by Jack Hodgins
“What’s this?”
Mr. Pernouski held onto the limb of a small tree to help himself come to a stop, and turned to see what Mrs. Eckhart was up to. Bent over, with her face down around her knees, she was scraping around in the dirt with her hands. Fingers pried up something lumpy out of the ground.
“They had children,” she said, looking at the object with a sense of wonder on her face. “Those people had children.”
Mr. Pernouski saw that it was a small metal car of some kind, rusted and squished flat. “I don’t know about that Australian bunch,” he said, “but the hippies had dozens of kids, swarming all over the place. Dirty and smelly and completely wild, a pack of savages.”
Mrs. Eckhart looked from the small toy to Mr. Pernouski without changing the expression on her face. “The child who played with this thing may have been your grandson, Mr. Pernouski.” She stuck her cigarette between her lips and squinted through the smoke while she brushed the dirt away to get at the metal.
Mr. Pernouski turned his back to her and led the way still farther down this damnable cliff. Even holding onto the bunches of small trees and the twisted roots of dug-up stumps he felt as if he were climbing precariously down the side of something. The weight of his own body threatened to send him hurtling down the slope at any moment. Maybe once he’d got to the beach at the bottom he’d feel less insecure.
But there was nothing when you got there that you could call a beach. The water slapped against slabs of rock, which were scarred by glacier marks and cracked in a checkered pattern like old paint and in places crumbled away to a pile of stones. No sand, no gravel, no gradual slope; hardly anything even here that was close to level, where you could feel you weren’t about to fall off and crack your head on the bottom. There were a few places where you could find a spot to sit, and natural steps where you might climb around the jagged lumps, and a sharp V where a small rowboat might be tied up out of the wind. A row of tangled weeds and chips and feathers and slimy kelp had been left behind by the sea. When Mr. Pernouski’s shoe, with its slippery sole, slid out from under him, he was saved from crashing by Mr. Eckhart, whose hand shot out to grab his arm. For a moment, the two of them teetered above the spray. Mrs. Eckhart, behind, said, “My Lord, look how far we’ve come down!”
The car, when Mr. Pernouski could bear to look up, was a small bump on the sky. Everything between him and it was a green jungle wall, which could as easily have been leaning towards him as away. Only his presence here could convince him that trail was something you could walk on and not just a dark scar scratched into the side of a cliff.
“You’ll never sell this lot to anyone,” Mrs. Eckhart said. “Where could you tell a person to perch his house?”
Mr. Eckhart looked at Mr. Pernouski for help. Perhaps he’d been thinking the same himself.
“You get a bulldozer, Mrs. Eckhart,” Mr. Pernouski said. “Have a look at those houses on either side. You get a bulldozer and make a shelf to build your house on. This is the modern world, the landscape can be altered to suit your needs.”
Mrs. Eckhart jerked herself upright to look at him. “Would your wife agree to that?” she said. “Or your children? If you consult them.” Before Mr. Pernouski had time to protest she glanced at her watch. “Well, I’ve seen all I need to see, let’s go. We’ve got a ferry to catch.”
Just like that? Mr. Pernouski would have thought she had plans for a shouting match, at least, here at the bottom. Or a discussion of philosophies. Having brought him down here, was she simply going to turn around and leave? “Just hold it a minute,” he said. “Have you any idea just how much the value of this property will go up in the next few years? You’re passing up a wonderful investment.”
No talk of investments, no talk of resale profits could stop her. When he tried to paint a picture of the summer cabin they might build there some day, with a cantilevered patio over the rocks where she could plan her lectures accompanied by the background sounds of waves, she said she couldn’t imagine anything worse. Right now, she said, she was thinking of all the other cars that were getting ahead of them in the ferry line-up. With her narrow legs jabbing into the slope, she found it easier going up than coming down.
Behind her, Mr. Eckhart, after only a few feet of the climb, had to stop and puff. “There wasn’t really much of a chance,” he panted down at Mr. Pernouski. “Though I thought that, maybe . . .”
If coming down for Mr. Pernouski had been a matter of abandoning himself to gravity, except for a restraining hand on well-rooted trees to keep from falling, going up soon proved to be impossible. He’d have had better hopes of surfacing from Mrs. Eckhart’s suggested plunge in the sea. His body, after just a very few steps, refused to rise. His heart pounded dangerously, his knees seemed prepared to buckle under his weight, the sweat that poured out of his skin felt hot and greasy inside his clothes. His vision blurred. Hoisting this bulk would do some terrible damage. He couldn’t move.
He sat, and tried to laugh it off. What a ridiculous figure he was proving himself to be!
“You can’t stay there,” Mr. Eckhart called down. He sounded as if he believed Mr. Pernouski were just being stubborn. He came down to sit beside him on the log. “You can’t just sit here.”
Mr. Pernouski fanned his face with his hand. “I should have known better in the first place. I’ll never get up.”
“Well, you’ve got to try,” Mr. Eckhart said. “We have that ferry. If I pulled on you . . .”
It was worth an attempt. Mr. Pernouski stood up and let Mr. Eckhart show him how they could grasp each other’s elbow for a steady grip. Mr. Eckhart grunted, leaning back, and Mr. Pernouski strained forward, eager to help all he could. But his foot pushed dirt out from under itself and he fell to his knee.
“If I got behind you and pushed!” Mrs. Eckhart shouted down.
Mr. Pernouski sat on his wet log with his knees far apart, panting, and imagined Mrs. Eckhart beneath him, pushing, while her husband pulled on his arm. Laughter bubbled up in his throat. If he fell, she could be ironed out, like a piece of cardboard, on the rocks. He felt his whole body heaving with laughter.
“Well then, if you crawled!”
Mr. Pernouski roared, and threw out his arms. If it hadn’t been too undignified, he might have pedalled his feet in the air. “Crawled!” Like a great fat baby, he could get down on all fours and drag himself up the hill, from bush to bush.
He took off his jacket and tossed it over a twisted root. He hauled his shirt up out of his belt and used the wide wrinkled tail of it to wipe the tears and sweat off his face. “I can’t. It would take forever.”
“Yes, crawl!” Even at this distance he could hear her mouth sucking impatiently at smoke, blowing it out. Mrs. Eckhart had come down a little closer to squat on her heels. She wasn’t laughing, nor was her husband, who made sympathetic noises in his mouth. “It’s the only way. Otherwise we’ll have to flag down a boat.” She stood up straight and stuck her cigarette in her mouth and waved her arms about over her head. But all the fishing boats were tiny dots, miles away.
“My son has a boat,” Mr. Pernouski said, almost before he realized he was going to say it. It sobered him up. There was nothing funny now.
“But your son isn’t here, is he?” Mrs. Eckhart said.
“We could call him,” Mr. Eckhart said. “We could find a phone.”
Would it really come to that? A rescue mission from the sea, when he was only a hundred feet or so from the road? There were those who might still find some humour in the situation, he supposed, but Mr. Pernouski felt the first stabs of panic. It would be like his son to bring a whole flotilla with him — dozens of boats filling up the bay, dozens of people to laugh. “If I have the choice,” he said, “I would rather you didn’t.” The truth of the matter was that he’d rather perish in great agony on this slope than live to see the grin on his son’s face as he hopped out of his boat to rescue him.
It wasn’t something, though, that he was willing to shar
e with a woman like Mrs. Eckhart. Mr. Pernouski considered the alternatives. If up was impossible here, then how about along? It seemed a reasonable thought, but when Mr. Pernouski looked at the coastline on either side he realized that there would be at least four miles of stumbling over this rocky obstacle course before he’d get to an access road that could lead him gently uphill to the world.
“If I had a rope in the trunk of the car,” Mr. Eckhart said.
“There’s no rope in the car,” Mrs. Eckhart said. “We took everything out before we packed.”
“I helped this fellow pull a tractor that had gone over a bank, once. We could’ve put a loop around your chest, under your arms see, and pulled you up with the car.”
“Surely someone in one of those houses . . . ,” Mrs. Eckhart proposed, from above.
But there was no one around to help. On Sundays, builders were at home, or out on picnics.
“Walter,” Mrs. Eckhart said. “If we don’t move.”
Mr. Eckhart glanced at his watch and took off his hat for the first time. He was bald. “We can’t miss it, Mr. Pernouski. There are people on the other side, expecting us.”
Mr. Pernouski might have suggested they phone their friends on the other side, since they’d seemed so eager to phone someone. Tell them they’d be a ferry later than expected. One missed ferry was not a tragedy. But he could think of no practical use these two might be to him if they stayed. All they could offer was company and the sound of her puffing — filling the air with the smoke of her impatient righteousness. It would be better, in fact, to have Mrs. Eckhart some place where she couldn’t watch him helpless like this, a fat fool. Like a cow on its back, bloating up. Or an overturned bug, wiggling its useless legs. Go ahead, go ahead, he told them. Someone was bound to come along sooner or later. Someone with a rope in his trunk, as Mr. Eckhart had already suggested. Or one of those fishing boats coming in at the end of the day, if it came to that.
Mr. Eckhart stood up and looked all around, as if in search of some alternative which hadn’t occurred to anyone yet. He shook his head, sadly, and put a hand on Mr. Pernouski’s wet shoulder. “When we get to the ferry dock we’ll call your home. I’ll tell your son to come help you out of here.”
Mr. Pernouski closed his eyes and thought of his wife — his nationally famous wife — being interviewed by magazines in Toronto. “Call my office,” he said. “Call my office. They’ll make jokes but they’ll send someone to come pick me up.” Maybe, he added, they could even get some publicity out of it — good for business. He tried to laugh. “The Plaid Tank Scuttled.” He saw it in terms of headlines. “By Prairie Guerrillas.” Then he put his hand over his eyes. “Don’t bother my family, though. Don’t phone them.”
When he removed his hand from his eyes, he saw that Mrs. Eckhart had come farther down the slope to squat on her heels just above him. He knew when he looked up at her face that it would be a miracle if any phone call at all was made. “In the meantime,” she said, “you’ll have your paradise all to yourself.” She reached for the damp tail of his shirt and wiped his forehead with it. “And you can think about things, while you’re waiting to be rescued. I should imagine, at a time like this, a man has no shortage of things to contemplate. I imagine you will think, for instance, about your family, and the kind of success you have been as a family man. You will think about your career, I’m sure, and estimate its importance to you.”
“Please go,” Mr. Pernouski said.
She smiled. This woman who’d been described by her husband as a saint. And turned to hoist herself up the hill.
Mr. Pernouski watched the ferry approach the Island from out in the strait and then, a half-hour later, nose out into the open water again from behind the point of land. Without moving from his spot on the damp log he continued to watch, until it had become a tiny white dot in the haze. Then he put his jacket on, took a deep breath, and started to crawl up the slope. Chuckling at the picture he would make if anyone saw. And whimpering. By grabbing onto the thicker salal stems, and chunks of roots sticking out of the ground, he was able to drag himself uphill a foot, a couple of feet, maybe even three, before collapsing, heaving for air, on his side. His hands already were bleeding. It would take forever. His knees and the rocks, between them, had already torn holes into the flapping tail of his shirt. How was it possible, he wondered, to get yourself into such a mess? When he had bounced, so stupidly, down this same slope.
By the time he’d reached a point which he estimated to be about a third of the way up, Mr. Pernouski imagined that the ferry had docked and that Mr. and Mrs. Eckhart were taking off their sweaters and making themselves at home in the living room of their friends. It struck him that this might become one of those jokes he could tell on himself — a fat man without the sense to avoid going to the bottom of a hill he wasn’t able to climb up. “They waited until they got to the mainland before they phoned,” he would say. “And naturally, they didn’t phone my office, they phoned my house. I had crawled halfway to the top, three-quarters of the way to the top, already ten pounds lighter just from the sweat I’d lost, when my son’s motor boat rounded the point and roared across the bay towards me. Hey Dad, he yelled, and I staggered down to the beach to embrace him. Thank God you found me, I said, but he pushed me away. Never mind that, he said, did you make the goddam sale?”
The light had begun to fade from the sky before it occurred to Mr. Pernouski that they might not have telephoned at all, this saint and her husband. They could not possibly have forgotten such a thing, but they were capable of discussing it on the ferry and of deciding that there would be no real harm in it, that he was bound to be rescued sooner or later, if only by accident, and a little bit of a scare never killed anyone. The woman would be thinking there was some lesson in it for him undoubtedly. For the Number One Salesman of the Island. Who knew what a woman like her intended? Or even whether this indignity was intended just for him, or for everyone who lived in this place she hated, everyone who lived on this island.
When the dark made it impossible for him to see where he was going, Mr. Pernouski curled up under his jacket against a charred stump and thought of his wife, Christina. Perhaps she was in her hotel room, already beginning to work on a condensed version of her speeches for the women who read Chatelaine. Maybe she was dreaming of that Maclean’s article and wondering if they would put her on the front cover. Or considering the Toronto woman’s suggestion — that she sell her string of import shops and spend all her time travelling, making her speeches for the hungry crowds of women who desired to emulate her example. Eventually, despite sharp stones that dug into his flesh and the wet leaves that brushed his face, he fell asleep and dreamt that rescuers came from every direction for him. Dozens of fishing boats and yachts and pleasure craft crowded into the bay, while wrecking trucks and police cars and wailing ambulances lined up along the road at the top of the hill. It was a helicopter, however, that got to him first. It hovered above him, slicing the air with its blades, and lowered a man on a ladder who strapped Mr. Pernouski into a giant sling on the end of a rope. Up into the air went Mr. Pernouski, arms and legs dangling, like an elephant being rescued from a pit, or one of those polar bears he had seen on television, being flown back to the north, tranquillized, after coming south to raid garbage dumps. With the helicopter throbbing above him he rose up over the coastline, over the trees, up over the town and the strait with the small white-and-blue ferries cutting lines on the surface, and ascended — perhaps the men in the helicopter had no intention of letting him down — to become engulfed in the clouds before breaking free to clear sunny sky.
When he awoke it was a grey dawn, and there were no helicopters, no sounds at all but the soft splash of waves. He was damp, cold; his legs ached. There were no boats either, or wrecking trucks or ambulances with sirens, no police. As Mr. Pernouski grunted to a sitting position, pushing the jungle of salal out of his way, he saw that if he were to be rescued at all from this hellish slope, he would have to do
it himself, in whatever way he could manage. On his knees if necessary, though it could take all this day that stretched ahead of him, it could take all his life, with the imagined sound of Mrs. Eckhart’s righteous puffing all around him as he climbed.
More than Conquerors
“AW GLADDY, don’t quit.”
He could yell his lungs out, though, before she’d change her mind. Gladdy Roote lay there on that beach, gasping, and would have called herself an old half-dead seal foundered on rock if anyone asked.
She knew well enough that in a bathing suit she was a sight to see: flesh like slabs of goose-pimpled lard, legs all knots and cords, breasts like dead fish hanging in her black canvas suit. Still, she lay there on that flat rock — half in, half out of the water — surrounded by bits of floating kelp and wood chips, unwinding the string of seedy yellow rock weed that was wrapped around her hand.
“Aw Gladdy, don’t quit, not yet.”
Carl was treading water a hundred feet out, riding the wash of a ferry that had slid into the harbour across the bay.
“Go to hell,” she said, and crawled farther up the slope. “I’ve frozen long enough.” She rested, breathing heavily, on the sun-coated sandstone shelf of beach.
And just to show how little he cared, he dived under and left her gaping at nothing but heaving surface for so long she was on the verge of whimpering; then came up farther out, laughing. She imagined that even from here she could see the brown snoose stains on his teeth. It wouldn’t surprise her if he was chewing now, it wouldn’t surprise her a bit to see him spit a long brown stream out into the water. The bugger.
“Gettin’ old, woman,” he yelled. “Your blood’s gettin’ thin.”
And laughed, floating up onto his back. He’d laugh in the Queen’s face, that one. Brown teeth showing, and all those lines in his face. Carl Roote had blood as thick and slow as syrup.
“Drop dead,” she said, and flopped over to face away from the bay, to face straight into the cliff that rose up seventy or eighty feet, nearly straight up, to home. A path zigzagged up the slope, through tangled shiny salal brush and Oregon grape and blackberry vines, right up past peeling mangy-looking arbutus and scrub oak. From down here the houses were hidden; there might have been nothing at all up there on top but miles and miles of bush.
