BEFORE EVERYTHING, THEY HAD TO get married.

That had happened just two days prior, at a little woodland bed and breakfast outside South River. There was some family, but it was mostly friends—in from Ottawa and Toronto, and Chicago where James had grown up. They laughed and drank and danced among the black flies and pine trees, the vivid afternoon light that laid the land in such sharp relief. When finally the friends and family went home they swapped out wedding luggage for camping gear from James’ sister Evelyn’s van, strapped their sea kayaks to the roof of the Honda... and James and Paul Berringer headed alone into the northern Ontario high summer.

The truck passed them the first time on a straight-away outside New Liskeard. It was a big silver GM pickup that rode high and was designed for sport more than work. James, driving, gave a polite wave, and Paul had thought he’d been waving at some road-weary toddler. Not so, as it turned out. Some old bat, James’d said. More than that it was hard to say, because the truck rode a good two feet higher than the Honda. To show what he meant, James gunned the motor the next straight-away and sailed past the truck. Paul waved out the window as they passed. He bent to look in the side-view mirror, saw a hand emerge, salute off the top of the cab like it was a captain’s hat.

The truck made its next pass on a curve, as the highway cut down close to a lake of tufted islands and wind-warped conifers. Two hands emerged from the passenger window that time, bestowing garlands of air kisses down onto the Honda. Paul tried to return the salute by jutting out his passenger window, propping ass on car door and waving over the top of the roof. But he remembered that the kayaks were there, about the same time as James shouted at him to quit fooling around and put his goddamn seatbelt on.

They laughed and drove, and turned up the music, and turned it down again when they wanted to talk and back up when they’d made their points, as the highway cut through blasted-out shield rock and trees that seemed to hang just over their heads. The truck showed up in the rear-view from time to time but it was gone as often as it was there. After awhile, they stopped checking for it. They were two guys on their honeymoon. They had other things on their mind. Christ.

They stopped, finally, in the late afternoon—at a place called Curt. The town wasn’t much more than a co-op grocery store, a liquor store and a filling station, all along the highway. They slowed down and pulled into the grocery store’s parking lot. It was late in the afternoon, and things didn’t stay open that long up here. And the truck appeared again, pulling into the spot right beside them.

 

“YOU TWO ARE BEAUTIFUL,” SAID the man behind the wheel of the truck. “Don’t know if you knew that. But you’re goddamn beautiful. You’re glowing.”

Paul leaned out the passenger window and smiled wide and toothy.

“Just married,” he said. Beside him, in the driver’s seat, James grinned and waved and Paul wondered if that might just be that. The man was about seventy—with close-cropped hair and a deep tan over a heavily lined face. His beard was longer, and it was winter-white. Sharp blue eyes twinkled in deep-set lines. His own wife rode shotgun. She was plumper, and more tanned, with reddish hair pulled in a ponytail that reached out the back of her sun visor. How do a couple like them deal with a couple like us? Paul wondered.

But when she said, “Honeymooners?” both Paul and James nodded and grinned.

“Honeymooners,” he said, and James said again: “Just married.”

The old man opened the door and stepped gingerly out of the cab. He was wearing a pair of walking shorts, and his legs were thin as sticks. Sandaled feet crunched on the gravel.

“It’s not hard to tell,” he said, and grinned. “Did your wedding go well? I don’t even have to ask that, do I?”

“Now you’re off on an adventure.” His wife came out from around the back of the truck. She had a canvas bag that looked like it was stuffed with other canvas bags. “Those are beautiful boats you have on your roof.” She and her husband made a show of admiring them.

“They’re our wedding gift to each other,” said James, and explained that they were just the right size for hauling the two of them and a full camp kit, and how they hoped their camping trip wouldn’t be too much of an adventure. Paul started introductions, and it developed that they were talking to Stanley Green and his wife Nancy. Stanley once worked in natural resources. Nancy used to be a compositor for a newspaper. They had been married for forty-three years. The last ten, they’d lived up here.

“We bought an old YMCA camp on Scout Lake,” said Stanley, and Nancy said, “It was his idea,” and Paul said, “Oh, it was like that, was it?” and everybody laughed.

Paul leaned on the hood of the Honda, and James easily wended under his arm. It was getting cooler here than they were used to, although the late afternoon sun made the town look lovelier, warmer. Nancy brought out a silver steel thermos and four plastic travel mugs. IF YOU DON’T STAND BEHIND OUR TROOPS, WE CAN ARRANGE FOR YOU TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM, was written on the side of Paul’s.

She set them on the wheel well of the truck, and poured. Paul sipped his. It was Irish coffee, with an emphasis on the Irish. He grinned like a baby. James wasn’t as pleased – he had to drive, after all, and they weren’t planning on stopping. But like Paul, he liked the Greens. They’d seen a “glow” about them. Where was the harm, really, in a bit more glow from Nancy Green’s thermos?

They finished their coffee, gave the mugs back and made it into the store just fifteen minutes before it closed and checked out with a box of supplies five minutes after it closed. Paul looked around for the truck – but it was long gone.

“That’s too bad,” said James when Paul pointed that out. “They were nice folks. Would have been good to say a proper goodbye.” Then he craned his neck, looking at their car, and said, “What the fuck?”

Paul set his box of groceries down in the gravel and pulled the folded sheet of paper from underneath their windshield wiper. He unfolded it.

“It’s a map,” he said, and held it up. “ Scout Tourist Region.” James checked it out. The lake was a maze of inlets and islands. It suggested the shape of a horse with a rider. Kind of like an old time scout, Paul thought. There was a big X on one of the islands, toward the western end. The highway was at the east. There was a note in a spot of clear water, written using the same thick pencil as the X.

GREAT MEETING YOU 2! WHY DON’T YOU JOIN US AT THE Y? BRING A BEDROLL & THOSE PRETTY KAYAKS—JUST SHOW UP & WE TAKE CARE OF THE REST! XOX YR HWY 11 FRIENDS STAN & NANC

 

THE WHISKEY IN THE COFFEE made James too sleepy to drive and Paul couldn’t say he was in any better shape, so they found a little roadside motel twenty odd kilometers on, and sacked out for the night.

When they settled in, Paul opened up the map on the pine-covered breakfast table and did finger measurements. “Shit,” he said. “That’s about twelve kilometers in.”

“Give or take a thumb,” said James. “You’re not seriously thinking about this?”

“Scout Lake’s a lot closer than Quebec. Just another hour up the highway, the way you drive.”

That drew a playful slap, and James bent over the map, made Paul show him what the route would be. He commented that it looked like a pretty run, but he counted more than twelve kilometers.

“But that’s not here nor there,” said James. “Fact is, that’s a long way in. And we don’t know these people.”

“Sure we do. Stanley worked in natural resources. Nancy…worked in newspapers or something. They carry open liquor in the cab of their truck.”

“They pick up glowing men on the highway.”

“I’d pick up glowing men on the highway. So would you.”

“That’s why we’re together.”

They laughed, but James wondered about that: whether they might just be old-school swingers with a dose of bi-curiosity. “I don’t want to go there just to find we have to sponge bath old Stan while Nancy watches on the webcam,” he said. Paul thought about that, and agreed: Yeah, it’s possible. But he didn’t take that impression from those two, and cornered on the subject, James admitted that he didn’t either. They both took another look at the map.

Depending on the wind, they agreed that, twelve kilometers or fourteen, they could probably make the run in under four hours. Just to be on the safe side, they’d pack some food and a tent—the camp stove—the first aid kit—and the rifle. They could camp out on an island, if it turned out they had to.

 

THE MAP SHOWED THE MARINA as being right on the highway’s edge, but that wasn’t how it played out. There was a little sign on the side of the road with an arrow pointing to a long dirt road, that first wound through bush, then dropped on a steep slope between high rounded rocks. Here and there, the dirt road passed a driveway that climbed those hills—and sometimes, Paul could peer up and see parts of houses poking out of the trees overhead. Twice, they had to deal with oncoming traffic: pickup trucks that appeared in front of them with terrifying suddenness and speed.

But they made it. The rocks and trees finally spread, and the marina appeared, in a little natural harbour rimmed with low cliffs and right across from a pair of knuckly little islands. There was a place to park, and a boat launch, and a couple of long docks with outboard motor boats tied up. There was even a little general store that sold wine by the box.

It wasn’t an hour before they were in the lake and paddling over still waters, to the sweet space between those first two islands.

 

AFTER TWO HOURS ON THE lake, they stopped on a little island that seemed to have been furnished for the purpose – with a firepit and a weathered wooden bench for fish cleaning—a box with a toilet seat on it that was not, as it developed, a proper chemical toilet.

The wind was picking up, and they were paddling into it. As they chewed on cold cuts and breakfast bars, James and Paul looked at their maps, and revised their estimated arrival time. Paul wished they could call ahead to say they were coming later—but as James reminded him, Stan and Nancy left no phone number on the map. Just the pencilled-in X.

After lunch, they crossed from the horse’s tail to the wide expanse of Scout Lake’s belly. Here, the winds were fierce. They moved along the shore, taking shelter in tiny inlets where water lilies grew.

A front blew in from the east and rain came and went, as they crossed the horse’s hind legs. This time, they didn’t take shelter, and the rain soaked them. The sun came out, and the wind died back, and they poached in their wet clothes as they pushed along low rock faces and cliffs.

“Not far now!” shouted James, and Paul laughed, and James said, “Wow.”

“What?” Paul shouted. They were maybe forty feet apart, drifting a moment in the stilled water.

James pointed with his paddle, ahead of them. They were coming up to a promontory—a long tongue of rock and dirt, where a patch of tall, brambled branches—you wouldn’t call them trees—clustered. Although it was the height of the summer, their twisted limbs had no leaves. At every crook in the branches, they could see a black speck.

The two kayaks drifted nearer one another as they watched. “Birds,” Paul opined, and James added that there were “a fuck of a lot of birds.” They dipped paddles and pushed nearer, and although they were as quiet as kayakers could be, before long it was clear they’d set off some sort of alarm. Black wings cut across the water and long sine waves of black-bodied birds emerged from the water. One snaked directly over James’ boat, and Paul looked closer and said: “Cormorants!”

They both had a vague idea of what cormorants looked like. There had been a colony of the birds in the city, on some parkland near the lake. The birds were ugly up close, and they ate too much fish, and their shit killed trees, and there’d been a hand-wringing debate about whether to kill them off to save the waterfront and a long segment on the CBC with some breathtaking pictures.

But what did James and Paul know about cormorants, really?

They lifted their paddles from the water and sat still, watching as more of the birds took flight, spun off in lines around them—circling, as if the birds were watching them, making sure they didn’t tarry too close. Protecting their nests... their families.

Paul wondered about adopting.

“Where did that come from?” asked James—they hadn’t talked about having kids, not really—and Paul shrugged.

“It’s the future,” he said. “It’d be nice, having a son. In the future.”

A cloud thinned, and the sun came pale and yellow through it.

“A son?”

“Or a daughter. But if we get to pick—”

“—a son.” James considered. “We’d need a bigger place,” he said.

Paul thought their place was fine for raising a boy. There were three bedrooms and there could be one for the two of them, another one for the office, and a third for the boy. The place was small and there wasn’t much of a yard—but it wasn’t much of a hardship, surely it couldn’t be much of a hardship.

Paul didn’t say any of that, though. He looked back at the shore, watched as the birds returned to their perches—to the bare soil and rock there. They had shapes like vases, standing upright.

James dipped a paddle into the water and started to turn his kayak about. “We should keep moving,” he said, and Paul agreed. They both turned the boats away from the colony, and continued further along the shore of the lake.

It was only when they were far away from the birds and their squawks and their black, jagged-looking wingspans, that it occurred to either of them: what a stench the colony carried. It was the foulest thing either of them had ever smelled.

Although neither remarked on it, both of them thought it stank of death.

 

THE SUN CAME OUT PAST the noon hour, and all the clouds vanished, and the lake grew quite warm indeed. James stripped off his fleece, and lashed it to the front of the kayak. Paul kept his on just a little longer, and pulled off his and his shirt too, and strapped his lifejacket back on over bare skin.

“Okay,” said Paul, “you win. No boy right now.”

“I didn’t say we shouldn’t.”

“You didn’t need to.”

They laughed, and Paul asked: “Where are we on the map?”

James fumbled for the paper.

He’d stuffed it in his fleece jacket’s pocket, which was lashed to the front of the boat. He raised up, and leaned forward—and took hold of the cloth. The kayak seemed to wriggle as he did so.

Paul thought: Oh shit, just as James thought the same. And all at once, the kayak tilted.

James threw himself back, slapped at the water with the flat of his paddle, and tried to twist his shoulders away from the tilt, reclaim his centre of gravity. It was no good. He started to pinwheel the oar, as though he thought he might paddle through air the same as water.

The kayak pitched over. James shouted, maybe screamed, and splashed into the water as the kayak pitched the rest of the way.

 

IT WAS VERY STILL, AND hot. The two dry bags that were lashed to the kayak came loose, and bobbed up, one at a time, alongside the kayak’s sky-blue hull. James’ fleece spread just beneath the water, like a torso-shaped oil slick.

Paul called out James’ name: first in the quit-fucking-around tone that James had used the day before, on the highway, when Paul was trying to prop his ass on the edge of the door.

Except for the ripples radiating out from the dry bags, the kayak, the water was a looking glass.

“James!”

Paul shattered that glass with his paddle and drew himself closer to James’ still kayak. There had been no struggling, no bubbles, still, as there would have been, if James had pulled himself free of the cockpit, or even if he were trying.

When Paul got close enough, he slid the paddle underneath the hull, where James would be. He might be able to catch hold of it—use it as leverage to pull himself up again, pull himself out. To safety.

Paul didn’t let himself consider certain matters: there was no sign of his husband underneath the boat. Even if he were sitting as still as he could, inverted in the kayak, there would have to be some sign of it on the surface: some small stream of bubbles. But how could he be sitting still, under the lake in an inverted kayak? Why would he be sitting still, fully conscious, aware of the fact that he only had so much air, and not struggle to right the kayak – to get out and save himself, before his air ran out and he drowned?

The paddle cut through empty water, and clunked against the plastic gunwales of the little boat, rocking it easily in the water, and this forced Paul to consider: nothing was underneath the boat.

James was not under the boat. He was not, in fact, anywhere.

 

A DOZEN CORMORANTS FLEW SO low their feet trailed in the water. They came close to Paul—so close he might have caught one with the blade of his paddle. But he kept still, watched them until they passed, then returned to the water, which he regarded with empty fascination. The air grew cool as the sun fell beneath the line of trees. Insects buzzed in his ear as James’ kayak drifted off, the dry bags scattering in their own directions.

As the first star emerged—probably not a star at all, but a planet, maybe Jupiter—in a deepened sky—Paul drew a breath.

He thought it might have been his first.

 

HE DIPPED HIS PADDLE INTO the water, and drew it to the kayak’s bow, and slid backward through the dark water. There was no moon. There were stars, scattering thick across the middle of the sky, but they weren’t enough. They left the world black.

He paddled backward twice more, and turned himself in another direction—by how much, he couldn’t tell—and proceeded. James was gone. The dry bags, the kayak—he left them all.

The night air was cool and numbing, and he warmed himself with exertion – paddling harder and driving the kayak faster across the lake. The water was still as it had been in the afternoon, and the stars reflected in it, dully, stretching infinity below him.

And Paul shut his eyes against even the pale light of the twinning stars, and thought: It’s just me now.

 

DID HE SLEEP?

He must have, for when he opened his eyes, it was to a bloody red dawn. The air was hot, and mist rose off the water and swirled about him. He was near a shore, but not one he recognized—this was high, round rock, topped with trees that looked to have been denuded by fire. Nearer the waterline, sharp stumps and rocks like broken teeth rose out of the mist. In their midst…a dock lolled, like a grey and splintered tongue, from the base of the rock.

He guided the kayak through the rock and wood, until its tip touched the wood. A moment later, he was stretched on the dock, pulling the kinks from his legs.

He lay back, and looked up the rockface. It was a strange place to put a dock, for there was no easy way to get up the rockface; it was nearly sheer here, and a good twenty feet up to the remainder of the woods, branches peeking over the lip of the cliff like an untrimmed brow. He felt a smile grow on his face.

And he thought again: I am alone.

His smile wavered. He sat up. Looked out through the mist. Its slow swirl fascinated him, and he cocked his head to watch it turn and bend, and as he watched, his smile vanished, as thoughts of speeding down a highway – hanging out the car window, feeling the wind…laughing, with him…

He bent his head away from the lake, and shut his eyes, and tensed, as a part of him fought…fought to return, to remember. He was having a difficult time remembering, anything really.

He gripped his own thighs, and rocked, and his lips struggled with the word, with the name of what he’d lost…

…of what he’d come for…

He opened his eyes, and stood on the dock. The kayak, he saw, was starting to drift off—so he bent over, and reached with his foot. He dragged it back, and took a breath, and put it together, and said it aloud:

“James.”

He was losing himself. There had been a second kayak, just like this one—the day before, the time before. As this kayak bumped back against the dock, he considered that moment—James, his husband. And the still water, beneath which he’d vanished.

He tried to hold that in his mind. James. The second kayak. Their wedding.

The long paddle through the night, across the lake of stars...

With an effort, he hefted an end of the kayak onto the dock, and hauled it the rest of the way along, until the length of the boat was safe on the dock.

Then, he turned his attention to the rock face.

It was smooth; there didn’t seem to be a way to climb it without gear. But it didn’t make sense that anyone would put a dock here, if there weren’t some way up. Most likely, this was set up to be a portage.

There had to be a reason for the dock. It had to lead to somewhere.

He ran his hands along the stone, and peered into the thinning mist at the base. There was no way up immediately, but there was a slick ledge, at nearly the water’s edge, that fell off into the water. Tentatively, he put a toe on it. Maybe there was some stairs, some kind of a ladder, further along. Tentatively he put a foot on it. He slid into the water, ankle-deep, then came up against a cleft that seemed as though he could balance on.

He put his weight on that foot, and drew the other into the water. It was icy cold, but he endured.

He made his way along the rock face in this way.

And as he proceeded, memory started to become clearer, and his situation clarified – and he thought about James, and the overturned kayak... and how he froze, and sat there in his kayak, as his new husband vanished. Why had he not jumped in? Finished the search? Why had he left... so easily?

He made it a dozen feet along, so disquieted by these new thoughts that he only heard the outboard motor when it stopped.

 

“WELL HELLO!”

Stanley Green waved from the back of the aluminum boat, as his wife Nancy sat at the bow, binoculars fixed on him. They were wearing colored windbreakers—Stanley’s blue, Nancy’s a brilliant yellow. A fishing rod hung over the side of the boat, lure glinting in the mist.

He didn’t wave.

“Where’s your friend?” said Stanley Green, and Nancy clarified: “Your husband?”

He turned in the water so he faced them, leaning against the rock face. The boat was maybe three dozen yards off, and they had to shout to be heard.

He shouted an answer.

“Oh my!” Nancy said, and Stanley shouted: “Where? Where’d it happen?”

For that, he had no answer. He’d crossed the lake at night, paddled through the stars. It was the other side of that.

Stanley and Nancy conferred, and Stanley turned back to him, and shouted that he’d bring the boat in, and get him, and they could go look for his friend together.

He trembled, and slid, and he steadied himself in the water, as Stanley bent over the outboard. What was Stanley doing there, this quiet morning, tugging at a rope on the top of the thing?

There was a terrible coughing sound, and a roar—and it sent his heart pounding…and he spun about in the water, and felt it sheathe off his feet, his long and slender legs—

 

HE RESTED A MOMENT, ON top of the rocks, the scoured forest at his back. The view of the lake was more commanding from here; the height made him feel better... safer.

The two in the boat were talking to each other. He couldn’t understand what they said. But they were pointing at the dock as they spoke. They were confused, and frightened. The boat made close to the dock, and they both climbed out. He craned his neck over the edge of the rock, peered down curiously at them. She looked up, and pointed, and her husband looked at him too.

Their eyes were wide, and wet, and afraid, and above all—

guilty.

And he had enough of it. So he spread his arms wide, and pushed down on the heavy morning air, and left them there on the dock.

 

PAUL FINALLY FOUND JAMES THAT afternoon, in the cleft between a small rocky island and the shore. It wasn’t difficult – he had eyes for this kind of thing, and Paul would recognize James anywhere. He circled twice just to be sure, then narrowed his wings just so, and let the earth pull him down. James flashed silver, as though signalling him, making a perfect target... and when the surface of the water broke, Paul took James around the middle, and his gills twitched in recognition, as Paul broke the surface again, and took back to flight.

The two didn’t speak after that. There were no words necessary.

They flew in silence, close to the water this time, as Paul guided them both, by prehistoric instinct, to the camp—the place where they were both expected, where hungry mouths waited.