The Master of Happy Endings (44 page)

A pair of red kayaks appeared from behind the trees to the south and stroked by, perfectly abreast, the murmuring voices of the two rowers suddenly breaking into laughter for a moment. Thorstad waited until they had passed before responding to Travis's accusation—if that was what it was. “There's plenty of time to think about what's next—six more weeks of summer.”

“Think about it now. Come back in the fall and help me survive my year of university. Come to L.A. again when I go. University is bound to be tough for a guy like me. It hit me while I was at my uncle's—I should've got a commitment out of you before I ever let you on that boat.”

Thorstad leaned forward for a good look at Travis's face. How much importance should he give to this appeal? “Do your parents know you've made this little side trip?”

“My parents want you back to tutor my stupid cousin, you know that. You might as well nag at us both. Bring a piece of an eighty-million-year-old shell with you and you'll be the hero of my first-year science class. We won't have to stay at the Evanses' again. We could find a place of our own. My mother'll be so glad to have you keeping an eye on me I bet she'll pay for any sort of luxury we demand.”

Travis hauled his knapsack onto his lap and ripped open a Velcro flap. “I wonder if a B&B without a toilet would have a DVD player. I found this in a store near my uncle's.” He brought out a cream-coloured paperback and opened the back to display a disc inside. “Just because you're old don't mean you can't, you know, keep yourself up to date with what's cool! What do you think?
The Rap Canterbury Tales
.”

The next morning, Axel Thorstad rode the reconditioned bicycle down the trail to his shack to begin the task of putting things back where they belonged. This meant wrestling his desk from one wall to another, straightening out the books, and rearranging the wall photographs: Cliff Lyons on the U.S. Mail coach, Susan Hayward riding horseback with John Wayne. He removed the picture of his father in the moment before the fall, and laid it beside the Centurion Museum photograph of his still-alive father on top of the bookcase, uncertain where they belonged. Then he shifted the various stumps into positions that felt more familiar, most of them with their red circle eyes facing more or less in the direction of his chair, his desk, the window, and the view of the strait outside.

When the shack was once more his own, he went out onto the beach, stripped down to cross the gravel and sand and barnacle-crusted rocks, and walked into the water to set out for a swim. It was cold, but the water here was always cold except where it had just come in over rocks the summer sun had been warming for hours. It was the same body of water he'd swum in daily off the Montanas' place, and the same he'd seen from the Evanses' place but had swum in only the last few days before leaving, in a pair of Elliot Evans's trunks. He had been a swimmer all his life. If he'd been raised in California, his father might have encouraged him to become a stunt double for actors afraid of the water.

Until he was walking up the beach to fetch his clothes he hadn't noticed that Lisa Svetic stood beside the double-trunked arbutus waving her arms. Her bicycle leaned into a bush of oceanspray. “My lord! You should wear a bell around your neck when you're naked so people will know to keep away. Birds are dropping out of trees. The killer whales are probably halfway to Alaska by now, mothers covering the eyes of their calves.”

She turned her back and spoke to the woods. “They sent me down to get you but they never told me I'd be stricken blind.”

He had left his clothing folded neatly across the top of a driftwood log half buried in gravel and worn smooth by decades of shifting tide. She waited till Thorstad had had time to pull his undershorts on before turning to face him again. “I'm surprised Hollywood let you come home, they could've used you for a lamppost now and then.”

It wasn't easy to pull clothes on over wet flesh.

“This fella that was left behind in Deeper Bay? They brought him in and laid him out in the Free Exchange but he won't let them take him across to a doc. He's a terrible mess, but he wants you—Goodness knows why. He groans and moans and doesn't talk very clear but he knows how to get across what he wants. He's already made life hell for the guys that rescued him!”

Thorstad supposed this would eventually make sense. “You saw him?”

“Of course I saw him. Bloody. Filthy. At death's door but fighting the guys that try to help. They should've left him where they found him.”

“He say who he is?”

“He said your name. Wouldn't say his.”

With his corduroy pants pulled up, he carried his shirt and socks and shoes up the slope to the retaining wall and then up the steps to the grass. A distinct sense of foreboding had lodged somewhere inside him. He had come home from the world, for a while at least, but that didn't mean the world wasn't capable of following. “Did he say what he wants me for?”

“He wants us to bring him down to your shack, but I figured you'd want to have a look at him first.”

“And he's in pretty bad shape, you say?”

“I could hardly force myself to look. Imagine a sick-and-dying man beaten to a pulp by a healthy gorilla. If he was mine I'd be bracing myself for the worst. A former
student
? He said a lot of things while they were bringing him in but most of it didn't make sense. One thing they caught—he knows you been looking for him. Asking up and down the streets if anyone knew where he was. You can take my bike if you want.”

“You take it. Tell them I'm on my way.” If he walked he'd have a little more time to think. And to gain control of this tremor in his hands, the confusion in his head. “You sure you heard right? He said I'd been looking for him up and down the streets?”

Lisa dropped a foot to the ground and turned back. “Looked pretty pleased with himself for a man breathing his last. Like he figured he was bringing you a great big gift you never thought to ask for!”

Acknowledgements

The quotations in Chapter 1 are from Geoffrey Chaucer's poem
Troilus and Cressida
and Earle Birney's poem “Bushed,” from
Ghost in
the Wheels, Selected Poems
, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto.

The quotations in Chapters 4 and 12 are from Geoffrey Chaucer's poem
The Canterbury Tales
.

The quotation in Chapter 8 is from Baba Brinkman's
The Rap Canterbury
Tales
, Talonbooks, Vancouver.

The plot of the fictitious play
Returning to Troy
is very loosely modelled on the Lena Grove story in William Faulkner's
Light in August
, as well as Horton Foote's
Travelling Lady
, in
Collected Plays, Vol. II
, A Smith and Kraus Book, Contemporary Playwrights Series (later a movie titled
Baby the Rain Must Fall
). Oonagh's sentence “It's all right, Ludie. I've had my trip” is from Horton Foote's play
The Trip
to Bountiful
.

The quotation in Chapter 13 is from Edgar Lee Masters's poem “Lucinda Matlock,” in
The Spoon River Anthology
, The Macmillan Company.

The review of Matthew Schneider's
The Long and Winding Road from
Blake to the Beatles
was written by Dr. Kim Blank for the
Victoria
Times-Colonist
.

“In Time of
The Breaking of Nations
” by Thomas Hardy was composed in 1915 and published in
Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy
, Macmillan, London, 1932.

Estevan Island is a fiction and should not be identified with a real island.

The television network producing
Forgotten River
is also a fiction and not to be mistaken for a real network studio.

For advice, support, and other forms of assistance, I am grateful to Curtis Gillespie, Bill New, Shannon Hodgins, my agent, John Pearce, and my editor, Patrick Crean. I am enormously grateful to Brigitte and Hart Hanson and the generous actors, writers, producers, and crew members working on the Fox television series
Bones
. And again, as always, to Dianne.