Inukshuk (6 page)

“Of course. You know I—”

They'd spoken at the same time.

“You first.”

“ No.”

“OK,” he drew a breath. “I was just going to say it was so good seeing you today. I'd forgotten how . . . how much I always enjoy your company. Whatever. It's just good, and I'm glad we're back in touch. Let's keep it like that.”

“Let's do.”

“So what's up?”

“Oh, you'll just think it's dumb.”

“Never. What's wrong?”

“You haven't seen Jeremy at all since my visit there, have you?”

“No, I had class straight through. Talked to Legere, though, just a while back and everything seemed fine from his end. The boys will make a formal apology to Thomas, blah blah, and there'll be some work detail for them. Nothing goes on anyone's record. All sounded pretty reasonable, I thought. A little too reasonable, maybe, but he's got his theory about barometric pressure and
eccentric behaviors due
to zee vinds,
” he said, trying to mimic Legere's accent. “Did he mention that? We were possessed by
the devil winds
.”

Her breath ruffled into the phone. A laugh? Not a laugh. “Jeremy never came home.”

“Oh.” Now he was maneuvering into traffic on the main road, Tim Hortons flashing by. Blockbuster, its formerly towering snowbanks shrunken to a meager misshapen few humps. The ridiculous new condo warrens. “Is that . . . that's unusual for him, I guess? Of course it is.”

“It wouldn't be if I could track him down anywhere, but I haven't been able to. His girlfriend doesn't know. She never saw him after school. Alas, no one seems to have . . . a clue where he went. Ordinarily, he'd be in touch, call or text. Late after school, going to the Okotoks mall, busy with Belinda, whatever. I suspect he's gone to Davis . . . his dad, but I haven't been able to raise anyone there, either. Unsurprisingly.”

“He'll turn up.”

“Yes. Of course. Dead or alive is the question.”

“I'm not touching that one.”

“No, I'm sure he's fine.” She sighed wearily. “It's just weird. He hasn't done this before, ever. . . . now it's going on six o'clock, and tomorrow he's got practice.”

Franklin checked his watch. 5:27. Drove a ways in silence. There were certain things he could (and probably should) ask now—where was Rick, why was he getting drawn into this drama instead of Rick, how had this sudden collusion between them sprung up again—but to ask such questions would be to incite an impeding logic, when all he really wanted right now was for her to keep breathing (distraught, worried, whatever) close, in his ear, as he made his way home. He didn't want to ask her why it was so, why she was inviting him to share her concern.

“So . . . OK. Was he OK with Legere's disciplining? Did he mention anything to you about it after?”

“We weren't talking.”

“Not at all?”

“I'd say he was a little disappointed, if I had to guess. But . . . I don't know. No, we didn't talk. I don't fight his battles for him. I told you.”

“Yes. You said that.”

“I can't anymore. Not for him or anyone. It's a road that goes nowhere.”

“Yes.”

She made a growling, exasperated noise. Laughed. “Fucking kid.”

“He's all right.”

“Probably having a hamburger somewhere or shooting pixels at imaginary aliens at some friend's house or at his dad's, according to a preapproved plan which I seem to have completely and inconveniently forgotten about.”

“For sure.”

“Anyway, I thought you might have seen him around. . . .”

“Sorry, no.”

“I had this crazy thought maybe he would have sought you out to make good and patch things up, but . . .”

“Sorry, no . . . like I said.”
Sorry
. He'd inflected the word Canadian-style almost before he could notice it to stop himself; some form of subconscious, unconscious mockery? Sabotage? Desire for inclusion? Hard
o
sound. Doubted she'd even notice. “Jeremy's not . . . not a kid I've ever had anything much to do with, actually, until today. If he was on the debate team, now, maybe. Otherwise”—he tried to lighten his voice a bit, speed it up—“I might've put it together long ago, you and him, you know. Turner Valley. Actually, though, aside from that, I don't really know how I would've figured it out. But I might have. Anyway, I had no idea. You have to realize that. No idea at all. Definitely, I wouldn't have grabbed him had I known.”

“He'll show up.”

“Yes, of course he will.”

“I should go now.”

“Call as soon as you know anything?”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“I didn't say that. Call if you want. Whenever you have a moment.”

“I'll try, John. I will try to remember. I appreciate that you care.”

“Well, of course I do. And I'm afraid I'm also at least somewhat culpable here.”

“I wouldn't say that.”

“Mmm . . . but I would.”

His phone went dead suddenly, bleated and flashed on and off—
Dropped Call
—before connecting again to his service. The dead spot at the turnoff—he'd forgotten. “Damn,” he said, snapping the phone shut as he rolled into the driveway. In the silenced car interior, he sat a moment, turning the phone over and over in his hand and staring idly at the thing as if willing it to ring. Should he call her back? To say . . . what? They'd been signing off anyway. You didn't redial someone to finish a call that was already ending. Did you? But this car—the Volvo—his pride and folly (and not many drives didn't end without a moment or two of appreciative reflection on this: the sweet blue-lit contoured dashboard and controls, all-automatic heated leather seats, heated mirrors), bought with money from the cash-out of their property in Calgary—it'd suit Moira. Rich girl. She'd like it. Had he chosen it (and Houndstitch over Cochrane, for that matter, where there'd been a similar position open) because of some semi-conscious impulse, despite all resolutions to the contrary, to be nearer to her . . . to be more
like
her? Possibly, all for Moira, yes. No, Cochrane was at least as overrun with new oil people as Calgary, and growing faster than Okotoks; moving there would never have satisfied his desire just to get
away
and clear of it all, back out to where your thoughts could stand in sharpest relief against the flat prairie light, the grass, the tall sky, the cold, the mountains—everything that had drawn him here in the first place. Never would have left him with the savings to establish such generous college funds for both boys, either.

No sound. Only the noise of the engine cooling. And then it dawned on him: no sound, no wind. The Chinook was done, or soon ending. If there'd been light enough still, he might have looked up through the windshield to see the sky clearly split in pieces, two or three bands of clouds like stair steps exactly demarcating the shifts
in air pressure and temperature where one front ended and the next began—that dramatic. In hours, temperatures would plummet. Minutes maybe. Instafreeze. Welcome back, February. He swung open his door and gripped his knees a moment, trying to remember those lost lines of almost word sounds—the melting snowbanks, the reflections in the vanishing puddles, and the light high clouds whipping by. Nothing. All of it so illusory. “Another day,” he said, and pushed himself upright to go inside, see about getting dinner ready for the lonely sailor-obsessed boy who was his son.

 

 

He tipped back in his father's computer chair to read this through a second and third time, trying to find the right ending to it, the right way of making Devon see why it was important, what the sailors faced, and how the only realistic way of ever fully fathoming it was to experience some part of it yourself. No, he didn't have to kill himself from botulism or eat a bunch of lead filings until he went nuts; that would be pointless, irreversible. But scurvy . . .
call it a lack of imagination,
he tapped out on the keyboard, and then struck it, too.
call it a failure.
Backspaced over that, as well.
call it my deal with the dead sailors. my way of giving them a little honour and respect so I can put them in the movie. anyway i've got it so totally under control you don't
have to worry. anything major bad goes down i can reverse it all in like ten days tops with vitamin supplements. i'm on target. all's well. recurrent bloody nose (yes!). corkscrew hairs: negative. dad mopes as ever.

But something peripheral to what he was writing had him distracted, so he kept wiping off the sentences and starting again, biting the ends of his fingers, never quite feeling as if he'd said the thing he'd meant to say, never finding the exactly satisfying and final way of putting it. Kept glancing up and out the window at the dying light—orange and yellow in the seed heads of the prairie grass bordering their backyard—and picturing that red-blue mark down Jill's face. The freckles. Her mouth. Was that it? The thing bumming him out? Her . . . her face? Could he ever get used to it?

Failure. That word he'd typed a few times and deleted. That was it. Not just his own (though it stung some still, remembering the way she'd dodged him there at the mailbox—
. . . wash with green soap . . . No canoodling. . . . See you later.
) but her failure, too: how she must have to survive some personal version of failure all day, every day, never escaping it anytime she saw a reflection of herself or caught someone staring and then quickly looking away, her so-pretty face eternally disfigured by that blue stain and nothing in the world to be done about it. It was too depressing to think about. Franklin, too. Because, whatever else you wanted to say about him or his expedition, however horrible the ordeal, noble, stupid, doomed, surreal, arrogant, absurd, colonial, whatever angle you wanted to take, there was really only one thing at the bottom of it, from Franklin's perspective: failure. Failure as a commander to find the passage, failure to break out of the ice, to follow orders and keep the men alive, failure to get back home. Failure, period. And then death. No, first suffering, and then death. What good was a movie about that? Who would want to see that?

To counter these thoughts, he shut his eyes a moment and pictured the grainy natural-light shots he so longed for. Meditated them back into existence. Sleety, overcast, with dubbed-in howling
sounds so you almost feel the wind, just looking at the picture; sailors' figures like shadows lunging in and out of the frame, suddenly close, suddenly far away. No way of gauging distance, really, with all that wind and ice and blowing snow like static. Blinding snow light. Sound of one man's breathing, hard breathing, and then his face right in the camera. Black with frostbite around the nose and cheeks, eyes rimmed all around by ice, more white around his mouth and, hanging from his chin, a stalagmite of frozen breath and sweat in his beard hair so massively overgrown with frost, he'll eventually have to break it off with a hatchet if he wants to eat or talk—no, his face is wrapped in wool and wolf skin, which appears to have grown right over with ice from his breath like a giant frozen beard mask. Only the blackened frostbitten cheeks and nose show. Eyes bugged from hunger.
Sepulchral voices
—those were Franklin's own words for it, from the other expedition, the one where he ended up cooking his boots and eating them with lichen and someone's buffalo robe to survive. Sepulchral. Entombed. Hollow. “Eh!” the man says. “Hallo? Johnny? Thomas?”

The scene . . . he knew just the scene to look at in order to think this through a little further. Out of sequence, but it didn't matter. Movies were always shot out of sequence.

He pushed back from his father's desk, sending the chair spinning until one of its arms clobbered the edge of the desk. Turned to see if anything had been upset, but no, all good, and went out of the room, thinking,
Later—I'll finish that off, send it, not now...
. Down the hall and up the stairs to his room. Vol. III, the red notebook, on the shelf over his homework desk with his pencil jars and erasers, ancient busted Super 8, VCR camera, tapes and CDs, and all the other notebooks. He knew right where the scene started and where he'd left off: the officer in the boat—the two officers in the grounded, sledge-hauled longboat on King William Island, waiting to see who would die first. Leg bones and arm bones frozen and strewn around them. Strips of dried, frozen flesh on the bowsprits. In the prow of the boat, a musket under each arm, the cracked-up assistant sawbones from the
Erebus,
Harry Goodsir, talking, talking, though quietly enough
that you can barely make out what he says over the ominous sound track; at the stern, Petty Officer Edmund Hoar, Franklin's steward, lips moving silently in prayer. All afternoon, they've wandered the area in search of anything at all to hunt or eat—rocks from which to scrape lichen, seabirds, seaweed, anything at all. The remaining food, the strips of sun-cured flesh and pounds of frozen chocolate in foil on the bottom of the grounded boat, will not sustain them much longer than another few days. So it's the insane waiting game, who will die first, which has to be shown really, primarily in the purplish intensity of the light. The glaring sun circling along the horizon and then dipping back up again in the sky, snow-blinding the men, but never warming them.