The Mountain Can Wait (20 page)

Afraid to submerge his face, he swam a mix of dog paddle and front crawl with his head up, gasping. He reached the kelp bed, and at first it wasn't too bad—a nibble against his toes, a lick of the thigh. But as he got farther in, the kelp began to wrap itself around him; his hands were full of it. It got so thick that Curtis could barely move. A strand drifted around his neck and he felt the gentlest of pulls and stopped swimming. His fingers were numb and had curled into claws that he couldn't open; his skin was alive and tingling with the frigid water. For a moment, the kelp held his body afloat. A pulse ran through the strand around his neck and he felt it move and tighten like a snake, warm and fleshy and inevitable. He closed his eyes and lay back so that only his face was above the water, and a shudder passed through him. It was as if all this time since the accident, he'd been strapped into a car going too fast on a potholed road, and now the seat belt was unclipped and his body was rising above the car, above the road, and he could look down and hear the stress and wrench of metal parts that no longer had anything to do with him. He exhaled whatever air he had left into the sky and sank under the surface of the water.

A ticking. A quiet rush in the ears. Minuscule sea life and sea dust suspended in moon-bright water. Below him: no light, no sound. A cold hand on his ankle. He screamed and his mouth and throat filled with salt water and he thrashed back up to the surface, coughing.

He lay on his back and kicked frantically toward the beach, stopping every few kicks to check his direction. Eventually the kelp bed thinned and then ended, and he flipped onto his front and swam until his fingers plunged into sand and stones. He pulled himself up onto the beach and lay on his stomach in the sand and began to shiver. The shivering turned into spasms, and he stripped off his clothes, curled himself tightly into a ball, and held on. When he was able, he wrung out his clothes and hung them from a sturdy, wind-bent beach pine. He climbed into the island's thick underbrush and collected whatever loose, dead foliage he could find to make a nest. He knew that he would wake up itching.

It was just past 10 p.m. when Tom and Bobbie stood on the porch of Dan's place. The large picture window showed a dark front room, but there was light coming from down a back hallway. Tom knocked on the door and waited, looked in the window again for movement but saw none. Could smell coal smoke. Bobbie pounded on the door with her fist.

“Don't do that,” said Tom.

“Chill out.”

A skinny, bald man in a robe answered the door, his eyes shot with alarm.

“Curtis here by any chance?” Bobbie asked.

The man blinked at Bobbie, then looked at Tom, and back at Bobbie. “What?”

Tom held out his hand. “I'm Tom Berry, Curtis's father. Sorry to be putting you out like this, so late at night, but Curtis has taken off somewhere. We thought maybe he'd come here.”

Dan held his robe tight to his body with one hand and shook Tom's with the other. “I haven't seen him since we went shrimping. Come in.” He stood back from the door and Tom followed Bobbie in. As they walked through to the back, Tom passed his fingers lightly over a tall sculpture on a plinth in the middle of the room, its surface cool and smooth. In a small, well-lit kitchen, Dan motioned toward two chairs at the cloth-covered table, took a kettle from the stove, and filled it at the sink. He turned and leaned against the counter. “Maybe you want something stronger than tea?”

Tom held up his palm. “I'm all right.”

“What're you offering?” asked Bobbie.

Dan opened a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of something amber. He filled a glass halfway and set it on the table in front of Bobbie. “You sure?” He angled the spout of the bottle at Tom.

Tom shook his head.

Dan dropped scoops of something that looked like mouse turds into two mugs and filled them with steaming water. “You working him too hard, Bobbie?” he said.

Bobbie rolled her eyes and took a drink. Her top lip was beaded with sweat and it occurred to Tom that she probably didn't venture from her house very often, and he appreciated the fact that she was here now.

“Kid's on the run,” she said. “Nothing to do with me.” She looked at Tom. “You going to tell him what for?”

“You don't need to tell me anything,” Dan said, handing Tom a mug.

“I appreciate that.”

Dan locked his fingers around his mug and held it against his chest and looked thoughtfully toward the floor. “Would he have gone for the ferry?”

“He left after the last sailing,” said Bobbie.

Dan continued to look at the floor, and then he snapped his eyes at her. “You try that girl from the beach?”

“Eh?” she said, head back, squinting at him.

“The gal working over at Blue's place. One of the feathers and bones kids.”

“Why in hell would he be with one of them?”

“Feathers and bones?” said Tom.

Dan smiled at him. “Kids come out here just for the summer. They squat out in the woods or get fruit-picking work on farms. Sometimes you see them with bones piercing their ears, feathers hanging from their hair.”

“Hippies,” Bobbie spat.

“Anyway, I heard from one or two wagging tongues that Curtis left the shrimping party with this girl,” Dan said.

“You know where she lives?” asked Tom.

“Yep. Take my truck.”

“Appears the boy isn't as traumatized as he's making out to be,” Bobbie said, eyebrows raised, filling her glass again.

Blue's farm was a few kilometers up the road from Bobbie's house. Behind the single-story, stucco house, which was dark and bedded for the night, there were a few acres of orchard: cherry and peach and apple. Dan had told them about a cabin at the back of the property where Blue's pickers stayed. Tom and Bobbie walked through the trees, long bars of shadow and silver-blue bark, stepping in the dead, slippery mulch of dropped cherries and peaches, to find a dark cabin with the door unlocked and no one inside. Clothes lay on the floor next to an unmade bed, and a plate of something crusty balanced on the end of the bed, and there was the smell of thick-oil incense, but this feathers and bones girl was not home. And there was no feeling of Curtis about the place at all.

Bobbie lifted a bra hanging over the back of a chair by its strap and dangled it, inspected it as if it were a clue.

“Put that back,” Tom whispered close to her face.

“Big tits,” she declared, impressed. The bra rotated a half turn.

“We'll go back,” he said, rubbing his chin. “Likely thing he'll do is go for the ferry in the morning.”

“I think you're going about this all wrong,” Bobbie said, tossing the bra to the floor.

“And your solutions make a whole lot of sense? A fucking sweatbox?”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Repentance comes from within, Tom.”

He could only look at her.

It wasn't really like waking—more like giving up on a very light and fitful sleep. Curtis rose to a pale, oppressive dome above him and mist in the trees. He was beyond cold, his fingers stone white, and when he brushed the feeble covering of leaves and sticks from his body and went for his clothes, he found them to be almost as wet as they had been when he hung them. Regardless, he pulled them on, jerking with discomfort. What a stupid, stupid idiot. How much of an asshole did you have to be to maroon yourself on an island? He couldn't see Aguanish from where he was, so he picked his way through the thick underbrush to the other side of the island, stooping as he went, in search of berries. He came to a thicket of blackberry and grabbed at the clusters of fruit, just beginning to turn purple. They tasted tart but Curtis ate anyway, thorns snagging his skin, and he continued to eat until he felt the berries' weight in his stomach.

When he eventually broke through the trees to the low, rocky drop of the other side of the island, he saw only mist—a dark and blurry impression of Aguanish through the mist. He would wait for it to clear, and when it did, he would swim back. As soon as the sun was up and his body was warmer. For now he sat on a rock, shivering, holding his knees to his chest. He had to readjust everything, hadn't been thinking straight the night before, and now he needed to rethink what he was going to do. It still made sense to keep to the islands but of course he was going to need another boat. He would steal one if he had to. He could go back to that campsite and wait for more kayakers to come.

A soft rumble began in his lower back and his stomach clenched. Some kind of darkness moved through his body, and he remembered that the only thing he'd eaten since the day before was cherries and blackberries. The thought of all that fruit brought spit up the back of his throat. Everything suddenly became very loose and he barely had enough time to pull down his pants.

When he finished, he lay on his side, thirsty, his thighs throbbing, and stayed very still, trying to see Aguanish through the white. He lay like that until the looseness in his bowels brought him up to his haunches again.

A small collection of people waited by the fencing at the top of the ferry pier in the morning. One old man with a bike and a dirty backpack, a woman in a toque with a wicker basket in the crook of her arm, a family of three, only the hint of a baby wrapped tightly against its father by a sling. It was a white and heavy morning that had settled wetly over everything. With Bobbie at home still in bed, Tom waited behind the wheel of Dan's truck, halfway up the hill from the pier. He drummed his fingers softly on the wheel. He heard the ferry's deep and off-key horn before he saw the boat, and then it appeared out of the mist at the wide mouth of the bay. Tom turned to look up the hill. He got out of the truck and kicked stones down the road and looked up and down it, even though something told him in a voice louder than hope that Curtis wasn't coming. He let his hands drop to his sides and allowed himself to be filled to the brim by emptiness. The boy couldn't be far but he might as well have been on the moon. It seemed to take a very long time for the ferry to make its way across the bay and maneuver into the pier, like a foot slipping into a shoe. Tom stood by the entrance to the gangway with the other passengers and waited there while they embarked, and he watched one last passenger, a girl, come running down the hill in a pair of cowboy boots. And he watched, as well, the ferry pull away from the pier and make a slow, laborious turn in the bay, and the white-wash trail of it as it motored toward the strait.

Back at the house, a note from Bobbie on the kitchen table. She'd gone down to the beach via the trail at the back of her property and wanted Tom to join her. And though he thought the smartest thing to do at this point was wait at the house until the next ferry sailing, he headed out the back door to find the trail. Maybe she'd known where Curt was all along, and was now ready to reveal him, like a prize. With Bobbie, you never knew.

He found her standing at the shore, hands on her hips, looking out toward a small island. When he approached her, she jutted her chin toward the island.

“At first I couldn't see past my own goddamn nose, but now look—you see there? On the rocks towards the right side? You see someone moving there?” she said, squinting. “Mist lifted and there he was.”

Tom looked and saw nothing but a rock of an island covered in short trees.

“My kayak's gone. I know it's him,” she said. “Look!” She pointed excitedly.

Tom looked again and found that Bobbie was right. Someone was moving among the rocks.

So they'd found him. There they were on the beach, watching. At first it was just Bobbie, but then his dad came and stood next to her. And then they left, picking their way back up the beach. Probably gone off to call the police. Curtis thought about getting in and swimming for it, but he was still so cold and there was no sign of the sun, and he felt weak as a baby.

A little later, the buzz of a motorboat woke him from a half sleep. He had been dreaming of drinking cold water straight from the tap. He opened his eyes to see that his dad was alone in an aluminum dinghy, strong-arming the tiller at the back, wind in his face. He coasted up to the rock where Curtis sat and cut the engine, moved to the front of the boat, and tossed up a line.

“Tie this to a tree or something,” he said.

Getting up, Curtis felt light-headed and had to sit again. He retrieved the rope with his foot and dragged it until he could reach it with his hand, and wrapped it a few times around the nearest trunk.

“Now give me a hand,” his dad said. He balanced on the seat at the front of the boat and offered his hand up to Curtis. He carried Bobbie's duffel bag over his shoulder.

Curtis took his dad's hand and pulled weakly. His dad looked at him angrily and yanked his own hand away, and scrambled up the rock without any help.

“Have you got any water in there?” Curtis asked, eyeing the bag. He looked even paler than before and was shivering.

His dad nodded. “And a blanket. Your grandmother isn't as hard a girl as she pretends to be. She packed some food too.” He made Curtis take off his shirt, and wrapped the blanket tightly around him. Curtis drank greedily from the bottle of water he was offered, but refused the napkin full of crumbling date bread.

“Why are your clothes damp?” his dad asked.

“Fucken kayak sank.”

“Shit. Where?”

“Other side of the island. I had to swim for it.”

“You jackass,” his dad said, laughing. He rubbed Curtis's back roughly, trying to warm him. He took off his own boots and socks, and pulled the socks over Curtis's blue-veined feet. “What was your plan?”

“To get away from you.”

His dad continued to rub Curtis's back, his arms. Curtis looked down through the clear green water where it pulsed against this small island, pulling at the locks of black weed that clung to the rocks.