Everything was in disarray. Most days she could deal with that. She could lay herself across the jumbled pile of it all and stretch out, find an equilibrium, a baseline, or at least make it look to the rest of the world like she knew what balance was. Whenever a cashier asked if she wanted her receipt, for example, Cara would always say yes. Yes, please. Even though each time, without fail, without even so much as skimming it, she would crumple that receipt and throw it into a garbage at the first opportunity. Because, in accepting the offer, sometimes enthusiastically—determinedly was actually the word—she was demonstrating to the world that she had her shit together. As though she was going to add the slip of thermal paper to the appropriate labelled envelope and at month’s end engage in some serious accounting. As though she knew what responsibility was. As though she had some idea of how it was executed, how it was performed.
The idea had begun to dawn on her that everybody was doing the same act.
So now she was looking not for a mode of life, but for a model of living. Not a role to inhabit, but a new way to simply traverse one minute to the next. Which meant looking outside her own narrow life and the people who populated it. To insert herself into some new and unfamiliar scenario. To remove the safety girding that surrounded her, though the terror that inspired shook her as much as it thrilled her. She was tired from all the shaking and thrilling.
***
They could have, for the purpose of their survey, remained at the Outlet, done their allotted hours checking anglers’ catches, calculating catch per unit effort and so on, then packed up and called it a day. But there were no boats returning just now, and Hill didn’t feel like waiting. He wanted to get back out on the water. The sun was high and brutal, and sitting on the dock would feel worse than if they were skipping across the top of Charleston Lake, generating their own breeze.
They each loosened one of the boat’s lines and pushed off. Hill yanked the starter line and, when the motor caught, sat astride the bench. He moved the boat in a wide circle until they were facing the mouth of the inlet, then pushing through it, then beyond it, the land on either side sliding away from them.
Hill figured that, in his rumoured youth, he had been attracted to the same sorts of things Cara was—or, at least, he hadn’t been as cowed and confused as they left him now. He, too, had spent weekends in Toronto. One night, he and Bill Frady had closed the Horseshoe Tavern, then forgot where Bill’s truck was parked and fell asleep at either end of a bench beneath the CN Tower. A security guard woke them up, told them they had to keep moving. They found the truck by accident shortly before the sun came up, and ate breakfast at a counter in the bus station before hauling their asses out of town and back to their basement apartment in Lindsay, two hours away.
Not long after, Hill moved to Kingston, where he had secured a twelve-month contract with the Ministry. Kingston was where he met Karen. Karen, who either miraculously missed all his glaring faults or was willing to overlook them, he was never sure which. The moment he met her was the moment he’d later believe that his adult life began. Thereafter, the milestones—marriage, first boat, mortgage, permanent job—piled up in a kind of somnambulant parade, as though the only agency required of him was the willingness to remain present.
Occasionally he did feel a greater degree of control, felt capable of harnessing loose energies in order to disrupt life’s routine. Like when he’d surprised Karen with a trip to an all-inclusive in Cuba for their tenth anniversary. But mostly he was content to keep his expectations at eye level. That, he felt, was the secret to preventing the world from letting him down. It was an approach that still left him opportunities for pretty sublime experiences. Misty sunrises over various lakes. That August night he and Karen spent with their sleeping bags zipped together on the shore of Canisbay Lake, the moon so full it was almost vulgar, the stars’ proximity startling, like he could reach up and brush them, feel their jagged tips with his fingertips. The multiplicity of smells in her hair overwhelming him. Shampoo and lake water and woodsmoke. The colour and the feel of all that. He could never convey it with language. It was not in him. But he kept the shapeless thought of it in the pocket nearest his heart.
It was on a night not too long after the Cuba trip that Karen told him, over kitchen-table beers, that she thought she might be pregnant. Hill thought he was ill-prepared to be a father, or, at any rate, was certain that just about anybody else would be better equipped for it than he. He didn’t like moving into circumstances with uncertain outcomes, and this was the most wildly uncertain set of outcomes with which he’d ever been presented. But Karen figured they ought to embrace it anyway. It was his love for and faith in her that made him agree. At the time, she was working the counter at a tire shop and, after a series of contracts, he’d landed a permanent Fish and Wildlife tech position in the Kingston office. He figured they could afford another mouth, if nothing unexpected popped up.
And then Abigail was born big and healthy and shiny-eyed, and before long, he couldn’t remember life before her. Every day was something new, a fresh set of wonders.
When Abigail was ten years old, Hill was stabbed in the right eye with a sewing needle. She’d left it on his pillow one night after using it to replace her Barbie’s hair, poking yarn through the holes left after she’d pulled all the original hair out. In the dead of the next morning, when Hill rolled over, the needle went through his eyelid and poked into the white of his eye, but only just. He felt the sharp twinge, felt it more as the muscles of his eyelid contracted, and then he reached up and batted the thing away, heard it land on the cherry laminate floor. His vision seemed fine, but as a matter of course he went to the emergency room on Stuart Street in Kingston, where the doctor marvelled at his luck while confirming the lack of serious injury. “Keep an eye on it,” was the doctor’s advice, laughing at that before shuffling off to see people with real injuries, severe illnesses, waning hope.
Hill didn’t blame Abigail, but he did ask her to be more careful with her things.
Life was a strange parade. And when he thought about such things—uncanny things, amazing, beautiful, puzzling things—he had a habit he could not explain, of whistling a two-note trill. He whistled those notes now, as they navigated the narrow passage, watching the lake bottom drop away from them, down beneath the clear, unexcited water.
***
The boat needled into the heart of the afternoon.
There was a kind of terror in Cara’s heart. She had an unbidden sense of her future lying somewhere just ahead; having set herself on a course to progress directly into it, the opportunity to deviate from it lessened with each passing moment.
Hill, on the other hand, appeared happy. Satisfied.
“How did you get into the MNR?” she shouted to him over the motor, as a way of alleviating her own doubts.
“Rocks,” he said, and when she stared at him in confusion, he said, “Geology. Started there. Switched to fish. Don’t know why, exactly, except that it seemed more likely I’d find work that way. Or I don’t know. Maybe I just came to see that I’d rather work with live things than with dead rock.”
“Rocks are interesting.”
“Sure. But they just sit there. Unless you’re talking about millions of years. That’s when you see change.” He spoke just below a shout over the Evinrude’s nasal roar. “But I didn’t feel like waiting around for that.”
“You seem to love what you do,” she said, as much question as statement.
“It wasn’t about love. Never saw it as important, about loving what you do, how important that’s supposed to be. But it came to be that way, yeah.”
“It means something, though.”
“This work? Well. Your dad certainly thought so. Had ideas about that.”
Hill was not looking at her, but beyond her, to the water their bow was approaching and overcoming, through his plastic wraparounds. The sound of the outboard rose and fell according to its cycles, a poorly tuned machine whanging away to produce i
nefficient motion.
“He went straight into it,” he finally said. “Head-on. Knew what he meant to do.”
Certainty, they both thought to themselves, was desirable.
“My dad said he always knew.”
“They still had the CO school in Dorset then. Sign up there, stick it out, and you were set. Couldn’t help but wind up with a job.”
“Easy,” offered Cara.
“No, I don’t expect it was. Not that your father wasn’t cut out for what he did. He was. He was very good at it.”
Despite the compliment paid to her own father, Cara felt rebuked, as if perhaps Hill meant to make her feel out of her depth. “I’m kind of making it up as I go along,” she said.
“Yeah, they don’t make it easy on you, do they? There’s no clear path.”
“I called like seven different COs to ask how they got where they are.”
“Got seven different answers, I bet.”
“At least.”
“You’ll figure it out. The difference now is what the government’s willing to show you in terms of loyalty. No security. You’ll be contract or seasonal or temporary.”
“I think that’s everywhere, though. I think that’s just how things are going.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” he said, and tightened his grip, twisting the throttle open. The motor screamed, and Cara had to brace herself as the nose planed upward. He was apparently done with the subject.
Even in the breeze skimming off the water, she was hot. The backs of her knees were wet. She felt laid out, exposed, broiled. The afternoon hours stretched out before her, thick and slow. She felt scrutinized. How would a person ever know all they needed to know?
Ahead of them, shimmering mirage-like above the lake’s glinting top, rested half a dozen boats of black, silver, white, nudged against a shallow sandbar. Hill eased back on the throttle as they neared, and as the boat came to a halt with one final lurch, Cara heard the sand abrasive against their hull. Hill wrenched out a spring-loaded pin on the motor’s housing and tilted the whole thing up so that the screw was out of the water. Then he replaced the pin in a second hole, and the motor stayed where he’d raised it.
“Afternoon, guys,” Hill said to the anglers, and they were all guys. Of course they were.
Cara remained silent behind him as he took the bow rope in his hand and leapt out onto the wet sand.
“Just wanted to survey your catches, if we could.”
“You Conservation?” asked one man with a comically large, drooping moustache. He sat in a new-looking bass boat, a gleaming showroom piece with built-in depth finder and a nifty little silent electric motor to move about, once he’d cast, without alarming the aquatic life.
It probably cost as much as a house, Cara thought.
“This is just research, guys,” Hill said, “not enforcement. Nobody’s getting a ticket.”
Cara felt an urge to attach herself to his authority, then just as suddenly felt a revulsion at the idea, and was seized by a need to differentiate herself, to claim some distance. She wondered if she could accomplish this with a facial expression directed at the fishermen, but couldn’t decide on which expression, so she settled for holding her mask rigid beneath her ball cap and aviators.
***
Hill took notes as the men offered the details of their catches. After a few minutes, he turned to Cara, who’d been standing in their boat watching, and said, “You should get some experience filling these out.” So she too stepped out onto the sand and watched, over his shoulder, as he recorded with a stubby pencil on waterproof forms. Mostly they’d caught bass, both largemouth and small, as well as perch, lake trout, and some rock bass. One boatload of Americans had a pile of pumpkinseed. It was so rote, he could have guessed at it all and been about ninety percent on the money. Hill handed the hinged stainless steel folder to Cara—an uptick in her level of responsibility—so she could fill out more details, recording lengths and rough weights, as well as how long the anglers had been at it.
Most of them had been on the water since before daybreak, but a couple had just shown up. Recreational fishermen, her dad would have said. Just out for the sunshine and a chance to get away from the day-to-day. Nothing wrong with that.
After they’d spent forty minutes on the sandbar, they bid the anglers good afternoon, climbed back in the boat, and pushed off, drifting slowly backwards until the water was deep enough. Hill pulled the pin, dropped the outboard back into the water, and pull-started it to life.
“One more spot,” he shouted over the whine. “Public ramp. That’ll be enough for today. Then we can take it in, get this tub out of the water, and head home.”
Cara nodded. “Sounds good,” she said.
Hill had a moment of anger then, built up from frustration at the way the day was unfolding. Impatience.
He had wanted Cara to be more assertive. That was part of it. He’d admired her father, saw in him a roll-up-your-sleeves ethos to which he related deeply—a getting-things-done spirit that resided more behind the breastbone than it did behind the eyes—and he wanted her to show him something that reminded him of her father. A bit of spit in the eye. But he wasn’t seeing that from Cara.
Hill whisper-whistled his two-note refrain. He told himself that she’d come to it eventually, once she got out of school and was forced to really encounter the world, had cut her legs in the shaggy thatch of things as they were.
He was reminded, again, of his old Lindsay roommate, Bill Frady, now an area biologist in Peterborough. Frady had done his graduate work with wolves in Killarney, spent a season tranquilizing and tagging them. And the amazing thing was, after that, no dog trusted him. Even though he’d always been a dog person. Was going to get one to take fowl hunting with him and so forth. But they’d growl when he entered the room, snap if he got close. Hill had seen this on several occasions, over many years now. It was the damnedest thing. There was some kind of a stink that Frady couldn’t shake, and dogs couldn’t help but notice.
It was life’s great lesson: you can’t get away from yourself, not for long. Your head can float, get you lost behind your own eyes until you think you’re somewhere else, that you’re someone else, but sooner or later, and often thereafter, there’d come something sudden and real to bring you right back to concretenesses.
***
Cara was looking ahead to her weekend, which promised a man named Trevor and a borrowed apartment in Leslieville. Cheap beer, Korean fried chicken, loud rooms, cryptic Facebook status updates, sex on a rooftop, 3 AM shawarma, sleeping late, brunch. Trevor was not someone she saw when she looked very far into her future, but he featured prominently in the next seventy-two hours, and she was happy about that.
But something in Hill’s carriage, his know-it-all practicality, suggested that her excitement was somehow unbefitting an adult—which, as both present parties understood, was the goal here, to look and act and think as an adult. It made her a little angry. If she, goddammit, if she chose to spend a couple of careless days with someone with whom she saw no future, someone who frankly couldn’t even hold up his end of a conversation, but knew where to go and how to have fun, whose business was it?
She and Trevor shared a joke.
He’d once asked her why she never looked at him with puppy-dog eyes. “You want some other girl for that,” she said. “Best you’ll get from me is dead-puppy-dog eyes.” And then she rolled her eyes back into her head and stuck out her tongue, holding that for a moment before beginning to laugh. Trevor laughed, too, and it became an inside joke. Dead-puppy-dog eyes. Sometimes Trevor would leave the room and when he’d come back Cara would be lying on her back with her arms and legs bent at each joint, her eyes blank, her tongue lolling.
These crude and louche things were dear to her. And if Toronto, that worldly venue, that place of choice and noise, that dense concrete maze, dazzled and excited her, why not go there? Did going there exclude this place, the lake’s spray in her face, the hot sun, the green shores
?
It seemed to her that it did not.
It seemed to her that it was possible to love both.
But Cara wasn’t terrifically interested in explaining that to Weston Hill just now. To open her mouth was to open herself to ridicule for her choices. So she kept quiet.
Hill apparently felt no such compunction, however. As the Evinrude settled back into its high, constant sound and the bow cleaved the lake to either side of them, he said through his sunglasses, “You know what I think about sometimes is how your dad was in ’96.”
“The strike?”
Hill nodded. “He was so committed. Stood in front of cars, banged on hoods. Got into managers’ faces. There were people who never spoke to him again.”
“I never heard about any of that.”
“You were a baby, I think.”
“Sure, but even later. Nothing about all that.”
“You were just a kid, a little kid, and you were gonna be protected from all that. When they ended it, five weeks in, there was a party at Ray Wynne’s house. People getting blackout drunk. I mean, just a total mess. Really. Puking, pissing drunk.”
She was certain he’d included this bit just to impinge on her delicate, young-lady sensibilities.
“But your dad has, I think, one beer. Sits in a corner looking serious. Because he knew. Whatever money we won wouldn’t add up to anything but a loss, you work it out. It was no-win. And the night ends and your father drives everybody home. Loads a bunch of people in the truck, takes them each to wherever they need to go, comes back for another load.”
Since she was entertaining the emotion, this angered her, too: how Hill seemed to be claiming her father, as though knowing him as an adult somehow gave Hill something she could never have.
Fuck you, she thought. He changed my diaper and taught me to fish and he barbecued my hamburgers until they were like hockey pucks.
Lands and Forests Page 3
