The Mountain Can Wait (17 page)

Behind Bobbie's house there was a little mushroom-shaped hut, like something out of a dream. Cedar-shingled roof and mud walls. She called it her cob house. Inside, shelves of small glass bottles—powders and oils. There was an old camping stove and canisters of fuel. Glass beakers, pipettes. Dried herbs dusted the floor. Curtis helped Bobbie hang the strands of kelp from clotheslines until the room was like a rubbery wet forest. When the work was done, she left him there and he took one of the bottles off the shelf and uncorked its rubber stopper. His nostrils shut to the sharpness of the inky black liquid inside. He tried another bottle, this one containing an odorless powder the color of ashes. Another bottle smelled like cat piss.

He felt the lightest pulse of breath on the back of his neck, heard the soft lick and hiss of something moving toward him. Slowly he put the bottle back on the shelf and turned around, and saw only the sway of the dangling, spiraling yellow strands.

The next day, Bobbie got Curtis to pick blueberries along the road in front of her house, gather nettles, and chop wood. On the third day, he found her at the sink again, wringing out the purple mass that she'd been cooking before, which she'd left to soak in a bucket. He stood at the back door until she noticed him.

“What?” she asked, not turning from the sink. “You hungry or something?”

“No, no. I'm just…Is there anything else you need help with? I know what you said before, but I don't think your land is a dump. Dan said something about pruning trees?”

“You can't prune trees in the middle of June.” She put the thing she had been wringing in a large plastic bowl and came toward the door where he stood. “Scoot,” she said, and moved past him. She smelled like farm, like goat.

He followed her to a splintered wooden picnic table, where she began to spread the purple stuff flat. He could now see that it was wool.

“You going to be under my feet like this all the time?” she said, pulling apart the wool and securing it to the table with straight pins.

He shrugged.

She stopped what she was doing and squinted at him, chewed her lower lip. “And what happens when the jobs run out, eh?” She pinched a fan of straight pins and tapped them against her thigh. “I don't know what it is you're stewing about but there's something. I can read you, son. You're just like your mother. I don't care what's bothering you. Most likely you've been humiliated by some coquette.” Her voice caught and she coughed into her fist. “But you can't follow me around like some kind of lost duckling. Go read a book or something. Take a walk in the woods. Does wonders.”

The parking
lot in front of the Nielson office was bleak and empty at seven in the morning. Tom turned off his engine and waited. The logging company's office was one cinder-block building out of a series that occupied a concrete lot near the airport. Tom watched the entrance to the lot, willing each passing car to pull in. Eventually a red pickup drove in and parked a few spaces away. A woman in a brown suit got out and walked around to the other side of her truck and took a bag from the front seat. She headed toward the Nielson building but walked past it and unlocked the door to an outfit that dealt in the rental of heavy machinery. Three more people arrived and three more times he was disappointed. Finally a yellow Å koda pulled in and he recognized the driver to be the Nielson receptionist. He waited for her to go in before he approached the heavy glass door, which she'd locked again from the inside. He knocked and waited while she switched on various lights and opened the window blinds, turned on a computer at the front desk. She looked at him and walked out of his line of sight and he thought he might go crazy having to wait before she came to the door, unlocked it, and opened it partway.

“We're not really open yet,” she said.

“I'm with the planting company,” he said. “Kevin's expecting me.”

“Well, he's not in yet.”

“It's just that I'm leaving town today.”

“But he's not in yet.”

“What time does he usually get here?”

She looked over her shoulder at the clock on the wall. “Anytime now.”

“Can I wait?”

“I guess.”

He sat in a metal chair next to a plant that he couldn't determine to be real or fake until he pincered one of its dusty plastic leaves with his thumbnail. A framed poster on the wall showed a guy leaning out of a harvester, the machine's insect-like arm extending toward a stand of pines. Tom got up and helped himself to a paper cone of water from a cooler. The water was cold in his throat and tasted like the paper cone.

Someone he didn't recognize came in, and then someone else, and finally Kevin, one of the three company managers. He boomed a hello to the receptionist and paused when he saw Tom and smiled at him with his teeth. He gestured with a lift of his chin and Tom followed him down a blue-carpeted, white cinder-block corridor to his office.

Kevin hung his jacket on the back of the door and asked Tom to sit. “I need a coffee. You want one?”

“I'm all right.”

Kevin gripped the doorframe, leaned into the corridor, and called for the girl to bring him a coffee. He then settled himself into his chair. “Everything okay with your son?”

“Nothing that can't be fixed.”

“Who's looking after your camp right now?”

“Two of my guys. They're good.”

“This Daryl Sweet has really hung you out to dry,” Kevin said. He flipped through a stack of papers on his desk and pulled out a folder and opened it. “All the problems occurred on his blocks?”

“He's been fired.”

Kevin laughed a low laugh and nodded. “We know. He came here. Talks pretty fancy, eh? He whined about discrimination and a bunch of other crap but I don't know why he would come to us. It's got nothing to do with us.”

“I think I set him off. I'm sorry about that.”

“And I understand there was an arrest in town a few weeks ago? A bottle thrown on a dance floor?”

“I took care of that.”

The girl came in with a steaming mug and put it on the desk in front of Kevin.

“You don't want anything?” she asked Tom.

He shook his head.

Kevin rolled the mug between his palms and blew across the surface. “You should probably also know he's telling people that you've been knobbing the camp cook. I couldn't possibly care less what you people get up to out there. Hell, this is bush work, I get it. I been out there myself, but you can see how this looks from where I'm sitting.”

“Thing is, Kevin, I'm not going to be around for a week or so. The two guys I've got out there know what they're doing. I was hoping we might be able to figure this out when I get back.”

“You're not going back to camp now? With all that's going on? You're down a foreman.”

“It's this thing with my kid.”

Kevin took the first sip of his coffee. He shook his head. “I don't think there's anything else for us to figure out. We've been satisfied with your work, but I don't see how you can hold your end up just now. There's a lot of guys out there lining up for this contract. I'm thinking there's enough grounds here to terminate at the end of this season and we go our separate ways.”

“But I told you. I've got it under control.”

“Well, I told you. We don't think you do.”

Tom went to look for Carolina at her house. She wasn't there, so he found his way again to the university library and through the warren of stacks and cubbyholes to the desk by the window, where he'd met her before. She wasn't there either. He asked someone where he might find the poetry teachers' office and was directed to another building, on the other side of the campus. Fine arts, he was told.

People lay in the grass with their books open and flapping beside them, and it didn't look as though they were doing much of anything at all. Smoking on benches under broad-leaved maples. A Frisbee arched toward him and he reached for it but missed. It bounced on the grass and rolled away.

Many wrong turns in a bright, clean-lined building brought him to the department he was looking for, where thick carpet swallowed the weight of his boots. Most of the office doors in the narrow corridors were closed. He found a woman with a mass of gray hair tied in a knot at her neck; she was pecking at a computer. Her back was to the door so he knocked lightly on the frame. She turned halfway toward him with a cocked eyebrow, her fingers still resting on the keys.

“Sorry. I'm just looking for Carolina Ferris?”

The woman's face showed no recognition. “Is she a student?”

“She teaches here.”

She shrugged and smiled. “Haven't heard of her.” She turned back to her computer.

Tom took a step into the office. “Maybe you could help me. I know she's a teacher here.”

She tapped something on her keyboard and the screen went dark and she swiveled back to face him. “What does she teach?”

“Far as I know, it's poetry.”

“She'll be over in the English department. In that cubist monstrosity on top of the hill.” She jerked her thumb toward the window.

Nothing made sense in the building on top of the hill. There was no numerical order to the rooms, and corridors led off corridors where they shouldn't. Too many stairwells. Tom found the English department in a wing of the building that he was sure he'd passed before, and found a man who told him that Carolina wasn't there either.

So he waited in his truck outside her house. Bars of sunlight angled and lengthened along the road, stretching time. Whether it was help or comfort he wanted, he didn't know. Across the street, three men smoked on a bench in front of the Aboriginal Friendship Centre. Two of them gesticulated together in conversation but the third man sat alone. Small and weathered, with his head pitched forward as if he carried a great weight around his neck, the man caught Tom's eye and nodded gravely.

By the time the street had sunk into dusk, Carolina turned the corner on her bike. She rode right up to his window. Her helmet, as always, was crooked, and grocery bags hung by her knees, the handles twisted to rope. A sweater was tied loosely at her waist. She angled her face away from him and stared down the street.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, one foot on a pedal, one on the ground.

“What am I doing here?”

She put her other foot down and leaned the bike against her thigh. The tail of her sweater was dirty and torn.

“You get that caught in the spokes?” he said. He pointed at the sweater.

“What?”

“Your sweater.”

She picked at the torn fabric and then left it.

“Will you get in the truck please?”

“What for?”

“If you've got something to say I'd prefer it if this door weren't between us.”

“Then maybe you should get out.”

He got out, and she leaned her bike against the front porch of the house and sat on the curb next to him. He crossed his arms over his knees and knocked his legs against hers and waited for her to speak.

She stared at the gutter on the other side of the street. “Your friend Sweet came to see me. You know why?”

Looking down the road, he swallowed dryly. The bench in front of the aboriginal center was empty. “I think I know why.”

“Ya?”

“Carolina, I'm sorrier than I have words for. But there's something going on with Curtis.”

“So he was telling the truth?”

Sweet's face stuck in his mind. “I'm sure it was the truth and then some,” he said, “but the truth is bad enough.”

“I know better, but part of me hoped he was lying. The vitriolic way he spoke about you, and about her. He was loving it.” She rubbed her forehead under her helmet, then took it off and rested it on her knees.

He almost said to her that out in the bush, things were different. That the thing with Nix was nothing more than skin and pulse and happened in a world that wasn't part of this one. That he was an idiot. That none of it was important because none of it was. Not anymore. “I think Curtis might have done something stupid. Right now, I need to find him.”

“Were you going to tell me about her?”

“What, Nix? No, I wasn't.”

“What kind of an asshole name is that.”

“It never came into my mind that it would do any good to tell you. I thought it would just go away. I guess that's stupid.”

“You guess.”

He tucked a loop of her hair behind her ear and she drew back.

“I need to find my son,” he said.

“So go and find him, then.”

“I want you to come with me. I don't want to do this alone.”

She looked at him sadly. “I'm afraid you don't understand.”

He watched her face, the soft down on her upper lip that almost wasn't there.

“My friends said I was a sucker, hanging around with you. But I liked how we were—that's the bit they could never get. I wasn't waiting for you to get down on one knee; I've got no intention of spending my life in this town, or halfway up a mountain shooting rabbits. I wasn't any good at being married anyway. But you've ruined this and I don't want to touch you anymore; I don't want your hands on me.”

She got up and he watched her unlatch the side gate to her backyard and wheel her bike through it, and he watched her shut the gate without looking at him, and he stayed there until she was gone.

At home, he walked through each room, opening the windows to let the heavy air move freely, to lift the dust. He checked the boarded-up window in the basement, where Curt must have broken in, and hammered a few more nails into the boards. This was something he could fix later. In Curtis's room, he sat on the edge of the bed. Stared at the oblong square of yellow cast on the wall by the streetlight and thought about what needed to happen next. Tonight he would find Sean, and in the morning—no, before that: at dawn—he would drive to Whistler. Grill the housemates, the girl, Tonya, who'd had the abortion. Curtis wasn't like him: Curtis talked to people. Somebody would know where he was.

He looked around the room. Under the bed, a stack of snowboarding magazines and a dusty hockey stick. In the closet, three naked hangers and a scrap heap of shoes. Pajama bottoms and single socks in the drawers, broken CD cases, one ticket stub slotted in the mirror frame. Nothing on the walls, no boxes of letters or photo albums. There wasn't a lot of history here. Was this Tom's fault? Should he have taken more photographs, told more stories? Wasn't a boy's room supposed to be full of stories? The curtain rail had come down on one side and he stood on the bed to reconnect it to its binding. He retrieved the blanket from the living room floor and came back in and pulled the bedsheet tight up to the pillow, covered the bed with the blanket and squared it neatly with the sheet, folded them over together, and smoothed the whole arrangement with his palms.

Sean's apartment windows stood dark and listless. Tom knocked anyway, his nose inches from the door. He knelt down to the mail slot, opened it and called Sean's name, and waited there in silence, a draft from inside cool on his face.

He took Giscome Road out toward Tabor Lake and went on memory from there. When Curtis was young, Tom used to come out this way all the time to pick up Sean from his parents' house and take the boys riding. Sean was a good kid. He changed after the accident in his uncle's truck, after they took all the hardware out of him and he started walking again. It was as if he was never quite sure what he'd come into the room for. Some of the kids around the place got mean but Curtis stayed close, and Tom loved him for that.

Sean's parents' lane was hard to find in the dark, especially now, with all the new houses on Giscome, but Tom did find it. Their place was the same, a timber build that fit naturally into the side of the hill, mostly hidden by grandfather cedars.

Sean's father answered the door just as Tom remembered that he'd forgotten the man's name. He was thinner than he had been before, and faded, more scalp. His face was cocked as though he was waiting for Tom to say something. He didn't know who Tom was.

Tom took his hand out of his pocket, offered it to him. “It's Tom Berry. Curtis's dad?”

The man slapped his forehead, squeezed his eyes shut, and then opened them wide. “Of course you are. I thought I knew your face, when I opened the door…I was expecting Sean. Come in.”