Consumption (36 page)

Amanda and Lewis lay together in Lewis’s bedroom in his father’s basement. She stared at him. He was so beautiful, his narrow shoulders rising and falling as he breathed deeply, his wet hair hanging in curls around his forehead, the nape of his neck. She ran her hand over his chest, her fingertips curling between his ribs. Harder. He smiled but did not move. Harder. Along the grooves in his abdomen she ran her fingers, as he shivered, the sensations of arousal battling those of being tickled. She saw this and grinned.

His father had painted the room the same turquoise he had long ago painted his baby son’s room. When the strategy of duplicating the boy’s mother’s house failed to move Lewis, others had been employed; there was a home entertainment centre in his room, with a wide-screen television, and a new IBM personal computer with a dramatic 640K of RAM and its own 20MB hard drive. It was a convenient place for Amanda and Lewis to come when his father was at work and they wanted some place to hang for a little while. Lewis almost never slept here, could not deal with his father’s beseeching attempts to curry his favour, and they were careful to be gone before he came home. (At least the boy remained involved with him, his father thought, when he smelled the pot, saw the strewn bedclothes.)

This afternoon it was raining in New Jersey, had been since the end of November. The cool grey afternoons hung over them, the effect of the weather growing more obvious as they retreated from every other stimulus, until it was only them, the two of them, and the meteorological facts of the moment.

They had fucked three times and were exhausted. It was four in the afternoon and Amanda had skipped school. She had realized
that she was immune to the administrative remonstrations of the vice-principal; her grades had remained excellent, even as she had aroused concern in one teacher after another. She looked an inch shorter than she had at the beginning of the year, though if she stood straight she revealed that she had actually grown two. She rarely stood straight, over concern that attention might be drawn to her breasts, whose increase horrified her. This grotesque body of hers, swelling and stretching in such obvious and public ways—she wanted to be blind to it. Only when Lewis discovered the beauty of her body did she feel, in the moment, lovely. She stretched, her arms reaching back over her head, and watched Lewis watching her, and she smiled as he moved closer. Long, glowing, and exquisite, she curled into him.

He was working these days at Garden Avenue Videotheque. He did not attend high school any more but was pursuing a correspondence diploma with the support of a private high school specializing in just his sort of circumstances. His father thought his mother had poisoned him with her anger, as she had poisoned herself; his mother thought his father couldn’t have made it any more apparent that he didn’t give a shit about anything but himself. They had joint custody. Lewis moved between his parents at will, evading every boundary with skilful manoeuvring. He had stopped going to school in the end simply because he couldn’t be bothered. He could go back anytime, he told her. One of these days he might.

It was his mouth she liked to stare at the most. It was perfect. Tight little lips, wry grin always hanging on them. She could look at his mouth all day long.

She liked that he was smart and she liked that he was trouble. She wanted badly for him to think she was smart too; she wanted him to admire her. Her mother and father, on the basis of one blinking introduction on her front door stoop, were appalled by him and she liked that too.

Her parents’ arguing had reached such a crescendo it felt like they could not possibly go one more minute without rupture, but
they did, on and on, screaming that had become the eye-rolling joke of the neighbourhood. There was talk among the neighbourhood wits of taking up a collection either to insulate their walls better or send them back to California. When she was home, Amanda huddled in her room. She was home less and less.

She looked up at Lewis’s dropped-tile ceiling. So many dots. He was rolling a joint now. The Monks’
Bad Habits
was playing on the stereo, so loudly the dots shivered; she felt the bass line of “Nice Legs, Shame About Her Face” rippling through the bed and into her. She watched him roll the joint. His fingers moved precisely. It was four in the afternoon and they still had hours to themselves.

Pauloosie carried her to the riverbank, where there was a gentle rise that exposed the ground and the rocks around it. He lay her down facing the river, and he placed her rifle alongside her and he made a row of large flat stones around her form. It was difficult to dig the stones out of the frozen dirt, he had to prise them loose, one by one, with his hatchet. He ran another ring of stone around her on top of the first layer, but leaning in. By the time the sun began to settle on the southwest horizon, he had finished three layers. He crawled into her iglu and rolled out his sleeping bag. He could smell her scent in there, in the snow and the few things that remained. As he waited for sleep he wondered whether it was possible any more for men and women to live on this land, whether the land itself had changed, become no longer accommodating.

Slowly the stones rose in the shape of an oblong cairn. It took him two days to finish it. Before he lifted the final stone onto the top row above her face he leaned into the gap. It was dark inside, but he could still see the outline of her jaw and forehead, a trace of hair. She had not thought herself to be beautiful and had so persuaded others of her assessment, but this was a mistake. She was beautiful.
She had ached for something she couldn’t have described with any precision, but it had something to do with a place like this—cold, hard, unyielding—and the sort of heat a place like this requires one to generate. She wanted to be the kind of person who could have lived here. And she could have been.

Pauloosie, grunting, lifted the final rock up and onto the last row of stone. She was now immune for all time to the depredations of foxes and even of bears. He tipped her sled on its edge beside the cairn. She had had some ammunition and fishhooks, which he took. Then he loaded his sled and hitched his impatient dogs to it and headed south. He thought he might go to Padlei to see if there were any
tuktu
there. He would be unlikely to run into another hunter in that part of the land.

Victoria sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and smoking. It was after eleven already and neither Justine nor Marie was home yet. They were supposed to be at a party at Johnny Apilardjuk’s house. Victoria had called there a few minutes ago and there was no answer. She was not going to call the police. She could not talk to those sons of bitches one more time.

When the door squeaked open and her daughters laughed their way into the kitchen, they didn’t notice her at first. When they did, they stopped laughing quickly enough.

Victoria’s mouth was tightened in a manner they had never seen before. Her lower lip was drawn half into her mouth and the muscles of her chin stuck out in protruding radiations. Her eyes—they had seen her eyes like this, but not until six months ago, when it seemed to them that everything had started falling apart.

“Mom, don’t be angry, it’s not late,” Justine said.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“For God’s sake, you smell like a brewery.”

“Well maybe just a sip—all the other kids were having some and…”

“And did you give your little sister liquor too?”

“Mom, we were just having a little fun…”

“Is that a hickey on the side of your neck? Oh my God!! You were drinking and having sex… Marie’s just sixteen years old!”

“Don’t go crazy, Mom, I was not…”

“Just shut up!
SHUT UP, BOTH OF YOU!
”

They cringed in silence. Each hoped Pauloosie and Robertson would creep in from whichever shadow they had been hiding in, to settle things down. Victoria felt like she sat within a cone of sadness and grief, her husband dead and her boy gone from her. Her fault, all of it. She tried to speak and a sob broke out before the words, falling over them like a breaking wave. She slid from her chair onto the linoleum, her legs jutting out from her like a three-year-old.

Her daughters looked at each other, still shrinking from the fury their mother had displayed. And now she was collapsed, which frightened them even more. They sidled past her to their room, closing the door behind them, their mother’s sobs echoing through the house.

Three times a year it was court week in Rankin Inlet. The Justice Department flew in a judge, a stenographer, a prosecutor, a defence attorney—all the necessary players. They stayed in the hotel and met every morning in one of the conference rooms. Portable chairs were brought in for the public and these chairs were always full. Common assaults were the principal fare, but there were attempts to smuggle in alcohol, a few drug-trafficking charges as well—a kilo of hash being so much easier to carry in than the equivalent, five hundred cases of beer. There were domestic abuse situations, and petty thefts at the various government offices. Occasionally a miner came up on an attempt to pocket a stone, but these cases were rare—the security
and searches of the mine site were so thorough no one thought very hard about risking their lucrative jobs for the slim chance they would get away with stealing a raw stone of undetermined quality.

Court week was a snapshot of impetuous and destructive acts performed many months earlier, and fading already in the memories of the perpetrator and the aggrieved. It was a ritual almost everyone directly involved would have been as happy to avoid, and the appearance rate of witnesses rarely exceeded 40per cent. For the uninvolved, on the other hand, it was incomparable theatre. Every elderly woman in the community made her way to the hotel on court days, to perch on the metal chairs and nod impassively as the victim impact statements were read.

The week Okpatayauk was to be tried, everyone in town spoke of the matter. It was generally agreed that he was being absurd, confessing to an act he so clearly had not committed. Elizabeth, his girlfriend, had placed a succession of calls to Constable Bridgeford, asking him over and over again if he genuinely believed that Okpatayauk did it. Bridgeford pled that the matter was in the hands of the Crown now, and that she should talk to Okpatayauk about this, not him. When Victoria called him and asked if she could visit Okpatayauk in his cell before the trial, Bridgeford was stumped. “Victoria, why would you want to do something like that?”