Inukshuk (2 page)

Someone had entered Thomas's field of vision and was waving a white handkerchief or wad of Kleenexes at him.

“Dude!” It was the dreadlocked bus driver. Koda? Cody? Dakota? Couldn't be more than four or five years older than the oldest kids on the bus. Always singing and bouncing his head to the music on his earbuds as he hauled around the enormous wheel of the school bus with one hand and banged in and out of gears with the other; always making cryptic, blessinglike remarks at the backs of their heads as they exited down the steps. “Someone got you pretty good there, hey buddy?”

“Got me?”

He remembered: the bloody nose, Martini, Malloy, and the other hockey goons. There he'd been, eating his peanut butter sandwich alone, trying to keep the hair from blowing into his mouth and enjoying the unexpected heat on his skin, not bothering anyone, when suddenly the sandwich went flying out of his hand, across the vanishing ice—bland, stabbing circle of pain in the back of his hand where he was hit, so he knew it was not the wind that had snatched his lunch away and caused it to become airborne. And then the rest of it—being propelled suddenly upward and dropped on the ice and assaulted from all sides, and last, the sudden back-severing pain in
his ass crack and the sound of ripping cloth and laughter as they tried to draw the elastic of his underwear over his head. His own words as he went down, jumbled and high-pitched, more petulant than fierce and therefore embarrassing to recollect—something about infantile homosadistic jock rituals—whatever he'd said, he was pretty sure it would have been mostly unintelligible.

“A little school-yard fisticuffs?”

He faked a smile. “Aftershocks of a random beating, more like. Hours ago now.”

“Here you go.” And before Thomas could stop it, the white cloth was being held to his mouth and nose, smelling vaguely of pot, sweat, licorice, and garlic. The outer fringe of it bumped his eyelashes as he blinked and tried to push Cody/Dakota—whatever his name was—back, but it was no use.

“Yeah. Apply some pressure there, bud; you gotta apply pressure. Now, this is a trick my old lady taught me. Lean forward a little.” Thomas seemed to have no real choice here, either. He was tilted out of his seat. Felt fingers prying open the back of his coat collar, shirt collar, deftly peeling one from the other, and then an icy shaft of wet streaked down his back.

“What the hell!” he said. Jerked free. “What are you
doing,
man?”

“Supposed to use cold keys or coins, drop 'em down the back of your shirt like that.” The driver laughed peculiarly, a sibilant
see-see-shoo-shoo
sound, like he was some kind of hissing hippy leprechaun, cheeks pinkening under his thin beard. “But I don't got any spares. That was just some ice. Relax man. It's just ice. Water.”

“Hell!” Thomas mopped the back of his neck, jerked out the tail of his shirt, and stood, so that whatever had gone down there would fall out. Held the white rag for Cody/Dakota to take back but did not meet eyes with him. “I'm OK now.
Thanks.
Really.”

“Lookie there. Dang if that nose didn't quit bleeding. See?”

Thomas ran a finger under his nose. Nothing. A little pinkish mucus. Sniffed once hard to restart it and swallowed the last brackish bit of spit and blood at the back of his throat and sat again.

“My old lady never did tell a lie.”

“Lucky you.”

“I'm like a friggin'
shaman
.” The driver ambled back to the front of the bus, bobbing his head, slapping the backs of seats as he went, one hand raised a moment to give a backward wave. “You can just thank me whenever you feel like it.”

“I said
thanks
.”

Reseated, Cody/Dakota studied Thomas in his extended-field rearview mirror a moment, nodding his head, grinning. Then he gave Thomas the thumbs-up and held it too long, way too long, staring and still grinning.

“Weirdo.”

“You're all right, kid.”

“I am not.”

More kids tromped on board, and more, no one he knew or cared about. Soon it was a humid racket of kids' voices reflected off the windows and metal ceiling—a continual bombardment as claustrophobic as the hold of his imaginary frozen ship. At last came the motorized wrenching sound of bus diesel starting up, squeal of the door closing, and off they went, bumping out of the snow-scarred lot. Thomas kept his head tilted back and practiced knowing where he was without looking out a window. Like the ice masters on board the
Erebus
and
Terror
maneuvering into Peel Sound and interpreting the forms of ice as they went—pancake, sludge ice, bergy bits, dread screwed pack—each distinguishable from the other by its distinct sonic characteristics as it struck the ships' hulls, he tried to maintain his bearings based on the shifting sheen of light reflected in the ceiling, and all corresponding sounds. The stop at the end of the parking lot beside the school sign and the sound of the turn signal; the surrounding barren, wheat-stubbled, snowy fields, acre upon acre, grain silos and rolled hay bales under tarpaulin, and the freaky caved-in top hat–looking glacial, erratic, bigger than a house; the oil derricks, one close, two farther out, enormous praying mantises, bobbing flat-headed alien life-forms eternally rolling their arms around and sucking the earth of fuel; the Lazy U Ranch; the turn, the dull highway haul of absolutely nothing, more oil derricks, cottonwoods, mud,
and sand hiss-slapping in the wheel wells, wind beating the windows, and then the first signs of Houndstitch—clusterings of raised ranchers and just-built brick and glass and shotcrete condo warrens for the new oil people, all with street names meant to evoke nature or native lore despite the surrounding tundralike desolation: Winding Creek estates across from the Blockbuster and Tim Hortons—Roaring Brook, Deer Trail, Eagle Feather Way, Rattler Drive, Harbour Crescent—none of it even here until about a year ago. All of it paid for by oil. In the western distance, always, the Rockies disrupting the horizon like a wall of frozen white waves.

Aside from this, and the story that wouldn't come back yet, two things had his focus now. One was what he'd eat tonight and what he'd have to refuse. No to corn; no on his dad's favorite iceberg salad with vinaigrette and chickpeas and hacked-up bits of carrot and ham and slimy silver-tinged tomatoes; no to juice or fresh fruit or berry tofutti dessert. With this was a memory he could almost stop before it was too late: the pleasure of ripping into a package of fruit leather for his after-school snack (every day of his life, practically, until this year)—how the packaging would peel away and then you'd roll the flattened, sticky, tonguelike fruit thing in your fingertips, apple, cherry orchard, grape-a-licious, mango madness, and bite into it. The sweet, acid-sour, C-saturated taste of it nailing him in the back of the mouth and gumming up his teeth, so good, and then doing it again.
Have as many as you like
, his mother always said.
They're good for you
. Of course he craved it; his whole body wanted vitamin C like nothing he'd ever wished for before, except maybe sex. All the more reason to resist and stick with facts. Foods safe for consumption: bread, crackers, peanut butter, tahini, rice, nuts, canned fish, potatoes, well-done meat. If all else failed, somewhere in the middle of dinner slip into the bathroom, drink water until he vomited; take two aspirin from the gargantuan bottle in the cabinet and an antacid to be double sure.

The other thing was the letter from his mother almost certainly waiting at home. It'd been a few weeks since her last, so one would be due soon. He didn't think of it like that, exactly. He got as far as
picturing himself unlocking the mailbox under the tree, the hollow
tocking
sound of the lock opening, and the dread-worry sensations closing around him as he reached in, and then standing there feeling like the ground had opened under his feet. Again her handwriting on the envelope. Another fat letter full of nothing—place names and animals and facts about life up there in the territories and the latest high and low temperatures, names of people she'd met.
My mother's in the Arctic, talking to schoolteachers about their problems and observing the effects of global warming on little towns you've never heard of and never will and would never care about even if you knew their names or could say them. Ulukhaktok. Tuktoyaktuk. Because that's what she does and that's what she cares about. More than anything else.

“Spaceman,” the bus driver was saying. “HEY, spaceman back there with the bloody nose.”

Thomas sat forward. Looked around. Light everywhere. “What?” He'd been a little off in his calculations. They were not, as he'd thought, approaching the crazy house of quilted-together RVs and trailers with the piles of split wood and innumerable junked cars just past Winding Creek (aka Oil Sands) Estates. “You talking to me?”

“You got a name?”

“No.”

Head bobbing, grinning, hissing laughter. “I didn't think so.”

“Thomas.”

“OK then, Thomas. I got some advice for you.”

“What's that.” For a moment, he thought this might really be it, might be just the news he needed today—weird warm Chinook wind day. Why not? The guy could stop a nosebleed. Maybe he had other powers.

“Come on up here, so I don't have to shout it.”

He studied the driver's shivering image in the rearview mirror. Watched his nose seem to elongate and shrink again (a warp or divot in the glass?) as he shoulder-checked and shifted and returned his gaze to Thomas: Native eyes and eyebrows, everything else about him Slavic or some other brand of northern European. Viking?

“Come on. Right here in the seat there behind me.”

“No thanks.”

“You gotta lay off the blow. That's my advice, man. It's a killer. Only thing worse?”

Thomas zoned out the rest. He didn't know why it should surprise him anymore: another so-called grown-up parading around advice that was really just a projection of his own messed-up personal life, personal traumas and experiences. Why were they
all
like that? Was anyone
not
like that? Give the guy two more seconds, he'd probably start talking about sex with underage girls . . . or boys—it was probably the whole reason he'd reached out in the first place.

“Is that a fact?”

“It's my walking-talking paranormal nightmare-testimonial, bro. You lay off the stuff or it'll kill you.”

“Sure, but I'm not your
bro
. OK?”

The bus driver kept nodding but didn't look back at Thomas. “You just lay off it, whatever your thing is. That's all I'm saying.”

“Whatever. If it makes you happy.”

And again as he exited the bus, the words seemingly aimed to pierce the back of Thomas's skull: “I don't care who you are or what you know or how much money you got. It's gonna kill you dead.”

 

 

THE DAY OF SURPRISES: first the snow-eater winds, then the fight, and the image of his son that kept coming back to him afterward—underwear wrenched from beneath his belt, elastic torn from the briefs, and the briefs themselves, laundered how many hundreds of times by him in the privacy of their own laundry room and never meant to be exposed like this. And the expression on Thomas's face. Beaten, defiant. Unreachable. Had Franklin responded appropriately? Could you be mad, sad, and perplexed in equal measures, all at the same time, and know it? It was a first for him anyway. And then the surprise in the hallway and his own rage, his son's disappearance, and the further surprises in Vice Principal Legere's office.

The thing about living in the north, he'd learned (though few
Canadians, he knew, Jane especially, would call this anything like actual north), day after day he could pass in a state of sleep-stupored, mind-numbing placidity—not a thing happening anywhere, to the point where he hardly knew if he was dead or alive. It wasn't bad really, just weird and tiring. The first light of day seeping up somewhere in the middle of first period and long gone by the time you made your way back across the lot—snow squeaking underfoot, icy air freezer-burning your nose and throat and blasting up your pant legs, so you were horribly awake, dreadfully, surreally awake—to unplug your car's block heater and drive home. And on the drive home, wind making the snow swirl and tunnel along the pavement in your headlights like the vapors of some inhospitable alien planet, frost spreading its crazed lace down the inside of the windshield faster than you could blast at it with the defroster or scrub it away with a mitten. Was any of this real? Some days, it was all he could think of anyway: bed—the smell of bed, the sound of the heater clicking on and off in the dark, the heavy blankets piled just right on top of him, the dark cold in the window and the frigid air standing just in front of each window, the clock humming and hours more of sleep ahead. No Jane.

Then, all of a sudden, a day like this, where nothing went right—everything ran against the grain.

Malloy had not come clean to Legere and apologized for his actions—trying to escape, bullying Thomas, being prime instigator. Instead, seated around the table in the conference room, where hearings of this type always took place, they'd witnessed something like an emotional reversion for Malloy from age fifteen to about ten. He wouldn't stop blubbering, kept looking at Franklin with his eyes streaming, accusing him between hiccupped sobs: “You almost killed me! He tried to kill me! We weren't doing
anything
. I swear! It was a
game.
” The other boys said nothing. They sat dumbstruck. Legere, too, twirling a gold ballpoint pen around and around his right index finger and thumb. What did Franklin know about this kid, after all? Almost nothing. He'd never had him in a class but had heard of him from other teachers and witnessed some
of his antics. It was a small-enough school that everyone seemed to know everything.