Consumption (47 page)

Alvah made breakfast, as Pauloosie kept an eye out up top. The smell of pancakes rose from the galley. Then there was coffee. Pauloosie’s hunger had been established over months on the land and had not begun to abate even after two weeks of reliable food on board. (After the first meal they ate together Alvah had revised his estimation of the stores they would need by a factor of four and had made another trip into town for food.)

With the scent of the ice-strewn sea sharp in the air, and in the knowledge that every minute put Rankin Inlet farther behind him, this food smelled better to Pauloosie than anything he could remember. The pleasures of raw seal steak notwithstanding.

TWENTY-FIVE

WHEN PAULOOSIE’S DOGS WALKED INTO TOWN
, for a while they were not recognized. Finally one of the old men, Panigoniak, came back from walrus hunting and saw them. He walked over to Tagak’s house and asked Winnie if he could speak with Emo. Emo came to the door, and did not know him, a man he had hunted with hundreds of times in the previous eighty years. So Panigoniak asked if Tagak was home, and Winnie said no. Then he told her that her grandson’s dogs were on the bay ice, with the other dogs. He had fed them, he said, but they didn’t look healthy. Winnie nodded, and the old man left.

Victoria picked up the telephone and listened to her mother’s news, then lay her head down on the kitchen table and shut her eyes. Simionie, with whom she had been playing cribbage, understood this to be a tragedy that could not be shared with him. So he found his jacket and went outside. As he closed the door behind him, he could hear her beginning to sob. He checked his watch. It was four in the afternoon. Justine would be home from school soon. He sat down on the porch steps and waited. When he spotted her dark blue parka round the corner as she trundled home, he stood and walked away. He had been listening to Victoria’s crying for an hour and had carved a groove into the wooden step he had been sitting on with his fingernails.

In bed that night, one in the morning and the sky scarcely dimmed, Johanna and Doug lay alongside each other and tried to summon sleepiness. They were as enlivened by the all-day-and-night sun as the tundra mammals were and felt, just as keenly, the unceasing desire to move, eat, and have sex. They had done all these things, and still they were restless. In moods like this, it becomes easy to speak of things prematurely.

“Are you sure?”

“No. I tried to see Dr. Balthazar today, but he’s not around for some reason. I’ll see one of the nurses tomorrow. The only reason I haven’t said anything before now, I wanted to know, first. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“So what makes you think you are?”

“Might
be. My breasts ache. I’m late.”

“Holy mackerel.”

“Holy mackerel.”

“Ha.”

“What do you mean, ‘ha’?”

Doug started laughing, his joy filling him, his extremities, leaking out of his eyes and his mouth and his nose like a soda swallowed hastily, mucus running everywhere, and Johanna rose up on one elbow to look at him quizzically, wondering if this was some stress-response variant she hadn’t seen before. Then she saw his eyes shining in the twilight, and tears running down his face, and he could not have been more transparently happy, and she breathed out for a long, long time, and rolled over on her back, smiling.

When they rounded the Bering Strait it was October already and they were very late, moving south not much faster than the edge of the pack ice did. The equinoctial gales had come upon them when
they were off Point Barrow, and they had nearly been driven ashore in that shallow, icy water, the lee shore at all times threatening, the smooth, featureless coast offering up only the breaking combers exploding in geysers of white water. The onshore wind had driven them so close one night they were certain they would die. The next morning the wind was fractionally lighter, though still slashing with icy ire, and they turned into it as closely as they could and motor-sailed away from the shore. When the sun had risen, they had been five hundred yards from the surf. They did not mention it.

They made Dutch Harbor in late October. The crab fishery was in full operation; the docks were crowded with exhausted and excited young men and pickup trucks. The bars were full, and raucous. Alvah’s advice was to stay away from them. Pauloosie was taken for an Aleut, but that language was not really comprehensible to him. He picked up cognates, as an Italian listening to Catalan might, but he could not converse except in the expletive-laden English he heard shouted from every corner those busy weeks. The Aleut thought he was one of them, until he opened his mouth. Pauloosie realized how far from home he was, with surprise; he wanted only to keep going.

They bought better foul-weather gear, and sunscreen and boxes and boxes of tinned food and coffee and bags of rice and noodles. Alvah produced rolls of greasy American dollars from somewhere inside the boat and together they hauled crates of gear and provisions to the dock where the
Umingmak
lay tied. The boat was uninjured by its time in the Arctic Ocean, but the stores were depleted. All this replenishment was carried out by the two men without any discussion of where it was they were bound. But they were in the Bering Sea, and winter was coming. So the boat was going somewhere.

When the storage lockers of the
Umingmak
were all full, the water and fuel tanks brimming, every locker packed with rope and fishing lures and Chef Boyardee, they sat there one night and drank whisky together and did not speak. Finally, Alvah asked Pauloosie what it was he was thinking about doing next.

“Staying on the boat, if there is a place for me,” he said.

“There is. Where would you want to head?”

“South,” he said.

“Everything is south of here,” Alvah said.

“Which makes me easy to please,” Pauloosie said.

They left the next day, due south, driven by a Bering Sea low out of the northwest, which threatened to dismast them from the moment battle was joined. The Bering Sea in winter is the worst open water in the world, and late October is pretty close to winter. The sea rose behind them in huge moving moraines of water. Until this point, Pauloosie had considered travel by these means to be a softer, duller proposition than by dog team. However, in a storm on the tundra, one builds an iglu and waits. It remains possible to die, but chiefly from starvation, a much slower proposition than the intense imminent peril represented by breaking seas the height of Jack pines curling up astern.

Alvah was inspiring to watch, Pauloosie thought, as they tied down every moveable object and doused sail until the boat was flying the equivalent of a small tablecloth from its headstay. Still they flew along at six knots, sliding down waves like they were snow-covered hills. Over and over again, Pauloosie vomited over the rail, wet black hair streaming into the sea as he gasped.

After her high school graduation ceremony, Justine had told her mother that she would not be staying in Rankin Inlet but Victoria hadn’t believed her. She could no more imagine her daughter living anywhere else than she could herself. Justine could only imagine living
anywhere
other than Rankin Inlet. She had thought Winnipeg, for a while. But after Marie’s trip down there, she changed her mind to Toronto.

There was less drama involved in her leaving than either of them had expected. Victoria gave Justine money, and Justine bought a
plane ticket and packed a suitcase. When it became clear that she really was going, Victoria gave her more money. She and Simionie drove Justine to the airport on the day of the flight and before she boarded, her mother gave her even more. Justine was embarrassed. Victoria didn’t know what else to do. “I feel like your father, suddenly,” she whispered to Justine as they hugged. Justine nodded, not trusting herself to speak. “But he’d have more advice for you than I do.”

“I’ll be fine,” Justine said throatily.

Victoria nodded. She started crying. Justine turned and walked to the plane. Simionie waited in the truck in the airport parking lot. Victoria collected herself and then went back to the truck. Simionie drove her home to her empty house.

By the time they were off the coast of Washington the weather was easing noticeably. The effluvia of the Columbia River and the Strait of Juan de Fuca coloured the sea a dull brown hundreds of miles offshore and everywhere there were floating trees. Pauloosie was over his seasickness now and understood the boat well. Simon Alvah slept soundly at night and no longer listened intently to the sound the sea made against the hull. Above, Pauloosie stretched out in the warming night air and studied the stars, as clear as on the tundra, a place he suspected he was not going back to. He watched as the bear slipped slowly closer to the horizon. One night, after he had caught an odour rising from his sea bag, he had fished out all his caribou clothing, his
kamiks
and his parka and his mittens, and tossed them into the sea. The moon was bright that night and he watched them floating as the boat reached southward, until they were gone.

TWENTY-SIX