HIS UNCLE HAD NOT returned by dark. Innis hoped Starr would be gone for the night, wherever he took himself now that he never answered the phone.
Innis did not dare hitch a ride down Ferry Road, he walked the whole long way as he had the time he took the Caddy out for a dry run, leaping off the roadside at the first glow of headlights. But this was a Sunday night, more than usual traffic from the cottages at The Head. He’d get a stretch where he could cover some ground before cars showed up, some at such rates of speed the ditch was safer than the shoulder. Only two kinds of Cape Breton drivers, his dad said years ago, go like a scalded cat or a cow with a calf in her. The houses he passed were far apart, set back a long way in fields or trees, but if one was nearer the road with lights in the windows, Innis crossed to the other side. One here and there he’d worked in, like Mrs. Melchuk’s, an elderly widow, her father came from the Ukraine, Innis had cleared her snow, repaired her sagging steps, her eave spouts ripped by frost, she fed him meat pastries in her steamy kitchen, he’d love one right now, she liked to talk about her husband, a steelworker in Sydney for years and years, and this little yellow house in the country they were to enjoy when he retired but he died of silicosis. The MacLeod house with its wide white verandah, bought by Americans as a summer place where last fall Starr got Innis hired on a remodelling crew because the contractor was a friend, but Innis quit after a few days, the men asked too many questions, What’re you up here for, b’y, no work in Boston? and Starr, disgusted, said, What the hell did you expect with an accent like yours? Sure they’re going to ask questions. There was Reverend MacLennan’s place, a huge old house he couldn’t get the bats out of, a retired minister, he hated them with a passion that made his big blue eyes widen when he talked about them, and Innis had waited one night in his yard, the minister standing behind him, watching bats stream out of the attic gable, startling gusts of them in the moonlight, and to pass the time he told Rev. MacLennan about the anthropologist he’d heard on the radio who’d eaten bat soup in Maylasia, tiny bones in it that crunched in your teeth, and the Reverend made an awful sound in the back of his throat, Look at them, look at the little devils, he said, shuddering, they scratch in the walls at night, horrible, and Innis went into the attic and plugged every gable opening he could find while the minister waved a flashlight under him, Hurry, hurry up before they get back. But there was no moon tonight.
He trotted down Wharf Road breathing hard until he saw that both houses were dark, the priest’s, the Captain’s, but he circled MacQueen’s quietly, what if the old guy was inside and sleeping? He banged on the front door. No light, nothing, so he slipped under the house, last time for this funky hole, in through the hatch. He could tell someone had been here cleaning up, maybe MacKeigan getting things ready for the Captain, a smell of Lysol, and the curtains had been spread wide, but Innis didn’t need a flashlight anymore, he slid through the house like a cat burglar. The ship’s clock chimed and brought him up short, he’d not heard that before, and he froze until it stopped. Seven bells, whatever that was. The keys however were not in the mug and he went through the whole cupboard, Christ, who moved them? that was the Captain’s hiding place. There was not time to search elsewhere, he had to get out of here, could he hot-wire it? But in the garage when he opened the Caddy’s door, the dome light lit: battery already installed, keys in the ignition, dangling, ready. Sorry, Captain. It’s only a loan, no one will take better care of it.
Driving back, only three cars passed him from the other direction, he drove at a sensible speed, if the car was seen they’d say, Well now, I didn’t know the Captain was down, but there he was on the road last night, couldn’t wait to get into that nice Cadillac, no. Innis’s plan was to pull down behind the toolshed long enough to fetch his suitcase and get away, hit the mainland before sunrise, but shit, the Lada was parked at an odd angle in the lower driveway. Damn you, Starr. He idled on the shoulder, his eyes at the rear-view mirror, where in hell could he hide this now? He buzzed the window down. Car coming around the curve behind him, he could hear it, and as he started off again he remembered the old logging road on the MacLeod property, long unused, could a Caddy get up there? He was afraid he couldn’t spot it fast enough in the dark but he saw a culvert and he turned and crossed it, headlights meeting the thick weeds, he gunned the engine, the car fish-tailing, skidding in and out of the old ruts, the lights of another car zipped past in the door mirror, Innis hoped the guy hadn’t seen him. He worked the Cadillac just beyond a turn, alders and young spruce and willow bushes raking the undercarriage, he couldn’t take it further than this, he’d get hung up. Lights off, engine. He leaned his head on the seat back. What time was it? The dashboard clock was screwy, must be getting on for midnight. Crickets, no longer shrill, resumed their muted, fading notes. The nights were colder. Later, he could back down without the engine, ease her onto the road when it was clear.
INNIS WALKED AS casually as he could down the long driveway. Seaward in the east, clouds were rising rapidly into a starless sky. There was one lighted window upstairs but the rest were dark, the fields as black as the woods. Starr was silhouetted in the door of the toolshed, a bottle of rum sitting on the bench under the dirty lightbulb. Innis turned past him toward the house.
“Where the hell you been on foot?” his uncle said.
“I don’t drive. Remember? And I don’t have to answer any questions.”
“A man has to answer somebody’s, sooner or later.” Starr flicked his cigarette into the darkness. “I thought you were in your room. You left the light on.”
“It isn’t my room.”
“Funny, I could’ve sworn I saw you there, oh, the last few months or so. Well, fàgaidh sìoda is sròl is sgàrlaid gun teine an fhàrdach.”
“Save it, Starr, whatever it means.”
“Silk and satin and scarlet, b’y, they leave a fireless, cheerless hearth. Claire called.”
“She did?” Innis came nearer his uncle.
“She didn’t.” Starr showed his teeth in a slow smile. “I just wanted to see the look on your face, Innis. Move into the light a little better, yes, you look like a puppy. Hoping for a pet, a little bone.”
Innis’s fist flew out before he even thought and sent his uncle sprawling into the toolshed, clawing the air. Innis took a fighting stance, breathing hard, fists cocked, he didn’t care, but Starr sat on the floor looking out at him. He touched his chin, pushed it side to side, then laughed quietly, shaking his head. “Go on,” he said. “Get away out of here.”
His uncle did not come in from the toolshed and Innis paced in his room praying the man would crash. His hands were shaking as he spread them out before him. Funny what hands could do, what they could take hold of, let loose. Claire. Here. Once. He flopped back on the bed, but soon sat up. No, no sleeping here anymore. He raised the hall window a few inches, he could hear Starr growling to himself but couldn’t see him, he’d finish that damn bottle before he quit. Innis would never get past him to the Caddy now, not with a suitcase. He pulled out dresser drawers in case he’d missed anything that belonged to him. There was the jar in the toolshed loft but that would have to wait. He poured water from the pitcher into the bowl and soaked his hand. His knuckles hurt, but it was hurt he could live with. Puppy? Jesus. I’ll give him a bone. He dozed in the chair. Claire was in his mind when he woke, he thought he was in Claire’s bedroom, where was she? Not here. Sick or well. The phone rang out, repeated, he lost the count. They were after someone else, too late to call this house anyway. He took his telescope from the dresser top and aimed it out the hall window: toolshed light still burning. Had Starr passed out? Trees were hissing with wind. Mountain was indiscernible from sky until slowly tumbling clouds turned livid with lightning. Thunder rumbled in the soles of his feet. He directed his telescope at the strait: above the thrashing treetops dim whitecaps raced by in darkness. Soft explosions of light. Christ, a nightmare, out there in a boat. The storm broke over the house as he was thinking could he slip past his uncle, past everything, but water was pelting the windows like gravel, and then in his head the tension of lightning, a sizzling blue beyond the barn, this was how he would remember it, a brightness bearable only for the second it took to strike, any longer and it was the light of madness. The lapse between flash and thunder grew shorter until they ripped the sky almost at once. Suddenly a pitchfork flash caught Starr, like a photo negative, leaping a puddle, making for the back door. The lights went out quietly, a pylon had been hit somewhere. Innis drew back from the window, slammed it shut and stood behind the closed door of his room. Soon his uncle came clumsily up the stairs, stumbling, pausing, his footsteps lost in a long erratic break of thunder. “She’d be here!” he shouted outside Innis’s door, “if it wasn’t for you!” then slammed it with his fist. Innis’s heart surged, what bullshit, what lies, he tried to shout back but only a croak came from his throat, he wanted to yank the door open but they would only tear into each other, things that had to be said could never be said. Lightning snapped close by, throwing the deer skull into absurd shadow. Trembling, he raised his walking stick like a club, he felt he could kill or be killed now, at this moment, this very spot.
Innis didn’t move. He heard nothing further from his uncle, only rain shifting across the roof as the storm spilled away into eruptions of distant thunder and fading light. He opened the door slowly, but Starr was not there, nor in the hallway. Still grasping the stick, he found him flung across his unmade bed, a snore mashed beneath his face.
The house was still dark when Innis stopped in the toolshed long enough for a good toke, and then climbed the wooden ladder to the loft, descending with the small jar in his fist. In some mean city he might need it.
He took up his suitcase and started up the driveway in the rain, disguised under the hood of his jumper. Streetlamp out, nobody driving, but they’d have to wonder about him this late at night, hunkered in their headlights, hauling an old gladstone bag. He wheeled around and walked backward for a few steps to take in the darkened house, the barn. Where was the excitement of leaving, the rush? Too much excitement, the wrong kind. Maybe on the highway, an accelerator under his foot, it would hit him.
When he reached the Cadillac the rain had quit, there were rifts in the clouds, whitened by a moon somewhere. He dropped his suitcase in the trunk, struck by how odd it looked under the lid light. With the trunk closed, there was just the darkness again and himself. He was thirsty. How far to the spring from here? Couldn’t be a long hike. He found a dim flashlight under the seat and pushed off up the hill, slipping in rut mud, he was tired, there were deadfalls to climb over, the rough hair of lichen in his hands, dead bark, he’d never been this route and the line break was further off than he’d thought. He rested, saving the flashlight, but the dark seemed to fall in on him so quickly, dizzying him, he forced himself ahead into an alder thicket, a smothering maze of thin branches. Crashing through on the edge of panic, he was breathing too hard, but he was in the open, in the break. The power line rose up overhead. Between this pylon and the next, just above the break, was the spring. Somewhere along here in the wet grassy sod he had found purple-fringed orchids and picked them for Claire, he could smell their faint scent now if he tried, she’d put them in a slim vase of clear glass.
That grey little hut, not easy to pick out with weak batteries, he missed a landmark and backtracked. But there it was, the wooden peg in its doorlatch. He knelt to the door, the peg was jammed tight and he had to work at it, his fingers cold, clumsy. Flashlight flared off the water when he opened the door, spiders trembled in their webs, sorry, fellas, tearing up your hard work, I know how you feel. He angled the beam into the still water, down to the quiet silt of the bottom. Then he put his mouth to the cold surface and drank, it hurt his teeth and he quit, his lips numb. With his head hunched just inside the shelter, out of the dripping trees, he put a match to the roach, toked deeply and nipped it out. He pulled back into the darkness. Maybe another squall moving in, above him long sighs of wind showered moisture from needles and leaves. I don’t know the Gaelic for car thief, Starr said many months ago, don’t make me learn it. The Cadillac, so long hidden, a treasure in a box. Maybe they could have left together, he and Claire. Maybe she would still be here, if. If something. Innis rocked gently on his haunches. A lynx swims like a dog, he had read, and if a foe awaits him at the shore, a lynx will not turn away, but land and fight to the death. Rivers are women, oceans are men. Somewhere he’d heard that and wanted to believe it, it sounded wise and balanced and true, but he still didn’t know what it meant. Claire liked blouses in plain but striking colors, with dramatic collars. How clear that was to him now. She would never come back, not here. Suddenly, his heart beating wildly, he tilted the jar over the water, held it at the verge of spilling, heard the liquid hit with scarcely a sound. He snatched up the flashlight and clicked it again and again, he wanted to see the water but it wouldn’t light and he smashed it on a stone. He threw the jar into the trees, then pegged the door fiercely tight, pressing his forehead hard against the wood.
His legs were shaking as he started down the hill. Jesus, only a little, in all that water, what could it do? Maybe trembling was how poison kicked in, then what? A hot shaking flash, your whole body coming undone, muscles, bones, vessels, cells, every thin little thread you breathed and moved with, all shorting out, every bit of wire burning, a smell on your tongue, black bile searing your voice so you couldn’t cry for help, and who would come anyway, who would hear you melting away while this stuff coursed in your blood like fire, killing every microscopic thing it met there, putting out every light? Would your mind go first, or last? Details rose at him vividly, indulgently, moaning, gagging, convulsions, a chalk-white face, a hideous swollen tongue, guts churning. But these visions had their own life, they were not attached to anyone, not yet, not even his uncle, and the rain began again, washing them from his mind, it was not easy going, he stumbled hard into a water-filled rut, soaked to his knees. In the back seat he struggled out of his wet boots and socks and jeans. If he left now, by daylight he could be well off the Island, by noon maybe out of the Maritimes altogether. Just a few minutes rest on this soft leather. He hadn’t been this whacked since that first week in Dan Rory’s woods, yet what had he done but hike to the spring and back. Claire’s skin, how unbelievably smooth it was, how soothing to think of it.
When he woke, uncomprehending, his head thrown back on the seat, his mouth gaping and dry, everything around him was so strange that for a few seconds he only moved his eyes. Too much grey light in the steamy windows. The first sound was not rain but the claws of a crow on the roof, and as Innis sat up, it flapped away, cawing to its raucous mates in the trees. Jesus, daylight! The wet glare of woods, the sun was already burning behind that lowering sky. He could see up ahead his ragged path of last night, the stomped weeds disappearing now in white mist. He hopped in his bare feet to the trunk and dug out dry jeans and socks, his feet were freezing. Damn it, he’d lost the night, let it get away. Shivering in his undershorts he pissed into the cold grass. The Caddy looked abandoned, they did that to old cars here, drove them up in the woods and walked away, but the Caddy was new, out of place. A chainsaw was snarling up above somewhere, much too near.
He dressed quickly, letting the engine warm up as he backed slowly down, playing the brakes, gritting his teeth at the sounds underneath the floorboards as the car combed back over crushed saplings and brush, skidding, scraping, but gravity got him to the shoulder where he stopped, and after a quick look each way, he backed out onto the Ferry Road and turned, for what he was sure would be the last time, toward the main highway.
The Seville took the road smoothly and he let out his breath, he had to settle down. Raining again, that was in his favor, in rain a car passes and people, huddled inward, might glance up, someone might even say, Wasn’t that Captain MacQueen’s car? But they wouldn’t be sure, the pavement slicked with light, the hiss of tire mist swirling off a black car already gone by, well Jesus, John, was it his, you think? No, no, it couldn’t be, not Moneybags’s, the man’s in Florida still. Let them talk, let them get on the phone and speculate, that could take up a good part of the day, there were other Cadillacs on the TransCanada, he’d be off Cape Breton Island in a couple hours, and by the time they determined the Captain had not arrived, Innis could be in New Brunswick, the car on a side street in St. John or someplace, another few days before anyone would know it was ditched. At the TransCanada intersection, he waited for three cars and a truck to pass, revving the engine, checking the rear-view mirror. They were barrelling all right, the traffic was sparse. He turned west, descending the long curve toward the strait, he was in the flow, ahead of him the elegant arches of the bridge. He didn’t need the radio yet, only motion, flight. The rain had let up but still flew from the metal of the car, like the stormy light off the strait as he levelled out onto the bridge, smoothly, rocked suddenly by wind, girders slashing past the window and through them the waters of the strait turning west like a wide river, the surface all silky metal, disappearing beyond the point that hid Starr’s cove, and lined by the wooded hills of St. Aubin on the side he was leaving behind, and by the high woods of the mountain ahead, and east out the passenger window the weather was rolling off the sea, dark, fast-moving clouds, the sun roiled in them like light in a school of fish. The causeway dipped into a level stretch of highway, past a trailer camp at the base, the bare brown cliff rising behind it where they’d blasted all the stone and fill for the bridge. He sized up two hitchikers as soon as he saw them though he didn’t slacken speed, two young guys hunched and miserable under backpacks. Sorry, fellas, my nerves are tight. Not cool to give you a lift in the Captain’s Cadillac, I’ll lose my momentum, I want to wind up that mountain highway fast. And then he was pushing it upward, keeping speed, the tires screeching slightly as he cut into the first banked switchback where semis sometimes lost it downhill and careened off into roadside trees, he slipped into the outer lane and passed three cars up that long grade, he could feel the strait behind him, there was a motorhome parked in the lookoff, its passengers staring east toward the Atlantic, a wide dramatic view he couldn’t glimpse from his direction, a postcard, he’d seen it in a drugstore. Another squall burst upon the road and he eased back, the curves were nicely banked but too easy to speed on. He tinkered with the electric seat, backing it a little, tilting it, until it held him just right, he was airborne, cresting the mountain, heading down, the silvered light of St. Ann’s Bay north of him, tapping the brakes now and then, letting a car pass him, easy does it. Through the wiperwash he saw the Englishtown turnoff coming up, the ferry route across the mouth of St. Anne’s Bay, but he wouldn’t take that, not this day, he wasn’t going north. If he did, he’d stand out on that small ferry, handing a quarter out the window to a crewman who’d have a great chance to remember him, just the sort of witness a Mountie would pump for information. Could you give me a few details of description, Mr. MacTavish? Oh, a ponytail of red hair he had, not real red, brownish, a sort of hawk nose in high bones, his face, the glass was a bit steamy.… Ahead on the roadside a girl, young woman, long skirt, a shoulder pack, and she turned her head calmly as he went by, smiled, not thumbing, as if walking in rain were just fine with her. Innis didn’t hit the brakes hard, all taillights and skidding, but came to a controlled stop, gliding onto the shoulder until she was a blur in the rear window. In a Caddy, you just sat waiting, engine ticking over, you didn’t back up. He was watching a car approaching in the side mirror, feeling suddenly conspicuous, when he heard a fingernail tapping glass. He buzzed down the passenger window and the opening framed her face, long light hair corkscrewed by rain, freckles across her nose, a pleasant face, tilting her head, smiling.
“You going down north by any chance?” she said. He was going west toward the Canso Causeway. But the Captain’s garage doors were still closed and his Cadillac behind them so far as anybody would know, and here was a girl he didn’t want to say no to.
“How far North?” Innis said.
“Ingonish, or thereabouts?” What would Ingonish cost him, an hour? It wasn’t as if there was a radio alert out for him.
“I can take you a ways.”
“Great. You could turn around and take the ferry, it’s shorter.”
“No, I’ll go around the bay. Sometimes the ferry’s a wait.”
She brought into the humid interior of the car a refreshing current, like a cool spray of water, her cheekbones red, she’d been in the sun. A long madras skirt and a short buckskin jacket stained with rain. She set her pack on her lap.
“You soaked?” Innis said, waiting for a car to pass before he took off. “I’ll turn on the heat.”
“No, no. I just got dropped off a little way back.”
The turn toward St. Anne’s came up quickly, then they were off the TransCanada, passing a lobster restaurant.
“You hungry?” he said.
“Not for that place. I’ve got fruit. You want an apple?”
“Maybe later. I’m more thirsty than anything.” He had no time to pull in there anyway, stare over coffee at the water of South Gut, a shivering smoothness after the squall, and just chat with her, talk of no consequence. She poked around in her pack and brought out a pop bottle, held it out to him uncapped.
“Water,” she said. “Here.”
His face went hot, he didn’t look at her. “I’m okay,” he said. She was talking to him but he only heard her voice. His breath was coming fast. They passed the Gaelic College, the road wound along the bay, down and up. The spring, their spring, his.
“Some bus you have here.” She ran her fingers along the dash.
“It’s not my car.”
She laughed. “What’s a cah? Are you Boston? Maine?”
“Boston. Visiting.”
“You don’t look like a tourist. Nova Scotia plates.”
“You’re not with the Mounties, are you?”
“Am I bugging you? Sorry.”
“It’s … my Uncle Angus’s. He can barely drive anymore, his eyes are bad.”
“Angus who? Where from?”
“Oh Jesus, no family trees, okay? Please? A MacNab, that’s all.”
“Sure, fine.” She muttered at her window, “Never heard of any Angus MacNab around here. Look at that pony in the rain! Poor little devil.” On a hillside field a small shaggy Shetland, head bowed, its rump to the wind. An herbal smell seemed to rise from her clothing, and of damp leather. Was Starr up? Hungover, he’d be thirsty too, gulping water at the sink. Jesus. But it wouldn’t have arrived yet, couldn’t, not down that long hill.
“Going to see someone?” she said.
“Just driving.”
“My mother, she’s home with my aunt, and no men anymore, either of them. It’s nice when you haven’t been home for a while. It’s all easy for a day or two, smiles and love and treats of meals I like. But then she takes a long look at me, with her eye cocked just so, stitching a tear in my skirt, say, a skirt she doesn’t like on me anyway. She can’t help it. She has it in her mind I’m a hippie and won’t let go. I love it there, above the sea. I just can’t stay home anymore, not for long.”
“I want to get away too.” Acts of moral turpitude, the immigration judge had said, a hardnosed Irishman, as an alien you get only one, Mr. Corbett, two at most, and then we send you home.
“From Boston? Live up here you mean?”
“Somewhere west, a long way from here. A real city.”
“Boston not city enough? I loved it for a while, around Cambridge there, around the university. Down there most of a summer. Great music. Awful hot some days.”
He braked for a sharp turn where the road went round a cove, his mind was drifting. He wanted to put mile after mile behind him as if nothing had happened, away so far he would never hear what turned out, not even in a newspaper. But his tongue lay bitter in his mouth. A car resembling a Mountie’s flashed past in the other direction, he hadn’t noticed it coming. He picked it up in the mirror and watched it disappear in the blowing rain.
“There was a bar there we liked,” he said suddenly, “my buddy and me, it had a submarine torpedo game, you aimed torpedos at passing ships, slow ones to fast ones. All hand/eye coordination, and we racked up scores, Ned and me, we were damn good at it. But a college kid came in one day and showed us how to beat the machine. He just held the trigger down and swung the sight from one side to the other real fast, he didn’t even aim it. Free game after free game, he ruined it. It’s easy, he said, don’t let them rip you off. But he didn’t get it. We played for the skill.” He was just yammering, filling the air that sometimes felt too thin to breathe.
“College guys,” she said. “There’s plenty they don’t know, but they don’t know that either.”
When they came out of a long valley and reached the east coast highway, Innis hesitated at the intersection. The Atlantic lay behind trees across the road. He wanted to inhale that rainy ocean light.
“When you’re past Wreck Cove,” she said, “there’s a little cemetery. Could we stop? I wouldn’t be long.”
“That’s a good bit north.”
“Not as far as Ingonish.”
“I’m in kind of a hurry. What’s your name?”
“Jessie.” She studied his face. “You’re awful pale. You okay?”
Feeling a car behind him, he turned north with a squeal of rubber. “Me, I can do without cemeteries. What’s there, relatives?”
“My dad’s there but they had to wedge him in. Sure, it’s relatives. Yourself must have a few around here, under stone.”
The old spring was ringed with stones, he’d knelt against them. “Jessie, I have to be somewhere else, I don’t have time for this place.”
“I mean here, now.”
“What about your uncle?”
“What?”
“Angus, his car.”
“What’s the time, Jessie? How far do you live?”
“Not far.”
A white church, he couldn’t catch the name, see what saint was on the sign against the white shingles, sometimes it wasn’t a saint but he preferred them, St. Margaret’s, St. Joachim’s, St. David’s. The sea was distant through trees, then moved near the highway, a sudden broad grey, bringing gulls, throwing itself white over the rocks, reaching, falling back. It wasn’t as if Starr was lying on the kitchen floor with a knife in his heart. One glass of water wouldn’t harm him, he’d have to drink more than one. Wouldn’t he? Gallons and gallons of water in that long waterline to the house, a dollop of hemlock couldn’t be lethal, not diluted like that. Could it? And the toilet flush, and wash water, all that would go down the drain, he might never put it to his lips.
“Piece of orange?” Jessie held a section out to him on the point of a jackknife. She had quartered the orange in her lap, flicking seeds into the ashtray.
He took it in his mouth, the tart sweetness, his mouth was dry. He thought for a moment he would weep, that it might well out of him and be over, but that passed, he wasn’t even stoned. When they finished the orange, Jessie shared an apple with him, slicing it carefully and placing each piece in his mouth as he drove. He let her find music on the radio, she liked CBC classical in the morning, but today it was organ music so doleful even she agreed it was a downer, like a rainy day in church. They passed an enormous concrete structure set into a steep hillside, gated and fenced, and beside it a road ran up into the high trees. “Wreck Cove Hydro Project, that’s the power plant there,” she said. “Looks like science fiction, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, sort of.” She mentioned a general store, they could get a bite there, a drink, but when he saw it was right on the highway, he told her he’d wait. He listened to her talk about Boston, about swimming in Waiden Pond Reservation with a boyfriend, and Innis remembered swimming there too, he and Ned Mohney, but there’d been too many people that day, even in the woods. Jessie said she liked The Garage on Boylston Street, the shops with folk art, far-out clothes, but when she came home she didn’t wear outrageous things. Innis asked her did she know the New England Aquarium, he and Mohney would get stoned and watch scuba divers feeding ocean fish in a huge tank, a real trip, more than weird to see them swim behind that glass. Jessie was quiet for a stretch and he could feel her brown eyes on him. No need for panic. Still lots of water between Starr Corbett and the spring. Small amounts moving down that line. One glass here, one glass there. A kettle. A basin. What if he took a bath?
“Jessie, could I make a call from your house? Your phone’s in the kitchen, isn’t it. Never mind. Everybody listens in.”
“Not everybody. Innis, you’re sweating.”
The little cemetery was just above the sea, on a strip bare of trees, but the narrow dirt road to it sloped downward and, parked, the car was mostly out of sight. Innis showed her the roach he’d been saving for later, and she said sure, and after they exchanged a couple hits, she took his hand and led him down to the older stones, some with Gaelic inscriptions, the dead had been born on the Isle of Harris, of Lewis, early 1800S. Her father had a new headstone of white granite, he was the last one, the place was full, some of the original stones no more than grassy hillocks.
“In the early days,” she said, “they’d just pick a stone from the beach, one they liked, and put it over the grave.”
“I bet the sea could climb right up here sometimes.”
“High tide and wind and you’d get waves up here sure, a lot of the bank washed away over the years.”
“But nobody here is feeling the water, they don’t care,” Innis said.
“We don’t entirely know, do we, Innis.”
He pulled the telescope from his back pocket and offered it to her. She laughed.
“I’ll look for a white whale, will I?” She found a freighter, hull down in metallic glare.
“That’s where I’d like to be,” he said. “Out there, farther than any spyglass could find me.”
Huddling in the misty rain, they put an arm around each other and watched the ocean breaking loud and white beneath them. In a sandy stretch a plover on its clockwork legs buzzed back and forth, always at the heels of the shore wash. Innis turned them back toward the Caddy where he warmed her hands in his.
“Jessie, I have to split now, head back south.”
“You want to come meet my mother first? It’s only her and my auntie. They cook one hell of a meal.”
“Jesus, I would, you know. I just can’t. Can’t. Not this time.”
“What makes you think there’ll be another time?”
Innis rested his forehead on the steering wheel. “Nothing. Nothing makes me think that.”
She squeezed his hand. “Come anyway, when you’re ready. See you when I see you, then. Okay? Safe home.”
He thought of getting directions to her house, but there was no point. She assured him she’d get a ride easily, she wasn’t that far from home, but when he left her at the roadside and waved to her out the window as he turned south, he felt desolate and alone. He would have loved to go with her, he could imagine the warm kitchen, the strong tea with milk and sugar, there’d be bannock, maybe with raisins, his favorite, butter and jam, he’d just be a guest, laid back, he wouldn’t have to come up with a lot of lies, a few harmless ones would do, Jessie wouldn’t care, she wasn’t suspicious, her mother and her aunt might even like him. He overtook two cars before he calmed down, cursing softly, tears in his eyes, come on, this is stupid. So here he was driving fast for St. Aubin back toward the spring. The sun hurt, flaring off wet pavement, he’d had sunglasses somewhere. Then two things caught his eye almost simultaneously: a Mountie car with its dome light flashing, pulled onto the shoulder up ahead, and, coming up fast on his right, the looming structure of the Hydro Plant. Innis braked just enough to swerve onto the road running into the highlands, it seemed perfectly logical that he avoid that police car no matter what.
As he climbed the steep road he was aware that it followed a deep brook hidden in big maples and birches, the asphalt looked fresh, and it was easy to believe he was being hotly pursued or soon would be, that he was climbing into the Everlasting Barrens with a Mountie on his tail and he’d have to put the Caddy to the test, do some real driving, there were other roads in and out of the Barrens, he could slip that patrol car and find his way back, but that urgency faded the higher he went: he could see wind in the foliage but an odd stillness descended over everything and he slowed down. The area felt recently abandoned, like a military site. Unearthed rock still lay about, huge pieces blown out of the landscape, but the road crossed over dams built of neatly piled rocks, in places bare earth looked newly healed. There was no person anywhere, but a little building off behind a cyclone fence, and further along on the other side of a small lake, a solitary trailer, accessible only by a causeway with a locked cyclone gate. A day’s workclothes beat like drab flags on a line strung from the trailer to a pole. Shirt, trousers, socks. Something forlorn in all that, fluttering out flat in a cold wind, the guy shut away inside the trailer by himself, his lonely stuff hanging outside, his underwear.
Innis drove on, more slowly, the asphalt gave over to graded dirt. Had Claire taken a plane off the Island, or was she driving too, on a road somewhere west? He would never find her now. He shut off the radio, no more than a murmuring hiss. Rocks had been no obstacle here, or woods. Dynamite, dust, an immense plowing. But all that was over. A strange calm, still settling. Like after a one-sided battle, everything had been buried, piled up, reconstructed. The engineers call it a flowage, Dan Rory had told him, from the old waters that were up here they had to, they said, correct the mistakes of nature. Imagine that. The way they looked at it, the engineers, there was all this water up there going to waste, running down little rivers and streams into the sea, such a waste of water, eh? So they made these new lakes and poured concrete canals and made spillways and sluices, stepped the water down faster and harder, into Wreck Cove Tunnel, into the great turbines there. And so the power went out over the land. Not to us. Over us. That’s where it always goes. Amen.
In the distance a single windmill, the wind was blowing hard but the blades were not turning. He was thirsty, he should’ve stopped at that general store like she’d wanted, got gas.
Had Starr already opened that cupboard over the sink, taken his time selecting a tumbler, raising it first to the ceiling to see if his nephew had wiped the glass clean? He would open the tap, he would not fill the glass right away but run his fingers under the water, feeling almost immediately that surprising cold. No reason for Starr to hesitate. Free of silt. Nothing swirling there, nothing to the eye.
On the upper side of the dam Innis was approaching lay a cold nervous lake, its surface darkly blue, charged with small, rapid waves. He turned down a short road to the windward shore hoping for a drink. The wind was immediately cold and steady when he got out of the car. The sun seemed to have no heat, though the air was bright. Deep behind the beach driftwood had banked up high, white and dry as bones against a concrete wall. Hundreds of pieces must have been driven there by storms, jammed into a long windrow of bleached wood. Newer wood not yet dry was scattered along the shoreline. Innis ran his hand over a piece like huge misshapen antlers, its grain a satiny silver, polished and damp. Tree stumps, most of that driftwood, and the lake was still giving them up, working them loose like teeth from the flooded, cut-over woods. He couldn’t see any wood floating, maybe they were still submerged in that dark water, like seabeasts, each one different, malformed, rising from the depths. Sunlight sank only a short way into the clear water, at first faintly yellow, then a rusty tinge deepening into a red darkness. Iron oxide. The lake’s surface seemed jittery in the wind, excited somehow, hurried, its choppy waves striking the shore in quick succession. You’ll still find trout up there, he’d heard. Hard to believe down in that bloodred darkness there’d be fish.
Surely it was fresh enough to drink, only the rock colored it, and Innis cupped out a few cold mouthfuls tasting faintly of metal. Maybe Starr had deserved a touch of poison. But just who deserved what, and why, was still a mystery.
The squalls seemed to have passed, shreds of cloud cooling across the sun. Could this be a thin place like the priest had mentioned? He picked up a piece of wood whose whorl of knots caught light like wet stone. There were interesting rocks lying about, fractured in attractive ways. He patted his pocket for a sketchpad but he’d forgotten where he put it, in his bag maybe back in the car. But how would he draw this anyway, this strange lake where all the blood had run? An army had been through here and what remained was the blown rock, the ruined trees, the concrete channels, the dams, the stilled windmill. There was no room in this wind for drawing, the wind was growing colder, it cut into him and he was glad to shut himself away in the car, every time that engine shot into life, he was comforted.
But signs for a road out, where were they? He drove carefully across a damn of earth and stone, a deep lake on one side, on the other a mean plunge to a thin afterthought of a brook, its water tracing off into a valley, a mere leak beneath the dam. From this maze of roads, any exit at all, he didn’t care right now where it would land him as long as he could continue south.
Scrub spruce and alders stretched away and away, and there was the bright wet grass of bogs, a stunted terrain to which had been brought dams, and deserted roads to get lost in fast, they would suddenly merge with the ground as if they had turned into the earth. There’d been a big fire across the Barrens back in the sixties, Finlay said, roared right over it, and the trees were stunted anyway, always small up here where the rocky soil is thin. A scrabble of dense little trees no bigger than they would ever get in this windy space, branches curled and huddled, roots twisted into the soil. When he deadended in a muddy clearing, he turned the car around, spinning clay, and retraced, he was certain, the same road, but once again other roads opened into it enticingly, they looked the same, and he bounced down one side road, then another, ending like the one before in a pile of bulldozed stones and he had to turn the mudsplashed Caddy again. He’d bottomed it already too many times, the muffler had a low rumble when he gunned the engine, a sound that in high school he would have thought cool but now it was a flaw, a worry, in this fine automobile. A highway car. That thought amused him at first, so sure of this car, no way you could keep it off the highway for long, but its shocks were intended for good pavement, not ruts and gravel and rainholes. Main road, mean road, little difference here.
He fingered out the roach stub from his breast pocket and lit it, sucked its smoke in deep. There was poisoned water everywhere, wasn’t there, diluted versions of it, people drank it every day, Starr was not putting hemlock in his mouth right now, the plant was a long long way from him, its stalk, its stems, even its deadly juice. Maybe. Wind jostled the car. Jesus, there was not a road sign anywhere, who was all this designed for, God? He took a turn where a road looked wider, better graded. Was that a human being, had he spotted a man, dark, solemn, maybe an Indian, fishing below the road half-hidden in the thick bushes, casting high into a brook? Innis was not sure. Of course the man would see the car and ask him questions, like what in the hell did you bring a Cadillac up to the Barrens for? He didn’t want to leave the car anymore, he felt safer moving, any temptation to stop quickly vanished. Conversation? For what? Who are you, where you from? Co leis thu? He was in the high Barrens now, had to be, best for berries, they said, maybe he could find some. He could see a long way, the windbeaten trees as low as bushes, some road just a tan scar in the distance. He stopped to pan his telescope across the land, but there was nothing it could pull close enough to matter. He went on until the road he was following quit in a small cleared turnaround and he sat there idling. With the window cracked, the wind whistled over the car, it was still August, for Christ sake, wasn’t there a touch of summer left to lift him up a little? In his mouth an aftertaste of the lake, a tinge of iron. He scooped out the contents of the glove compartment and found half a roll of stale mints. He popped them all in his mouth, cut the engine. Wintergreen. The Captain’s breath. How much gas would it take to get him back to the highway, if he could find it? Encirclement was creeping into him and he would have to beat it back, worse than being lost in the woods last fall: these were roads and roads took you places, they didn’t lock you in, they didn’t dazzle you, make you stupid. He folded his jacket into a pillow across the steering wheel. Just a few winks, he was hungry but resting his head, his eyes, seemed to matter more, clearing his mind. He could manage only a dozing, fitful parade of his unease, sleep would not let him arrive, anywhere. He slid down sideways to the seat, his mouth agape with weariness, eyelids trembling. Starr’s white shirts flew on a clothesline, three of them, sleeves snapping, pins could not keep them, they writhed away in the wind one by one.
His face felt mashed when he woke, his eyes gritty, squinting at the long late sun as he stood outside the car to piss, wind shoving at his back. Maybe Starr had taken no tainted water yet, not run a tap at all during the day, if he’d gone to The Mines. There were good reasons why he wouldn’t have put any in his mouth yet, that tiny cloud of poison was still diffusing, slowly, invisibly into that long hill to the house, under the road, then diagonal through the front field, a long run of line, so much water coursing through it, backed up behind the taps. Kitchen. Bathroom. A spigot near the back door. And the toilet. How many flushes would …? Maybe it was all there, collected in one small space, and something as innocent as a piss would disperse it, that few pints or quarts or gallons of danger. Suppose Starr simply was not thirsty for water? There were three beers in the fridge. Distinctly. Three brown bottles of Moosehead Ten Penny Ale, Innis could describe if asked the design of the label, the logo, the color of gold, the styles of lettering, the name, the origin of the brewery, the percentage of alcohol, higher than beer in the States. Starr liked a beer sometimes first thing in the door. But the weather was not warm, he wouldn’t reach for a Moosehead today grumbling about the sticky, windless air, wind was everywhere and it carried autumn, chilling summer away. Autumn light. Warm, yet cold on your face.
He tried to concentrate, he couldn’t be fooled anymore by roads that went nowhere. He’d been trying to get off that Cape Breton Road, hadn’t he, the one that ran from here to Boston and beyond and back again, a great circle of sentiment and memory, of love and anger and disappointment and hope, leading back to this Island, even to here?
The prospect of darkness had focussed his mind, he found he was moving beyond the Barrens, the trees were coming taller, the road straighter but monotonous. Stacked pulpwood appeared at the roadside, this had to lead to a highway. He was daring to pick up speed, the muffler grumbling louder, when the headlights caught the dark brown hide of an enormous animal, like suddenly encountering a zoo creature, a runaway from a circus, its size seemed so out of place in front of his car, claiming the center of the road. Innis skidded to a halt, headlights freezing the moose as it wheeled its great head around, like a comical horse with its bristly dewlap, exaggerated snout. Innis expected it to flee like a deer but the horn, that smooth Cadillac horn, seemed only to arouse it, it lowered its immense rack of antlers, then, with a deep grunt, reared up impossibly high, all belly and legs, a mighty bull. Innis reversed hard but not before its hooves thumped heavily on the hood, he kept backing up until he felt the impact of the ditch, his head flew back, the Caddy suddenly askew, stopped, stalled. He could hear the moose crashing away through the trees. Holding his whiplashed neck, he turned the engine over and over until it started and then listened to what he was afraid of, wheels whining in the wet ditch, spitting out mud and stones until the car barely rocked. The moose had smashed one headlight, the other was angled upward, illuminating uselessly the high branches of a tree.
Innis sat in the listing car, the thought of leaving it he could not handle, not yet. Bugs danced in the cockeyed light. Was that a wisp of fog or his own dust settling? He punched every button on the dash, the radio leapt from white noise to white noise, the aerial withdrew into the hood, the fan breathed cold air, he lowered all the windows, then raised them shut. Shit. A goddamn moose, and no Bullwinkle either, it must’ve been ten feet high, pissed off. Innis was sure he’d been on a road out, all he’d need have done is keep going. To a gas station, a house, a phone, anyone’s phone. Starr, don’t drink the water from the tap, just don’t, don’t ask me any questions, never mind where I am, goodbye. Goodbye.
The darkness was unbelievable, even as his eyes adjusted to it he was straining to keep to the road. But oh God, the stars, they blinded him, they made him stumble, they were brighter than the night with Claire when he spun slowly in that midnight water, weightless, certain he would soon feel her against him. He looked behind him just once, the Caddy’s headlight like a carnival beam, barely visible in trees. Jesus, he was thirsty, he’d never been so thirsty, there had to be a brook along here, why not take the woods, didn’t he know them, weren’t these the same trees that grew on St. Aubin, everywhere here? A terror seemed to flame through him, furiously cold, like his hands in the spring water. He was going downhill, the woods were thicker than any back home, but a hill would lead him somewhere he needed to go if he could stay on his feet, where was his walking stick, lying in the upstairs hallway, he was afraid of tumbling headfirst, of sinking in a bog, he had no gas left, his legs could not match the obstacles, the dead-wood, the tangles of tough young trees, but he knew too that this momentum would drive him the rest of his days, to better or worse, he saw flowers, yellow, were they primroses, his mother wanted him to dig holes for roses, outside there by the back window, Innis, please, I can’t get a spade into that soil, it’s hard as cement, but his pal was waiting at the curb and Innis didn’t want to be seen putting rosebushes in the ground, they were blooming even, cream and red and yellow, petals dropping to the pavement, but he regretted it now, that he hadn’t done that little thing for her, that if nothing else, roses in the garden she could look at, and she had tried anyway to plant them herself but they turned to brittle sticks and thorns. He tripped on a tree root, his knees dug into dirt, his palms, the breath knocked out of him, but he was up again, wiping his eyes clear, that had to be a light he saw, it was, yes, and he pushed on toward it, crashing drunkenly, never taking his eyes from it, it had to be a house, a dog was barking sharply, or was it a fox, there would be a telephone there, and he could crank out those rings, crank them like a fire call, loud and long, and Starr would count them out without even thinking, four-ring-three, and he would get up from wherever he was, the big chair in the parlor, the kitchen table, maybe even his bed, what time was it anyway, and he would say hello, and Innis would say, It’s me. It’s me, Innis.