The Mountain Can Wait (11 page)

“You know where Sweet and those guys are?”

“In jail, aren't they?”

“They were released this morning.”

She shrugged and turned back to her cards.

The hallway was cold and dark and smelled like stale beer and pot. The sticky carpet sucked at his boots. Tom looked through the doorways that were left open, but the silence, the lack of Sweet's monologue, could only mean that they weren't back yet.

He waited in the lobby, sitting on the edge of a single brown sofa by the window. Across from him, a cigarette vending machine glowed pale yellow. The street was mainly empty. When Sweet eventually came through the doors, he walked past Tom without seeing him and bent in front of the cigarette machine. He stood up, rummaged for coins in his back pocket, and swayed a little as he counted the money in his palm before slotting it into the machine. He pressed a button but no pack of cigarettes dropped, so he nudged the machine with his boot, hit the side of it with a flat hand, and stood as if he were considering something. He collected the hair at his neck in his fist, strangling the curls.

“Hey, Sweet.”

“What?” He didn't turn.

“Hey.”

Sweet looked over his shoulder at Tom, snickered. “Chief. You're like a little tree elf hiding over there.” He gave the machine another kick and strode over and stood by the couch. His hair had fallen over his eyes again and he flipped it back. “Fucker took my money.” His t-shirt was stretched at the collar and torn and spotted with brown blood, as if it had dripped from his nose. The knuckles on both of his hands were raw, bloody, and swollen.

“What happened last night?”

“We've just been discussing everything over breakfast, going over it with a…ah, shit.” He snapped his fingers by his temple; his face tightened, then relaxed. “With a fine-tooth comb. Yes! A fine-tooth comb. We've just been going over it and I've come to, what with the frivolity and the ganja and the beer. And the tequila. I mean I'm not a violent person by nature, but at some point in a man's life, things have got to get physical, right? There's bound to be damage to his psyche if the brute is never released from its cage.”

Tom relaxed into the couch, crossed his arms loosely between his legs, and looked up at him.

Sweet shifted his arms, as if he didn't know where to rest them, and settled on hooking his thumbs in his front pockets.

“Why throw the bottle?”

“Can you think of a better way to start a fight in this shithole town?”

Tom looked out the window at an empty intersection, a red traffic light.

“Frankly, I'm confused as to why you're here, boss—you've got nothing else you could be doing today?” His lisp was more pronounced, a wind blowing off the edges of his words. “You don't own me on my days off—not here. You've been hitting heavy on me all season but what happened last night has got nothing to do with you. Just can't help yourself from swooping in. Mr. fucken Fix It.”

Tom stood up and Sweet smiled, grinned. “I'm just fucking with you, chief. Look at that face you've got on, that grim old face. It's okay. Why don't you go upstairs and let Nix take it all away?” He slapped a big hand on Tom's shoulder. “I'll even hold the elevator for you.”

One of the other planters came into the lobby and took a half step toward them, then looked at their faces and stopped, mumbled something, and left.

“Your hand hurt?” Tom asked him.

“Eh?”

“It looks pretty bad.”

Sweet took his hand away from Tom's shoulder and held it up, extended his swollen fingers, then made a limp fist. “That's just from the fight.”

“Your knuckles didn't get torn up like that in any fight.”

“Course they did.”

“Nah. You've been punching a wall.”

Sweet smirked, chucked a low laugh.

“Isn't that right?”

Sweet shook his head and went to the elevator, pushed the button hard with his thumb, over and over.

“Because whatever it is you want, you can't get it. And you know it.”

The elevator doors opened slowly and Sweet put a hand on each to force them wider. He stood inside, his head down, and the doors closed.

In the parking lot, Tom walked up the side of his truck and kicked the front tire. The planter who had passed him in the lobby called out from the other side of the street and Tom waved with a straight arm, without turning his head. He got in and turned on the ignition and looked at himself in the side-view mirror, bit his lower lip. That thing about letting go the brute, in spite of all the rest of it—he couldn't deny that part of him agreed.

On his
last day in town, Tom wanted to see Carolina, leaving it until the end because he wasn't sure he should do it. One look at his face and she would call him out. When she kissed him, she would taste what he had done.

He called her in the morning and she asked him to meet her at the university library. Before leaving home he stood under a hot shower and scrubbed a layer of skin from his body, shaved, clipped his nails.

He hadn't been to a library since he was a kid, yet the hush of the place was familiar. Like in the bush, the silence at first seemed total, but once his ears adjusted he heard soft feet climbing stairs, leaves of paper, the characteristic call of the photocopier. On the wood-paneled, two-story wall of the open foyer hung a great fabric Haida print, a bear-faced moon in a purple sky, reflected in the sea.

Carolina had told him to go up to the second floor and straight to the back, behind the math and sciences stacks, where she would be camped in a cubicle by the window. He found her with her head down, asleep. He pulled a chair up beside her and sat, and watched her for a moment before he put his fingers on her back, softly drawing them up and down.

She sat up and wiped her mouth. “Oh fuck. I drooled all over this.” She pulled her shirtsleeve down over her hand and blotted the piece of paper in front of her. “Why do libraries have to be such somnolent places?” She frowned. “I've ruined this girl's work.”

“She might take it as a compliment,” he whispered.

“That I fell asleep?”

“No, the drool. It was that good.”

She scanned the area around the cubicle and then put her hands on his neck and drew him close, and kissed him, kissed his nose, the corner of his jawbone, under his ear. She pressed her cheek against his. “I'm sorry I don't have more time.”

“This is good,” he whispered. His hands shook. “This is enough.”

“It's not. Not nearly.”

“I get to see you in your natural habitat.”

She wore her hair in two messy braids behind her ears. Glasses doubled the size of her eyes.

He pointed to her face. “Have I seen you in those before?”

“What? My glasses?” Her hands rose to them as if she'd forgotten they were there. “I wear them for reading. You've seen them plenty.”

He took them from her and put them on his own face and his vision swam. “I never noticed.”

“Well. You should pay better attention.”

“I like them,” he said.

She rubbed her eyes and stretched, pulled a sweater from the back of her chair, and put it on. “If I'd known you were going to be in town…” she said.

“I know. I messed up. I had all this stuff to do.” His eyes ached and he took off the glasses, and gently tucked the arms back over her ears, settled the frame onto the bridge of her nose with the tip of his finger.

“I swear,” she held his face with both hands, “if thou come not forth I will love thee no more.”

He held her knees, leaned toward her, not caring anymore if she could smell or sense the other thing on him because he badly wanted her close.

“Sappho,” she whispered.

“Hmm?”

Someone moved quickly past their cubicle, looked in, and moved on. A coughing fit erupted a few seats over. She stared at him with her eyes in glass and he remembered he had seen this before, in a tent somewhere, while she read, entombed in her sleeping bag in the morning. If he told her about Nix right now, she would understand. She'd be hurt, she might even hate him for it, but he'd be able to make her understand. And he could tell her about his plans to build her a desk under the window in Smithers, because up until then he hadn't been sure if he should. Instead, he asked her if she wanted to meet him at the lake when he next had days off.

“We'll have more time,” he said. A fluorescent bulb in the ceiling stuttered.

She looked away from him and out the window to the campus field as if she were searching for someone. “It'll depend,” she said.

“On what?”

“What do you mean on what? On my life.”

“I'll give you plenty of notice.”

“No you won't.”

“I will.”

He ate lunch at his mother's house. Sat at her kitchen table and watched her spread butter and mayonnaise on bread and felt like a boy again, home only for as long as it took to pound back a sandwich, with burrs clinging to his shoelaces and scraped knuckles sticky with tree sap and blood.

“You remember Diane,” Samantha said, setting a plate in front of him. “Sissy's friend who got her realtor's license.”

“She's got the lazy eye, right?”

“You should let her handle your place.” She put a pot of coffee and another plate of sandwiches on the table and called Erin into the kitchen.

“I'm still not sure I'm going to sell it.”

“You can't afford to keep two places.”

“If I sell the business I can.”

Erin came in and sat down. She wore a pair of shorts over a bathing suit.

“You going to put a t-shirt on?” Tom asked.

“She's only going to the river,” said Samantha. “They float down the current on inner tubes.”

“We used to do that,” said Tom. “But there was always a shed-load of beer. There going to be beer?”

Erin shrugged. “Probably.”

“I think it's crazy, owning two places,” Samantha said. She took the top piece of bread off her sandwich and shook pepper generously over the ham.

“If I can, I will. Erin and Curt need somewhere in town.”

“You're really going to move to the middle of nowhere?” Erin asked him. “Am I supposed to live alone?” She reached for her glass of water. The angles of her shoulders, her collarbone under the delicate blue straps of her bathing suit, her frame—each part of her still as perfect as when she was small.

“It's not the middle of nowhere and I haven't figured it all out yet,” he said. “You still need to decide about university—where you want to go.”

“I'm not deciding today.”

“Applications need to be in by September,” Samantha said, more to her food than to Tom and Erin, as if this were a thing she had promised not to say anymore.

“What if you choose Vancouver?” he said. “Or Toronto? Jesus and hell, we won't recognize her when she comes back. What if she chooses Toronto?” He went for her hair and she ducked out of his reach.

“Maybe I will,” she said.

He wondered what that would be like, if she did end up at a school in Toronto, or even as close as Vancouver. He'd stopped trying to find in Erin that erratic behavior that Elka used to display. Winter walks at four in the morning, baths in the dark. A cupboard full of bags of rice and nothing else. He trusted now that it wasn't going to come. But still, the thought of Erin moving to the city dropped something hard and hollow in his chest that he hadn't been expecting.

On his way out of town, driving past the cul-de-sac that Sean lived on, Tom slowed to a stop when he saw a brown Suburban that looked a hell of a lot like Curtis's. He parked and crossed the street and looked at the license plate. It was Curt's, all right, but Tom still looked through the windows and took confirmation from the dent in the tailgate. He stood on the sidewalk with his thumbs hooked in his belt and looked up and down the street. Sean lived in a basement apartment; Tom had been inside once but couldn't place the house. He looked down driveways, searching for a battered shed that he remembered, concrete steps leading down to a side door.

He found the right house and went up the drive and suddenly felt hesitant and stopped. It was the same law that had always stopped him years before, when his kids were young, from driving by their school playground at recess. There was a balance between what a father should be part of and what he should not, and when it came to his kids, he respected this above just about everything else. Whatever the reason Curtis was in town and not staying at home, it was none of Tom's business.

He turned to go but the door opened and Sean came out and climbed the steps with a garbage bag knocking against his knees.

“Hey there,” said Tom.

Sean stopped and cocked his head at him. “Oh. Hey.”

“I was driving by and saw Curt's truck. Is he here?”

“Yes. Ya, he's here.” He carried the bag to a can in front of the shed and dropped it in. He came back down the drive and stopped at the top of the stairs, and shifted his eyes, red, the lids slightly puffed, from Tom's shoulder to his face. “You want to come in?”

“You sure?”

Inside, it was dark; the small, cubbied windows close to the ceiling let in little light. Curtis was sunk into the couch like a button, a beer resting in the crook of his legs. The smell of weed was strong and the flicker of the television harsh.

With slow, underwater movements, Curtis turned his face to Tom and sat up. He squinted at him. “How'd you—?”

“Saw your truck outside. I'm just heading back up to the bush. Had a few days off. I wish I'd known you were here.”

Curtis's eyelids hung thickly, low over his eyes that darted like minnows. The table in front of the couch was messy with empty bottles, rolling papers, drifts of weed.

“You got a cold drink?” Tom asked Sean. “A Coke or something?” He sat in an armchair next to the couch with Curtis watching him, his mouth curled in a half smile.

“It's fucken weird that you're here,” Curtis said, his voice croaky. He bent over the table and slid a rolling paper out of its envelope, swept the loose weed into a pile with the cupped edge of his hand.

Tom laid his hand on Curtis's arm, could feel the boy trembling. He tried to move Curtis's hand from the table but the boy resisted and continued rolling. He shouldn't be here, shouldn't be seeing this—whatever it was. Curt was right: it was weird.

Sean handed Tom a glass of water. Curtis sat back into the couch, evidently abandoning the joint. He seemed deflated. Tom sipped his water, tepid, and looked around the room, at a pile of clothes in the corner, a pair of skis leaning against the wall, pizza boxes stacked by the front door. “You guys are hunkered down here like a couple of bandits or something. Curtis, did you lose your job? Something like that?”

Curtis shook his head.

“Is it that girl? You still upset about her?”

Curtis stared at the television, his smile the stroke of a pencil, partially rubbed out. A repetitive drip-plonk sound came from the tiny kitchen, a room not much bigger than a closet, opposite where they sat.

“Have you got a tool kit?” Tom asked Sean, pushing himself out of the chair by the armrests.

“Out in my truck.”

“Go get it for me.”

Curtis shifted, glanced at Tom, and then looked toward the television. A man in a yellow shirt on a putting green against a low, gray sky. The arms of his t-shirt ruffled against a strong wind; the spectators stood with umbrellas.

In the kitchen, the sink was full of cloudy water, its skin broken into concentric rings by the leak. Tom knelt in front of the sink on cold tiles, opened the cupboard. He moved a black plastic bucket out of the way of the drainpipe. In the bucket, a full bottle of window cleaner and an unopened can of Comet. A bottle of bleach and yellow dish gloves still in the wrapper, and a blue cloth dried and molded into a twisted fist. The kit was probably an offering from Sean's parents when he moved in.

Sean came in and placed a heavy green box carefully on the floor next to Tom and left. The television volume gradually rose with the low and steady voice of the golf commentator, the hollow
thwop
of metal launching a plastic ball, polite clapping like rain.

Tom emptied the bucket and maneuvered it under the drain. The couplings on either side of the J trap were rusted into place, and with gritted teeth, he loosened the first one with a pair of channel pliers. In the box was a new can of lubricant spray, which he used on the second coupling. He put a little extra grip to the pliers and soon the coupling loosened, pulling away from the drainpipe like a scab. He removed the trap, and the water from the sink gushed into the bucket. He searched the floor behind him for the dish gloves.

Curtis shuffled into the kitchen and sat on the floor, his back against the fridge. He drew up his knees and draped his arms over them, and looked at Tom.

Wearing one of the gloves, Tom dug his fingers into the J trap. If Curtis had anything he needed to say, he would say it when he was ready. Tom excavated from the trap a coagulated mass of spongy pasta and bread crust and fat, like a lump of brain matter. After dropping this into the bucket, he tightened the trap back into place. He turned the spigot under the sink, shutting off the main water supply, then stood up and turned on the tap to let the last of the water drain.

Curtis put his head between his knees and rocked back and forth. Tom searched through the tool kit for a Phillips head, finding five in various sizes.

“A guy with a tool kit like this should be able to unclog a drain and fix a tap,” he said. “Eh, Curt? Shit. He's got everything in here.” Tom was careful not to look directly at him, to give him space to raise his head and speak. Tom leaned through the doorway and waved to Sean, dappled in television light. “You think you've got any replacement washers?”

“Huh?”

“There's no reason for me to go any further just now if you haven't got a new one.”

“For what?”

“This is you, Dad, how I see you when I close my eyes,” Curtis began, his voice muffled. He raised his head and rubbed his temples. “You've always got some tool in your hand, bolts in your pockets, fixing shit. It's like you go around looking for things that are broken.” Curtis looked directly at him and smiled. “You remember when Erin fell through the ice?”

“Of course I remember.”

“That didn't faze you at all. You had the same look on your face that day as you have right now. Nothing touches you.”