Black Fly Season (8 page)

Cardinal hurried up the trail, toward the pool he knew was at the next ridge. The ‘island’ (little more than an outcropping of rock, really) where he was to meet Delorme wasn’t far above that. There was a faint hiss in the air. As he approached the ridge, the hissing grew louder, until it sounded like radio static. The falls. He had forgotten about Nishinabe Falls. Cardinal stopped.

Most years, Nishinabe Creek is too small to boast anything resembling a falls. The pool is fed by a trickle of water - about what you’d get from your eaves-troughs in a summer storm. But this year the heavy snows had turned it into a glassy curtain of water that tumbled over the rocks and hid the cave-like recession behind it. Cardinal gripped his collar round his neck, staring.

Had the hiss of static reminded Red of this rushing falls? Of something that had frightened her up here? The water foamed and frothed at Cardinal’s feet. Further out in the pool it was black as onyx. A fly gouged his scalp, and he swatted at it, hurting his ear. He badly wanted to rush uphill, find Delorme, and flee these miniature vampires, but he was stopped by the

sense that Red had been here, perhaps in search of something. Perhaps against her will.

When he had been up here on a hike a couple of years back, Cardinal had crossed the creek stone by stone, but now the stones were submerged in froth. Luckily, beavers had been busy nearby and there was a birch tree sprawled across the water. Cardinal stepped on to the trunk, and it crumbled under his foot. It was stronger higher up. When he had a good footing, he edged his way out across the water. A fly bit into his neck and he cuffed at it, nearly toppling.

As soon as he was near enough, he leaped to solid ground and went after the flies in a fury, slapping his neck, the side of his face, the crown of his head. Anger and frustration were aggravated by the consciousness of looking ridiculous, even though there was no one to see. He climbed a series of boulders and then he was at the edge of the pool with the falls before him. He stepped under the overhang and right away he could smell the sickly odour of rotting meat.

Cardinal edged between a rock and the falling water. He stopped again and listened. The black flies had abandoned him now, driven back by the spray. Something else had Cardinal’s attention.The granite face of the wall behind him was defaced, not with the usual graffiti, but with long columns of hieroglyphics. They looked ancient, but Cardinal knew they had not been there two years ago.

There were pictographs of arrows three or four

inches long that intersected each other in weird patterns. Others were heaped in bunches with one longer arrow extruding, as if indicating a direction. Along the edges of the rock, there were drawings of the moon in various stages - full, half, three-quarter, new - and everywhere there were numbers, inscribed in coloured chalk.

Cardinal moved away from the rock face and stepped around a sharp corner of granite. The smell on the other side was nauseating. He pulled out his shirttail and covered his mouth and nose.

The thing on the floor of the cave had once been human but there was nothing lifelike about it now. The body was naked, male, with muscular arms and legs. All that working out hadn’t come to much, though: a pale heap of flesh in a dark, cold cave. However this human being had lived, his death had been savage. The hands and feet were missing, as was the head. Maggots heaved on the major wounds, giving the appearance of movement.

There was a noise, and Cardinal whirled around.

Delorme was staring at the body from behind the corner of granite.

‘I don’t know about you,’ she said. ‘But me, I don’t think the black flies did that.’

Kevin Tait picked up the fly-swatter and moved with great stealth to the window. The fly that had just taken a piece out of his ankle was trying repeatedly to fly through the glass. Kevin brought the fly-swatter down, and the fly went to its reward. Using the swatter like a spatula, he scooped up the tiny corpse and carried it to the cabin door. He opened the door just long enough to fling the dead fly outside without inviting any of its cousins to the Kevin Tait smorgasbord.

He cleaned the little smear from the windowpane with a Kleenex. Across the field, Red Bear was arriving in his black BMW. You had to hand it to Red Bear, the guy knew how to live. Dressed in white from head to toe, all six feet of him, and then he’s got that glossy black hair down to his shoulders and the Wayfarers dark as outer space. He climbed out of the Beamer and two nifty-looking babes got out with him, a blonde and a brunette With the kind of bodies that spoke of hours in the gym. The three of them walked across the former

baseball diamond to Red Bear’s cabin, by far the nicest in this crumbling old camp. Kevin watched them from his window, the tall Indian all in white, like Elvis in his last years, an arm around each of the women. Red Bear wore so many beads and bracelets he rattled as he walked. Somehow he overcame the vulgarity with his good looks and his aura of power.

Kevin Tait was not the kind of young man who believed in personal power or charisma, perhaps because he sensed that he possessed none. Oh, he knew he could be charming. Women have always had a weak spot for penniless poets, and the erotic power of melancholy is well known.

Kevin flopped across the bed and opened his notebook. He pulled out the black pen Terri had given him for his twenty-first birthday. He thought he might start a poem about misery and lust, but the pen remained inert.

He flipped through the notebook, browsing through jottings he’d made over the past months - musings, observations, bits of verse.

Her first love was a captain For whom she would become The muse of Navigation The smoke of opium

Just a fragment, and too Leonard Cohenish at that.

A wizard turning wisdom into wine…

God knows where he had been heading with that one. It seemed ages since he’d finished anything substantial. There had been a poem in March, but he hadn’t bothered to send it out to the small magazines; it needed another polish or two. The last few months he’d been conserving his strength, lying fallow, waiting for just the right idea; he’d know it when it came along. It would go off like a roman candle, sparks pinwheeling across the jet-black sky of his mind.

‘Kevin Tait, good to have you on the show.’

Kevin liked to do this thing in his head where he was being interviewed by David Letterman, even though he knew Letterman never interviewed poets. He figured he would be the first.

‘Kevin Tait,’ he said again. ‘Here you are, your last volume of poems sold a gazillion copies. People quote your lines to each other day in and day out. You’re not just a poet, any more, you’re a force in the culture. And - I don’t know how to put this gently - you’re hanging out with scumbags. N’er-do-wells. Drug dealers. What are you thinking?’ Letterman’s fratboy grin took the sting out of the question.

‘Drug dealers, Dave, provide a much-needed service to a, let’s face it, under appreciated crowd. People have used drugs down the centuries, and they always will. Look at Coleridge. Look at Rimbaud. A little disorder in the senses never hurt

anybody. And not just artists. It’s a long dark night out there, Dave, and everyone needs a little help getting through.’

(Applause. Letterman ignored it.)

‘But you’re a poet. And you’re hanging out with thugs. Doesn’t that make you nervous?’

‘Nervous? Not really.’ Kevin gave it a beat. ‘I’m actually terrified.’

(Laughter.)

‘So give us the big picture, here. How does this - sorry, I gotta say it - oddball behaviour fit into your grand plan?’

‘My plan, Dave, is to make a lot of money by selling as much contraband as possible in as short a time as possible. Then I’m heading off to Greece for a few years to write the big one. Maybe Barcelona, Tangiers, I’m not sure.’

Letterman then had him read his latest poem. There was a respectful pause when he read the last line, then a balmy wave of applause.

The plan had a flaw that Letterman didn’t know about: Kevin had a weakness for the product he sold. He liked to think his personal appreciation of his wares was what made him an exceptional salesman. In any case, he was clean these days; just a little skinpopping now and again. Nobody ever came to grief by skinpopping. Besides, he knew he could quit the skinpopping, too. It was just a matter of getting back to twelve-step.

So that was his plan: keep clean and stow away a ton of cash over the next year. Then he’d

hightail it to - who knew? Greece, Tangiers, Barcelona - and spend his time in creative isolation, doing nothing but drinking strong coffee and writing poems. He’d mail them back to Terri one by one, so she’d know he was doing fine. Otherwise, she was likely to chase him around the world, trying to look after him.

Terri had always had a tendency to mother him, and sometimes it just got out of hand. Just a few days ago, he’d had to tell her what was what on that score. That sent her packing, and he hadn’t heard from her since. Probably she’d gone back to Vancouver, which was perfectly fine with Kevin. He’d call her in a couple of weeks, let her know he didn’t hold a grudge. For now, the important thing was to get a nest-egg together, and Red Bear was just the man to help him do it.

When Red Bear had first come along, all dressed in white, talking of his contacts in the spirit world, Kevin had written him off as just another nutcase. That had been almost a year ago. Kevin and Leon had been sitting outside at the Lemon Tree on Algonquin Avenue, shooting the breeze, watching the girls go by. It was likely going to be the last perfect day of summer, and all the tables were taken. Red Bear gets out of a black car - someone else was driving - and heads inside the shop. A few minutes later he reappears with a lemonade and comes right over.

‘You mind if I sit here?’ He said it to Leon, not , Kevin.

Leon shrugged. ‘It’s a free country.’

Red Bear pulled the chair out and spun it round, then sat down facing them with his elbows on its back. The fringes of his white jacket hung nearly to the pavement.

‘In exchange for your kindness, I will read your cards.’ Red Bear had a curiously formal way of speaking, as if he were translating from another language.

Kevin was expecting a Tarot deck, but Red Bear pulled out an ordinary pack of cards and fanned them out across the table. ‘Pick a card to represent yourself,’ he said to Leon. Leon tapped the king of hearts, nothing subtle about Leon. He sat back and rubbed at his forehead with his index finger. He had a small scar there, and sometimes he rubbed at it as if he could erase it.

Red Bear gathered up all the cards except the king, shuffled them, and then began laying them out in squares and crosses. A deep groove of concentration formed between his brows. ‘You’ve recently had trouble with a relative,’ he said. ‘A difference over money.’

Leon looked at Kevin. His cousin had stayed with him the past winter and had stolen two hundred dollars before hopping on a Greyhound in the middle of the night. Next day, Leon had gotten drunk and beat the hell out of some stranger in the Chinook tavern, till Kevin managed to pull him off. Leon raged about his cousin for weeks afterward.

‘That’s pretty right on,’ he said to Red Bear. ‘Keep going.’

‘There is violence in your past.’ Red Bear looked up from the cards, a trace of concern on his brow. ‘You can be a violent man.’

Leon laughed. Maybe with nerves.

‘Not really. I’ve mellowed out a lot. Well, okay. Yeah. I been known to lose my temper now and again.’

Red Bear returned his gaze to the cards. ‘You have coming up some major opportunities for development. Perhaps a way to channel this anger.’

‘Okay, all right. Can we move on to another subject, please?’

‘You are leaving behind a period of romantic frustration.’

‘I hope so,’ Leon said. ‘Women, man. I could use a little action along that line.’

‘You are alone right now - romantically, I mean - you’ve been alone for some time.’ Red Bear snapped a two of hearts across the king and took off his sunglasses. Looked up at Leon. ‘That, my friend, is about to change.’

It was then that Kevin realized what a handsome guy Red Bear was. Strong bones in that face, two little parentheses at the corners of his mouth when he smiled, and those eyes. When he took off his sunglasses, Red Bear’s eyes were the palest blue Kevin had ever seen, paler than a husky’s, almost transparent.

Red Bear had pointed out a lot of other stuff in

Leon’s cards that Kevin could not now remember. Leon had been impressed, excited even, but Kevin hadn’t been, not then: lucky guess on the money thing, and the rest was the sort of crap you saw in astrology columns all the time.

‘You’re skeptical,’ Red Bear had said to Kevin. Those transparent eyes, those amazing cheekbones. Cherokee. The word had popped into Kevin’s mind, even though he didn’t know a Cherokee from a Blackfoot. He looked every inch the Red Bear, even before he mentioned his background.

‘It doesn’t matter if you believe,’ Red Bear said. ‘A thing will be true whether you believe it or not.’ He spread the cards again. ‘Pick one to represent yourself.’

‘Naw, that’s okay.’

‘Go ahead. Pick one.’

‘No, really. It’s not my kind of thing.’

‘I’ll pick one for you.’ Red Bear selected a jack of diamonds. Jack of all trades? Jack-off? One-eyed jack? One-eyed monster?

Red Bear shuffled the cards and snapped them off the top of the deck one by one.

‘Problems with the family,’ he said. ‘Someone older than you. The two of you bump heads now and again.’

Close. Very close, but Kevin didn’t say anything

‘You have recently overcome a bad habit, perhaps an addiction. That shows clearly, here.’ He tapped the pair of threes with a seven of diamonds. Kevin felt the hair at the back of his neck lift.

The queen of hearts came up, separated from the king by another three.

‘You have a lady in your life,’ Red Bear said.