The Other Side of the Bridge (36 page)

“Ancient tribal lore, man.”

“Really?”

Pete twitched his jig. “Naw. I read it somewhere. Some book by some scientist guy.”

“Oh,” Ian said, disappointed. He would have liked it to be tribal lore. “Well, how would he know?”

“How would he know what?”

“That they piss on their legs to keep cool. Maybe they’re just lousy shots. Can’t pee straight. He could know that they piss on their legs, but how the hell could he know
why
?”

It was a serious question but it struck Pete as funny. He started to laugh.

“What’s funny about that?” Ian said. He looked up at the vultures soaring on the wind and suddenly it came to him—a newly minted thought.

“I’ve got it!” he said. “Holy shit, I’ve got it! I know what I’m going to do! At last! I know what I’m going to do!”

Pete stopped laughing. He reached under his seat, pulled out a bottle of Coke and prized the top off on an oarlock. “What?” he asked suspiciously, taking a swig.

“I’m going to be a pilot!”

It was so perfect he was astounded that he hadn’t thought of it before. He’d never even thought to put it on his list. It was totally different from what everyone expected of him, and on top of that it was a good job—interesting, respected, well paid, the lot. Not the air force, though. He’d be a commercial pilot and see the world. No one—not his father, not his teachers, not even Jake—could disapprove.

Pete choked, and Coke shot out of his nose. He started laughing again.

“What’s so funny?” Ian said, but that only made Pete worse. He howled with laughter, rocking the boat, offending the vultures, who wheeled away on the cool evening air.

“Think you’ll come back here in the summers?” Arthur asked. They were sitting on a granite outcrop in the middle of a field of wheat, drinking tea. The sun was hot but there was a breeze, which made it just about perfect. The horses were standing head to tail under a couple of trees at the side of the field, politely swatting flies for each other with their tails.

It had been so long since Arthur had spoken that Ian looked at him in surprise. He was very quiet these days, even by his standards.

Ian thought about the question. The closer he came to leaving the more he saw that he was going to want to come back fairly regularly, not only for his father’s sake, but also for his own. “I think I probably will,” he said. “Next summer, anyway.”

Both of them were watching the wheat. The breeze brushed over the top of it like a vast and careless hand, making it roll and sway, hypnotic as the sea.

“Don’t suppose you’ll want to work on the farm, though?” Arthur said.

“Would you have work for me?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t think you’ll want to get someone who could be here weekends as well?”

“Ain’t too many people want to work on farms nowadays,” Arthur said. “’Specially not too many who’re good with horses.”

“Do you think they’ll remember me?” Ian said. “The horses, I mean?” Such sentimentality. He was glad Pete couldn’t hear him.

It was Arthur’s turn to look surprised. “Course they’ll remember you. They’ll remember you same as we will.”

Absurd how pleased he was to hear it.

Jake said, “And then there’s women. You interested in benefiting from my vast experience?”

Both conversations took place on the same day. If you compared the two brothers physically, Ian reckoned, stood them side by side and studied them, you could just about see that they might have a gene or two in common. Their eyes were the same color, for instance, and both had quite fair skin. But if you could get inside their heads—tunnel your way into their ears and take a look at what was going on in there—you wouldn’t think they were even the same species.

He gave Jake what he hoped was a man-of-the-world grin. (Eighteen years old and still a virgin. If by some terrible chance Jake discovered that, he just plain wouldn’t believe it.) “Sure.”

“Point one, they’re wonderful,” Jake said. “You have to give them that: the world would be a boring place without them. But point two, they’re out to get you. All of them. They can’t help themselves—it’s biological. Their goal in life is to tie you down.”

Ian nodded, thinking of Cathy. You could imagine Jake having trouble with women. He was a very good-looking guy.

Laura chose that moment to come out into the farmyard. She gave them both a wave and headed for the barn. Jake and Ian watched her.

Jake said thoughtfully, “Though there is the occasional one you might not mind being tied down by, right?” He looked at Ian and raised his eyebrows suggestively.

Ian smiled uncomfortably. He didn’t like Jake talking about Laura like that.

“I’ll tell you something,” Jake said. “As you get older—this is your uncle Jake speaking—as you get older, believe it or not, the idea of settling down starts to have a certain appeal. Like the other evening at supper I was looking at Art, sitting there like a sack of cement like he always does, Laura waiting on him hand and foot, and I thought, you know, if you look at it a certain way you could say that my dear dumb ox of a brother has it all.”

Here was the sum total of what Ian knew about Jake, almost two weeks after he’d arrived at the farm. He was thirty-five. He’d never been married. He’d lived in Toronto, Calgary, San Francisco, New Orleans, New York, and Chicago. He liked New York best and reckoned he’d go back there. He thought Cadillacs were the only cars worth owning. Considering how much he talked, it was remarkable how little he revealed about himself.

But a couple of days later, he said, “Actually I’ve just split up with someone. We’d been together three or four years, I guess. She was a looker, and nice enough, but you know…” He shrugged. He looked moody, which was unusual. It made Ian wonder if it could have been the girl who had ended things. Maybe that had something to do with why he was here. Maybe he’d come home to lick his wounds.

Ian was halfway around the point in the canoe when he heard the bell on the dock clanging wildly. It was Saturday evening and he and his father had just finished supper. He turned the canoe around and paddled back fast. Gerry Moynihan was on the dock, jigging impatiently from one foot to the other. “Car accident,” he said, hauling the canoe up on the dock almost before Ian got out of it. “Margie’s arrived but your dad needs you too. Four people hurt pretty bad, ambulance in New Liskeard’s comin’ but it’ll take a while.”

The two of them were running up to the house. Gerry Moynihan was panting. His paunch heaved up and down as he ran, not quite in sync with the rest of him.

“Who are they?” Ian said. “From around here?” He could hear screaming now, coming from the house.

“Tourists. Detroit plates. Going too fast. Bull moose on the road, smacked straight into it. Crushed the car.”

It was a family, the parents plus two young children. The man was on the examination table and Ian’s father was trying to get a tube down his throat. The mother was on the trestle table on the other side of the room, moaning faintly. Margie was bending over one of the children, a little boy, who was spread out on Dr. Christopherson’s desk. The other child, hardly more than a baby, was the one making the noise—at least it meant his heart and lungs were working. He was on a pile of blankets on the floor. There was a bandage around his head but blood was leaking through it and his face was covered in blood. He was pulling at the bandage and screaming hysterically.

“Deal with the bleeding,” Ian’s father said, nodding at the child. “Then see if you can calm him down.”

“Is it okay to pick him up?”

“Yes, but support his head. Gerry, I need you here.”

It was after midnight by the time the ambulance had taken the children and their parents off to the hospital. Ian and his father sat in the kitchen, listening to the silence. Ian wondered if the baby’s screams were going to echo in his head for the rest of his life.

“I think a cup of tea is in order,” Dr. Christopherson said after a long while. “By way of celebration. All four of them should make it.” He heaved himself to his feet. His face looked drawn, the skin sagging with fatigue. He’d been called out twice the previous night and had been working sixteen hours straight. The measles epidemic hadn’t burned itself out yet and weekends meant nothing.

The little coal of anger, three years old now and lying dormant most of the time, flared up in Ian—amazing how it could still go from barely a glimmer to white-hot rage in a matter of seconds. Anger born of guilt. Anger born of the unjustness of the guilt. In a couple of months’ time his father was going to be alone here. What would he do, on a night like tonight?

“You need another nurse.”

“You could be right.” His father set the kettle on the stove. “You did well with that little lad tonight, by the way. You have a real way with them.”

“You need to advertise for another one right now,” Ian said. “
Right now.
First thing in the morning.”

He was so mad, all at once, he was almost shaking.

His father put a hand on his shoulder. He said quietly, “Ian, things are going to be fine here. You don’t need to worry about me. Things are going to be fine.”

She had stopped writing to him and he was glad. She had phoned him on his birthday back in May and cried down the phone line so he’d hung up on her. There had been one final letter after that and then nothing. He missed the act of throwing the unopened envelopes away—over the years of her absence he had received one hundred and ninety-two letters from her and the ritual of throwing them away unread had given him great satisfaction—but when they stopped coming, he was glad. He still looked for them in the mailbox, but when they weren’t there, he was glad.

He had to go to the farm. It was very late but he knew he wouldn’t sleep otherwise; he was still too angry, too stirred up. He waited until his father had gone to bed and then got on his bike. The moon was up, and the night had an eerie brightness. The road looked unreal, insubstantial as a ribbon, as if at any moment it might unstick itself from the ground and lift off into the air. When he got to the woods surrounding the farm he left his bike in its usual place and made his way through the woods on foot. While he was still some way off he saw a light flickering, which meant that Jake—it was sure to be Jake—was still up. Ian felt a surge of irritation. He would have preferred him not to be there, not to be in the house at all. It got in the way of the sense of calm he used to find there.