Eye Lake (7 page)

Big Rock Candy Mountain

T
he week after we found the underground place, George came over in the morning and told me he was going back there. I said I wasn't so sure that was a good idea, what with the chance there was a shacker living in it and everything, but George got in a huff and said he'd go anyway, with or without me, and I knew he'd not get far with just him paddling. Okay, I said, and told him I'd go this one time and then we should leave it be. I don't like it there, I told him. He nodded his head and the brim of his hat slipped over his eyes.

‘Why don't you wear a baseball cap like everyone else?' I asked.

‘Why don't you shut up?' he said.

When we got to the riverbank we couldn't find the canoe anywhere. I had a look through the bulrushes and George tramped up and down through the bog mat, poking around with this old walking stick thing he'd brought along. ‘Well, that's that then,' I said. ‘
No
can do.' ‘Maybe if you'd look properly we'd find it,' George said. But it wasn't there and no amount of looking was going to change that.

George huffed and puffed along the riverbank until his pants were wet right up to his thighs. He got real ornery when he couldn't get started on his expeditions; it was what made his not being allowed out during the week so bad. Sometimes, when Mr. McKenzie wouldn't let him go out into the woods, he'd kick the door until his toes were almost bleeding and then writhe and whirl about their garden like a mink in a trap, spinning and stewing in his own circle of tempers. If his face could've gone red it would've. Instead, tears would hang in the corners of his eyes and then fall onto his cheeks. His frustration had to boil up and go somewhere even if he wasn't allowed to.

‘Goddammit,' he shouted, whacking a clump of innocent reeds with his stick. ‘Goddammit. Goddammit.'

Sitting there on the bank I was thinking there'd be no bulrushes left soon, when suddenly George calmed down.

‘Of course,' he said to himself. ‘Why didn't I think of that before?'

‘Think of what?' I asked.

‘It's elementary, my dear Eli.'

‘It's what?' George had been reading detective books that winter and was always saying strange things out of them.

‘Your grandfather's canoe. It's sitting right there in your garden shed. We can carry it here easy.'

‘No way,' I said.

That was the last trip Clarence's canoe made before it became historical and ended up outside the museum. It wasn't hard to carry to the river because it was still made out of birch bark back then; the only hard part was getting it out of the garden shed with nobody seeing. At one point we dropped it on the road and just stood there glaring at each other. We were getting on each other's nerves I guess, because he wanted to go and I didn't.

After we got out on the water George sat in the bow looking about as pleased as could be. He was thinking of himself being just like Clarence – or the Clarence he liked to imagine, at least – setting off into a brand new wilderness. You could tell he was thinking that because he kept jabbering on about our trip in the same style as Mrs. Arnold had told us the story of Clarence's arrival.

‘On 8 October George McKenzie paddled west down the Crooked River. Nobody was sure where he started out from … ‘ etc., etc.

In the stern I was thinking about another Clarence: the one going around and around on the looping river and never getting anywhere.

It was harder to keep the birch-bark canoe straight than the other one, and what with George making his speeches the whole way instead of paddling properly it took us hours to get to the right spot, or near the right spot anyway. That's the thing with the bush around here – you'll think you know it, you'll think you'll easily recognize the places in it you've been before, but there's times it'll turn you around and you won't. That little creek you saw, that clump of spruces, that outcrop of rock, that piece of swamp, they'll go and change into a slightly different creek, a slightly different piece of swamp, a slightly different clump of spruces, and then you'll end up peering around you, and everything, for as far as you can see, will look like clumps of spruces and pieces of swamp and little creeks, all of them slightly different and all of them slightly the same. And then you'll feel it: the empty, scary space growing in your belly, growing bigger and bigger until it seems as big and empty as the thousands and thousands of kilometres surrounding you. And you'll feel the wildness of it then. And you'll know the fright that lives and breathes in that wildness too.

But we were lucky, if lucky is what you'd call it. As we rounded a bend George shouted back to me to pull over to the bank. I wasn't sure what he was up to, but when we got there he reached towards an overhanging spruce branch and grabbed hold of a piece of red tape wrapped around it. ‘What's that?' I asked him. I hadn't spotted it myself.

‘It's a marker,' he said, as if I were an idiot for not knowing. ‘You should always leave a marker.'

I'd never even seen him leave it.

As we got nearer the underground place I kept both my eyes on the ground. I had to. George's eyes were wandering excitedly all over the place. It was like he'd forgotten the bear trap and what it did to that sapling. And so he didn't see the signs I saw: the markers that weren't made of tape and weren't left on purpose.

I'd been out with Virgil when he hunted for moose and deer and seen him read the ground as easily and happily as he read his
books. He'd see hoofprints and touch them with his finger and say that's from this morning or last night or last week; he'd see broken twigs or scrapings on the bark of trees or droppings and tell me whether it was a cow or a doe, a bull or a buck. Now, I saw a candy wrapper and knew it was a person. But when I tried to tell George he pretended not to hear me. He spent so much time looking for special things he didn't see the normal ones.

When we got inside the underground place, I couldn't stop staring at the open hatchway. I clung to the square of sunlight that fell through it like I was a minnow keeping close to cover, like down below was the dangerous shadow world – where the slubes hovered patiently on their slow-flickering fins – and up above was the safe place, the place you could hide.

George was busy picking through the stuff on the shelves. Every now and then he'd hold something up to me and say, ‘Hey Eli, look' – a chisel, or a box of aspirin, or something like that. In the middle of the room he made a pile of the things he thought were the most interesting.

‘If you take those you'll be stealing,' I told him.

‘If nobody lives here it's salvage,' he said.

‘Somebody lives here,' I said.

We'd been down there a half-hour or so when George moved over to the table with the map on it.

‘I reckon whoever lived here travelled a lot and these circles are markers for all the places he went.'

‘Like a hobo,' I said.

‘Hobos don't have loads of stuff like this,' George said, as if he'd read about them in one of his
National Geographic
s and was a real expert on the matter. I wasn't no expert neither, but I remembered Nana talking about them and how they'd sometimes come on the boxcars in the summer and hang around town doing odd jobs. The ones who stayed a while became shackers. I remembered how Nana used to sing me one of their songs. It was about a place called Big Rock Candy Mountain, where cigarettes grew on trees and there
were whiskey fountains. Sometimes she changed the cigarettes to candy canes and the whiskey to soda water but it didn't matter really – what mattered was it was a place where you could have pretty much everything you wanted. She told me they left markers too, secret ones on fences and doors, made of little circles and lines, to let other hobos know if the people who lived there were likely to give them food or jobs. I was going to tell George that, but he'd found a box of papers and books under the table and was rifling through them. He'd got about halfway through when an odd look came over his face. Holding a piece of paper up to the light of the flashlight he stared at the words on it like they were written in a language he'd half forgot and was trying to remember.

‘What's it say?' I asked.

‘It's not what it says,' he whispered. He wasn't sounding such an expert now, which kind of pleased me. ‘It's … it's … '

And then the sunlight above me disappeared. It was like a cord or line or something had been cut and I felt like I was tumbling down into the shadow world where the slubes were waiting. Above me was the dark silhouette of a man.

‘… it's
his
writing.'

‘Hello, Mr. McKenzie,' I said.

‘Hello, Eli,' Mr. McKenzie said. ‘Hello, George.'

Mr. McKenzie was staring down at us through the hatchway. There was no surprise on his face. He must have known someone was here; he must have seen the signs. His beard seemed huge, as red and huge as an Irish Santa's. Then his head disappeared and his boots started coming down the steps. Clump, clump, they went. Careful and steady. I saw George put the papers back and then glance nervously over at the pile of things on the floor. His mouth was half open and his skin was so white it was almost glowing.

‘So,' Mr. McKenzie said, ‘I see you two have been doing some exploring.' He'd grabbed hold of the flashlight and was shining it
into the corners. Its beam came to rest on George's pile. ‘Or should I say stealing?'

‘We didn't think anyone lived here, Dad,' George whimpered.

‘Really, George. You didn't think that. But look around. It seems quite habitable here, doesn't it? More than quite. Very, I'd say. It looks very much like someone's made an extra-special effort to make it habitable, wouldn't you agree, Eli?'

I was going to say that I'd told George somebody lived here, but when I looked at Mr. McKenzie I didn't say nothing. He was speaking in the way he used to in school: asking questions that he never expected you to answer, that he'd end up answering himself. But I was glad he was speaking like that and not like when he was speaking to Mrs. Arnold, telling her
this
and then telling her it again and again.

‘Yes, I'd say someone had gone out of their way to make this a place they could live in – a place they could live in for a long time if need be.'

‘But Dad,' said George. ‘Nobody lives this far out of town, not even shackers.' The whimpering had gone out of his voice now, as if he'd remembered he was on an expedition and not at home.

‘Perhaps that's the point of it, George. Had you even thought of that? Perhaps the reason for it being here is so no busybodies from town would poke their noses into it. Perhaps it's here because it wasn't
meant
to be found.' Mr. McKenzie was talking to George but he was looking at me. I could see the sunlight from the hatchway where it tumbled onto the back of his head and lit up the fiery edges of his beard, but his face was in the shadows and I couldn't see his lips move. And again I got that feeling that time had got stretched or stuck down here. I felt like I was waiting for a school bell that might never ring. George shuffled from foot to foot and I knew he wanted to say something about what he'd found.

‘Why is your writing on those pieces of paper?' he said at last.

‘That,' said Mr. McKenzie, ‘is none of anybody's business.' His voice had gone quiet the same as when he'd told Mrs. Arnold,
‘This conversation is over.' And without even thinking I looked up at the rack with the deer rifle and shotguns. ‘Now I think it's time we were all leaving, don't you?' George and I nodded and started walking towards the steps. When I'd almost got to the top of them he called up to me.

‘Eli,' he asked, ‘have you told anybody about finding this place?'

‘No,' I said. ‘I haven't told nobody.'

‘Well,' he said. ‘Why don't you keep it that way.' And when I looked back I could see his face coming into the light and his eyes were shining like the light was coming from inside them instead. I knew he wasn't asking me, then.

After we'd closed the hatchway we started walking back towards the river, Mr. McKenzie first and then George and me. We'd got about halfway when Mr. McKenzie stopped and turned around and said, ‘I think it's best if George comes with me, don't you, Eli?'

They veered off upriver of where George and me had left Clarence's canoe, towards a thick cluster of bulrushes. George looked back at me for a second and then carried on behind his dad. He was keeping both his eyes on the ground now all right.

I didn't see George for a time after that. He wasn't even peeking out from behind the boards of the fence when I looked for him there. I bugged Gracie whenever I saw her, asking if George was coming out, but she just said his allergies were really bad and he couldn't for now. Gracie had started coming to our house quite a lot, ever since the summer when Mr. McKenzie lost his job and started building the fence. She used to sit in the kitchen and talk to Nana and then to Virgil. Sometimes she'd be crying. She was different back in that time; I couldn't ever imagine her crying now. But already, even then, she seemed to be older than she really was.