The Last Woman (12 page)

The next morning, he’s sitting with Yvonne at her kitchen table when Jimmy comes in. Ignoring their greetings, the boy cuts himself a piece of pie and sits to eat it, to all intents and purposes alone.

“So I stopped by Whitbread’s,” Yvonne says to him. “A job,” she explains to Billy. “Deliveries to the cottagers. He’d be out in a boat all day.” And back to Jimmy. “Perfect for you. Those running shoes you want, they don’t grow on trees.”

“They’re racist over there,” Jimmy says after a while, in a muffled voice.

“Come on,” she cajoles, darting a look at Billy. “You think they’re racist everywhere. If John Whitbread’s racist, so am I.”

The click of Jimmy’s fork.

“He won’t hold it open for you forever,” Yvonne says. “I told him you’d come in tomorrow.”

“Could have asked me first.”

“I did ask you.”

“I don’t think so.”

Sighing, Yvonne sends another glance to Billy, who lowers his eyes. He has some experience of what it’s like to be badgered by Yvonne Johnson. When the washing
machine falls silent in the basement, she goes off to attend to it.

As before, Billy feels drawn to his nephew, yet he can’t think of anything to say. On an impulse, he sets a lead sinker (he’s been rolling it between his fingers) on the table. It wobbles away and comes to rest against the ketchup bottle. “One fish in three days,” Billy says, as Jimmy looks up. “Been away too long. Fish aren’t where they used to be. How’re you finding it?”

“Okay, I guess.”

“I tried the black boulders there, where Watcher’s Creek comes in. One good pickerel – all I managed all week. Where do you go? Or is that a trade secret?”

“We use a mask,” Jimmy says. “Old diving mask. When you look through it, you can see the fish.”

“And lay the hook right on their noses. Pretty smart.”

“Don’t fish much any more.”

“No? How come?” It is out before he can think. Briefly, the boy’s gaze flashes with anger – not at him, but into the deep solitary space where, Billy imagines, Ross Shewaybick’s lifeless body hangs. For some time neither of them speak.

“Thought I’d go out tonight,” Billy says at last. “Always got room for one more.”

Jimmy glances up and for a second looks much younger than he is.

After supper, Billy carries his tackle box and two poles down to the dock. A slight breeze has come up, setting the boats rustling, bringing a touch of coolness. He feels
exhilarated by the change, and by the prospect of fishing with his nephew. But Jimmy doesn’t show. Finally Billy drives off alone and anchors in the lea of a nearby island. But he has little heart for fishing now, and after a while he starts his motor and heads back toward the lights.

The next afternoon, in a dull mood, he goes for a walk. His way takes him along the shore path toward northern parts of the Island where no one lives. In some bays, the shrinking lake has exposed acres of bottom. He treks over mud flats among a scattering of large and small boulders. It is like a desert here – the sun fierce, the powdered mud rising in clouds around his boots. In places, animal tracks pepper the flats: moose, weasel, racoon, dog, fox. The heat is oppressive, and he’s glad to return to the path that keeps, for the most part, under trees.

Big pines ascend a slope. The atmosphere has changed – the trees drawing him into the still, sun-pierced understory. He climbs among giant pines where the air is cooler and shadows stripe the rust-coloured duff: a deeply private place, holy to his mind, where he has often felt close to those no longer here.

Many of the trees are browned by drought. Digging with his heel, he finds the soil like powder. Climbing higher, he comes to a plateau where the pines stand farther apart and the space between is littered with wind-felled trees. The fuller light is harsh, settling a relentless pressure on the brain. Balancing along a trunk, he catches
a flash of white – patches of brilliant white, as if snow had persisted by some miracle in the July woods.

Plastic bags: scores of bags, caught in bushes, strewn along the ground. Revulsed, he is about to turn back when a cry comes. It sounds only once, muffled and far away, a cry from the piney depths of the afternoon, so faint that he stands quite still, wondering if he has imagined it. There is something terrible in its brevity, as if human life had risen in an instant and as quickly vanished, sinking away forever into the heat and mosquito-plagued shadows of the bush.

Creeping forward, he comes across several boys sitting or lying about in a clearing. In their hands are more of the plastic bags, which they keep lifting to their faces, as if peering inside. Their movements are slow, languorous – they are more like old men than boys, enclosed in a sickroom atmosphere, from which drifts, now, the overpowering stench of gasoline.

A boy leans over and vomits, to the jeers of others. Another boy lies face down on the ground. One foot and then the other lifts and falls back, desultorily, kicking up puffs of dust, as if he is trying to walk straight down, into the earth.

Before Billy can think, he is in their midst, their stupefied faces staring up at him.

“Good work, good work,” he hears himself say, his voice breaking. “Killing yourselves up here. Good work!”

It is as if they do not speak his language. Some fool is shouting. Nothing to do with
them
.

“
Well?
” he demands. Already he can sense his helplessness here. He snatches up a tin. It contains a couple of inches of gas, as clear as apple juice, which he flings on the ground.

“Great move, buddy,” a voice says.

The boy is standing with his back to a tree. A rangy, good-looking kid of thirteen or fourteen whose blue eyes fix Billy with hostility.

“Who are you?”

“Who am I?” the boy echoes, his drugged, insolent gaze swinging to the others, as if to be asked for his name was something absurd.

A few of the boys croon with slow laughter. The boy looks back to him now, with such victorious contempt that Billy has to resist striking him. The boy is beyond his power and he knows it. They are all beyond his power. Still, he must go about ripping bags from hands, knocking over tins. Most of the boys watch indifferently. One surrenders his bag with a worried look, like a student handing in an exam. Still leaning against his tree, their leader sends out his sarcastic commentary.
Great move. Wow. Sign that guy up
. Billy’s only consolation is that his nephew is not here.

A shrill falsetto pulses from the deeper bush. Following the sound, Billy finds a boy kicking viciously at another. The victim, who lies on the ground, is doing nothing to protect himself. But with every kick he shouts like some great bird:
Hak! Hak!
The blows land with sickening force on his chest, his legs, his head.
Hak! Hak!
When Billy grabs the kicker and starts to pull him away, he struggles
to go on kicking. And he’s weeping, Billy sees – his face burning with fury and grief, as if
he
were the aggrieved party – as if he were battering himself senseless on a door that will not open. Breaking finally from Billy’s grip, the boy staggers off.

The other boy lies quietly now, with his head on his arm. A bubble of spit and blood glistens at the corner of his mouth. He lets Billy help him up, but as soon as he’s on his feet, he runs off, after his oppressor.

Numbed, drenched by his own exertions, Billy listens to the boy’s cries that get smaller until the woods are quiet. Returning to the clearing, he finds it empty. Around him, the ground is littered with plastic bags, pop tins and candy bar wrappers, pieces of abandoned clothing, and the charred remains of a fire. Picking up a running shoe, he stares at it for a moment, then tosses it aside.

At the base of a large pine, a little boy, not more than five or six, lies with his knees pulled up. His face is filthy, his chin slimy with drool. When Billy rouses him, he opens his eyes and smiles in a vague, trusting way. He’s too stoned to walk, so Billy lifts and carries him.

He goes back the way he came, down through the pines. Here and there the sun, sloping on a shallower angle, bands the huge trunks with orange. On his shoulder, the little boy murmurs incoherently as he clutches at Billy’s T-shirt. He smells of gas, but his hair gives off a faint scent of soap: someone has cared for him.

By the lake, he props the boy against a rock and fetches water in his hands. Sucking noisily, the boy drinks, and
when he’s had enough, Billy soaks a corner of his own shirt and dabs at the small face.

“So what’s your name, guy?”

“Ants,” the boy says.

“Ants? Ants in your pants?”

The boy giggles, and Billy tousles his hair.

He hears footsteps on the path behind him. Turning, Billy sees his nephew emerge from the trees. Jimmy takes in Billy, the boy; he glances up the slope.

“Your friends have left,” Billy tells him sharply, turning back to his work. In the deepening silence he senses shame. “Do you know who this is?”

“Lance,” Jimmy says, scarcely audible.

“That would be Lance –?”

Jimmy sniffs and lifts his head; he will not look at Billy. “Cormier.”

“Well then, let’s take Lance Cormier home.”

They trek in and out of bays, beside the brilliant lake. Billy carries Lance Cormier on his shoulders. Behind, the slopping of Jimmy’s running shoes fades, comes on, fades: over mud flats, over tongues of baking rock, down troughed paths where their footsteps are nearly silent.

Leaving the shade of the woods, they start across a sand flat. About halfway over, tracks appear in the greenish, scummy sand. Billy waits for Jimmy to catch up.

“Beaver,” Billy tells him. “Really big –”

Jimmy tosses his long hair, apparently indifferent.

“So, look,” Billy says to his nephew. “I’m not going to tell your mother where you were headed. She knows about
the gas anyways. I guess you know that. But this gas –”

“What business is it of yours?”

Jimmy’s eyes are fixed in some deep, burning space. It’s as if someone else has spoken; but his anger arrives like a blow. Billy turns away. As a boy, he would not have dreamed of saying such a thing to an adult.
What business is it of yours?
It seems a new kind of question, impossible in the old world. You didn’t have to be someone’s father or mother to care. You didn’t have to be someone’s child to listen. They don’t believe us any more, he thinks. They’re like those boys in that book, wrecked on an island. They don’t believe anybody. They’re going to eat us alive.

They go on, through birches, through pines, through a field of weeds. They are close to the houses now. He can hear someone’s chainsaw stuttering in the heat. But he can no longer hear Jimmy; looking back, he finds the trail empty.

He is awake for half the night. The next afternoon he finds his sister sitting on her back porch in the shade, Pascale asleep at her feet.

“I been thinking,” he says. “Maybe this winter, in the holidays, Jimmy and I could go up to Silver Lake for a while. Check the cabin out. Maybe do a bit of trapping. Could help.”

His sister turns her handsome face impassively. She daunts him, his sister; in her eyes he glimpses considerations that elude him.

“There’s no trapping up there any more. I told you that.”

She has told him that north of the lake, where most people have their trapping grounds, clear-cuts have broken up the lines. But he refuses to believe things are as bad as she says. His sister is a great doomsayer.

“I haven’t seen the cuts myself,” she tells him. “Debbie Roy went up with her dad. She says it’s terrible. She says she cried for a week. There’s nothing left, Billy.”

That night, he dreams of a three-legged bear. It has a queer, hopping walk, and keeps pausing to nose at its stump, which resembles a twist of melted plastic. In the fur on its back, a tiny roll of white cloth has been tied up with red ribbon: a medicine bundle? Then the bear turns into a woman with one eye, and the little bundle is tucked behind her ear, like a cigarette.

He wakes soaked in sweat. When he goes outside, everything looks the same – the woodpile under its mouldering tarp, the view through birches to water – yet he senses that something has changed. For several minutes he stands motionless. In the north, over the tree-tops, the sky seems false, hollow: blue paint smeared on a board.

Ann Scott’s failure to meet him at Mad Jack’s Island was not the end of their summer, not quite. Two days later, Billy was sitting on the steps of the blue house with Emma, helping her shell peas, when Ann walked up the
path. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse and those shortish pants she called pedal-pushers. She was moving quickly, her head down, entirely self-absorbed, but when she looked up and their eyes met, he stood up abruptly, oblivious to the scattering peas.

She appeared as if she hadn’t slept for days. There were deep circles under her eyes, their gaze now evading his as she knelt to help him pick up the peas. When Emma went back in the house, they stood in silence.