Walt Read online

  2 white

  Two of each

  Miss Vickies

  Apple Juice

  Ginger ale

  pepsi

  I could imagine her in my head — daydreaming, gathering up what a Jackie might look like, imagining her on her side, her back to me, half asleep in my bed. A little chips-and-ginger-ale curvy, but that’s just fine, too.

  Maybe this is why some guys need pornography, to put them that much closer to women they see on the street and know they’ll never even have a chance to get close enough to touch. Not me: I can take a note, especially a new one, and just imagine the woman who wrote it. Imagine her in the store, imagine her in my living room. Take that thought and spend hours driving just like that, not even putting the radio on, barely seeing the scenery through the fantasy.

  I remember really well that there had been too much water in the O’Keefe for the fish to be holding there, and not enough in the Big Barachois to stir the weeds and bring them up from down between the sharp rocks. So I went further to the Little Barachois, where there are always fish to catch, even if it’s only the pale-fleshed ouaniniche, land-locked, puny salmon that you always see coming up at the last second, strangely olive-coloured through the water and quick like little bullets.

  They’re so pale and soft inside that they aren’t even worth keeping, certainly not worth keeping to eat, so as soon as I caught them, I’d shake them off the hook. The only worthwhile moment they give you is that first hard electric strike you never expect, the one you feel through the line the instant they hit the fly, a strike that always makes them feel like a larger fish. But see the colour of them through the water, and the only thing you’re thinking about is letting them go.

  And all the time, there’s the sheer physical effort of watching the fly, looking to see the fish strike, even keeping your balance. Just standing up is an intense kind of concentration that leaves little room for anything else to make its way around in your head. You don’t think other thoughts. You don’t work over an argument you had with your wife. You don’t get into “what I should have said was . . .” Because there just isn’t room.

  And I love that.

  A couple of hours after I got on the river, I was climbing up and over the big shoulder of one of the two cliffs that leaned in toward each other and made the river suddenly deep. I was farther down the river than I’d ever been: those cliffs had always turned me back before, because it’s no fun to scramble up fifty feet of rock just to turn around and struggle back down again.

  Besides, someone died down there once: there on that exact piece of cliff, only on the right-hand side, opposite to where I was climbing. I don’t know who it was or when they’d fallen; all I know is that they did, and that the body had lain there until a rescue helicopter came in from Gander to airlift it back out.

  Once I’d climbed back down, the water was disappointing; between the cliffs, the rock pinched in and made a place deep enough for trout to hold, but on the other side, the river only broadened, with scattered river rocks poking up black and dry through the shallows.

  But I was stubborn and angry with myself, not about to just let disappointment win, not after getting myself that far from the road. So I kept pushing forward, making myself work down the current, tired enough that I had stopped watching where the side brooks came in, stopped paying attention to the drifts of moss and the occasional brightly coloured flowers and small orchids.

  Then I cut a corner, after about half a mile of flat, shallow river, hardly more than a gentle curve around a stand of juniper, and all at once, I saw a cabin off to the edge on the left-hand side of the river, in under the trees where the river had suddenly gone still and deep. I remember, for a moment, being split between the cabin and the river — the cabin obviously a surprise, but the river curving into a great, deep left-hand cut bank that just shouted big trout.

  When you’re walking along a river, it’s not like you’re making your way along a path where you might be expected. You suddenly arrive somewhere, and it’s like you’ve deliberately chosen to sneak up on someone. You’re coming in the back way, no one expecting you.

  So when I see something new ahead of me on a river, I always go slow.

  The cabin was leaning, a corner post so far gone and rotted that one side knelt right down low and I could see up onto an edge of the roof. An old-style roof, the sort of thing that needs an annual tarring with a pail and brush to stop the nail heads from leaking.

  The front door was half-open — a white-painted, peeling door, three rectangles of wood — and the inside of the cabin was dark.

  It’s funny what you do without even thinking.

  I pulled my fly line back into my left hand in loops without winding it onto the reel, so that the reel wouldn’t make the soft but regular mechanical clicks the ratchet makes when you wind it in. I pulled myself sideways to the edge of the river, the shaded side, and pushed my back into the high ferns so that I was as far out of sight as I could get.

  And I waited.

  It was a hot day, July, bright with the sun cutting down the way it does around eleven in the morning or so, and I could feel the heat of it on the top of the baseball cap I wore to cut the glare off the water, and there was sweat in the middle of my back and deep down along the backs of my legs inside my boots.

  It was quiet enough that I could hear the beating of my heart in my ears, the gentle swoosh of the blood in the small capillaries.

  There were big aspens or poplars down in the dip around that cabin — they had to have been brought in, planted there, because they were just too out of place on that river — and the light that was passing through the leaves kept changing, flickering on the surface of the pool, as if the water was moving far more than it actually was.

  Even today, I don’t know what I kept waiting for.

  I waited and I took the tip of my fishing rod and threaded it in through the ferns and brush so that I could lay it down silently and have both my hands free just in case I needed them.

  The cabin was aimed so that the front door opened straight out onto the small, deep, sheltered pool in the river, a place where the river had turned along some unseen contour line toward the ocean, the sharp directed edge of the current cutting straight into one bank, carving into the ground and then hanging there, the water curling slowly around as if it couldn’t quite decide where to go next. There was a dab of dirty river foam circling gently at the centre, circling like it could spin there endlessly, nothing ever changing, with the brown edges and the peaked tops of the foam looking almost caramelized.

  There was probably a trail that came straight in to the cabin from the road somewhere on the other side, maybe even something as wide open as an all-terrain vehicle, the brush cut back and the track etched down to the rock by the passage of knobbed tires. There had to be. Certainly no one would be making their way down the river every single time they wanted to get there.

  I sat and waited, and when no one came out, I finally crossed the river and went up the noisy gravelled bank in front of the door, walking that way that says “notice me, notice me, here I am, I am here.” Every foot set down deliberately heavy.

  As I got closer, I realized that the cabin was abandoned — and that it had been abandoned for a long time. Each piece I was looking at became slightly harder and more distinct as I approached, like the building was taking its time coming into focus. The paint peeling more, the front edge of the porch bending farther toward the ground than I had seen from the other side of the river.

  Where I thought there had been window glass, there were only open sockets, the glass long since broken out.

  When I reached the front door, I found that the floor inside existed only in small patches, most of it rotten and fallen in. I went in: there was a small oil stove in the corner with an aluminum kettle still sitting on top of it, a sagging jerry can on the floor with fuel. A d
irty-looking countertop with one half of a yellow plastic box of rifle ammunition, 30-06 shells, the ones you need to drop good-sized game, caribou or larger, but with not a single one of the twenty-five bullets left in the box. Twenty-five holes, no takers.

  The whole place stank of mould and neglect and something foul or rotten; I stuck my head around an inside door into the back and pulled it right back again pretty quickly.

  In that one back room, there was a camp bed frame pushed into the corner, up against the wall, the mattress rotten and settled through the frame in tufts. That room had one small window with dark, mildewed curtains, the wind occasionally breathing the fabric back and forth gently, the room brightening and then blinking darker as they moved.

  At the foot of the bed, a tangled quilt and blankets in a ball, like someone had just then gotten up out of that soggy bed and thrown the covers over into a fat mound.

  The only thing I could think was that there had been people there, that it had to have been some kind of special place for someone and that at some point they had stopped coming, that there might not be one single clue left that could even begin to tell me why.

  Part of me wanted to keep looking, to turn the place over and pick through every scrap of the remains to try and find some kind of sign, to discover who had felt it necessary to board up one broken window at the very back but leave the rest of the glass scattered across the remains of the floor in great sharp spears. To pick up the white enamelled bowl with the bottom rusted right out, just to see if there was something out of sight beneath it.

  I remember thinking that even the empty tin cans in the ragged trash bag could tell me what those people ate or maybe when they had been there last, if I dug them out and had a good look.

  At the same time, there was a part of me that wanted to get out of the place as quickly as I could.

  I can collect the whole outside of that cabin in my head any time at all from the first time I saw it — the long, swinging curve in the river, the dark corner of the building protruding from the shelter of the trees. The sharp, brisk, deliberate destruction of it all.

  And everything else — the heavy, constant smell of the mould on the walls in the front room, the long curls of the wallboard pulled away from the anchoring nails and bending toward the floor like gravity working on heavy, drooping leaves.

  Then I was heading back up the river, the sun cutting bright down through the trees and reflecting off the water, making me blink as I tried to work my fly across the surface, fishing just to keep my arm and my mind moving, more than anything else.

  It was like the things around me caught my attention but fled immediately, fractured and insignificant: I remember a stand of birch, white-barked and unusually straight, all together in a huddle on one small piece of flat land. Shadows that I saw out of the corner of my eyes that looked like people standing back in the shelter of the woods until I broke my attention from the river and actually looked — then realized it was nothing like that at all. All of it caught up in my head in fleeting little pieces, all broken apart and loose as if they couldn’t find clear traction in memory.

  It was only a little past noon, but I got off the river and climbed through the alders up the gravel embankment to the car, threw my boots in the trunk and drove the half hour on the looping Cataracts road to Placentia, the rocks kicking up from the tires and rattling against the bottom of the car in an uneven rhythm.

  I drove the long way back around on the highway, thinking I’d find another place where a river crossed the road and I might feel like heading up or down on the water to fish, and that it might all run clear and cold and pure again. But there wasn’t the right kind of river, or, more to the point, there wasn’t any place I felt like stopping, so I burned up a tank of gas for virtually no reason at all.

  I got home cranky, the release I normally get from a day on a river completely gone, and that night, doing the dishes in the kitchen, I broke a wineglass on the edge of the sink, a wineglass Mary had bought, and cut my hand badly. Strange the way single events can anchor themselves so clearly in your memory, down to the exact day itself, even the exact time of day.

  For almost a minute I stood there and stared down at my hand in the water, at the foam clinging to the edges of the metal sink and the water slowly staining red. Standing there and staring at it like the blood wasn’t coming from me at all, as if it was just blossoming in the water all of its own accord.

  A month later, in the middle of the night, I sat up straight in bed next to Mary. She was snoring slightly, the covers thrown off her so I could see that she was wearing only panties and that the lines of moonlight were threading in through the blinds and landing on her skin in an even pattern, like she was wearing an elaborate dress made out of strips of skin-tight black fabric. There was the wind, knocking up against the house in regular, familiar thumps the way it does when it’s an eager night-time northwesterly, rattling in the maples. Everything was exactly, precisely familiar, yet not quite right — everything jarred sideways by what was going on in my head.

  And I realized that I was covered with sweat, the bed soaked under me and cold, and I also realized then what it was that had been bothering me about the cabin on the river.

  It hadn’t caught me when I was there, hadn’t even occurred to me, and I think it’s because there was something I was trying hard not to see.

  Sometimes the whole picture is too much — your head doesn’t want you to have it, because you can’t deal with it yet, because you aren’t equipped to deal with the rush of sounds and sensations and sights all over again.

  When that happens, I think your mind rips it all into shreds and stores it that way, and you can somehow deal with a handful of individual scraps until it’s time to start weaving them back together. Like there will be a time later on to consider the whole thing, so that you can assemble it in some place a little safer.

  Awake in that night, I could suddenly see much more.

  The cabin was all right there again, like a movie running through my eyes, with me walking into that back room, feeling the flex of the rotting floorboards under my fishing boots and seeing the way the light came through the broken glass in the window.

  And there was something about the way the camp bed was pushed up against the back wall, about the tangle of wet bedclothes at the foot. Sitting up in bed, I could feel my breath rushing, blood thumping in my ears.

  You can look at things and have them not make any sense to your head and your eyes.

  It might take a day or a week or a year before something lets the pin drop and everything starts to make sense, but when it does, the bits all click together so tightly that there’s no other possible explanation. You don’t escape it then, because then you just know. And once you do, there’s no undoing it — no unknowing it.

  Safe in our bed and our bedroom, with stripped, striped Mary right there beside me and the wind safely locked outside, I was suddenly acutely aware that I had been in a cabin where someone had gotten up and left a bed in a hurry, and that bundled up against the wall of the cabin, they’d left what looked an awful lot like someone else’s dead body.

  Chapter 26

  Mar. 29 — Apparently the people at the resort are far more spooked about Mexico than they have to be. I mean, it’s bad and all, because lots of people go missing and plenty are killed — journalists and police especially — but it’s not like if you step outside the resort, you’re instantly whisked away in a van or something and held for ransom. It sure doesn’t feel menacing. I think I know menacing. I guess a lot of it is where you are and how well you know the place. I met a couple of girls on the beach — Daniel was sleeping; about the only thing he’s doing down here that’s close to Mexican is a siesta — and they were saying that they have been beating around the interior for almost six months, that they stick together and have fun and once in a while, they book a resort room for a day or two to get cleaned
up. One of them, Anne, said, “The front desk takes one look at us and the backpacks and, every time, you can see them trying to decide if they should have us marched right back out the front door.” Her friend’s Liz. She’s smaller and darker, with a mouthful of white teeth: “We just whip out our credit cards real fast, and always speak English.” They’re from Oshawa, and they say that most of the country’s nothing like this — that a lot of it is really old and the countryside’s beautiful, that you’ve just got to get away from the sand and the high-rise hotels to see what the place is really like. I like the idea of that — just getting away. “You can fall in love with it in an instant,” Liz says. “And we know lots of people who have just stayed down here, teaching English in small schools and living completely different lives. The visas can be a bit hinky, but nothing’s impossible.” It struck me then that, even with the strangeness of the place and everyone going on about how dangerous it is and everything else, I actually feel safer here than I do at home. Like a weight has lifted. And I don’t know what to do about that.

  Chapter 27

  Flowers — hall, sitting room x 2, dining table

  Imperial cheddar

  Prosseco

  Grand Marnier

  Madeira

  Calvados

  Armagnac

  3 red

  3 white

  Plum Tomatoes

  Hot Sausages 1 lb

  2 lb regular sausages

  Frozen bread dough - dinner rolls

  Persimmons?

  Pomegranates

  Grated cheddar

  Fruit for salad

  Cream

  2 Cups pecans

  Butterscotch pudding

  Pistachios

  Dark Choc

  Lady fingers

  Organized. You look at a list like that, and it just screams organization, yells out into the darkness that this is someone, goddamn it, who has it all under control, every single piece of life firmly pressed into place, right from when they were an infant and had their hands and feet pressed down in those old-fashioned plaster of Paris casts, old writing on the back, “Elizabeth at eight days.” Set firmly, almost from day one.