THE LAST TIME COLE HAD BEEN ON A PLANE was to leave Wounded Sky First Nation. Back then he was nervous to go, nervous about what the city would hold for him. He could still remember the feeling he had, perhaps a harbinger of what was to come. He remembered walking to the plane on the tarmac, his stomach turning, his heart racing, his palms soaked with sweat. He kept rubbing them against his pants. Now he was nervous to return. His body was shaking as though the plane was going through turbulence.
Wounded Sky never did get many visitors, only pilots stopping over when making food deliveries. Nobody really came by car, not over the winter road, not on the old, rusted ferry that could carry one car at a time over Silk River. There was food on the plane Cole was on now. When he was little he would look up at these little twin engine planes, and wonder what was on them. He never thought it was something as benign as groceries. Cole wondered if there was a kid like that now, down there on the ground somewhere, looking up and wondering what the plane was bringing in. What would that kid think if he or she knew it was Cole Harper? What stories had the kid been told by their parents about him, that he was a freak…or a hero?
Cole had been on the plane for two hours now. He’d been looking down for the whole flight, watching the city disappear into a kids’ model of the urban landscape, watching the highways shrink into grey veins nestled in the green skin of Mother Earth, watching how everything seemed so small, even his worries. But when the plane began to descend, and he saw Wounded Sky choked against the horizon by Blackwood Forest and pierced by Silk River, those worries started to feel too big for him.
The sun was just starting to set when the plane landed on the perilously thin landing strip. He hadn’t known what to expect when he landed during the plane ride, but he’d imagined a small crowd gathered by the airstrip, waiting to see him come back home, maybe cheering for him. With signs. Cardboard signs with sharpie words: Welcome home, hero. Thank you, Cole! Cole H. for Hero! A prodigal-son-returns kind of vibe. He remembered the attention he got back then. All the eyes on him. All the questions. He understood why he’d been taken away from that. But maybe he was ready for it now. Maybe it’d be cathartic. A healing. Then he’d imagined only his best friends from Wounded Sky being there. Eva. Brady. Ashley—the people who used to matter most to him. Who still mattered most to him. Distance hadn’t changed that, at least for him. A large crowd might’ve been cathartic, but those three, that would’ve been something else entirely. He’d almost prefer a crowd. He wanted to see them, especially Eva, but at the same time, he didn’t. At the same time, thinking of seeing them, of seeing her, felt overwhelming. He went over his latest text exchange with Ashley, trying to keep the phone steady, and to dissect whether or not Ashley would’ve told Brady and Eva that he was coming home.
COLE: Guess what? See you later today! But you didn’t have to lie to me about the memorial. I know that’s why you asked me back.
ASHLEY: Really? Just like that?
COLE: Yeah, just like that.
ASHLEY: It wasn’t about the memorial though. Just saying.
COLE: What was it about then?
ASHLEY: Come see me when you’re in. When are you coming?
COLE: Get in around 6 p.m.
ASHLEY: Kk. See you then. Maybe come to see you in.
COLE: Anybody else?
There was no answer to that question, but Cole found that he was disappointed when he stepped off the plane, his bag slung sadly over his shoulder. There was no crowd, no Brady, no Eva. Not even Ashley. Could everything that happened ten years ago mean so little now, that the seven-year-old kid who’d saved some lives didn’t deserve any sort of welcome? Maybe this was best. If I don’t like a basketball crowd, a Wounded Sky First Nation welcoming committee would be pretty harsh. It was never going to be cathartic. And he could understand Brady and Eva not being there. Cole hadn’t texted them. He hadn’t contacted them in ten years. Even if Ashley had let them know, they might not have shown up. But, Ashley not being there?
COLE: Here. Where are you?
Cole waited for a response for several minutes, standing just yards away from the airport, staring not at the beauty the surrounding forest boasted or the vastness of the country sky, but at his phone. Nothing.
“Why’d I bother doing this?” He’d been begged to come. It was so urgent. Yet there he was, alone, with nothing but time to welcome him here. The plane was still there. It was going to sit there until it was unloaded and then it was going to leave, back to Winnipeg. If it were leaving anyway, then maybe the pilot would take him. But what would he say to his grandmother? The flight had cost almost $1,000. He could’ve bought a car for that. No, he couldn’t just leave. He owed it to her to stay until the memorial, lay the tobacco she’d given him, get it over with, and go back to the city. Plus, staying meant the added bonus of not having to face his auntie right now. He’d ignored about one thousand of her calls by now. His grandmother was dealing with her, and that was something else he owed her for.
“Fine, okay,” he said to himself. “You win.”
COLE: Whatever. I’ll come there.
He pocketed his phone, swallowed his pride, and started on the short walk into the community.
Cole expected everything he saw and everything he came across would stir emotions, jog his memory, but the first thing he actually encountered sent him reeling: the old research facility. The place where his father had worked… and died. It was obviously still abandoned, no doubt since the accident that had taken his father’s life. The windows were boarded up, a large chain sealed the front door, and the entire building itself was enclosed by a metal fence that let off a constant humming noise. Cole walked towards the building. He couldn’t count how many times he had come here as a child with his mom to see his dad for lunch. He and his mom would pack a sandwich, usually peanut butter and jam, and some kind of fruit. He preferred apples. They mostly brought apples. The picnic table they sat on to eat together was still there. Cole reached out his hand to open the gate—
“Stop!” a voice shouted.
Cole’s hand recoiled, and he turned around to see a security guard running up to him from a short way down the perimeter of the fence, handcuffs jingling from his belt.
“Don’t touch that!” The security guard stopped inches away from Cole.
Cole didn’t know if he recognized the man, his face hidden behind a pair of sunglasses and a black baseball hat pulled down low. The man rested his hand on the grip of his gun. Cole backed away a little.
“Sorry,” he said with his hands up in a defensive posture.
“Wait a minute,” the guard said. “Are you—”
“Cole Harper.”
“—Cole Harper, back from the dead.”
“I don’t…”
“Sorry, how insensitive of me, considerin’ why you left in the first place. Back home, are you? What brings you here, city boy?”
“Can you…” Cole motioned to the man’s gun. The man looked down and laughed, then took his hand off the grip.
“Sorry, hero.” The guard reached up and took off his sunglasses, and Cole recognized him as Scott Thomas, an older kid from the elementary school back in the day. He was kind of a bully back then. It made sense, him having a gun. “So, what’re you doin’ here, city boy?”
Cole took a deep breath. “I heard there was a memorial coming up, for the…you know.”
“Right, right, right,” Scott breathed. “Right. Yeah, Tuesday.”
“Tuesday,” Cole said.
“Well, good for you, Cole. Leave everybody here to suffer through it all together, save whoever the fuck you wanna, and then come back to soak in the awe and wonder of your return. Right?”
“Save whoever the…no, it’s not like that, man.”
“Hey.” Scott reached forward and slapped Cole on the shoulder. “I’m just screwin’ with you, guy. It’s all good.”
Cole, sensing now that he could change the subject (desperate, in fact, to change the subject) motioned to the fence, and the building. “So what’s up with all of this? Are you guarding this place?”
“Yep.”
“Why? I mean, what’s there to guard?”
Scott took the bill of his cap and moved it up and down a few times, then let out a big breath and shrugged. “Kids are always comin’ around here, tryin’ to get inside. You know what happened here, city boy.”
“Right, sure,” Cole said. “I just thought, I don’t know, it would’ve been cleaned up by now.”
“Ha! You’re funny, guy. You think whoever ran this place gave a shit about cleanin’ up their goddamn mess? Far as anybody knows, shit’s still messed inside. Hell, your old man’s still down there, rottin’ away.”
“Screw you, Scott.”
“And that chick. Both of them. Worm food. And kids, y’know, they wanna go check it out, see a dead body. It’s like Stand by Me or somethin’.”
“Shut up!”
“Sorry, that was rude of me. Where are my manners?”
“I’m out of here.” Cole turned to leave.
“What’s your rush?” Scott grabbed Cole’s shoulder.
Cole jerked it away. “What’s it to you?”
“I just thought we could spend some quality time together. Everybody else is at the hockey game anyways.”
Of course. It was Saturday. How stupid of him. Saturday was hockey night in Wounded Sky, the reason Ashley wasn’t there to greet him at the airport, and everybody else. Nobody missed hockey night. Not even, it turned out, Cole.
“Yeah, that’s where I’m headed.”
A path ambled its way to Wounded Sky from the airport. It forked off twice on the way to the community’s perimeter, once towards the old research facility, and the second time towards Cole’s former elementary school. Cole took the forked path. He stopped where it stopped. He stood there facing the school a couple of hundred yards away. Only the skeleton of a school remained, a collection of concrete and brick bones, broken and charred. Small sections of the school appeared undamaged by the fire. Bigger sections were completely destroyed, laying in piles on the ground, untouched in ten years and overgrown with grass and weeds. He could see hallways with partial walls, or no walls whatsoever, extend out from the front of the school to the left, where classrooms once were, and to the right, all the way to the gym, with its crumbled walls, ceiling, and metal beams piled on top of each other.
Cole’s knees began to shake and weaken. He heard the screams of children. They erupted from the ruins and echoed deep inside Blackwood Forest. Flames roared, thunderous and terrible. He saw everything around him—the grass, the trees, the path to the school—painted in yellow and orange and red. He saw black smoke spiralling into the sky. His heart began to race. He could feel his pulse pound through every vein. Sweat and tears dripped down his face. He felt dizzy and his vision began to blur. He reached out instinctively to steady himself. A hand grasped his wrist.
“Hey, what’s up with you?” a girl’s voice asked.
“Huh?”
Cole looked to the side, where he saw Alex Captain. Alex had been in grade one when Cole was in grade three. She must’ve been fifteen or sixteen now. Her father was a teacher at the school, and was in the building when it burned down. He recognized the loss in her eyes, a kind of emptiness that couldn’t be filled. He knew that look was in his own eyes, too.
“It looks like there’s a tiny earthquake right under your feet. Centralized,” Alex said. She was pointing at his feet, at an imaginary earthquake.
“Oh, no. It’s more like—”
“Either that or you’re drunk,” she kept on. “Please don’t be drunk. Don’t be like those Saturday night hockey idiots. They pour into The Fish after the game, all of them, order the whole menu, and, you know, a third of it ends up in their stomachs, a third of it ends up on the tables or walls or floor, and a third of it gets puked up on the grass outside the building. Awesome.”
The Fish was really The Northern Lights Diner. It’d been called that for as long as Cole could remember, probably since time immemorial. Named after the fact that most of its best dishes, most of its dishes period, contained jackfish. And there was also a jackfish on the sign, not, as one might think, the northern lights.
“I’m not drunk. It’s just tough being here, I guess.”
“Waitaminute.” Alex leaned in closer and took a good look at him. “Cole?”
“Yep.”
“Holy shit!” Alex backed away, slapped her knees, and spun in a complete circle in disbelief. “What the heck’re you doing out here?”
“Like here?” Cole pointed to his feet, to the imaginary tiny earthquake.
“No, here, obviously.” Alex spread her arms out wide. “Wounded Sky.”
Cole shrugged. “Not sure. I could ask you the same thing.”
“You mean here. Like here here. Not here. I live here.” Alex was pointing all over the place now, just messing with him.
“Sure.” Cole managed a chuckle. “I thought it was mandatory attendance at the arena on Saturday nights.”
“Please. I defy hockey, Cole. I defy the expectations of hockey worship as a Wounded Sky band member. I’d rather clean up puke out front of The Fish.”
“Gross,” Cole said.
“I’m walking, I’ll have you know. I go for walks. My shift hasn’t started yet, so…”
“You work at the diner now?”
“Ever since I could. You know, if a job comes open in Wounded Sky you have to snatch it up. There’re only so many of them.”
“Right.”
They encountered their first silence. It teetered on the edge of awkward, but it was far better than what he had experienced with Scott. Cole felt encouraged. There’d been no welcoming party, but there was this.
“What about you?” Alex asked. “Where are you headed? Here, then over there, then all around everywhere? Trying to find a good door frame for refuge from the earthquake?”
“Actually, I’m one of the sheep,” Cole said. “Headed to the arena for the hockey game.”
“Oh, fun! I’ll walk with you,” Alex said, as though she hadn’t just trashed the sport and the hockey worship that was evidently still prevalent in the community.
Alex started on her way before Cole had even moved. When he did step forward, back towards the main path, his knees were steady, and he became aware that his entire body was calm. He hadn’t even taken a pill. He met up with her as the short trail to the school grounds converged with the main pathway, and they walked together from there.
“Thanks,” Cole said.
“Oh,” Alex said, “I was heading that way anyway. My kindness is out of convenience.”
“Still,” Cole said.
“I guess I did save you from certain death.”