When Is a Man

For Alana

It is the third commonness with light and air,

A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .

Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore

Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,

The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

—Wallace Stevens,
“The River of Rivers in Connecticut”

1

Paul slammed on the brakes. Duffle bags, books, and spare boots leaped from the back seat, struck doors and windows, then settled in a heap. Ahead of him, the brake lights of Tanner's trailer flashed, the wheels kicking up dust. The scene in front of him had appeared out of nowhere, from around a blind corner. Emergency vehicles crowded each shoulder of the logging road, hazard lights blinking. Cops, ambulance attendants, and Search and Rescue volunteers hefted tools, cases, and cameras, striding from task to task with tight-lipped purpose. On the far side of the gauntlet, a stocky
RCMP
constable waved through three logging trucks headed in the opposite direction with their loads of timber. They inched past, the drivers flashing flinty scowls at the cop. Long after they were gone, their terse, irritated chatter crackled through Paul's
CB
radio.

He'd just been imagining the riverbank as a good place to sleep, sunny and warm in the August heat, open to the sky and free of the oppressively dark forest on the other side of the road. He'd been following Tanner's truck and its swaying trailer for more than an hour. They'd left the town of Shellycoat in the early morning, driven north past the McCulloch Dam and along Immitoin Lake until they'd reached the upper end of the vast reservoir. There, a rusted white sign peppered with bullet holes named the collection of ruined buildings and abandoned yards Bishop, Unincorporated. They sped past the boarded-up remains of a community hall and an old general store, the occasional log house or plywood-sheltered mobile home tucked between copses of second-growth pine and power line right-of-ways. Along the lakeside, incongruous modern summer cottages—cubes of aluminum siding, trapezoidal windows—perched above the rocky shoreline, elevated by wood stilts or concrete pillars. As the road led them to the Immitoin River, the cottages became less frequent and more rustic. From there—if not for the confusion of men and vehicles that suddenly blocked their way—it would have been less than an hour to the Basket Creek recreation site, where he would spend the next forty days alone.

He felt a nagging, physical urgency, the kind that scattered most clear thoughts and deadened curiosity. But even beyond the press of his bladder, the slight dampness in his incontinence pad, and the ache above the pubic bone where the dirt road pounded the scars of his surgery, he was desperate to keep going. Hell-bent on the solitude Tanner had promised him, and deeply uneasy, as though this scene, whatever was happening here, had the power to derail him, throw everything off.

Yesterday he'd left Vancouver, where he'd lived all his life and where, for the last several months, he'd been a medical rarity in the offices of the Prostate Centre. At the first visit, the receptionists had assumed he was there to drop off his father. After that, he sensed a change in the looks the two young women gave him, the spiralling away of possible attractions, connections. He was only thirty-three.

The constable signalled again and Tanner's truck crept forward. His friend rolled down his window and Paul did the same.

“Cliff!” Tanner called to the officer. “What's it this time? Another rafting accident?”

The constable squinted at him, then walked over. He had white and grey sideburns and a walrus moustache, a body threatening to become portly. “I dunno yet. It's not pleasant.” He grimaced slightly, then gave Tanner a brief smile and patted the trailer with a meaty hand. “Time to count the fish again?”

Tanner jerked his thumb back toward Paul's vehicle. “Not me this year. I got him. Old buddy of mine, Paul Rasmussen.”

The cop gave Paul a curt wave, which Paul returned, mentally assessing the amount of moisture in his underpants. Tanner opened his door and unfolded himself to stand on the road, lanky and bearded, every inch a fisheries biologist in his long-sleeved plaid shirt. They glanced Paul's way, either talking about him or expecting him to join them. He rolled up his window and drummed an agitated rhythm on his thighs. His mind curled around the ache of his perineum and bladder, and he tried a few clenching Kegel exercises to distract himself.

To his left, a short driveway sloped from the road down through the trees to the river. A mossy and weather-beaten house sat along the bank, its deck overlooking a broad eddy. Beyond the gently stirring pool, the main current bucked and swirled past boulders and gravel bars, the water glinting in the sun. Along the shore, two
RCMP
were stringing yellow tape between two poplars that flanked the eddy, while others stood transfixed by whatever was in the water. Just as Paul considered slipping out through the passenger door and seeking the privacy of the woods, two attendants removed a gurney from the ambulance. Things would turn ugly soon. Paul turned up the
CB
radio and found a station that played nothing but static, cranking the volume to keep the world out. There wasn't much else in his vehicle to distract him, no music, his laptop emptied of all his old research files. Most of his things were buried in storage. This was part of the plan, to strip himself down to the essentials, see what these might be.

He remembered his last really good August, two years ago, when he'd lived at his parents' summer cabin on Salt Spring Island. He'd cobbled together lesson plans for an introductory undergrad course in archaeology, which wasn't his specialty—just another hoop to jump until his doctorate. He'd stretched on the dock on St. Mary Lake with a beer in one hand and
Archaeological Theory
in the other and, while his parents lazily bickered nearby, re-learned all he'd forgotten from his own first year at university. Sometimes he would plunge off the dock and down, until he found a mind-numbing shock of cold beneath the pondy surface. He would rise, towel himself dry, and continue his list of course objectives and prescribed learning outcomes, or concoct PowerPoint presentations, slideshows of elated field researchers gathered on riverbanks to excavate an Adena burial mound or a Salish midden. Meanwhile he was quite content to let his dissertation, his ethnographic study, sit cooling on the backburner. The project seemed both ambitious and foolproof, as most ideas do at their inception. He'd always been good at beginnings, if nothing else. Most of his happiest moments were beginnings.

Meanwhile, on the banks of the Immitoin, the wall of police and rescue personnel stirred. Some of the men turned from the water and wandered a few paces up the driveway or leaned against the woodshed adjacent to the houses, their faces pale, slack, and grim. He couldn't hear anything over the radio static, but the bleakness of their expressions, so at odds with the sunshine, infected Paul with a type of hysteria, and he thought he might suddenly grin or even giggle.

On the deck, an old man had appeared, bare-chested beneath an unbuttoned flannel work shirt, pacing like a trapped animal, gesturing erratically. A young, smooth-shaven policeman followed him around with a notebook in hand. Down in the water, two
SAR
volunteers in neoprene wetsuits, hip-deep, dragged something between them. The clutch of officers parted, and now Paul could see the grey, bloated flesh. The body belonged to someone much shorter than Paul. A child or adolescent—no, the shoulders were too broad, the torso and belly massive. The corpse's clothing, a green T-shirt, khaki pants, and blue briefs, had been swept aside to reveal the battered, discoloured figure of an obese man. Beneath a shock of coarse white hair rusted with what might have been clay or blood, the face was pallid and bulging, amphibious. Half-man, half-salamander—a missing link.

A spasm of nausea clutched Paul's throat just as a sudden warmth and dampness hit his pad, and he unbuckled his seatbelt and threw open the door. Tanner and the cop turned toward him, eyebrows raised, and he managed a bizarre, cheerful wave before he bolted into the trees.