The Other Side of the Bridge (21 page)

“You don’t want to know,” Ian said. “Take my word for it.”

“You’re a real bastard, Christopherson, you know that?”

Ian nodded. “So’s my father. It runs in the family.” The cut was still leaking. He should press on it, direct firm pressure on the wound, but Fats would yell and possibly hit him—he was their star quarterback and could pack quite a punch. Ian got some more magazines and added them to the pile. At least it was just seeping, not spurting. He didn’t fancy jamming his hand into Fats’s meaty groin.

“Will he put stitches in it? I mean, he doesn’t normally do that, does he? He doesn’t stitch every little cut a person comes with.”

“I don’t think that’s a little cut,” Ian said. He went over and tapped on the door to his father’s office. His father said, “Come in.” Ian opened the door and stuck his head around it. Mrs. Jenner was sitting beside his father’s desk with her sleeve rolled up, displaying a monstrously swollen elbow.

“Hello, dear,” she said. “How are you?”

“Hi, Mrs. Jenner. I’m fine, thanks.” He looked at his father and said, “Fairly urgent,” in an undertone, hoping Fats wouldn’t hear. His father nodded. “Okay. Be with you in a minute.”

Ian went back and sat down beside Fats. “So tell me how you managed to cut it on a tin can,” he said. “Was the can on the table at the time? And was it tuna, or beans, or peaches, or what?”

“Piss off,” Fats said.

“It makes a difference to the treatment,” Ian said. “If it was tuna he’ll do one thing, because it’s fish, and if it was beans or peaches he’ll do another. For your sake I hope it was beans or peaches.” He thought for a moment. “The worst one’s corned beef, actually. That’s a real nightmare. Was it corned beef?”

“Piss off.”

He left Fats with his father and went out in the canoe. There’d been an east wind blowing for days, which normally meant rain, but it hadn’t materialized yet. The lake was choppy, little scuds of wind ruffling the water, and he had to work at keeping the canoe steady. The sky was gray on gray—low dark clouds hanging under higher paler ones, the whole lot moving slowly across the sky.

Without thinking, he’d automatically turned west toward Hopeless Inlet. It was where Pete had nearly been pulled out of his boat a year ago and ever since then Pete’s mission in life had been to get even with whatever it was that had grabbed his line. Normally Ian would have joined him, but Pete’s comment still rankled. They seemed to have reached some sort of impasse, and he didn’t know why, or what to do about it.

He turned the canoe into the wind and paddled hard. The cool air felt good on his face—he imagined it filling his lungs, flowing through his whole system. It was hard going though, the wind gusting against the canoe, swinging the bow around. When he reached the mouth of Slow River he turned into it for a rest. Rounded humps of pink granite rose out of the water on either side, forming shields against the wind, and between them the river flowed smooth as syrup. Ian paddled slowly, trying not to disturb the stillness, trying instead to absorb it. He needed to clear his mind of the tangled mess that seemed to occupy it nowadays—exams, death, the future, the past, his father, women, his friend. He craved stillness, the mental equivalent of the river’s flow.

He concentrated on the movement of the water, the small tight whirlpools left by his paddle, the smooth curve of water over rocks beneath the surface, the narrow V-shape fanning out from the bow of the canoe, but thoughts kept crawling back in. He slid the canoe up beside a low bank of rock and climbed out. As soon as he stood up he was battered by the wind again so he sat down on a shelf of rock, low down by the water, and watched the river drifting by, and gave himself over to worrying.

He was getting good at it, that was for sure. If there were an exam in worrying he’d top the class. Earlier he had been looking around his room, wondering which of his possessions he should take with him to college: a few books—
Moby-Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, The Catcher in the Rye—
his radio, his camera, a photo of himself and Pete holding up a pike, twenty-six pounds, thirty-four inches long, their biggest ever. That had started him worrying about Pete again, and had also made him realize that he didn’t have a photograph of his father without his mother, which had set him thinking about her. He wanted no reminders of her cluttering up his new life.

He wished he could prevent his mother from getting hold of his address, wherever he ended up, but he knew his father would give it to her. She still wrote every week and in three years he had not opened a single letter; they went straight into the wastepaper basket, envelopes intact. Even so, from the envelopes themselves, he knew more about her life than he wanted to know. Her last name was no longer Christopherson, for instance: she had married the geography teacher. And they had moved to Vancouver a year ago. She phoned him on his birthday and at Christmas, and for his father’s sake he didn’t hang up on her, but once he left home he reckoned he would be able to sever that contact as well.

The pain of what she had done no longer filled the whole of him, but what was left was a hot, glowing coal of bitterness that flared up whenever he thought about her. He wanted to get rid of that as well. He wanted to be—to have been—untouched by her betrayal, as if she were nothing to him and never had been. Just a casual visitor who had stopped for a while and then moved on. He had a fantasy that in a few years’ time they would pass on a street somewhere and not recognize each other. That would be good. That was what he was aiming for.

There was something in the water: the movement caught his eye. It was heading directly toward him. It wasn’t until it was about ten feet away that he was able to work out what it was—a water snake, with a frog in its mouth. It kept coming toward him; presumably it thought he was part of the rock. When it reached his feet, it slid the first eighteen inches or so of its length out of the water, drawing a smooth, glistening S-shape on the pale rock, and then, to Ian’s consternation, rested its sleek, dark head—plus frog—on the top of his shoe. Then it yawned hugely and began to eat.

Ian, holding himself rigidly still, watched with fascination and disgust. The frog was headfirst inside the snake’s mouth but very much alive. It was at least twice the diameter of the snake’s head and fought hard, legs thrashing, toes scrabbling for purchase, pulling backward with all its might—he could feel the struggle through the leather upper of his shoe. His impulse was to try to rescue the frog, but he could see the absurdity of that. The frog was the snake’s dinner, after all. And he himself had eaten beef last night.

The snake, having moved its jaws about until the frog was in exact alignment, began to swallow, slowly—the lack of haste was the most disconcerting thing about it. Waves of contractions flowed along its body, sucking the frog down. The frog fought furiously. It managed to hook the toes of its left hind foot into the hard edge of the snake’s lower jaw and set its right hind foot against the side of Ian’s shoe and pushed for all it was worth, muscles swelling and straining with the effort. The fight went on and on. Sometimes it almost seemed that the frog would win its freedom, but blood was making a red slick on its back now and there was no real doubt about the outcome. This is how it goes, Ian thought. Like it or not, this is how it goes.

It was nearly dusk by the time he turned back. The wind was increasing and the waves were building up. They weren’t big yet but the water was choppy and the canoe bounced around like an eggshell. As Ian neared the dock he saw that there was someone sitting on it, a dark figure, with knees drawn up, arms clasped around knees. Cathy.

She watched him silently as he maneuvered the canoe alongside. He put down his paddle and grabbed the dock to stop the canoe smacking against it.

“Hi,” he said cautiously.

“Hi.”

He got out of the canoe and hauled it up, then flipped it over, belly down, in case of rain. “You been here long?”

“A while.” Her voice was muffled by her arms, which were still wrapped around her knees. She was wearing a light jacket that made a ruffling sound in the wind. When he sat down beside her he noticed that she’d been crying, and his heart sank.

“You okay?” he said. She put her head on her arms and began to cry. “Hey,” he said, his heart sinking lower still. He put his arm around her. “Hey, Cath, what’s wrong? What’s happened? Has something happened?”

He pulled her closer, searching guiltily through his mind for something he might have done to upset her further—apart from not missing her all that much, which she couldn’t have known about. She was leaning against his shoulder now and he could feel his shirt getting wet.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Come on. Tell me what’s happened.”

She lifted her head, finally, and looked at him. She was very pretty when she cried. Her eyes became luminous pools and when the pools spilled over, the tears traced clear silvery lines down her cheeks. He wondered if she would have cried so much if she’d been made ugly by tears, if her nose became red and swollen and her eyes puffed up.

“Nothing’s happened,” she said. “Not really. It’s just that I’ve discovered…how much I love you. I’ve just wanted to…
die,
Ian. These past few weeks, I’ve just wanted to die. I just…don’t care about…anything anymore. About the exams or anything else. I’m going to fail, and I don’t care. I just need to be with you. I’ve just realized that it’s the only thing that matters.”

Oh God, he thought. He looked out over the lake. Whitecaps were starting to appear; a last lone gull was skimming the tops of them, graceful as a skater. He felt bowed down under the weight of her love. He wanted to say, Look, I’m sorry, but I’m just too tired to think about this at the moment, could you come back next week? But he couldn’t say that, and anyway, next week he still wouldn’t know how to reply.

And then, to complicate things still further, the thought slid into his mind that given how Cathy was feeling, he could almost certainly persuade her to have sex with him, right now, right here on the dock. He was sure of it. He started to get an erection just thinking about it. He shifted his position, drew her closer to him, and with his free hand unzipped her jacket. She was wearing a sweater over her blouse; he slid his hand up underneath it, cupped her breast for a moment, then began undoing buttons. Cathy turned her face toward him and lifted her mouth to his, willingly, trustingly, and he knew she was going to let him, and simultaneously, with a feeling close to despair, knew that he couldn’t go through with it. Not because of his principles, not because it would be taking advantage of her, but because, when it came right down to it, he was chicken. Too scared of the consequences to take the risk.

Cathy was still looking up at him, her eyes questioning now. He had to say something. He whispered, “I respect you too much, Cath. We should wait.”

It sounded so false, so unbelievably corny, that if he had been her he would have got up and walked off and never spoken to him again. But Cathy smiled, and curled up against him, and whispered back, “I’m so lucky to have found someone like you. I can’t believe how lucky I am.”

It was a relief when Saturday came. There was a simplicity about his work on the farm that seemed to be the perfect antidote to everything else. He envied Arthur the smooth pattern of his days. Sure, he had worries, but in many ways there just couldn’t be a more perfect life than plodding up and down a field all day, under the pure, uncomplicated sky.

That morning he began plowing the ten-acre, which bordered the northernmost edge of the farm. The Dunns’ boundary was marked by the Crow River, and when you were working on the ten-acre you could hear it in the background all day, the smooth cold rushing of it filling the gaps between the clinking of the horses’ harnesses and the bickering of crows. It was his favorite field. More than in the others, which were so well tended, so tamed, you could see the history of the farm in this field.

Needless to say, it wasn’t Arthur who had told him its history: it was Laura. Details came out from time to time, generally at dinner. “It was a bush farm, wasn’t it, Arthur? Just a small clearing hacked out of the bush. By your grandfather?”

A nod from Arthur. “Yeah.”

“Most of the farms up here started off as bush farms, Ian. Sometimes they didn’t even bother felling the trees to begin with, they just planted turnips and potatoes in among them, to tide them over the first winter. And then when they did cut down the trees, they had to wait years for the stumps to rot enough to dig them out. How many years does it take, Arthur? Five? Or even more than that?”