Wilderness Tips (25 page)

“George, you smoke like a furnace,” she says, without turning around. “You really should stop, or it’ll kill you.”

George considers the ambiguity of the phrase. “Smoking like a furnace.” He sees himself as a dragon, fumes and red flames pouring out of his ravenous maw. Is this really her version of him? “That would make you happy,” he says, deciding on impulse to try a frontal attack. “You’d love to see me six feet underground. You’ve never liked me.”

Pamela stops wiping and looks at him over her shoulder. Then she stands up and wrings the dirty cloth out into the bowl. “That’s juvenile,” she says calmly, “and unworthy of you. You need more exercise. This afternoon I’ll take you canoeing.”

“You know I’m hopeless at that,” says George truthfully. “I always crash into rocks. I never see them.”

“Geology is destiny,” says Pamela, as if to herself. She scowls at the stuffed loon in its glass bell. She is thinking. “Yes,” she says at last. “This lake is full of hidden rocks. It can be dangerous. But I’ll take care of you.”

Is she flirting with him? Can a crag flirt? George can hardly believe it, but he smiles at her, holding the cigarette in the centre of his mouth, showing his canines, and for the first time in their lives Pamela smiles back at him. Her mouth is quite different when the corners turn up; it’s as if he were seeing her upside down. He’s surprised by the loveliness of her smile. It’s not a knowing smile, like Prue’s, or saintly, like Portia’s. It’s the smile of an imp, of a mischievous child, mixed in with something he’d never expected to find in her. A generosity, a carelessness, a largesse. She has something she wishes to give him. What could it be?

After lunch and a pause for digestion, Roland goes back to his chopping, beside the woodshed out behind the kitchen. He’s splitting birch – a dying tree he cut down a year ago. The beavers had made a start on it, but changed their minds. White birch don’t live long anyway. He’d used the chain saw, slicing the trunk neatly into
lengths, the blade going through the wood like a knife through butter, the noise blotting out all other noises – the wind and waves, the whining of the trucks from the highway across the lake. He dislikes machine noises, but they’re easier to tolerate when you’re making them yourself, when you can control them. Like gunshot.

Not that Roland shoots. He used to: he used to go out for a deer in season, but now it’s unsafe, there are too many other men doing it – Italians and who knows what – who’ll shoot at anything moving. In any case, he’s lost the taste for the end result, the antlered carcasses strapped to the fronts of cars like grotesque hood ornaments, the splendid, murdered heads peering dull-eyed from the tops of mini-vans. He can see the point of venison, of killing to eat, but to have a cut-off head on your wall? What does it prove, except that a deer can’t pull a trigger?

He never talks about these feelings. He knows they would be held against him at his place of work, which he hates. His job is managing money for other people. He knows he is not a success, not by his great-grandfather’s standards. The old man sneers at him every morning from that rosewood frame in the washroom, while he is shaving. They both know the same thing: if Roland were a success he’d be out pillaging, not counting the beans. He’d have some grey, inoffensive, discontented man counting the beans for him. A regiment of them. A regiment of men like himself.

He lifts a chunk of birch, stands it on end on the chopping block, swings the axe. A clean split, but he’s out of practice. Tomorrow he will have blisters. In a while he’ll stop, stoop and pile, stoop and pile. There’s already enough wood, but he likes doing this. It’s one of the few things he does like. He feels alive only up here.

Yesterday, he drove up from the centre of the city, past the warehouses and factories and shining glass towers, which have gone up, it seems, overnight; past the subdivisions he could swear weren’t there last year, last month. Acres of treelessness, of new townhouses with
little pointed roofs – like tents, like an invasion. The tents of the Goths and the Vandals. The tents of the Huns and the Magyars. The tents of George.

Down comes his axe on the head of George, which splits in two. If Roland had known George would be here this weekend, he wouldn’t have come. Damn Prue and her silly bandannas and her open shirt, her middle-aged breasts offered like hot, freckled muffins along with the sardines and cheese, George sliding his oily eyes all over her, with Portia pretending not to notice. Damn George and his shady deals and his pay-offs to town councillors; damn George and his millions, and his spurious, excessive charm. George should stay in the city where he belongs. He’s hard to take even there, but at least Roland can keep out of his way. Here at Wacousta Lodge he’s intolerable, strutting around as if he owned the place. Not yet. Probably he’ll wait for them all to croak, and then turn it into a lucrative retirement home for the rich Japanese. He’ll sell them Nature, at a huge margin. That’s the kind of thing George would do.

Roland knew the man was a lizard the first time he saw him. Why did Portia marry him? She could have married somebody decent, leaving George to Prue, who’d dredged him up from God knows where and was flaunting him around like a prize fish. Prue deserved him; Portia didn’t. But why did Prue give him up without a struggle? That wasn’t like her. It’s as if there had been some negotiation, some invisible deal between them. Portia got George, but what did she trade for him? What did she have to give up?

Portia has always been his favourite sister. She was the youngest, the baby. Prue, who was the next youngest, used to tease her savagely, though Portia was remarkably slow to cry. Instead, she would just look, as if she couldn’t quite figure out what Prue was doing to her or why. Then she would go off by herself. Or else Roland would come to her defence and there would be a fight, and Roland would be accused of picking on his sister and be told he shouldn’t behave that
way because he was a boy. He doesn’t remember what part Pamela used to take in all this. Pamela was older than the rest of them and had her own agenda, which did not appear to include anyone else at all. Pamela read at the dinner table and went off by herself in the canoe. Pamela was allowed.

In the city they were in different schools or different grades; the house was large and they had their own pathways through it, their own lairs. It was only here that the territories overlapped. Wacousta Lodge, which looks so peaceful, is for Roland the repository of the family wars.

How old had he been – nine? ten? – the time he almost killed Prue? It was the summer he wanted to be an Indian, because of
Wilderness Tips
. He used to sneak that book off the shelf and take it outside, behind the woodshed, and turn and re-turn the pages.
Wilderness Tips
told you how to survive by yourself in the woods – a thing he longed to do. How to build shelters, make clothing from skins, find edible plants. There were diagrams too, and pen-and-ink drawings – of animal tracks, of leaves and seeds. Descriptions of different kinds of animal droppings. He remembers the first time he found some bear scat, fresh and reeking, and purple with blueberries. It scared the hell out of him.

There was a lot about the Indians, about how noble they were, how brave, faithful, clean, reverent, hospitable, and honourable. (Even these words sound outmoded now, archaic. When was the last time Roland heard anyone praised for being
honourable?)
They attacked only in self-defence, to keep their land from being stolen. They walked differently too. There was a diagram, on page 208, of footprints, an Indian’s and a white man’s: the white wore hobnailed boots, and his toes pointed outward; the Indian wore moccasins, and his feet went straight ahead. Roland has been conscious of his feet ever since. He still turns his toes in slightly, to counteract what he feels must be a genetically programmed waddle.

That summer he ran around with a tea towel tucked into the front of his bathing suit for a loincloth and decorated his face with charcoal from the fireplace, alternating with red paint swiped from Prue’s paintbox. He lurked outside windows, listening in. Trying to make smoke signals, he set fire to a small patch of undergrowth down near the boathouse, but put it out before he was caught. He lashed an oblong stone to a stick handle with a leather lace borrowed from one of his father’s boots; his father was alive then. He snuck up on Prue, who was reading comic books on the dock, dangling her legs in the water.

He had his stone axe. He could have brained her. She was not Prue, of course: she was Custer, she was treachery, she was the enemy. He went as far as raising the axe, watching the convincing silhouette his shadow made on the dock. The stone fell off, onto his bare foot. He shouted with pain. Prue turned around, saw him there, guessed in an instant what he was doing, and laughed herself silly. That was when he’d almost killed her. The other thing, the stone axe, had just been a game.

The whole thing had just been a game, but it wounded him to let go of it. He’d wanted so badly to believe in that kind of Indian, the kind in the book. He’d needed them to exist.

Driving up yesterday, he’d passed a group of actual Indians, three of them, at a blueberry stand. They were wearing jeans and T-shirts and running shoes, the same as everybody else. One of them had a transistor radio. A neat maroon mini-van was parked beside the stand. So what did he expect from them, feathers? All that was gone, lost, ruined, years and years before he was born.

He knows this is nonsense. He’s a bean counter, after all; he deals in the hard currency of reality. How can you lose something that was never yours in the first place? (But you can, because
Wilderness Tips
was his once, and he’s lost it. He opened the book today, before lunch, after forty years. There was the innocent, fusty vocabulary that had
once inspired him: Manhood with a capital M, courage, honour. The Spirit of the Wild. It was naïve, pompous, ridiculous. It was dust.)

Roland chops with his axe. The sound goes out through the trees, across the small inlet to the left of him, bounces off a high ridge of rock, making a faint echo. It’s an old sound, a sound left over.

Portia lies on her bed, listening to the sound of Roland chopping wood, having her nap. She has her nap the way she always has, without sleeping. The nap was enforced on her once, by her mother. Now she just does it. When she was little she used to lie here – tucked safely away from Prue – in her parents’ room, in her parents’ double bed, which is now hers and George’s. She would think about all kinds of things; she would see faces and animal shapes in the knots of the pine ceiling and make up stories about them.

Now the only stories she ever makes up are about George. They are probably even more unrealistic than the stories he makes up about himself, but she has no way of really knowing. There are those who lie by instinct and those who don’t, and the ones who don’t are at the mercy of the ones who do.

Prue, for instance, is a blithe liar. She always has been; she enjoys it. When they were children she’d say, “Look, there’s a big snot coming out of your nose,” and Portia would run to the washroom mirror. Nothing was there, but Prue’s saying it made it somehow true, and Portia would scrub and scrub, trying to wash away invisible dirt, while Prue doubled over with laughter. “Don’t believe her,” Pamela would say. “Don’t be such a sucker.” (One of her chief words then – she used it for lollipops, for fish, for mouths.) But sometimes the things Prue said were true, so how could you ever know?

George is the same way. He gazes into her eyes and lies with such tenderness, such heartfelt feeling, such implicit sadness at her want of faith in him, that she can’t question him. To question him would
turn her cynical and hard. She would rather be kissed; she would rather be cherished. She would rather believe.

She knew about George and Prue at the beginning, of course. It was Prue who brought him up here first. But after a while George swore to her that the thing with Prue hadn’t been serious, and, anyway, it was over; and Prue herself seemed not to care. She’d already had George, she implied; he was used, like a dress. If Portia wanted him next it was nothing to her. “Help yourself,” she said. “God knows there’s enough of George to go around.”

Portia wanted to do things the way Prue did; she wanted to get her hands dirty. Something intense, followed by careless dismissal. But she was too young; she didn’t have the knack. She’d come up out of the lake and handed George’s dark glasses to him, and he’d looked at her in the wrong way: with reverence, not with passion – a clear gaze with no smut in it. After dinner that evening he’d said, with meticulous politeness, “Everything here is so new to me. I like you to be my guide, to your wonderful country.”

“Me?” Portia said. “I don’t know. What about Prue?” She was already feeling guilty.

“Prue does not understand obligations,” he said (which was true enough, she didn’t, and this insight of George’s was impressive). “You understand them, however. I am the guest; you are the host.”

“Hostess,” said Pamela, who had not seemed to be listening. “A ‘host’ is male, like ‘mine host’ in an inn, or else it’s the wafer you eat at Communion. Or the caterpillar that all the parasites lay their eggs on.”

“You have a very intellectual sister, I think,” said George, smiling, as if this quality in Pamela were a curiosity, or perhaps a deformity. Pamela shot him a look of pure resentment, and ever since that time she has not made any effort with him. He might as well be a bump on a log as far as she’s concerned.

But Portia doesn’t mind Pamela’s indifference; rather, she cherishes it. Once she wanted to be more like Prue, but now it’s Pamela. Pamela, considered so eccentric and odd and plain in the fifties, now seems to be the only one of them who got it right. Freedom isn’t having a lot of men, not if you think you have to. Pamela does what she wants, nothing more and nothing less.

It’s a good thing there’s one woman in the universe who can take George or leave him alone. Portia wishes she herself could be so cool. Even after thirty-two years, she’s still caught in the breathlessness, the airlessness of love. It’s no different from the first night, when he’d bent to kiss her (down by the boathouse, after an evening paddle) and she’d stood there like a deer in the glare of headlights, paralyzed, while something huge and unstoppable bore down on her, waiting for the scream of brakes, the shock of collision. But it wasn’t that kind of kiss: it wasn’t sex George wanted out of her. He’d wanted the other thing – the wifely white cotton blouses, the bassinets. He’s sad they never had children.