When Is a Man (31 page)

She had a few hours of spare time and wanted to spend them in bed with him. When her questing hand crept between his legs, he pinned it against the bed with his arm and moved his mouth and free hand over her aggressively. He was afraid of her ministrations, her patient hands and the soft nest of her mouth. What if she coaxed just enough of a twitch, a surge of blood, to fill both of them with false hope? Before last night there had been no possibility of performing, and therefore no real sense of failure. It had been easier to have nothing—now he risked a deeper humiliation.

A relief when she finally fell back, satisfied, and her hands stopped struggling to reach him. A reprieve. “You're all right?” she asked, as she always did. How could she not be bored of him already?

“Perfect.” His body was silently reconfiguring itself, remapping channels and pathways. Last night may have been an aberration—or maybe his capillaries, nerve endings, and drive were conspiring against him. Better to tell her nothing.

Hi Paul:

Your dad saw an interesting news clip he wanted to tell you about, but I figure I'll go ahead and spoil it for you because he'll never get around to calling. He's decided to renovate the basement, did I tell you? Anyway, the story was about this river on the Olympic Peninsula off Washington State—the Elwha. Apparently they're tearing down the dam, a full restoration of the river, which of course he found quite fascinating. Turns out it was a Canadian, Thomas Aldwell, who built the dam in 1910. It put an end to a very large salmon run, destroyed clam beds along the delta, and drowned the site of the Klallam people's sacred creation legend (I didn't quite get what the legend was, and I'm pretty sure your father didn't either). After that, someone built a lumber mill on top of their ancestral village.

There are volunteers growing native plants in local greenhouses, ready to replant the old riverbanks after the dam's foundations are blown up and the reservoir has been drained. I love that idea, but your dad's a bit skeptical. He figures they'll be planting in a hundred years' worth of sediment filled with mercury and methane. The way he sees it, the river won't be restored so much as it'll become something entirely different.

A biologist said there are still salmon genetically programmed to return to the river—some continue to make the trip each year, poor lonely stragglers, and then sit at the base of the dam poking around for decent gravel until they die. I wonder what they'll think when they find the river navigable for the first time in more than a century. Well, I guess they won't think anything at all, they'll just starting heading upstream, right? What with the job you had counting trout, you're probably more optimistic than your dad about trying to turn back time.

Watched the weather channel today—don't go driving around in the snow too much, there's supposedly more on the way. I do hope you're feeling more like your old self.

Love,

Mom

A group portrait beneath the flumes, the patriarchs Donald Wallace and Frederic Wentz, gnarled and stern, at the centre of a group of farm punks and weathered toughs. A young Cyril like an aristocratic version of Billy, leaning against a massive circular saw, all pride and mud. A row of smirking, scowling teenagers—the wildest and biggest of them would soon jump ship for good-paying jobs on Caleb's crew. Easy work as land agents, maybe a future in engineering like the boss himself.

He was sifting again through the archives' photo collection, happening upon familiar names. Frederic Wentz, Billy's grand­father, in his prime: an image captured while he leaned on his axe, a quick breather while clearing the new homestead at the turn of the twentieth century.

“So many interesting lives,” Paul said. “Surprised more people haven't written about them.”

Elmer looked up from a series of old soil type distribution maps he was sorting and gestured to the crowded bookshelves around them, confused.

“No, like a real book. I mean—sorry.” He laughed at the archivist's half-offended, half-amused expression, his wiry eyebrows comically rising up his bald pate. “A novel or something.”

“I'm not a big fan of most historical fiction, to be honest,” Elmer said. “All that guessing what a real person from a hundred years ago might have thought or felt. Too much speculation.”

“Sounds more fun than what I'm doing. Guesswork isn't a viable option in my profession.”

“Those stories get too convenient. Just give me the documented facts and I'll fill in the gaps myself, thank you very much.”

Paul laughed. Elmer had to be bullshitting him—his desk was littered with crime novels set in ancient Scotland or Greece, pages bent and powdered with cookie crumbs.

Finally, near the bottom of the stack, Kai Soules, a beaming, slightly paler version of his grandfather. Sixteen years old in 1964, a year away from death. The photo was black and white, faded, the men all drenched in the same mix of sawdust and oil—it tricked the mind into seeing resemblances.

“Kai could be his kid brother, don't you think?” Paul asked.

“Whose?”

“Hardy's.”

Elmer squinted at the photo, then shrugged.

“Kinda has the same mouth and jaw,” Paul said. “Do you have a photo of the whole Soules family?”

“No, oddly,” Elmer said. “Granted, they lived in the shadow of the Wallaces, but I've never run across anything—no photos, diaries, mementos.”

“Probably all disappeared when Arthur moved Marcus away from the valley.” Too bad. If he had enough decent photos, he might spot family resemblances that had skipped a generation. “No chance you carry old medical records or anything like that?”

“Now you're really reaching. We're not a spy agency.” Elmer was bent close to his stack of maps, jotting down dates and numbers and mumbling to himself.

“Or maybe some anecdote from a person who knew the extent of Donald's injury.”

Elmer finally looked up. “Sorry, but what are you getting at, exactly?”

“Never mind.”

Eavesdropping on Sonya and Jory was dark, effective medicine. It was necessary to stray into this taboo territory, to brush against the fringes of what he found acceptable. He'd succeeded in getting himself hard two or three times now while listening to the two of them—or not exactly
hard
, just solid enough to feel good. The erections didn't last long, nothing to make him any braver with Gina, which, he reminded himself, was the real point of this exercise—not Sonya, not the idea of her. Part of him wanted desperately to see her—the part of him that lurked under the stairs—but he knew this was shaky ground.

Lately he heard more arguments or silence than sex, and Gina and Shane became a constant presence again with Elsie's recovery. He was, for the most part, relieved that his evenings under the stairs were coming to an end.

One night, Gina took him in her mouth and suddenly there came the small, unmistakable throb he'd dreaded, a small rush of pleasure followed by a cold swell of panic in his chest. Gina made a muffled, surprised noise and worked her mouth faster. The bobbing of her head revolted him, the ridiculous sucking sounds, her apparent desperation. He pulled away, and she looked up, surprised. He slumped against the wall, knees against his chest.

“I spotted your pills,” Gina said. “On your desk.” He'd hidden them behind a stack of papers, but the papers were always sliding onto the floor. Her face collapsed in sympathy. “They're not working, are they?”

“I haven't taken any.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“I don't know why. I really don't.”

“Wait,” she said. “You haven't taken any? Not even one?”

“Is it that important?” he asked. “That I, you know, be
inside
you or whatever?”

She shrugged, defensive. “It would be nice,” she admitted in a low voice.

“Jesus, I must bore you. I'd be bored—we're stagnating.”

“No.” There was a bit of steel in her voice. “We're not. Everything's getting better. We are. Sex is just one thing.”

“Don't know why I feel this way.” He rested his forehead on his knees and spoke into the hollow between his head and groin.

Her hand slid over his foot. “It's fine.”

“Oh, bullshit.” Childish and defiant, snuffling.

“We don't need the stupid pills. We'll take our time.”

“We've taken our time. All fucking winter.”

So why not the pills? Two years ago, healthy and potent, he might have taken them recreationally, just for the hell of it. But now he had this fucked-up notion that the pills would undo who he was becoming: either they'd work so well they'd inspire a hunger that devoured all his time, or they'd fail and he'd be utterly devastated, knocked back to square zero. None of it made sense, and it was impossible to explain it to her. But that's how he felt. The pill was an unfeeling thing. It offered amoral erections, a prick-centric view of a man's existence. It said he deserved sexual function, a hard-on, regardless of what he really did deserve. It obligated him. The pill was not an instrument of grace. And why was he in need of grace, except that, up until very recently, he might have been guilty of wasting his adult life?

They had been silent a long time when she suddenly sniffed and crinkled her nose. “Do you smell pot?”

“They're growing it upstairs,” he said. “In their closet.”

She nodded. “I'm pretty sure Billy was growing last summer with his buddies.”

“He wouldn't tell you?”

“Afraid of losing Shane. Doesn't want to give me leverage.”

“You never noticed anything inside his house?”

“It would have been an outdoor show, somewhere in the hills.” She shivered and they both slipped under the covers. “Or were you talking about Caleb Ready?”

“No. No, not right now.” He checked to see if she was annoyed, but her eyes were half-closed as she shifted against his chest. “Ready's death never bothered you that much,” he said after a moment.

“I didn't know him. Despite what he did all those years ago, or how angry I can get about the past—he's a piece of history, nothing more.”

“I like that you can't make yourself hate him.”

“Sure, but then I feel guilty, because of Mom, because I can't quite hold on to her resentment.”

“You shouldn't have to. What good would that do?”

“I just feel, when she's gone, that part of our family's story will be too. But it won't make things right.”

How many people, he wondered, harboured Gina's anxiety that time was running out? For decades, Caleb had spent his summers in Bishop, the derelict ghost town he helped create. Paul tried to imagine how he must have felt. Smug? Repentant? Maybe indifferent to people and their changed lives, the way a prospector might be oblivious to his surroundings, his thoughts immersed in the glittering creekbeds. And then along comes a man, or men, dreaming of an action that could answer the past, no matter how many years later.

Paul,

You are right to say there are some interesting parallels between what your subjects have described and what can be found in other parts of the world. In fact, I've found a rather dizzying number of coincidences. For example, Mr. Pilcher's trappers, a marginalized community who were not properly informed and did not know what they were witnessing, experienced something very similar to what the Tsay-Keh Dene hunters did when the W.A.C. Bennett Dam was built on the Peace. They too returned home along a ridge and were mystified by the rising waters. One also thinks of the Senecas' forced relocation from their reservation along the Allegheny River (did you get around to reading that book?), or the fifty-thousand Gwembe Tonga relocated to make way for the Kariba Dam, among dozens of other examples.

Likewise, doesn't the loss of the Immitoin Valley's orchards echo the orange groves drowning beneath the Yangtze River, or the cherry trees along the Arrow Lakes long ago? Or the ranches and settlements along the Peace River—not just what was lost in the late sixties, but the land now threatened by the most recent dam proposals?

Still on the subject of the Peace River and Arrow Lakes, I've found reports—mostly unsubstantiated—of suicides similar to those of Frederic Wentz, and even the presence of a villain (unnamed, a sort of bogeyman) who bullied people out of their homes by using, of course, fire. And, finally, the mercury-poisoned fish of the Immitoin can also be found in Kinbasket Lake—and in the vast reservoirs of Africa, where hungry villagers eat them by the bucketful.

Don't be alarmed by all my snooping around—you can't blame me for a little mistrust, all things considered. And, unlike other supervisors I know, I won't steal your ideas for my own work. I wouldn't have the time. Christine and I are planning another conference, “Identity, Family, and the Sporting Body,” to which you're welcome to submit a paper. But I imagine all your old projects must feel very far away by now.