Given (21 page)

Gradually the trees thinned out and the dominant conifers were replaced by the rebel alder, whose hold on life was more tenuous. The trail wound down through salmonberry, huckleberry bushes and salal, and ended abruptly, just as I tasted the smoke in the air that rose from Hooker's chimney, and streeled towards the sea. His cabin sat in a clearing halfway to the end of the point. A raven the size of a flight bag crouched on the edge of the roof as if preparing to ambush me.

I made a noise to try to shoo him away, and a dog began barking inside the house. The raven hopped further up the roof, almost to the peak, where he sat tall and erect with his bill angled up, his throat hackles puffed out, and his wings spread broadly to the side, making himself even bigger than he had first appeared. I knocked on the door, and the barking became more frenzied.

“It's open,” Hooker called out. “Come on in. Don't worry about Toop. He barks at nothing.”

I was more worried about the raven than Hooker's mutt. I approached the door, and opened it a crack. “Sit!” I heard Hooker order, but it was the opportunity his dog had been waiting for. He got his nose in the crack and forced the door all the way open; if I hadn't jumped to one side he would have run right over me, three legs and all. When he looked back at me over his shoulder I saw he carried a shoe in his teeth.

Hooker lay on a mattress in the middle of the floor propped up on one elbow. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he was naked except for a pair of jeans, faded around the crotch. His belt was undone.

“He has to bury everything,” Hooker said, as if that explained why his dog had been in such a hurry to knock me over, “just so he can dig it up again. He likes to chew on things after they're nice and ripe. He's got caches all over.”

I asked how his dog had lost his leg, as I closed the door behind me.

“Guy I got him from amputated it off to slow him down. You might as well try and stop the sun coming up in the morning.”

I said I had rarely seen the sun come up on this island. I figured it was afraid to come out because it might drown.

“You've got a point there. Anyways, Toop keeps me out of trouble a lot of the time.” He yawned, and stretched. I tried hard to keep my eyes off his body. “Keeps me in line.”

Hooker told me to come on in and take a seat. I looked around but could see nothing to sit on. A driftwood slab piled with shells, bullet cartridges, dishes, and a bowl of fruit served as a table, and a large steel barrel that had been converted into a woodstove squatted on a platform of flat rocks.

“My old man built this place,” Hooker said. “Gracie and I were born here . . . though I tried to put it off as long as possible. I could see my old man's fists at the end of the tunnel, waiting to pound on me.”

He paused as if waiting for me to comment. “After two days he got tired of waiting and he reached up inside my
naha
and grabbed hold of one of my arms. He thought he could force me out.”

I didn't know what to say and moved towards the heat of the stove, in front of which lay a heap of running shoes, all different sizes, the same kind Hooker's dog had carried in his mouth. They looked as if they had been sentenced to a dozen life cycles in a washing machine with a grudge.

“Cat got your tongue?” Hooker said.

I was saved from having to try and answer by the sound of a
thunk
on the roof, as if Toop might have been plucked up by an eagle and dropped from a height. I'd watched birds let go of their victims — clams and mussels, mostly — from the sky, to dash their brains out on the sharp rocks below, but Hooker didn't look concerned.

He raised his eyes to the ceiling. “That would be Charlie.

You probably met him on the way in. He's letting me know it's chow time.” I listened to the sound of wings beating, and the discussion that followed, one that Hooker appeared to understand.

“He and Ralph are at my feeder, up on the roof. I keep it supplied with roadkills. I like to have ravens around, they're better than any watchdog you'll find . . . even Toop. If I'm not home they won't let anyone near the house. And I like to watch them eat.”

He reached out, picked a big red apple from the bowl and polished it on his thigh. “I like to watch
people
eat, too,” he said, taking a bite of the apple, then tossing it to me. He had juice on his chin, and didn't bother wiping it away. I caught the apple, and set it on the driftwood table.

“Come over here,” Hooker said, quietly, “and help me do up my belt. It's one thing I have a bad time doing myself.” His trousers were unzipped and I could see he wasn't wearing any underwear. My throat felt like I had a roll of quarters stuck in it.

I walked over to where Hooker sat on the edge of the mattress with his legs stretched out, and squatted between his knees; he didn't even need to hold in his breath while I zipped up his fly. His skin felt hot where my hands touched it. The draft coming from under the door made the fine hairs on his arms horripilate.

“You cold?” he asked. His hair tickled the back of my neck, my mouth was inches away from one of his nipples. I sat back on my heels, shivering.

“I could put more wood on the fire. I don't get much company so I usually stay in bed. It's always warm under the covers.”

He got up, bent over a pile of laundry on the floor and searched for something to wear. “My old man used to talk down at my
naha
for not picking up after him. These are mostly his clothes. The only thing I got left of him. Besides this . . . ” He held out his hook.

He pulled a black T-shirt over his head, opened the stove door, and fanned away the smoke that belched out. He looked at me and laughed as the smoke rose to the ceiling, spread flat against the boards and hung there, grey and featureless, like a version of the actual sky.

Hooker said his mother lay on this mattress, in this same room, in labour for three days. On the fourth day his father hiked into town to fetch Agnes. “He told her I was stubborn. He says to Auntie, ‘The kid's not even born yet and already he's a pain in the butt'.

“When they got back Auntie seen my arm sticking out from between my
naha's
legs, rubbed raw and that from where the old man had spent so much time tugging on it.” Hooker said Agnes massaged his arm — he still remembered the feeling — how she stroked the inert limb with her index finger. She told him, years later, she thought he was gone and that all she could try and do was to save his mother. But when she began to stroke his tiny hand, she said, it suddenly closed, clutching her finger, refusing to let go. Agnes got to work. “Long story short, she saved my hide,” Hooker said. “That's pretty well it. What time's it getting to be, anyways?”

He looked at me and smiled, a slow half-dance of a smile. I stood with the emptiness of the room between us, feeling as if I had lost my nerve even for speech. “I don't even know why I am telling you this,” he said. “It only makes you old, when you hear bad things like that.”

“You care about him. He's your father,” I said.

“He was a mean bastard who hurt the people who were stupid enough to love him. Why should I bother to care? By now he's probably dead.”

I wanted to say, if the dead live on in us for any reason, it is to force us into remembering. But Rainy said, in group one day, “The truth is a bully we all pretend to like just so we don't get singled out and picked on,” and nobody could come up with anything better than that.

“I'm just having fun with you, anyways,” he said. “Jus' kiddin' around.”

Hooker wadded up a newspaper and laid a tipi of kindling on top of it. “You ever had a kid of your own?” he asked, striking a match. He looked up at my face as he spoke, fanning away the smoke.

He sat down again, his eyes moving from my face to the fire, and back again, generating their own heat. I wanted to tell Hooker about my son, but Angel was a secret I wasn't ready to share, as much as it hurt keeping it to myself.

“You're beautiful when you're sad,” Hooker said. “Anyone ever tell you that?”

I turned away, frowning. Hooker cocked his head, looked at me sideways. “I'm jus' kiddin' you. If you're good at something, that's beauty,” he added, quickly. “That's all I meant. You're good at looking sad. It's a compliment?”

He always seemed to get the better of me. He was quick, an expert at feeling me out. He had a way of looking at me, too, that made me feel I was standing before him, dressed in a white cotton bra and French-cut briefs, like a model in the Christmas Wish Book. I folded my arms across my breasts.

He walked over to the door, then turned to look at me over his shoulders. “You're easy to like,” he said. “I think I like you more than might be good for either of us.”

This time he didn't add, “Jus' kiddin'.”

Hooker led the way through the darkening woods, away from the sound of the pebbles on the beach being drawn back into the sea. Toop, who had reappeared with a worried ‘W' on his forehead the moment Hooker whistled for him, limped beside his master, his large wing-like ears sticking straight out on either side of his head. Every so often he stopped to mark his territory on a tree root that snaked across the trail.

Hooker said he had taken this path so many times he could walk it blindfolded, and that he knew the surrounding woods just as well. When he was a boy his mother had sent him into the forest to learn the secret of seeing into shadows, and find his animal guide.

“No animal I ever found was crazy enough to take on the job of looking out for me. Except for Toop, who looks after me all the time, don't you, little guy?”

Toop cocked his head to one side, the same way Hooker did when he was about to say, “jus' kiddin'.” There was something else unusual about Hooker's three-legged friend: I looked closer at his face — he had one blue eye, one brown. “A dog with one blue eye, they say he can see the wind,” Hooker said, when he saw me staring. Toop lifted his head, sniffed the air, and blinked. “He knows what we're talking about, too. Don't you, buddy?”

We had reached the end of the trail when a slaughter of crows lifted up from the trees and swept across the sky, as one entity, like iron filings, magnetized, over the inlet. I covered my head, as if they might sweep me up with them; Hooker laughed and said that was nothing, there were so many birds here in the old days that when they took off from the inlet the sky went black over the graveyard.

Up ahead I could see the spectral white dabs of the gravestones floating beyond the trees and had started towards them when I heard a branch snap in the bushes. “What's that?” I whispered.

Hooker grinned at me over his shoulder. “Could be a
lumaloo
. A person like you, who asks too many questions.”

In the Yaka Wind language, he explained,
lum
meant spirits,
memaloos
meant dead.
Lumaloos
were the spirits of the dead who lived, mostly, in the ancient apple trees growing in the graveyard. Hooker's mother had told him the story of a girl who'd been killed by an enemy tribe during her wedding ceremony: the mother cut off her daughter's hair and spread it on the limbs of the apple tree they buried her under, with apple seeds in her cheeks. Her hair blew from tree to tree, turning grey with the years, an enduring tribute to those who died in love.

“Even the moss has a story, eh?” Hooker said. “My
naha
told me once, “you have to risk your life to get love.”

I stooped to pick up a windfall, but Hooker took it from my hand.

No one ever touched the apples that grew in their graveyard, he said. “You wouldn't want to eat one. Once you get a taste for flesh you become a
Tsiatko
, a badass who prowls the graveyard at night looking for
kahkwa mimoluse
— the restless ones — spirits who won't stay still in their beds.”

Toop, who had been sitting quietly at Hooker's side, jumped straight up in the air, his tail a stiff excited feather. He bolted ahead into the graveyard.

“What does it mean when he does
that?”
I asked.

Hooker lip-pointed to the fern I'd seen dancing by itself on my way to his cabin. It hadn't stopped.

“That's a
lesash,
Hooker said, “an angel, a dead gone soul. You can feel him blowing down your neck sometimes. They say the wind's his breath.”