Part of my mind was contemplating going down by the lake, hiding among the canoes, and watching the stars until everybody went to bed or died of old age. Or whatever.
But I couldn't get away with that, so I waited till Bob and Belinda were feasting on some dehydrated mush, and said, "Hey, Mr. Tucker, I hear you and some guy at the lodge won't be sharing a tent anytime soon."
He looked up from his gruel, which, I suppose, was some sort of pasta mix. He gave me a look that was cold as a train rail on a January night on the dark side of Etobicoke, and said, "Place is full of nosy Parkers." Then he went back to eating his noodles, rolling them around a plastic fork. He was wearing a tight T-shirt with short sleeves; it was a warm night, and the muscles in his arms glistened with sweat. His movements had the grace of someone who could move quickly when he wanted to.
"Even out here in the colonies people talk," I added. I watched the lovely Belinda Lalonde. She was watching Patrick and brushing her hair. It shone red in the firelight, reflecting or maybe creating fire.
"It seems to take bloody little to keep the locals amused," he said, doing the cold look thing again. "Besides, all I did was tell him what might ‘appen to him if he didn't let my girl alone. Serve the bastard right if ‘e fell out of ‘is damn canoe and drowned."
I cheerily said, "Your troubles are over, I guess. He fell out of his canoe and drowned."
Bob's wiry body went rigid. "Bloody ‘ell. What are you on about?" His eyes, and the girl's eyes, turned towards me. Kele watched all of us, in sequence. Ned whispered to Patrick, who got up to saw off another chunk of firewood. Like sensible campers, they'd dragged a sizable log out of the forest and had a good saw.
I repeated, "Fell out of his canoe and drowned."
"’ow?" An odd question.
"Mr. artist here thinks I offed him," I said. I nodded my head over towards Kele.
Kele had a very quiet voice. "The photographer man came out of the water carrying George's wallet."
"Bumped off a total stranger for twelve dollars and his library card." I reached for the wallet.
"Oh, you keep it," Kele said, holding his hands in front of him. You might need it to get a book from the mobile library in Burleigh Falls. Gets in every couple of weeks."
"Hey!" Ned spoke up. "Nobody's accusing anybody of murdering George. It was obviously an accident, and perhaps we should show more respect to the dead." His balding head and deep voice seemed to carry authority. I was impressed; I wondered how he'd look at the end of a fishing line with a perch checking out the reflection from his head.
But I was all for ending the conversation. I don't like to talk. And, I guess, showing respect to someone I didn't know, just because he got himself drowned, never made much sense to me. It was just the sort of strange unwritten rule that drives me to remote lakes in the first place. Mosquitoes and frogs have their own rules, but at least they don't expect me to actively participate.
"Just how did you come to be in the water with George? That's right, isn't it? He" - Belinda indicated Kele with her finger - "he said you were in the water."
So I provided another rendition of my time that afternoon fishing on a small, dark lake. I didn't add any details from the telling I'd given Kele; I figured I'd be telling the story a lot in the next few days.
Kele broke the following silence with, "Consistent story, anyway."
He was beginning to annoy me.
"Gormless bastard might ‘ave wanted to learn ‘ow to ‘andle a canoe better," Bob said.
Belinda stopped brushing her hair long enough to look at Kele and say, "Bob's gotta be a bit nervous, right now. He's the one most likely to be asked questions if it wasn't an accident. I imagine the police were probably keeping an eye on him even before he told George he was going to mail George's balls to Los Angeles. In separate envelopes." She put her hairbrush away and took out a nail file, inspecting her nails by the light of the fire.
"He looks tough enough to do it," I said.
Bob Tucker set his food down. He was a slow eater, unlike me. A black cylinder appeared suddenly in his hand. A shiny blade snicked out of it. The blade winked in the firelight, then disappeared back into the knife handle. In one fluid motion, his arm went down and came back up with his food bowl.
It was an impressive show. "That's one way to stay alive in Liverpool, I guess," Kele said.
"Manchester." Bob looked at me. "You can be a rabbit or you can be a fox." He put his bowl down. "In England, come to that, it don’t make any odds; both get done in the long run."
"You have to practice that evil look?" Kele poked at the fire with a long stick. The burning logs rolled a bit, and a cloud of sparks rose into the sky to join the constellations above. An opening, glowing orange, appeared in the logs, like the gateway to hell. It made the trees surrounding us all the darker.
"You run once, you run always after that. You should ‘ave people wondering if you're going to slice them. Otherwise you watch your back all the time."
"Slice many?" Patrick broke his silence, and brought out a couple of bottles of imported dry sherry.
"Ned’s mouth dropped open. "You've been carrying those since we left?
"I was saving it," Patrick said. "In case. Like, in case we needed it."
Belinda dumped the water in her blue plastic cup onto the ground, and held it out. "I'll have some. And yes, I understand that slicing people is how Bob learned about canoeing."
"Explain." Patrick poured some sherry into Belinda's cup and some into his own. Then he passed the bottle to Ned, on his left.
"In the ‘ope of reforming us bad ‘uns, some very kind social agencies gave us suspended sentences. Without a by your leave, we’re gadding about in a canoe in Canada. Canoeing to save our souls." Bob hesitated with his cup, then declined the alcohol. "We were part of a group from Scotland, Germany, and Sweden. Three years ago. We went up a bit farther north." Bob paused, then added, "Not everybody who’s blotted ‘is copybook gets to ‘are off canoeing, but I guess the guy I cut ‘ealed pretty quick."
"And you came back?" Ned carried the first bottle over towards Kele, without taking any. Patrick was already opening the second.
"First time I clapped eyes on this country, I wanted to stay. Just wanted to do it without the aggro of knocking about with a crowd of stupid berks."
Kele also declined the alcohol, so it came to me. I pondered it a long time while the loons laughed in the dark on the lake. It had been a long day, and alcohol and campsites seem to go together.
You'd think it would be the opposite way around. That, surrounded by pristine nature, you'd want to do without liquor. But it doesn't work that way. The appeal of a drink at a campsite in the dark can just about overwhelm a guy.
Maybe it’s that wilderness can relax a person, almost to the point of euphoria. All that stands between you and total escape are a few thoughts, flitting like night mosquitoes, in the back of your mind. So close.... A couple of drinks to drown those nasty thoughts, and you’ve got nothing to do but watch the waves of night in the sea of darkness.
On the other hand, alcohol, especially sherry, does interesting things to a migraine sufferer. I would probably wake up with some god of the underworld smacking me on the side of the head with a crowbar, and yelling, "Good morning, Win! Have a Fun Time last night, did we?" I sighed, and declined. One cup wasn't going to make me forget my practice session for the Synchronized Swimming with a Corpse event. Maybe if they had offered me the whole bottle and a straw....
I passed the bottle back to Patrick, who poured a generous amount into his cup. I watched him. He'd seemed a bit hesitant and shy at first, but he'd transmogrified back into a university professor's "I'm your intellectual superior but I guess I'll talk to you anyway" attitude. I had been pretty good at it myself, years back, when I was teaching first-year Economics. But I didn't need that protective coloration any more.
"No more slicing up the youth of Manchester?" I asked. "The treatment must have worked."
"W
ell enough. I found a place where I didn't ‘ave to be a fox or a rabbit."
"So why'd you have a fight with our late guide?" Patrick poured himself another round and held the bottle out.
We all waved our hands "no". Patrick placed the bottle beside him. I watched the bottles carefully, the way the light from the fire rolled back from green glass. When I looked up, I could see Bob and Kele keeping one eye on the bottle.
I knew what it was to me; there's nothing a migraine victim craves more than something that will give him a real monster of a headache. If they're ever going to hang me, I want a pound of chocolate and a bottle of sherry before I go. Then I can yell at the hangman, "Hurry up, dammit! My head hurts."
Belinda laughed at the question. "Bob's got a jealous streak. And George and I were an item for a few months a year ago - no - make that two years ago.
"That's where I remember you from." Kele tilted his head. "Why'd you bring Bob back here?"
"He asked me if I knew some quiet lakes. So we came here. George talked about these lakes. He was in love with this country, you know."
"You didn't go camping with him?" Bob watched the spear-point tips of pine branches that shifted in the dancing firelight above the tents.
"Oh, no. Sally would have found out about us." She looked at me. "Sally's his wife. Her father actually owns the lodge, so George has to stay married to her."
Sounded like a reasonable thing for a man to tell a young redhead, I figured.
"And why are you here?" Belinda sipped at her sherry and looked at Kele.
"George and I had an appointment. With destiny, it turns out." Kele smiled.
“The owl called his name,” I added.
"Out here?" Belinda asked.
"No finer place. No other place."
"But really?" Belinda was curious about something, either about Kele or about his motives. She seemed to have a curiosity about people that I lacked entirely.
"Like the man said, I heard the owl call my name." Kele kept on smiling, but his eyes had a look closer to the one Bob Tucker could do so well.
Now I knew that he was doing the Indian mystery stuff on us, but I thought it a good idea. As far as I was concerned, it was nobody's business but his own. He didn't have to tell anybody about his time.
The fact that I had been asking people personal questions, too, meant nothing; if people wanted to answer them, that was their hard luck. But I was wearing down, and my need to get some quiet time was getting stronger than my desire to needle strangers.
The redhead turned towards Patrick. "And you. We might as well find out why you two came here with... George."
But it was Ned who answered her. He put another log onto the fire, dodged the inevitable sparks, and looked around. "We" - he indicated Patrick - "we hired George because he knows this country. And we wanted someone who could help with the portaging and all." He waved at the tents. "He could get the tents up and supper on while we were still trying to decide what lake we were on.
"Besides, it's nice to be able to relax a bit. Patrick and I haven't done much camping since we were both younger. He's a geographer, and I'm a geologist by trade. But we're analytical types, rather than field people, so it was good to have someone who could do the routine camp stuff for us.
"He carried both the canoes for us. Saved me, at least, from getting a coronary or two on the portages."
"Especially on that last portage from Fox," Belinda Lalonde said, looking at Bob."
"Well, yeah. Having someone local, someone who knows the routes... That's always useful."
"Prospecting for gold?" Kele's quiet voice slipped into a moment of silence. I thought, "Like they'd tell, if they were."
But Ned answered right away. "Oh, there's no gold around here! This is a geologist's holiday." Seeing several pairs of eyes on him, he kicked at the fire again and explained.
"Picture a pot of gravy, that you're reheating on the stove. Got that? A disk of fat has hardened on the surface. The fat is a solid mass for a while, with the gravy heating under it. You poke it to break up the fat, and the gravy begins welling up between the chunks of fat.”
Now, this country is like those floating blocks of fat." Ned reached towards the rocks that circled the fire. He tested one near the edge, then picked it up. It was an angular piece of stone about as large as his fist. He passed it to Kele, on his right. "Most of this country is granite, floating on lava. The lava's got the good stuff, the minerals, but it's down there." He pointed straight down. "A long way down.
"What you've got to find is where the lava spouted up, millions of year ago, carrying minerals up to the surface. The edges of the blocks." He smiled and nodded at us, firelight gleaming off his head.
"So we're not about to start mining Cedar Lake right away?" I asked.
"The nearest edge is about thirty miles to the east. It runs from Bancroft to Nephton Mines. These lakes are safe, thank God."
Belinda tilted her head, and asked, "Why so thankful? Don't you make your living telling people where to cut up the landscape?"
"I got into geology because I liked rocks. But I also like the land, and there's just too little of it left unspoiled." He seemed to be getting quite serious about it. His voice was a bit louder.
"So, if you found gold here, you wouldn't tell anybody? Like your employer, for example?" I decided Miss Lalonde needed a bit of help bothering people who could be bothered.
"No! If I didn't die from the shock of finding anything in this country, I'd never tell. This country's had enough of its beauty spots gouged and torn in the name of money. When the industry learns to respect something besides the sound of dollar bills being sorted, maybe then it'll deserve the right to the minerals in the ground." He looked at me, then around, the sweat on his balding head catching the firelight.
Abruptly, he leaned back again. "That's where George and I got along. We just came by it from different directions. To him, this land was as much beauty as he ever needed."
"So how did you manage all those years in the mining industry," Kele Marten wanted to know?
The geologist looked up at the sky. "I retire in a year. An early retirement."
I looked at Patrick? "And you?"
"He smiled a deep professor's smile. "I deal in glacial geology. I'd be finding gravel pits for the highways if I hadn't stayed in the academic world. Now my ambition is to make full professor and nurture my tenure."
"Glacial?" Bob had his knife out, and was carving something into a piece of wood.
"This country used to be covered with a glacier. It came from that way," the geographer pointed to the northeast, among the trees, "and ground its way that way." He pointed across the lake. "It scooped out all these lakes and pushed most of the soil south. What used to be here," he pointed down, "is now part of the hills around Peterborough.
“I guess you don’t want to hear about glaciofluvial deposits and ice-contact stratified drift.” He smiled a professor’s smile and sucked back the last of the sherry in his cup.
There was a silence as we tried to imagine a giant white bulldozer scraping the land.
Abruptly, Patrick reached for the remaining sherry bottle. But Ned got it first. He stood up and, moving quickly around the group, poured some into each person's cup without asking. We all had cups - sitting around a campfire requires something to hold and fiddle with, and drinking tea or soup or water gives you something to do with your hands. So the sherry created some strange mixtures. Tea and sherry, hot chocolate and sherry, soup and sherry, or just watered-down sherry, depending on whose cup it went into. I took some - it didn't seem worth fighting about.
Bob was the first to react. He stood up, held the cup up looking at it carefully. Then he poured the contents of the cup onto one of the rocks surrounding the fire. Sherry steam rose and disappeared into the night. "This is for my father," he said. "God knows ‘e loved the stuff."
Kele followed suit, standing up, then pouring his cup onto the rock. He turned to face Bob. "You father c
ouldn't possibly have been as big a drunk as mine."
"’Ung ‘is ‘at very night at the local. Spent every penny getting keg-legged."
"You had money? My father traded beaver skins for his booze."
"You ‘ad beaver? We ‘ad to trap rats to get enough to eat."
"You got to eat meat? We lived on the inner bark of the white pine."
"You got greens? We never washed the dishes, so we could ‘ave a bit of mold every now and then."
"Wait!" It was Belinda who spoke. "It's getting late, and I'm tired. You guys can do the rest of the shtick tomorrow if you want." She drained her cup, made a face, and said, "Where are the facilities in this hotel?"
Patrick pointed at the woods. Bob picked up the flashlight, and handed it to Belinda. "Here's the torch. Good luck." We watched the light wander into the woods, then blink off.
I poured my sherry, most of a full cup, onto the most convenient place, my tonsils, and got up, too.
"Too late to wash the dishes, I guess." Patrick dumped his cutlery into the cookpot.
"I never do, on the last meal," I said, dumping all my cookware into a white IGA bag and tying it closed. "A lot easier to wash stuff at home."
"What about breakfast?" Bob wanted to know. "They always made us wash everything."
"Eat out of the cans, or finish the granola. I want to get out of here early." I looked up to catch the glare of the flashlight announcing Belinda Lalonde’s return.
"You’re bang on there, squire," Bob Tucker said, rattling his stuff into a green garbage bag.
Ned was down at the water, then coming back with a bucket of water. The bucket was a collapsible camp bucket, made of nylon. He poured the water onto the fire, and darkness came out of the woods and swallowed us. Flashlights flicked on. Civilized people that we are, we all had battery-driven light-swords to wave in our battles against the shadows of night.
A second bucket of water went onto the fire. Patrick's light picked out Ned DeVincent on his knees, stirring the ashes with a stick and feeling for warm spots with one hand.
At the edge of the campsite, a flashlight picked out a place where Bob was having his before-sleep pee. All the men would be doing that, one at a time, separately. Only close friends pee together. I handed my flashlight to Kele, who nodded an appreciation and disappeared uphill.
Bob's flashlight lit the inside of his tent, providing a brief silhouette of Belinda loosening her brassiere. Not that I noticed.
By the time Ned and Patrick had returned from their time behind a bush, Kele was unrolling the dead man's sleeping bag inside the dead man's tent.
Me, I followed a loon cry down to the edge of the lake.
Loons have many sounds, but the most basic of them is like a laugh made by a goose that's been worked on a bit by Dr. Frankenstein. It comes out of the night as if to say, good-bye, you who are just passing through. Good-bye.
The smooth rock sloped down to the water, and, walking slowly onto it, I was free of the forest. I shone my light ahead, its beam picking out the line where water met rock that was old when North America ground itself apart from Europe.
For a moment the beam slid into the water. Like most of the northern lakes, the water was very clear, almost totally transparent in the shallows near shore. A variety of bugs, creatures of the night, swam in the random dance of chaos that runs the universe.
A variety of leech, probably not a bloodsucker type, swam casually like a tiny snake suspended just above the bottom. It was brown, with blue and orange spots along its rippling edges.
I turned the light out, and let my eyes adjust to the dark. It took a moment, as I lay back on the rock. A mosquito or two came out of the night and settled on my neck. I got them both with one hand. "Better luck to your sisters," I thought.
There was no moon, and the stars were bright, becoming brighter as my eyes adjusted.
I don't know the constellations. I had a telescope when I was a kid, but the old brain isn't what it used to be. It was still a hot night, so the stars weren't all they could have been; on cool nights, this far from the city, they can be awesome.
This night, they quivered above the darkness. A meteorite died in silence somewhere around Cygnus, the swan. The sky was a deep blue- black, getting a bit lighter towards the horizon. The lake was a well of blackness without a break to the tops of the trees. For a moment it was a jagged-edge velvet bowl overflowing with sky.
Then the lake was a black mouth trying to swallow the universe. The treetops were dark teeth ringing a lightless maw, waiting. Among the teeth and into the indigo the movements of tiny bats appeared and disappeared, zigzagging silently.
I wondered if George Aden had a spirit, and if it would haunt a small, dark lake not far west of this one.
A twig snapped and some bushes swished behind me. Someone tripped on a pebble and rolled towards the water. A small splash and a "goddamn" announced that a hand or foot had made contact with lake water, undoubtedly causing consternation among the inhabitants of this end of the lake.
"Indians are supposed to sneak up silently," I said.
"I was out sketching when they held that course in the wigwam," Kele said. The flashlight went on briefly. He was pouring water out of a boot.
For a while we sat there in silence. Another meteor died trying to wipe out planet earth.
A whippoorwill called “whip-poor-will” several times. An owl hooted, but it didn’t seem to be anybody’s name. The loon laughed again. A couple of bullfrogs started a “jug-o-rum” chorus. Something made an odd noise in the lake.
"A Mishipizheu, maybe," the painter said. After a long pause, he added, "Like a large wildcat. Swims through water and rock. Eats eyeballs. Drives a Buick. Will protect you if it looks at you."
I let my mind encompass the stars and their faint reflections on the water. "A Buick?"
"Okay, so I lied about the Buick. The Ojibway used to have a saying, 'Stupid as a white man'."
"I passed?" I asked. "What do I win, you racist pig?"
Kele laughed. "You get your flashlight back. I found George's." He turned my light on, and handed it to me.
"So he didn't take it with him?"
"Makes you think."
I was too tired for thinking. "Not me," I said.
I could hear him getting up. His light touched the rock. "See you in the morning," he said.
"If the whazzit doesn't eat my eyeballs in the night."
"Or you don't get hit by a Buick."
But I had a hard time getting to sleep. Something seemed to be biting me on the neck and I started sliding off my mattress. The self-inflating mattresses are light, but they’re thin and slippery. Since the outside of a sleeping bag is slippery too, and the floor of the tent was on a slope, gravity took over.
It’s a fact that there are few flat campsites in the country. God seems to have left all the flat ground in Saskatchewan and around Chatham. Leastwise, in an Ontario woods, the landscape planners seem to have decided that any flat area more than a foot across would attract undesirables.
I had slid down till I was bunched up against the side of the tent. I’d made the rolled-up air mattress as a pillow by stuffing it into a bag, but it didn’t slide like I did, and only a death grip kept it under my head.
I turned on the flashlight, swatted a couple of mosquitoes hanging onto the walls of the tent, and threw a daddy-longlegs outside. Then I settled against the downhill side of the tent, thinking of everything and nothing. Dead men and bats, redheads and stars, age and instant rice.