I cheerfully refuse, p.13
I Cheerfully Refuse, page 13
It was that filth, Werryck.
I will credit him with the sentimental poster. Who knew he had the low-tech wherewithal to write “our bright & zippy Kellan” and dangle it for the credulous to find?
I pushed Cancel. Four seconds later the cell rang in my hand. It sounded like a low whistle or birdcall. No doubt it was meant to be pleasant. I refused the call and steered outward. Mist rose off the water thick as cream.
Another whistle from the cell. I ignored it. Flower moved steadily along in the near-silent breeze. Through a gap in the fog, lightning paced back and forth in the east.
After some time the cell beckoned again. This time I answered.
“I’m sorry to be the voice you don’t wish to hear,” Werryck said. “I don’t blame you. I also mean you no harm and bear you no animus.”
“Well, I bear you some.”
“I regret what happened to Lark,” he said. “I implore you to believe me. It was not by design.”
It made me livid—her name in his voice. The boat heeled as I got to my feet. “Not by design. How can you stand yourself? I found her on the floor. I saw the hammer and saw what it did. It was not by accident.”
“I understand how this must look to you,” Werryck said.
“You understand nothing.”
“I can tell you,” he said in a tone of hard-won patience, “that the man responsible has been punished.”
This contention—that something like justice had been done on Lark’s behalf—made me dizzy with outrage. My sight grayed and sparked at the edges. I sat down and gripped the tiller as if it were sanity.
Werryck said, “After you slipped away from Lightner I realized you may not understand why we tried to speak with you.”
“No one tried speaking that I recall.”
He cleared his throat, an aggrieved sound. “I accept your resentment, but we have to reach an understanding on this man Kellan. He stayed with you for some time, and now we need to find him.”
“He rented a room. That’s it.”
“Let me clarify something. Give you context. I assume you’ve heard of the therapeutic known as Willow.”
“‘Therapeutic.’”
“Kellan worked on the production floor. He disinfected equipment is my understanding. Centrifuges, granulators. The assembly of pharmaceuticals is not my zone of interest. Your friend Kellan overrates his cleverness but has a talent for the easy lift. He is light-fingered but empty-headed. I expect you glimpsed this in some way.”
He took my silence for affirmation.
“You wouldn’t guess it, but Willow was an accident. Researchers attempting something else arrived at this instead. Lo and behold, demand is high. Had this outworker simply vanished, I’d never have heard his name. Every day they vanish. But your friend nicked ten thousand doses on his way out the door.”
I sat at the tiller and looked up at the sail quietly pulling us along.
Werryck said, “You liked him, didn’t you. Saw him as essentially good. You should know that the doses he stole comprise a nearly infinite bank account from which he is already drawing.”
“How so?”
“Remember his car? The one you helped repair?”
I did.
“He bought it with Willow. Got cheated, from the sound of it.”
Again I had nothing to say.
“Remember talking to those kids in Lightner?” he said. “The ones outside the church, perturbed about the suicides? Kellan sold those folks the stuff.”
“I never took him for some blameless urchin,” I said, but my voice was a forgery. Of course I’d taken him for blameless. I’d insisted on it, proud quixote that I was.
“Your old friend Labrino was another happy customer.”
“You can stop, Werryck.”
“You think I am cruel to say these things. No. I’m relieving you of the need to defend him.”
“I’m not defending Kellan. I’m just not helping you.”
“Then help yourself instead.”
I waited.
“Give me something useful. A location. Any plans he talked about. His blue-sky dreams. And you will not be charged.”
“Charged with what?”
“Oh, Rainy. Harboring a fugitive. Fleeing from authorities. Trading annulled currency. You’d be shocked how little of your life is legal. And yet I have the authority and will to absolve you. To vanish your indictments. Return to Icebridge, Rainy. Play music with your striving band. A small world is better than none.”
As if sweetening the pot he added, “I’ll see that repairs are made to your house. We believed the therapeutics were stashed there. My crew became aggressive in their search.”
I hadn’t thought of the house in days. Everything I loved there—its steep staircases and odd angles and the lives we had inside it for twelve years—had fled my memory. Instead what blazed to mind was the place as I drove by that last night, its windows lit and its rooms ripped up. The red-faced man standing in my doorway, pointing at me with his swaddled hand and his personal hatred.
“Take the offer, Rainy. We’ll never be friends but in this we’re allies. Kellan is the reason Lark is gone. The reason you’re on a boat, alone, and snow coming.”
“What snow,” I couldn’t help asking.
“The system forming over western Manitoba. I’m looking at it now. Heavy snow, cyclonic winds. It looks like a map of invasion. Are you ready for it, Rainy?”
“You don’t know where I am,” I said.
“It hardly matters. I’ve seen the lake stand up and throw a thousand-foot freighter against its chains. How long would Lark want you bumbling around on that filthy sea?”
“You clearly didn’t know her.”
“Get off the water and come home. She’d want you to be practical,” he added, an observation so ignorant it helped to settle my mind.
“Werryck, listen. You say Kellan isn’t clever. Go find him then, and leave me be.”
As I spoke the breeze picked up. The boat heeled ten degrees and stayed heeled. The watery slipstream hissed alongside.
“All you can do out there is die.”
“Then we won’t talk again.”
“You can’t thwart me, Rainy.”
He had something else to say but I don’t know what it was. The cell with its beach-stone feel inspired me. I curled my index finger round its top and reared back. Werryck quacked spasmodically as it ricocheted over the waves.
• the Great Girard
IN THE EARLY HOURS I saw what the blind clerk had asked me about—a cut in the shoreline, a perched water tower on a height of land, then what looked like a slanted bowl in the earth, as if a scoop descended to remove with stark precision some hundreds of acres. Inevitably the event was spoken of in prophetic terms, and many wondered what grave and sensual pleasures brought judgment to Gold, Ontario. But then maybe it was simply a pattern of relentless gales, the sea pounding and shoving and shouldering across the millennia until everything loosened, foundations below foundations. Even bedrock wearies at last. In the Mosquito account, the first witness to trouble was an ancient dog keening into the night, a white-muzzled hound leaning against a screen door, howling and howling, triggering any number of similar alarms through the community, screeching cats, a braying backyard donkey, every local citizen of the animal kingdom understanding at some level a tectonic slippage as yet undiscernible to human equilibrium. Then people began to stir, their beds tilting up as if on a sinking ship, wakeful husbands lit by open refrigerators where leftover drumsticks slid eerily away from their reaching fingers, the creak and stretch of plumbing, a final mighty electrical surge detonating transformers in glorious sequence before the world went black and floors turned to freezing mud unlike any in your memory or mine. The remaining wide basin presented itself as I sailed away from Thunder Bay on a five-knot breeze, a full moon displaying the blue-gray hollowed landscape. Once a suffering Great Lakes town, now a ghost amphitheater. I stood on the foredeck holding the port shroud. When the place faded aft I went below and fixed a can of beans in a frying pan and broke an egg into it and carried it into the cockpit.
As if to counter the despair thrown off by the lost city of Gold, the dark water then gave me two days’ slow but lovely progress. I think the sea has no in-between: you get either rage and wayward lightning and schizoid frenzy or such freehanded beauty that time contracts or turns in on itself leaving you forgetful and no more civilized than a gull. In this way Flower and I poked and drifted in idle drafts up the coast of Ontario, past the entrance to Nipigon and up the Black Bay Peninsula. The sun flared and I got down to sleeves. The keel hummed easily over depths so clear boulders forty feet down shone like pebbles you might lean over the side to pluck. The northerly breeze smelled of spruce marshes and occasionally of damp smoke, which made me feel safe and fully forgotten. We thought we were remote in Icebridge and took some pride in that, but here along the fifty-mile volcanic stone peninsula I saw neither roads nor buildings, no emblem of human ambition or discord. That night I slipped into a primeval cleft and anchored in water still as sky. Boiled a potato and ate it with salt and a little oil, then slept in the cockpit to the booming cry of a heron. In a dream this bird surfaced as a godlike sentry guarding the entrance to the Slates. In a resonant croak it allowed me to enter. And when I sailed out again, Lark was aboard smiling and took the helm without a word. With her at the tiller I took the lines and winches. This episode was as real as the gash on my chin. The pain of waking can’t be told. I sat up uttering a lament of my own that traveled over the water in a vanishing decay.
The night was translucent, the surface unrippled under fading stars. I tried to imagine the Tashi Comet, to picture where in the sky it might appear. It was comforting somehow, this clump of ice on long approach. Maybe because it was old and reliable. Just cruising through on a route it knew well, each cycle billions of miles, maybe hundreds of years. A swing past Earth wasn’t even the highlight of its day! A calm came over me. My first teacher, the droll bass player Diego, said all of us were ancient beyond knowledge. By us he meant people and animals, rocks and seas, the stars and all the night between them. He said music woke everything up, back in the beginning, uncountable eons ago.
That day I crossed turquoise deeps under black stone cliffs. Those who imagine themselves alone on tragic planets understand the allure of desolation. A line of horsetail clouds gusted overhead in a tanbark color for which Instant Forecasting had no precise correlative. My best guess was an imminent blow, and within an hour a microburst came crackling over the surface. The boat was on her side before I could react. The rigging whined. The mast rang like a cracked bell and shifted in its boot. When the squall passed we returned to vertical with dripping mainsail and a strange new slackness aloft. Something had given way. Below was a scramble of books and flung pans. Sure enough one of the worrisome chainplates had cracked. I laid my palm against it—depleted steel flaking away—then took down the sails to relieve the old spar of as much load as possible.
But Flower was badly shaken. Even when I’d got things mostly back in place, the mast trembled as it hadn’t before, and there was a new noise to worry about—a maddening clank-and-roll I couldn’t track down. If I stood forward, it sounded aft; when I went aft, the clanking leapfrogged forward. I tried to ignore it, but as hours passed it got on my nerves—a stealthy lodger up to something, one I could not catch.
The chart book showed a town a dozen miles east. Jolie. The name rang because Lark and I had intended to stop there after leaving the Slates. We never did, I don’t remember why. What was Jolie now? A phantom town? Another moon crater? Folsum’s Anchorages mentioned a cafe and recommended its specialty pancakes, but Ernest Folsum was sixty years in the ground. Lashing the tiller I putted along the coast whose unseemly beauty of an hour ago now appeared forbidding. With a sound boat and sunshine, the world is yours. Now the boat clattered in residual swells and clouds jammed the northwest.
In the late shadows I limped into Jolie, easing through a slumping breakwater to the deserted dock, which had a sign on it saying: TRANSIENTS PAY AT OFFICE.
If an office existed I couldn’t find it. I walked up into the streets as night fell. A closed cafe with chairs overturned. An old shake-shingled Canada Post bungalow. A redbrick cube with an ornate ICE & BAIT sign and a tufted dog curled in front of the door. The dog lifted its head as I passed but was diffident when I held out a hand. I walked into the center of the town’s main intersection and stood a long time. A percussive rhythm somewhere suggested music, but I was tired and the rhythm was far away. I returned to the boat and slept.
In the morning I scrubbed my face, cautious about my chin which felt large and tender. My hair was long and looked like bad weather so I pulled it back and tried the town again. The cafe was open. It had a different name than in Folsum’s day but a good pancake smell. I hadn’t enough money for pancakes but found enough coins for coffee and an order of toast.
While waiting I saw a recent Mosquito in an empty booth and snagged it. There’d been more Willow suicides. A pair of lovelorn teenagers in Iowa. A homeless family sheltering in an abandoned Salvation Army store. A youth group aged eleven to fourteen were found by their pastor when he arrived at church in the morning. He was quoted, weeping, that he had no idea, only knew these earnest kids had a desire to go in search of better.
These stories struck harder now. I couldn’t read the whole paper. Much as I wanted to think of Lark in someplace better, I knew from a thousand conversations that she never worried about that place. Maybe it was real and full of saints and poets, or maybe it was poetry itself. Her concern was this place. This animal world with its unfurling dread and convulsive wars and fabricated certainties, and its breathtaking storms across the water. With Willow infiltrating the landscape and its stories coming thick and fast—these explorers getting younger and more innocent—I felt desperate to reach through time. I wanted to find these kids in a moment of calm. To take their lapels gently in my hands and say, “Better is right here.” I still hear it in Lark’s voice. Better is here. Stay, and make it better.
My breakfast arrived. The girl brought it with a generous side of peanut butter and I choked up trying to thank her. She was a big, kind, dark-haired girl not afraid to approach a haggard stranger with a seeping chin wound. She asked if that were my boat at the dock and then volunteered that there was a grocery in town, a gas station, and a man who sewed canvas and could repair sails. When I asked could anyone fashion me a piece of steel and held out my hands in the desired dimensions, she described a welding shop on the north edge of town. It would be open by the time I finished my toast. Lark’s theory of angels was that they are us and we mostly don’t remember.
The welder was a woman named Stevie who built trailers of various sizes and repaired skidders and knuckleboom loaders for logging operations nearby. She had a pile of heavy steel from a fire tower she’d decommissioned and was willing to cut my dimensions and drill holes, even supply me with bolts. I explained about no money and she sensibly wondered what I might have to barter. Anticipating this I’d carried up in a duffel some items I had on the boat—a hundred-foot power cord in good condition, an effects pedal, two extra-long quarter-inch cords. Now that I had no amplifier these things were useless to me.
“Musician,” Stevie observed.
“Electric bass.”
It seemed to me her focus narrowed.
“How long are you in town?”
“Depends on the steel.”
She then said, “How long since you played?”
This was Stevie’s proposition: there was a man in town, Nils, a father and ex-convict dying fast of cancer. A few of Nils’s friends, Stevie among them, had organized a fundraiser for his family two nights hence. Stevie had volunteered the entertainment—her daughter was the de facto leader of a local band called the Indolent Vagrants, a name so beguiling I leaned forward involuntarily. The Vagrants played whatever they liked. They had a keyboardist who’d almost toured Europe decades ago with a Scandinavian supergroup whose name I don’t remember. They had a self-taught drummer with drone-core roots and a bagpipe maestro who didn’t always show up but was thought to be the most proficient rock piper in Canada. Coming to the point, Stevie explained they also used to have an adequate bass player, popular at gigs for dressing like a stork or plague doctor, but this fellow had fallen in with a gloomy cult and renounced all music, preferring to cruise around collaring infidels and browbeating the merry. Stevie asked would I be willing to play the Nils benefit, and I agreed before the question cooled.
At this point a man entered the shop. He wore a clean white shirt and glasses so heavy he seemed to hold his head at an angle of discomfort to support them. Stevie excused herself, went into a back room and emerged with a tabletop radio. It was compact and substantial, encased in hardwood. She handed it over and the man hefted it admiringly and made a play for his billfold, but Stevie said no, he owed her nothing. He nodded as though used to this and began to speak, then his eyes fell on me and clouded behind his heavy glasses.
“What happened to your face there?”
“A rope and a high wind.”
“May I look at it?”
Stevie said, “Doc, this fellow arrived last night by sailboat.”
“I wondered whose that was,” said this clean-shirted customer who did not pay for radios. He had an odd, clipped way of speaking. He came over and peered up into my face. Took off his glasses and put them on again. I bent over a little so he could get a closer look.
“How much does it bother.”
“Quite a bit.”
“It will get worse, left alone.”
“I do clean it.”
“What with?”
“Boiled water.” I didn’t always boil it.
