River meets the sea, p.4
River Meets the Sea, page 4
We wandered up to the counter with our hearts set on waffle cones, the warm, sweet, golden grooves like honey paper. My attention quickly turned to the kaleidoscope of colours behind the cold glass. I pressed my nose against it, enticed by a two-toned ice cream.
“I want tiger.”
“You’re sure?” The man flashed a crooked smile.
I hated the taste of citrus and of black licorice, but that was irrelevant. I liked the way the black stripe tangled around the pale peach. And I loved the name. Vathany chose mango sorbet, and Appa chose mint chocolate chip to wash down his cocktail of prescription meds, the ones that helped with his shakes and nightmares from a war called “civil” that seemed to be anything but. We licked our cold cones as the salty summer breeze complemented the sun-baked cedar of the picnic table. Jurassic ponderosa pine and Sitka spruce grazed the heavens.
The fat sound of a guzzling truck cut into the peace. “Dirty ragheads! Fuck you!”
The red flag with a starry-blue saltire in the back window shrank as the truck sped away. Appa grabbed Vathany’s hand. She didn’t finish her ice cream, and I didn’t understand how she could neglect something so delicious. My father swallowed another pill.
We got back in the van and drove until we reached Cox Bay. There are places dotted along the west coast of Canada that look almost tropical, places where the ocean is a pale cerulean and the golden sand wraps around the towering sea stacks.
“When we lived in Gurubebila, we surfed at two local breaks: Plantation Point and Coconut Point. October to May was the season.” Appa smiled, transported back to his homesands. “The sand is white, glitters like crystals, not beige and flat like this.”
Although I’d never seen a horizon like that before, it sounded like home, or close to it. The sand like packed sugar beneath the opal sky.
“White sugar and brown sugar,” Appa said. When he smiled, his eyes turned into crescent moons. “This beach is like a widowed Gurubebila.”
“Ceylon is like this?” The moody sky and deep teal water made me feel slow and pensive.
“In some ways, it is like this, but it is so much more colourful . . . more electric. The sand, the ocean, the trees — everything is rich with colour. The air smells of salt, coconuts, and cinnamon. And, of course, it is never this cold.”
Vathany shoved a bottle of coconut water in my face. She drove to the other side of town for it, drank it by the litre, swore it was the elixir of youth. To me, it tasted like Froot Loops and urine, wasn’t worth the extra years of life.
“I hate coconuts. What about a cola?” I cocked my head at the sight of a little sculpture made of stacked stones.
“A cola?” Vathany sighed. “First he tells me he’s a vegetarian, now he asks me for a cola? What black magic did you conjure this voodoo child up with, Sam?”
“Enough, Vathany. Kids like sugar, kids like animals. You cried for a week when your uncle slaughtered your favourite goat.”
“Aashika. That goat’s name was Aashika, and I loved her more than I’ve loved a single human being.”
“Oof, an arrow to the heart.” Appa clutched his chest and reeled back.
“I knew Aashika. I played with her daily. Chandra doesn’t know the market fish or pepperoni.”
“What animal does pepperoni come from?” I asked, struggling to pull my calf in through the leg of the black wetsuit. It suctioned onto me like a boa constrictor. “This is suffocating me.”
“It has to be like this, Chandra. It grows in the water.” Appa tugged harder as I resisted. “That’s another thing about Eelam — you don’t have to wear a wetsuit there.”
“I want to go there!”
“Stop filling his head with these coconut-blossom dreams of Ceylon. It’s a cemetery. We are lucky to be here.”
Appa’s face dropped, dragged down by the weight of Vathany’s words.
I pulled my arms through the restrictive wetsuit, and Appa gingerly zipped up the back but still managed to pinch my neck. I furrowed my brows, then caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection on the Westfalia.
“I can diiig this!” I said, running my hands over my slick neoprene stomach.
Appa grinned, hoisted the board on his head, and walked out to the water. I imagined Vathany had looked the same when she carried water basins through the rice fields back in the forbidden place that my father called Eelam, my mother called Ceylon, and most others called Sri Lanka.
The water prickled like tiny needles as it leaked in through the ankles and collar of my suit. Then it engulfed me whole. I made the swift decision to piss in my suit. The warmth travelled all the way up.
Appa paddled me out into the choppy, teal water where I could still stand and the waves were about a foot high. He held the board as I lay flat on my stomach and kept checking behind him. “You need to watch the water. Watch it rise above the horizon . . . Here it comes!”
He sent me surging through the water like an arrow. “Dig, dig, dig!” he chanted as I pulled the water with my palms. “No fork hands!”
I closed my fingers so I could cup the water. I stood up, wobbly-legged, way too far up on the spongy board. I didn’t weigh enough to topple over the front of the board, but instead crumpled off to the side. That was called pearling, which I proceeded to do, over and over again. Briny ice water filled my stomach like a frozen, nauseatingly over-salted broth. It seeped into my nose and ears and eyes.
I faced the shoreline, shivering with frustration. “Appa, can we go ba —”
“Paddle!” He thrust me forward.
I felt the wave surging beneath me and paddled my heart out. Then, I popped up, remembering to keep my core flexed and my legs loosely bent. I rode the tiny, undulating wave into the shore, feeling like I was flying. After that, I was hooked. Every wave I caught was a victory. Each time I pearled or bailed was easier to shake off because now I knew what it felt like to surf. My arms burned as I dug into the water. It was alive. I could feel its pulse as I glided over the surface of the sea.
Evening fell over the horizon like a velvet drape. The waxing crescent moon became visible above the Sitka trees as we warmed our pink palms over a fire Appa made.
“If you’re ever upset, Chandra, you should go to the sea,” Appa said, handing me a toasted marshmallow, golden brown.
“Why?” I popped the marshmallow in my mouth: a caramelized pillow of sweetness.
“Because it reminds you of how small you are. How your problems aren’t as big as they seem.” He looked up at the black-azure sky, ridden with white stars.
“What are stars made of?”
“The sun is a star,” Appa said, not answering my question. “And we are made of the dust of stars.”
“But what makes up the stars?”
“They’re exploding balls of energy . . . atoms, I guess. Most of those stars are already dead.” He nodded up at the sky, smiling at me in a way I didn’t understand.
“So they’re like angels?”
He laughed, revealing his straight, off-white smile. “Sure, you could say that. It all depends on what you believe.”
g
The next morning Appa and I surfed while Vathany looked for God in the sand. The sky was a charcoal overcast, ominous and epic, like it wanted to devour us. I caught five waves in a row. I was discovering the sweet spots of the board and my centre of gravity.
We spent the afternoon racing tiny crabs we found under rocks. I tried to find one of every colour: dark purple, olive green, brown, grey, pink, white, and red.
“What makes the crabs different colours?” I asked Appa.
He laughed. “You are so curious about everything. I suppose the same thing that makes people different colours: மெலனின்் . . . I forget the English word. It’s an insoluble pigment.”
I was about to ask him another question when I fell and scraped my leg on a barnacle-covered rock. Scarlet blood streamed down my chilled calf.
“But we all bleed red.” Appa chuckled. “Just rinse it off in the salt water. It cleans.”
I bit my tongue and hobbled over to the water’s edge, cleansing myself in the tide. The purifying sting confirmed to me that the ocean really did cure everything.
On our way back to Nanaimo we stopped at a pet store in Coombs. It smelled of wood chips, earth, and sweet birdseed. There were calico kittens in large, open cages, iguanas, bunnies, a blue parrot, lime-green budgies, and a marmoset that roamed freely around the store.
The marmoset was silvery brown with a scrunched-up face and big ebony eyes like a doll’s. He was latched onto a cat tree, being accosted by two teenage boys who were buggin’ out. One with a shaved head and the other with a mullet, both wearing cut-off T-shirts. They swivelled around the cat tree, trying to scoop the marmoset up, but he squirmed away from them, into the small cat house, chirping from the blackness.
“Come on!”
“S’no use.” Mullet shrugged and held his middle finger up to the marmoset.
When they moved on to pester the parrot, I crept up to the cat house. The monkey crawled out cautiously and scampered to the top of the cat tree. I stayed still, extended my arm.
“Say ‘tits,’” Mullet barked at the parrot. “Say ‘Ungawa, Black power.’”
“Hey, Jesse, look.” Scalp nudged Mullet, nodding in my direction.
The marmoset took tentative steps towards my open palm, grabbed onto my fingers with both of its little paws. It ran up my arm and onto my shoulder.
“Blood brothers,” said Scalp.
“Blacks are related to apes.” Mullet laughed, then turned back to the parrot. “Ungawa! Come on, Ungawa!”
My face went hot. I wanted to duck-dive under the wave crashing over me.
On the drive home I felt like a shaken can of soda pop, thrumming in the space between my chest and my lips. I clenched my jaw, grinding my teeth for two straight hours. After we passed Qualicum Beach, one of my baby teeth popped out like a kernel of popcorn. I tongued the sour, metallic taste of the tender place where my tooth had been.
“Throw it out the window,” Vathany said.
“But it’s my tooth!” Hot tears and snot sluiced out of my aching face.
“What use do you have for a tooth?” She reached back, snatched the tooth from my hand, and tossed it out the window.
The moment we returned home, I grabbed my skateboard and zipped over to the Flower Power House. Staying still was painful when I had so many questions. As I wandered up to the lawn, a sound that could only be described as electric water washed over me. It pierced like lightning, rippled like a lake under rain. I leaned languidly over the banister.
“Hey, Moon, how were the waves? Did you love it? You gonna abandon us to be a Ukee bum?” Jill turned to me on the porch swing, docile and sleepy-eyed. She was draped over Rocky’s torso, rising and falling in time with his slow breath. She lifted her body so that it was slightly more upright, crossed her uncrossed legs.
“What’s this music?” I rested my board against the steps and crawled up to the porch, trance-like.
“Isn’t he the grooviest?” Jill handed me the album. The cover was all splashes of colour, a coffee-skinned man with a cloud of black hair, like Rocky’s. “And he’s left-handed.”
“What? Like it’s a magic power or something?” Rocky scoffed, nudging Jill off him as he combed his fingers through his fro. “You should grow your hair out, Moon.” He ran a thick, shea-buttered palm over my scalp.
The house was full of sweet clouds again, so they made me wait on the porch. I sat in the splash of light, surfing the chord progressions. Jill came out with a pitcher of sun tea and some blackberries, copies of a new play wedged under her armpit. I sprawled on the chipped cedar and watched the shadows move across the wall, tried to catch them. She handed me a script, and I shed my skin, trading my problems with someone else’s for the rest of the evening.
The next day, Appa and I went swimming. He wanted to make sure I could contend with the white kids before signing me up for summer swim club. Taught me everything he knew in a diamond-shaped loop: Long Lake, Green Lake, Lost Lake, and Diver Lake. He wrapped sugar-laden space food in our towels and shoved them to the bottom of his red duffle bag so Vathany wouldn’t see the metallic blue and red wrappers of our vending machine stash. She was pulling her eyebrows out over how chubby I was getting that summer. And blacker.
Appa couldn’t have cared less what I looked like. “Beautiful thoughts make a beautiful person,” he said, half-joking, as he washed his meds down with cola and a toaster strudel.
Vathany wrung out the damp tea towel in her hands and whipped him in the butt with it. Appa kissed her chiselled cheekbone, spackled with faint vitiligo, before swinging the bag across his body. He rushed ahead on his cherry-red bike, putting metres between us. I pedalled as fast as I could, panting, barely keeping up.
I couldn’t see the end of Long Lake. Clabbered brown sand and a wood pier stretched into vast blue that looked like a discount version of the sea. The water sure glimmered, though — light filtered through an aquamarine gemstone. Appa and I leaned our bikes against the trees, pulled off our shirts, and ran to the lake’s edge. A school of perch scattered as I waded in, digging my toes into the soft sand.
“Did you know people steal sand from Eelam?” Appa said.
“You’re lying.” I splashed him.
He grabbed my wrist and shook his head. “Am not.” He splashed back. “Beach theft . . . It’s a real thing.”
“How can someone steal a beach?”
“Humans do . . . all sorts of strange things.” He rubbed his head in a circular motion, chuckled softly. I pictured bandits shovelling trucks full of pristine white sand under the moonlight and vanishing before the sun arrived.
I learned my rākkeṭ kappal at Long Lake. Appa squeezed my arms in a tight streamline, my shoulders suction-cupped around my ears. He propelled me forward, and I launched my rocket ship out into space. Blasting off, I heard his voice in my head: Squeeze your ears. Look down. When you lift your head up, your belly sinks! I kept my eyes fixed on the perch and the reeds dancing in the lake bed as I glided forward, making it a little farther every time, thinking about stolen sand. The more I learned, the more cluttered my brain became and the less anything made sense.
Green Lake was sandless and named for the brilliant jade hue of the water. The bottom was filled with a colourful array of eroded stones.
Appa stood waist deep in the emerald lake, his furry chest covered in water pearls. “Watch this,” he said, humming “American Pie” and slowly submerging himself until bubbles came out of his nose.
I started humming along between inconsolable giggles, lowering my face into the water. Sure enough: bubbles.
“Always, always blow air out when you’re underwater.” Appa said this over and over. “Always. But if not,” he warned, “hold your breath.”
I held onto his shoulders as he dove down, stretching our lungs, exhaling small reverse sips of air. I pointed to a calico stone and he grabbed onto it, walking along the drop-off until my chest was pierced and tight, aching to explode. I let go of his shoulders, propelling out of the water to suck in the sweet air.
There was a monster at the bottom of Lost Lake, vinyl black, nestled in pine. The water was ominous and overtaken by the reeds.
“Imagine there is something gross on your foot and you want it off,” Appa said, flicking off his loafers in demonstration.
Every time I felt a reed graze my leg, I imagined the tentacles of a ravenous sea monster and thrashed as quickly as I could.
“No, okay, no — not like that. Fast and little. Flick, flick your feet!” He scooped me up by the armpits and clasped onto my feet. “Like this!”
I kicked and kicked, away from the clutches of whatever lurked beneath, knowing that the faster Appa was satisfied with my strokes, the faster I would be safe, out of the bewitched black water.
Diver Lake was, ironically, shallow. Shallow and still. The chameleonic surface reflected the forest. At Diver Lake, we floated, waded, and looked inward, sometimes spending an hour in silence, just staring at the water, breathing in time with the ripples.
“Many swimmers . . . many athletes . . . they overlook the importance of union. The marriage of movement and breath, but it is . . . everything. The ability to be here.” Appa flicked the water. “It is our connection to the divine.”
He was talking about that God thing again. That thing Vathany called Jehovah, or whatever. They were always on about the great unseeable that was in the water and in the air. The thing that was holding everything together.
“But how do you know it’s there?”
“I’d be a liar if I told you how to know anything. I don’t think you can ever know. But you can always look closer. Feel . . . ” Appa dragged his fingertip gently over the water’s surface, slowly submerging his hand, then his entire body.
I tilted my head, chewed my lip. Traced my own fingertips over the sleek skin of the lake. Then I slipped in, let it pour over me like cool silk.
5
The River
qiqéyt, 1947–48
g
The Sunday after we found the missing log driver, I went to church rather than the river, only to find that it was full of corpses. The skeletal, blue-skinned pastor raked strands of white hair across his veiny forehead, which extended several degrees north without going properly bald. “Through Christ, we conquer death,” he intoned in a voice so hymn-book paper thin I felt I could break it. His thread of an upper lip quivered; sweat pooled at his armpits.
Behind him, the gaunt and gaping marble Jesus peered into my soul with pupilless eyes. Corpses. Corpses everywhere.
“Here.” The boy beside me nudged me with his elbow and shoved a plastic goblet of burgundy juice and a crumb of stale bread into my lap.
