The Mountain Can Wait (10 page)

Early in
the morning, when the camp was empty and only Tom, the two cooks, and the manager remained, Tom went to meet the manager in his office and get the Ruger and a box of .223s. Tom balanced the rifle in his palms and felt the weight of it. Held it up to his eye and pressed his cheek against the cold stock, pointed it toward the window, and looked through the sight. He laid the rifle on the manager's desk and went back to the window and scanned the tree line. He wasn't confident in the rifle, and the caliber was hardly enough to safely take down a deer. He turned back into the room and put one finger on the barrel. “This gun had any intervention?”

“Few years back I bedded the action, floated the barrel. It's no tack driver but it shoots good enough.”

“Okay, then.” He slid the bolt and checked the magazine and loaded three cartridges.

Tom sat on the hood of the manager's truck, eyeing the tree line, with the rifle resting across his knees. The manager stood with him, eager to see the job done. He wore a trucker's cap that may have been blue once and kept taking it off, smoothing his hair and putting the cap back on again. The air was dry and warm, the morning sky white. The faces of the two cooks appeared at their small boxcar window and it seemed that the whole world was waiting to hear the crack of this shot. The manager took out a packet of tobacco from his back pocket and put it on the hood of the truck, and proceeded to roll a cigarette. He offered the tobacco to Tom.

Nothing about this was fair. By all rights they were trespassing on her land, and it was their waste that drew her. There wasn't even a need to hide, or mask his scent. She was habituated; she would come. He would shoot her because it needed to be done, and this was the way of men working the bush and he believed in the virtue of that, but he felt uneasy. They'd been irresponsible, had wronged her, and they couldn't take it back.

The manager finished rolling his cigarette and looked once more to see if Tom was going to help himself, and then folded the packet and put it in his pocket. He spun his thumb on a plastic lighter three times before it took and he lit the cigarette in a cupped hand, and began to speak. “I was surveying, me and this guy Gerry, way up near Liard River? Close enough to Alaska you could of crossed the border without knowing it. Come across a bear like this one, about fifteen years back. He was a grizzly, but he was skinny and mean, just like Old Mrs. We come up on him one morning—he was on high ground, other side of a meadow—he sees us and takes off fast as a shot. Few hours later, we're in thick bush, at the bottom of a draw, flagging a line with tape. We notice this same bear following us—we seen him up the side of the draw. He's keeping his distance but you can be sure he's stalking us. Gerry throws a rock up toward him and he takes off again. Later we're heading back to our truck and we come up to this boulder, size of a small house, and Gerry goes around one side of it and I go around the other. It's real thick bush and I'm ripping my way through some pretty thorny shit and I realize, eh, it's going to be easier to climb on top of this mother than try and get around it. So I grab on and I'm kind of hugging the thing, trying to find some kind of purchase for my foot. And then I hear this high hell—I don't know what kind of animal it is, right? Something screeching. But then it calls my name, and I realize it's Gerry screaming, other side of the rock. I figure the best thing to do is carry on up and over and when I get to the top, I kind of scramble to the far edge and look over and there's Gerry, hugging this big old fir, doing some kind of hokey pokey around it. The grizzly's on the other side and they're feinting each other out, eh, either side of the tree. Gerry's face is covered in blood, so I know the bear's already got a good swipe on him. I don't know how the hell he got on the other side of that tree and to this day, he doesn't know either.” He looked at Tom as if Tom might know how he did it.

“Self-preservation is a powerful thing.”

“Damn right it is. So you can imagine. I'm lying there holding on to this boulder for dear life and I look around me—what can I find, you know? From my vantage point I can see the white flag tape we tied at the beginning of our line, so I know the truck, the fucken road, is only about a hundred meters away. I can smell the bear; I can hear the sonofabitch breathing. Gerry is screaming the air blue and the bear takes another swipe and this one lands on Gerry's shoulder, rips half of it away, some of his back too.” He stopped talking and drew on the stub of his cigarette, then held it away from his face and studied it as if he were deciding whether or not there was any puff left in it. He took another sharp hoot and ground the thing into the dirt. “Thoughts come to you in times like this that you're not expecting. Okay, I was looking for some kind of a weapon, I was screaming my head off, but really I was thinking how easy it would be to climb down off that boulder and get to the truck. Maybe I can rev the engine and scare him off, and I know there's a toolbox in the back full of shit that can do a lot of damage to a bear, but really, these are just lies I'm telling myself. If I can just get to the truck, I don't have to watch while my friend is ripped to shreds. And I know my ass is safe.”

“None of us know what we'll do in these situations.”

The manager nodded. “By this time, bear's got Gerry's head in his jaw and he's trying to drag him away. But Gerry's legs are wrapped in the underbrush and the bear can't get him out. There's some good-sized rocks on top of this boulder so I get one and chuck it. Miss the bear by miles. Get another one, a good ten-pounder, and hurl it and this time it bounces off his shoulder. He drops Gerry and goes up on his hind legs and huffs at me. That's when I see how skinny and mangy he is. And I can see Gerry's eyes are open; he's alive but he's playing dead. While the bear's upright I get another rock, and another. The rock that sent him running got him right in the nose.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Eh?”

“You said you thought about making a run for the truck.”

The manager shrugged. “I guess my ass wouldn't of been worth much to me if I hadn't saved his first.”

He set to rolling another cigarette and Tom turned his attention to the tree line, a hundred and fifty meters away. The sun climbed higher and beat down on them where they waited. One of the cooks brought mugs of coffee and asked Tom if he thought Old Mrs. could sense what was going on, because, he said, she was late.

“If she doesn't come this morning, we'll try again tomorrow,” he said.

A snap resonated from somewhere close within the tree line, then another. Tom slid off the truck's hood and clicked the safety off the rifle and squinted into the trees. The dark mounds of her shoulders and haunch moved visibly in a stand of white alders, slowly rolling. The bear came to the edge of the trees and stopped, sniffing down her speckled snout, and then stepped out onto the clearing. Tom raised the rifle and secured it against his shoulder and rested his cheek against the stock.

“Poor fucker,” the manager said.

Tom lined her up in the crosshairs and visualized the shot, straight through the heart and lungs. He wasn't happy with the angle. He wasn't happy with the caliber. She took a few more steps toward the waste puddle and he lowered the rifle and walked around the side of the first boxcar and down the row to get a better line of fire. Old Mrs. stopped and sniffed the air, watching him. He continued moving down the boxcars until he was at the right angle and he got down on one knee and raised the rifle to his shoulder again. She was close enough that he could smell her. He sighted her again and nudged the trigger with the pad of his finger, and waited for her to take a step with her left front leg, and took the shot. A crack and its echo punched the empty morning. The manager whooped. Tom knew he'd missed before he even let go of the trigger. Instead of dropping, like she would have if he'd hit the right spot, she lunged to the left and rolled, and when she pulled herself up, he could see the wound in front of her back leg. She scrambled in the dust and stumbled back toward the tree line, where she disappeared, leaving a ripple of quivering branches.

Tom slung the rifle over his shoulder and ran across the clearing. Spots of red-black blood made puckered holes in the dust and glinted on the leaves where the bear had crashed into the bush. He stopped and listened to the echoing cracks and pops of the injured animal running through the underbrush until there was nothing.

The manager trotted up to him and stood at his side. “She'll bleed out.”

“I think I got her in the gut. It could take hours, maybe even days, and it'll hurt like a bastard.”

“You going to track her?”

“Shit.” Tom rested his hands on his knees and peered into the inky green. Several meters in, a staff of sun broke through a gap in the high pine boughs. He put the safety on the rifle, secured it over his shoulder, and stepped into the bush, into a veil of mosquitoes.

“You want a radio?”

“She'll gain too much ground. I'll go now.”

For three hours, he plowed deeper into the bush, following and losing and finding again the bear's trail. She was moving clumsily because of the shot, and though they were few, her marks were obvious: leaves black and wet with blood, the vulnerable white ends of broken branches, a fresh pile of scat. The land eventually sloped down and he came to a creek, and where the sun hit the water, the creek widened to a sandy pool. By the side of the pool, a blood-filled divot in the sand where the old girl must have rubbed her wound. Tom poked a stick in the blood and drew it out, and the blood veined into the pool and stopped, a cloud. He leaned the rifle against a pine and sat. Whatever had happened to the sow to get her to the point of scavenging the camp's dirty dishwater—an injury or habituation or just plain old age—he'd made it even worse. He had to do right by her, but if he went much farther into the bush, he risked getting lost. Great legs of sunlight shifted delicately through the trees, playing the shadows. He mistook a black mound of dirt from an uprooted tree for the bear and had the rifle off his shoulder before he realized his mistake. The fractured shadow of some large bird swept across the ground.

He picked small stones out of the sand and tossed them underhanded into the marbled pool, cupped water in his hands and wet the back of his neck. Blackflies burrowed behind his ears and he killed them there, and flicked away their carcasses. He didn't even need to be here, had come only because of Nix. Now that he'd had his hands on her once, he didn't know how to stop.

Bear could be anywhere, thirsty, tired, and in pain. And even if she didn't soon die from blood loss, or infection, she would be less able to feed herself than she had been, and an even worse death would come in weeks instead of days. A branch snapped behind him and he turned to see what animal it was but saw nothing. Mosquitoes droned in his ears. He stood and got hold of the rifle, secured it over his shoulder, and walked a few paces up the creek from where he'd seen the blood. He stopped, blew the mosquitoes from his face, and listened. Eventually he came to a wall of rock, meters high, slimy with moss, where the temperature seemed to drop by degrees. He turned and stood and listened to some kind of small bird on a high branch calling to its mate. Where the land rose slightly to his left, something jumped off a rock and darted beneath the underbrush. It could have been a marten or it could have been something else.

And here he was again, searching for someone who didn't want to be found. A wind came up from the stillness and the tops of the pines swayed eighty feet in the blue, rearranging the stretched patches of sunlight where he stood. Deep in the murk he saw the shadow of a bear stand and turn and roll away, but there was no disturbance in the underbrush and he knew it was only a shadow. His need for it to be her.

The evening meal had been cleared up by the time he found his way back to camp. He begged a sandwich and a piece of lemon cake from one of the cooks, who peeled carrots over the sink and asked Tom for details of the chase. He took his food to the rec car and ate in front of the television, ruts of static running through the picture, one eye on his food and the other on the news. Something about a hit-and-run death in another part of the province and the expectation of a record-breaking winter, and he wondered why they even tried to predict a thing like that in June.

It took
eight days for the crew to finish the contract up in Minaret. They boarded the diesel train early in the morning, and while there was never any chance of Old Mrs. returning, Tom watched the trees for her rolling black back and, like before, was shown the shadow of the bear, but never the bear itself. He said good-bye and hoped against common sense that her death had come quickly.

They got back to Takla Lake just as the evening campfires were being lit, and he found Roland and Sweet eating chocolate cake and swigging rum from the bottle in the back of Sweet's truck. Licking their fingers, they told him that the new reefer had arrived, but the seedlings were still partially frozen and couldn't be planted.

There were three separate fires that night, and Tom went to each one and told the planters that after five weeks in the bush, they would head to town tomorrow for a few days off, give the seedlings a chance to thaw. He warned them not to get too drunk and antagonize the locals, and reminded them that when they weren't in the bush, it wasn't okay to drop their pants and piss wherever they liked. Now everyone was in a good mood. Tom sat at a table at the back of the mess tent and wrote out paychecks for whatever amount they wanted out of what they'd earned so far.

“A thousand, please, chief.” This came from Luis, drinking from a can of Coke.

Tom put down his pen and looked at him. “A thousand? You sure?”

Luis gazed at him through his thick glasses.

“Most people just want a few hundred bucks to get drunk and do laundry.”

Luis shrugged. “Don't sweat it, Mom.”

Later, Nix sat at the table in Tom's trailer drinking a mug of coffee and whiskey. She asked him about Minaret and he told her about the bear. She asked him why he cared so much about a bear, and why he did stupid things like risk getting bitten for that hawk, and he said it was a hell of a thing to leave an animal to die. He didn't tell her that the problem wasn't the bear. The problem was that he was getting tired of fixing what wasn't his to fix.

“I think you went to the other camp to get away from me,” she said. “To forget about what we did.”

“You could be right.”

“Did it work?”

“No.”

Her hands were warm on his skin, warm from the mug she'd been holding. Warm on his face and his chest. The first kiss tasted like coffee but after that it was only her. He needed to be in control, but like before, she seemed to be writing the terms of the thing and he was maneuvered up and down the bunk, her grip on his ankles, his wrists, his hips. She used her teeth, bit his lip and he tasted blood. He tried to pinch her in retaliation but couldn't find enough fat to get a grip.

Afterward, he lay with his head on her belly, his arms draped loosely along her sides. With eyes half closed, he listened to the coffee and whiskey passing through her gut and was melted, buzzing, disturbed by his own lack of decency and willpower.

“When I was little,” she said, “like three or four or whatever, my dad used to take showers just after I went to bed. I loved that. I loved hearing the sound of the water falling into the tub. I guess I could pretend it was raining, you know, so I felt all cozy in my bed. And sometimes, even better, he'd play the piano. You say tomato, I say
tomahto;
you say potato, I say
potahto
. I think he only knew a couple songs. We had this massive house with two living rooms and his piano was tucked away in this dinky little side bit off the bathroom. Not much bigger than a walk-in closet.” She inhaled deeply. “My parents fought a lot.”

Tom nestled his cheek deeper into her stomach.

“Now you go,” she said, the words rumbling deeply through her body. She drew lines in his hair at the nape of his neck.

“Hm?”

“It's your turn.”

“To do what?”

“Tell me a story.”

He turned his face to the other side, eyes wide-open now. The carpet under the cupboards was curling up from the floor.

“This is what people do, Tom. They fuck each other and then talk about personal shit.”

He moaned. “Really?”

“Tell me something from when you were a kid.”

“Like what?”

“You haven't been a stick-in-the-mud all your life. You must have been fun once.”

He pushed himself off of her and fell to the side, leaned back on the bunk. He reached for his underwear from the floor and pulled it on. “I don't know what you want me to tell you. Life was pretty normal for me as a kid. My mom is tough as hell, brought me up alone. Pretty much left me to it when I was growing up. What else. I always had a dog? Is that what you want to know?”

“What about your dad?”

“You want to know about Albert, eh?” He rubbed his hand flat across his chest. “Women always want to know about Albert. He was around a bit. Not enough to make it count, I guess.” He looked at her sideways and she was turned to him, propped up on one elbow, waiting for more. “I've got a lot to thank him for, though. He taught me to hunt, how to recognize my ass from my elbow. He wasn't a bad guy. Just not the type to stay in one spot. I think he ended up in Saskatchewan or someplace.”

“When did you last see him?”

Tom scratched the hairs at his jaw, chewed his thumb. “I was about fifteen.” He rolled away from her, onto his side. Hoped she would want to sleep in her own tent.

After a few minutes of silence, she jabbed his back with her elbow. “By the way,” she said, “first time we did this you told me it was never going to happen again.”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “You complaining?”

“No. But does this mean I get more? I want more.”

“Now?”

“Fuck, ya.”

First thing Tom did when he got into town was go to the grocery store and buy the fixings for pizza. Ingredients for the dough, ham and a can of pineapple chunks, peppers. He bought ice cream and chocolate syrup that was meant to harden as soon as it hit the cold. He took all this home and put it away, and checked that everything was secure in the house after it had been empty for five weeks. It was as he'd left it, the only thing out of place being the lack of dog.

He mixed the flour and salt and yeast for the dough and left it covered with a damp cloth to rise. When it was ready, he knocked it back and wrapped it tightly in cellophane and put it in the fridge. The local newspaper showed the movie listings and he sat at the kitchen table with the entertainment page folded open, phoned Erin at Samantha's, and went down the list with her. He didn't know any of the titles or the actors starring in them so he let Erin choose.

The movie was mindless and he fell asleep partway through and stayed that way until she elbowed him awake at the closing credits.

“I've got some food at the house,” he said as they walked back to his truck. “I thought you could sleep at home tonight.”

“I'm meeting friends.”

“Now?” He looked at his watch. “It's almost nine.”

“Congrats. You can tell the time.”

“Varmint.” He pushed her sideways, and they walked quietly to the corner. “Which friends?” he asked, crossing his arm in front of her as she stepped off the curb while a car passed.

“I wasn't going to get hit,” she said. “Jesus.”

“Who are you meeting?”

“Just people from school.”

“I guess you guys go to bars these days, eh?”

They were at the truck now. She grabbed the tailgate with both hands and hopped up on the bed.

“What are you doing?”

“Let me ride in the back.”

“No.”

“Why.”

“Because I said so.”

Something close to a roar rattled at the back of her throat as she pulled the passenger door shut and crossed her arms. “You're faking it,” she said, looking out the window.

“I'm faking what?” He pulled out into the road.

“When you do something like not let me ride in the back of the truck. You're pretending to give a shit.”

They were in the middle of an intersection, waiting to turn left, and he watched car after car go by until the opposite traffic stopped and he had enough time to make the turn. He thought about what he could say and decided that, given the way she misunderstood just about everything he did, there was pretty much nothing in the world that could answer a thing like that.

At home, he rolled out the pizza dough and covered it with the toppings he'd picked for her. He ate at the kitchen table, finishing the pizza and leaving the ice cream untouched in the freezer, and went to bed.

A ringing phone pulled him up through the haze of sleep and left him searching for a sense of where he was. The red numbers next to his head told him 3 a.m. He let the phone ring until the machine clicked on but whoever it was hung up and rang again. He walked down the dark hall with the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes.

“Who is this?” He leaned his shoulder against the wall.

“It's Nix.”

“It's three in the morning.”

“Sweet's got us all in a bit of trouble.”

She explained, her voice slow and thick, that a bunch of people had gotten into a fight in the bar and Sweet threw a beer bottle onto the dance floor, and it hit a girl. A few of them had been taken to the police station and things got a bit rowdy and now the others were in the drunk tank for the night and she needed a ride home.

“Can't you get a taxi?”

“You really want me to get a taxi?”

She was slumped in a metal chair with one heel tucked on the seat and her other leg stretched out arrogantly in front of the police reception desk. Tom addressed the man behind the desk first.

“You've got some of my employees in the tank. Anybody hurt?”

Nix rose from her chair and hung from Tom's shoulder. “I told you he was coming,” she said.

The officer looked at Tom. “I gather you're the chief?”

Tom rubbed his hand up and down his face, tried to shrug Nix's weight from his arm, but she held on tight. “Do you know what happened?”

The man watched Nix, amused, and then looked at Tom. “I can't tell you what happened exactly, but my colleagues tell me one of your guys thought it would be smart to throw a glass bottle onto a dance floor. You can imagine all hell broke loose, so we're keeping the young men overnight. Let them cool off.”

“He didn't think it would be smart,” said Nix. “That's a gross insinuation.”

“You can take her home now, please.”

The low, pale light in the eastern sky filled Tom's rearview mirror as Nix slept in the truck on the way back to the planters' hotel. When he turned off the engine, she sat forward and leaned her head against the dash, then slowly turned her face to him and smiled sadly. “Is it that early I can hear the birds?” she said.

“I'll walk you in.”

She sat up and rubbed her face and looked out the window, frowned. “Here? Can't I come home with you?”

“I've got my girl at home.”

“I'll be quiet.”

“Nix, how bad was it tonight? What happened to the girl he hit?”

She yawned and stretched and leaned her head against the window, spoke with her eyes closed. “I think she cut her foot and her redneck Prince George boyfriends went apeshit. Those cops were only pissed off because Sweet embarrassed them. You can't throw someone in the drunk tank for being more intelligent than you.”

“You think he's so intelligent?”

“I think he's a reprobate. You're pretty smart, though.”

“Hate to break it to you, but I'm one of those Prince George rednecks.”

“Your neck is beautiful.”

“I'll walk you in now.”

“No. I'm coming home with you.”

He got out and went around to her side and opened the door. He held out his hand and she ignored it, turned her back to him, and curled into a tight ball. Her body shook as if she were crying, but what he heard was a low, stuttering giggle. He reached across and gripped her shoulder and tried to turn her around, but she resisted, clung to the upholstery and curled into a tighter ball.

Tom stepped back and crossed his arms over his chest and waited. “You're embarrassing yourself,” he said.

She stopped shaking, slowly unfurled, like some kind of dawn flower, and looked at him as if he were a stranger. Keeping her eyes on his face, she stepped down from the truck and quietly clicked the door shut and then turned toward the hotel entrance.

“I'll see you up to your room,” he said, catching her arm.

But she shrugged her shoulder against him and pulled away, and yanked on the door. It was locked.

“Try your key,” Tom said.

Swaying, she dug into her back pocket and took out a hotel key. She missed the lock with her first attempt and then guided the key slowly in with both hands. White-knuckled, she tried, and failed, to turn it.

“Here. Let me,” Tom said, and reached for the key.

She pulled it out of the lock and held it up like a tiny sword. “You try and open that door for me, I will make you choke on this fucking thing.”

He backed away and watched her until she unlocked the door. She pushed through it without looking back, and he was left for the second time that night wondering what he should have said.

In the morning a woman sat behind the desk at the police station and told Tom that his people had been released without charge. He drove to the hotel and, in the first room he looked, found LJ and Beautiful T sitting opposite each other on one of the beds, playing cards. On the other bed were arms and legs and twisted blanket.

LJ's hair was dripping and she wore a towel, and the air in the room was humid and blue with cigarette smoke.

“Good night?” he asked.

LJ turned her head to him slowly. “A typical bash.”