Echolocation

by Karen Hofmann

  The lake gleams briefly, here and there, as the dusk thickens, condenses. Loons call, their voices juddering over the surface like skipped stones. Kirsten and Jeff pass the joint between them. It’s as if they’re taking turns blowing up a balloon. Their fingers brush.

  Jeff reaches for the folded blanket that lies next to him and throws it around both of them, slipping his arm around her shoulders to do so. She can feel each woollen fibre of each strand of the blanket’s fringe as it trails across her bare right arm. Her left arm brushes his right, the hairs on his forearm touch her individually. But the touch is not intrusive; it is a delicate inscribing of boundary. It outlines her, both of them, defines where they begin and leave off. It is utter separateness, utter safety.

  SHE DREAMS A JERKY, disjointed dream. She is walking along her cul-de-sac, at home, in a filmy aqua nightgown, like a 60s film star, Anne Bancroft, might have worn. In her dream she faints. The street becomes water, thick and beating with micro-organisms, pulsing around her. Then Linda is also there. She and Jeff and Evan lift Kirsten into the canoe and hoist her onto their shoulders.

  Now they carry her through the forest, through the stately, overarching fir and spruce, the dappled shade. She feels guilty, fraudulent. But she lets them carry her.

  A rhythm of footsteps grows louder, and she realizes they are walking amid a crowd. Through the ribs and skin of the canoe, the fibreglass cloth that is patched, even transparent, in places, she can see a multitude of men and women, in suits, in legal robes, surgical scrubs. She can’t make out their faces, but she knows them. They are marching in a group, and she is being carried in the centre of it, trapped in her diaphanous gown.

  When she wakes, the beating of feet has become a helicopter’s chop. Later, when they return to the park entrance, they’ll hear that the bodies were found that morning.

  THE TROUT TASTES OF MUD: it is too late in the year, already.

  Evan and Jeff announce that they will go help search for the missing couple. They have canoed in this lake for years, since they were boys. They know its currents and rhythms, they say. They have an idea. (They have no idea.)

  While they’re gone, Kirsten and Linda hike along the shore; they are looking for a path up to an alpine meadow that they think they remember, from an earlier trip. The beach trail curves through a marshy area, a giants’ wood box of standing dead spruce and tumbled, blackened logs. Where wood is exposed, it is ashy.

  Fire, Kirsten says.

  No – flood, Linda says. The spruce choked with sudden, sporadic engorgements of the lake, in past years, high-water years. The black, the ash, a mineral crust, from leached salts.

  They find a trail that ascends through the spruce, a dim cleft stitched loosely together with spiders’ webs. Farther on, though, where it cuts across an open slope, the trail is blocked by a recent fall of shale.

  What the hell, Linda says, surprisingly.

  They could go around, through the scrub and spruce, but decide to scramble up. There’s a trick to it, Kirsten finds. If you try to track up horizontally, the shale starts slipping and you’re soon fighting an avalanche of rocks and dust. You have to take a run at it, instead, go diagonal, spraddlelegged, grasping whatever tussocks of plant you can. And you can’t follow anyone else up. You have to make your own path, or you collide with all of the debris in your partner’s wake.

  She and Linda begin the ascent, taking parallel routes, but suddenly, she is in difficulty. Her legs won’t move fast enough, and she is sliding, the shale carrying her downwards, though she is still climbing.

  Help! she calls, half-joking, and Linda calls back, Run! But the rocks above her begin to cascade down, their flinty edges striking her shins. She stops.

  I’ll go the long way round, she calls up.

  But Linda slides down, grabs her hand, and pulls her, at a run, back up the slope. And after a moment she gets her wind back, is able to scramble faster and faster, till they both collapse, laughing and winded, where the path resumes.

  In the meadow, an embarras de richesses. Linda names the flowers: Marguerites, monkshood, Indian paintbrush.

  Arnica, fireweed, gentian.

  Harebell, lupine, snow lily.

  They find a sun-warmed boulder, an occasional, dropped by a glacier, and sip from their water bottles. Linda lies back against the dark rock, shaking out her light hair.

  Ticks, Kirsten reminds.

  Oh, who gives a damn, Linda says. She stretches her legs, tugs up the elastic cuffs of her wind pants, so that her strong tan shins shine in the sun. Biologist, marathoner, mother of sons: Linda, in Kirsten’s inner eye, is always running with whistle and ball in a scrum of small boys. Sturdy, matter-of-fact. Her flesh and bone a cage, a barrier against the merely imaginative. But now, sprawled back on the rock, she seems aqueous, of another element.

  Linda turns her head, looks at Kirsten sideways under lowered lids.

  Jeff doesn’t care for flowers, you know, Linda says. He’s colour-blind. Also, he doesn’t have a very good sense of smell.

  Oh, the layers in her voice. The currents, the swirl of sediment.

  THE LAKE WATER IS COLD, beyond cold. It is compressing her chest, her blood vessels, even though the initial shock of it, the burn on her skin, has numbed. The lake was likely frozen over until only a few weeks ago.

  Kirsten pictures the breaking up of the ice, to keep her mind from the growing ache in her fingers and toes: the infrasonic booms as it began to fissure, the dreaming world below beginning to stir. Fish and amphibians, molluscs, aquatic insects, safely tucked in their mud beds, wrapped in their own antifreeze, but stupefied with cold, with lack of oxygen, slowly coming to consciousness. What has she read in a journal, lately: that hibernating squirrels wake with pounding headaches, from the shutdown of their systems, the buildup of toxins. Perhaps fish and frogs do as well.

  She hears her name shouted across the water, turns from her slow crawl to see Evan, who has woken and is standing on the shore, very far away. From here the tents look like toys, like the models in camping-goods stores. Now, Linda and Jeff emerge from their tent, half-dressed, stand in an odd posture, something between controlled concern and panic.

  Kirsten! Evan booms. Come back, now!

  She lifts an arm to wave, and resumes her swimming. She is not spent, not frozen, yet. In fact, she is somewhat warmer: Her body is starting to immure itself; she is finding her stroke. She is a strong swimmer.

  Evan shouts again, real fear in his voice. (His fear a bottom-dwelling creature, with atrophied eyes, mouth feelers.)

  She can no longer make out their words, but can hear the voices of the others, on the shore, calling to each other about blankets, life jackets, no doubt. They sound delighted that something is happening. She hears the scrape of the canoe being launched: not the Beans’ lighter, newer one, but their old heavy craft.

  Evan had bought that canoe soon after they were married, bought it second-hand, from a neighbour. It had been the first important thing they’d bought.

  He’d been the first of whom she had thought: He will do.

  She can hear the fast slap of the paddles, now, getting closer.

  On the brink, she had known: We have little in common. We do not think on the same plane. But had said to herself: The more you have in common, the finer and finer hairs you will split between you. Taxonomy is in our nature.

  She slows her strokes. It is almost time to turn around now. She isn’t tired; instead, she feels hyper-alert, as if the immersion has woken her up, not from hibernation, but from something like it. She glances over her shoulder: Evan is paddling, Jeff crouched in the bows. Jeff calls something to her that she doesn’t understand: There is water in her ears. She hears, though, a kind of scorn, a kind of thin twitch at the underskin that is different from Evan’s blunt hungry strike, but not altogether different.

  The canoe is almost on her. Ah, fuck, she thinks. There will be no escape.

  But she turns around, treading water briefly, and begins t
o swim back towards the shore.

  CLEARWATER

  IN THE MORNING Bryan follows the North Thompson, which is grey, sluggishly rippled, like a black-and-white photo of water, north and east, towards the mountains, toward the headwaters. The highway hugs the mountainsides, is flung back and forth in wide loops, rising from the floodplain to precarious slopes.

  He had telephoned Roy Tuesday night, long enough ahead that Roy won’t feel rushed, close enough to the visit that he won’t forget. But he still doesn’t know how he’ll find the old guy. It’s not as if Roy goes anywhere, or takes the trouble to clean up the place more than usual, or fixes a meal when he comes. More that he needs the time to get himself organized mentally, for the visit. Bryan can understand that. You get pulled along by the current of your life, and it takes a little time and effort to swing out into another routine. He guesses it will be like that for him, too, when he’s Roy’s age.

  Rayleigh, Vinsulla, McLure, Louis Creek: the little towns along the highway. Grassland on either side of the road and the river. The grass bleached out by the summer’s heat, dotted by sagebrush, that purple-green colour he can’t name. And then crumbling grey and yellow rock, the highway now cut off from the river by cliffs, and the black stubble of trees on both sides, where the fire leapt the canyon. An uncompromising landscape. Sere. He has driven it too many times to count, but it always impresses him, the harshness, how the trees and grass can survive on so little.

  The first time must have been that summer he was eight. The two of them, Bryan and Jenny, driving up from Vancouver on the Trans-Canada, then the Yellowhead, the landscape, after the mountains, getting browner by the mile, and Bryan changing to a new radio station when the one from the last town got too fuzzy. Then they were past Kamloops, where they’d stopped at the Dairy Queen and both had small cones, and Bryan had found a quarter under the floor mat so he’d been allowed to have his cone dipped.

  Cowboy country, Jenny had said. Yellowhead Highway; I love it. Then later: This landscape is awesome! Like a roadrunner cartoon. And later still: I’m sick of this. Looks like someone forgot to water the grass.

  That must have been around Barrière. They were headed for Jasper, but it was almost night, so they would have to sleep in a campground. That’s how they’d ended up in Clearwater, at Roy’s.

  Here he is at Barrière now. Another bridge, this one punched-out steel, with rivets and cables showing, so you could see how it was put together. Not reassuring. Like that stuff boys used to have, the metal stuff. Meccano. Did kids still play with it?

  Birch Island, Darfield, Little Fort, Blackpool. Old railway stops, not even whistle-stops now, some of them: just names. He likes that the signs are still there. He likes to know where he’s going. He likes to know where he is. The landscape lusher, here: green fields, dense trees in the deep shadows of the hills. Autumn colours and a pheasant scudding across a frosted pasture. The dull flicker under his collarbone: remembering his dream years ago of buying some property, living here, and then the realization he wouldn’t, ever.

  And then the town, just past where the Clearwater River flows into the North Thompson, and the turnoff, and the short road through the trees.

  WAITING WHILE ROY stumps across the house to the door, Bryan casts his gaze to the porch roof, runs the edge of his thumbnail along a suspicious joist. He’d noticed the slope of the roof as he walked up to the house. Sagging at the left outside corner. Not his business: Roy’s still perfectly capable of getting someone to take care of it. But a shame to let things fall apart. The timber gives spongily under his nail, as he expected. He drops his arm, turns around just in time for the door to open, timing it by Roy’s approaching steps.

  And there’s Roy, all jut of grey beard and belly, low-slung jeans, high-tension suspenders, wheezing a little and frowning, as if Bryan were a Bible salesman, as if he’s never seen him before. But at the sight of Roy, at the rush of warm, coffee-and-dog-pee (though the dog isn’t here anymore, died a couple of years ago) scented air that puffs out around Roy, Bryan feels the breath return to his body, feels his shoulders relax.

  They’re not the sort to hug, either of them. Bryan holds out the case he’s brought, beer in bottles, and Roy grunts and gestures to come inside, and stumps back through the kitchen, Bryan following, looking around, as always, at the pinky-beige lino, the speckled countertops and newer white appliances, and seeing under them, as always, the worn aqua-blue tiles, the Harvest Gold fridge and range, the metal-edged laminate, of his childhood occupancy. In the living room, Bryan’s eyes go to the photos ranged along the shelves; there is the familiar parade of Roy’s two kids through the seventies, photos faded so both of them have pastel clothes and soft brown hair, as if they’re preserved in soft-focus. Then more recent photos of kids of various sizes: Roy’s grandkids, babies and toddlers in Christmas outfits, and Bryan’s two boys.

  No pictures of Jenny or of Roy’s previous wife. No photos of Bryan growing up.

  He’s learned already that there isn’t a sign of himself in the house. Why would there be?

  The room he’d had at Roy’s is still there, of course. The first time he’d brought Lori, he’d asked to see it. It hadn’t been the same: It had been painted, had different furniture. The ceiling had been too low, the window too small. It had not seemed familiar at all. Then he’d asked about his things, the racing cars, the sled. Roy had said, feel free to look around. He had. They weren’t there.

  WHAT’S NEW IN YOUR NECK of the woods? Bryan hears himself say, then winces – he sounds like an old man, older than Roy.

  Roy ignores the question, though. He picks up a folded newspaper, holds it out toward Bryan, shaking it up and down as if to settle the words.

  You see this? Roy asks.

  Bryan takes the paper, knowing what he’ll see, approximately. Something about Iraq. His eyes scan the half-sheet. No, it’s Canada. The environment. He scans the article, composes a non-committal reply. The thing about Roy, he’s not like the old people in Bryan’s neighbourhood who can be counted on to have conservative views.

  They never learn, Bryan says, which is a useful response at any time. Bryan isn’t so keen on arguing politics with Roy. Roy knows too much, makes him feel like a fool, whatever Bryan says. He hands the paper back to Roy, still folded. Roy grunts again, almost a disappointed sound, and lays the paper back on the couch.

  You keeping well? Bryan asks.

  Roy nods gravely; says, Can’t complain. He says it with the same dignity with which he took his seat: a sort of gracious acceptance of the world’s shortcomings.

  They sit for a while.

  You want some coffee? Roy asks. I got some fresh in the pot, if you want to get it. Some baking from the store across the highway, too.

  Bryan wanders into the kitchen. You got a new coffee maker, Bryan calls.

  Yeah, Roy says. Darn thing turns itself on in the morning. Fresh coffee before you even know it.

  Roy is taking care of himself still, Bryan thinks. The kitchen looks scrubbed. Clean bag in the trash can. Good that Roy’s looking after things. He feels he should offer to fix something, but he can’t see anything that he could do quickly. When he comes back to the living room, Roy puts down the paper again.

  This Harper guy, he says. Afraid to stand up to Big Brother. We should be ashamed, as Canadians. It wasn’t always like that.

  No, sir, Bryan says. He remembers that Roy is actually American, one of the original draft dodgers. Though that’s all over with. What’s the word. Amnesty. And that American politician, what was his name, meeting them all in Nelson a couple of years ago, dedicating the monument. Well, times change. When he and Jenny had met Roy, though, there’d been some question of Roy’s legal status. Some possibility of his still being extradited, or deported, or whatever it was. Which made Roy’s choice of profession kind of interesting, if you thought about it.

  Roy looks like he wants to show Bryan something in the newspaper, but then folds the paper up again, drops it and sig
hs.

  How’re the boys doing? he asks.

  Oh, fine, Bryan says. He curls his hands around the mug, stands closer to the wood stove. He used to bring his kids up to see Roy, a couple of times a year, when they were younger. When a car outing was something they jumped at. Lori too. Lori always made sure they visited Roy, always sent him a card at Christmas and went to the trouble of packing up a box of baking and some gift, those gloves with the removable mitten top or something like that, things that women think a man wants. Bryan used to be pleased by this effort, though; he should remember that. There was a time when he would have said, Lori has a soft spot for Roy, or, Roy has a soft spot for Lori, though he has come to realize that isn’t likely true, only a way he liked to see it.

  Now Lori can’t be bothered with sending things up for Roy. This is a means of punishing not Roy, but himself, he understands.

  He skirts the topic of Lori, and gives his news of the boys. Jared’s in high school now, he says. He tried out for basketball, but I think he’s too short. Didn’t make the team. He does okay in his classes, though. Gets Bs if he puts a little effort into it. Ty is another story; he can’t be bothered. Could get As, could be a decent hockey player. If he’d of stuck to it, he could be playing rep, even at his age.

  I suppose the boys are both engrossed in video games, Roy says, and Bryan sighs. That’s it; that’s it exactly. Kids don’t want to play outside anymore, don’t want to make things. That’s some of the argument with Lori: the growing piles of expensive devices and games; the hours the boys spend immobile in darkened rooms, their faces lit by screens. He’s afraid suddenly that Roy is going to ask something personal about himself and Lori, but he doesn’t.

  Roy says, instead, Must be a lot of entertainment value in them.

  Yes, there is, Bryan says. He does not want to talk about video games, but he does not want to talk about Lori, or work, either.

  Roy is silent for a few moments, his head nodding a little. Parkinson’s, Lori had said once, but Roy says it is not.