The Last Woman (8 page)

“I’m here to see Gerald Spicer.”

“I’m not sure he’s in right now. Perhaps you could come back later?”

“Why not check,” he says quietly. “Gerald and me go way back.”

He enjoys her hesitation, enjoys the defiant flicking of her ass as she hurries upstairs. As he waits, a middle-aged couple stops outside the entrance to the dining room.

“Just go on in,” he tells them. He meets the woman’s startled glance with a smile.

In a few minutes the hostess is back. She directs Billy to the second floor, where an open door leads into Gerald’s office.

“Billy Johnson!” Gerald cries, rising behind his desk. Jack’s son: the remote young man grown into this crisply authoritative fellow in dress shirt and striped tie. Behind him, a picture window, like some glowing aquarium, reveals the green, sunstruck expanses of a golf course.

Gerald’s hand is damp, his smile brief, rabbity, under his trim moustache. Offering Billy a chair, he returns behind his desk. On the wall beyond him, where Jack’s
photos of hunt camps and fishing trips used to hang, is a large colour shot of racing cars, herding through a bend under an orange sun.

“So what do you think of it?”

“Ah…”

“All the changes!”

“Impressive,” Billy says.

“Totally changed the name of the game here, whole new type of clientele. I loved the old lodge, but it just wasn’t cutting it any more. We decided the time was right to go upscale, really put some money into the place. People still want to think they’re getting wilderness, but they don’t want to put themselves out too much – go figure. So we sell what we call the northern experience – great food, luxury accommodation, golf, tennis – all in the same great surroundings. Of course a few still want to go fishing and so on. We take care of them too. How you doing, Billy?”

“Good.”

“Good. Excellent. You’ve been away for some time. What, a couple of years now?”

“’Bout that.”

“How are things at home? It’s been some time since I’ve been to the Island. How’s your big sister?”

He tells him everything’s great.

“Good!” Gerry’s hands are rapidly fiddling with a bit of paper, twisting it up and pulling it apart. Billy misses Jack’s old, dim office; he misses Jack’s stories, spun out to the accompanying clink of bottle on glass. Jack’s way of doing
things had been so relaxed and off-hand, he hardly seemed to be working.

“Say, sorry about your uncle!” Gerry says, looking up suddenly. “Sorry – I forget –”

“Matt.”

“Yes, Matt. Tragic, really. My dad was very fond of him, you know. One of the best guides we ever had – really something, I guess. So – what can I do for you, Billy?”

“Was wondering if you had anything in the guiding line.”

It is all he can do to say it. He feels
that
close to walking out. Now he watches Gerald’s face change, its surface animation gone smooth, blank, as he fixes on the paper in his hands. The other man has gone away to where he keeps his true accounting; and in that place, there is no room for Billy Johnson. There is something shameful about this, for both of them. For a few seconds they can no longer even pretend they are connected. Glancing at him, Gerald tosses aside the paper and says in a more serious voice, “You have to realize, Billy, that the emphasis here is different. We’re not really wilderness any more, whole area’s changed. I’m not saying we don’t take people out, but hunters and fishermen are getting to be a rare species, around Lake Nigushi, anyway. All the changes – the clear-cuts – well, I’m sure you’re well aware. Now – we still keep a few guides on call. It’s not steady work, of course, but we’ll certainly keep you in mind.”

Murmuring a vague response, Billy stands, relieved to be finished. His face is hot, and as he heads for the door, he
doesn’t realize, at first, that Gerald is still speaking to him: “I’d really like to show you the place.” As they go down the stairs into the lobby, Gerald points out the teak front doors (“dropped five thousand bucks on them”). Outside, he insists Billy see the course. Boarding a golf cart, they hum down an asphalt path toward the green glow of the fairways. “This is a Phil Waits course,” Gerald tells him as they draw up on a knoll. Before them, as far as they can see, sprinklers fling long, shuddering plumes over the grass. Billy does not know who Phil Waits is, but he catches the pride in Gerald’s voice as he explains how he and Phil worked on the design together. He keeps glancing at Billy, eager for his approval, it seems, and though Billy responds with an occasional nod or grunt, there’s such an air of unreality about it all, such a feeling of bleakness, that he has trouble staying focused. And the sun beats down on the emerald fairways; and the sprinklers go on shushing and jiggering; and the sweat is prickling inside his shirt.

An hour later, arriving at the Harbour, he walks to Whitbread’s store. A new cement-block extension runs into a field, but the old country storefront persists, its tall show-windows plastered with the week’s specials. Taking a cart, he heads toward the produce section.
When the trees are all gone, the people will be gone
. For some time he stands without moving, as other shoppers push past: Fred Plante’s words opening a vast space, invisible to the eye, but felt – a chill fleeing over it like a breeze shivering the surface of a lake.

A minute later, he sees Ann Scott at the pharmacy counter. She is talking to a clerk and at first doesn’t notice him approach.

“Well!” she says, colouring.

“Thought you’d gone back to the Falls.”

“I’ve got a painting going – couldn’t leave it.” She goes on watching him, as if trying to make out exactly what or who he is; after her warmth at Inverness, he is taken aback.

He waits while she makes her purchase, then they go outside, into the sun, and walk to Lola’s restaurant, where they take a table on the empty deck. She has put on sunglasses with outsized frames, which give her the look of some exotic insect. He asks about her painting.

“Here’s Lola,” Ann says, and for a couple of minutes they deal with Lola.

“How’s your painting?” he persists, after the woman goes off.

“It’s so fragile at this point. I can’t really say much about it.” For a moment she is silent, then the huge dark eyes fix on him. “It was good to see you and Richard talking again.” She pauses, and when he doesn’t respond, she tries again: “I know things weren’t good between you when you left –” He shakes his head. He does not want to talk about Richard or the land claim. He does not want to revisit the past. He wants to reach out and remove her glasses.

“You know, he’s never really told me what happened –”

“I may have said a few things,” he allows, shrugging. “We were both pretty angry. Upset.” He feels cornered,
resentful. For some time they sit in silence, drinking the coffee Lola brings in thick china cups.

“You haven’t been happy, have you –”

He shifts in irritation. Happiness: people are always going on about it, about their right to it and their search for it. As long as you’re happy. Makes him sick, really.

“Why did you stay away for so long? Was it the claim, or –”

“I don’t know, Ann. Why do we do anything? You go into a city, you get a job or you don’t get a job, but somehow, you live. The sun shines the same as here. It didn’t seem to matter where I was.”

“Sounds like depression,” she says. Another of those words, the opposite of happiness, a place with neatly defined borders, to be escaped at all costs. “I’ve come to know something about that.”

“Didn’t realize you’d missed me that much,” he says.

“Things go flat,” she says, ignoring his joke. “Nothing means anything. There were times when the only reasonable thing – well.”

He looks up, alerted.

“But then it goes,” she says with a faint smile, sweeping past the shadows she has evoked. “It’s gone now. I don’t ask why – I just – go back to painting.”

They fall silent again. Out in the Harbour, boats sit motionless in the sun-blackened noon. Stirring her cup, Ann starts to talk again about Richard. She’s worried about him, she says. He’s got thick with the upper crust in Black Falls, he’s involved in local politics. In fact, he’s thinking
about running for the legislature. But he has no real friends in that world, she says. “Nothing like the two of you. He’s alone, really. All he does is work.”

He watches her intently as she talks: the way she touches one finger, thoughtfully, to the handle of her cup; the way she brushes a hair from her cheek. He doesn’t want just an hour with her. “Could you take off those glasses?”

For a long moment she stares at him and then, with both hands, removes them. Her glance is pained, elusive.

Taking her free hand, he draws it toward him.

“Billy –” she warns, but he is beyond warnings now: he no longer cares. Her hand is cool, surprisingly cool, and remains open to the stroking of his fingers.

He finds the little white scar. It is fainter than he recalls: a fading scimitar. “I see a lot of confusion here.”

“Oh, tell me something I don’t know.”

“There’s a man who’s very close to you. This man loves you –”

“Billy,” she scolds softly, pulling her hand away.

They walk along the quay without speaking. At her boat, he unties her lines for her.

“When can I see you?”

She is standing behind the wheel looking up at him: the sunglasses again. He feels he is oppressing her.

“You make everything impossible, Billy.” Below her dark mask, her lips tighten in an expression he can’t read.

Later that week, he drives to Mad Jack’s, an uninhabited island a mile from Inverness. The approach to the island is more difficult than it used to be – heaps of boulders denying him passage. Finally, he leaves his boat and wades ashore, clambering up a hill of pink rock. Standing with his back to the sun, he finds the little hollow shaded by the low, spreading branch of a pine. Twenty years of dropped needles have made the depression shallower, but all around, the island looks remarkably the same: the same long swells of rock, rolling away under a blazing sky; the same mobs of white pine, their dark, ragged branches streaming toward the southeast. Mad Jack’s burns still under the summer sun, as sharply defined and fresh as ever. Yet what happened here has left no trace: it is a kind of mockery.

She knelt a little to one side, so that the red canoe heeled over slightly while her blade cut the water with slow, lingering strokes. He had never seen anyone paddle with such effortless economy: the hull progressing as if drawn by a magnet down the brimming channel. She was wearing a white sunhat with its brim rolled up, and sunglasses, so that at first he did not recognize her, though he was primed to, had been primed all morning, ever since he and Matt had pulled into the familiar island to work on the dock.

And now: the knock of her paddle on the gunnel, the sudden pivoting of the hull. He was standing in the water where the dock met the boathouse, hammer in hand. He had turned nineteen that summer.

She paused to talk with Matt before paddling along the side of the dock. A few feet away she stopped and began to unload. “I won’t be in your way a second,” she told him. Walking by with a pack and a woven basket, she disappeared into the boathouse and returned seconds later to haul up the dripping canoe and overturn it on the dock. Again she went past. Her voice was lower, but her face – she had removed her sunglasses – yes, it was Ann Scott. He had not seen her since the summer he’d first met her.

Some time later, she returned. “Dad wondered if you and Matt would like to stay for supper. I’m Ann, by the way,” she said, looking down from the dock.

“I know,” he said, shading his eyes.

“You know?” A hint of playful remonstrance. “So, and what’s
your
name?”

When he told her, he could sense something stop, behind her eyes.

He helped her carry plates to the porch, setting them out on the table where purple and white asters poked from a glass. He drank her in: her broad hands cutting cheese; the faint, blonde hairs lacing her forearms; the strong-looking fullness of her compressed mouth. She was the same and yet not; and the change seemed to have come upon her in an instant, like in one of the old stories Matt told, when a woman was changed to a bear, or a girl into a star.