The Other Side of the Bridge (29 page)

“Not too bad.”

“I heard about the jailbreak.”

Pete looked at him. “Me too.”

“The Mounties there yet?”

“They’re everywhere, man. Comin’ out of the woodwork, crawlin’ up the walls, you can’t go for a crap without finding a Mountie in there, sniffin’ around.”

He grinned. He looked as if he’d just won a million dollars.

Mr. Aaronovitch arrived and they filed into the room and sat down. They were pros at this now—it was almost a shame it was all coming to an end. Aaronovitch handed out the papers and said ready, set, go, and they all flipped the paper over and started scribbling. For three hours Ian poured out onto the paper everything he had taken in in the past two days, and when it was over his brain felt as empty as an old boot, nothing in there at all.

Afterward they milled around restlessly, talking about how great it felt to be finished but how it didn’t seem real, and how it was going to take a long time to sink in. Somebody suggested they go to Harper’s, but Ian decided against it. You could predict exactly what the conversation would be. They’d do a postmortem on the exam, question by question, until they’d all convinced themselves they’d failed. He didn’t fancy it. He caught Pete’s eye and nodded questioningly at the door, and Pete nodded in reply. Ian felt a huge relief. Almost as good as Jim Lightfoot getting away was the fact that Pete seemed to be back to normal.

Their fishing tackle was at Pete’s, and his grandfather had told him to stay out of the way of the Mounties, so they decided to hike up to the Leap. It had been years since either of them had been there; fishing was so addictive it left time for nothing else.

The Leap was a sheer granite cliff over three hundred feet high, rising up out of the lake. It might have been possible to scale it if you had the right equipment, but as far as anyone knew it had never been done. Instead you approached it from the rear, where the climb was merely steep rather than precipitous.

They went past Cathy’s house to pick up Ian’s bike, cycled to the point where the road came closest to the Leap and then abandoned their bikes and set off. The going was easy at first, rising gently across great rounded humps of pink lichen-encrusted granite, bare but for the occasional tuft of grass or rich green pillow of moss. Here and there, in hollows deep enough for a little soil to gather, there was a knotted jack pine, hanging on tight.

Then the rocks got steeper and they had to pick their way, climbing as fast as they could, both feeling the urge to push themselves physically, to get the blood moving again after the concentrated mental effort of the morning. Partway up there was a giant turtle-shaped boulder they remembered sitting on as kids, so they climbed up and sat on it again to get their breath back.

“It was your grandfather who brought us here the first time, wasn’t it?” Ian said breathlessly. “Years ago. We were really young.”

Pete nodded.

“Was it your birthday or something?”

“Yeah.”

Ian had a dim memory of the old man helping him up a rock, saying something encouraging to him in a language he didn’t understand, then saying it again in English.
There. Now up this one. Good. Good.
He was a great old guy. And now there were Mounties prowling around the store. Asking questions.

“How’s he doing? You know—with everything that’s going on.”

“He’s okay. Worried.”

“About Jim?”

“About everything, man. About everything.”

Below them a couple of crows were bouncing about on a boulder, yelling at each other. Then a third crow joined them and added his opinion, then a fourth. They stood around bickering for a moment and then, abruptly, they seemed to reach agreement and they all flew off.

Ian put his hands flat on the rock and lifted himself fractionally, easing his backside into a more comfortable position. The rock was warm from the sun and under his hands the rough rounded surface felt like the skin of an ancient beast.

“How old are these rocks, do you think?” he said pensively.

“They’ve been here forever,” Pete said. “These are some of the oldest rocks in the world.”

Ian looked at him curiously. “Really?”

Pete nodded. “Bits of the Shield are coming on for three billion years old.”

“Three
billion
?”

“This is top-quality rock, man. It was a mountain range once. High as the Rockies. Then it was under the sea…then there were glaciers on top of it.” He patted the rock approvingly with his hand. “Still here.”

They climbed on. The rocks rose up more steeply and sometimes they needed to search for handholds and haul themselves up. And then abruptly they scrambled over a crest of rock and found themselves at the top, the lake spreading out below them, dazzling in the sun.

“Wow!” Ian said. “I’d forgotten how fantastic the view is.”

The sun on the surface of the water was so bright that he had to shield his eyes to look at it. In the distance the shoreline looked like lace, hundreds of bays and rivers and inlets running off from the vast pool of the lake itself and disappearing into the wilderness.

“What’s that at the edge of the cliff?” Pete said.

“Where?”

“There’s something in the air.”

They were still thirty feet or so back from the edge, but now, looking more closely, Ian could see that the air appeared to be dancing in a strange way, almost like a heat haze but not quite. At first he thought it was a trick of the light but as they got closer he could see that Pete was right, there was something in the air. Many things, in fact. Thousands of things.

“Holy shit!” Pete said. “They’re dragonflies!”

A curtain of dragonflies was hanging in the air at the very edge of the cliff, hundreds upon hundreds of them, like a vast army of tiny helicopters, hovering, almost motionless apart from a slight swaying to maintain their position on the updraft of warm air from the lake. All of them were facing inward as if they’d been on their way somewhere and had come smack up against a sheet of glass.

“What the hell are they
doing
?” Ian said, getting as close to the edge as he dared. Three hundred feet below, the waves were frothing around the foot of the cliff.

“Dunno.”

“Have you ever seen them do that before?”

“Nope.”

Pete sat down, cross-legged, at the edge of the cliff, face-to-face with the dragonflies. He watched them and they watched him. Man and bug, Ian thought, grinning at the sight. Man and bug, eye-to-eye on the brim of the oldest rock in the world. He sat down beside Pete, edging cautiously closer to the brim, and focused on one individual dragonfly. They were hovering quite close together, not more than four or five inches apart in any direction, but they maintained their positions so well that it was easy to pick out just one. It was less than three feet away—he could have touched it if he’d leaned out over the edge—but it didn’t seem in any way perturbed by his presence. They eyed each other, mutually uncomprehending.

“So how old are dragonflies?” he said at last. “Since you know so much.”

“You mean these particular ones?”

“No. Like, when did the first dragonfly fly?”

“Two to three hundred million years ago.”

“That’s not a very satisfactory answer—give or take a hundred million years. Can’t you be a little more precise?”

“Two hundred and seventy-six million, three hundred and ten thousand, four hundred and twenty-two years ago on the fourteenth of December.”

“Thank you.”

“Anytime,” Pete said. “If there’s any little thing you need to know, just ask.”

They sat on in silence, or almost silence; if you listened closely you could just hear a faint thrumming from thousands of wings. Beyond the dragonflies the sun was sinking slowly, casting its rays across the lake, and on either side, everything, as far as the eye could see, was slowly dissolving into the haze.

Ian thought, If I live to be a hundred years old, I will always remember this.

It was after dark by the time they got to Low Down. Most of the others were there already and had a bonfire going. Cathy was there, huddled in a little group of girls who kept shooting dirty looks at Ian. He avoided looking at them.

Someone had spread a couple of old blankets out on the sand a few feet back from the fire and Ian sat down and stared into the flames. He felt strange, distant and detached. Part of his mind was still back on the cliff and the other part was too tired for a party. He tried to shake himself out of it—this was probably the last get-together they’d have before they all went their separate ways—but the others didn’t seem to feel particularly hyped-up either. Someone passed him a Coke and someone else held out a king-size bag of potato chips; he took a handful and ate them slowly. People were standing around in the shadows at the edge of the firelight. Others were down by the water. Pete was down there, looking out over the lake. Maybe he was back with the dragonflies too. Or communing with his mythical muskie. Or wondering what the Mounties were up to on the reserve, and how his grandfather was making out.

It was getting cold. The fire had died down enough to cook the hamburgers and hot dogs people had brought, so they did that and then heaped more wood on the fire and huddled around it. There was a bit of petting going on, but nothing serious. Someone tried to start a singsong, but it petered out almost immediately, and they sat mostly in silence, like a bunch of cavemen, watching the flames.

Earlier they’d talked about staying all night, greeting the sunrise together, but in the end people started drifting away about one in the morning. The good-byes were quiet and subdued.

Pete had disappeared some time before, so Ian went home alone. He cycled slowly, wanting to hang on to the feeling of detachment that had taken him over. A state of not-being. A state of no-time. No past, no present, no future. No decisions. He thought it would be good to stay like that for the rest of his life.

When he got home the car was gone; his father was out on a call. Ian went up to his room. He lay on his bed, thinking of what Jake had said about leaving the North, then thinking about Jake himself. It must be strange, coming back after a long absence to the place you grew up in. Strange to see again things that were once so familiar they were almost a part of you. Though it was hard to imagine Struan or anything in it being a part of Jake. He didn’t look as if he had ever belonged. He was a city type. Sure of himself. Confident. Ian envied him that. He looked like someone who had no doubts about himself or where he was going. Someone who knew exactly what he wanted out of life. Someone who had all the answers.

TEN

VICTORY LOAN NEARING OBJECTIVE

RUNAWAY TRUCK FINISHES UP IN MILL CREEK

—Temiskaming Speaker,
May 1943

T
he cows needed milking, so he had to get up in the mornings. If it hadn’t been for that, maybe he wouldn’t have. Maybe he would have stayed in bed, sagging into the mattress, too weighed down with loss to move, while the forest crept in and took over the farm. But the urgent lowing of the cows reached him where he lay under his heap of gray blankets, and it wasn’t a sound anyone with a heart in him could ignore.