Headwaters

A story in a single sentence:

Shaky after two days' release from the psych ward, she wants to "put it all behind her," as the genial yet guarded advice had gone, so she takes the Skytrain to go ask about rental costs at a nearby Enterprise office whose bleak geometry squats in a grim patch of stilted highways, loose rubble, and territorial chain link somewhere near where Vancouver borders Burnaby, but she gets cold feet at Renfrew Station, turns around and scurries back to the library near her home on East Pender, where she searches Google Maps and decides Swift Current is the loveliest place name she's ever heard, especially in contrast to that of its province, which is all brittle stalks and wheat sheaf angles (Sask-atch-ew-an), and wants to visit for that reason alone—Swift Current, that is; a name that evokes homecoming sockeye vigorous and sleek as distance runners' quadriceps—although the furthest she's ever driven was Vancouver to Hope, ironically when she'd been at her least hopeful, and even then she'd had a tire blow somewhere near Yarrow, nearly killing her, and the towtruck and repair costs had been so high she'd had to turn back, out by many dollars and by even more self-worth, given all her struggles with what some might call mental health issues yet she chooses to term emotional difficulties, since the former still contains a tiny jab of stigma, and dammit, it's hardly her fault, given her early life with Uncle Giorgio and then those grey-stuccoed group homes and weary, spiteful foster parents, let alone the haunted jaundiced nightscape of the Downtown Eastside and her disaster-recipe life with Gunther, he of the one-part lavish confectionary largesse and two-parts savage fists, but she is free now, aside from the medication she needs to remember, while something about Swift Current calls and calls like babbling headwaters to a downstream eddy, urging her to spawn, to take this step that might mark a new chapter in a thus-far chiefly sorrowful tale, one charged with the possibility of something other than grim nights shivering with cold or dread and warmer nights sleepless with mosquitoes or regret, so she finds somewhere online that calculates the cost of gasoline, which comes to a little over a couple hundred bucks for the three thousand kilometre round trip, and she feels a heartsurge of joy until she sees the carbon footprint she'll be leaving—one thousand three hundred and fifty pounds, to be exact—which sounds so appalling she immediately scratches out this new life at its source—indeed, guilt and eroded morale have long perfected her inner Scratch 'n Lose—erasing the evocative names of Shuswap and Salmon Arm, Golden and Banff, Dead Man's Flats and Medicine Hat from a future that might have held something other than the pitiless tidal ebb of try then turn back, try then turn back, the balance of which has always seemed impossibly, monstrously weighted.

Demon Eyes

When you're in trouble, it don't matter the exact location of that trouble, he supposed. Just the fact you're up to your neck in a deep mess and need to darn well fix it. Yet it still bothered him that home was a damn sight more than a hop and a jump and a skipped rock away and lookit, there were no goddamned people on this godforsaken island, apparently. Which, he had to admit, was kind of the point.

Okay, obliterated ankle and apparent blindness aside, let's back up here.

Grant was a proud Texan, lord of all he surveyed, which actually wasn't much. But hell, he was lord of it. A salvage yard and a used car lot, to be exact, just outside of Lubbock. Between the two, he and his crew brought them in lame and sent them out new, as the saying went. Or if you prefer a more Texan flavor: brought 'em in sinners, sent 'em out right with God. Well, almost new, almost right, close enough for Jesus to turn a blind eye. Small time as his little operation was, it nonetheless provided him with enough enticing glimpses of a world in which movers moved and shakers shook that he pretty much craved a piece of that world every waking minute. This hunting trip was the end product of some complex favors involving at least a couple bribes and even more meaningful nods and winks between connected associates and their high-powered acquaintances. And money. Which went without saying, was the way of the world. All so Grant could solo-stalk some private island off of the coast of British Columbia and bag himself a timber wolf or two. Or black bear or cougar, maybe. No doubt he'd owe somebody something when he got back to civilization, but still. If he brought back the head and pelt of a wild, grizzled mutt, his wan star might rise somewhat, and he was damn sick of being the one who had to constantly bow his own balding, blocky head in company.

Fucking Canada. Swell idea on paper, and he still treasured the memory of the six hundred pound grizzly he eventually took down somewhere near Jasper, Alberta, but it was always either too cold or too damned wet for regular folks—a godawful place, truth be told, filled with mosquitoes, ice, socialists, and black flies, where no one gave you eye contact and too many self-described hosers repeated sorry and thank you instead of aiming for the top, most of them drinking piss-weak beer and pretending to enjoy grown men exchanging punches on a flat rectangle of ice, so's they didn't have to think about their overall predicament—the predicament being that they're an entire country that's basically Minne-fuckin-sota. 

And apparently the place was also home to attack plants. And it wasn't only the lord Jesus who turned a blind eye, no sir. Right after he'd identified his quarry—a ghostly, damn-near white sonofabitch, and big too, well over a hundred pounds—Grant had stumbled, grabbed something greenish and upright to prevent a fall, then—relieved he hadn't taken a tumble and intending to do a double take at the spirit wolf—had rubbed his eyes with his palms. Worst decision of a bad decision day. But why the hell hadn't anyone warned him there were killer plants in the neighborhood? Took him a while to make the connection, but it had to be some kind of plant. Poison ivy? Nah, he knew poison ivy. Someone had even warned him about grabbing on to devil's club, so that wasn't it, either. He vaguely remembered some tall stems topped by parasols of whitish flowers. Come to think of it, maybe one of the early briefings had mentioned them? An "invasive species"? Giant something? Guess it didn't matter what the fuckers were called or who invaded what-all—hell, he was an invasive species himself right now—what mattered was he'd done manhandled those puppies and now he couldn't see. His eyes burned something awful and his hands were tight-swole with what felt like chemical burns, and that wasn't even the whole of it; to add injury to insult, he'd hightailed partway out of the hollow in a momentary panic (which shamed him in retrospect, boy did it ever), then went and plunged his dumb ass down the same gulch or ravine or whatever they called them in this god-abandoned place. He knew it was bad when he both felt and heard the ligaments in his right ankle rupture with an audible pop that actually echoed among the trees for an appalling second or two.

And after that, silence. Lying still as a newborn after some calamitous birth, waiting for the pain in his lower leg to catch up to the fierce agony in his eyes and hands, barely able to distinguish light and dark. Disbelieving. Until he heard the twigs breaking right up close and the sounds of canine breathing. He went cold and still, reached for his rifle and went colder still. What kind of hunter drops his rifle and neglects to even notice? Worse still, as he reached he actually felt the animal's breath on his throbbing hand. He snatched it back and scrambled away, knowing he was only ruining his weirdly flaccid ankle more by moving. He didn't care. The wolf made a low sound deep in its throat. Grant felt around for his rifle, desperate. The beast was right there, its carrion breath assailing his nostrils, and Grant lashed out with his burning hand, catching its wet muzzle, eliciting a mutual yelp.

"This ain't a fair fight, ya flea-ridden heap o' mange!"

The wolf answered with a brief whine.

Then more silence. Grant's entire body was a tuned receptacle: for sound, for smells, for the briefest of movement. His skin, its fine hairs swaying like antennae, could feel the wispy fall of a single seed head, the tiny ripple of air in the wake of a lacewing's bright flutter, the soft exhale of the vast sleeping forest. Oddly, he'd never felt this alive, as he waited here in this place of solitude for his throat to be torn out, to end his days gargling his own lifeblood.

A hot rank tongue raked down his cheek and he actually screamed. But the teeth didn't follow. The animal had stepped away. It whimpered again. Stepped away further.

"You want me to foller you? You know I cain't walk, right?" Talking to the overgrown mutt only made him feel more stupid than ever, but dignity had dropped precipitously down his list of priorities at this point.

He heard the wolf scrambling in the forest detritus and for a mad moment imagined it finding his rifle and bringing it to him, and he almost laughed at that, but then he felt the damp splintered end of a branch and realized the goldarn brute had indeed brought him something: a crutch. For a moment he was amazed, must have looked like a sightless imbecile sprawled amid the needle-rich dirt and the waxy salal with his jaw hanging loose as an old-timer's drawers, but even a blinded Texan with a busted foot knows not to look a gift wolf in the general direction of its mouth, so he accepted the unlikely offering and began to pull himself to his feet.

Using the rudimentary crutch, he began to shuffle in the path of the timber wolf, who made a low chuffing sound, as if in encouragement. Then all of a sudden, Grant got wise, woke the hell up. What made him think this beast was leading him somewhere good? Who's to say it was on his side, this alien biped from a distant land? No doubt it could smell his strangeness on him. Nature's a bitch, always was since the wily old serpent made a naked chick eat an apple, and always would be until the sun went huge and red and time stretched to some kinda impossibly thin strand, and he of all people should fucking know better. This white monster was no friend of man, and somewhere in the darkest forest its dark companions waited, no doubt drooling and pacing some shadowy den. He knew coyotes did that, lured cats and small dogs away toward the waiting pack, and what was a wolf but a damn coyote on steroids? Hell if he was gonna go meek and stupid like some dumb house pet.

He recalled some latte-loving treehugger a couple days ago telling him the wolf had been unfairly "demonized" throughout history. Well fuck that with a giant fucking lumberjack dick. He sincerely begged to differ. And besides, everyone knows history's a tale told by the winners.

Grant stumbled and lurched in the opposite direction of his newfound spirit guide.

He felt a surge of elation, a sense he'd outsmarted this backward place, called the endless sly bluff of the world, until he stepped hapless into cool space and, as he fell, heard the last thing he'd ever hear on this busy green earth: a single forlorn and terrible howl desolate enough to make all the dead, faraway and near, predator and prey, shudder within their eternal sleep.

Behold

Behold the dark rider in the day's pale onset.

Blaze rubbed his eyes, not yet believing in the apparition on the road to the south. The tide was faraway to his right, and the surf sounded like slow distant applause, as if the waking land itself were reluctant audience to this human theatre. 

A man on horseback was approaching, ragged black against the grey ribbon of the coast highway.

Beside a sign that read Tsunami Evacuation Route, Blaze stood his ground and felt like a child who'd stumbled onto a battlefield. Stripped, hopeless, defences all done. 

As the figure began to resolve and the light from the east made pearly molten banners of the treetops, details emerged, and they were painful, as if a broken man dragged himself from a cave into the raw light. The man on the horse was worse than broken; his dark and hectic face atop the ruination of his body seemed to plead for something neither his fellow man nor this wan morning could conceivably deliver, some annihilating mercy.

The fly-tormented horse slowed and hung its leaden head and was still.

Blaze breathed and felt like the only thing that breathed in the silent vacuum of the world.

"Klootch?"

Less than a stone's throw away, Klootchman—for it was he—sagged forward then dropped to his left and hit the asphalt hard.

Blaze ran then, and the world breathed at last, although it was a stale and ignoble breath.

***

Behold the woman on the sand at dawn.

Athena ran as the light grew around her, seeming to buoy her to weightlessness as her bare feet left prints that filled quickly in her wake. Where her soft blue dress pressed against her body, she was rightful and animate, a creature of warmth. A vanguard of the coming day.

The shoulders of the islands out in the ocean still wore shawls woven from darkness and mist, but to her left the sky was brightening, like the shell of an oyster opening.

She was neither liquid nor solid, such states being meaningless, as joy and sorrow were meaningless to the sea and to the land. They were the same. Animal and machine had no distinction. Her feet touching kelp. Her elbows and knees fulcrums to abet her passage in the parting air, her hips a plummet to hold her to the earth, her neck the urge of an iron swan to break from that same adamant earth. She laughed through tears.

Until she heard her man screaming the name of his friend and even the world had the good grace to dim for a while.

There Is Lonely

Something had made her stay.

The call of her humdrum job cutting lengths of fabric and of two likeable if slovenly roommates in an untidy apportioned suburb had not been loud enough. A relationship not so much on the rocks as fully shipwrecked had not been loud enough. Her one-time companions imploring her to head back east with them had not been loud enough.

This was loud. This place. Painted a safe watercolour veneer over hallucinatory light. Where the beat of life drummed deep within the marrow of the land. This land. This place. With its incessant rush and rumble of tides across mist-draped miles of satin blond sand and the restless receding hiss; its storm-stunted forests whose edges leaned ragged and coerced on promontories; these wispy echoes of a world pre-settled; those scents of tangish salt and sweetish cedar; eddies and flukes, spawn and breach, fat tangerine starfish, driftwood bleach, clustered shellfish; brackish secrets of orca and sockeye, coho and squid, slipping slick through the chuck as skinless muscles; great tawny bays flanked by dark masses of dripping beams trailing mosses like the beards of truant gods; vast spruce posts and struts and torrential canopied ceilings, immense sweatlodge dwellings for bear and raven and eagle and wolf, framed and fashioned by no man and heedless of same. 

A poet of sorts, she was humbled to silence by the indigenous poetry of locale.

But now she was isolate. Something had sequestered them here. A fear hush had wrapped them just as the mists became sometime cauls for the trees. 

Her beachfire pulsed in the tideborne gusts, and sparks were whipped and buffeted and streamed to join the effervescent stars in the forthright arc of the overbearing sky.

She stood. She was lonely. She was hungry, in truth, and something about that brought her shame. That she was so utterly unwomanned. Diminished. Five feet ten of corvid-black enviable beauty reduced to a hanging jaw and knees that would barely lock.

We are blunted spears riding the pactless gales of a livid world, tumbling enfeebled from stentorian skies into breeding swamps of buzzing unchecked swarms absent treaty or terms. If an ending is in store, and soon, what of hundreds of years of white-skinned settlement and tens of thousands of far kinder years before that? Of carvers and surfers, of fishers and loggers and holy dancers under the greying brows of both lucid and baffling skies. Did the land dream us? Are we part of a long slumber from which greater sleepers are already set to awake?

She'd noticed two men and a woman earlier, and they seemed to her kindly, but she could no longer see them, and staring so nakedly at everyone on the beach made her urgency more shameful, more needy. Around the closest fire sat three men and she thought they'd been stealing not so benevolent glances at her. Or glances of a different nature. But they were people.

As she stood, a meteor bisected the big spill of the Milky Way above, flashing like mercury from east to west at the speed of an eyeblink. She imagined it hissing into the dark Pacific, some solitary birdless place where our world's face showed nothing but ocean to outsiders, as lonely in its brisk and sudden finale as it was throughout most of its existence, unable to relate its first-person tales that spanned an eon or more, and dying companionless in cold saltwater on this strange convulsing planet orbiting an unremarkable star on some dismal limb of the galaxy.

Enough. She would walk. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream or plead, but she wouldn't. The surf kept rushing, crashing, as if everyone exhaled but no one remembered to breathe in.

She would walk and talk to the men at the next fire, and if that made her a fool then a fool she would be.

Je Reviens

There was a moment as they climbed the logging road when Max thought they were in trouble. They had rounded another corner when Jasper hunkered in confrontation and bristled and growled with what to Max felt like excess zeal. Max stopped and squinted, his heart jackhammering past normal exertion, eyes fixed on the gnarled and twisted stump beside the road up ahead. For that was all it was. Not a black bear. Especially not a murdered hiker. Just a storm-blasted old stump.

His released breath was all the border collie needed to also relax, and the two companions continued their path over the loose, broken shale logging road that switchbacked all the way to the mountain's summit. Although it felt like midsummer heat still, it was in fact late morning on the day after Labour Day, and as a consequence he'd barely seen another person since they'd parked the Jeep a couple hours earlier, down in the rainforest shade. His boots and his dog's paws kicked up the sweet, dusty berry scent of a late Canadian summer. 

Max was hot. His water bottle was below halfway, already tasting like lukewarm sweat, and he knew Jasper was possibly more thirsty than he was. He decided to keep going to the next large buttonhook in the road, a good distance up ahead but clearly in the cooling shade of a stand of cedars, after which he'd make a call about continuing.

They trudged on, the gradient climbing, everything blasted and bare. Jasper, his blacks and whites blurring into greys, slunk wary and busy. Max too stayed on high alert, watching all things. Bone dry coyote shit like scorched braids. Faded du Maurier filters. A gleaming black corvid feather beside a rusted can of Molson Canadian. Spent and flattened shotgun casings. All light-peppered with the dust of a parched season. A tiny infant forest sprouting from the descending incline to their right, baby spruce and fir like hopeful stubble on an ailing face. Beyond, the hazy valley entire, with its veiny, shimmering roads, swayback barns and bright pastures, its silt-gagged sloughs and cedar-shingle roofs, tree farms and dikes, and all the critters—women, men, children too—that made of this flood-prone land at least a temporary home.

Reaching the shade and breathing hard, Max knew he'd already made his decision. There'd be no great vistas today, no panoramic views of the faraway delta and distant Pacific and its scattered and sparkling island emeralds set in liquid sapphire. Sad, but there would be other days; the summit could wait. No, he'd underestimated the sheer fatigue factor of this early September scorcher, and needed to head back the way he'd come, find shade and water.

Laughing out loud, he yelled, "Not today, Jasper, old friend!" then was immediately chagrined by his note of hysteria in so muted and lonesome a place. Jasper sat quietly panting, accepting of all outcomes.

Out of nowhere, Max recalled the stupid fight he'd had with Becky earlier, and how, if he got into trouble here, she'd likely be as indisposed to help him as she'd ever been. He hadn't even told her his destination. Dumb. Despite the heat, his skin rippled with the chill waves of portent. The gist of their blowup was already trivial: something about a landlord, a truck, a cord of beech wood, and a conversation they both agreed needed to happen.

Labour Day. He thought about that. Only yesterday, his peers and neighbours had been up here, dirt biking and shooting, swimming and four wheeling, making a holy hellacious racket and leaving their thoughtless scraps and heedless scars across a big and tolerant land. Never seemed right to him that on account of our bigger brains we had carte blanche to make the deepest gouge. But yeah. Labour Day. He heard a story not long after he arrived in Milltown Falls about another Labour Day long ago, back in maybe the seventies or some other sepia-washed time. A town gives up its secrets in small parcels, usually, so this particular one Max had garnered from various local folk, yet mostly distilled by a gaunt, cadaverous man named Swampman Jacques in the Fisherman's Catch pub one night, down by the big river.

Like so many tragedies, it had begun as a lark. Everyone was gathered on the southern shore of Devil's Lake, and partying had commenced in earnest. One or two groups sparked up joints, a couple forty-pounders were cracked open and, at some point late on a clear galactic night, someone decided that releasing the parking brake in a camper would be a laugh riot. Short version: it wasn't. Two passed-out teenagers slipped into the lake that night, right around midnight, and never came home. Witnesses claimed to have heard the underwater screams and even what might have been clawing sounds as the van dropped into the depths. Yet even the cops knew it hadn't been done out of malice, and while the victims' families could never fully quiet their outraged grief, most of the town circled the wagons and left it alone in terms of blame, chalking it off to dumb adolescent idiocy.

Although the victims themselves were less sanguine. Legends were built on swimmers who felt the pull of the restless dead beneath a surface suddenly flyblown, about hikers who glimmered then darkened from existence, fell off the world's radar, soon after passing the turnoff for the lake.

If you've ever taken a dip in Devil's Lake, you'll know. You'll recall how warm it felt when you stepped along its shoreline shallows, your feet growing sore on flinty grey quartzite, your torso soft and frail as you waded into its hotspring heat? Was your dog there too? Did you register the infernal drone of the deer fly before you ducked your head and breaststroked toward the centre of this shadowed lake? Mostly to escape the damnable fly? Held your breath only to meet the same winged demon, who'd waited, who hadn't for a second been fooled. While your dog plunged in, his earnest smiling head bobbing toward you, to save you, since that was his only ever job, to make you safe as a lamb. There's a point where your lower torso feels like it belongs to another creature, where the warm surface smile turns instantly to cold rage, somewhere near your heart, and your dangling parts sense their imminent uncoupling.

Local legends be damned. Max was feverish with the day's heat and his own exertion, his skin streaked with riverscapes of silt drawn from dust and sweat, and as his hot, dry boots had crunched their way down the logging road, the legendary chill of the lake had become a siren for him. When he reached it near midday, it was deserted. And silent. A diving raft lay still at its centre. As he waded in, he felt a note of disquiet when Jasper balked and whined, but it was brief, and soon the collie had overcome his rare hesitance and joined his companion, both making for the raft in the middle of the lake. Forested, almost sheer slopes rose on all sides; abysmal, umbral, in defiance of a bright hot day, only the shallowest of membranes managed to absorb the smallest daubs of warmth. The cold below that surface was anesthetic, immobilizing. Max kicked out and Jasper still whined occasionally, his limbs pistoning overtime to keep up.

A moment before they reached the platform, Max felt something brush his leg. A fish? He instinctively recoiled but felt the same whispery touch on his other leg. He stopped swimming, trod water, and looked down. What he saw almost stopped his heart: a white grasping limb and, attached to it, further down in the depths, a silent screaming face. The limb's icy fingers grasped his ankle. Insanely, in the temporal dilation of trauma, Max could clearly see a watch on the wrist of that terrible pale limb, one of those old watches that used to play "The Yellow Rose of Texas" every hour on the hour, and God save him, but he thought he could hear that song now, so weak and watery, with the watch face showing 12:00, and the cold iron grip of the bleached and slime-covered hand was pulling him down into the endless dark, and now Jasper was snarling and launching his sleek body below the surface and frenziedly biting the thing that assailed his master, and Max tried to help, he did, but the cold had him now, and he wondered why he could no longer see the light of the surface, and whether he had fallen asleep by the shore, and this was all a… 

***

It was the appalling howling dog that had alerted them. Even before they rounded the corner, hidden by stands of dark silent fir and red alder, their hackles rose at the sound, both boys strangely aware that whatever awaited them here would likely dwell forever in nightmares yet to come. Reaching the lake shore almost reluctantly, their every instinct urging them to go home, leave now and phone this in, they stopped and stared.

A naked man lay on the rocky shore, clearly dead. Bloated and bluish, his corpse was a latticework of lacerations. Bizarrely, he was encircled by a tree limb—what appeared to be a twisted branch of white birch—and even more perplexingly, someone had placed an old-style watch around one end of it. But worse still was the dog and the sounds it made—like all the loss of the world distilled into a late summer lakeshore snapshot; the sound of eternal sorrowing. Between howls, it would lower its head, and they saw that its muzzle still dripped with fresh blood. The boys backed away, watching that baying creature as they did so, and long after the emergency people had come and gone, had asked their serious questions and swabbed and scrubbed away the scene in a way memory never could, the two boys agreed on one thing in particular—that up until that grim and awful day they'd neither seen nor heard of such a thing as a pure white border collie.