That Savage Water (10 page)

Terry landed it. The co-pilot helps.

Jan studied Connor's grey-stubbled face. It had always interested him to watch another man in the moments following a disaster, when the thing was still raw and fibrous inside and you could watch the scene replay across the wets of his eyes. It was only then, once you'd seen that part of him, Jan felt you could know if a person was for real.

Not many would have thought so quickly – Jan said – But you did. Always the champ.

The cabin depressurized. It was hard to breathe.

You still landed it.

From what Connor could remember, the boy at the door was barely twenty. Almost a man but with the smooth features of someone freshly hatched into a world forever shy of his expectations of it. Connor remembered that disarming feeling from years earlier, the ache of something molten inside he would spend years trying to bury, that thing which gave a sad, disembodied quality even to his laughter.

How are they looking for the body?

Snow squalls have the west shore covered. They'll send out a Cormorant when it clears. The kid jumped somewhere over the game sanctuary so it could take a while to search the area.

Bears will get him by then – Jan stood up from the bed and pulled back the edge of the ochre curtain. His pickup truck was parked directly outside; an unopened pine freshener hung from the rear-view. In the windshield's reflection, a V of geese zippered across the sky, then vanished where the eaves met the glass.

One thing I've learned – Jan turned, scratching his bare shoulder – is that forgetting something isn't any easier when you keep thinking about it. Don't beat yourself up, hear me? Anyway, I've got to head out. A jeep's ditched up on Pine Lake. I told dispatch I'd take it.

Suit yourself – Connor said.

He watched Jan get dressed. The dim margarine light of the motel room made Jan's body look younger. He was still boyish and lean where it counted but his face betrayed his age and heavy smoking. He buttoned his jeans over his crotch and slid the belt through its buckle. His chestnut pubic hair flashed through his fly as he did it up.

I know it's not polite to say… – Jan put on his coat, the fur of the collar circling his face – but lots of those native kids have serious kinds of problems. I don't blame them for thinking up crazy ways to off themselves. It's not the kid's fault either, but you've got to be a little nuts to do it that way – Jan crossed the room and stood in front of Connor – I'll go and come back if you're still around.

I don't take off until the morning. Maybe I'll just nap. Come by when you're done.

Sleep well, handsome.

Wear your seat belt.

Connor stood at the window warming his feet against the baseboard heater as Jan's truck pulled back onto the snow-packed highway. Jan's kiss dissolved on his lips in a memory of wet pressure.

He's forgot to clip his chain – Connor thought. The chain of the tow swung from the winch like a sail main loose from its rigging – He'll get fined if a cruiser sees him. Not likely though. Not up here.

According to airline protocol, he was supposed to be sleeping in preparation for his return flight to Winnipeg the next morning. He'd insisted he didn't need stress leave but nonetheless he was kept awake by the image in his mind of the native boy lingering at the door of the plane. The wind at that altitude had been so cold he was certain he'd have ended up with frostbite if Terry hadn't ordered him back into the cockpit. But the kid had stood there, the brown skin on his arms goosebumped, nearly white, the look on his face as though it had only been some May afternoon.

Horizon to horizon across the domed expanse of sky, the contrails left by the aircraft would last for an hour at most, gradually fattening outward into a uniform haze fine as gauze. They would hover in the sunset, tangling with the treetops and hydro pylons, their bellies singed red and purple.

More of them than usual – Jan thought, as the truck crested the hill at the Pine Lake turnoff. It was awesome to think how many people were in the air circling the globe, how many of us flew to where we could never get to by land. The vapor trails came and went with the kind of regularity that contrasted with their transience.

The truck pitched and swayed over the dirt track, the rusty suspension releasing the chassis up over the potholes. He'd picked up a few jobs along this road in previous months. Mostly game hunters who'd returned from the bush to find their tires deflated by the cold. Every so often the eight-seater from Ijiraliq would fishtail into the ditch. The Inuit were hearty Christians and made the sixty-four-kilometre journey into Rankin every Sunday for the service. His last call from dispatch had relayed that the jeep he was driving to now wasn't local. It would be hard to tell what he was in for. Locals knew to keep watch out for the random herds of musk oxen and rogue polar bears. Those unfamiliar with the North could easily become distracted by the inferior state of the roads. He'd been first on the scene after a family of campers had T-boned a male ox last spring.

I've also pulled a body, frozen solid, from the water – Jan boasted to Connor – Shit, I had to wrap my chain around the guy's middle and haul him out with all his fishing buddies looking on. The ice just hasn't held this season. In all, around fourteen huts have fallen through.

Terry flew cargo down in the Antarctic – Connor said – You can land a plane on only eight feet of ice.

I'm telling you, this melt's a strange one. Once it gets going, there's no stopping.

Connor hooked Jan around the waist, gripping his own forearms in a secure lock. The smell of cigarette on Jan's skin was comforting as a campfire.

The bears can't hunt their usual territory. That's why they're wandering down.

Bears wander regardless – Jan turned his head – Try putting a fence around nature.

What happens if they're boxed in. They attack?

Sure, if they're threatened. You corner any predator, he'll attack.

Connor was typical of the men Jan found himself involved with. They carried a hunk of iron around inside them that Jan felt useful trying to suss out and then repair like a surgeon removing a bullet. It never ended the way Jan believed it could but he made the best of a difficult situation. Rankin was small enough that he knew to take what he could get when he could get it.

Whenever Connor was in town, the two men met in the far room of the Siniktarvik Motel. The owner, an aging Inuit hunter named Anawak, stayed put in the souvenir shop attached to the reception. The shop was a depleted rack of postcards, an array of polar bear snow globes on a melamine shelf above a thawed-out ice cream freezer. Anawak's cataracts prevented him from seeing who came and went from the parking space at the far end. For years he'd only asked that Jan pay upfront.

Jan spotted the jeep in the ditch about a kilometre down the road – a dark rectangle tilted against the brightness of the snow. Though the ridge was slight, in the flatness any altitude meant an impressive view of the surrounding tundra. Jan could just make out the darkened figure propped against the vehicle, but the sight of something swinging in his side-view drew his attention from the road. He slowed the pickup and pulled to the side of the gravel.

Not long after he'd met Jan, Connor thought he'd heard the sound of a truck down the lane and had convinced himself Jan had somehow driven down to Winnipeg to see him. Connor ran to the opening at the far end of the tunnel of leaves where the lane met the county road. The fence of poplars that bordered their property bent and rattled their leaves, just starting to yellow in the fading daylight. Somewhere out in the acres of forest that backed onto their yard, a wolf howled. It wasn't yet dusk so the sound signalled a kill – a coon or a rabbit, Connor thought, even an elk or one of the neighbour's unlucky pups that had wandered too far from its territory.

As the sound of the truck grew near, he'd felt his heart quicken. There was something about both of his worlds approaching each other, like alien planets on a near-miss collision course that gave him the same feeling he'd felt during flight school. The attack of pressure in his chest he'd wanted to rely on, what he saw and felt inside, not the attitude indicator or altimeter spiraling down in the cut-engine chaos of free-fall.

It must be difficult living in a world of so many odours tacked onto tree trunks – Connor thought, as the district's garbage truck rumbled past – How easy to misplace yourself.

In the far corner of the yard near the row of pears and blackberry bushes, his son Riley bounced on the trampoline. He fell into a rhythm as Connor walked back to him that hinted at something constant.

Dad, how sensitive is a girl's crotch? – Riley landed on his knees and sprang upward, back into the air.

Not very.

Not at all?

I didn't say that. Why?

Someone kicked Carla in the crotch at school. She came home early – Riley bent his knees when he landed to gain more height on the following bounce. His arms flew outward, his sock feet impacting the taut surface with padded thwacks that reverberated into the creaking springs.

She wasn't really hurt but Mom still had to go pick her up. Is it the same as when a boy gets kicked?

No, it's not the same – Connor said – Who told you that?

Riley landed hard and flew high into the air. For a moment the boy was perfectly framed against what was left of the blue day. His smile as he soared was less what Connor noticed than the vapor trail of the 747 arching across the purpling sky behind him.

What that fall must have felt like – Jan thought, circling around to the back of the truck. Twenty-three thousand feet of deafening noise, the stubborn, arctic air refusing to enter the boy's lungs. The surface of the earth below crisscrossed with snow-capped trees and the dark moraines of glacial till that had been carried down from the extending ice cap millennia earlier.

Jan fastened the hook of the metal hoist to the rig with the rusty clip. Attached, the winch line bowed with gravity from the top of the boom, a heavy sag that mirrored the curve of the cigarette foil he'd crumpled and tossed to the snow. It felt good to love someone as guarded as Connor. To engage the mechanics of having to open up for someone else to examine, to exhibit all the vulnerabilities that had taken him so long to pack inside himself. It seemed counterproductive, but his emotional distance was one of Connor's flaws he felt he benefitted from.

Jan knew about Riley and Connor's youngest, Carla. He'd seen the unnamed wife smiling awkwardly in the backgrounds of the photographs Connor had shown him when they'd first met in the motel. But it was never a question of needing more than that. The simpler things were kept, the easier it was. For both of them.

Lighting a smoke, Jan walked back along the side of the truck to the hood. The jeep below must have hit an ice patch coming down the hill and veered off as it tried to regain control.

The driver was a dark stationary point against the snow a little to the right, and Jan couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman by the distance. He'd finish the smoke and then drive down to pull the truck free of the ditch. It wasn't much to offer the world, but this was a respectable service and it made him feel useful to offer something other people couldn't.

The dark point stood in the distance and suddenly reached out for the vehicle. Jan saw the point slip and fall, landing in the snow like a period dropping to the bottom of a phrase. It lay there for a moment, stunned perhaps, and then strangely it began to slide away from the car out onto the expanse of snow that reached out to the horizon.

Is the guy crawling somewhere? – Jan thought, flicking the cigarette butt and squinting to focus on the vehicle.

The point suddenly grew a tail of red as it slid. Unlike the airplane's contrails that scarred the sky so precisely, this red one blotched and zagged across the ice as it drifted outward. It was then Jan saw the movement of the bear. Camouflaged perfectly against the brightness, its white bulk tugged the point away from the car, leaving a long red smear that grew in length as the animal pulled the body.

Without thinking, Jan yelled out at the creature. His voice broke the vacuum of the air around him in a holler that morphed into a cry, filling the gigantic space with the kind of electricity that follows a gunshot.

Jan could see the bear stop in its tracks, its invisible form drawn like a transparent ghost laid over the white snow background. Jan had seen enough of them hunting for seals on the slick ledges of icebergs to know what one of their muzzles looked like covered in blood. The chill of the outside didn't subside when Jan jumped behind the wheel and sped down the hill towards the vehicle.

Connor's granddad had told him that in 1974, when Connor had been just two years old, an iceberg the size of a warehouse had drifted into the shallow waters of Rankin Inlet. Larger than any of the dwellings on shore, it parked in the bay for almost a half year, melting slowly, changing shape as elegantly as an ice sculpture at a wedding. The villagers who'd come down to the shore to study it soon noticed a thick gash streaked through the middle of it. They conversed in small groups on the pebble beach, the women wrapped in blankets, the men in rubber boots skipping stones out to hit it. The ripples that broke the iceberg's giant reflection in the cold, dark water of the inlet quickly soothed over and mended.

They've found people in icebergs before – one of them guessed – Mammoth hunters frozen since the last ice age.

But the dark spot was too extensive to be a single human. It spread out on a diagonal across the whole thing, bisecting the turquoise and cobalt stress lines and disappearing beneath the black of the waterline.

A woman holding a baby guessed it might be the frozen remains of a polar bear, but another quickly dismissed that possibility since he was a hunter and knew the bears were eaten by their comrades when they died or else sunk to the ocean floor to be devoured by microbes. They would have to wait. As the daylight increased, the warm breeze licked at the mountain twenty sun-filled hours all summer long.