the window told you, all you had to do in this place was look outdoors and your sight took wing, the long mountain went as wide as your vision and the water of the strait could ebb you out anywhere east. But west it was for Innis, not seaward but into the vast green ocean of Canada, into mapspace.
He knew these upper woods better than his uncle ever had, he was sure of that now. Apart from trips to the spring, Starr hadn’t walked up this far since the old fields had grown in years back. Was all cleared up there once, he said in one of his moods of recollection when the farming he had hated took on a soft, rum-colored glow, we pastured right the way up that hill. Starr didn’t care to beat his way through thickets anymore, over the budwormed deadfalls, spiked with sharp branches. Leave it to the holiday hunters, Starr said, those damn fools from town. But Innis had found lots of paths, a network of narrow trails deer had cut, their hoof marks in the sod, the moss, the mud. Not that they had the same journeys in mind that he did, the same ends, and he’d picked out his planting spot partly because he had never seen deer near it, no tracks or scat. He pushed on, winded but excited now, over the boggy ground beneath the power lines, catching a whiff of the thawed mackerel in his backpack that Starr had tossed in the garbage thinking they were on the turn.
Through a stand of spindly maples Innis beheld his clearing. Well above the power line break, he had never seen hunters this far up last fall. It was conspicuous in no particular way, at least on this afternoon whose sky had gone from blue to dank white, the sun’s heat strong but the light diffused. Birch and maple ringed it, and a few spruce stark and brittle, ashen, as if an incredible frost had blasted them, but in fact just tiny worms, a plague that had passed. Young spruce were straying into the clearing and that was good. There in the new grass were the pine seedlings he’d brought here months ago, stuck in the ground like sticks, not a needle on any of them, rusty as old metal. Christmas pines? More like grave markers. A forlorn time anyway when he’d planted them, desperate to put anything down in this place, to say mine. And the clearings were always attracting him then, in the fall, he’d turn toward one and then another because he expected something living to be there, he didn’t know what.
He set to work with a pleasure no other task had matched, spacing the pots zigzag so they would look natural, like weeds, if someone did happen by, seduced, like him, by the light of a clearing. He chopped through mats of sod and stubborn roots, worked the soil clean of stones. Tougher than Claire’s little plot, but oh what flowers would be blooming here! When the reddish clay was as fine as he could make it with a trowel, he prodded each plant free of its pot, nesting carefully the white net of roots into its hole where half a mackerel waited, tail, or head with its foggy eyes. He shaped a small basin around each one to hold the water he’d have to carry to get them started, and keep carrying if the summer was dry. A few pails from the spring. A good hike but still closer than any of the brooks. That spring only dried up once, Starr said, in the worst summer for rain we ever had, when I came home from the navy. The guy in the pot book said, Those roots got a trauma, pardner, if you know what I mean, and they need a nice deep drink of water to ease their pain. Innis whittled small branches from a willow, poked them into the ground and made plastic tents for each plant out of five-pound potato sacks. They’d keep off a late frost, and maybe deer too if they were nosing around. Would they even eat marijuana? Wouldn’t hurt them to try it, might tune their ears even finer, sniff out a hunter downwind. The book writer didn’t mention deer, but how could he know? He never thought about north, he didn’t know these boreal woods, so removed from a pot-loving sun.
Innis stood back admiring the snug protection of his tiny greenhouses, hardly visible in the low brush. Suddenly he sensed something behind him and whirled, raising the mattock like a club: nothing. But it got his heart going, he was edgy anyway, Christ. Some animal. Maybe the cat? He made a wailing, mewing sound, friendly, not fearful, and listened again, he didn’t know just what sound this cat would make. But there was only the mute trees, the misty green light of new leaf. A tall gaunt spruce, grey with lichen, creaked against a windfall it had captured in its branches. The plastic tents fluttered and breathed. Nothing but what was always here when the wind capered through woods, the subtle sounds of branch and needles and leaves. Innis drove the pickhead hard into the ragged brown bore of a stump and left it standing. No one could ruin this, not after the weeks of nursing those seedlings, whispering to them, holding his breath every time Starr walked along the upstairs hall, or was curious as to why the ceiling light in the kitchen dimmed sometimes, but he never bothered to investigate it. Well, the plants were safely hidden now, and who could prove Innis owned them anyway? Deep in trees nobody cared about, a dozen plants whose leaves and buds people liked to light up and inhale, harming no one. The whole operation here could be over by early September, maybe sooner if the weather was right, Innis gone and the pot too, not a soul this side of the island tainted by anything Innis had done. Over and out.
Innis hid the basket in a clump of young fir. He’d have to fetch a few pails of sweet water from the spring, and the seedlings, so dry from their pots, would draw it up like blood.
But first, the skinny joint he’d saved, once hoping to share it with Claire in this very clearing, to give his seedlings a lucky send-off with her lovely touch, then watch her kiss a toke, and when she passed it back to him, he would inhale a taste of her. Instead, it was just him, loading his lungs for a good buzz. The wind was cooler, the sun seemed underwater. He felt real affection for his plants, arranged there, free of Starr’s house, on their own, their roots already beginning tender investigations of this new, deep ground. You live a little differently when you have room, Starr said once of the country, though he didn’t say just how. Innis laughed. Love. Damn it, this was the only love he was likely to get, the hot and roving fancies of good weed, and there were lots worse things to put your lips to. He got up and wandered about the clearing, pressing his footprints down into the soft sod. He pissed against the scarred bark of a birch tree. How’s this, Mr. Cat? Raise your tail here tonight if you want. The pick stuck up from the stump like a stroke of Chinese writing, black against the greening woods. He pressed his palms together: Lord, give the deer everything they love, leaves and buds and wild apples, but let them pass my cannabis sativa by.
From far down on the road, the faint buzz of a car with a bad muffler, soon gone. Here, out in the sticks, you’d have to be careful and clever: a stolen car could stand out like a firetruck. Be a challenge, though. He’d never stolen the cars for money—with one exception—not for anyone but himself and his own escape, a particular high. People often left the keys dangling there, asking to be turned. Richer the better, the careless ones accustomed to money, dropping things casually in their wake. All you had to do was open the door, and later a guy would come out of a bar and could not believe his luxurious set of wheels had vanished, he would rush all over the lot, up and down the street thinking he’d done something wrong, forgotten where he parked it, embarrassed. Innis was well away by then, taking the crazy back streets of Boston, laid out for horses a long time ago. Staying off the roads the cops cruised, didn’t he always leave it on a side street before daylight, clean as when he’d driven it away, maybe smells in the seats and leather that weren’t there before? All except that one, that Porsche he’d stolen for money because he’d been drinking then and was cocky and stupid when the hard guys asked him to steal it, Just park it a certain place and there’s a grand in it for you, Innis. There wasn’t, there wasn’t anything in it but grief, and what was he to do about it? Go after them with a gun?
Still, he’d never seen himself as a criminal. He didn’t think it sexy or macho to be hustled into a police cruiser in cuffs while neighbors looked on like he’d just knifed his mother, to be preached at by a juvenile court judge, to spend time in a detention center with toughs and fuckups. He’d just wanted the cars, couldn’t stop himself from taking them, each one grooved him into a mood he needed. And the court convictions, they seemed to accumulate in a dream, and finally they’d crashed through the ceiling. As a kid, when his mother yelled him out of her hair or argued with his dad about money or about things to do with Cape Breton—they never seemed to agree on how to think about “down home,” they loved it to tears one day and the next recalled ways it had held them back—on those days Innis would wander up the street trying car doors, looking for one shiny and big and unlocked, and he would sit inside, the windows rolled up, in the deep plush comfort of its seats, eager for whatever flight. He would play the wheel that could turn him in any direction he wished, his voice for a motor. The silent hand of the dashboard clock advanced, just an instrument among others, measuring he didn’t know what. And always that smell of new, all new. More than once he was found asleep in the back seat, but no one accused him of felonies, a boy sleeping in a car not his own was not illegal, not yet, and his mother was crying when they brought him home, but she slapped him too, angry because she was scared, undone. He would undo her many times more, fraying her, later, especially when a new man came home with her, he gave her a hard time. But he had never heeded what his mother told him until it was too late, the one thing he truly needed to remember: You are not a citizen, they could send you straight back to Canada some day. And after the final hammer came down on his head, he asked her why in hell she hadn’t made him a U.S. citizen, for Christ’s sake. Listen, Innis, she said, it wasn’t my lookout, it was your dad’s, he tended to things like that, not me, and he always thought we might go back home, I never thought about it later, not a citizen myself yet, I didn’t think it would ever come to this, how could I?
He savored his supper that night, two salt codfish cakes fried crusty in butter, washed down with ice water. The sun was sliding into dove grey cloud above the mountain, burning like steel on the sheened surface of the strait, glimmers of sequined light, thrilling, then gone. A calm excitement in every simple action, the last bite of food, drinking cold water from a glass. He had an itch to sketch. A cat, its still-mysterious face, burning too, tufted ears alert. Paws big, the size he’d seen in snow. Dan Rory told him there’d been a mountain lion on the island once, he’d seen him, quite a beast it was, he said, but it was shot in a trap eventually. Eventually. Innis flipped a page and did a quick take of Claire, leaning into her spade, smiling, a bit tousled by her labor, her blouse undone deeper than it had been, a sexy hitch to her hip, a pose she might have assumed for a joke, if he’d asked her. He liked shaping her with his pen, now she knew he could draw her well. Okay, the impulse had been juvenile, but the nude sketches were good. This ballpoint pen in his hand could turn out a vision of her, and yet she was up there someplace in the green hinterlands of Cape Breton, doing something not like this on the paper at all, her expressions would be totally different from what he had drawn, her hair would be tousled in a different way, her leg, arm, hip angled some other way from how he had her in these lines and hatchings. She and Starr now, maybe, heading for a motel on the Cabot Trail. Getting away, that’s what lovers did—they excluded you. No surprise in that. Well, he’d sown his crop. Leaving wasn’t just another vague, murky intention. A red spill of cloudy light, the mountain a long silhouette beneath it: it had once looked only like a wall to him, and Starr had said, if you want to go west, you got to go over that mountain, and I don’t mean just by car. Through the screen door the wind turned suddenly, carrying with it distance, momentum, places it had passed through, the fragrance of trees, the sea. At night now Innis opened his window high to feel it sweep over his body.
His plants, in that cool clay, deep in a woods their genes had not prepared them for. Was there a Gaelic word for pot?
He tidied up the attic, around the loom, swept up traces of soil. Pushing a trunk aside, he found a long-dead mouse behind it: a grey puff, dessicate as bird down, its tailbone tiny beads. Not really a mouse at all but a misty grey aura that dispersed like dandelion seed when he blew on it. He was tempted to look into the trunk, but no, this was not the time to pore over the old things of this house, he was moving forward. He unfastened the lights from the loom, carried them and the warming tray out to the toolshed and stashed them in the loft, maybe Starr could use that kind of heat and light someday. One big risk, the attic risk, was over. He was sorry, in a way, it had charged the air at times. Like the evening the lights went out when they were all in the parlor. Good Christ, Starr said, why are we cooking so many fuses? I’ve screwed in a goddamn boxful. He dragged impatiently on his cigarette, it glowed bright, and Innis had listened to Claire’s breathing, it was easy to hear it in the dark, until she said, I guess it’s my turn, and went off to find a flashlight. It’s the old wiring, Innis said. Something new in the old wiring, Starr said. But he never sought it out.
Just about dark, Innis hitched a ride on a propane truck that dropped him off at Dan Rory and Finlay’s. He walked up the hill across the brook, through the path he’d cut, and found Finlay bent into the weeding of their potato patch below the house, Dan Rory at the end of the row talking away but not about weeds or potatoes.
“You referring to the power in those damn lines up the hill there?” Dan Rory said, waving his cane toward the upper woods. “It shoots over our heads to the mainland. What good was the Wreck Cove Project to us?”
Finlay flung aside a fistful of weeds, smacked a mosquito. “That was a feat of engineering, Daddy. That’s the modern world.”
“Come out of those potatoes, it’s after getting dark. Listen, they blasted rock and dug out the earth and cut down thousands of trees, yiss. They messed up the old lakes there in The Barrens, linked them with concrete. What are you trying to tell me?”
“We got lakes to burn, Daddy. Important places have dams and things, for Jesus sake. The fish are fading, the mines shutting down. But the Wreck Cove Hydroelectric Project, now that’s a different pig altogether.” Finlay stood up, rubbing his spine. “Look, there’s Innis himself. How’re you now?”
“I’m good, Finlay. On my way home from Father Lesperance’s, just wanted to say hello.”
“We were on about the Everlasting Barrens, way up in the Highlands,” Dan Rory said. “A maze of little roads there now, after the Project, I’d get lost myself.”
“I shot a moose up there years ago,” Finlay said. “Felt bad about it. They invite their own killing. Deer will gambol away but a moose, he’ll just keep eating, he’s that kind of animal.”
“Or charge right at you. Have you eaten moose, Innis?”
“Never had the pleasure.”
“Och, they’re a big beast. Come inside for a cold drink.”
Innis said no, he really couldn’t, Starr would pick him up on the road any minute. He idled long enough to discuss the bats flowing out the west gable of the house, dozens of them, “We don’t care, Finlay said, “they can have the attic, eat mosquitoes by the carload, you know.”
A thin moon had crept above the southern hill, up toward the power line. Innis would have preferred a darker night.
“Have you seen that sight before, Innis?” Dan Rory said, pointing his cane over Innis’s head. The sky above the mountain ridge pulsed with flickering, shadowy lights of unimaginable size, their source hidden by the mountain, their rays wavering in the dark blue sky. A chill rushed up his back.
“No,” he said.
“Northern lights,” Finlay said. “Something to do with the polar ice, I think. I’ve seen them brighter.”
“We thought they were the breath of dead warriors,” Dan Rory said. “A long time ago.”
Innis glanced back at the tall upstairs windows already lit and that brought him down. They went to bed early, these old men. He bid them good night, leaving with an alibi, should he need one.
He jumped the ditch into the trees whenever he heard a car. He didn’t want anyone to see him walking toward the Wharf Road, not tonight. And there was a chance that the priest might be at his cottage now that the weather was turning. But no, it was dark. Captain MacQueen’s silver poplar loomed in full leaf, shadowing the little house. He was nervous, he hadn’t expected that, and so he continued on past the Captain’s garage, stopping for a dutiful look in the priest’s window. He tried the door to see if it was busted. Nope. If he got caught in the Captain’s, they wouldn’t send him away, they would put him away. But at the moment he was comfortable in his innocence, he basked in it, he was almost sorry to cash it in. I’m a good boy, Father, not a Catholic but I’m okay for the moment. Have I done anything lately bad enough for confession? I wish.
He stood on the wharf, the water beneath him slapping through the blackened timbers, their bolts and pins exposed and harsh, they’d rip a hull quick. A lively place once, a ferry back and forth, cars, people, the priest’s cottage was a thriving store. A rough stretch of water sometimes, squally seas when the wind tore over a strong tide. He wished he had a boat and the knowhow, he’d sail her right down that strait, under the bridge and into the ocean. Ports were great places to start over, their wharfs clustered with boats. The distances here, a glance could take in miles of mountain, long sweeping looks you wouldn’t get in a city.
Telling himself it was precaution, making sure he was alone here, he plodded along the beach. A car had spun deep ruts, somebody parking for a hot session, beer bottles flung into the sand, before or after. He had not often seen cars here in the day, not in winter, except for the odd one come down for a gaze at the strait. He arced a bottle end over end into the water, a white splash in the small, steady waves. Starr could fix TVs and stereos, but there he was in a grubby old shop, a throwback, totting up bills on an adding machine you cranked, paper tape unspooling over the floor. But Starr didn’t care, it didn’t matter if people came to him only by word of mouth, that there was nothing in the window but the twisted, dusty blades of a dead aspidistra. And Starr didn’t care, no matter what he might say in his cups, to go any further than the boundaries of Cape Breton Island, and most of the time St. Aubin Island itself, tucked safely inside it, would do him. But Claire? How long would she hang around? If she was still here in the fall, the fall …
Innis cut in behind the old garage and stood listening, his back pressed against the weathered shingles. Why couldn’t a guy they called Moneybags build himself a good garage, protect that sweet machine inside? All oiled motion, that Caddy, a car that swam. Innis was shivering as he came up through the hatch and set out searching the house, moving through it confidently now, switching the flashlight off when he passed a window. What if the man didn’t keep any keys here? Maybe someone else looked after them. But the old Captain, God bless him, had to be nothing if not neat, adept at hiding things from sight. Innis spent a little time in the obvious places, whipping drawers open and shut, rooting under linen. The flashlight flared in the glass doors of a tall cabinet. There, inside the third from the left of a nice row of brass-hook-hung mugs with different sailing ships on each, sat a nest of keys, among them two with a Cadillac logo. Yes.
Cracks and seams of moonlight scored the earthy darkness of the garage, caressing the car’s black finish. Damn, he liked that short rear deck, the classic lines. Seville. Best looker Cadillac ever made, as far he was concerned. The key slid into the lock smoothly and he laughed as he inhaled the leathery smell and eased himself behind the wheel. But the ignition switch lit nothing on the dash. Battery. Stowed. He found it on a small wall bench plugged into a trickle charger, a half-inch box wrench lying beside it for the cable nuts. Captain MacQueen, always at the ready, gear within reach. Innis dropped the battery into the engine compartment, connected the cables. Even the engine was clean. When he turned it over, the squawk of the starter seemed disturbingly loud and he sat for a while before he tried again, his heart going hard. But who would hear it? Only this house and the priest’s on the Wharf Road. The third go the engine caught, ran rough for a little and then idled quietly. He revved it but not high. Couldn’t run it for long, even in a garage peppered with holes, but he knew how smoothly it would respond on the road, how it would carry him. Tank was almost on full. Before anybody discovered the empty garage, he could be miles away west, a few days’ driving if he slipped out of here late at night, an hour and a half and he’d be off the island, across the Strait of Canso, go all night with the radio and just enough weed to make the road interesting, stop for doughnuts and coke when the munchies hit. He’d head out across those long, half-deserted Canadian highways where you could pull over and piss in the trees and nobody’s headlights would pick you out, there would be only the silence of the endless woods and your own trickle and steam, the car idling on the shoulder, waiting to carry you as far as you wanted to go, and as you pulled away, the lights might sweep across a pulpwood road cut into the trees and it would chill you, imagining the dark woods and monotonous labor and being trapped in that kind of life. And no borders to cross but provincial ones, no cold customs officials looking him over grimly like he was a serial killer with a razor hidden in his shoe. He could ditch it maybe near Toronto, push it in a river somewhere, sell it even, cheap and quick, and start living again, city living. But he could not push his imagination into the blurry regions of this vision, he pulled back from its necessary details into the simple certainty of his plan: the plants were in the ground, growing this very minute. When the earth warmed up, they’d flourish there in the woods, flower, bring him profit. Then he could leave the way he wanted.
Smelling exhaust, he turned off the ignition. A gentle wind had risen, rustling the big poplar. He’d have to do this fast, get out quick and button her up.
The old doors, sagging on their hinges, dragged in the dirt as he pushed each one open wide. Then he backed out slowly, the space was narrow, and left the engine running without lights while he closed the garage. A quick look around and he jumped behind the wheel. Lights, reverse, ease out, into drive, and away, calmly, no rush, laying no rubber. The Seville took the road smoothly, for a stored car, accelerated without a miss. At the Ferry Road he turned west toward The Head. His breath fogged the windshield, he was breathing hard like he’d been running and he rubbed the glass with his fist. His brights picked out animal eyes at the roadside and he dimmed quickly. No unnecessary attention, please, don’t look like you’re running off with somebody else’s car, headlights screaming down the road. Just a loan. Hey, he’d earned it, he’d paid his dues here and no one could tell him different. The brakes were a bit soft, and the steering wheel off a couple degrees, he’d have thought that would have bugged the Captain, fussy guy. But everything else was cool. Let Starr and Claire have the Lada, that old lunchbox. He was wired, had to settle down, too long since he’d driven a vehicle like this, though North St. Aubin was hardly a network of dangerous streets. It was not a town or even a village, but a community in the manner of the Highlands, Dan Rory had told him, a run of farms, in its original makeup, on a long single road, it never had the focus of a village, no center, no collection of shops, just two churches, a store, a fire hall, and in the old days, a forge here, a grist mill there, for a town you went elsewhere, but we were all held together just the same, he said.
The road ran close to the water, past cottages clinging to a piece of shore land, lit with summer residents or weekenders, but at The Head where it turned southward there was nothing at first between him and the beach but a strip of shingle, the hills of Cape Breton Island clear and dark across the moonlit water, green places he did not know and did not intend to know, just a light here and there, and the lights of a little town, a cluster of excitement at this distance, to his eyes now it might as well be Boston, whatever it was a long journey by car across the bridge and over the mountain, but direct by boat or by ice the way they used to go when the roads were poor and seasonal, terrible mud, Starr said, and the heavy snows. The paved road ended, the dirt smooth and graded at first, then trees closed in and it turned rough, crisscrossed by little gullies of water, baring rocks. He braked for ruts, groaning at every muddy splash resounding in the wheel wells. No damage, please. Mud spray was bad enough. The road narrowed and he swore, he’d expected the good road would take him clear around The Head to Southside St. Aubin, all he’d need now was a patch of mud bad enough to mire him. He didn’t dare turn back. This was the pace of horse and wagon. He wanted to move, bust out. God. Dense woods right to the roadside.
A skinny driveway dropped away into trees, so fast out of sight he couldn’t spot the house, just a mailbox. Summer places probably, no door he’d want to knock on in any case. Hi, look, sorry to bother you but I got this stolen Cadillac up there and I need to get it out of the mud quick, could I use your phone? Jesus, headlights coming his way, barely two lanes. Innis slowed even more, straddling the ditch edge as the headlights glared anonymously toward him, the stupid bastard had his brights on. Shit, talk about getting a good look. Innis averted his face as the vehicle passed by, near enough to touch, and assumed the shape of a pickup, mudspattered, the guy must live along here somewhere, no other reason to be on this goddamn road unless you were crazy enough to take a Cadillac down it. He caught glimmers of water through the lower trees, the road widened, he passed a deep field and a good house at the back of it where the land sloped away to the water, Innis knew there was water below the way the light came up behind it. He hit pavement again and picked up speed, it was like taking a deep breath, tires centrifuging mud until they cleared it and the car whispered cleanly again. He relaxed a little, tilted the electric seat back, lowered it, made room for his legs. No breakdowns please, pulled over on the shoulder with a wheel jacked up while anyone driving by could get a good gawk at him wrestling with a spare. This car had been idle for months, no telling what might balk. Moisture in the wiring, the gas. He gave it more gas, the grades and curves were gentle. A long farm unfolded on both sides of the road, up the hill and down toward the water, a prosperous spread, nothing like it on the north side. The water a good way below the road. St. Georges Channel, deep water there, Starr said, eight, nine hundred feet. A car passed him in the opposite direction, fine, it sped out of sight, but when another pulled up close behind, he slowed enough to let it pass. In Boston he had never worried who saw him in a good car as long it wasn’t the alerted police, but now everyone he encountered tightened him up and he felt like he should get off the highway, not cruise on it. After all, this was not his flight out of here, he was not heading off from St. Aubin, from Cape Breton Island, from Nova Scotia, not yet. Everyone who set eyes on this car was a threat, he was exposed, might as well be driving a tractor-trailer. This was not a kick after all, not the high he had hoped for. All he wanted now was to get this car out of sight.
Innis squinted for signs of a road back to the north side, hit the brakes and backed up when his headlights caught a sign MACLEANS CROSS. Dirt road again but high, better, more clearings, some big fields, and what looked like a track for running horses. But very dark when the trees closed in again. Okay with him. He was crossing a high part of the island, surprisingly level for a long stretch, when there was a flicker of fur at the edge of his lights and immediately an ugly thump, low at the wheel well. He swerved too late, he stopped, leaped out, his heart thumping. Behind him the engine idled smoothly as he strained to make out the dark form on the road, an animal, yes, and then he heard someone calling further back in the dark, yelling a name. Innis slid back behind the wheel and screeched away, killing his lights until the road turned and descended, passing a house carved into the dense spruce and another before he reached Ferry Road and could make for the wharf again. He was sweating, the steering wheel was damp. He’d have to wipe everything, smear away every fingerprint. A dog. Jesus. Somebody’s dog.
He drifted down the Wharf Road with his lights out and, after he opened the garage, steered the Seville inside faster than he’d backed it out and barred the doors. He stood in the dark listening. Then he quietly got back inside the car and touched the glow of the dashboard lighter to the tip of a joint. What a trip! If that person got the license, he was fucked. But the voice had been way down the road, they couldn’t have seen much. He jabbed the radio button past classical music, a pop station, somebody talking, then hit the sweet huskiness of the French DJ. What the hell was she saying? Could be anything, just dumb DJ jabber, but a hot voice nevertheless, he could take it in his hands almost, draw it into him. Claire had French blood in her, her mother’s side. Didn’t she murmur Innis in her fevered sleep? But she was out of her head that night, delirium didn’t count. She might have said Starr in the same voice, breathing it, puzzled or yearning, you couldn’t be sure. A small scar on her ribs. Details came to him. A beauty mole, a perfect daub above her breast. If she were here in this car, in the sealed warmth of exchanged breath, of moist lipstick, that faint, inverted, intimate whistle of pot smoke, shared and held, he could forget he had just killed a dog with another man’s car. Ash in the ashtray, singed paper, the sulfur of an extinguished match. The two of them, everything else shut out.
He sat in the glow of the dashlights, recycling the smoke he had made. The DJ, she had cued a record, some rock band, but Innis preferred her voice to the music. Rock? The lyrics sounded goofy in French, dubbed, unreal. Maybe they were really singing about mushrooms or wine or cheese, not about funky love, about disappointment and anger and electric guitars. Okay, he would learn French, go live up in Cheticamp on the west coast of the big island or some other Acadian place in Cape Breton like L’Ardoise or Isle Madame, meet a different kind of people. Make himself over in a new language, take another name. The priest might have some advice on that, sure. And on some things Innis didn’t want advice on too. The priest. Where was Father Lesperance from? The man had a thirst. So what. Innis had a thirst too. How did a telephone get into a French rock song? Christ, the phone was ringing in the house! Radio, off! He sat rigid, each ring pounding in his ears. It was so loud he almost expected to hear someone answer it Hello? He tried to count the rings, was it three longs, a couple shorts? Then it stopped. He fell back on the seat, too weak to move. Phones rang simultaneously in every house, he still forgot that sometimes: you just listen for your ring, and he didn’t know MacQueen’s. But other people did, and it would’ve rung in their houses too and somebody might be saying right now, Wasn’t that Captain MacQueen’s ring, now who in the world would be ringing his number now, him still in Florida? Phones were bad enough at the best of times, they screamed for attention, they brought bad news, and Innis could count on both hands the times he had used one in St. Aubin. But it was the grass that gave him the fright, the phone just plugged into it like an electrical wire. Paranoia. Easy.
He closed up the Caddy quietly, every click, and ran a rag over the door and hood where his greasy prints were visible after he took the battery out. With each disengaging step he dealt himself another alibi, in case in case, goddamn it, he couldn’t take anything for granted now, if they can send you across the border for good, Look, I work for Father Lesperance over the road there, I thought I saw a couple kids sneak under the house, I heard the car doors shutting, and the engine running and I thought, Jesus, what’s going on, I came in to check it out, I didn’t even know the Captain had a car. The keys enclosed in his fist, Innis returned them to the mug, made his way out, feeling along the short hall where the phone’s echo still hung, his flashlight was too dim now, useless. He pulled the back door behind him until the lock clicked and stood with his eyes closed under the enormous poplar, wind high in its leaves, their pale undersides rustling in the dark like water.
HE WAS GLAD to see Starr’s house slowly come into view, pitch dark and empty, the high moon over it, and Starr wouldn’t be there asking him where he’d been this late, walking. He was exhausted, footsore, thinking of the dead dog, he hated killing an animal like that but Christ it shot out of the dark, what could he do. Over an hour it had taken him to cover this road, scrambling for cover at the first sign of headlights, like a strafed refugee. The rest of the time it was the scuff of his feet, his breathing, a little humming and muttering to himself until the pot faded and he was merely tired, even the utility pole lights seemed unusually bright as he trotted to get beyond their reach. A buck had snorted up in dark trees, loud, driving Innis into the ditch until he heard the thump and crash of its departure. People used to walk here all the time in the old days, nothing at all to hoof it in the dark for miles, Starr said, setting out in search for a ceilidh or a kitchen racket or any sort of drop-in fun, through fields, woods, whatever, nobody thought twice about distance, it was a kind of walking that didn’t exist anymore. Innis was only pounding along the shoulder of a paved road, straightest way home now, no shortcuts, he didn’t know any. He should have been at the wheel of a car, not running away from one. Maybe Claire and his uncle had found a dance up there somewhere. She had to be a hell of a dancer, didn’t she, with those long smooth legs? Do you dance, Innis? she might say. No. Yes. On the dance floor of my head. Too tired to think about it. Farming was hard work, this kind, trekking way up in the woods. Harder yet on the nerves. The Caddy was supposed to be … what? Recreation? What a joke. The woods below the house had merged in darkness with water and mountain. The mountain was a mountain of sleep, a long, reclining, quiet mountain, hushed by its forest.
Too weary to bathe, he gulped down two glasses of water and stripped, toppling onto his bed. What a downer, the whole evening, flattening someone’s dog and running off, they’d want to string him up if they found him, and why not, he deserved it. Couldn’t sleep, his head teeming, his feet burning as if he had a fever. Should he tie salt codfish to them? That’s what Granny would have done. Would she have a salve for his heel blister, for his heart? He realized that he was weeping, he could not believe the sobs that broke from him, he couldn’t swallow them, keep them down. Then he gave in to it, let self-pity and anger wash over him, who would hear it after all, it was just between him and himself, the boy and the man.
Soon it passed into rueful laughter, man oh man he had fucked things up. But his plants were in, they were in the ground! From inside the pillowslip he pulled out the stolen panties, fingering the silken material. A scent of dried flowers, the sachet Claire kept in her drawer. He should put them back, this minute, this was nuts. Starr has her. You have her underwear. He went to her room and stuffed them back in the dresser, took a long, thoughtful piss, and then fell into sleep.
Loud moonlight, cold and clean, pulled him awake. In those first moments its light was fused with a cry that terrified him, fixed him to his bed. Where was it? Outdoors, not in. From the wooded gully just west of the house? In the crazy turmoil of his mind he thought it might be the dog, it had dragged itself here somehow to torment him, but no no, that road was a few miles away and this was no sound a dog could make. Like a shriek and a yowl entwining, tortured, urgent, pitched more to nightmare than waking. It rose again, raw and terrible. Was it killing, or being killed? Animal, but what? Something you couldn’t shoot, couldn’t kill, could you? It had come too far, he had no measure for it. He lay there stiff, his heart flayed by the sound, gripped by nothing else until it stopped. His ears ached with listening. There was no other noise, nothing of a creature. The silence seemed stunned by the moonlight spilling over his body, the deep woods sweeping away into night.
The utter wildness of what he had heard had numbed his hands and legs but under his ceiling light the room took on its familiar cast. He went from room to room switching on lights, and finally the television, whose foolish and misshapen images calmed him. Bolder now, afraid but fascinated, he went outside and swept a flashlight across the dark field, lurching along like a drunk. Nothing, nothing different: the stolid spruce and white birches of the gully, the spindly willows. The old stone pile glittered dimly with broken glass. Not a stalk of weed or grass or bush moved. There was nothing in those trees he should fear, yet the hideous cry of some animal had gutted him. “Hey!” he yelled. “I didn’t mean it! It was an accident!” His voice was small, nothing. The tiniest bird would have been louder. He turned the beam toward the gully, the summer gurgle of the brook. But there was nothing there.