White Heat (30 page)

    All
around him, the muskeg was on the move for as far he could see; a mass of
reddish grey pulsed and throbbed across the willow, south towards Jones Sound
and west across the Inuak River, obscuring everything in its inexorable
progress forward. He knew now that it was a lemming that had fallen onto Edie,
another he had seen tumbling through the air. Here it was, the swarm. Not
suicide, as the myth had for so long had it, but a great swell of life, the
survival instinct in its purest form, thrilling in its intensity. From where he
stood, Derek could see, in the frazzled water of the river, bodies swirling and
kicking, struggling frantically to reach the other side.

    Edie
came up beside him, laughing, exhilarated by the swarm and they moved towards
the pack, standing firm for a while to feel the rodents flowing over their feet
like molten rock, the racket of squeals and the musky smell of lemming
droppings overwhelming.

    'Edie,'
he shouted over the cacophony. 'I've thought about what we said last night.
You're a hunter, I get that.

    You
want me to hold off, I'll do it. Not for ever, but for a while.'

    He'd
been prepared to let the deaths in Autisaq go. Now, he knew that, sooner or
later, he would have to act. For her sake, he would make it later.

    'We
got a deal?' she said. She looked at him with those fierce button eyes of hers.

    He
nodded.

    'Another
fine mess, right?' she said, but she was smiling.

    Hours
afterwards, when he finally arrived back at the detachment, he found Misha
waiting for him. He went to her and kissed her cheek.

    'You're
late,' she said.

    He
told her about the swarm.

    'You're
still late.'

    He
looked at her and suddenly felt incredibly clear. I
have no idea what I am
doing with this woman.
The thought saddened him but he felt relieved of the
burden of loving her, too. She seemed to sense the change in him. He saw her
back away a little.

    At
last he said: 'I think you should leave.'

    'Yes,'
she said. Her voice was resigned, not at all vindictive as he might have
imagined it would be. 'I was going anyway.'

    'I
don't know why you came.' The words sounded crueller than he had intended.

    'Tomas
split with me. I was on my own,' she said. 'I thought maybe I loved you.'

    'But
you didn't?'

    She
smiled ruefully. 'No.'

    Edie
found Willa at Sammy's house, watching TV with Sammy's new on-off girlfriend,
Nancy. Beside them sat a bowl of popcorn and there was something heating in the
microwave but no sign of Sammy.

    'Hey,'
she said, aware that she shouldn't mind seeing her ex-family reconstituted into
something new, but minding anyway. Nancy looked up and smiled. Willa didn't.

    'What
do you want?' he said. 'I'm watching this.'

    He
was in one of his confrontational moods, but wasn't he always like that with
her these days?

    She
said: 'Just a small thing.'

    Nancy
shifted awkwardly in her seat, then rose. 'I'll go fix some food.'

    Edie
waited for her to disappear into the kitchenette, and turned to Willa: 'We need
to talk in the snow porch.'

    'What?'
He looked up at her, irritation hardening his face.

    'Privately.'

    The
cramped porch forced the pair to stand closer than was comfortable for either.
Not so long ago they would have hugged, but it had been a long time since
there'd been any chance of that. She still remembered when, at bedtime, he
would call out to her to come and tell him the story of Sedna, the little girl
whose grandfather tossed her from his boat then cut off her clinging fingers.
'The fingers became seals and walruses,' she would say, 'and Sedna sat at the
bottom of the ocean directing the animals to give themselves to the hunters or
to stay hidden in the depths, depending on whether Inuit people made her happy
or not.'

    'Do I
make Sedna happy?' he would ask.

    'Sure
you do,' she'd say and he'd close his eyes and be asleep in moments.

    Now,
given his mood, Edie thought it best to get directly to the point.

    'I
figure the glasshouse was your idea,' she said. 'But why the hell did you have
to drag Joe into it?'

    Willa
had been a pothead for as long as she could remember, she didn't know how long exactly
because by the time she'd been sober enough to notice, he had already moved on
to heroin. Eventually he'd given that up and gone back to marijuana. Progress
of a sort.

    He
shook his head and let out a venomous snort.

    'You're
priceless.'

    Taking
a step back she held up her hands, palms towards him. 'I'm sorry,' she said.
'That came out bad. Can we do this civilized? I just mean, how was Joe
involved? Was he smoking?'

    It
seemed unlikely, she hadn't smelled it on him, but she knew that marijuana made
some people depressed, paranoid, and even suicidal.

    Willa
glanced back towards the living room but Nancy was still in the kitchenette.
'For one tiny second I forgot that everything,
every damned thing,
always has to come back to Joe. Forget it, Edie. I stopped owing you anything a
long time ago.'

    Edie
stood for a moment. Willa was right. She had given up the right to have any
claim over him the moment she'd hit the bottle. All those years when he still
wanted her to love him as much as she loved Joe and she'd been unable to give
him what he wanted. Now he was just content to see her suffer. She'd brought
his hatred on herself. It was no less than she deserved.

    'Listen,'
he said, sounding more conciliatory. 'If I had any idea why my brother killed
himself, I'd tell you. But I don't.' A plume of warm air rushed in where he
held the door open. 'Joe was complicated.
Ayaynuaq,
Edie, it can't be
helped, so just drop it.'

    'I
would if I could.'

    Willa
rolled his eyes. 'You wanna know what we did? I'll tell you what we did. We
supplied the
qalunaat
at the science station. You wanna know another
thing?' He was going to tell her anyway. 'I didn't make nothing from it, Edie,
not the whole time. Every damned cent, every loonie went to Joe, his nursing
fund.'

    Her
breath caught in her throat and for a moment she was stuck there, unable to
inhale.

    'Did
you know Joe was gambling?' She wondered if it would give Willa any
satisfaction to discover his brother had his own flaws, but saw he was as
shocked as she had been. She felt ashamed of herself. 'I think maybe your
brother gambled away that money.'

    Willa
took a step back.

    'You're
crazy.'

    Something
occurred to her. 'You weren't... he wasn't...
using,
was he?'

    'Every
so often we had a smoke. So what.' He stared at her, searching for meaning,
then his face grew as dark as a winter noon. 'Oh, I get it. You think I was
trading weed for dope, something I could spike. That's it, isn't it?' He let
out an ugly laugh. 'You want to know, was I helping my own brother turn into a
junkie?'

    'No,
Willa,' she said. 'Uh nuh.' The truth was, she didn't know what she thought.

    'It
ever even occur to you, Joe wanted to use, he had a whole pharmacy of drugs,
more pills than the average junkie could spike in a lifetime, sitting right
there at the clinic. All he had to do was to cook 'em up a little and grab the
nearest needle.'

    She
looked at him blankly. It had never crossed her mind that pills could be
injected. Willa gave her an exasperated look.

    'Duh.'

    With
that he slammed the door and disappeared back inside the house.

    She
got home and clambered, wretched, into bed, clutching the pillow over her face
to block out the world. It was either that, she sensed, or another rendezvous
with the bottle and she'd promised herself not to go back there.

    Still,
the encounter with Willa had hit her like an ice avalanche. How many
relationships would she have to ruin before she was prepared to give up? Maybe
there was no rationale whatsoever for what had happened to Joe.

    Just
then, the front door slammed. Sammy burst in.

    'Why
are you doing this, Edie?' Angry. Again.

    She
sat up in bed, dazed. Then she laughed at what a fool she'd been to doubt
herself. Hunting was the way she made sense of the world. No hunter ever called
off a hunt until it was hopeless.

    Sammy
stood at the foot of the bed. He'd been drinking. 'Leave my son out of it.'

    She
felt suddenly desperate. 'Which one?' Her voice was harsh. 'The dead one, or
the pothead?'

    The
second the words left her mouth she knew they were incendiary. He took the
bait. In an instant, he flared and came at her, a ball of fury. For a moment
she thought he was going to hit her; she could see in his face he thought it
too. Then he slumped back, slit-eyed with exhaustion.

    When
he'd collected himself he said:

    'The
glasshouse thing, Edie, it was my fault.'

    'Uh
nuh, Joe was gambling, he was in debt.' She wasn't going to let her ex play the
martyr. 'He was doing it at the clinic, online, with his credit card,' she
said. 'He owed money.' There was no point keeping it from him now.

    Sammy
looked puzzled.

    'Edie,
Joe didn't have a credit card.'

    He
was wrong. She and Joe had filled in the application together. He'd needed the
card to buy nursing books from some internet site.

    Sammy
sat down at the end of the bed, all the anger drained out of him. 'Joe cut up
his card. I saw him do it.'

    'You
mean he maxed it out?' That would explain why he'd come to her for a loan when
he needed new parts for his snowbie. This was worse than she'd imagined.

    Sammy
shook his head. 'No, I did.' His voice faltered. 'I needed a thermal scope on
my rifle, I mean, I wanted one. You know, for night hunting. I didn't have any
money, and I knew I'd never get credit, so I borrowed Joe's card.'

    'You
borrowed
your son's credit card?'

    'OK,
I took it. And then Lisa persuaded me to buy her a new furnace.'

    For the
first time in as long as she could recall, Edie was speechless.

    'But
then the credit-card company contacted Joe and, Jeez, Edie, the whole thing was
a mess.'

    'So,
the glasshouse money ...'

    Sammy
nodded miserably. 'Went to pay off the credit card. Which is why Joe cut it
up.'

    'So
his father couldn't steal from him again.'

    Sammy
snuffled. 'Aw, Edie.'

    'I'm
tired, Sammy. You can let yourself out.'

    Lying
in bed on her own once more, she tried to figure out the sequence of events.
Maybe Joe had set up a gambling account then never used it? But no, that didn't
make sense. More likely he had started to use it then, when he saw where it was
taking him, he'd given it up. Maybe none of this mattered any more. She'd made
a mental note to speak to Robert Patma, but not now. Right now she needed to
sleep.

    When
she woke it was light. But then it was always light now. There was also a man
standing in her room. For an instant she thought the
puikaktuq
was back,
then the figure resolved into Mike Nungaq.

    'You
sick, Edie?' He sounded genuinely worried. 'It's late.'

    'Uh
nuh.'

    He
held out a mug. 'I made you some tea.'

    While
she was taking the first sip, he dug around in his pocket and pulled out a
padded envelope. 'Your stone came back.' He was watching her expectantly. 'I
thought you'd want to know.'