Inukshuk (14 page)

“OK, Dad. But I liked it.”

“Pretty cold, though, wouldn't you say?”

“Cold, yeah.”

“OK, then. Let's go back inside. Get a little hot milk in you?”

“No milk. See—bad for my health.”

“OK. But you agree we should go back inside?”

“They were going to bury him, I think. Right here.”

“Who's that?”

“You know.”

“I do?”

“Sure.”

“OK. I—”

“And they needed our help.”

“Help. With . . .”

“Well, I don't know yet. They'll tell us when they need it.”

“Who's ‘they'?”

He turned Thomas to face the house and, hands on his shoulders, pushed him along step by step back across the yard.

“Just some guys.”

“‘Some guys,'” he repeated. “And when do you figure they'll tell us if they needed our help?”

“I don't know. Soon as they're ready.”

“But how do you know they needed our help at all?”

“Because. It's obvious. And they said so.”

“Right. Here come the steps. Easy, tiger. One up, next one.” When it was happening more often, he'd read some of the articles and books on somnambulation. He'd heard of people breaking bones in their sleep. The mind could anesthetize itself well enough, apparently, you could walk right off a curb or stair, twist an ankle, and
keep going. Crash a car and never wake up. He didn't think any of this would happen to Thomas, but all the same, he worried. Now, as when he'd been younger, Thomas was remarkably compliant and agreeable—easy to direct—but not really in control of his body. “No. You've got to lift first, here, and then step up.” Thomas had stopped moving forward. Both feet on the second stair going up to the back doorway, he seemed intent on shuffling forward without raising his feet. Franklin tried again. “Up. Honey? Are you listening?” And when Thomas still didn't move, he drew him back, tilted, caught him in his arms and lifted, staggering up and sideways through the open doorway, and inside.

“Jesus,” he said. “Thomas. Are you awake yet?” The boy was surprisingly heavy, dense and awkward to carry, and it didn't help that once they were inside, heading for the couch, where Franklin intended to dump him, only then did Thomas start fully coming to his senses. He stiffened in Franklin's arms and tried to bolt, crashing back with his head and nearly clipping Franklin's chin. “Stop! Can you just wait—”

“What's going on here?”

“You tell me.”

“PUT ME DOWN NOW THIS INSTANT.”

He angled Thomas floorward.

“What were you
doing,
man?”

Briefly, they faced each other in the darkened living room. Thomas's hands were in fists and he looked poised to strike—a reflexive, meaningless stance, Franklin was pretty sure. Thomas had never hit anyone in his life. Probably. Maybe Devon once or twice, and then in self-defense.

“Easy there. You were sleepwalking, kiddo. Outside. OK? I had to get you in.”

“What the . . .”

“Yes, exactly.”

Thomas straightened and breathed once in and out. Combed fingers through his hair and flopped it side to side until, to Franklin's relief, it all appeared more or less proportional. Good. So he
hadn't done something ridiculous to himself with scissors or a knife. “Sleepwalking,” he said. “But I don't
remember
. . .”

“No, you never do.”

“Did I say anything, though, like what I was dreaming?”

“They were going to bury him, I think you said, and they needed our help. Something like that.”

He nodded. He seemed vaguely pleased by this, or amused—at pains to conceal an embarrassed pride, and attempting to overcover that with puzzlement. Like he had an unfair advantage over Franklin, a secret, but didn't want to have to say so. “Yes,” he said, still nodding. “It's coming back now. Only, they didn't bury him. It was a concrete cairn. I'm pretty sure of that.”

“Let me guess. Franklin?”

Thomas nodded.

This was getting ridiculous. So many things he could say now and so many different tones in which to say them—dismissive, chiding, jokily concerned, mad—he couldn't choose. Could not chart a course or deduce ahead of time what might give him any leverage. “Thomas,” he said. Just as likely none of his words would ever make a difference. He turned and started out of the room. “That back door is still unlocked. Would you mind, please, locking before you head to bed?” Turned again. “You're sure you're all right?”

Thomas shrugged. “Fine, Dad. All's well.”

“To bed, then. And stay there.”

KABLUNA

A
LWAYS, IN THE LAST TEN MINUTES of second period, it happened, as if some hitch in the day's passage hung him up and kept him from engaging until he'd bumped past it—some internal thermostat cued to the school clock's minute hand ticking infinitesimally ahead, 10:05 . . . 10:06—Thomas's blood suddenly, unreasonably released, moved faster, his bladder filled, and his head swam with good feelings. He couldn't help it. Always the accompanying thoughts and emotions were more or less the same: He'd survive. The day had passed its hump. He was safe. He'd even occasionally tried not looking, keeping his eyes down on his open math book and the sheet of graph paper on which he was supposedly working out the evening's homework problems, straying only as far as quick sideways glances at the desk to his left or right. It made no difference. Clock or no clock, he knew.

Tick
. A new lead opening into the rest of the day.

He'd be all right.

This day, waking up over what should have been a set of inequalities and was instead turning into yet another sketch of Franklin's hand, this time holding a spoon, a series of sketches, actually, morphing from the outer edges of the page ever inward, two things occurred to him almost simultaneously. One was that his feet hurt. He'd been registering this all morning—a new tenderness in the balls and sides of his feet—without giving it his full attention or really identifying what it was or how it had come to exist. Something related to the sudden change in temperature and his depleted vitamin C levels, he'd figured. But now, as he came awake, he knew what had caused the pain and what it signified: It was from walking barefoot outside the night before, sleepwalking, over their backyard of frozen grass and rocky soil. Maybe, if he thought hard enough about it, he could even read backward from the sore spots and abrasions on his feet to retrace his exact movement across the yard—remember where he'd
gone, what he'd been dreaming. Picturing it—the seldom-used picnic table by their property line, the old apple trees, bumpy ground and frozen grass—the second revelation came, the thing he'd never considered before: He could walk. Like the men. To suffer as they'd suffered and know their miserable end without having to endure it himself, he didn't need just to starve himself of vitamin C until his gums swelled and bled and his skin turned black; he could
walk
. Walk north from here, say to Edmonton, or west to Banff. Somewhere tragically, heroically far. A few hundred kilometers, sleeping outside and hauling a heavy weight of some kind, eating nothing but tinned meat, jerky, and chocolate.

Idea.
He printed this on the page, below his drawing of Franklin's hand.
WALK NORTH
.

He spun the page around to start over—more drawings of hands and wrists, ink-stained calluses, a miniature of a man's face and then another, ice-blinded eyes and blackened cheeks—and to let the new idea settle more deeply. View it from another perspective, inverted, sideways—
WALK NORTH
—make it more questionlike. Determine whether or not he might really mean it. Walk? North? Could he do that? How far? What preparations would be involved? Sledge of canned foods; tent, pad, sleeping bag; cookstove and mess kit; spare boots and runners; all of his warmest clothes.... Anyway, how had it been when he first decided to quit foods containing vitamin C—how definitively had he made that choice? He didn't remember. It had been summer, that much he was sure, because it had been so very hard at the start, with a lot of backsliding. No fruit, no milk shakes, no frozen fruit Popsicles, no lemonade, cherries, melon, berries. All the good summer foods—all the foods that were best all summer. It had been almost impossible, really. Pleasantly impossible, and infuriating to his father, which, he supposed, was a sweet natural side effect of the experiment, if not the whole point itself: mystifying the old man and leaving him baffled. Unconcerned as ever, of course, and positively wrapped up in himself and his
book,
but still aware that
something was going wrong,
even if he had no clue what it was or how he might control or stop it. Fool.
Let him
come after me,
he thought. He would, too. If Thomas walked, his father would follow. He'd be desperate . . . insane, even, reading his son's disappearance as a measure of his own epic failedness. Might not find him, but he'd try.

Again, Thomas spun the page, and this time he wrote out the inequality from his math book. Stared at it a moment and could not focus. Something his father had said that morning on their way into school was echoing in his memory now—not the exact words at first, but the feelings the words had woken in him, which, he supposed, had been resonating all morning without his having realized it.

His only comeback:
You don't know everything, Dad. When's the last time you talked to her?

Not the point. She's my wife. I know her and I can tell you exactly where her deal is headed
.

The conversation had ended there not just because they were arriving at school, his father lovingly gearing the transmission to PARK and leaning up sideways in his seat with a rumble of seat leather to face Thomas, keep him there talking. But Thomas, vaguely alarmed and panicked, wishing simultaneously to run and to hear much more of whatever his father would say (they never discussed his mother openly, let alone clashing over interpretations of her
plans and intentions or what she was doing up in the north), found himself suddenly in the grips of an uncontrollable physical corollary to his panic, unkinking days of his bad diet and causing him to cramp sharply and go limp through the core, stricken. All other concerns vanished.

Now Thomas tipped his head to the side, wondering what the relationship here was.

I can tell you exactly where her deal is headed
.

WALK NORTH
.

What did one have to do with the other? Anything? Or did it matter? Did he always have to be reacting to his father?

As often happened at about this point in second period, Dalia Harvey, seated two rows back on his left, done with her homework, was reclined in her desk chair, feet lifted to the lower rung of her desk and wool skirt taut across her lap, paperback novel propped open on the edge of her desk, and all her attention sucked into its pages. If Thomas (or any number of boys seated in the rows ahead of her) leaned forward and tipped his head at just the right angle, he could see straight up to her floral-print underwear. It was astonishing and irresistible—a miracle of sorts: a more than halfway pretty girl regularly displaying herself to the world. What was wrong with her? Didn't she know? As soon as one boy sensed it from another's body language, they were exchanging smirks, tipping casually from desks, peeking from under forearms, pretending to have dropped things. He tapped his pencil eraser on the page but wrote nothing further, drew nothing, the sticky pressure mounting in his groin as he looked and looked again, waiting for the end of class. Today after school, maybe it would happen finally . . . him and Jill on the floor of the basement rec room,
canoodling
. Worth a try anyway. As long as he touched her over the clothes, she was fine with most anything—receptive even, cooperative, grinding back against him—but the moment she sensed him fumbling with a button or strap or snap, she stopped. Went rigid. Picked away fingers. Closed her mouth. Said,
“No. Don't. Thomas, stop.” Once, he'd been delicate or fortunate enough to open the top button of her corduroys without her noticing and had slid in a hand for a glorious full few seconds before she realized what was happening, at which time her hand closed viciously over the back of his wrist and a noise began in the back of her throat. The trick was . . . obviously the thing he needed to do....

Bell. End of class.

He stood, slapped shut his books, lowered them to waist level, and strode out and down the hall with the rest.

It was still true. He could walk. Maybe all the way to Inuvik. Offer his help.
I'm here, Ma,
he'd say.
I'm going to film you being the world's greatest one-woman activist team. I'm going to make you famous. Together, we'll save the world.