Blaze Island

by Catherine Bush

  Frank lay sprawled on his back, naked, the sheets and quilt in a tangle on the floor, Miranda’s entry waking him so suddenly he bolted to his feet. Staggering to avoid the ceiling, he attempted to wrench the sheet from its mound and cover himself while Ella sniffed and Miranda stared.

  All that skin. She tumbled from one tumult into another. There were bruises all over his body, which was nothing like her father’s body, what of it she’d ever seen. Or Caleb’s body. The room smelled of Frank’s sleep. The sun was rising, pulling yellow over the hills from the east. Surely Frank could sense her agitation, although he seemed to be surfacing slowly out of whatever dreams or dreamless state had gripped him. He seated himself carefully on the edge of the bed as if he still wasn’t sure where he was — what explanation was she to offer for bursting in?

  “Did you really mean it last night when you said you could live here — here in this house? With my father?”

  In response, Frank offered her a dreamy grin. “Would you like that?”

  “No,” Miranda said firmly.

  And Frank laughed, which made Miranda laugh as well, even though she barely knew why, yet somehow the laugh was a release.

  She wanted to touch him, touch all of him. There wasn’t time. She shouldn’t even be imagining these things. Stepping close, she ran her fingers over the line of black characters tattooed along the inside of Frank’s left forearm, how soft and smooth his skin was, pale brown, nearly hairless. He would get cold soon, in the raw morning air, and cover himself. He was ephemeral, not of her world, and soon he would disappear.

  “What does this mean?”

  “Oh,” Frank said as they both looked at his tattoo. “It doesn’t say noodles or dog or terrible mistake in case you’re wondering. It’s inspired by something my mother used to say to me. Like when I would get furious at my father and harangue him about why he didn’t pay more taxes. I’d call him a swindler and a thief, and she’d take me aside and say, Frank, please be more productively disobedient. I believe she meant, Don’t be so reactive. So when I asked her how that might be translated into kanji she said it was impossible but she wrote this out for me instead. Gihan. The character gi means justice or morality, and han means rebel or outlaw, so like righteous rebel. I can live with that.”

  When Miranda ran her thumb over the characters, 叛義, the touch went all the way through her, into the deepest places. Frank twisted his fingers so they were laced against hers, a delicate pressure. He yawned and smiled again. This was the feel of her fingers on his lips. Nothing, nothing had ever been like it.

  Miranda couldn’t stop the words from bursting out. “I think my father’s doing something with your father.”

  Frank struggled to his feet. So much was competing in her: his skin, the ferocious surface of her own skin. Her father had left the house about an hour ago, she said. He’d told her to stay with their guest. Didn’t that mean she was free to go anywhere Frank went? Her body followed every movement of his body.

  Wait, there was more. Her father was a climate scientist. How liberating, after so long, to say the words. He’d been attacked by climate-change deniers. Her mother had been hit by a car and died. In Princeton, New Jersey. Nine years ago. They’d fled and hidden themselves away on Blaze Island.

  Shortly after they arrived, Miranda said, she and her father had borrowed a book of poems from the library. There was one poem in particular they’d loved and memorized and sometimes recited to each other, sitting by the shore. It was sombre but beautiful, a poem spoken by a father to a daughter, by a man facing death who also looks out on the new lands of a new life from his wrecked ship, and somehow the poem had felt like an echo of their own journey. It was by a man named T.S. Eliot, she said, from a book called The Ariel Poems, and she’d seen it lying on top of her father’s dresser only that morning. As far as she knew, it was still there.

  “Caleb Borders came by and said my father’s meeting the men from the plane.”

  “We should go.” Frank dropped the sheet and seemed unabashed, now, at Miranda seeing him naked, even with an erection, as he tugged on his black boxers. “I think I remember when that ruckus happened, with your father. Crazy. And now he wants to engineer the air.”

  He was still so close, close enough to touch, the room small enough they had to squeeze around each other, and he was touching her, kissing her, were they not kissing each other, the bed taking up so much space, and Ella sprawled on it, panting.

  Had her father written the letter that had drawn Frank to the island? Was her father the enigmatic Anouk Sand, who, for his own reasons, had brought Frank here and thrown him in her way? He had directed all this, offering Frank to her as a gift or distraction, to keep her occupied while he did what he wanted.

  The repulsive idea rose in her and Miranda backed out of the room, aghast, leaving Frank in his ripped jeans, staring at her as he yanked his arms into his own bedraggled sweater. His face pulled into a question mark. “What?”

  She had a choice. Run out of the house, down the lane, clamber alone over the broken road. Who was going to stop her? Where would she go? Anywhere she could reach. Her chest was a cloud chamber, churning. Why did the new bring so much loss? But she was ready to throw herself into whatever lay ahead. Into who knew what weather. Possibly her father had imagined this: there were things she could learn from Frank, and he from her. And she had. She was learning with every moment. She needed to know all she could. Here was another thing she knew: she didn’t want to make a new world alone. There had to be others and she would seek them. They had to build a world together. One, two, a crowd, as many as possible. Who else was out there?

  “We have to find our fathers —” Frank shouted, dashing ahead of her.

  “There are other things we have to do, too,” Miranda shouted back.

  . . .

  Caleb stumbled down the lane. This time, meeting the girl in her yard with the dawn light growing, there’d been no shouting. This time she’d been the one to tear herself away. Eyes burning, when he came to the road, he turned in the direction of the washout and Green Cove, back the way he’d come, past the wreckage of the stranger’s blue car. Once again, he scrambled over chunks of pavement, boulders, the broken world, through water that was lower now, its ferocity becoming a remembered shock. On the far side, still some distance off, Della Burke’s dew-speckled compact waited where Caleb had parked it the previous evening, when he’d brought the two men to his home-in-progress, still caught up in the fervent, ludicrous belief that Len Hansen would be his saviour. How far he was from that hope now.

  Caleb had no idea how Anna had returned the two men to Tom’s Neck after she’d burst in on them. He’d been in no state to drive anywhere and Anna hadn’t asked. They must have stumbled along the road in the dark, past looming rocks and glimmering ponds, Anna herding the men unforgivingly with her flashlight. There was a twinge of vicarious relish in the thought of the men’s drunken discomfort, their being slapped about by the cold night air. Caleb touched the sore place at his throat — had Tony McIntosh really tried to strangle him? Once they’d departed, Caleb had collapsed on the fisherman’s daybed in the corner of the Cape House kitchen, wind roving over him. At dawn he’d blundered outside, gripped by the conviction that he had to go to the girl — tell her all that he knew.

  At the sight of Della’s car, Caleb patted his pockets. Mercifully, he hadn’t lost the key. Inside, he rested his aching forehead on the steering wheel. The car’s cool interior smelled of air freshener, old smoke, and the sea. The sun came up and its warmth caressed him. The rote of the waves filled his ears. At a bird’s piercing cry, he raised his eyes.

  A flock flew past, circling, searching for the sand that hadn’t yet returned. Curlews, their long, curved bills unmistakable, flying down from the north, on their way south for the winter. Early. They shouldn’t yet be here.

  What would the particulates the old man and those others planned to spray into the atmosphere mean to the curlews? Could the haze har
m them? But the new, man-made weather was already tossing the curlews about.

  Caleb let his mind move into the curlews, into the swift, steady pounding of their hearts. There was calm in it. Still grief-stricken, he turned the key in the ignition and Della’s car shuddered to mechanical life, gasoline flowing through its veins. He had no clear thought as to where he would go until, reaching the rutted, gravel access road that led through the barrens to the crest of Telephone Hill, he took the turn.

  Leaving the car where the bumpy lane ended, he walked the last stretch to reach the perimeter fencing that enclosed the metal cellphone tower. Above him, its broken support cables clanked mournfully in the wind around its spindly, canting height. One of its receptor panels hung loose in the air. He didn’t care about the tower. Instead Caleb poured all his awareness into the lichen that crawled in the slowest circles across the granite, the soft mounds of moss, the masses of crowberry bushes, the little flies, the coppery water of the ponds that dotted the barrens. Seeking consolation. And advice. The old man was out there somewhere. If he and the other men were going to meet, presumably this morning, they would have to travel across the land, and, from up here, their tiny figures would be impossible to miss.

  He’d wait them out: he had all the patience he needed to sit tight until he saw something.

  Once more the new knowledge gleaned the night before tore through him: the man-made haze; these men, who wanted the weather to do whatever they wished, who might use violence to get their way. Who wanted to make money off whatever this new technology was, an engineered particle. Was that not something the old man and Arun had spoken of in his presence? Hadn’t the old man spoken of patents as well? So was the old man, despite all his concern about changing weather and melting ice, looking to get rich alongside the Hansens? How deep did his deceptions go? Whatever experiments he’d been conducting, whatever trial particulates he’d sprayed into the air from his homemade pumps through that lime-green tubing attached to floating balloons, he’d done it here, on Blaze Island, meaning Caleb himself and all that he loved — this small place vast enough it had once taken days to cross, where there might yet be rocks no human had set eyes on, where fish had once been so plentiful you could practically scoop a hand into the water to catch one — they were at the heart of the experiment. When the old man had said to him, Tread lightly on the land, and, Find your home and stay close to it, he’d listened. Oh, such a good student he’d been. And look where it had got him.

  He’d eaten so little in the past day, drunk more than he’d eaten. His head throbbed. But there were Labrador tea bushes just out of reach and his mother’s words, some of the old wisdom, returned. Chew the leaves to settle your stomach. Stumbling to his feet, Caleb pushed a sprig, bitter and aromatic, into his mouth.

  There were bright red partridgeberries at his feet, dotting the rocks. Spitting out the leaves, Caleb gathered them, the fattest and juiciest ones, leaving the pale pink ones to ripen. Here was something. Their tartness made his stomach quiver but they stayed down. The dizziness that had rocked him began to settle. The land was a hand at his back. A warmth that held him.

  Only two days ago, before the storm — how could it be only two days? — he’d come upon old Wince Osmond, out on the rocks by Wells Lane, flat on his stomach, picking the first berries. Caleb had halted at the sight, a man lying on his stomach amid the rocks. Raising his head, old Wince had told him how he’d just had an operation and couldn’t yet bend his right knee, but that wasn’t about to stop him picking for the wife.

  He would never be able to tell the girl this story.

  The sun had risen above the hills. Far off, if he stared towards the water, the solar panels on the shore side of the little white house glowed as the moon sank. The wind turbine spun in its field, wind flag rippling into the northeast. The weather monitors on the far side of the house were out of sight but trees climbed the slope to where the girl’s garden was. Trees that might one day make a new, small forest. How benign it all looked. How much of his life had been touched by a place now utterly inaccessible.

  Locked in the trunk of Della’s car was a thing Caleb had set there and nearly forgotten. The previous morning, he’d filled a can of gas at Vera’s store in Pummelly. He’d left that can with Pat Green to give to his uncle Leo to pass on to his mother and great-aunt. Caleb hoped Leo had done so. Midday he’d filled the old man’s jerry can in Tom’s Neck, then transferred that container, still full of gas, from the back of his quad to the trunk of Della’s car. Where it still lay.

  Once more Caleb patted the pockets of his coveralls for the key. Back at the car, he blessed Della Burke who smoked and kept a lighter on the little shelf in front of the emergency brake, even if she might be beyond furious with him, wondering if he’d run off with her car for good. Caleb pressed the key to release the trunk. There were some rags in its depths and he grabbed a couple of these before lifting out the red plastic container full of gas.

  When someone spoke his name, he dropped the can as if it were on fire.

  He recognized Agnes Watson immediately, for all that he hadn’t seen her in years. Her curious, compressed energy, which had once made him feel as if he were standing near a caribou, travelled towards him. At the top of the track, in a jacket the colour of sand, she was smaller than he remembered, her brown hair, or what he could see of it beneath her wool hat, longer, a dark fringe spackling her forehead.

  “When did you get to the island?” Caleb demanded.

  In response, Agnes crunched up the lane with her deliberate stride. He’d not seen or heard any sign of a vehicle from the direction of the road, but Caleb knew of Agnes’s propensity for walking great distances across the land.

  One snowy afternoon four years before, he and his cousin Ger were running an errand in Gerald’s truck to the hardware store in middle island, when Caleb had spotted a figure walking along the highway between Harbour Islands and Shallow Bay. This was the day after Agnes Watson had surprised him out on the slide paths, when he’d snowshoed in to check on his rabbit snares rather than borrowing one of his uncles’ Ski-doos. Once again, as she walked along the road’s narrow shoulder, made even narrower by the drifting snow, Agnes was wearing a snow-white jacket, which seemed pure foolishness, except that a red knapsack slung over her back made a bright and moving flare, and her sealskin hat and mitts stood out as well. Gerald didn’t want to stop but Caleb said they ought to. He told Ger the woman was staying with Alan Wells. When they pulled up in front of her, Agnes thanked them for the offer of a ride, but said if it was no bother, she preferred to walk, her narrowed eyes turning back to the still, white expanse of the iced-in sea.

  She made his skin stiffen, as she faced him on Telephone Hill. She’d arrived the night of the storm, she told him, on the last ferry, made it as far as Shallow Bay before pulling off the road. She’d used the jack in the spare tire set of her rental car to break into the disused Anglican church.

  “Out of gas?” Agnes asked, nodding at the jerry can. Caleb didn’t know what to say. He heaved shut the trunk of Della’s car and picked up the plastic container.

  “Everyone’s running out of gas,” he managed, shifting from foot to foot. “What are you doing this way?”

  “Out for a walk. Hoping to meet you.” Agnes offered a thin smile.

  “Where did you spend the night?”

  “At the shore.”

  “The shore? What shore?”

  “On what sand is left in Green Cove.” This was utterly perplexing, yet when Caleb looked closer, he spotted traces of sand clinging to her jeans and speckling Agnes’s wool hat. So while he’d been up at Cape House, she’d been not far off. Water must practically have been lapping at her toes.

  “Now why would you do that?”

  “I had it in mind to speak to Alan but saw he had a guest” — she must mean the young American — “and this morning he left so early I had no chance. Then you showed up in the yard. And I wanted to greet and sing to the sea.”


  It was unnerving, to discover such a private, rending moment had been observed, if at a distance, by someone engaged in their own private moment. Agnes had an air of mournful exhaustion. There were dark stains under her eyes, as if, not surprisingly, she’d barely slept. “I heard the car start and head up the hill, so I followed the sound, saw it parked up here from the road. Thought you might be able to tell me what’s going on.”

  “Me?” Caleb said in astonishment. “Is that right? You’re one of his team, on that fancy project, aren’t you? You ought to be the one telling me.”

  The long, contemplative look that Agnes gave him was not unlike the look she’d offered the wintry day they’d met on the slide path. Then, Caleb had felt her taking in the colour of his skin, darker than her own, and the curiosity he’d felt from Agnes had not been like the estranging curiosity of others around him. When she’d asked him who his people were, he’d told her his mother’s were from the island. As for his father’s, well, could be Papua New Guinea or Paraguay for all he knew, smoked Irish was what most people around here called people like him, and when Agnes nodded, Caleb felt no judgment from her.

  “What do you know, Caleb?” Agnes asked now.

  “What do I know? I reckon it’s not weather monitoring going on here, is it, the particle haze, the deal with these men. Why all the secrecy, why doesn’t he want to be seen, why is he so frantic they not know his name?”

  “Can I tell you a story?” Agnes asked.

  “No time for that now.” Because, truly, if he was to do as he planned, he needed to be on his way.