Read Death on a Rocky Little Island Page 5

  ***

  “What’s that you’re cooking?” Heather asked, as I got out an insulated pack and took from it an inner insulated pack.

  “His opening-night special,” Phil explained, getting out a packet of dried lasagna mix with a picture of a happy hiker on the front of it. “He’s only got two nights to catch up on three months worth of cholesterol and nitrates.”

  I looked up at Heather, then at and Nancy, who were about to cook hotdogs over the fire. I unfolded the little camp stove and put the big frying pan on it. Then I poured out some peanut oil and added the contents of the insulated pouch, one sirloin steak, three sausages, and five strips of bacon. I looked up into the eyes of the women.

  “You eat that shit?” Nancy asked.

  Phil answered, stirring lake water into his mix in the rusty can he used for a pot. “”Aisha - that’s his wife - she feeds him soy and tofu and greens all year. Sometimes I think he goes camping just to get his arteries reclogged.”

  Above the wonderful sizzle, I asked, “isn’t that just as bad, those hotdogs?”

  “Tofu and soy,” Nancy said. “At least mine are.

  Heather smiled. “Beef and nitrates. Gotta love the stuff.”

  Nancy turned to her. “You didn’t tell me you were eating that stuff.”

  “Damn right,” Heather offered, putting her wiener, blackened on the outside at least, into a somewhat squished bun. Then she added mustard, tossing the empty plastic packet onto the fire.

  She wolfed that first hot dog; there was no other term for it. Phil and I both lost track of what we were doing for a moment.

  I could have put my meat on the plate I’d brought with me, but something prompted me to stab the steak with my knife, slap some of the grease off it onto a rock, and just start chewing on one end. Halfway through, I got out a plastic bottle of vodka and took a big sip.

  People were looking at me, but I didn’t care. I was enjoying the meat and the vodka made my headache, which I’d had since drinking so much of Phil’s whiskey that afternoon, feel better. Not any less, mind you, just a better quality of headache.

  I ate the sausages and bacon the same way, slapping them silly on a rock then ripping chunks out of them.

  “Vodka?” asked Heather. I handed her the bottle. She took it like I’d handed her my firstborn kid.

  “Careful,” said Phil. “It’s a little over-proof.”

  “Damn right,” whispered Heather, after having a swig, then handing the bottle back. “You got your own still, or what?”

  “I bring it in from the States, as grain alcohol at double the concentration of normal vodka, then dilute it.”

  “Aisha hasn’t figured it out yet,” Phil noted.

  “They sell - what’s it - grain alcohol in the States? Is that like the ‘alcool” they sell in the liquor stores here?” Heather actually looked interested.

  “Same stuff,” I said, “chawing down some very crisp bacon. Alcohol in water. Difference is, the stuff in the States is twice as strong - eighty percent alcohol.”

  “I’d think that stuff would kill you,” Nancy observed.

  “Can’t drink it straight,” I said. “Gotta dilute it. But they only allow a certain size of bottle to be brought back to Canada.”

  “That explains a lot,” Nancy said, as if it explained a lot about me.

  “Want a taste?”

  Nancy held out a red plastic cup and I poured some of the mix in there. Phil held out a stainless steel cup and I handed him the bottle. He put a lot in there. I was glad I’d brought a lot and that it had been his whiskey we’d been drinking that afternoon. Nancy made a face when she tasted her sample, and added water to it. Phil sipped, rolled it around his mouth, and smiled.

  We ate in silence for a while, as the sky crawled overhead like a gray pavement and stars didn’t climb into the sky. There were noises from the water, but no loon calls. A pair of mink eyes glowed out from behind a log, then disappeared.

  Far away, there was the gleam of cottage windows, and a fisherman’s boat coming in to his cottage for a beer and some Kraft Dinner. In the other direction, there were couple of large boats far out on the bay.

  It was perfectly peaceful, and not raining yet. The lapping of waves grew less and the fire crackled more. I poured myself another drink. Around me on this small outer island were my friend and two younger women. I wished I were alone.

  Actually, I’d have been happy if Aisha were there, but you don’t get everything you ask for.

  Not in this life.

  “Win wishes he were alone.” Phil dropped that little bomb into the peace.

  There was a heavy sigh from across the fire. “We’re not good company?”

  I quoted a couple of lines that Nancy had called me when we were dining by candlelight at the café back on the mainland.

  “And you took all that seriously?” Nancy held out her cup for more booze.

  “Well,” I said, “I distinctly remember my knees getting shaky and my balls retreating into my body.”

  She nodded. “I’ve had worse dates, but not many.”

  “It’s not the company, or rather it’s the company in general,” Phil said, getting out a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips and passing them my way. I declined, citing concern about my weight, but Nancy took a few.

  “Win,” Phil said, “takes pictures in the rain.”

  Both girls looked at me. “It’s true,” I assured them. “Great moody pictures of landscapes in the rain.”

  “Professionally?” Heather wanted to know. “You sell many?”

  “A few,” I said. “Enough to pay costs and get a new camera or lens from time to time.”

  “Cover of Outbound? Couple of years ago?”

  “That was mine,” I acknowledged, shifting around on my lawn chair and reaching for the chips. At the moment I was contemplating islands in the rain, all moody and misty and with Heather dancing all nude in them. Maybe without the islands.

  “Ah.”

  “Good picture.” Heather took in another wiener, minus the bun. Her fourth, I figured. She must have some metabolism to stay relatively thin.

  “On the other hand,” Phil said, “you’re on a tiny little island with this photographer, so what else is a person going to say but a compliment?”

  “You’re being an idiot again,” Nancy said, gnawing at an overcooked soyweiner.”

  “By your logic,” I told Phil, “that must have been a compliment.”

  “Yes, he is a good photographer,” said Phil, “in his own way.”

  “Where I come from,” I told him, “that’s known as a ‘Peterborough compliment.”

  “But why here?” Phil asked. “Didn’t like the other campsite? Few women have raved about our company.”

  “The landscape looked better over this way.”

  “As in our mutual friend Cork Detson - the big guy - might have to stumble over the two of us if he were on his way to asking you for a date?” Phil hauled out a bottle of something. It was clear and it was in a two-liter jug that said “ginger ale” but I had a feeling that it wasn’t ginger ale. “Or just keeping an eye on us and our maps?”

  “Gin?” I asked.

  “White wine. I’m trying to cut down.” Phil came up with a couple of plastic wine glasses, but he and Heather were the only ones interested.

  “Ghost-story time?” I asked, sitting back in my lawn chair and contemplating the alcohol in my cup.

  Phil was in his own lawn chair, a shortened version that left his legs to stretch out and over a log. Nancy was braced against an odd-shaped pink granite boulder, and Heather was standing, wine glass in hand, looking out over the dark water.”

  “Treasure-story time,” Nancy suggested.

  “Ahhhhhh…..” Phil said. “Treasure time. Always liked that story as a kid.”

  “You’re looking for some sort of collaboration,” I suggested.

  “How good is the information you’ve got?” Nancy wanted to know.

  “Are
s Big Paul’s grand-daughter?” I asked, finishing off the booze and watching the world warm up.

  “Great grand-niece.” Nancy shifted. Granite boulders are never all that comfy; hence the lawn chairs. I’d rested against a lot of them when I was younger; now I’ll go without a lot of things on a trip to have a lawn chair along.

  “Did he really hide money out here?” I contemplated more alcohol, but decided instead to put the teapot on. I hung a billy can from a stick over the fire. It would have been both faster and easier to get the gas stove going, but everyone needed a breather and everyone needed something to watch.

  “Most people with no brains are convinced of it,” Heather said, moving along the line between shadow and darkness, the campfire light dancing on her clothes and changing her contours as she moved.

  “Obviously,” Nancy said, “you two believe it, too, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Got that right,” Phil said, farting noisily at the same time. “Just ask ol’ Win, here.”

  “Me?” I’m just a follower.” I scratched my beard and polished my glasses on an old piece of tissue I found in my pocket. I thought about getting my jacket out; it was going to get chilly later, although the cloud cover would keep some of the day’s heat in.

  “That true?” Heather asked, from the shadows. “He looks more Machiavellian than that.”

  “Oh, for sure, he’s all of that.” Phil reached over to his travel bag and hauled out a laminated and waterproof copy of our map and handed it to Nancy.

  She looked at me and looked at Phil and looked at Heather, and set it down, still rolled up. “Why this?”

  “It’s got all the islands on it, with my cryptic markings.”

  “And I wouldn’t be able to figure them out?” Nancy looked sideways at the map and then back at Phil.

  “Nope.”

  Nancy got up. “The money belonged to my family.” She sat on another log. “I feel I have some stake in it.”

  “We could come back some other time, Win and I.”

  “You could always have done that.” She swatted at some bug that came circling the fire.

  “Have a look at the map.”

  Nancy did, with Heather sliding in to peek over her shoulder with a small flashlight. “Just a map,” Nancy said after a minute. No markings on it that I can see.”

  “All in my head,” Phil said, “and in this wonderful manuscript.” He hauled out the navigational book and flipped it open to the page with the code on it. He handed it to her.

  Where this was going, I didn’t know, but it added interest to the night. If I wasn’t going to be alone, I might as well have some interest.

  Not like there was anything out here or we’d ever find it.

  “This is some kind of code?”

  “Just a transposition with a key to some lettering on the cover of a Seagram’s bottle.”

  Nancy held the book on her fingertips, like it was the fifth revelation of John the Baptist or maybe was secretly filled with springy snakes.

  “Have a look through it.” Phil didn’t seem concerned.

  “I might not give it back.” Nancy smiled, mockingly.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Phil said.

  “It’s too hard for a woman to break?”

  “A fake!” Heather disappeared back into the shadows for a moment.

  “You think so?” Nancy stared into the darkness.

  “Ask Win.”

  “Me?” I reached for the cup, but it was empty.

  “You!” This from Phil. “You faked the whole bloody thing just to get me out on this island!” He got up and picked up a very, very large knife.

  “I proclaim my innocence! I’m already circumcised!” I got up from my seat.

  I reached into my bag and came out with a large flat knife in a rustic scabbard. “I can take you with one eye tied behind my back!”

  “Man to man!”

  “Man to man!”

  Phil turned to the women, and said, “Please excuse us. We have a debt of honor to settle.” He bowed to me.

  I walked ahead of Phil into the darkness, letting my eyes try to adjust. There was mostly bare rock on the island, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

  We crossed the ridge of the island in less than a hundred feet, and stepped down the other side until we couldn’t see the firelight. The waters of Georgian Bay made little lapping sounds on the granite shore, and some creature made a night sound in one of the cedars.

  “What the heck was that,” I asked. I couldn’t decide if it was a real bird or if two of Cork’s friends were out there with blood-spattered femurs over their shoulders, about to adjust our anatomies.

  “BTSOM-Bird,” Phil replied. That didn’t help. Phil commonly categorized wildlife into BTSOM-birds, BTSOM trees and BTSOM bugs. Because BTSOM stood for “beats the shit outta me”, it was a broad category.

  “Thought so,” I said. “Did you bring a flashlight?”

  “Nope. You?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “Let’s try not to pee on each other’s shoes.”

  In the night I heard the bird once again, and, out on the water, the sound of a motor.

  “Sounds like Bill’s motor,” I said. “But most motors sound the same to me.”

  Phil peered into the night. “Whoever’s out there is running without lights. Must know the place pretty well.”

  “Lotta rocks out there?” I tucked the relevant portions of my external genitalia back into my pants, making sure nothing got caught on the zipper on the way by.

  “Rocks, islands, sunkers.”

  “Sunkers?”

  “Newfoundland term for rocks just under the surface. Bloody bay is full of them. You get yourself a boat here and you’ve got to keep away from the scenic parts, or else spend all the time looking at the charts and the water.

  “Well, he seems to be going pretty steadily.”

  Phil pointed to the north. “Watch out that way.”

  I did. It was black out there, but a couple of red lights sparkled, then, from closer, a green one.

  Then, from the general direction of the motorboat sound came a double green wink, very indistinct.

  “Almost didn’t catch that last one,” I said.

  “Probably pointed away from us,” Phil said, “towards the ship.”

  “Ship?”

  “There was an ocean freighter anchored out there earlier.”

  “So maybe Cork wasn’t lying. Maybe there is some smuggling going on tonight.” I listened for more noises but there was only the faint outboard motor sound.

  “Makes sense.” Phil scratched himself. “But if so, they’re going to be worried about us being so close.”

  “You think?”

  “If I were them, I’d send someone to make sure we’re just happy campers and not government agents.”

  “Yeah. That makes sense, too.”

  The women were at the campfire when we got back, both sitting down on logs, and Nancy trying to read a book by the firelight.

  I sat down in my lawn chair. Phil went down to the shore.

  “Have a good pee?” Nancy asked.

  “Not bad,” I said. “You?”

  “Reasonable, under the circumstances.”

  Things were more comfortable as we settled down, Phil and I on our lawn chairs and the women, Heather and Nancy, on the ground, resting against a couple of boulders.

  They didn’t look too comfortable, but I was. Gotta love them lawn chairs. I didn’t even consider having another shot of that vodka.

  Nancy indicated the book of navigational charts beside her. “You really think this is a fake? If it isn’t, it might be just what we - you - need to find anything that’s there.”

  Phil pointed at me. “Win faked it.”

  I mixed up some vodka with a can of Coke, carefully. “That’s a hangin’ accusation, pardner.”

  “It uses a key based on a Seagram’s whiskey-bottle label,” Phil said. “After that, it’s a simple substitution
code, starting with W - for ‘Win’ - as 1.”

  I scowled at him, not knowing what else to do.

  “The keys that it’s a fake are that it starts with ‘W’, the ‘S’ is out-of-sequence, and Seagram’s didn’t start using that label until four years after the supposed event.” Phil looked at me.

  Heather and Nancy also looked at me.

  “It’ll take more than that to hang me,” I mumbled, watching the clouds going by. “Besides, Phil and I came to a conclusion out there in the dark. About some visitors we might get tonight.”

  The women looked at Phil. “There might just be another booze-smuggling operation going on tonight,” Phil said, “or maybe Win here has arranged a re-enactment of the original.”

  “We figure,” I jumped in, “that someone’s brought a ship and anchored it out there. And we heard a boat - with no lights - go by. We think there’s a rendezvous, and Cork said they were smuggling liquor.”

  “That,” said Nancy, “is probably a Chinese freighter that’s heading for the Sound. They’re scheduled to pick up some industrial equipment from the old Northland Steel Works factory. Everybody in town’s been talking about it.”

  “Seems unlikely that the Chinese are into liquor smuggling,” I said. “There’s not enough of a markup for an operation that big.”

  Three people poked at the dying fire, and Nancy threw on another log.

  “Besides,” I added, “Cork said that’s what was going down tonight, and I find it hard to believe him.”

  “Anyway,” said Phil, “they tried to talk us into camping a lot further away. Now we figure they’ll send someone to make sure we’re what we’re supposed to be, and not federal agents with submachine guns.”

  “If it’s more valuable stuff than liquor,” Heather said, “you might be right.”

  There was silence as we listened for something more than our imaginations over the crackling of the fire. Logs out that way tend to be from evergreens, and evergreens crackle a lot.

  “I hear a boat,” Heather said, but it was another minute before the rest of us did.

  “Actually, “ said Phil, looking right at me, and sliding his knife under his jacket, “it might be really important to confirm that you, my friend, did fake all this.”

  I slid my own knife under my own jacket. “You think so?”

  “We need to know whether to protect the chart or if we can sacrifice it,” said Heather.

  That made sense. “Phil got it right on,” I said. “It probably took me longer to make up that code than it took Phil to break it.”

  “Why in God’s name….” Nancy began. She looked like my grade eight teacher the time I’d brought in a bag of my dog’s turds with bits of my essay in them, to show that I wasn’t lying this time. It seemed funnier in grade eight.

  “Hey,” Phil said, “I deserved it. I’ll tell you about it sometime, as soon as I’ve figured a way to, ah, adequately repay my friend here. Who, by the way, was just after a few pictures in tomorrow morning’s rain.”

  “Goddamn you motherfuckers,” Nancy said. “You mean there’s no money here?”

  “As much as there was before we started out, anyway,” I said. “Haven’t you searched these islands a few times.”

  “Hell, yes,” Nancy said. “I was just hoping you had some definite clue.”

  “Not us,” Phil laughed, “they don’t come any more clueless than us.”

  Couldn’t argue with that one.

  From out of the dark water came the sound of a motor coming really slowly, with a flashlight waving freely between the water under the boat and the shoreline. It was a bright light and it momentarily blinded me when it swung my way.

  “Ahoy!” came a voice from the boat. I didn’t know anybody said ahoy anymore.

  “Ahoy,” I called back. I looked around. Phil and Nancy hadn’t moved but Heather had disappeared.

  We watched as the boat came close and the motor stopped. The boat continued in until it made banging noises on the rock shore. Fiberglas, I figured, from the sound. They don’t make any of them anymore; it’s all traditional wood or indestructible aluminum.

  A rather tall, thin woman, dressed in green pants and an orange sweater stepped from the boat onto the shore, holding the end of a rope that would hold the Titanic. She had short blonde hair and braces on her teeth. Early forties, I thought. Something about her reminded me of a snake. For the life of me, I couldn’t think what it was. She squinted into the firelight, and when nobody said anything, she trailed the rope out, slithering it across the rock and tearing at the tiny raspberry bushes until she could loop it around a boulder.

  Then she walked up to the fireplace and Bill Bunch himself stepped out of the boat. He looked around. He’d have been in his early 30’s, 5'11 with close-cropped hair, and glasses. He wore black running shoes, jeans, and a horizontally striped shirt that made him look like an escaped prisoner.

  “Hi,” he said, “looking at me. We meet again.”

  I didn’t say a thing, and Nancy and Phil remained perfectly silent.

  “Can we sit down?” the woman asked.

  “Pull up an island,” Phil said, “and make yourself comfortable.”

  Bill got a case of beer in cans from the boat, and set it beside Nancy. Then he hauled out a couple of folding concert chairs - the ones that come in a bag - and set them down not far from me.

  Now bringing twenty-four beer for six people seemed like a mighty neighborly thing to do, but not bringing any extra lawn chairs was, I thought, a major mistake. You might be able to get people drunk, but unless they’re comfortable, they’ll be forever getting up and wandering about. I just cannot imagine how a million years of humanity evolved without inventing a lawn chair first.

  Look at a cat or a dog curled up or sitting on their haunches. They’re comfy when they’re asleep or sitting. Not humans, unless they’re properly supported in the proper places. Just try to sit or sleep outside without support. You’ll never be comfortable and in half an hour you’ll ache something awful, somewhere.

  I was going to hang on to my lawn chair in any case, because I’d felt that Nancy and Heather, arriving all uninvited, deserved no better than rock to sit on and old log to lean against.

  But everything’s relative, as Einstein used to say before he decided quantum theory was as bogus as my treasure code, and Heather and Nancy were suddenly looking a lot more like my kind of people than these two.

  Neither of whom offered anybody a chair.

  “I’m Bill,” Bill Bunch said. “And this here’s Alice.” Alice took a nod, ripped open the case of beer - Bud Lite, I saw, like these islands just needed a bunch of cans of Bud Lite to compliment their natural beauty - and handed cold beer out. The she coiled herself into a chair. I reached for a beer, to say I was in the game. After a brief hesitation, so did Nancy. Phil followed in due course.

  At this point Heather reappeared from the darkness and took one for herself out of the case. She sat down without comment.

  A succession of popping sounds announced the opening of six beer. Was this, I wondered, a Canadian version of some modern bonding ritual you normally find in Arkansas where a group of people all becomes a unit by sharing Bud Lite?

  On the other hand, if it had been we who had offered something to the new guys, maybe that would have been some sort of acceptance into our group.

  Rather, since they’d simply shown up and offered the beer (if you can call it that) to us, were they saying that these islands were theirs and they were accepting us as visitors?

  At least, when Bill offered their names, neither of them tried to shake hands with anybody. Maybe they knew what would happen.

  Of course, nobody offered to shake their hands or even say “thanks” for the beer. Nor did anybody seem to want to tell Bill and Alice their own names.

  Heather reached out and grabbed a piece of wood to put onto the fire. Claiming part ownership of the fire, now, was she? Well, I couldn’t object: it was all relative, and
I figured Phil and I had made a temporary truce with Heather and Nancy now that Bill and Alice had stomped onto our little piece of land.

  “We were looking out the cottage window,” Alice lied, “and figured you people were new to these islands.” She smiled at me and continued. “We’ve been here for years now, maybe twenty years now, and we figured maybe you’d like to know something about these islands.”

  We nodded, silently. Sure. Like they weren’t sent to hold us down until whatever was happening was over. I had a couple more sips on my beer.

  “I’m a adult-education teacher in Barrie,” Bill announced, suddenly. “I got into it when I was twenty-eight. I was sitting in my father’s office – he manages four companies in the Toronto area – when his boss came in and gave him hell for something or other. Really laid it on him.

  “Well, my father’d managed those companies for over twenty years and knew what he was doing better than the boss, but he couldn’t say anything. Just took it.

  “So I said to myself, what the hell’s the use of being somebody else’s whipping boy?” Bill looked around. “I quit my job with the company and now I’m teaching people who really need to learn. It feels good, you know. I do a lot of night school and get odd jobs and if I don’t like them, I quit. I know Mary – that’s my wife – would like more money, because we often run short, but I like being able to go around and do things I want. I spend a lot of time out on these islands if I can.” He paused for breath.

  “Ready?” Phil said to Nancy.

  “As good a time as any,” she answered, although she couldn’t have had any more clue than I what he was talking about, whether he was ready to assault out visitors with rocks or to disrobe and have a quickie out behind the kayaks.

  Phil set his beer can aside, and got out of the lawn chair. “You can use this till we get back,” he said to Heather. “I got the code book,” he continued, getting the book of navigational charts. “Got the map?” he asked, looking at Nancy.

  “Over here,” she said, getting up and pulling the topographical map out of my packsack.

  “Flashlight?” Phil asked.

  “Got it.” Nancy said, taking a rather large one from her own packsack.

  “We’ll try not to damage your canoe,” Phil said to me, assembling his metal detector.

  What Alice and Bill were supposed to do about this impromptu performance I didn’t know, and from the look on their faces, neither did they. Bill took to clenching his fist and Alice started licking her lips while one eyebrow went up and down.

  Nancy turned to our unwelcome guests. “You can entertain our friends with some island stories. We’re off to find the money box.” She showed Alice the code along the edges of the old set of navigational charts.

  Heather got up and settled carefully into Phil’s chair. “Ah,” she said. “That’s lots better.”

  “We should have brought a few extra lawn chairs,” Bill said as Nancy and Phil started loading the canoe with paddles and lifejackets. “Do you want me to go get some?” He was clearly agitated and at a loss as to what to do. Alice didn’t look any happier as Nancy got into the front of the canoe and Phil pushed off and sat in the rear seat. They disappeared into the night like someone had got some flat black spray and sprayed them out of existence. For a moment we could hear the noise from the paddles, then even that was gone.

  I had to trust that Phil could see and hear better than I could, but he didn’t have the campfire and its light and crackling sounds to contend with.

  I figured Alice and Bill were having a major psychological problem now that Phil and Nancy were gone. But what could they do? If Bill took the motorboat, that would leave Alice with no way off the island.

  The whole thing was so quick and smooth even I had a hard time.

  Heather turned to me. “I presume this is the lost loot of Big Paul they’re talking about.”

  I pretended to look confused. “Ah…. Well, I guess if Phil thinks it’s okay…. Yes, actually. He thinks he’s got a lead on it.” My nose got itchy.

  “People been looking for that for… well, Nancy’s grandfather went out looking for that. I figure it’s all just a story.” Bill shook his head.

  “Well I thought so, too,” I said, putting a billy-can of water over the fire, “but then I saw what Phil did with the code and the charts.”’

  “I never heard of a code,” Alice said. “And I’ve known the story since I was a kid. Even went out with one of my boyfriends a couple of times to look for the money.” She smiled. “At least that’s what he told me till we got out here.”

  “Still don’t believe it,” Bill said, trying to peer into the darkness beyond the campfire light where Phil and Nancy had disappeared.

  “Looks pretty genuine to me,” I said. “Written in a book of navigational charts of the area. Got another beer?” They passed me a can of Bud Lite. It wasn’t as cold as the first one. It didn’t improve the flavor.

  Heather declined the offer of a beer. She sat like a queen in Phil’s lawn chair, watching the action. For a moment there was no action. That was okay: it made other people uncomfortable before it bothered me.

  “Cork…” Phil started. Bill and Alice looked up.

  From far out in the night came a sharp noise.

  Alice sat up. “That sounded like a rifle shot.”

  “303, if I’m not mistaken.” Bill got up and walked down to the shore.

  A bunch more shots came in on the night air. I wondered where Phil and Nancy were.

  I probably knew Phil as well as anyone could, and I just couldn’t see him taking off into the night like that. A flashlight would be of limited use out in these islands, and it was easy enough to lose your way in daylight.

  Then, of course, there was Cork out there somewhere. I had no desire to be out in the dark with a dickhead like that, even in broad daylight; there was something about him that reminded me of a one-man street gang.

  So my guess was that he’d taken Nancy away just to get away, and they’d probably sneak back to the island somewhere along the shore. Heck, maybe they’d just circle the island.

  Now, I’m an independent bastard, and like to paddle my own canoe. Unfortunately my own canoe wasn’t there any longer. I was on Blizard Island with two kayaks and a fishing boat. And Alice and Bill. I needed them like I needed another hemorrhoid.

  When I was very young I tried too hard to be friends with other kids. Do you realize kids are monsters, selfish to the point of being psychotic? Only the fact that they’re small in size and too young to know better saves them from the wrath of adults. Only the fact that they’ll probably grow out of it.

  I piss off my friends. I don’t have many and I piss them off, one or another with great regularity. What do you think I do when I find I’ve insulted Phil or Chet or Ron? Not what I want to do, which is to find a way to piss the rest of them off and become a hermit.

  My father once told me, when he got old and frail, “I’m tired of living and scared of dying.” I think he was quoting a song from Showboat. The wonder of the world fades with the magic of youth. The songs sound all the same and the pictures I take in a slow falling rain are the ghosts of my childhood tapping on the windows of my soul and they’re too much the same.

  I learned, later than I should have that sharing a drink with a friend remains a constant warm glow long after the fireworks of the rest of the world are ashes falling from the sky. I was still fighting that. I was still thinking that my primary goal was to get away. Even without a canoe.

  So I was mentally eyeballing Alice’s boat when the first shot came. That stopped me.

  Because, let’s face it, it seemed pretty obvious that something was going down out there that night, and that some of the locals didn’t really want any of us poking our snotty city noses into it.

  It was quite easy to say, “nobody’s gonna tell me where I can’t paddle” in the daytime, but an hour before midnight on a rocky little island – that was a different proposition. I decided
that maybe I’d sit back in the chair, by the fire, take a Bud Lite, and just hope Phil and Nancy weren’t getting ventilated out there. Not to mention my canoe.

  On second thought, I decided to sit a little further from the light of the fire. If someone had planned a midnight meeting, they were about an hour early out there. A chilly wind danced with the pine tree nearby.

  Alice was peering intently into the darkness, shielding her eyes from the fireplace glare, and Bill was at the shore. What with the echoes, it really wasn’t possible to tell where the shot came from. I did keep in mind that bullets can skip over the water a long ways on a calm night. And that, to a boat, the only really visible thing was our little patch of island, lit by a campfire.

  The same thought must have occurred to Bill when a volley of shots mixed with the sound of what might have been a machine gun or automatic rifle, changed the atmosphere. They didn’t sound any closer, but Bill walked to his boat, took out a bailing bucket, and used it to scoop lake water onto the fire.

  There was a volcanic hiss and cloud of steam, then a few embers, which Bill got with the second bucket of water. We must have all been waving at the steam. The noise covered my retreat back a few more steps.

  We entered blackness just like that. I wondered where Heather had got to.

  “Sounded like shooting,” Alice’s voice noted from the darkness. That certainly confirmed my observation. “What’s going on?’ Like Bill or I might have a clue. Like I might have a clue.

  “Rifle,” Bill said, “and AK47.”

  “Jesus Fucking Christ,” Alice said. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “Well,” Bill said, “for one thing we might just want to keep quiet until we figure out what to do next.” His toe squashed the last ember. By now my eyes were at least able to separate sky, island, and water, but that was about it

  “Where are those other two?” Alice stumbled over something.

  “Win?” Bill asked. “That you there?” There was enough light in the night to give him a faint silhouette against the sky. He looked like the abominable bogeyman come to get me for my childhood sins. I felt like covering my crotch and running through the woods.

  That, of course, was guaranteed to leave at least one eyeball impaled on a cedar twig. Cedars are nice trees, but not the friendliest of their genus. I just backed slowly behind a bush and lay down.

  Heather was out there in the darkness of the island, too, but at least she’d have firm ground under her. I couldn’t say the same for Phil and Nancy and my damn canoe. Without the fire, they’d have trouble finding Blizard Island. And if I were them and were out on the water somewhere, shining a flashlight seemed at that moment like a very very bad idea.

  “There’s not much point in staying here.” Alice’s voice followed a dark shadow that edged towards me.” She added some interesting words when she bumped into something.

  “What do you suggest?” Bill seemed more confused than sarcastic.

  “Home,” she said. “Back to the cottage. If Cork’s going to find us, that’s where he’ll look.”

  “What about these two?”

  “I guess they don’t matter now,” Alice said, and I didn’t know what she meant by that. I’d gone down on my hands and knees and was most of the way to the place where the kayaks had been beached.

  A flashlight did a quick search, and caught me in the act of escape. It also showed me that neither kayak was where it had been left.

  “Hey!” Bill yelled.

  I didn’t figure they could yell and shine a flashlight for much longer before someone found them, so as soon as the light went out, I went, bent over, into the nearest patch of Juniperis Virginiana, the tree of life, one hand over my eyes and one over my beloved genitalia.

  There are a lot of things one can run into on a rocky little island in the dark. There are branches dropped from trees and logs washed in with winter storms. There’s rocks just lying around and rocks that stick out of the soil.

  My first big trip took me headfirst into a dip in the land. I threw my hands out in front of me, which turned out to be a mistake, crotch-wise, since the dip had an old log in it. You might imagine old logs as being cylindrical things with a smooth finish. Evergreens aren’t like that; they hang onto their branches long after they’re dead, and it’s only the bombardment of wind, rain, and photographer’s crotches that wears those down to nasty little stubs.

  My face, fortunately, landed in something really soft. For a moment my libido – that of it which wasn’t hurting – fantasized that I’d found Heather. But what I removed from my wide-open mouth (I tried to close it, but that wasn’t going to happen) turned out to be moss. Soft, but damp.

  I lay there, my torso wrapped around the log and my head against the moss, for a moment. Alice and Bill were still by their boat, to judge by the voices. The conversation went something like this:

  “The motherfucker’s probably hiding in those bushes.”

  “Jesus Christ. What the fuck do we care? He’s not our problem now anyway.”

  “Fuck that. Cork’ll want to know where he went. We fucking gotta have something to tell him.”

  “Fuck Cork. It was his fucking idea that fucking got us here in the first fucking place. Let’s go before we fucking get shot or something.”

  Well, it wasn’t Shakespeare, but I was happy with the last idea.

  “Throw everything in the fucking boat.”

  “What about the beer?”

  “Fuck the beer. Just get the chairs. Have you seen the girl?”

  It was Bud Lite, so I wasn’t concerned about intercourse with the beer cans. And I was glad they had no idea where Heather was. Mind you, if she was out in a kayak they were more likely to meet her on the water than on the island.

  There was noise, then the sound of an aluminum boat sliding over rock and into water. When the motor started, I began to get myself out of my oasis. Then I sat on the moss and moaned. I felt like I’d been the bum sleeping in the dumpster when the trash truck finished its rounds.

  Since nobody I knew was back at the campsite, I crawled and stumbled across the island to the far shore. Blizard Island isn’t very big, so it only took a couple of lifetimes.

  I figured to wait by the shore till morning came, or someone showed up to rescue me. I figured anybody but Cork would do.

  I tried to make myself comfortable against a crooked rock and figure out what the dark shapes all around might be as midnight got closer. One moved.

  “Well, if it ain’t my old buddy,” Cork said.

  Now I want you to realize that there had been a lot of shooting out there, and to the best of my knowledge Cork had been the only one out there except for Phil and Nancy.

  It’s not that I’d wished the dear boy any harm, but my gut feeling had been that I’d have preferred to see him again as a morgue shot on the cover of the local newspaper. But here he was, sounding way too healthy for me. And way too close.

  I got up, aching in a few places I’d sooner not have ached in, but aided in no small measure by the fact that Cork had got his large hand around my neck and was using it to provide substantial lift. He was a quick man, that Cork Detson, real quick.

  “My friend,” he said, pushing me against a tree and frisking me, “I’m very glad to see you.”

  “Arghhh,” I replied.

  “This little smuggling operation of ours has gone rather badly tonight,” he said, “and it seems quite a coincidence that you guys should be so close just when all that happened.”

  I would have pointed out that coincidences happen, but I still had his thumb in my windpipe.

  “And yet,” he mused, “you guys just don’t seem like anybody who actually knows what they’re doing. Shall we go for a ride?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  He laughed. Then he said, “you want to be walked or dragged?” and took out something. When that something pressed coldly against my left eyeball, I figured it must be a pistol.

  “I’ll walk.” r />
  “Thought you’d see it my way.” He shoved me down the granite slope towards the water, where I met with the edge of his motorboat and fell forward. Cork picked me by the legs and flipped me into the boat, where I made intimate acquaintance with a bunch of unidentified hard and sharp objects. There were three large coolers in the boat, strapped down securely.

  With a loud grating noise the aluminum boat slipped into the waters of Georgian Bay and shuddered as Cork leaped in. The boat rocked, then the motor started and we headed out into the darkness.

  I huddled as best I could on the front seat, my windbreaker cutting the night wind, but not enough. It was overcast and moonless, and darker than the crawl space under my heart.

  The outboard motor put out a steady lion’s growl and the aluminum boat slapped into the waves. The horizon was a dim purple velvet between the water and the sky. I could just make out the silhouette of Cork, one hand on the steering arm of the motor. I couldn’t see his other arm, but figured he had it in his pocket, curled around the gun.

  I was getting fonder of him because he hadn’t killed me yet. If he kept it up, and I couldn’t find a way to rip his throat out and throw it to the fish, we could get to be real friends. Boat buddies, like.

  Thirty Thousand Islands, I thought. A hundred times that number of rocks just above the surface of the water. A hundred times that number of rocks just below the surface. 6

  And there we were, Cork Detson and I, almost friends, barreling through this water wonderland at three in the morning with a thirty-horse Evinrude and not so much as a penlight. I wondered just how good his night vision could be. He’d been raised locally, but I wondered how good his memory could be. I pictured myself pitched backward over the front of the boat onto an island in a symphony of tearing aluminum. Then, of course, a flying six-foot-one Detson would land on me, breaking the rest of my bones.

  I thought about rushing him, taking us both over the back of the boat and working out our differences in the water, but he was big and he was quick. And he had the gun.

  “Don’t cogitate about it, little buddy,” Cork said, over the sound of the motor. “I can get three shots off before you can cough, and one of them’s all it’ll take.”

  Like I said, my new friend was quick. I believed him. We roared on into the velvet night.

  There was a loud bang that stopped my heart a moment. The boat rocked up and down like a harpooned whale. I hung on to the sides, and the motor stopped.

  In a moment the boat came to a halt. There was a coolness to the night air, but I no longer had so much wind blowing by. The boat shifted and creaked. Cork said a few words that seemed suitable. But people his size don’t need as many good phrases as smaller men do. He did something with the motor.

  “We broke a shear pin,” he said. Using “we” seemed a bit of a stretch, but I didn’t want to argue the point. He had the one and only gun, after all. I reached into the windbreaker pocket and found a mint. I washed the lint off it, and popped it into my mouth. I was prepared to wait. I went down a seven-page list of my options and that was the only one on it. I waited.

  “I’ll probably have to slay you now,” he said, “and I guess I know how.”

  My mouth went as dry as the armpit of a cactus and the mint began to rattle against my molars.

  “I’ve got a few supernumerary shear pins,” Cork said, “but it takes both hands to put a new one in, and I can’t trust you while I’m doing it.”

  So much for being boat buddies.

  “There must be a better way,” I said, more loudly than I’d intended. I thought about leaping out of the boat and swimming underwater a mile or two and finding an island in the dark and hiding in the trees there, but I wasn’t sure about steps one and two. Step three looked dubious in the dark, too.

  He laughed. “Like what?”

  “You could tie me up.” I’d seen it in the movies.

  “All I’ve got is the anchor rope, and if it was any good for tying up people, I’d have attained that objective a while back. Besides, who’s going to hold the firearm? Or do you want me to hold it with my toes? Or stuff it up my nose. Hm?”

  “Maybe I could tie myself up.”

  “I’m sure you’d do a singular and consummate job, but I must admit I’ve never seen it done. I think I’ll have to disappear you. Hole you and smear you.”

  The mint rattled against a bicuspid; one I’d had filled a couple of years ago. Tooth decay. Those mints are deadly.

  “I could change the shear pin,” I suggested.

  “You?”

  “Me.”

  “Tell me the consecution of events.”

  “Remove cotter pin,” I said. “Remove drive nut, use new shear pin to push old one out, replace drive nut, put cotter pin back in.” The mint disappeared somewhere into the ebony night.

  Cork’s silhouette moved as he thought. “Easier to kill you. Tip you and spill you.”

  “You need me to find the money.”

  ‘I might need you to find the assets.”

  “Lots of money,” I noted.

  “Get an oar,” he said.

  I got an oar.

  “Paddle us frontward and to the left.”

  I leaned over the bow and paddled, awkwardly. A small boat isn’t meant to be paddled, especially with an oar. I paddled three strokes on the right and two on the left, then repeated. After a minute or two, Cork called, “Paddle more on the right.” I did. It was just as dark. I still couldn’t see anything.

  Abruptly the oar touched bottom. I could see a dark mass breaking the thin purple horizon line. Cork must have had eyes like an owl to find an island in the dark.

  “Take your clothes off,” he said. “Unbutton and doff.”

  “Pardon.”

  “Now.”

  I compromised, and stripped down to my underwear.

  “Egress,” he said. “But hang onto the boat.”

  I got out, hanging onto the boat. The water was surprisingly warm, but my feet found bottom about knee deep.

  “Get to the posterior end of the boat.”

  I walked hand over hand and rotated the boat at the same time. Eventually I felt my way to the back and got smacked on the side of the head with the motor shaft, which had been raised into a horizontal position. My hand felt its way to the prop. It was nicked but it spun freely: Cork’s diagnosis was accurate.

  There was a rattling in the boat. The waves rocked it against me.

  “Here are the pliers.”

  “Where?” I couldn’t see a thing.

  “Here.” They smacked against the side of my head. I grabbed them; a pair of vice grips. I decided to remove all his body parts with them. The spherical body parts would get carefully pressed and mailed to a remote corner of Nunavut in small envelopes. The sausage-shaped parts would get put onto a shark hook and used to catch goldfish. After I fixed the prop so I didn’t get shot.

  “I can’t see,” I said. “Can’t you turn on a light?”

  “I’d rather not utilize the flashlight,” Cork said. “Maybe I should do it myself. Put you on a shelf.”

  It wasn’t that hard. I straightened the cotter pin and pulled it out. I had nowhere to put it so I stuffed it into my cheek. It was oily and cold, small and sharp-edged.

  I adjusted the vice grips and unscrewed the drive nut. It was greasy and too large for my mouth, so I stuffed it into my undershorts, at the front, where it wouldn’t fall out. Designed to hold nuts, that outfit.

  I felt the shaft; the broken shear pin seemed to have fallen out when I removed the nut. All to the good. I held out my hand and felt a shear pin dropped into it. I reassembled the assembly

  I hesitated. The underwater option started to look good.

  “I’d get you when you came up, buttercup.” Cork said. But I knew he didn’t read minds, or he’d already have ventilated me. He just knew how a cornered rat felt. And I didn’t like his rhymes, but I know how sensitive a poet can be, so I kept my mouth closed.


  I climbed back into the boat, at the front. I took off my wet underwear and put my dry clothes on after I’d air dried for a minute. The motor roared again, and the bow lifted as we headed back into the night. I curled up and tried to get some sleep.

  I’m not known for my courage or my swiftness of action, but I do have my moments. One of those moments happened as Cork’s flashlight flicked on and the motor slowed. The bastard must eat a lot of carrots, I thought, to sense something out in that blackness. The flashlight swung across the water and lit up, dimly, a kayak – no, two kayaks, maybe hundred yards away. I thought I recognized Heather in the lead kayak. The second one was empty.

  I took in the scene. Cork had throttled back the outboard motor and the boat wallowed in the water for a moment. Cork was turned, looking backward, his flashlight picking out Heather and her two kayaks. She was paused in mid-stroke, her paddle in the air.

  Cork reached into his coat pocket.

  I had passed some sort of valley of fear by this point. I stood up and walked quickly to the back of the boat, barely keeping my balance in the sway and bruising my feet on various unseen things. It looked like Cork was reaching for the gun, or maybe he wasn’t. In retrospect, I imagine he’d more likely have run the kayak down. Who knows? It was past the witching hour and time to wrestle with a goblin.

  Reaching the back end of the boat, and stepping on one of Cork’s big feet, I wrapped my arms around his neck and just continued, over the back of the boat and towards the dark, dark water.

  For a long moment I hung there, head to head with Cork, one of his arms flailing my back like some sort of pile driver. I ignored him and took as many deep breaths as I could.

  Then he tumbled back over the transom with me and into the midnight waters of Georgian Bay.

  As soon as the waters closed over my head, I let go, getting a kick in the leg and a punch in the ribs as I did. I waved my hands, pushing me deeper underwater. I wasn’t sure whether the propeller was turning or not, so I started moving away from the boat in the general direction of the kayak.

  When I came up, not far away (Olympic swimmer I am not), I could see Cork’s boat rocking, presumably as he tried to get back into it. Against the sky I could see Heather’s kayak coming towards me.

  I turned to see if Cork had got back on board and/or found his gun, and saw a bright light illuminate his boat. Cork was still hanging off the back of it when a much larger boat – the one with a light coming from it – hit Cork’s boat right in the middle.

  The sound carried very well, I must say. Sort of like a 747 hitting a bakeware factory. The big boat reared up, and Cork’s boat folded up, and a shitload of waves – none especially big, fortunately – came my way.

  “Grab on to the end of the kayak,” Heather advised. I grabbed onto the side and almost flipped her over. She hit the water with her paddle, hard, and the side of my head a little more gently. “The end of the kayak,” she advised.

  I caught on and didn’t even have to ask which end.

  “Now what?” I asked, although there didn’t seem like there were a lot of options open.

  “Shut up!” Heather said, beginning a long turn in the kayak. My weight seemed to make the procedure difficult, so I let go. When the kayak did a quick turn I swam over and grabbed the back of the kayak that was being towed.

  There was a lot of shouting over where Cork’s boat had been, and someone fired a couple of shots. Then lights started flashing around the water, and I expected a little hole to appear in the back of my head and my brains to jump out the front. It didn’t happen, but it’s a funny feeling and it certainly makes one appreciate things.

  I kicked gently, trying not to make any noise, and the kayaks slid further into the darkness. After a few minutes the noises in the background seemed far enough away that I asked, “Where are we going?”

  Heather kept paddling. “Beats me; I’m lost.”

  That was comforting, and I wondered if morning would find us somewhere out in the middle of Georgian Bay, out of sight of land.

  “I think there’s an island ahead.”

  I looked up. There was a definite darker patch ahead. In a minute or two the lead kayak hit some sort of shoreline with a crunch. I swam the other one in until my feet felt bottom. Then I staggered out of the water like the creature from the black lagoon and stood up, water pouring out of my pockets.

  “I’m cold,” I noted.

  “You’re alive,” she countered. She had a point.

  “Is there a paddle for this thing?” I asked.

  “Inside the front hatch, in two sections. With a lifejacket.”

  If I had known how to open the hatch, if I’d been able to see the paddle sections, and if I’d had a flashlight to figure out how to join the sections together, maybe it would have taken a lot less time.

  But I did it. Heather was still sitting calmly in the one kayak when I finally tumbled into the other one, gripping a double-ended paddle and wearing the lifejacket for what warmth I could get.

  The kayaks bobbed very gently along the dark mass of the island. The sky was still overcast, and starless, and it felt like it was going to rain. On the other hand, seeing as I was soaking wet and sitting in a puddle in the kayak, no wonder it seemed like it was going to rain.

  “Any idea where we are?” the lifelong paddler of remote areas asked the younger person who’d probably never been out on Georgian Bay before.

  “Follow me.”

  It sounded like a good idea, so I did. The exercise of swinging the paddle at least warmed me. As we passed the tip of the little island, I could see the lights of the ship in the distance.

  “If that ship hasn’t moved,” Heather said, “we might be able to figure out where Blizard Island is.

  I did a calculation. “To our left and closer to the ship.” That fit in with the travelling I’d done in Cork’s boat.

  Heather swung her paddle and started off towards the ship. I followed, because sometimes following’s what I’m good at.

  In ten minutes or so, the ship didn’t seem noticeably closer, but we were closing in on another island. I squinted. “That’s Blizzard.”

  “You sure?”

  “I was planning on including that snaggled pine in one of my photos.”

  “Sounds a little trite.”

  “Sometimes people like trite. A photographer’s gotta sell a few.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “Anyway,” I said, shivering, “I think this is Blizard.”

  “You recognize one tree?”

  “I like trees. They stand still for pictures and they don’t ask for anything. Every one is different, when it’s grown up.”

  “Okay. This is Blizard. We must be close to the campsite.”

  “I don’t remember exactly,” I said, “but I think we’re south of the campsite.”

  “We’ll go north.” Heather started paddling.

  I ducked her paddle. “Do we stop at the tents.”

  “We could snuggle in a tent till you’re warm again.”

  “Ah….”

  “But I’d feel better if I cut your cock off and threw it to the catfish first.”

  “Ah…. Catfish?” I asked, for lack of anything else to say.

  “Channel catfish. Unlike most catfish, they like clear water. And fresh meat.”

  “Do we have any other plans?”

  “Sure, leave it to me. Let’s circle the island and see what we find.”

  That seemed like a better idea than sitting in the kayak shivering, and even better than getting my dick thrown to the catfish. Aisha was bound to ask, sooner or later, about my missing dick. We paddled north, keeping the dark shape of the island on our left and the lights from the mystery ship ahead of us.

  And, maybe, the dark torpedo shape of a large and hungry catfish in clear dark waters under the kayak.

  Sometime we must have passed the place where the tents were still set up. But there was no fire, and no boats along the shore, so I was
never certain when we did. I was, after all, tired. I’m not a late night guy, and only the events and the cold of my wet clothes were keeping me awake.

  We got a few drops of rain as we came to the tip of Blizard. A gentle swell and a disappearance of the utter blackness beside us marked the end of the island. As we turned west, I squinted at a long shape at the shoreline. It was, for sure, a canoe. “Flashlight?” I asked. “On shore.”

  From Heather’s kayak a light snapped on, traveled the shore, paused at what was absolutely, positively, my canoe, and as abruptly snapped off.

  “Is that you, Win?”

  I was more than happy to hear Phil’s voice.

  “A bio-engineered clone,” I called back. “Are you alone?”

  “Nobody would clone you,” Phil said. “There are intergalactic laws against it on esthetic grounds.”

  “You alone?” Heather asked.

  “All alone on this Christly dark island, with wet clothes and a bad attitude.”

  “Where’s Nancy?” Heather moved her kayak in until it scraped rock.

  I could see a dark form moving on the island. I edged in and tried to decide how to get out of the kayak without getting my soaking feet wet. I didn’t really want to get out of the kayak – the puddle of water I sat in was just warming up.

  “We ran into a bunch of guys in a boat,” Phil said, grabbing on to Heather’s kayak. “They took her.”

  “You’re a drip,” I said to Phil. “I can hear it.”

  “Who took her? Where?” Heather rested one end of the paddle onshore to stabilize her kayak. My kayak just rocked back and forth, grating on the rock on the forth part.

  “Bunch of guys who didn’t speak much English. Oriental, to judge by their accents.”

  “Where?” Heather’s voice was sharper.

  “Beats me. They came up beside us, showed us a nasty-looking gun of some sort, and one guy told us to get in the boat.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “When one of them grabbed Nancy, I rolled the canoe. I hung onto a paddle and they eventually gave up looking for me. I got in the canoe and paddled it back here. I don’t know where she went. I guess she’s either still in the boat or they took her to that ship.”

  “You’re shivering,” Heather said.

  “Wet and cold, ma’am,” Phil said. “I’d be grateful if you could point the way to Blizard Island.”

  “You’re on Blizard Island,” I said. “At the north tip.”

  “Shit.”

  “Now what do we do?” he asked. But I’d lost all my leadership skills when I got wet. Or maybe I didn’t have any to start with.

  “You’re going to have to get warm,” Heather said. “You’d better get back to the campsite. Just follow the shore; you can’t miss it.”

  That was strange; I’d done a nice job of missing it fifteen minutes ago.

  “What about Nancy?”

  “We’re going out to the ship and see what’s going on. Maybe we can negotiate.” That’s what I should have said, but Heather said it instead.

  “I think maybe we should just paddle back to the mainland and call the cops.” I didn’t like the look of the ship and I knew there were guns around.

  “Go ahead. Send me a postcard when you get there.”

  The night, or maybe just me, started to warm up as we approached the ship. My clothes were wet, but not quite as cold a wet.Maybe twenty minutes into paddling – it wasn’t hard; we just kept the ship lights ahead of us – we could make out the hulk of the ship against the darkness. The ship didn’t seem to be moving at all.

  At that point Heather waited for me to catch pull alongside and asked, in a whisper, “Do you have a plan?”

  I thought about it. “Nope.”

  “Any ideas?”

  For Christ’s sake, it was somewhere an hour or two past midnight. Which meant it was five hours past my natural bedtime, even not considering the quantity of alcohol I’d consumed that day. I was tired as a marathon runner that’s just got to Montreal only to discover the race ended at Kingston. And hungry. And, as my prostate informed me I had to pee really, really bad, and was wondering how to do it in a kayak. So any ideas I had didn’t involve ships and rescuing people.

  “This ship is in trouble,” I said anyway. “Whatever they’re doing is something they don’t want the authorities to know about. So if they’ve ended up with Nancy, they’ll want let her go before they’re in any more trouble.”

  Heather broke the ensuing silence with, “Okay. You go negotiate,” and with a paddle swing that almost took my head off, moved her kayak towards the ship. I guessed it was an idea of some sort.

  There were lights on the ship, but none pointing at the water, so we started at the bow, which was pointing at Blizard Island, and followed the hull. There were noises bouncing from the hull, so something was going on inside.

  My kayak banged into Heather’s somewhere past the halfway point. “Ladder,” she said quietly. She shone the flashlight on a rope-and-board ladder hanging over the side and disappearing into the water.

  “You know,” I remarked, wisely and sagely and oldguyly, “if I get on that ladder I don’t know if I can get back into the kayak.”

  There was a long silence. It just kept getting longer. Finally Heather said, “as soon as you’re on the ladder, I’ll tie your kayak to it.”

  The wet bottom of my seat made an obscene sucking sound like Caspar, the Nith River monster lifting himself onto a mud-and-cattail shore. I grabbed the ladder and tried to pull myself out of the kayak. It didn’t work like it would have when I was a kid. The kayak sort of rolled out from under me and I guess Heather pulled it away before it rolled over.

  A bit of scrambling left me standing on the ladder, my feet on a wooden rung somewhere under water. I stepped up a couple of rungs until I was out of Georgian Bay entirely, water dripping from my shoes. The ladder swayed.

  Heather spoke: “If you have to, just scream my name and jump off the ship. I’ll find you.”

  After another minute or so, Heather asked, “Are you going up?”

  “I’m taking a leak,” I said. I’d figured it would be the last chance I might have for a while, and I wanted my mind to focus on other things for a change.

  “Oh.” She didn’t ask me to hurry; maybe she knew about prostate problems from a previous incarnation.

  Then I started up. It wasn’t a big ship, so it was only a mile or two straight up on a wildly gyrating trapeze assembly. I went under the deck railing like I’d made it to the pearly gates.

  You’d think that if you were running a ship in the middle of the night in among rocks and you had boats around shooting machine guns or whatever, and you had a ladder hanging down the side of the ship, then maybe you’d post a guard.

  Maybe I was looking for someone to surrender to.

  The other option, from watching too many movies and action TV shows, was for me to sneak up behind some evil-looking character, wring his neck with my bare hands or slice his throat with a jagged fingernail, steal his machine gun, and take over the ship. After rescuing the hostage unharmed of course.

  Nobody came to take me hostage so I could negotiate. Nobody shot me, either, which brightened my spirits.

  I looked around. I was on a back deck of some sort, with piles of stuff that looked like loading and unloading stuff all around me. The ship was making creaky ship noises and I could hear people talking, but not in English. A couple of the voices seemed to be coming closer.

  At that point I decided to kayak the thirty miles or so to Parry Sound and explain it all to the “authorities”. Any authorities.

  I crawled back to the railing, stuck my head under the railing, and called out, “Heather?”

  “Still here.”

  You know, I couldn’t see how I could get back in the kayak even if I used the rope. Kayaks are rolly and bobby things and the ladder wasn’t any better. The odds didn’t look good. And if I jumped, I couldn’t see how I’d get into the kaya
k either. Maybe Heather knew some tricks, but even then I suspected it would take a lot of help. And I really didn’t think I’d get any help if I came over alone.

  “Don’t stay too close, in case I have to jump.” I had to say something and this seemed reasonably intelligent.

  “Okay.”

  That seemed to end that conversation. I backed up and stood up.

  Still unshot and seemingly undetected, I figured I’d either have to hide or be brave. I looked for a place to hide.

  Then I took a deep breath, hoping it wasn’t going to be one of my last ones, and marched resolutely forward, as if I were king of the bay. I kept one eye on the railing, in case I decided to do an unkingly thing like leap off the ship.

  The first person I met was some officer. Anyway, he wore a hat with a lot of fancy gold braid on it. He said something I didn’t catch, then shone a light on my face. I bravely squinted.

  There was a lot of talking to some other people, but I didn’t catch how many because of the light. Then the light dropped and somebody frisked me.

  Another guy with a light went to the railing and shone it around. I caught the word, “kayak” so it was a reasonable guess he’d spotted Heather down there.

  Nobody seemed to have a gun, so I decided not to do the old over-the-railing-and-into-the-deep-cold-inky-water trick. There was more shuffling then somebody said, with a smooth American accent, “Can we ask you what you’re doing on this ship, sir?”

  “I’m looking for someone,” I said, shivering in my still-damp clothes. “I think she’s on board somewhere.”

  There was more talk, presumably as this was translated.

  “A young woman,” the man said. “Short, dark, and noisy.”

  “That’ll be her,” I said. “Nancy.”

  This led to a lot of talk, followed by some of arguing. The man asked me, “Are you cold?”

  “I’m wet,” I said, “and cold.”

  “Follow us.”

  It was the railing, now or never. I had pictures of Heather smacking my head with a paddle every time I came up for air. I followed them, with the flashlight guy just behind me.

  We stepped through a low steel door, walked a few feet down a steel hallway, and stepped through another steel door into a small room with tables and vending machines. Inside, sitting at a table, were three other oriental gentlemen and Nancy Barnes.

  “My God!” said Nancy.

  “I appreciate the salutation,” I said, “but I’m only human.”

  “Where’s Heather?” Nancy stood up. No one made a move to stop her.

  I pointed. “Over that way, in a kayak”

  “And how did you get here?”

  “A kayak. Your kayak, I guess.”

  Nancy turned to the English-speaking fellow. “Can I leave?”

  He looked puzzled. “How.”

  “My kayak’s out there.”

  “Hey!” I said. “Can you get into the kayak from a rope ladder?”

  “Just watch me.”

  “What about him?” the English-speaking guy asked.

  “What about me?” I asked, somewhat more loudly.

  “Maybe we can send help?” Nancy offered, as if she cared. It was a question, not a statement.

  “Are you going to let her go?” I waved at Nancy.

  There was only a bit of chatter before the English-speaking guy said, “She was brought here by mistake by some of our crew and we’d be most happy if she could get back to where she belonged safely.”

  I turned to Nancy. “What’s going on here? Doesn’t anybody know that the ship is way out of the ship channel?” I turned, to the English-speaker. “By my maps, it’s dangerous here, Mr….. ah.”

  “You can call me Peter,” he said. “There’s been a disagreement among the crew, and we’re working on solving it. Until then, we’ll just have to be patient.”

  “Some disagreement!” Nancy said to me. “Some of the crew have taken over the control room or whatever you call it.”

  “Bridge,” I suggested.

  “Bridge,” Peter confirmed.

  “Whatever.” Nancy stood up. “I didn’t get the feeling that much was going on in the way of negotiations.”

  Things made sense. “I don’t suppose you wanted to call the Canadian Cost Guard or anything. Not with Cork out there.”

  “Mr. Detson,” Peter said, “has been a complicating factor in all this. And one of the reasons we’re trying to solve this one by ourselves.”

  “What do the rebels want?”

  “Nothing for you to worry about,” Peter said. “We’re doing our best but we’d really like to get both of you off the ship.” He had to turn aside a moment and argue with a rather large man who had a dark scowl and a mean look.

  “You could drop us off on an island,” I suggested.

  “They don’t have any boats!” Nancy said.

  “We have two boats,” Peter said. “One is controlled by the people you call ‘rebels’ and the other has been overdue for an hour now.”

  “There’s a kayak waiting for her,” I said, “She just has to call for it.”

  Peter talked with the rest for a long while, then turned back. “We’d be happy to let the lady off this ship, with our humblest apologies and regrets for any inconvenience.”

  “What about you?” Nancy asked me.

  “I’m stuck here, but it looks a lot better for this ship with me here, rather than you.” I felt in my pocket just in case my knife had magically returned, but it hadn’t been there in the boat with Cork and it wasn’t there now.

  “Because you’re a man?” Nancy glared at me.

  “That’s one reason. And because I wasn’t brought here; I came of my own free will – and uninvited. Looks a lot better for the people running this ship if explanations are required.”

  Peter nodded. “We’ll take care of….”

  “Call me ‘Win’,” I said.

  “We’ll take care of Win,” he assured me. The rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look tried to smile at me, I think. It didn’t work.

  “Can I get a drink of Pepsi?” I asked.

  Peter laughed and said something to one of the other men. I was soon given a can from one of the machines across the room. They also threw me a couple of packs of candy. The labels were in Chinese, so I didn’t know what they were, but I wolfed them down with the Pepsi for the sugar boost and stuffed the wrappers in my pockets for souvenirs.

  “Ready to go?” I asked Nancy.

  “Anytime.”

  I led the party outdoors to the railing and followed it back to the place where the ladder led down into the darkness. I asked to have a light shone on my face.

  Peter talked to the fellow with a flashlight and then to me. “If someone starts shooting at you, duck down. We’ll turn the light off.”

  I found that less comforting than one might think.

  “Heather!” I yelled into the night, with my face lit from the side like some ghost act.

  “Right here,” came the response from just below me.

  “Nancy’s going to come down the ladder and get into her kayak,” I said, much less loudly. “If you think she can do it.”

  “I’ve seen her do harder things. Nancy?”

  “Coming down,” Nancy said, and the light covered her and the ladder, then briefly down to the water where Heather was, one hand on the ladder and one on the other kayak.

  “I’ll swing your boat around while you get down,” Heather called, and let go of the ladder.

  By the time Nancy got down, the empty kayak was touching the ladder, although Heather seemed to have a problem keeping the two items from drifting apart. She did a lot of juggling with her paddle, from what I could see, and a lot of rocking back and forth.

  It didn’t seem to bother Nancy. When she got close enough, she put one foot on the deck of her kayak, moved it until the cockpit was right beneath her and more or less dropped into the kayak like a lump of potatoes. She grabbed the ladde
r to stop the kayak from rolling over, then grabbed the paddle from the clips that held it to the kayak, and pushed off.

  “We thank you!” Heather blew me a kiss.

  “By tomorrow you won’t remember my name!” I called back, as they drifted away from the ship.

  “If you jump into the water, we can tow you somewhere,” Nancy said.

  “I’ll take my chances up here where it’s dry,” I said, although I was still wondering about people shooting at me.

  They paddled out of the flashlight beam and suddenly I felt all alone in a far foreign land. So I was still in Canada, it was way past midnight and I was tired and disoriented. Or maybe, given the nature of the ship, too oriented.

  “Let’s get warm,” I suggested to Peter.

  In the cafeteria again, most of the other guys disappeared doing odd things. I took a still-wet wallet out of my pants pocket and found a twenty, which I offered to Peter. “I’d like to buy some more Pepsi and a lot of chips,” I told him. He hesitated, then took the money. In a few minutes he came back with two cans of Pepsi and three bags of chips and a bag of peanuts.

  I went through the lot in the next fifteen minutes.

  “Let’s get this straight,” I said. “Some rebels have taken over the control room - the bridge - of this ship. So you’re stuck here. And they took one of the ship’s boats, too.”

  “It’s a problem we’re working on,” Peter said.

  “Who’s got the gun?” I asked.

  Peter closed his eyes for a long time. “The boat with the, ah, rebels have an AK-47. It’s the only gun we had.”

  “So what the hell were they shooting at?”

  “It was a belief among some of the crew members that the other boat had gone to get authorities to arrest them.”

  “And so they went out to try to stop them?” Peter didn’t answer, so I asked, “Did they have any reason….?” I stopped. It was way late in the night or early in the morning and I wasn’t thinking too well. “Of course not. What with doing business with Cork, you sure wouldn’t want to have any sort of authorities around.”

  Peter nodded. “But why are you here?” he asked.

  “I came here to take pictures.” Peter looked puzzled. “I’m a photographer,” I told him.

  Peter nodded. “And the others?”

  “All here,” I said, “to look for some money that might have been hidden on one of these islands many decades ago.”

  “And you’re not with Mr. Detson?”

  “Hell no,” I said. “Cork’s been wondering we’re plainclothes members of the Mounties. Here to check on what he’s doing.” I shook my sleep-fogged head. “I just came to take pictures.”

  “Well,” said Peter. “I guess we just have to wait.” He spoke to the rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look. I gathered he wasn’t much the waiting kind.

  “What do the rebels want?” I asked.

  “Nothing we can’t work out.” He paused, then must have figured I deserved more of an explanation. “There’s been a change in ownership back overseas. Some of the men believe that they won’t get paid when they go home. Some have a personal quarrel with the first mate. Others want to jump ship and claim refugee status in Canada.”

  “I don’t think you can just jump ship and become a refugee here anymore.”

  Peter smiled. “These people are not well educated. They believe more in rumors than in anything I could tell them.”

  “So we wait,” I said, leaning back to put my head against the wall and closing my eyes.”

  “For now, we wait.”

  So many nights of insomnia in my life. So many three-in-the-morning television infomercials. So easy to be awake. Tired as I was, I couldn’t see myself getting any sleep sitting on a hard floor, my head leaning against a steel wall that never stopped rumbling.

  I woke up to the sound of the ship’s motors and a banging sound. I was alone in the cafeteria. Out in the hall, I found a grimy men’s washroom and washed my face in cold water.

  Back in the cafeteria, I was halfway through a Pepsi and chocolate bar when Peter showed up. He was accompanied by the rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look, who was accompanied by a knife not quite long enough to be a sword. I didn’t know whether he was Peter’s bodyguard or watcher or what.

  “I hear the engines,” I noted.

  “We might need your help,” Peter said, indicating I should follow him.

  I finished the pop and stuffed the chocolate bar into my pocket. I was glad to find that, except for some residual dampness in my pocket, my clothes were mostly dry. I put on my socks, which had been draped over the pop machine, and put on my shoes.

  Peter led me not to the bridge, but down into the ship’s depths, one steel staircase after another.

  Four men lined the wall while one man hammered at a steel door with a fire ax. Not, it seemed, to much effect.

  “Strong door,” I noted, when the ax man paused for breath.

  “Engine room. Piracy. South China Sea.”

  I nodded. If you wanted to avoid having pirates take over your ship, you’d make the engine-room and the bridge as difficult as possible to break into.

  Three more men appeared, wrestling a ten-foot length of steel pipe down the stairs. I didn’t have to be told; I grabbed on with the rest of them, and we started using the pipe, maybe five inches in diameter, as a battering ram. The noise made my head hurt even more than usual.

  I’d have asked Peter what the hell was going on, but carrying out a conversation at that point didn’t seem like a great idea, even if it were possible.

  It seemed obvious to me that the “rebels” had control of the engine room as well as the bridge, and that someone had decided that the situation was no longer tolerable. The rumble of engines throughout the ship was probably the reason for the hurry. Unless someone knew the waters very well, it would be hard to go anywhere in a ship without joining the hundreds of wrecks already on the bottom of Georgian Bay.

  Swinging the steel pipe, I had a sudden thought. Maybe the captain had hired a local pilot to take them to open water. They’d have stopped the ship at that point to send the pilot home by boat. A perfect time to let the ship idle for a while, or overnight. And perfect time to do whatever smuggling or other illegal deal Cork had arranged. Then the ship would be on its way.

  It wouldn’t be long until morning; a couple of hours, probably. I figured Heather and Nancy had gone back to Blizard Island to get their stuff. Maybe then they’d get the hell out of there and back to the mainland. It would be slow at night, but it could be done.

  Phil. Phil worried me. My canoe was on Blizard, but I couldn’t be sure Phil was okay. Or if he had the sense to hide somewhere safe or go get the Mounties or something useful.

  Cork. Well, if he hadn’t drowned when his boat went under, then he might have made it to the nearest point exposed bit of rock. I hoped it wasn’t Blizard Island.

  The other two, I wasn’t worried about.

  The tempo of the ship’s engines picked up as we hammered on that steel door. Someone wanted to get somewhere in a hurry. I felt like a cat who’d gone to sleep on the engine block and woke to find the ground zipping by when I looked down.

  We could only get four guys on the steel battering pipe at a time, so we took turns. Twice we punched jagged holes in the door, but that wouldn’t let anything bigger than a groundhog in, so Peter started again at a different location. I had some good theories as to where to pound, but nobody asked me.

  I was standing at the back, to one side when the door gave way, opening a few inches. Some of the guys leaned against it and pushed. It had obviously been blocked by furniture, so it took a minute before they got in.

  Inside the engine room stood three frightened-looking guys with steel bars held in front of them. Slowly “my guys” edged into the room. Peter said something in a loud voice, but it didn’t make any difference to the three guys with the steel Win-bashers.

  The rather large m
an with a dark scowl and a mean look waved his knife. Peter sighed heavily, and took out a small pistol from his pocket. I guess he’d lied to me about how many guns there were.

  For a moment, the other three guys hesitated, then one put down his steel bar. The other two looked at each other a moment, then did the same. Two of the crew started towards a set of controls across the room.

  The ambient noises suddenly increased by a factor of five or so, and the floor shook. Hell, everything shook, including the walls and me.

  The ship’s engines faltered into silence, but the rest of the noise and a deep rumbling continued. Everyone but me made a run for the door and disappeared up the stairs.

  For a moment I was alone. Then I figured that this was no time to be a non-conformist, and started up the steel stairway as fast as my legs could take me.

  The rumbling continued while I made my way up various passageways and stairs. I didn’t remember which way I’d come, but I could hear the others ahead of me. And it wasn’t that big a ship, when you get right down to it.

  I got on deck eventually, to find myself at the back of a group of loudly talking men. They were edging their way to the front, and I followed them, not able to see much because my eyes weren’t adjusted to the darkness yet.

  I’m a sociable guy; I just ambled along with the rest of them.

  The deck was lit by a couple of bulbs, and I followed everybody to the railing. I looked over the railing, like everybody else, but I couldn’t see anything.

  I squinted out into the darkness, and as my eyes adjusted I noticed first that one horizon was noticeably lighter than the other. And that there were a couple of sparkles of light over that way. Brilliant man that I am, I deduced that I was looking towards the islands closer to the mainland, and that some insomniacs in some cottages were up.

  In a moment I could make out some triangular dark points just ahead. It didn’t take too much to figure out that these were trees and that although the engine was still running, the ship wasn’t moving. The fact that someone was shining a flashlight on a nice set of gnarled cedars helped.

  We had reached land.

  I edged over to the guy with the flashlight, bumped aside the guy next to him (pushy bastards, us Canadians), and told him to shine the flashlight down. Much to my surprise, he did; but then again, he’d been waving the light all over anyway.

  In the moving light I caught a fleeting glimpse of my canoe.

  Blizard Island’s the hub of the universe. I’d never known that until that moment. Everything came to it, if you just waited long enough.

  I guess I’d waited long enough.

  I was glad the ship had missed my canoe when it hit land. But I wondered where everybody had got to. If Heather and Nancy had been sensible, they’d have lit out for the mainland. Maybe they did, I thought, and that’s why the lights on shore. Maybe they woke up somebody at a cottage.

  On the other hand, there were two ship’s boats and at least one Kalashnikov out there. One of which boats was full of ship’s crew out to keep whatever was being smuggled – that was the best explanation of events – from being found out. The other ship’s boat was full of uncooperative “rebels” who were supposedly trying to get into Canada without applying at the consulate.

  Phil might be on Blizard, waiting for me somewhere. Or something might have happened to him. Or Cork might have survived and be cooking Phil over a fire. Or Phil might be cooking Cork over a fire.

  Not to mention Alice and Bill out in a small boat or heading to Mexico via the Mississippi.

  A whole theatre out there and me without the script.

  The world suddenly got real silent, and I realized the ship’s engines had stopped. I glanced at the bridge. Peter was up there. I hadn’t a clue what had happened to the guys who had taken control before, but I suspected that they’d realized they’d come as far as they were going to come on this ship.

  The ship groaned and tilted back. I was blinded as the flashlight beam passed my eyes and when I could see again, I was left alone on the front of the ship. I ambled to the prow and looked over the railing. There was rock thirty feet directly below me. All I needed was a ladder.

  I could have run to the back and jumped into what was probably deep enough water, but I’d had enough of being wet.

  I watched as the others uncased some life rafts, inflated them, and tossed them over the side, followed by a couple of rope ladders. What the hell, I edged over to be at the back of the group, although I knew from the depth charts that the ship probably wouldn’t completely sink and was probably the best place to stay.

  Two of the crew I’d helped with the battering ram seemed to get nervous as I got closer. Didn’t trust the locals, maybe. They got me by the shoulders, marched me to the middle of the deck, and sat me on a box of something. I stayed.

  In a few minutes the last of the crew had vanished over the side, presumably to get into life rafts and make the twenty-foot trip to the island.

  The ship continued to creak, and listed a bit more. I sat.

  Eventually, Peter showed up, and sat beside me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “If I leave the ship, you can claim it for salvage,” he said.

  “You’re the captain?”

  “That depends upon whether Gee Chung ever returns. He left in the ship’s boat.”

  “And left you in charge?” I closed my eyes.

  “That was the idea.”

  “I’d be glad to get off the ship,” I said. “I’d like to get onto dry land.”

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” he said.

  “Better than shooting me,” I noted.

  “I thought so.” He got up, chuckling. “Help me with this ladder.”

  We opened another life-raft holder and he hauled out a rope ladder. He tied one end of it to the railing at the front of the ship, tossed the rest over, and invited me to climb down.

  I crawled under the railing, grabbed the ladder, and put my foot onto a rung. I love rope ladders. All my worst enemies should have one. But I got down to the bottom and into a rubber raft. Several men followed, including the rather large man with a dark scowl and a mean look.

  I was out of the light of the deck, and I could see that it was definitely getting towards dawn. We covered the distance to the shore and I jumped out.

  I stood on the rock, the ship towering over me, and saw a whole bunch of rubber rafts full of people still bobbing along the shore like some sort of D-day pre-dawn invasion. One by one, the crew got out of their rafts.

  If what Peter said was true, then these guys included a bunch that didn’t want to get back on the ship and go back to wherever the ship had called home. I looked up and waved at Peter, who was leaning over the railing. By now it was light enough that we could see each other as gray blobs. He waved back, captain of a ship that wasn’t going anyplace soon.

  I was also in a group of people with whom it was going to be hard to communicate. This became important when a couple of them started investigating my canoe. I jogged over and tried to explain it to them. Some other fellow asked me, “You own canoe?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding vigorously. “My canoe!”

  He looked skeptical, but explained it to the others. I didn’t expect it to make much difference, since some of them would figure out pretty quick that they were on an island and that they sorta like outnumbered me. But the others seemed to accept it, for the moment, at least.

  There was a brief conversation, and the one man asked me, “Island?” pointing to the ground.

  “Yes,” I said. “Small island.” I made small-size gestures with my hands.

  “Canada?” he asked, pointing in various directions.

  “Canada,” I said, pointing straight down. Then I pointed to the east and waved my arms around. “Canada,” I said. They probably got the idea.

  A lot of the guys were smoking, and when I saw that they had matches and were getting cold, I figured it was time for a fire.


  I found some driftwood and dead branches from the lower part of a cedar tree, and with the help of a smoker we got a small fire going. Some of the other guys got helpful and rounded up wood living and dead, including my paddle. I rescued the paddle and left them talking and making the fire bigger. At that rate they’d run out of burnable wood pretty soon, but it served the purpose for now, even if it just kept them busy.

  At this point things were looking up. I was off the ship, nobody was trying to kidnap me, and not a shot was being fired. I was getting chilly but the best fireside places were taken. And the guys I was with were eyeballing the local trees. They would be difficult to get loose, and besides, they'’ probably been there a couple of centuries and I hated to root them up.

  I looked up at the ship. Peter was silhouetted on the rail. “Wood!” I yelled at him. He hesitated a moment, then disappeared. A minute or so later various articles made of wood started coming over the railing. I recognized one as a picnic table, before it hit the island; and a few chairs; the rest might have been used to hold cargo. After a minute, it stopped coming down and Peter looked over. “Thank you!” I called. He gave me the thumbs up.

  When the men started putting the wood onto the fire, I figured I’d probably saved the island’s trees. My good deed for the day.

  I was on dry land, and the night was ending.

  And I had my canoe and a paddle, even if I was short the legally required bailing bucket, lifejacket, whistle, and forty feet of rope. And the sword of morning was in the sky.

  “Phil!” I yelled couple of times. How far could he have gotten? He’d probably been the one to beach the canoe, so maybe he was still on the island. Unless Alice and Bill or Cork had got him.

  The crew probably had no idea what I was yelling, and ignored me. The first bright flash of sunlight crept over the distant shoreline as I slid the canoe into the water and got into it.

  It felt damn good.

  I figured the east side of the island, where we’d made camp, was the logical place for Phil to go, so I started down the west side. Phil was perverse most of the time. I called out for him as I went.

  Blizard Island hasn’t much in the way of trees, and it isn’t all that big. Which is why I didn’t get away from the ship and the sound of the sailors until I’d paddled quite a way along the coast.

  The wind was just starting to pick up, but it was coming from the land side so far, which was good. It was still mostly overcast, with broken cloud, which meant my chances of getting any rain pictures were getting slim. And the chances of getting a nice set of canoe-scaring waves were going to get a lot better. So much for weather forecasting.

  The canoe was empty, except for me, which made it light and hard to steer. A canoe works better with weight at both ends. This is especially true in a wind, so I wasn’t looking forward to a wind coming up.

  But life was fine.

  Someone out Owen Sound way a century ago made a really big canoe out of iron, they say. I guess they figured it wasn’t going to be portaged, and it would be more stable. But apparently it didn’t go up and down with the waves, it just cut through them. Which gets a lot of water in a canoe.

  Does this sound strange? I’m alone in a canoe at daybreak, and my friend is missing, and there are people with machine guns out on the water, and there I am contemplating the wind and enjoying – yes enjoying – being away from everybody in my own damn canoe.

  There was water below me, deep and dark, except where I kept grounding on shallow spots because I didn’t want to get too far from the shore.

  There was sky above me, the clouds pink with the first sunlight of the day, and purple velvet between their ragged edges.

  There was rock and ages-old cedars to my left, still turning from gray to green the gray of reality, and the tiny lapping sounds of water against granite.

  And, to my right, a line that represented the horizon, where sky met water, way out on the bay that Aisha had been so very, very concerned about.

  I paused every now and again, to call, “Phil”, and heard nothing but the lapping water, a few birds, and once, far away, a loon. It was better than the sound of shots would have been but my sense of solitude was starting to become a sense of being too damn alone.

  I wasn’t far from the south end of the island – one island’s length from a grounded ship – when I paused to squint at a shape onshore. There are a lot of boulders on the islands around Georgian Bay, and a few hummocks made of old logs and weeds, but this shape looked different.

  Sometimes when I go driving with Aisha I’ll slow down just catching a shape out of the corner of my eye. I’ll point, and the shape often turns into a fox or a vulture or a wild turkey. Aisha marvels that I can spot things like that, but I figure it’s a product of a million years of evolution. Men did the hunting, where shape recognition was valuable, while women stayed in camp developing language and social skills. You don’t need to ask which has turned out to be more valuable.

  I edged up to the shore, grounded the canoe carefully on a shallow spot, and took a big step onto the shore. The canoe, being a canoe, immediately took off for open water, but I snagged it with the end of the paddle and hauled its ass back then onto the shore.

  I kept the paddle with me as I made my way to the lump. The lump became a lump with a shirt on as I got closer and the light got stronger. When I got to it, I recognized it as a man, but when I poked him, nothing happened.

  Mortality. Ain’t it fun? It was time to bend over and find out who this was, or had been, but I hesitated until I was reasonably sure it wasn’t Phil. The figure had no shoes, and no jacket, but I knew that shirt wasn’t Phil’s.

  I knelt to confirm that this was, as I suspected, Cork Detson lying there, then backed away as if I expected it to be a trick and he’d jump up, kill me and take my canoe.

  But he didn’t, and I touched his cheek. It was cold as the rock he was lying on. I circled the body, and discovered that what I thought was a curled stick in his hand was a stout Massassauga rattlesnake, about half as long as his arm and as thick as his protruding tongue. And just as dead as Cork was.

  I contemplated this a moment, my brain working with all the sleep-deprived speed of a bus without wheels. I looked around. “Phil?” I called, not as loud anymore. But there were only the same sounds, and the cry of a seagull coming in from the lake.

  Now a Massassauga rattlesnake can kill a person, but it’s not likely; they just don’t carry enough venom to kill a normal adult. Not that I was going to argue; I decided to donate to the rattlesnake preservation society, if there was one, when I got back home. Just in case Cork, who knew these islands well, actually had made a fatal mistake of some serpentine sort.

  I was most of the way to the canoe when I did a U-turn and came back. Carefully, I checked around for anything else at the scene. From under the dead guy, tucked under one leg, I pulled out a piece of paper. Phil’s library card. I tucked it into my shirt pocket, and after completing a search, pried Cork up at various places to see if there were any other interesting items under him. I couldn’t find any, but I didn’t get to look at all the space under him. I searched my pockets and found the candy wrapper I’d stuffed there when I was on the ship. It had nice Chinese writing on it, so I tucked it into one of Cork’s pockets.

  Without saying goodbye, even to the snake, I returned to my canoe and pushed off.

  I did some confused, sleep-addled thinking as I continued following the shore. What killed Cork? It hadn’t been cold enough for hypothermia, and I really couldn’t see the snake doing it, although I could have been wrong about that. Did he have a bullet hole from an AK-47 somewhere on the side I couldn’t see?

  Or had Phil made the acquaintance of Mr. Detson and done something rash to a man exhausted from a long swim? To a man he didn’t really know? Maybe he and Cork had had a half-hour’s acquaintance and Cork had explained a few things in his own inimitable way. About a canoe, say. Cork was a nasty piece of work, but Phil was a special case in
his own way.

  It seemed a stretch, even for a person knowingly obstructing justice by removing evidence. I didn’t thing Aisha would approve of my act, but if I had my way, Aisha wasn’t ever going to find out.

  So it was that I got right back to the landing point, having almost circled the island, before I got back to the campsite. There was no sign of Phil, and no sign of the kayaks. I liked that last part. Charming as those girls were, I’d feel better if they were out of harm’s way.

  That feeling of solitude lasted till I got to the place where we’d made the fire. The two kayaks were stashed under a cedar tree. I dragged the canoe onto dry ground and marched up. Sitting in front of a cold ash-pit on lawn chairs were Heather and Nancy. Phil sat to one side. All of them stared at me.

  “Phil!” I said. “Boy am I glad to find you. Where the hell you been?”

  The trio sat there, staring at me.

  “We can make a fire,” I suggested. My camping motto is, if in doubt, make a campfire. I got silence, and stares. I began to wonder if I’d stumbled into Madam Tussaud’s or if these people had been taken over by aliens. It was spooky.

  I noticed that Heather was looking just past me, to my left. I turned slowly that way.

  There was a guy standing there, dressing in dark camouflage clothing, with only the eyes and mouth showing on his face. Ski mask, I decided.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, because that’s what people had always asked me when they meant, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” Then I noticed the short black gun he was holding. It looked very efficient, whatever it was, like a machine gun you could fit into a briefcase.

  He said nothing. My eye caught more movement to my right, and a couple more of these guys appeared out of the shadows. Hey, I was impressed.

  “Sit,” said one of the new arrivals. Sit, hell, I’d have rolled over and eaten Kibbles at that point. People with guns have that effect on me. I sat.

  Another guy came in from the shore. He squatted beside me. “Talk quietly,” he said, “or I’ll break some part of you.”

  I nodded, which is about as quiet as you get, and he asked, “What is your position in this group?”

  “A bit to the southeast,” I answered, but maybe not quietly enough. He tapped me on the head with his gun; just enough to draw blood and hurt like hell. “We have no positions,” I said, “but I’ll nominate myself as leader-in-chief of this arm of the galaxy if you’d like.”

  “Smartass,” he didn’t say. He just nodded. “There’s a ship,” he said, “at the north end of the island. What do you know about it?”

  “I was on it for an hour or two last night, I said. “But I don’t even know its name or what it’s doing here.” I didn’t want to calculate the odds of a person being on a ship without even knowing its name. I braced for another whack on the head.

  My man looked up, and nodded to somebody behind me. I didn’t know whether that was good or bad, but I had the feeling that the truth wasn’t going to do me any harm right there. Besides, I was too tired to make stuff up. I’ve had more sleep driving the Don Valley Parkway that I got in the last twelve hours.

  “Why were you on the ship?”

  “Hostage exchange, sort of. They captured Nancy earlier in the night and I stayed when she left.” The guy made some notes in a tiny notebook. “They’d have let me go, but there weren’t any more boats available,” I added.

  “Why did they beach the ship?”

  “Some sort of mutiny on board,” I said, and explained about the rebels controlling the engine room and bridge. “I think it might have been about wages and maybe some of them wanted to get into Canada as refugees.”

  “Listen carefully,” my man in black said. “I need to know what you’re doing on this island.”

  “I’m here to take pictures. I’m a photographer.”

  “You have a card?”

  I fished one from my wallet. It was more than somewhat damp.

  “And the rest of the group?”

  “Treasure!” I said, expecting another bop from a gun barrel on my head. None came, so I told him the long sad story of Big Paul and his booze and my unfortunate companions. And about Cork and his friends and maybe they were smuggling liquor.

  “You believe that?” He shifted and smiled.

  “I figured they were smuggling something,” I said, “but alcohol didn’t seem very likely to me.” From out in the bay I could hear the sounds of boats and a helicopter or two.

  “Well,” he said, “we’ve got a problem here.” He sat back and put his notebook away. “This ship – it’s the Oyakki Maru by the way – delivered a load of Christmas ornaments to Toronto. Then it picked up a bunch of old industrial material from Parry Sound.”

  I said nothing.

  He continued. “It stopped out there,” he pointed to the north “last night and the ship’s boat went out to meet another boat, so we suspect something was transferred last night.”

  I nodded.

  “They sent out two ship’s boats, neither of which returned to the ship. In fact, the only boats of any kind that went to the ship were your kayaks. If,” he went on, “smuggling was going on, that sure looks like you were part of it.”

  “Know what I think?” I said. “I think you were watching that boat and none of it makes sense to you. But you’re worried about somebody smuggling in some real nasty stuff, like anthrax or nuclear material or whatever.”

  He took a stick of gum, and popped it into his mouth. He called another guy over, and gave some sort of signal with his fingers. The other guy booted me behind my knees and I suddenly found myself kneeling. The ground wasn’t even.

  “But,” I went on anyway “I think this was just a small-scale smuggling operation between Cork and the captain of the ship.”

  “We’ll ask this Cork when we find him.” He got out a small pair of pliers and said, “You have a loose piece of scalp. Maybe we can help it.”

  “He’s not going anywhere,” I said, getting up. “He’s dead. He’s lying over that way, on this island.” They let me stay standing, which was awfully kind of them.

  Well, that got some action. My man had a quick conference with somebody – I didn’t turn around to look – and sat there for a while, contemplating me as a murderer, I suppose.

  “We’ll go for a walk,” he said, getting up. When I didn’t get move, he added, “you can lead.” I guess he was used to people who watched the muzzle of his gun instead of taking things for granted.

  I started inland. There were a few places that didn’t ache, but my head wasn’t one of them. It was quite overcast, but not raining yet, which was probably good for anybody not actually planning to take pictures in the rain. Maybe I was making a positive impression; he let me take a moment to ache at the universe.

  “Don’t get out of sight,” he said. Then he added, “one-inch circle at thirty yards against a running target, twelve shots out of fifteen.” He tilted his head my way and added, “probably not as good on full automatic, but it’s hard to tell when the body’s all mangled like that.”

  Don’t call me dense. I got the point, and slowed. Another helicopter sound came in from the distance, and a couple of motorboat sounds.

  Like I said, it isn’t much of an island. We scrambled across the mossy ditches and under the cedars; me collecting spider webs wet with morning dew and well populated with spiders, until we broke out onto flat rock on the other side. I looked both ways and saw a helicopter coming in towards the ship. Strangely, it seemed to be coming from the open water area, rather than from the mainland.

  We walked steadily along the shore for a few minutes, and I readily spotted Cork’s mortal remains, still huddled on the bare pink granite rock.

  “Ah,” I said, “I’d be happier if I had a name to call you by.”

  “What’s yours?” he asked, kneeling over Cork.

  “Win.”

  “He thought for a moment. “Call me Lew.” “This is Cork Detson, you say.??
?

  “Well Lew,” I said, “I have no way of knowing who the hell he was, but last night I got the distinct impression that that was his name.” I sat on an uncomfortable rock. “We were never properly introduced, he and I.”

  “Roll him over,” Lew said.

  “Pardon.”

  “One of us has to do it, and I usually understand it’s the guy without the gun.” He smiled at me. His dirty little automatic weapon was slung at his side.

  “Piss on you,” I said, but I grabbed one of Cork’s arms and rolled him. He didn’t roll too well; I guessed rigor mortis was setting in. The candy wrapper lay there, so I stuffed it casually in one of Cork’s pockets. Lew just raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

  “Snakebit?” Lew asked me.

  “Doubt it,” I said, and told him how a Massassauga doesn’t really carry enough poison to do in a grown man like Cork. “How long would you say it is?” I asked.

  “Coupla feet, maybe. Lew was obviously a bit shy on the metric system.

  “A rattler’s got a striking distance of maybe a third of its body length. That means, about eight inches.”

  “He’d have had to be kissing it,” Lew said.

  “Or trying to use it as a pillow. It’s possible he tried to nap on a rattlesnake, and it’s possible that a neck bite could stop a man’s heart. But it sure doesn’t seem likely to me.”

  “I think you’re right,” Lew said, “but things are going to be a lot simpler around here if he died of a snakebite.”

  “What do you think killed him?” I asked.

  Lew waved me away from the body. I found a piece of rocky shore to sit on and nice piece of rock to lean against, and closed my eyes. It looked a lot like rain just before my eyelids covered the universe. But I didn’t sleep much and a seagull or two called out its annoyance.

  “He’s got fang marks on his neck, and there’s a bruise there, but I think you’re right. He was dead when the snake bit him.” Lew waited till the seagull paused. “I think somebody shoved a sharp thing, maybe a long needle, down into his heart while he was sleeping.”

  A guy with a gun and a dead body, and I was still just about asleep until he said that. I let the chill run up my spine. “Nasty,” I said. Opening my eyes, I watched him.

  “Effective.” He poked at the body, but didn’t find anything to focus his attention. “If it’s true, someone knew enough to stick it in through the neck and down. Then maybe cover it with a snakebite.”

  “Who are you guys?” I asked him. I was tired beyond the redemption of humanity of any stripe, and my eyelids dropped over the world again.

  “Coast guard,” he said. “Canadian Coast guard.”

  I laughed. He smiled. “Canadian Ninja Coast Guard,” I said. Even without his central-U.S. accent, he was more likely to be advance guard from Atlantis than from the Canadian Coast Guard.

  “I like that one,” Lew said.

  I came out of a bizarre dream in which I was teaching economics on the shore to a group of pandas who didn’t speak English and were eyeing me for lunch. Heather, dressed only in moonbeams was dancing again by the water. I just had to get one of Galbraith’s simpler concepts over to the pandas, then I could go see Heather, but she was half-hidden by some panda asking a really stupid question of some sort, in a foreign language. Maybe it meant something. Someone was kicking my foot. I opened my eyes. I was sitting on a rocky shore, the sky looked like rain at any moment, and Lew was nudging my foot with his brown army boot.

  “Nap’s over,” he said. “Up and at ‘em.”

  Jesus Fucking Christ,” I said, suddenly wishing I were back with the pandas. “How long did you give me.”

  “Almost fifteen minutes. Probably more than you deserve.” He turned and walked away, stepping around Cork and heading north. I could hear helicopters, more than one, somewhere in the distance, and maybe a couple of outboard motors.

  I followed, pausing only to bend over Cork. I checked that the candy wrapper with Chinese writing on it was still in Cork’s pocket. He didn’t object.

  I stumbled down the shore, stepping over logs and rocks and other tripum stuff, till we got in sight of the ship, still patiently grounded on Canadian rock. There were a bunch of uniformed guys as well as the ship’s crew, and a big yellow helicopter was parked aslant on a clear spot.

  An inflatable with a big motor on the back slid towards us. The water had barely a ripple and the boat made almost no sound, despite the size of the motor. A murmur of voices from the area of the ship and the distant thwopping of a helicopter assured me I hadn’t gone deaf.

  “Now what?” I asked Lew.

  “Those Bill and Alice people you told me about. We’re going to find them if we can.”

  “Can’t I just stay here and sleep?”

  “You’ve got to identify them for us.” He grabbed a rope from the boat, and hauled it towards the shore. One of the two men in it got out and took the rope.

  Three guys with ugly little machine guns. The odds didn’t look great, so I got in, clambering over the black rubber pontoon. I sat on a seat in the middle, and when Lew was in, the guy on shore kicked the boat away and we were off, turning back towards the ship.

  “You might want to get somebody else from my group,” I said. “To help with the identifications.”

  “Your eyes gone bad all of a sudden?” Lew asked. He sat at the front of the boat, turned to face me.

  “I was never good at faces,” I said, “so it might be quicker if we had someone else.” It was the truth.

  “We’ll take that chance,” Lew said. He murmured sweet nothings into a small black box. The water hissed by, and the big outboard, painted in splotchy camouflage colors, hummed a hymn. We passed the group on shore. The fire had gone out, and the crew were milling in groups. Some people in black outfits stood among them.

  As we rounded the back of the ship, I looked up, but couldn’t see any activity up there.

  It took us less than ten minutes to get back to the campsite. Gypsy, my big plastic canoe, was still sitting on the shore with one end touching the water. Heather was standing at the edge beside it. She handed me some food: a bagel and some pepperoni sticks, as well as a bottle of water. She’d obviously been into my pack.

  “Things are looking up,” I said. I waved goodbye as the raft started. She was already on her way back to the camp, and didn’t see it. I said nothing to the guy running the motor behind us or to Lew, on the seat in front of me. They didn’t seem to mind. The guy at the motor had a brush cut, a hooknose, and an attitude that precluded trying to make conversation with him. He had that look in his eyes that would stop a hawk out of a clear sky.

  I examined the food and I ate it all. I loved it all. The morning had finally come, I had a chauffeured trip in a rubber boat, and all I had to do was identify and annoy Alice and Bill. The world brightened and it started to rain.

  “Where do we start?” I asked Lew.

  “You said they said they could see you from their cottage, so we’ll start with the nearest cottages.”

  “They could have been fibbing, you know.”

  “Gotta start somewhere.”

  We got to the closest island with cottages, and cruised in towards a nice little place with a wooden dock. “No sign of their boat,” I said. I covered my eyes and tried for a micro nap.

  “You’d recognize a boat before you’d recognize a face?” Lew asked.

  “Ah… yes, actually.”

  Lew got out and walked to the cottage. It looked empty, with boats on the rocks instead of at the dock. Lew inspected the place, then put something to his eyes and looked around. Infrared, I figured, checking for heat sources.

  After disappearing behind the building for a moment, he came back and got into the inflatable.

  “This could take a while.”

  “We’ll take the time. Anyway, we’ll be getting help shortly.”

  Something didn’t beep on Lew’s walkie-talkie, but he spoke into his shirt pocket. Q
uietly. Then he looked up at me and said, “We’ve got the angels on our side now.”

  “Right through the clouds?” It was spitting rain now and I was looking forward to getting wet and cold again. Not. I figured they had something checking the infrared signals from the local cottages.

  “Still works. Saves time. We’ve got a cottage at the tip of this island. It’s got heat from the kitchen and a bit from a motorboat.”

  If I hadn’t been so tired it might have impressed me. But I slid down to the bottom of the boat and closed my eyes, even with drops of rain falling on me and the boat slapping against the increasing waves.

  I must have got over a minute of deep slumber before Lew woke me.

  I crawled up to the seat and looked over. “That looks like their boat,” I said, nodding at the fishing boat tied to a steel dock.

  We walked slowly up to the house. At least I did. Somehow Lew disappeared from behind me after a few steps. I guess he figured that if someone was going to start shooting, I could warn him by falling onto the stones and bleeding to death.

  I walked up and knocked on the door. There was no answer. “I know you’re in there,” I yelled. “I’m going to count to five and kick the door in.” I stood to one side, and started counting. I figured when I got to four I’d start running for the dock. Or the woods; I hadn’t quite made up my mind.

  The door opened at three and Alice glared at me, chin thrust forward. “Nice to see you again,” I said.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m the one who knows what’s going on, and I think you’d like to know, too.” I waited. No doubt she’d like to pretend it was her evil twin sister I’d met the night before, but there was no doubt she must be frantic wondering what the hell was happening.

  She stood back. I entered.

  “Wanna make love?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Can I sit down?” There was a fire in a stone fireplace and a table with a couple of white coffee cups on it. On the table was a pair of lamps with coiled rattlesnakes as the bases. Pottery from Arizona, I figured, since the snakes looked like western diamondbacks. Cute.

  “Do you have to?”

  I sighed one of those world-weary sighs that reach out to the ends of the universe. “You will want to hear this,” I said, “and so will Bill, if that’s his real name.” I walked over to the end of the table closest to the fireplace and pulled out a chair. I turned it to face the fireplace and said, “The ship’s on the rocks, Cork’s dead, and there’s guys with submachine guns all over the place.”

  Bill came through a door and sat down at the table. His eyes were wide. He pulled at one eyebrow.

  “Better get him a coffee,” I suggested.

  Alice hesitated, then turned on a gas stove and put on a kettle of water. Then she sat down and looked at both of us.

  “We don’t know you,” she said. “We never saw you.”

  “I’m fine with that,” I said. “I really don’t care. But right outside your cottage there’s a guy in a camouflage outfit with a nasty little machine gun slung over his back. He’s probably wiring this place with listening devices or explosives right now.”

  Alice and Bill just looked at each other. The kettle started to boil. “Tea,” I said. “I don’t like coffee and I’m really, really tired.”

  Bill got up this time. I went to the door stepped out, and yelled, “Lew, for fuck’s sake, get your ass in here!” I tried for an echo off the nearby islands.

  “You don’t have to shout,” said a voice behind me.

  “Cased the joint?” I asked Lew. “Wired it with plastique? I’m still alive so they’re not shooting people today.”

  He grinned. “Standard procedure. Besides, even us ninjas need to have a crap now and again."

  “I’ll have some of your wonderful instant coffee,” he told Bill as he came in behind me.

  “These people,” I said, indicating Alice and Bill, “say they’ve never met me in spite of my claim I spent a nice time with them around a campfire last night and know them as Alice and Bill. You can figure out which is which. This fellow,” I said, indicating Lew, “claims to be a Canadian Coast Guard officer named Lew.” I took my teabag out of the cup and dropped it onto the vinyl-covered table. People never think what you’re going to do with the teabag.

  “A fellow on a freighter who said his name is Peter claimed a bunch of rebel crew ran his ship onto the rocks. Somewhere along the shore of Blizzard Island I found the body of a guy who I called Cork.” I looked around. About the only thing I’m sure of is that the ship’s on the rock, somebody’s dead, and this tea isn’t strong enough to keep me awake much longer.”

  You’d think all that talking would have inspired the others. It didn’t. I looked at Lew. “I think these guys were smuggling something and are trying to deny it all.”

  I turned to Alice. She looked smarter than Bill. “If this guy’s Canadian Coast guard, I’m Walt Disney and all his little mice,” I said. “I think that when that ship whose name I can’t remember because I’m so tired stopped someone thought someone might be smuggling anthrax or nuclear bombs into the continent. I can’t see such interest from all these James Bonds for anything else. If I were you, I’d confess real quick, before I fall asleep and he pulls your fingernails out and dumps you into the bay with an anchor accidentally attached.”

  It was a long speech. I went to the cupboard and found some crackers. I went to the fridge and found some cheese. I love cheese and crackers. I didn’t offer any of the others anything.

  Bill spoke first.

  “We…” he began, waving his arms and spilling coffee.

  Alice interrupted him at once. “Shut up.”

  Bill did. I didn’t know whether he was shocked or just used to taking orders from her. He sat down abruptly, and took a sip of coffee.

  Alice rubbed her nose in the traditional fashion of all liars and looked me directly in the eye. “Cork,” she said, “was a close friend of ours.” She sipped her coffee and went on. “He asked us to do him a favor.”

  Bill stared at her, but said nothing.

  Neither Lew nor I bothered to interrupt, so after a moment of silence, she went on. “Cork asked us to watch this guy” – she indicated me –“and his friends to make sure they wouldn’t see, ah interfere, with what he was doing. And, ah, that’s all we did. Just went over and made sure they didn’t wander around and see things they weren’t supposed to see.”

  Lew didn’t turn out to be much of an inquisitor, from what I could see, so I asked, “And what was it that we weren’t supposed to see? What was Cork doing?” I looked over at Bill, but he didn’t take the bait.

  “Smuggling,” Alice said. “He never said for sure, but all the locals here knew he was into smuggling.”

  “What,” Lew asked, “would he want to smuggle to a Chinese ship or get from a Chinese ship?”

  “Animal parts,” Alice said.

  There was a long silence.

  “Animal parts?” I asked.

  “You know,” Alice said. “Stuff that they make into medicines in China and places like that. Tell them, Bill.”

  “Ah,” Bill’s eyes focused on something other than Alice, finally. He went to the cupboard, brought back a package of figgy cookies, and set them on the table. I looked at them like the groom looks at the bride when the motel door closes behind them.

  I took a stack of ten or twelve and passed the package to Lew, who took a few. I guess he figured, like me, that the odds were good that Alice and Bill didn’t have a readily prepared batch of poisoned cookies handy.

  “Bear gall bladders,” Bill said about the time I had my mouth full and was off to the cupboard for a glass to get some water in. “That and deer antlers and….” He looked at Alice. “Penises from some animals. Maybe a few other things, too.” He looked directly at me. “I’m not sure. I just hear things like that around town.”

  “He told you this?” I asked
, crumbs of Fig Newton scattering everywhere. I watched my hand push any that were on the table onto the floor.

  “No,” Alice broke in. “It was pretty common knowledge that he was in the market. That he’d buy any of that sort of thing anybody had to sell.” She looked over at Bill, then went on. “He’d usually go to Toronto for that sort of deal. So I’ve heard. But I guess someone was watching him now.” She turned and looked out the window over the bay.

  In the distance, a helicopter flew by. Then another came in, low and slow over the cottage. We stopped and waited. Like a schoolboy, I was burning to run out and have a look, but instead I helped myself to a cup of lukewarm tea.

  In the following silence, Lew asked. “How did Cork get paid for this stuff? These animal bladders or whatever? Cash or exchange.”

  “Cash. Always cash. American dollars.”

  “You’re sure.”

  Alice bobbed her head. “Oh yes. He insisted on cash and nothing but. Where would he deal with anything else in Parry Sound?”

  “That’s right,” Bill started to add, but looked at Alice and stopped.

  “What do you think?” Lew wanted to know.

  “I think this tea is going to make me throw up my Fig Newtons,” I said, “and that I’m tired and want to sleep.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “I think Cork sold four thousand bear penises in exchange for a low-yield nuke and a big bag of anthrax,” I said, and that this tea was spiked with strychnine.”

  “Wise-ass.” Lew handed me a pistol he extracted from somewhere on him. “If they try to escape, shoot them.” He got up and left. Our eyes followed him down to the dock, where he sat and held a long conversation on his Boy Scout walkie-talkie, or whatever they’d issued him.

  I looked back at the other two. “Do you think this thing is loaded?” I asked, setting the gun on the table.

  “Want me to take a look?” Bill raised his eyebrows.

  “Can I take a leak, or are you going to shoot me if I don’t sit here?” Alice asked.

  “So many decisions,” I said. “Go do whatever you want. Strangle Mr. Ninja out there and take his boat for all I care.” Alice gave me a nasty look and went through a door at the back of the cottage.

  I slid the gun over to Bill, pushing it too hard. He caught it and set it gently on the table. After a moment’s examination, he pressed something and a cartridge popped out of the handle. He picked up the parts and examined them. “Eight or nine bullets in here,” he said. Reassembling the gun, he passed it to me, handle-first. I dropped it into my pocket.

  Then he leaned towards me and whispered, “She was his girlfriend, but they were having a big fight.”

  “What?” I asked, my head groggy. “Who?”

  “Alice and Cork. They were living together until last week.” He pointed to a couple of speakers by a large stereo system. “He kicked those in.” They did look as if someone had taken a real dislike to them. They were good speakers, Jensens, and it seemed a shame. But then again, I’ve been so close to kicking in so many speakers in life, or pulling the wires loose, that I was no person to judge. But that was mostly the sappy music they played on them wherever I wanted to have a moment’s peace. The Canadian content regulations have made sure that everyone in Canada has heard “Big Yellow Taxi” or “Sweet City Woman” eight hundred million times.

  Besides, they were big speakers, and nowadays everyone’s into little itty bitty speakers with thick wires running to them and an amp that’ll dim the house lights when someone hits a base note.

  “They had a big fight about something last week, and he moved out,” Bill went on. “Just as well because she wouldn’t dare move out on Cork. You just don’t do that to that guy. Is he really dead?”

  I nodded. “He is, and I’ve got you pegged for murdering him.”

  “Me?” No way! Jesus, man, unless I had a nuke to drop on that bastard and a long-range missile to do it with, I’d never think of trying. He’s too dangerous. Jesus, I wonder if Alice did it. Did they say how he died?”

  “Looked like a rattlesnake,” I said.

  Bill laughed. “Oh that’s rich. Cork used to pick up rattlers in his bare hands. I heard from a guy I knew that he ate one, once, the entire thing. Let’s hope it actually was a rattler.”

  I nodded, groggily. “Yeah.”

  Outside, Lew was still talking down by the dock. Another helicopter went by, in the distance, and I could hear a motorboat or two out on the water somewhere.

  Alice came back in, and I got up. “My turn,” I said.

  Inside the toilet I dropped my pants and sat down. I really needed to take a crap, and it was so nice to have some time to myself.

  You know, I’m not the most social of people, although you wouldn’t know it from the trip I was on.

  I like – hell I need – to get away from people from time to time and contemplate the sky, the earth, and my own rotten little soul.

  I’d dearly have loved to be sitting on the shore of Blizard Island as the sun went down or came up or with the rain falling all over me, all freaking alone and sipping on a whiskey and just feeling bejeezedly alone, alone, alone. Did I mention that before? I guess I did.

  Well, I’ll mention it again, because it sure hadn’t turned out that way. Phil might know when to leave me alone with my thoughts, but Alice and Bill and Lew and Cork the corpse and shipfull of foreign sailors and whatever SAS-clones were out there sure as hell didn’t know.

  I was sitting on the toilet feeling sorry for myself and thinking how damn near constipated I was, maybe from having a tight sphincter for the last 25 hours and looking at the gun on the floor and thinking this was the best place I’d been in a while, smell or no smell, when a voice I didn’t recognize said, from the other side of the door, “You’d better come out now.” It was a deep, authoritative voice.

  “Okay, I’m done,” I said, pulling up my pants.

  “We want you to open the door a bit, then slide the gun out on the floor with your foot. Then you can come out.”

  It seemed like a perfectly reasonable request. I picked the gun up by the tip of the barrel, then dipped it into the toilet bowl to season it. It came out – well, I won’t go into details. I put the gun on the floor then flushed the toilet.

  Then I opened the door, kicked the gun out into the room, and came out with my hands up.

  There were three new guys there, all of them with the same little machine guns and dark outfits that Lew had. One guy looked at me, then picked up the gun. He dropped it real quickly.

  From the corner of the room Lew said, “I guess he won’t be any trouble,’ and came forward.

  The guy who’d first picked up the gun kicked it towards Lew and said, “your pistol’s damp.”

  Lew inspected it, then found an old plastic shopping bag and toed the gun into it. He looked at me. “I could make you clean this. I could make you lick it clean.”

  I smiled. “Then these guys would think you’d lost your cool. And they’d talk about it forever, you know.”

  “I’ll be back,” Lew said, “and they will anyway,” and went to wash his gun in the lake.

  The other guys were grinning. I ignored them and went down to the dock to watch Lew. Nobody tried to stop me. I noticed Bill and Alice sitting on lawn chairs on the front porch of the cottage, talking to yet another dark-suited hero. I wondered what the relationship between Bill and Alice was, but I never found out.

  “Tell me,” Lew said when I sat on the dock, “that you were afraid the monsters had come and you were trying to hide my gun. Don’t tell me,” he went on, setting the cleaned and wet gun on the dock, “that you did this out of some anger thing. Cause then I’d have to shoot you.”

  “The authorities will be here any time,” I noted. “The real authorities that deal with grounded ships and things like that. Like immigrants and things. If you haven’t found anything serious, it would be in your best interest to get out of here before the media gets here. Just to prote
ct your own – just to make sure people don’t find out all about you, if you know what I mean.”

  “That,” said Lew, disassembling the gun without really looking at it, and cleaning it with a small cloth, “is the basic idea. It looks like this was nothing more than a small-time smuggling venture in animal parts for Asian medical shows.”

  “No anthrax? No nukes?”

  “Not that our detectors could find.”

  “That’s what those helicopters were doing.”

  “One of the things they were doing.”

  “Now?” I said.

  “Now?”

  “Now you want our silence, in case we tell the Globe and Mail that the CIA special forces have been running all over these islands, probably without anybody’s invite.”

  “We’re allowed. Special circumstances. And we’re not the fucking CIA.”

  “Tell that to the papers.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Well,” I said, “Bill and Alice here aren’t going to say anything if there’s a chance they can pin the whole thing on Cork.”

  “And the rest of you?”

  “You’ve been scanning these outer islands for metal from the helicopters. Tell us where you found any metal and we’re happy to tell the world you’re just two retired officers from the OPP in Parry Sound.”

  He thought. “Probably easier than drowning you guys.”

  “Not really,” I said, “but less messy.”

  I walked to the end of the dock to be alone. There was a large moving line off a dock support. I leaned over, saw a dark mass moving down there. A catfish, tethered. Lew lent me a knife and I cut the line.

  I went back to Blizard Island with Lew and some other dude in a helicopter with pontoons. It was fun. I decided I’d like one for Christmas, so I wouldn’t have to paddle upwind any more. I got a good view of the islands. I could see two kayaks out among the islands. Heather and Nancy, I figured, heading home. I didn’t know whether to be sad or glad.

  The helicopter landed just outside our campsite. I waded ashore like General MacArthur, water to my knees. “I have returned,” I told Phil and the two military types with him. They were standing around a small and smoky campfire. One of the guys was covered with ash. You should never stand downwind of a helicopter prop wash.

  The other two guys waded out to the helicopter, had a brief shouting match, and got in. Then they left, with our ears trying to adjust to the silence.

  “Hello you old motherfucker,” I said to Phil. “Did you eat all the hotdogs?”

  “Might have a couple left I used to wipe my ass with.”

  For a minute we just looked at each other. The sound of the helicopter motor disappeared into the distance, leaving only faint sounds coming from the north end of the island.

  “Noisy bunch, aren’t they?” I said, nodding my head in that direction.

  “Probably,” Phil said, “just a bunch of very oriental people waiting for a bunch of very confused Parry Sound police to arrive.”

  “It’ll give the police something to do other than looking for lost fishermen.”

  “I’m surprised there aren’t a lot of them sharing our campfire.”

  “My campfire, stranger.”

  “Isn’t this the one I made last night?”

  “It went out. I made this one. It just looks the same.”

  “Sure does. Anyway, no point in calling me ‘stranger’. You’re stranger than I’ll ever dream of being.” I grabbed my lawn chair and pulled it up to the edge of the fire. The smoke swung around in my direction.”

  “It’s all relative, as Albert said.”

  “He must have had some strange relatives.”

  “Some special ones, I hear, and a general in the family. I expect someone’s guarding them till the real cops show up and they’ll do the guarding till the real coast guard shows up.”

  I realized he’d got one reference beyond me and was talking about the ship and its crew again. “Crowded little island,” I commented, tossing a small twig onto the fire. It seemed strange having a fire about ten or eleven in the morning, but I was still tired and this had been a strange trip from the get-go. “We could move.”

  “I like that idea,” Phil said, putting a can of water onto the grate over the fire. “Got any good ideas?”

  “Just another island, but not too far. We wouldn’t want to miss the rest of the show. Besides,” I dug a wiener from the cooler, “somebody’s going to want to know what we don’t know about Cork.” I watched Phil.

  “Cork’s around?” Phil seemed casual about it.

  I pointed. “Over that way a few hundred yards, last I saw. Dead.”

  Phil went to get a wiener for himself, impaling it sideways on a y-shaped wooden stick. I was using a telescoping gadget I’d got as a gift. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Phil said.

  “You and he must have got back onto this island about the same time,” I said. “You didn’t meet him?” I was getting concerned about how little surprise Phil had learning of Cork’s death, and that he didn’t have any questions about how Cork died.

  “Didn’t see him,” Phil said, putting ketchup on his hot-dog, a hanging crime as far as I was concerned. I have only mustard on my hot-dogs, like a civilized human.

  “Bigger island than it looks,” I said.

  “Must be bigger than it looks,” Phil agreed, watching the horizon. Off to the northwest a couple of fast boats were approaching the island. The police, I figured.

  “Phil,” I said, putting down my hot-dog and looking him in the eye, do you think hockey players are overpaid?”

  “Vastly,” Phil said, after a moment’s silence. “Unlike the royal family, who provide far more entertainment than they ever get paid for.”

  “You put ketchup on your hot-dogs,” I accused him. “And you laugh at the House of Windsor.”

  “You got any idea what they use to make mustard that yellow?” Phil said. “Probably what drove the royal family nuts in the first place.”

  “I’m kinda tired,” I said. “I could use some sleep.”

  “I got a few hours last night under some tree,” Phil said. “Go ahead; I’ll keep the ghouls and goblins off you.”

  I curled up in a sleeping bag in the tent, put a towel over my face, and decided after a couple of minutes I was way too wound up to sleep. About that time I must have fallen asleep.

  I dreamed that a storm had come up. Heather and I were in the ship, somewhere in the islands. It was dark from the rain, which was driving horizontally and banging against the steel hull. I knew in my heart that the ship was in danger; it was heeling over to an awful degree and I could hear the hull scraping and banging on some rock.

  The wind had whipped the sea into froth, and you couldn’t tell where the water surface ended and the air began. Strangely, it was all very quiet, like a TV set in the video store with the sound turned off.

  I looked up, and the crew, which seemed to include a former prime minister and a journalist, were launching the last lifeboat.

  I figured there was one chance to get away, but Heather had gone down to the galley to make sandwiches and I ran after her. When I opened the door, Cork was sitting on the table chewing on a very large snake. I ran back up, but the ship was rolling over as I climbed the steel stairs.

  I woke to a loud noise and the tent flapping. A very loud noise and a lot of flapping. I got out of the sleeping bag and out of the tent before the tent pulled up stakes and flew along the ground to snag in a dead cedar. I’d always wondered why dead trees were called snags; I guess I found out.

  I was still groggy and confused, because I’d been dreaming I was sitting in a café somewhere with Heather and explaining to her that nudity wasn’t allowed in whatever town the café was in. Then she was dancing again on the shore, which was just outside the café.

  Adjusting was a stretch.

  There were dust and twigs, some of them smoldering, everywhere, particularly in the air, coming at me. Above me
looked to be the same helicopter I’d come over on, pontoons and all. It was about ten feet above the ground when it stopped coming down.

  A door in the copter opened, and Lew leaned out. He tossed a something at me. I ducked, and it missed me, but I didn’t know whether that had been his intention or not. Then they were up and gone, thwopping back towards the mainland.

  I found the thrown object, determined that it didn’t look explosive, and then joined Phil in stamping out fires started by having the campfire wood blown in all directions, and in gathering up our belongings. I think we got most of them.

  “I think we should have changed islands,” Phil said, dousing smoking branches in the lake.

  “Gotta agree with you now,” I said, setting up the lawn chairs. I left the tents in sad-looking bundles.

  “Your friends?” Phil asked, as I showed him what gift we’d got. It was a brick, with a bag attached. Inside the bag were a few folded sheets of paper.

  “Acquaintances,” I said, “at least one of them.”

  You must have pissed him off, somehow.”

  “He loaned me his gun once, and I took pretty shitty care of it. I guess he took it personally. But maybe he does keep his promises.” I opened the bag and took out the papers. After a look at them, I passed them to Phil.

  He looked puzzled for a moment, then smiled. “Any beer left?” he asked.

  “In the morning? You never drink beer in the morning.”

  “You’re right,” Phil said. “Pass me the scotch that’s hidden in the beer cooler bag.

  It wasn’t a big bottle and it was Alberta Rye instead of scotch, but I guess you have to make some allowances for people like Phil. I handed him the plastic bottle and found his cup among the debris we’d collected and put into a pile. “Get your cup, too,” Phil said.

  We’d got in the habit of taking plastic bottles of stuff with us years before, when we’d done some camping in Algonquin. The park doesn’t allow cans or glass bottles, because people abandon them at the campsites. Besides, plastic bottles don’t clink so much when you’re loading your camping gear back home.

  My cup, of course, was also filled with various debris and lifeforms, so I washed both in the waters of Georgian Bay. The waters by the shore would have been cleaner if someone hadn’t scattered a thin film of ash and dirt in the immediate locality.

  “Want a fire?” I asked, handing Phil his cup and the bottle.

  Phil looked around. “I think we’re done with fires for today.” He gestured with his cup, and I held out mine. Squinting, he poured half the bottle into my cup and the rest into his cup.

  “And what did I do to deserve half the bottle” I asked, warily. I almost said, “who do I have to kill?” but nipped that line before it got past my molars.

  “These,” said Phil, “are pictures from the air.” He pointed to the roll of papers that Lew had chucked from the plane.

  “Like aerial photographs, somewhat,” I suggested.

  “If they were wide-angle they might have got your asshole in them too. These,” he continued, still waving his cup around – “no! Don’t drink yet!” he said when I was about to take a sip, “wait a goddamn moment won’tcha.”

  I sank into the lawn chair facing the nonexistent fire and set my cup carefully on a rock. Considering the fact that God seldom provides a horizontal surface anywhere in rock country, this may have constituted an act of bravery on my part. Unnoted by the war medals commission, for sure.

  Phil went on. “Now that I’ve got your undivided attention, I’d like to note that these pictures are of some of the islands around here, and they have little X’s all over them.”

  “Ah,” I said. “A promise fulfilled.” I gave Phil a smug grin.

  “Then it’s what I think it is? The location of metal sources in the islands?”

  “That’s what he said he’d get me,” I said. “A gift from above,” I added.

  “From out of the whirlwind,” Phil said. “Not to mention the possibility of a few burning bushes around.” He looked around, but nothing was on fire at the moment.

  “A check for nukes?” I asked.

  “Likely. If somebody tried to sneak a small nuke from the ship to one of the islands, there’d be enough of a metal signature to show up.”

  “I’d have thought they’d pick up radiation, too.”

  Phil shrugged. “I imagine they checked out each of these places with a Geiger counter. As well as turning over every aluminum boat and peeking in every cottage.”

  “Any other places on those pictures.”

  “Yup.”

  “Treasure hunt!” I held up my cup.

  “Treasure hunt.” We both took a big sip.

  “Wait!” I think I deserve more than half!” I said.

  Phil spat some back into his cup and handed it to me. “On the other hand,” I said, ignoring his cup “ you’ve got the metal detector. Half will do.”

  “Wanna throw a log on the celebratory fire?” I suggested, figuring that when I’d finished my cup of maybe seven ounces of Alberta rye I wouldn’t be pronouncing “celebratory” as well, so it was as good a time as any.

  Phil picked up an imaginary stick and tossed it to where the fire had been. Then he poked the place with another imaginary stick.

  “Footstools.” Phil said. “We should have packed footstools.”

  “Your own goddamn fault,” I said. “If you had kept Heather and Nancy here, we could have used them.”

  “So what,” Phil said. “We sit on lawn chairs on a desert island, looking at treasure maps, drinking Irish whiskey, with our feet on a couple of cute chicks? Did you want to have our flies open and get a blow job at the same time?”

  “No point in limiting our fantasies.” I turned towards the noise at the end of the island. “Our desert island has a way to go to be deserted, it seems.” There was the sound of many voices, some giving orders, the sound of approaching boats, and a helicopter and small plane buzzed the end of the island. A fighter came and went, leaving a roll of thunder.

  “Some people don’t appreciate a good treasure hunt.” Phil finished his drink and set his cup down. “It’s true you got kidnapped by a ship full of oriental women?”

  “An all-female crew,” I said. “Six hours of non-stop fucking. I had to run the ship onto the island just to save my life.” I looked up at the treetops, to a small red plane circling in. “Last I saw you, you were paddling away with Nancy.”

  Phil paused a long time, rubbed his nose, and hunched up in the chair. “Many adventures. Got approached by some boat full of strange people. Rolled your canoe. Lost track of Nancy when she got hauled into the boat. Got your canoe and a paddle after they’d gone. Came back to the island and went to sleep under a bush.”

  “I guess it’s good or bad depending on whose bush you go to sleep under. You’re lucky Cork didn’t find you.”

  “Yeah.” Phil turned and smiled. “But now we’re all alone on the island.”

  Alone must be a state of mind. The north end of the island was still noisy with people and craft coming and going. True, some boats were leaving the island, all right, but a couple of uniformed guys were coming through the trees in our direction.

  “Phil,” I said, “throw another log onto the fire. We got company.”

  “Phil followed my eyes. “Welcome,” he called. They had provincial police uniforms and looked like they were having a positively neutral time. “Can I put some coffee on for you?” Phil mimed pouring water into a billy can and propping it over the ashes.

  “We’re going to need some identification,” the shorter of the two said, tilting his head.

  “Gotta say amen to that,” Phil said, putting more imaginary logs on the imaginary fire. “You should see your boss about getting some name tags. And business cards. Business cards are always good. Then you’ll always have identification when you need it.”

  I really didn’t think tweaking the local cops was a good idea, so I took out an imaginary toothbrush and
picked up my cup and did some imaginary, if thorough, brushing of my teeth.

  “Ah,…” the bigger cop said, probably trying to figure out whether to drown me or not.

  I reached into my pocket, drew out my wallet, and handed him a damp business card.

  “Mr….” He began.

  “Szczedziwoj” I said. “At your service. Wilderness photography a specialty.” The name’s pronounced Chehgeevoy, with maybe an “sh” at the front. It stops most people, which has its advantages. I didn’t stand, which probably put me in the same category as a thousand local yahoos and drunken cottagers about to try to wrassle the nearest cop to the ground.

  On the other hand, I didn’t feel inclined to suck up to anybody at the moment. Even if he had a gun.

  “You got a business card?” the other cop asked Phil.

  Phil just shook his head. That was fine; I’d expected him to moon the cops.

  “Look,” I said, “We got here last night. We haven’t got much sleep. Anything we tell you is something we’re going to have to tell you again, when you can type it up on some sort of form.” I scratched my ear. “So why don’t we stop up at the police station in Parry Sound tomorrow some time and tell you everything we know?”

  The bigger cop, who had probably just enjoyed an hour’s jaunt away from the aggressive drivers from Toronto and the drunken locals of Parry Sound was inclined to be forgiving. “That would be fine,” but I’d like some photo ID before we go.

  So long as they left. I handed him my driver’s license, which was, at least dry, since the government now produces plastic-coated cards. I considered for a moment plastic-coating my business cards, since I did have a tendency to fall out of canoes. The bigger cop scanned it, compared it to my business card, and handed my license back to me.

  Turning to Phil, he said, “I’d like your name, too.”

  Phil shook his head. “I don’t think so. You’d have to get a new driver’s license and passport and you’d disappoint everybody but your kids. Best to stick with your own name.”

  The smaller cop looked like he was trying to decide whether or not he could get away with a couple of warning shots through Phil’s head. He said, slowly, “we’d like to see some photo ID.” Then he paused, knowing Phil was about to agree that that’s what they’d like to see. “Please show us some photo ID now,” he said. Then he added, “sir.”

  Well I could tell that those were the very words the inquest would hear, so I turned to Phil. “Man-o-War always stopped running when he’d gone once around the track.”

  Phil laughed, and dug his wallet out of his pack, with two cops wondering if he’d come up with a bazooka. He selected his driver’s license and handed it to the smaller cop, who noted the details, slowly, onto a notepad.

  “We’d invite you for hotdogs,” Phil said, when he’d got his card back, “but we’ve eaten the last one.”

  “How unfortunate, sir,” the bigger cop said. “We’ll expect you sometime tomorrow. You can find the police station in Parry Sound?”

  “Did you know,” Phil told him, “that snapping turtles breathe through their asses all winter?”

  “We’ll find it,” I said, beating Phil to a response and saving ourselves some trouble. The cops nodded and left without another word.

  “Speaking of treasure….” I said.

  “Finish your drink,” Phil said. Not knowing what else to do, I did. Let me tell you sometime about the evils of alcohol.

  “We start with this island?” I suggested.

  “No way,” Phil said. “There are too many evil people wandering all over here looking for other evil people. We’ll go over thataway.” He gestured to the west.

  Well, there wasn’t much in the way of islands to the west, and I figured if I got into the canoe and we missed the island, Phil would just keep paddling out across Georgian Bay. With me backpaddling and making the canoe go in circles, we’d get somewhere in about twelve years.

  Besides, Aisha would find out if I paddled drunk, and I wasn’t prepared to face that sort of price.

  “The best time to treasure-hunt this island is exactly when there are lots and lots of people here,” I said, waving my hand and spilling the last of the scotch. It’s perfect cover because people will think we’re actually doing something useful.”

  “You have an addiction to paddling sober that is truly sad to see in an old fart,” Phil said, shaking his head at the ground.

  “Besides,” I said, “it’s my canoe.”

  “It’s my canoe, it’s my canoe, it’s my canoe,” Phil mocked. He sighed heavily and shook his head again. “I guess I don’t have much choice.” He looked like the universe had conspired against him.

  I got up and took the maps.

  “Shouldn’t we set up the tent?” Phil asked.

  “It’s still early,” I said. “Shouldn’t we eat?”

  Phil dug a couple of cans out of a tote and handed me a can opener. I mixed canned corn and canned tuna onto a plate, and handed Phil half. We ate with our fingers, which seemed reasonable at the time. We must have been hungry. We took a few big drinks of water. Then we set out along the island.

  We must have stopped every twelve feet to check the map or to pee. You’d think we’d had a dozen beer, rather than some dehydrating scotch. In among the grass there was a goodly sprinkling of the shiny green leaves of poison ivy, but neither of us peed on them; however illogically, it felt like we’d get itchy dicks just from the contact. Nobody needs to be logical all the time.

  Finally, Phil looked at the map, and looked at the landscape around us. We were in a tiny moss-and-branch-filled gully on the south end of the island. “Here,” he said, pointing at the ground at the lowest point of the gully.

  “Here?”

  “That’s what the map says.”

  “You just pissed here,” I noted.

  “Yeah, I did, kinda,” Phil agreed.

  “Your fucking metal detector.”

  “I detect; you dig. That was the agreement.”

  “I don’t’ remember any fucking agreement like that,” I said.

  “Your memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  “It’s still good enough for that. Besides, it’s your piss, not mine.”

  “That makes it easier?” Phil scratched his foot against a tree.

  “It should. You pissed on your boots twice in the last half hour.” It was true. When drunk, Phil tended to wave his arms when he talked, even when one of those arms was connected to his dick. His friends had learned to stand well away under occasions like that.

  Phil pondered this slowly, swinging his metal detector in large arcs. It beeped every time it came back to the wet spot on the moss. “Make you a deal,” he said. “Good forever.”

  “What deal?” I sat on a log, because the moss was such shifty stuff underfoot.

  “My metal detector, you dig unless I’ve pissed on the place.”

  I pondered what I might be letting myself in on. “Only if I’ve renewed the agreement before we leave on an expedition.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “I don’t trust you not to phone me from the Bank of Nova Scotia some midnight telling me to bring a pick and shovel.”

  “How about on all joint treasure-hunting expeditions?”

  “Okay,” I said. Something told me a lawyer would have been a good idea, but I figured I could always get one later.

  “Hold this.” Phil handed me the detector, broke off a dead branch of tree, and scraped a couple of inches of green moss away. Then he took to moving any dead branches nearby – he didn’t get the bigger ones moved – and scraping into the spongy ground with his hand when his improvised shovel broke.

  We found it about a foot below the moss, and even I got to helping, if only to hold back some tree branches that insisted on swinging back at Phil.

  It was pretty rusty. Actually, it was a pile that was as much rust as metal. We worked at it like prospectors going after the Lost Dutchman mine.
r />   When we hit solid rock underneath, Phil sat back, sweating. “What do you think we got?”

  “A canoeful of iron oxide, if we want to take it home,” I said, “but I hear the market for rust’s down nowadays. Maybe we can take it out in the bay and flag down a lake freighter and trade the whole pile for an old donut.”

  “Wise-ass.”

  “Maybe we can call it an art object and get a Canada Council grant. Call it ‘Abstract With Temporal Vectors and an Odor of Piss” for example,” I suggested.

  Phil sat on the moss, still huffing, and just looked at me.

  “What we really have,” I said, “is a mess.” I waved my arm around. “We had a pristine island except for a grounded ship and stuff like that, and now we have a mess with pieces of rusty metal.”

  “No historical value?” Phil asked.

  “Your brain has more historical value.”

  “I guess we put it back.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do with it, so we spent half an hour trying to stuff it back where it came from and make the ground into some semblance of what it had looked like before we came. Phil does a lot of metal detecting, and prides himself on “replacing his divots” – making sure there’s little trace of his searchings.

  It didn’t work here. When we were done the place still looked like two warthogs had fought a battle to the death in that little hollow. Maybe we should have numbered the pieces of moss before we dug them up.

  And there was a rusty pipe a half meter long that just refused to be buried. Eventually, Phil gave up on it, and took it to the edge of the island and chucked it as far out into the water as he could. I was glad nobody saw that, or we’d have had half the army dredging for it.

  “Now what,” I asked, when Phil got back.

  “Now we leave the scene of the crime and proceed to desecrate another place.”

  No problem for me. We were starting to get sober with all that work and I wanted some semblance of lucidity before trying another island.

  There were three sites from the aerial photo on Blizard Island, one within sight of the ship. There were a dozen people around the ship, and they watched as we dug up a piece of aluminum fishing boat.

  Three islands later, on a somewhat bigger island called, for reasons unknown, Palestine Island, we hit pay dirt.

  By that time we’d made a fire and had an early supper. Phil’s an atheist who firmly believes the gods are out to get him, so it was either bad luck that it was pretty well the last place we looked or good luck that we actually found something.

  By agreement, I was digging when we hit a wooden box with metal bands. The wood was mostly rotten, and the metal bands came apart in a shower of rust, but there was a worm-eaten canvas bag inside. The whole thing was maybe a meter square, and half that deep.

  I looked at Phil and Phil looked at me, and together we peeled back chunks of canvas. I handed Phil a soggy mass of greenish paper.

  He inspected it. “Might have been money, once.”

  “Worth anything?”

  “Only to the worms.” Phil set the lump on rock. He peeled back a bit of the outside and shook his head. “Sons of bitches of pirates should stick to gold. Gold doesn’t rot.”

  “Not good enough to redeem?”

  “Not good enough for compost.”

  I reached into the box and started handing out the contents, unlabelled green bottles. Phil took each one and set it aside. There were eighteen of them. There was nothing below the bottles but rotten wood, a couple of rusted iron straps, and solid rock.

  “Shall we open one?” Phil asked, waving to them. He was covered with debris and sweating buckets.”

  “Let’s go back to camp.”

  “Too crowded there.”

  “Our sleeping bags are there.”

  “We could bring them here.”

  “Too much like work.”

  “We could stay up all night.”

  “Did that last night. Two in a row seems unlikely.”

  Phil contemplated that for a while. “Okay, load them into the canoe.”

  “Me?”

  “You. I gotta carry the metal detector.”

  “I’ll take as many as I can carry.”

  In the end, since it was only a stone’s throw to the canoe, we got them all in and paddled back. We must have made a fine sight for someone, being silhouetted against the sunset.

  “Is this what it comes to?” Phil inspected a bottle as I set up my tent. He didn’t seem inclined to set up his own tent, but hey, I’m for every middle-aged guy doing his own thing wherever possible.

  “What?” I said, putting a rock onto a peg. There was no soil to pound pegs into, so one tied as many tent corners as possible to trees, bushes, and twigs, and for the rest you set the peg sideways onto the ground and set a rock on it. It’ll pull out and let the tent fall on you in a heavy wind, but, unlike Phil, I hadn’t brought a self-supporting tent.

  “I asked the gods to bring me success. I put tobacco on a rock to appease the manitous. For this I get eighteen bottles of rotgut alcohol.”

  “Might be quality American whiskey.” I threw my sleeping bag into the tent, along with anything I didn’t want to get wet if it rained in the night. My camera was still in its Pelican waterproof case in a ratty old tote, but I put it inside anyway. I was half hoping it would get stolen or washed away someday so I’d have an excuse to buy a new one. On the other hand, it was an old friend.

  “They shipped the cheapest possible stuff to the States then,” Phil said, poking at the fire. The first stars were coming out, and the clouds were breaking up around them. “And they brought industrial alcohol back.”

  “They brought alcohol back from the States?” I got the lawn chair as level as I could and scratched myself. Note to self: take shower when arrive home.

  “It was legal to make industrial alcohol for export.” Phil poured a can of stew into a pot more or less balanced over the fire.

  “And Canada imported industrial alcohol…”

  Phil stirred the stew. “We flavored it and smuggled it back as well-aged whiskey. Made a lot of Canadian millionaires that way."

  I eyeballed the eighteen bottles and took a long sip of water from the canteen. “There’s no reason for these bottles,” I noted. “Industrial alcohol would come back legitimately in large containers. And nobody would bring back the same stuff he wanted to smuggle out.”

  Phil got out a corkscrew and opened one bottle. He sniffed it, then took a sip. Then he handed it to me.

  I waved my arms. “I damn well deserve my own bottle, considering whatever and your many social diseases.”

  Phil opened one for me, sniffed it, and passed it over. “Same stuff.”

  I sniffed, then tilted it back.

  “Well,” Phil said.

  “Whiskey. I’ve had worse.”

  “I’ve made worse,” Phil said, confirming a persistent rumor among his few friends.

  I took another sip. It did interesting things to the fatigue. “But why bury it with the money?”

  I case you’re wondering, we never did figure out why eighteen bottles of booze were buried with the money. Perhaps if was just to keep them from providing a clue where the money was. Perhaps anything; not all mysteries get solved in life.

  “Poisoned whiskey,” I declared. To get rid of anyone who dug up the money.”

  “Didn’t need eighteen bottles for that,” Phil said, but he stopped drinking and eyed the bottle suspiciously.

  “How do you feel?” I asked. “You had the first drink.”

  “Magnificent!” Phil took a big slug of whiskey, or maybe faked it.

  We talked about Canadian politics for a half-hour or so. Neither of us fell over screaming, so by some unspoken mutual agreement, we started drinking the stuff again.

  The sky cleared as the evening approached. Phil got a couple of cans of chili con carne and I dug out some flatbreads. We ate them like old women in purple eat chocolate.

&
nbsp; “I thought,” I said, “that we’d agreed not to bring beans on a camping trip.” It was a general rule that had started in the days when guys still shared a tent, before the snoring started and some people had woken up in the wee small hours of the morning with a pillow over their faces and a madman with an ax sitting on the pillow.

  “Fuck the beans,” Phil said, “and fuck the farts. I figured we’d be home before I got these out and if not then it was damn fucking well time we did get home.” He glared at the ground.

  “Fuck the farts,” I responded. “Bring on the beans!” I could tell by the way Phil had gotten into bad language that he was getting too drunk to be reasonable and I swallowed another half cup of whiskey to level the playing field. Then I added, “fuck”, in case I was one swearword behind.

  “Do you think,” Phil asked, “that trees are just the souls of people who thought too much in a previous life?”

  One thing about Phil, he doesn’t get into sad songs and stupid jokes when he’s drunk. He gets into bizarre philosophies. I used to try to answer his questions, but I finally learned that I’d just drive him into realms of thought that no human should approach.

  “I’m going to kill you with an ax,” I said. “One chop every time you fart.”

  “Can you imagine having nothing to do but feel the wind in your leaves and think about things? You’d solve all the problems of the universe and have nobody to tell it to.” Phil scooped the chili into two plastic bowls, and handed me one. I noticed that the bottom of the cooking can was black with burned chili, and that the chili smelled of charring.

  I handed him some bread and a spoon. “I’ll thank you not to speak about my friends that way, and besides, I’m here, aren’t I, and insects under the bark aren’t any worse than Bob Stedd’s last girlfriend, the one with the scrambled eggs. My glasses are losing their focus. I need new eyes and a canoe filter for my camera.”

  It was always good to try to distract Phil with nonsense, before he really got maudlin. I’d have traded him for Heather dancing on the shore, but no one seemed to be offering.

  “A toast,” I said, still needing sleep. “To scrambled eggs.” The sky got darker and there were a few gusts of wind. A few lily pads lifted their edges to show their pink parts. Foam gathered where the old gray rock met the dark dark waters of the bay.

  Phil raised a glass. “”A toad,” he said.

  “A toad?”

  “Makes as much sense as toast,” he said, watching the treetops. “About as much sense. A toast with warts on it. A toast that lives under a damp log.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I propose a toad to all the gods that have let us down, and all the tomorrows they have made to lie to us.”

  “Naked women,” I said. “A toast.”

  “Try making a toad.”

  “To all the tomorrows with no naked women. Or booze.”

  “You have chickenshit for brain cells.”

  I laughed. “In the last day I’ve been in and out of a canoe, a kayak, a freighter, and two goddamn aluminum boats with goddamn motors. I’ve had two pistols and a couple of submachine guns pointed in my direction. I kneed Cork Detson in the chin while doing a somersault over his head into Georgian Bay. I’ve dug up buried loot and farted upwind in front of a campfire.”

  “Which means what.”

  “I have chickenshit for brain cells, but sometimes I hit it lucky.” I stirred the chili over the fire, then raised a glass, but didn’t feel much like drinking any more. Something to do with my stomach.

  For a while we ate chili, washing it down with water and the occasional sip of whiskey. It tasted like hell. All of it, which slowed the consumption. When I woke from a catnap, Phil came up with a stanza of Omar Khayyam:

  The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon

  Turns Ashes--or it prospers; and anon,

  Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,

  Lighting a little hour or two--is gone.

  He knew the poem by heart, at least a couple of versions of it. It’s about the futility of life, and I could tell he was getting seriously depressed. It couldn’t have been the treasure-hunt; this was the first time he’d actually succeeded in finding something he went after. Or maybe that was exactly it.

  Green moss lined a lot of the dips between rocks. I reached over and picked some up. He furrowed his eyebrows as I set it on a rock beside us. The wind got damper and there was a chill to my bones. “It’s dying,” I said, pointing at the moss.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “It can’t live on this rock,” I said. “We’re all going to die.” It wasn’t much, but I’d had a lot of drink by this time. “Whether you find a gazillion gold doubloons or a box of chicken Oxo, you’re going to die. I’m going to die!” My voice was going up, and I was pointing at the moss like it was Jesus on the cross. “We gotta deal with it.”

  Phil got up and put the moss back where it had come from, more or less.

  “Now you’re going to heaven, for sure,” I said. “God’ll send down a chariot with six freakin’ big-boobed angels any minute.”

  The silence stretched on as Phil sat down. He looked at the drink beside him, and turned to watch the water. I poked the fire and looked at him. He was crying, silently.

  “I think we should be happy for every day we have alive.” I looked over the water, too. “I think the world begins again each morning. When a month is over, I tear the page off the calendar and throw it into the garbage. The world is born again every day.”

  “Fuck it. If I told Aisha you’d diddled Heather twice behind the canoe I think she wouldn’t have that attitude.” He stood and turned his back on me. “It accumulates,” he said, “like scabs on your face, until you’re a monster.”

  “There are monsters all over the place. You can’t be a monster. I know that.”

  “Then maybe you’re the monster.”

  “Fuck you, then!” I yelled, standing up. Then words failed me, and I sat down. After a moment, I asked, quietly, “Do you think we found Big Paul Stanley’s treasure?”

  Oh, no doubt,” he said. “That was all of it.”

  “First thing we ever found that we went after,” I said.

  He turned, smiled, wiped his face with his sleeves. “We’re the joke of the gods. They’re laughing at us all the time.”

  “I think they like pain.”

  “Then they created the right species. Only humans can have mental pain.”

  By now I was getting pretty morose, too. “Snapping turtles,” I noted, “breathe through their assholes in winter.” Don’t know why I said that.

  Phil added a couple of logs to the fire, a good sign. A fire is life, and life is a fire. Or whatever it meant. I’d taken to chewing a chocolate bar and would have made some tea, except that the thought almost made me gag. I wasn’t sobering up; I could hardly stand. But I’d stopped getting drunker, and more booze wouldn’t change that.

  “Wanna fight?” I asked.

  He squinted at me. “Kick your head in.”

  “I know a few tricks.” I didn’t talk about Cork and he didn’t talk about Cork and I wondered if he wondered if I thought he’d killed Cork and I wanted to tell him I didn’t care and wasn’t going to ask. We seriously didn’t discuss the topic, I thought.

  On the other hand, if he’d slipped a long needle into Cork’s neck and down into his heart right about where there were two fang marks, he might have to answer some interesting questions if a coroner determined that as the cause of death.

  It was late afternoon, and overcast. A few drops of rain suddenly fell. Then stopped.

  “You didn’t get any good pictures,” Phil noted.

  “I’m slowing down.” I opened a Pepsi and poured some into his cup and my own. Then I added some Big Paul’s rotgut to it. “A toast,” I said.

  He eyed the mixture. “To what?” He leaned his head way back in his lawn chair, and looked at the sky. He closed his eyes.

  “To all the songs we never sang. To all t
he times we never stood by the shore and watched the sun go down. While yet we live.”

  “We could head home, now,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Promised Aisha. No paddling while intoxicated.”

  “I’ll paddle. You sing.”

  “That’ll work till we hit the waves.” I changed the subject. “What’s going to happen to Jane?” Jane was a friend, someone we met with in groups of people.” She had MS. She’d been A mercurial person, with lots of moods, but generally more positive about life than no. After she’d been diagnosed though, she’d spent her time mentally carving vines onto her tombstone.

  “She’ll die. It happens.” Phil turned up a small stone into an impromptu marker.

  “While waiting for it, she could choose happiness or gloom,” I noted. I made up a poem:

  “People kill themselves

  In their own special way

  Some with a gun

  Some, day by day.”

  Shouldn’t that be ‘ways’?” he asked. “Then you have trouble with the concept of ‘days.’”

  “I could try ‘each person’,” I suggested.

  “That implies everyone does, instead of just those who choose to.”

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “Sometimes you don’t know Dick.”

  “Sometimes I don’t know anybody.” I shouldn’t have said it. I just should have thought it. We all seem to be in our own little cosmos. We see things the way they are, but other people see the same things differently. Every symbol is different. And there are way more symbols than there are things.

  “She’ll die,” he repeated, and I realized he was talking about Jane again. “She’s got a couple of good years left, but she’ll waste them feeling sorry for herself.” He looked away again. “It’s an option,” he noted. I didn’t like the way he was always looking away. He was removing himself from me, step by step.

  At that point I began to wonder if he really had killed Cork. Taken the long hatpin he often carried with him, slid it between Cork’s shoulder blade and neck. I suppose it could have happened. Maybe there was a rattlesnake handy. I don’t know. It all sounded improbable. But Phil, who should have been at the top of his world, having located a treasure trove, however small, was shedding things and walking into a cave that no one else could enter.

  I didn’t ask. So I started talking about the weekend, going over the whole thing, in case he’d missed some of it before. I made sure he knew about Cork, what other people had said and about my time in the dark, in his boat.

  After a while, he offered me some more booze, and I drank it, with him. We thundered into silence, sitting on a train bound for nowhere. He didn’t tell me about his time on the island when I was on the ship. He didn’t tell me much. I think he was working on not existing, but having a hard time of it. I guess he needed a manual.

  Time passed. No gods descended from the skies, and no ghosts walked in from the cedars. A couple of small planes flew over, checking out the freighter grounded on the tip of our island. Phil showed no interest in going to see the thing, and I didn’t push him. A few boats buzzed by without slowing down.

  It was late in the afternoon by the time I squeezed into my little tent, rolled up in my sleeping bag, and went into as deep a sleep as you can get on hard rock.

  I woke a few times to take a leak or put something quick on my stomach. The first time I woke, it was after dark, and stars were out. One of those times Phil was asleep, rolled in his sleeping bag behind the lawn chair and another time or two he was sitting by the fire. I don’t know what time it was any of those times.

  Once, surprisingly, there was a moon out. I stepped carefully down to the shore. The campfire was down to a few embers, and Phil was nowhere in sight. Maybe he was one of the dark lumps silvered by moonlight.

  I like islands. I told you that. They’re not symbols of personal isolation, either real or desired.

  Or maybe they are. Maybe I don’t want to even ask that question.

  I watched the water ripple silver disks into silver shards. And beyond and around were the low dark shapes of a dozen or two of the thirty thousand islands. It was dark. There may have been the tip of a giant catfish’s tail in the tiny ripples. Or not. One of the islands may have been a snapping turtle, breathing through its nostrils because it was still warm weather. There was of foam right along the shore. This is produced by bacteria in warm weather more often than by soap. Not everybody knows that, so I slipped myself into my sleeping bag and went right to sleep thinking of turtles.

  In the morning, when I got up, Phil was sitting in front of the fire, on a lawn chair, under an umbrella. It was raining lightly. I wished I’d brought an umbrella. I sat on one of the other lawn chairs facing him.

  “Breakfast,” I said. My head hurt. All of me hurt. I should drink rotgut and sleep on rocks more often. I farted at Phil, but the wind was the wrong way.

  Phil rummaged in his packsack and came up with a bag of instant oatmeal mix. I eyed it, blearily. It didn’t appeal. I checked my packsack and came up with a couple of bags of trail mix, mostly raisins. I tossed one to Phil.

  “What time is it?” I didn’t have a working watch on me.

  “About nine.”

  I nodded. “About the time we got out of here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Got a date with the cops in Parry Sound.” I didn’t look at Phil and he said nothing. After a while I made myself some tea from water heating over the fire. Water from the skies dripped off the hood on my jacket.

  When I finished the tea I got up and started loading the canoe. The rule of coming home is that you don’t have to wash any dishes or pack anything up properly. Except sleeping bags (they take too long to dry) and spare clothing (you might need it). I stuffed things into the canoe until Phil got up and started stuffing things at the other end. We left enough space for ourselves. Our garbage we put into green garbage bags and mashed into spaces in the canoe. We put our lawn chairs on top of the pile. We looked like a garbage scow.

  This left us with the two lawn chairs and a case of mostly-empty bottles of Bud Lite, the legacy of Bill and Alice. I looked at Phil, and he looked at me.

  I talked him into loading the chairs and beer onto the top of everything else. We paddled along the shoreline until we got to the tip of the island, where the ship, slanting slightly, was grounded. There was no sign of Peter, and two guys with short-barreled rifles were sitting on rocks, covered in orange plastic. They eyed us suspiciously.

  Phil, who was in the stern, angled the canoe into the shore. As I got out, both of the guards, if that’s what they were, got up. I set the beer onto the shore, and leaned the lawn chairs against the case.

  As the first of the men got within earshot, I yelled, “We brought you some chairs.”

  By the time they’d pondered that, we were on our way out of there. Last I saw, they were settling into the chairs and opening a beer. In the rain.

  Phil paddled and I took pictures from island to island. So I could pretend to someone that I’d accomplished something other than staying alive. We stopped in a bay or two for a rest, saying nothing among the lily pads. Like all the others, they had bug poop on them. I left it there this time. Clean is a fiction. Life on bug poop on lily pads has rights, too.

  None of the pictures turned out to be worth a shit, except the one of the ship grounded on the island, which I sold to a newspaper.

  We got to Parry Sound and found the police station. It was close to lunch by that time, so we had to come back at one and, together, we told our story into an antique Radio Shack tape recorder. When we were done, we told the guy in charge and he told us to go home. I asked if we’d be needed to testify at the inquest and was told that there wasn’t going to be an inquest and we should leave. He didn’t look happy.

  He was right. That’s the last we heard of it. “Man Killed By Snake” made the inside pages of the newspaper a day later. There was little made of the ship grounding itself on the sa
me island and no mention of any boats full of would-be refugees, so I never did find out what happened to the first ship’s boat. Or if the crew ever got paid.

  I dropped Phil’s stuff at his place five hours after we left Parry Sound, and he said thanks. It had been a quite drive, with Phil resting or maybe sleeping in the passenger seat. I’d been tired and not up to conversation. We’d got take-out junk food at a couple of places and kept driving. Traffic had been good.

  Aisha was glad to see me. She hustled me into a bathtub and served me a martini while I sat there. After three martinis, I started into the story. It took a few days to get it all told.

  I never saw any of the other participants again, though once I thought I saw Heather in a crowd at a concert in Barrie. Can’t be sure, though.

  Nothing ever seemed to come, from what I could read in the papers, of the smuggling in animal parts or anything I expected to make the news.

  Phil and I should have had many laughs about the weekend, but we never really got together again. I mailed him a couple of pictures from the trip, and a week or two after that he emailed thanks to me.

  You get friends, I understand, you lose friends. I guess I lost one. It’s never a happy event when you lose a friend, but I’ve lost enough not to bitch when it happens. You only find out the reason in the odd case, so I won’t speculate on his motives. Maybe it was something I said. Maybe.

  ***END***

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