Year of Lesser (21 page)

Driving down through Steinbach and La Broquerie and into the Sandilands Provincial Park, Michael talks. He recalls last year’s baiting. “A bear came after me,” he says. “Right up the tree, mouth frothing, claws scrabbling. I fired a shot into the air and she stopped and slid back down and bulked off down her path. They all have their own path. They’re scrupulous about stepping on the same track in the same way. A bear will approach the bait, sniff, go up on her haunches, swivel, and retrace her exact tracks.”

“You say
she
,” Johnny says. “You shoot females?”

“No. If I see cubs, I don’t shoot. In fact, these last years I haven’t shot anything. I seem to be going soft. I get a kick out of chaining myself high in a tree and just waiting and watching. It’s wonderful to observe the approach. The delicate swagger, the nose high up. God, they have lovely noses, what an instrument.” Unconsciously, Michael lifts his own nose and seems to sniff the air. “I hunt with a bow these days,” he says. “It’s a bigger challenge. More humane too. Shoot a bear with an arrow it’ll run twenty yards and drop dead. Shoot that same
bear in the same spot with a .308 and it’ll run one to two hundred yards.”

Johnny feels obliged to ask why. Michael is excited. He’s pulling at his beard, shifting his chin down towards his chest as if focusing on a distant target. He answers, “You see, a .308 shell stops inside the bear somewhere, messes things up horribly, but doesn’t kill immediately. An arrow, on the other hand, goes right through. Zip. The bear bleeds to death, just like that.” Michael smacks his hands.

They’re deep into the park now and the road is lined with pine and birch and poplar. The car picks up stones from the gravel road and knocks them off the wheel wells. Michael points at a skunk beside the road. They see a buck with big eyes at the edge of the forest. Its head kicks up at the sound of the car and then he’s gone.

Michael was here last week and he takes a familiar sandy side road, a trail with two narrow tracks, up to the edge of a gully where he stops and says, “We’ll go by ATV from here, I’ve got a series of sites about three miles further on. There’s bog and all kinds of shit we’ll have to wade through.”

They off-load the ATV and an hour of rough driving takes them to the first baiting site where Michael builds a fire and fires up some bacon. Johnny sucks on a rasher. He’s leaning against a stump, looking up at the sky, listening to the fire and the ticking of the small engine as it cools.

Michael takes an old sock from a bag and throws it in the frying pan. He stirs it, soaks up the grease, drops a good-sized stone down the opening of the sock, ties a long rope to the sock, and heaves the whole bundle at a fairly tallish tree in the clearing. Holding one end of the rope he drags the greasy sock through the limbs of the tree and finally leaves it dangling, halfway up.

Johnny watches from his stump. All this fooling around with nature strikes him as phoney, as if creation were a toy to be banged about.

Michael toes the ground. “In a week,” he says, “if a bear finds this place, we’ll come back and those drippings from the sock will have soaked the ground, and the bear will have ripped a four-foot hole in the earth. It’s a fact.” He looks up at the sock as if it’s a beautiful and intricate invention.

“Where do you get all this stuff from?” Johnny asks. He’s feeling slightly sleepy, slightly curious, locked in this sunny spot here in the middle of the woods.

“You pick it up.” Michael sits down close to Johnny. He asks for a cigarette and Johnny gives him one. “Like how to hunt for moose. When you come across a trail, head downwind. The thing is with a moose, he’ll loop back and come around like he’s making a U, so you don’t follow his trail, you cut across to meet him, knowing he’s going to circle with the wind. The last thing to know, and this is the most important, is that if he senses you he’ll spook. And when he spooks he’ll run for one to two hundred yards and then stop to piss. So you have to run like hell and catch him as he’s pissing, because once he’s started he can’t just cut if off. You could walk right up and kiss him.”

Johnny is searching out the sense of this. “You shoot him while he’s pissing,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Huh. You’ve done this?”

“No. Just seen it.”

They sit for a while longer. Johnny thinks maybe he dozes because when he opens his eyes Michael is stroking his bow, sliding his hairy hands over the cord and wheels and risers. Johnny sees it as a dirty instrument, hard and dangerous. Michael obviously adores the weapon. He polishes the shaft, fits an arrow in the rest. Draws. If Michael turned slightly, he could pass the arrow through Johnny’s chest. A bizarre thought, Johnny thinks, but he waits and watches, breathing slowly. He has to pee. Michael finally stores the bow back in its black kit and Johnny opens his eyes and yawns.

They eat salami sandwiches as they bump and jolt to the next site. Arriving, they scatter donuts and Frosted Flakes. It is late afternoon by the time they retrieve the car and load up the ATV. Driving later, the wind filling his eyes, Michael calls out to Johnny, “How’s the baby? Loraine, I mean.”

“Okay,” Johnny says. He’d forgotten her the last few hours. Forgotten,
too, Melody, and the trip south he will be taking. He looks over at Michael who is pulling on an Orange Crush. When he lowers the can to his thigh, his upper lip has an orange rim that makes him look comical, more approachable. “Babies,” Johnny says, and then he asks, “You ever wanted one?”

“How do you know I haven’t got one?” Michael laughs. “Or more?”

Johnny laughs, waiting, but that’s all the other man offers.

“I’ve been thinking about things,” Johnny says. “About this war that goes on inside of everyone.”

“Does it?” Michael asks.

“Yeah, take Lesser for instance. You’ve lived there a year now and do you have any better idea than me, who is evil and who is good?”

“Everyone,” Michael says. “It’s a curious place, Lesser. There’s this above-the-surface cordiality and kindness, like life is fine and good and clean, and evil is something others suffer from. I don’t believe in evil, by the way, not in the Judeo-Christian sense. If there is such a thing, it constantly changes, I mean it evolves, in the same way our brains evolve. Neanderthals, who did not write Elizabethan sonnets, were also probably incapable of ingenious methods of torture.”

Johnny is trying to work his head around the bullshit. He fans a hand at the air. “Whoa, there. You’re saying this massacre, these beheadings taking place in Africa right now, are not evil?”

“Forget that,” Michael says. “That’s out there. What about Johnny Fehr? Is he bad?”

Johnny ponders. Nods his head. “Sure,” he says. “Sometimes.”

“Which means you’re always looking for salvation.”

“Yes.”

“There’s this theory which I find quite possible. Claims that Jesus was gay. You know, homosexual.”

“Ahhh, piss off.”

“No, seriously. I mean, why didn’t the man have any women? Think of it, twelve disciples, all men. Thing is, this theory states—and this is based on good research—Jesus and Judas were lovers. And if you accept that, how much greater the betrayal?”

Johnny’s smiling and cracking at his knuckles. “You’re unbelievable.”

“You people don’t admit to other possibilities. Narrow little views of salvation. What if I were to say that seeking out redemption in itself is evil; this idea that the world revolves around me. You know,
my
salvation,
my
soul,
my
wish to live forever.”

Johnny says, and believes this very strongly, “No, I don’t want to live forever. It would tire me out. I fear death, yes, but I’d rather burn brightly. What I’m doing, when I dig around in these ideas of salvation, is thinking of myself, of course. But why not? You don’t think about yourself?”

Michael doesn’t answer directly. He says, “Nobody is free to become a Christian: one is not ‘converted’ to Christianity—one has to be sick enough for it.”

Johnny chuckles. He doesn’t quite grasp what Michael’s getting at but he does feel, at his centre, this idea of sickness. He wants to say yes, but instead he laughs. Michael, encouraged by Johnny’s response, taps at the steering wheel with the tips of his thick fingers and growls, “The rancour of the sick.”

But Johnny is no longer chuckling. A thought has come to him like an offering from above; a brief pleasant memory of Loraine slipping into his arms in the middle of a cold December night and laying her wet mouth on his chest and telling him that he was good. Good. Johnny’s body trills.

He stops listening to Michael and Michael, sensing this, becomes reflective and quiet. It is dark when they arrive back in Lesser. After the Fairlane rattles down the driveway and back onto the gravel road, Johnny stands in the middle of the yard and looks up at the sky. There’s a bit of a wind coming in off the neighbour’s field, bringing with it the smell of rain. Johnny listens to the wind. He closes his eyes, then opens them again. He stares up into the sky and waits.

Melody phones Johnny at work on Monday morning and says, “I’ve got an appointment for tomorrow night at eight. That means I could leave after school and be back at Carrie’s house by just after midnight. It’s up to you now.” She pauses. Up to this point her voice has been matter-of-fact, almost too aggressive, but now she says, with a breathiness that reminds Johnny of her pudgy lips, “So?”

“Yes,” Johnny says. As he speaks he experiences a dizziness that forces him to sift through his brain for a balance. Melody’s voice rights him.

“It would be best to pick me up away from school. I’ll be at the Tot-Lot on the south end of town. ’Bout four o’clock, okay?”

Johnny, after hanging up, is grateful for Melody’s precautions. He himself, in his haste to get this done, would simply have risked picking her up at school. She’s intelligent, this one, Johnny thinks. Almost too.

The next day, he finds her where she says she’d be. Crawling up in his Olds, Johnny sees her first. She’s straddling a swing, rocking it side to side and kicking at the sand. She’s wearing jeans and a thick green sweater and big black boots. An overnight bag squats at her feet. The park is empty save for two other kids. They’re about eight or nine, wrapped up in a game by the climbing structure. Johnny, not wanting to attract attention, waits till Melody sees him, and when she does she’s off the swing and clutching her bag and walking towards him. She almost runs; not quite.

Johnny leans back and watches. Her youth is a perfect disguise for what she’s about to embark on. Melody settles into the smoothness of the car; she sighs and slides low.

The leather seat squeaks.

“Don’t worry,” Johnny says, “the windows are tinted.” He drives up the 75 through Morris and keeps going directly to the border. The fields are brimming with water and in some of these lakes there are geese and ducks foraging, or resting, or swimming in circles. It’s a cool day, there’s a possibility of rain. Johnny has the heat on, Melody’s feet are tucked underneath her. The darkness of the swift clouds, the hum of the engine,
the wheel in his palms, Melody beside him, all of this evokes in Johnny a sense of both comfort and approaching loss.

Just beyond Morris, Melody pulls out a joint and asks, “This okay?”

“Shit, Melody,” Johnny says, “we’re crossing an international border and you’re carrying dope.”

“It’s my last,” Melody says. “Should I toss it?” She’s sly, because even as she says this, she lights up and adds, “It’ll help me be brave.”

Johnny watches the road and sniffs the air. His palms tingle.

“Here,” Melody pokes the joint at his face.

“Aw, girl. You’re corrupting me.” He takes it, another tiny step down these stairs he’s descending, and pulls twice, hard. He holds his breath, exhales into the glass of the windshield and says, his voice shifting to a whine, “You won’t tell?”

“Uh-uh.” Melody cozies herself into the seat. The two of them pass the joint back and forth like a popsicle two children must share. Johnny is surprised by the wetness at the tip, as if Melody’s mouth were full of water, or she’d gathered her lips and kissed it. Loraine gives wet kisses. Even the simple goodbye ones.

“Do your folks know who you are?” Johnny asks.

“Huh? Waddya mean?”

“Like, do you hide everything from them?”

Melody’s voice is low, hard to hear. “That’s how we do it in our family. Keep our secrets. Don’t make trouble. Like my mom at the supper table will say to my sister and me, ‘There was this man I used to love, and then I met your father.’ And my father, well, he’ll sit there and say, ‘No one is sinless.’”

“Do you like your father?”

“Does any teenage girl like her father?”

“A lot do, I would think. Yes. Lots.” Johnny sees that Melody is, above all, unhappy.

“I feel sorry for him,” she says. “Everyone thinks my mother is all beaten up and stuff like that, like under his thumb. No way. She’s king-shit. At home. It’s just around the town, in church, etc., etc., that she puts on this oh-I’m-so-pathetic look.”

“You hate
her
then?”

“Do I?” Melody giggles.

Johnny smiles. Grunts with sudden contentment.

The border arrives quickly. Johnny opens the window to clear the odour, his head. He concentrates on this red flashing light beyond the windshield. He’s got it then,
snap
, it’s gone.

“Where’d you get that shit?” Johnny asks. He’s swinging now.

Melody answers but Johnny doesn’t attend. Her voice is a mosquito trying to land in his ear. He swats it away, readying himself for the border. “I hope it’s busy,” he mutters.

It isn’t. The officer leaning into the window is older, trained to sniff out lies and fear. Johnny, close to the man’s mouth, sees sharp teeth. Johnny jabbers, “My daughter and I are going to Fargo for a day. Do some shopping.”

“It’s evening,” the man says.

“Yes?” Johnny waits, not quite getting it.

“You gonna stay overnight?”

“Sure, officer, yes.”

The man leans in further, nostrils moving. “How old is your daughter?”

“Sixteen.”

“Anything in the trunk? Firearms? Alcohol? Tobacco?”