Caleb stopped by Duck’s spot a day after the trailer burned up. It was a warm day, a cooker good enough for a swim. Caleb’s plan had been to visit Duck on his way to the northern cape of the island to camp, a break from the city. But then the fire happened. Yesterday. A fluke, that his trip fell so close to Ducks death. Caleb’s mother phoned him when she heard about the fire. His kitchen window rang with low evening sun and spring pressed a hand against the glass. A gloved hand, pearly green.
–There was a fire and Duck’s trailer burned to the ground and he was in it, his mom said.
Caleb’s mind halted and shrank into a small, radiant chessboard.
–So is he dead?, he said.
–I don’t know. Well. The officer who called said not much. There was practically nothing left. Don’t go up there.
She spoke these words in an even tone with its pulp scooped out. There was practically nothing left. An ambiguous sentence, a sentence without a body in it. But when Caleb pulled up to Duck’s trailer spot, down a bushed-in dirt road tremoring with house finches, a ferry ride and then a five-hour drive from his apartment, he did not encounter the charred rectangle his mind had conjured – a silver heat-proof box labeled Shock.
Instead, the site reeked and cried. A freshly burned-to-the-ground trailer looks and smells like a massive beast detonated by a shrapnel bomb. Tin intestine, hairy insulation sheared by teeth, blackened lining of the stomach’s tender room, bones folded up into the profile of something half-boat, half-mammal. A whale left for the world’s blaze to undress. And a smell like a fire pissed out by ten men. Foul, fading. Caleb thought the police officer who told his mom that nothing was left probably just wanted to get rid of her. They didn’t want her to come looking in this exploded place. They didn’t want to manage her crumple of city-person shock. Caleb imagined a rural officer in his black Ford pick-up with POLICE decals on the window, shepherding his mother, her face eclipsed by a sunhat. Is this what burned flesh smelled like? Caleb didn’t know. Maybe it was the insulation, chemical musk snared by brush.
His dog huffed at the open window and shrieked as Caleb jumped down from his truck and stepped towards the wreck.
–Off. No. Down, Caleb yelled, a scattershot of commands, evidence of his lazy training. He couldn’t let the dog out. He’d just freak over that smell, piss everywhere.
The cheap bright dream of a tarp hovered over the wreck. The kind of blue tarp used here in the north end of the island for everything. Boats, doorways, burials. Someone had anchored the tarp to cinder blocks at its corners and the tarp had struggled partially free. The tarp roved around the wreck like a great half-crippled bird bound by a diagonal loop of sky.
Caleb walked the perimeter. The tarp avoided him, bending away, its wingtips scurrying on gravel. Behind the pad, a hammock rocked over singed bushes plunging down to copper creekbank. The hammock was a new addition since he’d visited in the fall, when he’d driven up to bring the news that his grandma would die in the next few days, to offer Duck a ride down to the mainland to see her because she’d loved Duck in a previous lifetime. Duck had sat at the wooden picnic table (mystifyingly intact after the fire, branded with the hairy dreams of clouds) and stared off into the bush as if tracking a slow-moving animal. His white hair tangled around his HOME DEPOT toque.
–I don’t want to go down, Duck had said. –Hospitals give me the heebie jeebies. I don’t like to be around dying people.
How many dying people had Duck been around? Caleb had wondered. Duck had worked the woods of this giant island for forty-five years as a tree planter, sowing seedlings into the open wounds of clearcuts, before a sudden stop with no pension. He’d probably seen a lot of injured men out in those woods. But dying people? Duck had never talked about the specifics of his work.
The tarp flew up on the blow of char and wild grass, surrounded the wreck with a luminous tent, revealing more. Caleb saw a thick warped book. Island-wide phonebook? Scrabble dictionary? No fucking way it was a Bible. A blister of can lids. He saw patches of ashed-out void. He saw scorched metal joints like ankles. He saw melted things, unrecognizable. He stopped looking. He didn’t want the bone of memory in him. The fire had enjoyed itself, sucked black lips on silver. The trailer beside Duck’s was roasted tan like a tremendous marshmallow.
Duck had started to over-winter here several years ago. Before that, he’d towed his trailer six highway hours south to a warm nook of the island for the winter. Then he’d stopped migrating and stayed up here year-round where government pension covered a trailer pad and a guy from the foodbank brought around sunflower yellow Dairyland crates of bashed apples and condensed milk. When Caleb first heard from his mom that Duck was over-wintering here, he’d been frightened by the thought of Duck’s old trailer in this valley of ice floe and booze and propane. No more use for the city – for cell phone signals, for hot water and data on silver taps, for chilled lettuce under stage lights, bouquet after bouquet, the anonymous, upturned faces. Duck was always broke. It had never been possible for Caleb to romanticize being broke the way his university friends had because he grew up watching broke-ness form Duck, before dismantling him. Broke is in the phone numbers that evaporate, in the narrowing of travel range, in what winters without insulation do to a body, to a mind, in the other means of heat a body and mind seek out.
Crown Royal, propane, righteousness.
Caleb had to get going for the rest of the drive to the northern tip of the island, to the honeycomb of coastline where he’d camped with Duck as a kid. Those places held Caleb’s oldest memories. Beaches like bleached lunar plain. Sculpted rocks like giants in permanent sleep, hips cocooned in kelp black as blood.
He stepped over Duck’s bike, now a molten slipknot. Yellow police tape lingered in the ash. Caution, Caution, Caution: the words laid in the ash.
*
On that final visit months ago, Duck had embraced him and pointed out the deer path up to the store, but Caleb drove them around instead in his new truck, because he’d wanted Duck to admire it, a green Tacoma. They’d passed the row of cabins where Duck’s best friend lived. Over the bridge, where they stopped and watched the river’s muscle wax jade then onyx, afternoon’s end bringing the sky down to the corner of the valley’s eyelid. Down to the unused airstrip where people slept rough. A long line of low-slung blue tarps in the seeping woods like a row of stooped shoulders on shamed men. Circled back to a train engine under a shellacked pine shelter, a sign about the deactivated railroad. Rails reached into the bush to where logging camps used to grind year-round. Chewing old-growth. Swallowing centuries.
–Did you ever go out there to those camps?, Caleb had asked Duck.
–I lived there, Duck had said.
–Oh yeah? What did–
–Buncha seasons, yeah.
–and it was like?
Duck had shrugged. –Work. Brutal mostly. Work’s work.
–But old growth. Must’ve been beautiful.
–No big trees out there now.
–Yeah. But you were planting out there though, right?
–The big trees never really come back, that’s the lie of it.
–The lie of it, Caleb had echoed Duck’s last few words, as he tended to do.
Duck never used terms like old growth. He said big trees or big stumps.
Duck was always between tree planting camps and boondocking. Duck lived in trailers, in vans, in tents, in a houseboat. More like a shack nailed to a raft, Caleb’s mom had said. It sank, she’d added.
Duck’s minimalism had carried him further and further away. No life of mortgage payments, appointments. When Caleb was a kid, Duck liked to ask him: know how many trees I planted this year? It was always a number that blew Caleb’s kid-mind. Caleb’s mom always echoed: know how many trees were cut down this year? Duck’s way wasn’t the work that triumphed over the skyline. The further out Duck drove them into the woods on their handful of camping trips, the more mammoth the logs riding the backs of trucks that skimmed the clouds with their sharp upturned nails. No need to argue, to do the math, Caleb understood. Saplings in clear white raincoats faltered beside trucks that transmitted mountainsides. Plunder. Duck never flipped. Never worked for the logging camps for more pay, a pension and medical insurance. Planting more trees was his obsession, a task that could never be complete.
Duck had pulled up at their home in different trailers – old ribbed trailers with the colouring of toy rockets, their insides dipped in essence of smoker’s cough, and once a silver trailer, round as a moon. He appeared without warning, but regular as seasons switching. Every time Caleb would first enter Duck’s trailer, it felt like trespass, but by the end of the visit, like love. Spoons, whiskey, foam that perspired like the back of long-distance runner’s neck, counters scrumming with Irish Breakfast tea tins and DVDs. Duck sat cross-legged on the seat by the stove and looked intently at Caleb – a cautious boy, a nervous teenager, and all the other ages until he moved out to go to law school. Except for several years, in the soft middle of Caleb’s adolescence, when Duck had vanished entirely. For those years, Caleb’s mom didn’t hear a word from him. No phone calls, no letters, no emails. She called a few camps. Nothing. She changed the subject when Caleb mentioned Duck. Caleb believed Duck was dead. A secret death and she didn’t have the heart to tell him.
Those years were when Caleb first fell into and out of love, when his mother drifted into a depression like a sinkhole in the middle of the kitchen floor, when he made the determination that he was better off without people, when he shuttered a part of himself for good and decided that when he grew up, he would be rich, a lawyer, probably. Then out of nothing Duck reappeared. His habit of plugging his trailer into their house during the night resumed. His trailer appeared the easy inexplicable way a bird lands on a palm. Caleb’s mother resurrected.
–I haven’t had a mailing address in thirty years, Duck told Caleb one time when he materialized with a gift, a box of Japanese glass fishing floats that sparkled like the lenses inside the eyes of a giant fish. When Caleb held a float in his hand, his fingers sparkled and swayed on the other side like optic nerves.
Duck wasn’t homeless, a word that telegraphed lack. Decades of camp life sanded away all excess, but also made him unyielding. Duck turned running away into a deep practice in travelling light. He’d only stay until the arguments with Caleb’s mom fired up. He was a master at avoiding conflict.
He just towed his home away.
*
Caleb wanted something from the fire. He found a spade in the cinders and stretched it out as afternoon brayed into the tarp’s mouth. The blue gullet opened, drank. He hacked black chunks from the ground and slid them into an empty water bottle. Caleb felt grim and bold. His grief was coal under glass. A couple trucks passed – north island tires like alligator backs, grills like grinning silver-capped teeth. Caleb waved a hand sideways in response. The trucks bobbed by on potholes, boats on a soft tide. Caleb didn’t want any of these guys stopping their trucks, saying “Whassat?” and pointing. The bottle held pieces of how Duck lived – his complete exit to the universe of forests and lakes. Duck had run away at sixteen from his dad’s beatings and never stopped moving. That’s all he’d ever told Caleb about his own childhood, that his dad chased him with electric cords. If a truck stopped, there would be a story passed on to his mom who came up here every few months to try to talk Duck into moving back south. Caleb had given up on understanding his mom and Duck’s relationship many years ago. Now that Duck was actually dead – worse than dead, burned to death – he dreaded calling her. Last year, his mom told him how hard she’d tried to talk Duck into plugging his trailer into her house for the coldest months. Caleb had thought: you sucker, after all this time. She’d also tried to convince Duck to sign his financial and medical decision-making rights over to her. In case it comes to that, she’d said. And Caleb had thought, in a private part of his mind no one would ever reach: this is your last attempt to control him.
Caleb stood and looked at the burn site and a relief swept over him. Unexpectedly, it rose. A deep relief that Duck died in this patch under sky held by birches and weeds. Duck could not have died in a hospital. Even in a room. When a person has lived in the forest’s green hold for decades, there’s a point when they cannot come back out. The relief that moved over Caleb didn’t come from inside himself. It moved over him like a strong hot wind, as if it came unbidden from the burn site. His chest hurt, suddenly. The wind seemed to tug at his skin, his vision twitched, like a sheet draped over the world had been moved. The wind touched every part of the inside of his body, blew in the windsocks of his throat and his ankles. He had the feeling that he was a feeble creature and at any moment the sun could send a random chunk of light down and he would be gone. Nothing, there was nothing here. He’d expected to feel Duck here, but there was nothing. The relief under that was a shock, a burning surface he couldn’t bear to feel. The wind picked up some ash and shifted it closer.
*
Caleb had bought KFC to eat at Duck’s site but instead he’d stress-eaten it on the drive up, his dog yodeling jealously. Root beer and fried skin gelled in his belly as he drove toward the lake over the dry washboard mud. At the lake, he pissed ant tunnels into the brown sand and let his dog vault weightless through cedar veils. A rusted sign nailed to the outhouse commanded LEAVE NO TRACE CAMPING. Underneath, someone had drawn a stick figure with an erection being eaten by a bear.
The years that Duck had vanished entirely was a nebulous space, a place he’d emerged from without evidence. A lover? An addiction? A depression? The condition of Duck’s love had been to not ask questions and so his reasons had burned up with him. The way people could wander through this life, trading skins. It terrified Caleb.
Caleb had attempted to confront Duck about it only once. He was in his mid-twenties. Sitting in Duck’s trailer in his mom’s driveway during a visit home from law school, sipping the Peroni Duck had handed him, he’d said, forcing his voice into a casual position, –So did you go far, were you travelling?
He’d asked the question with no context, but Duck had known instantly.
Duck had gazed at him in a low flare of lazy surprise and said, –I was in a container ship.
Duck lit a cigarette. Caleb watched him smoke, holding his own cigarette, unlit, in his fingers, eating soft gingerbread with the other hand. More than ten minutes passed.
–A container ship?
–My trailer was parked on a beach and I woke up and it had scooped me right up. Carried me right off.
Caleb wanted to yell at him then, I’m not a kid, but he hadn’t, because yelling you’re not a kid makes you a kid.
–I was scooped up, what can I say, now I’m back.
Caleb remembered looking at Duck and the truth opening up under him, the truth that questions make things worse.
–Those container ships will scoop you up. Don’t think of it till it happens to you. Happens a lot.
Now, the thought came to Caleb that Duck must have been in jail for those years. An everyday crime – stealing a car, punching someone in a bar. Caleb had never known Duck to be violent. His hands were permanently tree-planting hands, long-boned and muscled. He glanced at his phone to check the time – five missed calls from his mom and text messages, spraying him with her crushed-glass worry.
Caleb sat on a log and watched the lake go dark and thought about setting up camp here instead of continuing north to the cape, and he thought about driving back to the city to his mom’s house to perform forensics on her sadness, and he thought about camping at Duck’s spot for the night beside the tarp, a fucked-up vigil he couldn’t stomach, and then it was too late, and he bribed the dog back into the truck and drove back through the potholes tipping deep with star milk.
*
No ash on the highway only wind. Trees stretched like children’s sketches of cyclones. Fewer houses. None. Now no source of light other than Caleb’s headlights which felt like powerful beams emerging from his eye sockets. He leaned forward and the headlights in his eyes intensified. The road fell and wove amidst minor valleys, rivers, bridges. He could gun it to the cape in two and a half hours but the last hour would be a shaggy road shared with logging trucks on night runs, fast as sharks. The thought crowded him: how many of the trees that made up this vast darkness had been planted by Duck?
When the turn-off sign for the town finally pounced out of the night, it was raining.
Thick rain, tar rain.
Inside the motel’s office, a folding table stood behind a barricade by a row of life-sized figurines of the twelve dwarves. A sign read “Slumber Lodge: Putting the Slumber in Your Lumber.”
–Hello?
He pressed the button marked AFTERHOUR PPL. The button was sooty with fingerprints, of all previous itinerant sleepers, the cops and loggers and highway workers. He could be touching Duck’s fingerprint, one hundred layers down.
–Are you open?, Caleb called out again.
–Yes, hello, slumber lodge, a voice crackled.
Caleb looked around and saw a camera taped to the head of one of the gnomes.
–How many nights?, said the gnome.
–One.
–Here for the memorial?
–A memorial? No. Camping.
–Rain’s sposed to get real bad.
–I just need a room?
Caleb heard his dog barking in the truck. Brat.
–That your dog? Twenty dollar pet fee. Hundred and fifty for the room. Plus tax, said the gnome.
–Yeah yeah.
– Tap your card.
Obviously, the gouge of a price had been invented based on the look of him, his clipped-around-the-ears blonde hair and the red waterproof jacket that he’d bought special for this trip. What memorial? No way a memorial would be held here, in this under-heated motel. Maybe a church, or the local legion. A sheetpan cake and rows of styrofoam cups half-filled with milky tea, as there’d been at his grandmother’s memorial at the hospice Duck had skipped. All Caleb remembered was rambling to the hospital pastor about his grandmother’s story about the army jeeps coming down her childhood street and tossing bent metal sheets onto lawns – shelters for families to set over holes as shields against the bombs – and the way the pastor sank his front teeth into the rim of his Styrofoam cup as he’d glanced upward at the fluorescent lights in prayerful boredom and Caleb had realized that this story didn’t matter to the pastor, it was only his story now.
Shadowed people sat on chairs on the covered walkway along the second floor, shifting in the darkness.
Caleb looked up at them through the rain as he grabbed his bag from the truck.
A woman called down from the walkway.
–What a beautiful boy.
She must be here for the memorial, Caleb thought, but then he saw a rubber tree beside her door and Christmas lights around the door. She lived here.
The dog dragged Caleb up the stairs. The people wore rainforest uniforms. Gore-Tex, work boots, toques with the rims folded up. Each nodded as Caleb passed.
–Your dog’s so beautiful. Long drive up?, the woman asked, as he approached. He stopped, reluctantly, irritated, when the dog pushed his head onto the woman’s lap.
–On my way to the cape, Caleb said.
–Oh you’re not here for the memorial?
–Overnighting because the rain–
But the woman had already stopped listening to him. She was focused on his dog. She was doing that thing people did with his brindle, floppy-eared dog.
–Oh hi hi hi big beautiful boy, the woman said, in a babyish pitch. Her voice traveled up and down, like a slide whistle. –Aren’t you perfect? Aren’t you so pretty? Aren’t you the prettiest dog who’s ever lived? What does your dad feed you to make you so pretty?
This happened a lot. His glossy dog, a brontosaurus crossed with a teddy bear, brought this out in people. People went on and on in these stupid voices, said things to his dog that they would never say to any adult stranger. It embarrassed him, as if a very private part of the person were suddenly on display.
People normally stopped – this woman kept going. She must be lonely, Caleb thought. One of those people who use any excuse to make conversation. Her fingernails were banded with dirt that looked almost blue through her thick, glassy fingernails.
–Are you a very good boy? Are you a very very very good boy?
His dog rubbed his head against her knees.
–Look at you, look at you, what a good boy.
–Stop it you goof, we need to get going, Caleb said, roughly, and tugged the leash.
He heard his voice come out in a furious stranger’s whipcrack.
The woman looked up at him from her position caressing the dog. She looked hurt. Her eyes were wide and pale blue, ringed in darker blue. He’d never seen eyes with such distinct concentric circles before, like the rings in trees. Did she wear contact lenses? He saw that her skin was leathery, and deeply smoothed. Fisher skin. Skin created on the water. She was probably only ten years older than him, but aged from the work up here. He felt ashamed for snapping at the dog, and therefore at her. She lived here, in this motel, and that made snapping at her feel worse, like he’d knocked on the front door of her house and shouted. Her eyes, in the half-dark, looked warm.
Then she said to the dog, in the same sing-songy voice, –Is your daddy an angry man? Is your dad an angry, angry man? Is he the angriest man?
She smiled at him. He stared back, stunned. She had the unapologetic look of a kid who knew they’d just cracked an adult-level joke.
–Are you feeling alright?
Her tone of voice was forthright, as if she knew him.
–Just a really long day, he mumbled.
–What’re you doing all the way up here?
She’d pegged him as a mainlander on sight.
–Death in the family, said Caleb.
The words slipped out because of the direct way her eyes fell on his, how this disarmed him, but more because of how utterly exhausted he was, this endless day, and at the centre of it, the black gape.
The last time he’d been there, Duck had been alive. Impossible, eyes darting to every scrap of Caleb except for his eyes, but alive. Still, alive. Blade-black eyes, cantering speech, four season tan, the way he didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought of him and how honest that made him, how hard. His tree planting camp name had been Rocket Man. Like the song, like cheap firecrackers. Once, he’d said to Caleb, all casual, don’t have kids, it’ll ruin your life.
–You’re here for the memorial?, she said.
Caleb walked off, feeling a cloud system assume the shape of a self-devouring eagle in the locked cabinet of his chest. The dog bounded ahead of him and leaped onto the bed. As he shut the door of his room and glanced down the length of the walkway, he saw the woman sitting in her chair, her Christmas lights making a dingy portal in the rain.
*
Rain blasted the motel. Caleb swayed in and out of sleep.
The storm’s roar hauled him back up onto the bed, back to the microwave light’s anemic pulse and the dog’s snoring and then the rhythmic pounding water soothed him and consciousness lost him, again, to the deep. When Caleb was six, Duck had taught him how to upright himself in a sea kayak. Duck’s teaching method was to put Caleb in a kayak and shove him over in the deep water beside the end of a pier. He did it over and over again. Caleb moved through an initial stage of shock, then terror, then exhaustion. The water’s electrified cold, the salt-cave dark. Each time, Caleb sprang up into the daylight, hacking. Again, Duck pushed him back over, until his exhaustion wore down and revealed another layer, a fury, and Caleb learned to right himself. He cast his little body against the blind black clutch. The moment he released into the pure air, the sky slithering athletic around him, and Duck’s long siren laugh above him, calling, you did it, you’re out, I’m up here.
Shriek. The yellow phone on the bedside table.
–Yeah?, Caleb coughed.
–Front desk. Calling to tell you highway’s washed out. Nother night?
–Washed? Do you – do you know when it’ll be clear?
Stupid question.
–Tomorrow night earliest. What the water does. Depends.
–What about the road to the cape?
–Pure shit mud. Breakfast’s in the office.
Caleb curled up tightly under the glossy pink quilt.
He calmed himself by reciting the following facts, in a low soft voice (it only worked when he did it aloud): this doesn’t change anything, because I have booked the time off for camping anyway and I am not needed at the office and I told the articling students I might not have a cell signal; I brought an extra supply of my anxiety meds; and storms are random, and this has nothing to do with Duck’s death, nothing. He knew how his mind linked things, without reason. A totality of rain, patternless, surged. Rain was different up here, rain without forethought or afterthought. It rained as if to put the fire out.
*
The woman from the walkway, the woman who’d accused him of being the angriest man in the world, sat at a round brown Formica table in the office, beside the dwarves. Cereal and a coffee maker on the counter. He didn’t want to sit with her, but she said loudly, –Where’s the baby?, while he got his cereal and he sat down across from her.
–In bed, Caleb said.
The dog had burrowed under the quilt and refused to move, rumbling and farting.
She watched Caleb scoop frosted flakes out of a tiny disemboweled box.
–What’s with the remote check-in thing?, he said.
–Owner moved to Alberta. Half this place is apartments now. So you’re here for Tommy’s memorial?
–Tommy?
–Oh, you said you were here for the memorial.
This irritated him. A transparent manoeuvre for details he’d seen in dozens of courtrooms: set up an answer, then wait for backfill.
–A different death.
–Who?
He was surprised by her directness. But this was the north island. People were different up here. That’s what Duck had said he hated about people in the city and why he refused to live in one – the way people pretended. Caleb remembered the plants and lights outside her door, that she lived here. Caleb’s apartment in the city was on the twenty-second floor with a view of the mountains. When it snowed on the mountains he lay in his expensive sheets and imagined he was up there, in the peaks, in the spotless white.
Caleb hesitated.
–My dad, technically.
Her ringed eyes lingered on the word “technically”.
–I never lived with him.
She scattered more instant coffee crystals over the brown liquid in her mug, like croutons on soup.
–What happened?
–His trailer burned down, day before yesterday.
She nodded and drank. He liked how the bald facts didn’t seem to faze her. He had texted his closest friend Akhil, a litigator, about the fire and Akhil’s responses had been immediate, disbelieving, sympathetic. Akhil’s family was rich. Akhil would never know a death like this.
–Here? In town?
–Jomo. Two hours south. Just off the highway. You’ve probably passed it, like, a thousand times.
–Yeah I’ve seen that turn-off. Didn’t know there was much there.
–Isn’t.
–Good swimming lake right? There’s a trailer park there?
–Off to the right. Yeah nice lake.
–Didn’t know there was trailers. Trout lake right.
–If you’re not going there you don’t know it’s there.
–What was his name?
–Donald.
She shook her head.
–Didn’t know him. How’d the fire start?
He shrugged, chewed.
–The whole place?
–No, no. The trailer next to his was kind of torched, but.
–It was propane, she said, with a quality of certainty as she sat back in her chair, a breakfast coroner. –It’s always propane with trailer fires. People from the city worry about bears, but it’s propane that’ll get you. Only takes a sec for propane to catch. It’s not like a regular fire. Nothing you can do once it starts. Not a normal fire. Propane, propane.
The image of Duck’s trailer pad overtook Caleb’s mind, with the velocity of a large black bird opening its wings, embracing his mind. He didn’t know how the fire got started, but knew that Duck started drinking when he woke up. His mom had told him Duck’s memory was going. Caleb had studiously shoulder-checked his mom’s attempts at seeding obligation in him. In those moments, when his mom implied he should visit more, Duck’s disappearances always came back at him. When Caleb bought his first car, a hatchback, Duck had pointed to it and said, you could live in that. Caleb had dismissed this. Now he saw Duck was saying something else – you could carry everything with you, this small space could hold everything you need.
–I’m Terry, the woman said, as Caleb blundered out of his own mind.
–It was just a coincidence that I was going through, he mumbled. –I wasn’t supposed to see it all.
Caleb looked down at his hands, hands like long-stemmed soft flowers. It had come out like, I wouldn’t have come up just for the death. He forgot to say his name back.
–I thought maybe you were one of Tommy’s friends from college.
–No. Who is it?
–We worked together.
–You a treeplanter?
–Logging. No, logging.
Terry stopped and looked at him and sipped.
–So. You.
The syllables lingered in the air.
–Yeah?, said Caleb.
–So you saw it?
–Yeah.
–Nothing had been cleaned up yet?
–No. It was all there. Everything.
–They just left it all.
–Yeah.
–Must have been a fucking mess.
Her bluntness was welcome. An odd slippery laugh sloughed out of his throat. A trace of what had happened at the wreck, that relief, shifted in him and moved around and trying to put his mind on it made him feel lighter, like looking at the burn site had made a small hole in him and he was being drained, slowly, of all matter.
–There wouldn’t be anything left, she said. –Propane.
He knew when she said “anything” she meant the body.
–Not a thing to look at for too long, Caleb said, to shove the moment along.
–Propane, she said again. –Like a roman candle. Nothing anyone can do.
After they ate, he said he needed to take the dog out, and she said she’d love to walk the dog with him if that was okay and they climbed the metal steps together, through the waterfall.
They smoked Terry’s weed under a striped awning behind the motel, watched the dog slosh ass-deep in the surging yellow ditches with the gladness of a dolphin newly released from captivity. Water was filling the parking lot.
She told him about the guy who died, Tommy, who’d worked in one of the camps way out in the deep bush. He worked for the logging company, like everyone did who grew up here and stayed or returned. One morning last week, a cable sliced his body in two. Logging companies get everyone, she said. They even go into the AA meetings and recruit guys who’ve just made their first six months sober. Tommy’s death was a shock but not a surprise, like all the deaths out there in the camps. It was always a possibility in the back of the mind that a person might not come back. The memorial was being held here at the motel because it had the biggest meeting room in town, and Tommy had one native parent and one white evangelical parent, and the motel was the neutral option, like a community centre.
–A community centre for dirtbags like me, Terry said, even though she was beautiful, the dark gray of her eyes shining out between the rings.
Caleb had forgotten what it was like to not be with lawyers all day, who suspected every word, ran their gloved fingers along the gumlines of sentences.
–Don’t people up here do tree planting too?, Caleb said.
–Logging’s where the money’s at.
–Doesn’t that make you feel like shit?, he asked.
–Broke my shoulder a year ago so now I’m here, waiting for my pay-out to come through.
She held up the joint, sucked it deeply
–Medicinal, she said, the way she’d said propane.
–Duck said loggers were just raping the earth and getting a big pay day.
–Your dad? Technical-dad?
She held the smoke in.
–That’s the kind of thing people say at memorials, eh. Man of the woods. Blah blah blah.
He laughed at the way she said “blah blah blah” like a French chef in a cartoon, condemning mediocre plating. Bluh bluh bluh.
What would people say at Duck’s memorial, if there were one? Caleb didn’t know. He would only read out a list of questions.
–You never lived with him?
–No.
–Saw you passing through kind of thing.
–City, yeah, he worked all the time, the camps.
–So were you born up here then?
–No he met my mom when she planted for a summer. It never really stopped, between them. He was older. Quite a lot older.
–Somewhere to go in winter, she said.
–Just not a city person.
–Camps full of guys like that. Living their Kerouac bullshit.
He was surprised by the protectiveness of Duck that rallied in him, sudden as wind.
–He must have planted thousands of trees. More than forty years planting. Must have been thousands and thousands.
She kept smoking, with an indifferent look.
–He disappeared for a few years, though. Never knew where he went.
–Disappeared? Like how?
–I was a kid. I don’t know.
She waved at the dog. The dog jumped and waved his whole body back at her. His tail looked like the thumb of a huge hand.
Then he said it. Caleb had never told anyone, even his mother, even his ex Rishi who he’d lived with during the fever-dream of articling at the firm, about the container ship. He’d kept it to himself, all these years. All his theories, even the one from yesterday, about prison, the patch of theories he’d tended, each of which served a purpose of excusing or explaining Duck. A story about a secret alternate child with an incurable disease and a limited lifespan; a theory about Duck being a hero based on a radio interview with activists who’d camped on platforms in the canopy of old growth; and, the oldest story, a stone tumbled in the darkest acid of his brain, that Duck had been held in a hospital somewhere, treated for his perpetual, nameless sadness. Nothing could cure it, not even four decades of plunging hands into rich earth.
–He said he was in a container ship, said Caleb.
–What?
–A container ship.
She was silent.
–I asked him where he was, one time, and he said the trailer was swallowed up by a container ship. And he was in it.
She was still silent.
–So that’s where he said he was, Caleb said.
When he turned, he saw her face was blank. Then furrowed, a look of concentration. Then disgust mixed with pity. There was a long silence. An empty room with water pouring through it.
–Isn’t it amazing when something you’ve worried about your whole life is suddenly just fucking gone?, Terry said.
*
They went back around the hotel and up the stairs and into her room for more weed and as he closed the door she put her hand on his belt. It rushed off. He said, wait, and she said, don’t worry, my shoulder is almost all the way healed. He saw pink walls draped in Christmas lights, he saw a row of the dwarf statues (did she steal those from the office?), he saw a wolf’s face blown up on the bed, as he fell forward into it. Fleece, smoke. She was over him, pulling his pants off, and he thought, I should stop, and then a stronger feeling swelled up inside him, a sorrow that wanted to be pulled out, that could only be pulled out by someone else’s fist.
He was already hard. His boxers were off. Her body was stronger than his, muscle against his elastic limbs. Heat flooded his body, flooded the bed. The walls shimmered with light. There was a bass drum that started up at the other end of a long dark hall in his brain. The sound grew louder, louder, louder, until it was unbearable. A deep thudding under everything, and then singing, a choir of karaoke Dolly Partons shouting from the deep corners of the building, nine to five, nine to five, nine to five. The choir roared. What is that?, he whispered. Ssshh, it’s just the memorial, she whispered back, fucking him.
*
He called, three AM, from the narrow space between window and downpour.
–Caleb, I’ve been calling and calling and calling. Where are you?
–I got rained out. Crashing. Some motel.
–What, where?
–Port Maklo.
–Do you need me to come get you?
–No.
–Did you?
–I went.
A silence.
–Is–
–There’s nothing.
–I’m going to get–
–Mom, no.
–morning ferry over–
. –The trailer was already cleared away, he said. –Just some black stuff. Gravel. They cleaned it all up.
The trailer’s gone?
–There’s nothing. You’re free, he said.
Silence.
–I got you some.
–What?
–Some ash. From the site. I put it in a bottle.
Her voice twisted on the other end of the line, a silk rope in his hands.
–Thank you. Thank you.
–So you don’t have to go.
Caleb looked out over the flooded lot. A dark lake studded with the backs of trucks. Dull metal sides of planets. Glinting bald heads. Rain sheeted down. No sign of easing. Through the darkness, the dog hurtled out, barking, towards the end of the sea. Death was standing out there now. Death had not been at the trailer site, the place he’d gone looking. It was here. In the casting strokes blending away to smoke. Eavesdropper. Not absent, just delayed.
*
I lived in a container ship for those years and the nights between. I stretched out on the floor slick with my own dark. How did I get there? A container ship like a whale who has swallowed an oil spill. I lost track of the stars, of my own weight. It was dusk in the container ship. Night did not come and go, come or go. There was no longer a calendar in my cells. I could hear other things. A loaf of ice colliding. A whale’s lover. A call through a crack in the base of the ocean. Maybe. But I was not listening. I was not even there. I absorbed. Nothing and nobody knew I was in there. I was running from something I could not see. The container ship was good for rust, for my big nothing. I was the only one in there, my brain bloated to the size of a life. No day or night in that place. I could not touch the walls. Do not doubt I was a mistaken passenger. Do not doubt I also wanted it that way. Do not doubt I wanted to die. Do not doubt I wanted to die, so badly. Do not doubt I had no choice. It was not your fault. Do not doubt I had no choice but to roll in the brine and muck and lead and belly acid and unnameable paste until the day I punched a hole through my own eye socket from the inside and climbed out.
About the Author:
Alex Leslie has published two collections of short stories, People Who Disappear and We All Need to Eat, shortlisted for the BC Book Prize for fiction, and two collections of poetry, The things I heard about you and Vancouver for Beginners, shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Prize and winner of the Western Canada Jewish book prize for poetry from the Lohn Foundation. New work is in Periodicities and Yolk. Twitter: @notherstories. Website: alexlesliewriting.ca
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