Eye Lake (19 page)

Virgil said he didn't know exactly why he woke up so early the next day himself. But it was barely light when he did, and he just lay there in bed staring out the window, trying to get back to sleep. He could hear someone shuffling quietly about in the kitchen and then the faint click of the porch door, and then he watched Clarence go by below him on the sidewalk, wearing an old black jacket full of holes, his slow, steady steps hardly making a sound, moving through the half-dark of the morning until he reached the corner and turned and disappeared.

‘There was something not quite right,' Virgil said. ‘And I couldn't for the life of me put a finger on it at the time. I fell back to sleep and it wasn't till I woke up again and the sun was properly up that I figured out what it was. He hadn't been carrying his fishing rod. He hadn't been carrying anything.

‘And that was the very last time I saw him,' Virgil said.

They didn't ever find a body, not a single bone. They had nothing to place into the earth and put a stone over. And so Clarence's only remains were these last things: his last words and conversations, the last place he'd been seen, the last plans he'd made. Ordinary things you'd take no notice of usually but that somehow got fixed in people's minds because they were the last, like they were prints made in air and time, just the same as the prints his feet had made in the dirt.

The Lost Highway

G
eorge said we should head north. I said we should head east. If we hit the river then it'd be easy enough to find our way back to town – that was our thinking – but neither of us knew for certain what direction the river was in anymore. To be honest, neither of us knew where north or east was neither. The only difference was that George thought he knew.

‘Look at this moss here,' he'd say, rooting about in the woods. ‘It's growing much thicker on this side of the trunks. Look at these flowers coming through. Look at the sun. It's
obvious
. That way's north.' George was really liking this being lost, you could tell. He seemed to have forgotten all about the underground place. He was so excited he was jumping around like a jack.

‘But I reckon that way's east.'

‘Eli, Eli,' he said. ‘Who's seen the most maps of here? Who's studied them?'

‘I don't care about no maps. I think it's east. It felt like we were heading west when we started running.'

‘It
felt
like we were heading west? How do you
feel
a direction, Eli? That's dumb. I remember seeing maps of around here showing a swamp and a creek like this to the south of the shelter.'

‘There's a hundred swamps and creeks around here,' I said. ‘There's hundreds of them. How'd you know for sure it was these ones?'

But it was no use arguing with George. He had an answer for everything. And besides it was getting on and I reckoned any direction was better than none, even if neither of us knew for certain what direction it really was.

We set off into the bush.

‘After a full and frank discussion about their bearings,' George said, ‘they decided on a northerly course.'

It was pretty tough going at first. The ground was wet and swampy and sometimes our feet would sink through the surface right up to our knees. It wasn't too warm down there neither. And when we eventually made it onto the higher ground of a ridge, the blowdown was so thick it took us a while to creep our way through it.

When we reached the top of the ridge we stopped to get a view of the land around us. In every direction there were more trees and more swamps and more ridges. The river was nowhere in sight.

By then our clothes were already in a bad way. Both our shirts had tears in them and our shoes and pants were soaking. There was a big scrape on George's cheek where a branch had hit him. We sat down on a rock for a bit and I stared around us at the trees and swamps and ridges, beginning to feel sorry for myself. But George seemed about as pleased as could be. He was peering in front of him with his hand held up to his forehead to keep the sun out of his eyes.

‘I think our best route is that way,' he said, pointing ahead. ‘The ground looks easier.'

It all looked alike to me. One swamp seemed pretty much the same as another. They'd all feel as cold and sludgy when I traipsed through them.

But he was right. When we set off again the ground did get easier. George seemed to have a real knack for finding the best way through. He guided us around the swamps and kept to the bottom of the ridges, finding little creeks we could follow without having to whack our way through the bush. We made good progress and when we stopped for a rest he turned to me and said, ‘See. It's elementary.' He was smiling. And I couldn't help smiling myself then.

A couple of hours later, as we were rounding the edge of a small lake, George said he'd spotted a gap in the trees over to our right. I couldn't see it properly myself, but he insisted it was there so we cut into the bush towards where he said it was. As we got closer I could make out a break in the tops of the taller poplars and white pines, and the trees around us began to thin out. A few feet further on we came to a path. And a foot and a half further, another path.

They were running along beside each other, with bushes and saplings growing in the gap between them. It took us a few seconds to figure it out. They weren't two paths. They were the tracks of an old road. We'd found the road to Bad Vermilion. We'd found the lost highway.

We kids all knew it was somewhere out there, in the bush to the north and west of us, but we didn't know absolutely for certain. You heard stories about it and that was all.

Nobody in Crooked River liked talking about Bad Vermilion, and when they did their voices dropped till they were almost whispers. They said that before the mine came to Crooked River, it was the big town in these parts – compared to Crooked River, anyhow. It was the only other town in these parts, so I guess there wasn't a bunch of competition. They'd found some gold there a few years after Clarence arrived in Crooked River, and it'd grown fast, until it had two hotels and two stores and its own road. Then the gold had run out and because the railroad didn't run close to it, there was no reason for it being there anymore. And that was that. It just sort of faded away. And ever since then it was considered pretty unlucky to even mention its name in Crooked River, as if its bad luck might rub off on us somehow, as if people didn't want reminding that things like that could happen to places. ‘Ah, Bad Vermilion – our memento mori,' Virgil used to say, which he told me was a fancy way of saying, ‘Remember – this could happen to you!'

George had made plans to find it once. He said we should go on an expedition to ‘unearth' it, like some old cities in South America he'd read about in his
National Geographic
s. But in the end we didn't bother. It was a ways off in the bush and after a while he had to give up on the idea.

You can imagine how pleased he was to find the road to it now, though. A big grin spread right across his face and he kept hopping from one side of the road to the other, through the bushes and the saplings.

‘I knew it was here,' he said. ‘I found it, Eli. I found it.'

He was right. We had been heading north. But I was right too, because we'd gone west as well.

‘I knew it was here,' he said.

George looked a bit surprised when I reminded him we were supposed to be trying to find the river and getting back home. Then he started talking like this had been part of his plan all along. ‘That's the thing, Eli. We know where the river is now,' he said. ‘We know this road goes north so we know the river's over that way. But we'll never be able to reach it and get back today, will we?'

He was right about that too. The sun was beginning to dip down towards the horizon. There was probably only three hours or so of good daylight left.

‘The way I see it we can either camp out here in the open in the bush, or push on till we reach Bad Vermilion. There'll probably be places for us to stay there.'

‘But no one lives there no more,' I said. ‘We don't know what's there.'

‘There's got to be something,' he said. ‘It's got to be better than being stuck in the bush. We can find the river first thing tomorrow. We know where it is now, don't we?'

The way he was eyeing the road in front of him I knew there
was no use arguing. And so off we set, along the lost highway, towards Bad Vermilion.

After a mile or two I'd forgotten my doubts about George's plan. There was a sweet spring smell in the air, of fresh leaves and pine needles, and the hum and bustle of everything beginning to wake up from the winter. George was so excited it was kind of catching. He'd got hold of a stick and was prodding the bush on the sides of the road, looking for stuff, and talking in his
National Geographic
voice about us unearthing things. It made me feel curious too, like him, and I hardly noticed my stomach grumbling. It'd been a while since I'd eaten. I pictured a bowl of porridge. In the back of my mind was the thought that Nana and Dad and Virgil would be worrying about me – but I'd be back tomorrow, I thought. It wouldn't be long. I was imagining me walking in through the porch with George beside me and everyone saying, ‘You found him, Eli. Would you believe it? Eli's found him.' Nana would give me a bowl of porridge. Virgil would slap me on the back. Dad would smile. It'd be like I'd caught the best fish in the world.

‘Just think,' George said. ‘If we kept following this road we'd reach the real north.'

He'd put his stick down by this point and we were walking side by side.

‘I guess,' I said.

‘We could walk and walk and eventually there'd be icebergs and frozen seas and the only people would be Eskimos. We could spear seals and live in igloos and find places nobody had ever been before.'

‘I guess,' I said again. I wasn't so sure about the icebergs and igloos. The sun was dropping fast and I was already beginning to feel pretty chilly.

‘And this time of year it'd be light all through the night. It'd never get dark. We could get dogs and sleds and ride for as long
and as far as we wanted and there'd be no one to stop us. We could go all the way to the North Pole if we wanted to.' He made it sound just like Big Rock Candy Mountain: somewhere you could have everything you wanted.

When I looked over at him, I saw George's eyes had gone kind of red and watery and bloodshot. I guess it must have been from the sun. He didn't have a hat to keep the light off them.

‘I don't want to live in Crooked River anymore, Eli,' he said. ‘I don't want to.'

I gave him my baseball cap. He looked at me with his funny red eyes and his white face.

‘Thank you, Eli,' he said.

There wasn't any sign saying welcome to Bad Vermilion. And if there had been, it would've said
Population 0
.

At first we didn't even know we'd reached it. We'd passed a few shacks off the edge of the road, and when we went to look at them we found their roofs had fallen through and bushes and grass were growing up through the floorboards. They didn't look too promising.

‘These must be the outskirts,' George said. ‘There'll be better places in the centre.'

So we went back to the road and carried on following it. We'd only gone a few hundred yards further along when it ended at the shore of a small lake. There were some mouldy old boards piled up in the woods beside it that must've been boats once. George and me both went a ways along the shore to look for the rest of Bad Vermilion but we didn't find nothing.

‘That must've been it back there,' I said.

‘All of it?' George said, looking a bit bewildered.

‘I reckon so.'

Further back in the bush, behind the shacks we'd looked at first, we discovered a few more of them. One still had its roof on
and pieces of glass in its windows. But there were no old hotels or stores or anything like that. Here and there we stumbled on the wrecks of old-fashioned cars and trucks, dark and cratered with rust and so overgrown with moss and grass and bushes that they looked more like weird-shaped plants. Moving around from shack to shack, we kept on finding other stuff too: a set of swings with pines growing up beneath the poles and a seat hanging off one of the branches; a pair of sneakers that a squirrel had filled with pine cones; an old-time radio with a bent aerial and chewed-up wires sticking out the back. George put that aside for keeping.

We settled on the place with a roof to stay in. The door fell off its hinges with the first push we gave it. Inside the air was still and chilly, as if it hadn't quite shook off the winter yet. There was a table and chairs in the middle of the front room; one of the chairs was pulled out from the table like someone had just that second got up from eating. In the corner was a wood stove, and when we opened it a squirrel scampered out from the nest it'd made in there, stopping for a moment in the middle of the room to give us a disapproving stare before heading out the door.

There were two other small rooms at the back, each with an iron bed frame and a half-eaten mattress on it. There were pieces of pine cone scattered everywhere and in one of the mattresses there was a nest made out of the pages of a chewed-up Bible.

‘This'll be perfect,' George said.

I wasn't so sure about that. I couldn't shake off the chill of the place. And when I breathed the air in there it felt strange and stale and thick, like it was full of the spores of someone else's leftover and forgotten life. The light from outside came through the dirty windows and settled in ragged patches on the floor. It was fading. It was getting late.

‘I'm hungry,' I said.

‘I'll go rustle something up,' George said, bounding out the door.

‘Where you going?' I shouted after him.

‘Nature, to the well-trained eye, is a fully stocked larder,' he called back.

I checked out a cupboard in the corner and found a few old cans of beans.

It was getting near dark when George came back. He was carrying an armload of twigs and roots and leaves.

‘There,' he said, dropping them on the floor. ‘Dinner is served.'

‘I'm not eating them,' I said.

‘They're all edible.'

‘For bears, I reckon. I found these,' I said, pointing to the beans.