The Cannibal Spirit (21 page)

Harry found that tears were pouring down his face. He could not remember when last he had wept, or indeed if he had ever done so before. “Must have got caught up in the tidal surge,” he shouted back to Charley, when he finally found his voice again. “Got drawn through.”

“Sign,” said Charley again. Then he went back to singing some Indian dirge, a rough-throated jumble of monotonous sound from which Harry could not even pick out the individual words. But in that instant, Harry felt hope come into him, where he had not realized there had been none before. It was such a surprise that he should feel so that he rose up on his feet and went to sit forward. He wasn't even sure what the nature of that hope might be, what it was he hoped for.

A half-hour later, they came near a headland. Charley shouted, “See?” Harry looked back and saw the old Indian was pointing toward a small island just beyond the headland's tip. “Dead man island. Same like Rupert grave island.”

It came off the port bow, ten cables away, an islet no more than fifty yards across. There were broken statues of men, small rotting shelters, and mouldering boxes in the trees. At its far side, another great branch of the inlet forked away east, as wide as the one in which they currently travelled. The high, grey cloud was breaking up. Sunlight and shadow rolled in fractured segments over the forested hillsides, which fell steeply into the
waters of the inlet. Far off he saw the sheer granite mountain ranges of the Interior.

“Where dead man island,” Charley said, “there village too.”

Twenty minutes later, they floated some yards off the ruin of an Indian village. A pebble beach ran down to the water, and behind, thick and tall and filled with shadow, the forest loomed over the broken timber frames of long-abandoned houses.

Then he saw the upended canoe with the killer whale design along its flanks. He saw the hull staved in so badly it would never be of use again.

“George canoe,” said Charley quietly.

“Walewid found him,” said Harry.

“Hmm,” said Charley.

“Look at his fucking boat.”

“Hmm.”

“What if they're here, waiting in the forest?”

“Where them boat?”

“They could've hid the boats so we'd not see them.”

“Hmm.”

“What fucking hmm?”

“Think they no here. Maybe come go. Maybe something else.”

Harry looked at Charley, the old man's gnarled fingers scraping at his stubble. “So what're you suggesting?” he said.

“I go see.” Charley looked Harry up and down. “You wait boat.”

They steered in close with Harry at the tiller again, his body shaking now with fever, but clinging to his rifle with his free hand. Charley hopped over the side and waded in. He stood for a while beside the canoe, examining the damage that had been done to it. Then he clambered up the pebbles to a collapsed totem pole about which the canoe had been secured. He squatted down, looking at something. Then he stood and came back down the beach.

“Think safe,” he said.

“How come?”

“George thing here. No one take thing.”

“So what about the canoe?”

“Think safe.”

Harry watched the old Indian on the shore. Then he said, “All right.”

The day was ending and the tide was near its fullest ebb. They beached the
Hesperus
beside the canoe, yet near enough to the waterline so that, with a heave, it would float when next the tide was in.

“I got to see to the outside of the hull first,” said Harry. He put his feet over the gunnels and dropped onto the beach, but his legs had no strength in them and he pitched forward on the pebbles.

Charley helped him to his feet. He led him up to the remains of George's camp. “See,” he said. George's belongings were wrapped in a tarpaulin, which Charley had opened. They lay neatly ordered inside. “George take some thing go forest. Leave thing here. If someone come, then this not be here. Be stole or move about.”

“Don't explain the canoe, though, do it?”

“Hmm,” said Charley. Harry slumped down on the tarpaulin, thinking Charley could wrap “hmm” in nettles and poke it up his crippled ass. The old Indian sat down beside him and drew out Harry's tobacco tin from his own pocket. He rolled two cigarettes in silence and handed one across. They drew smoke together.

Nodding toward the canoe, Charley said, “Think George do.”

“How you figure that?”

“Know George many year.”

“But he'd strand himself.”

“Ek.”

Harry smoked for a while. “You're saying he came here to stay. Or to die.”

Charley just shrugged.

After they finished smoking, it was Charley who worked on the boat's hull, Charley who gathered wood and made up the fire, Charley who brewed coffee and cooked food, Charley who fetched a bottle of whisky from the hold and poured part of its contents over Harry's bandaged wounds, which were black and, at his shoulder, dirty yellow with pus.

Harry lay propped against the fallen totem pole. He did his best to ignore the stench of decay from his shoulder. He ran his fingers across the worn
carving of the owl. Charley sat opposite, watching him and drinking from the whisky bottle. Then he said, “I go look sign George. You stay. Sleep.” Charley hefted the rifle and trudged away along the beach, bent low, his head ranging left and right like a mangy tracker dog snuffling for a trail.

Out on the quiet waters, mist curled in the breeze like slow-dancing ghosts. It was still only mid-morning, but soon enough Harry was asleep.

“Fat Harry!” He opened his eyes. Charley was kneeling beside the embers of the fire, a pot bubbling over it. “You father-law not here,” he said. “Track go forest. When come back? Maybe never.” He leaned in closer to look down on Harry's face. He shook his head and muttered to himself. “Sick bad.” He handed Harry a cup of coffee.

He felt as if he had been unconscious for days, but he saw by the sun that it was only noon, the light thin through the heavy, broken cloud. He sat up, leaning against the broken totem pole, and sipped. His sleep had been filled with nightmares. Raven-headed men, bloody eyes in the darkness of thickets, great fanged maws snapping. Well, he deserved them. “Short life bringers,” the Indians called the white man. Here among the heathens, here on this wild coastline, whisky smuggler as he was, murderer of men, bringer of ruin—yes, he deserved his nightmares.

He had killed three people in his life. The first was the night of his escape from the orphanage in San Francisco, and he had made his peace with that. The last was Poodlas, and none could deny that he had been protecting his own. Yet the truth was he'd been quick to vent his anger and the darker places of his soul on that poor drunken idiot. There'd been many ways he might have played that scene, but he chose violence. Perhaps he'd pay with his own life now.

The truth of it was that he felt wrung with shame. And it was not so hard to fathom why. Shame for his anger back at Blunden Harbour. And shame for that other murder of which he was culpable. The second killing. Hong Kong. The door with the Chinese sign that meant Joy. Though he would not dwell on that. He would not step inside those memories. There was death enough already. Death surrounding him here and now—
Poodlas, this village, the people gone, the imminence of his own death, as seemed likely now. It was enough for any man to bear.

He coughed hard and long, leaning on his one good arm, spitting black phlegm into the embers. His head spun until he nearly fell forward into the fire. Charley reached across to hold on to him.

There weren't many had looked on him with favour down the years. But Grace had. And, he supposed, in his grim way, so George had as well— at least, in sanctioning his marriage, if he'd not been exactly welcoming thereafter. But even then, George was only reacting to the truth, as he had spied it: that Harry had been planning to run with the spring tide.

He was here on this dead beach, near dead himself, sent on some fool errand he'd never wanted that had brought him near his own death. Yet there was something still to be done. Some part in the spin of things for him. He had to find George. For Grace. For Francine. For this family that had been straight with him. Across the fire, Charley watched him, his head seeming to emerge directly from his chest in his deformity. Even for cripple Charley. Now he had come this far, Harry would not have these people undone—broken by the likes of Halliday and Crosby.

“White fuck,” he said, not meaning to speak aloud. When he heard his own voice, sounding as if it came from deep inside a cave, he realized how far his mind had been ranging.

Charley nodded slowly, as if deep in contemplation of Harry's statement. He handed Harry the waterskin. “What come next?” he said.

“My faith were placed in George,” said Harry, lying back and gasping at the air. “Too late to turn back now.”

Charley shrugged. “George go up in forest,” he said. “I know where.”

“Then we get after him,” said Harry. “Soon is better, I'd say.” Charley looked at him for a time, and Harry knew the old Indian was sizing up the chances of his making it much farther. “Damn your pig eyes,” Harry said. “Help me get this bandage off. Let's have a see of what I've got left in me.”

Charley unpeeled the bandage from his shoulder. Harry could not keep from moaning as the scabs came away with the blood- and pus-soaked cloth. A thin yellow liquid seeped from the wound. A crust of dried pus lay beneath the skin, bulging the ragged edges taut against the twine holding
them together. The skin was mostly black, and the festering stench made even Charley blink and pull away.

“Yellow not so bad. Black not good,” Charley said. “Die soon.”

“You've a soft manner,” Harry said. The corners of Charley's mouth twitched a little. Harry sighed. “But I know it.” He picked up the whisky bottle and poured a quantity down across the wound. He breathed slowly through his nose for a while, then put the bottle to his mouth and drank. “Seems I'm reacquiring the habit,” he said.

“Good time for start again,” said Charley.

They looked at the wound on his leg, which somehow had escaped infection. Then Charley washed the bandages in the sea. He put them in a pan upon the fire to boil. The
Hesperus
was beached at such an angle that its stove could not be used. They reapplied the bandages and then Charley said, “Best go now.”

So they checked the
Hesperus
was secure, took a little food in a bag, which Charley carried along with the rifle, and then Harry followed him along the shore until they reached a hillock, which rose up dead square in the centre of the beach, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high, its far edge stretching twenty yards into the water. Beside it, a small stream emerged from the forest.

“In here,” Charley said. Harry could see now that a narrow path led away beside the stream into the darkness between the trees.

“How far?” he said.

“All this day. Some this night. Maybe you die before. Maybe not.”

“If it ain't your idiot trap what kills me first.”

To begin with, the trail was easy enough to follow, the water shining next to them in the thin light, the tangled undergrowth many feet high all around, yet low and broken still upon the path, so that it could be stepped upon, or waded through where it had grown a little higher. Harry had never walked inside these deep forests before. The massive trunks of spruce, hemlock, and cedar rose into the dim canopy. Vines crept and clutched and hung down everywhere about. Birds clacked and cawed, their voices sounding harsh and dead in the heavy air, which itself seemed tinged with a deep emerald. The foliage looked too huge to be real, swaying
and lurching, as if in irritation, as they moved among it. Everything was drenched. Drops of water the size of duck eggs fell out of the canopy from time to time, exploding noisily. The whole forest clicked and rustled, spat and sighed, threatening somehow, not at rest, not at peace.

The sweat poured down his skin. He found it harder and harder to focus on anything other than Charley's humped back as it swerved and ducked and forced its way forward. His boots trudged and tripped, each pace sending dull but intense shots of pain through his shoulder. Slowly, his eyes lost focus, until he saw nothing clearly, and all became a blur of green shadows.

He came abruptly awake as he was falling, his foot trapped by a root or tangle of vines. The undergrowth caught him barely halfway to the ground. He lay still, rocking in the embrace of a giant spread of fronds.

Then Charley's hands were upon him, pulling him up. “Eye open better,” he said. “Then not fall.” So Harry ran his hands down his face, shook some of the water from his jacket, though he was pretty much soaked through. He razzled his fingers through his hair, trying to clear his head. Then he looked around.

The day was ended. The shadows had become black, impenetrable, the calls of birds replaced already by a greater silence. The stream could still be heard, just off to their left, though he could not see it. But the path, what little there had been, was no longer in evidence, at least not to Harry. Charley had a machete in his hand—the same one Harry had wielded in Blunden Harbour two days before. Now the old Indian turned again and hacked and thrust, beckoning Harry on into the gathering darkness.

Soon, however, the darkness became absolute. Eyes open or closed, it made no difference to Harry at all. There were only the sounds of sweep and thunk in front, as Charley kept to his work. Harry lifted each foot with caution, not sure what he was standing on or moving through, or what was immediately ahead. His breathing came more ragged. As time went on, his fever inched its way back through his thinking, until the world rocked as if he were aboard a ship on a heavy sea, and he knew that he could not go farther.

“Stop, you fucking whoreson,” he said, rasping the words, reaching out, trying to grab hold of Charley's shoulder. “Just stop, won't you?” He sensed Charley turn back toward him.