by Jack Hodgins
“You must wonder how I could bear to leave with so much excitement going on!” Thorstad said. “Now tell me how long you’ll stay. There’re rooms at the B&B but we’ll need to get you your own chamber pot first, unless you want to use the Women’s Room.”
Travis closed his eyes. “I have to catch the next ferry back—in two hours. I’ve got a rehearsal tonight.” To Lisa he explained, “I’m Prince Charming.”
Lisa snorted. “No kidding.”
“A real test of an actor,” Travis said. “Think of how you’d feel if two hundred kids walked out because they refuse to believe you are handsome and rich, with royal blood in your veins.”
Inside the Store, once he had his chocolate bars and a can of processed meat to keep a balanced diet, Thorstad admitted he was inclined to risk Travis’s life and virtue in order to check up on Gwendolyn again, “Just in case she’s packed up and taken off.”
Lisa said, “You could leave Prince Charming here with me.”
“I don’t think so,” Thorstad said. “You need to get ready for your tar-sands fellow, who could arrive here any minute.”
Lisa tilted down her head and stared at her countertop for some serious thinking. “Well.” She looked up and turned her hardest gaze on Axel Thorstad. “Promise me, if she gets that look in her eye—you know the one I mean—you’ll get this fellow outa there fast. We don’t want any more young men missing!” To Travis she said, “We haven’t found where she buries them.”
Rather than taking the trail through the woods, Thorstad left the bicycle against the wall of the Store and led Travis down onto the beach to follow the shoreline—a chance for Travis to get a sense of his life on the edge of the sea. Any number of treasures might have been washed ashore and abandoned while the island’s salvage-master was away.
Travis showed little interest in the washed-in children’s toys or the unusual shapes of driftwood stumps. He saw only the potential souvenirs—conjoined oyster shells and patterned rocks, things to show off to friends or mount on display in his upstairs rooms. He admired the colours in a stone worn smooth by the tides; he could imagine that bright orange starfish hanging on his wall; he saw any number of purposes for a rusted oarlock off someone’s boat. But Thorstad explained that collecting rocks and shells and dead animals was frowned upon here. “You should have brought a camera.”
“You mean I can’t keep this one mussel shell?” He opened his hand to show where the dark blue shell lay cradled comfortably in his palm.
Thorstad shook his head. “You could take that rusted oarlock up to the Free Exchange.”
The mussel shell would look less interesting once Travis had got it home, of course, even if he slipped it under his shirt while Thorstad wasn’t looking.
It was more difficult for Travis to obey the local rules when they came to the long bay of volcanic stone fashioned by time and tides into a broad staircase leading down into the waves. Here Thorstad pointed out the fragments of oyster shells embedded in the stone. “Eighty million years. Maybe more.”
Apparently the number was so astonishing that it required repetition. “Eighty million years!” Travis bent low to study the eighty-million-year-old bits of shell. He stood up and looked one way and then the other. “If you’d turn the other way for a minute I could pry up a small piece. I promise I’d keep it safe.”
“It’s safe enough where it is. Let’s go.”
Gwendolyn Something sat on a log in front of Thorstad’s shack, the skirt of her flowered dress pushed down between her thighs, her bare feet curled over the smaller log below, her gaze out to sea while a cigarette burned between her fingers. Though she could not have been unaware of their gravel-crunching approach, she did not turn to look. She raised the cigarette to her mouth, drew in deeply, and then exhaled the smoke. “Too soon,” she said. “She said I had till tomorrow.”
Her older girls were working in pairs to carry the painted stumps back into his shack. That the blue tarpaulin was unmoved since yesterday suggested they’d just begun.
“We’re moving down to Townsends’—scrunched together even worse than here. We’ll steal your tarp and string it up for a lean-to, so we can take turns going outside to breathe, even in rain.” She said this to a small boat passing by. “Lisa said you ’n Normie’ll add more sleeping space at the back.”
“Unless we find something better.” Farther away, he meant. “Is the coffee pot on the stove?”
“It is, but I’ll pour it. I don’t want you in there till we’ve cleaned things up!”
When she’d returned with two steaming mugs and Thorstad had introduced Travis—“a student”—Gwendolyn looked the boy over from his close-cropped hair down to his chequered shoes. “Hooker’s Willow’s daddy was a student. Said his specialty was the sex life of trees—whatever that’s supposed to mean. Trees on this island mustn’t have much sex, because he was here and gone in a day. Poor old Hooker’s Willow nearly wasn’t.” She drew on her cigarette and looked again out to sea. “Wait a minute.” While releasing shreds of smoke from her lungs she added, “I got it wrong. He wasn’t Willow’s dad, he was Rosy Pussytoes’s. Which may explain why Rosy is such a quick little thing.”
She stood up then, smoothed down her skirt while looking straight at Travis, and winked. Then she turned away and went up into Axel Thorstad’s shack and came out again, this time with a pile of clothing over one arm, and started down the trail towards Townsends’ little house. Travis watched her out of sight, then turned to scan the rocks and gravel and kelp and bits of driftwood down on the beach, looking no doubt for something to put in his pocket in case he had lost his chance for an eighty-million-year-old oyster shell. Yesterday’s scattered lumber had been taken away by tides, and a birdcage had arrived from someone else’s beach.
Sitting on the top log of Normie’s retaining wall, they drank their coffee—which Gwendolyn had obviously made from his supply of Kicking Horse—while chattering girls went in and out behind them. Thorstad didn’t want to see the inside of his shack before all of Gwendolyn’s belongings had been removed. He knew the three photos would not be in their right places on the wall, the painted stumps arranged without any plan. The spines of his books would no longer be perfectly in line, some would be nearly falling off the shelf.
“You’ve agreed to go somewhere else in September, haven’t you.” Travis delivered this accusation without removing his gaze from the chain of mountains opposite. Sun shone down on the stony peak and timbered slopes, and no doubt on the hidden valleys with their wild animals and hermits, as well as on the glittering waves of the strait directly in front of them.
“If you keep your eyes peeled you might see a pod of killer whales out there.”
Travis tore slivers off the log they were sitting on and tossed them, one after the other, down onto gravel. “You avoided my mother’s invitation to tutor my cousin in the fall. I figure you decided against it. You’ve probably already signed on for somewhere else.”
A pair of red kayaks appeared from behind the trees to the south and stroked by, perfectly abreast, the murmuring voices of the two rowers suddenly breaking into laughter for a moment. Thorstad waited until they had passed before responding to Travis’s accusation—if that was what it was. “There’s plenty of time to think about what’s next—six more weeks of summer.”
“Think about it now. Come back in the fall and help me survive my year of university. Come to L.A. again when I go. University is bound to be tough for a guy like me. It hit me while I was at my uncle’s—I should’ve got a commitment out of you before I ever let you on that boat.”
Thorstad leaned forward for a good look at Travis’s face. How much importance should he give to this appeal? “Do your parents know you’ve made this little side trip?”
“My parents want you back to tutor my stupid cousin, you know that. You might as well nag at us both. Bring a piece of an eighty-million-year-old shell with you and you’ll be the hero of my first-year science class. We won’t have t
o stay at the Evanses’ again. We could find a place of our own. My mother’ll be so glad to have you keeping an eye on me I bet she’ll pay for any sort of luxury we demand.”
Travis hauled his knapsack onto his lap and ripped open a Velcro flap. “I wonder if a B&B without a toilet would have a DVD player. I found this in a store near my uncle’s.” He brought out a cream-coloured paperback and opened the back to display a disc inside. “Just because you’re old don’t mean you can’t, you know, keep yourself up to date with what’s cool! What do you think? The Rap Canterbury Tales.”
The next morning, Axel Thorstad rode the reconditioned bicycle down the trail to his shack to begin the task of putting things back where they belonged. This meant wrestling his desk from one wall to another, straightening out the books, and rearranging the wall photographs: Cliff Lyons on the U.S. Mail coach, Susan Hayward riding horseback with John Wayne. He removed the picture of his father in the moment before the fall, and laid it beside the Centurion Museum photograph of his still-alive father on top of the bookcase, uncertain where they belonged. Then he shifted the various stumps into positions that felt more familiar, most of them with their red circle eyes facing more or less in the direction of his chair, his desk, the window, and the view of the strait outside.
When the shack was once more his own, he went out onto the beach, stripped down to cross the gravel and sand and barnacle-crusted rocks, and walked into the water to set out for a swim. It was cold, but the water here was always cold except where it had just come in over rocks the summer sun had been warming for hours. It was the same body of water he’d swum in daily off the Montanas’ place, and the same he’d seen from the Evanses’ place but had swum in only the last few days before leaving, in a pair of Elliot Evans’s trunks. He had been a swimmer all his life. If he’d been raised in California, his father might have encouraged him to become a stunt double for actors afraid of the water.
Until he was walking up the beach to fetch his clothes he hadn’t noticed that Lisa Svetic stood beside the double-trunked arbutus waving her arms. Her bicycle leaned into a bush of oceanspray. “My lord! You should wear a bell around your neck when you’re naked so people will know to keep away. Birds are dropping out of trees. The killer whales are probably halfway to Alaska by now, mothers covering the eyes of their calves.”
She turned her back and spoke to the woods. “They sent me down to get you but they never told me I’d be stricken blind.”
He had left his clothing folded neatly across the top of a driftwood log half buried in gravel and worn smooth by decades of shifting tide. She waited till Thorstad had had time to pull his undershorts on before turning to face him again. “I’m surprised Hollywood let you come home, they could’ve used you for a lamppost now and then.”
It wasn’t easy to pull clothes on over wet flesh.
“This fella that was left behind in Deeper Bay? They brought him in and laid him out in the Free Exchange but he won’t let them take him across to a doc. He’s a terrible mess, but he wants you—Goodness knows why. He groans and moans and doesn’t talk very clear but he knows how to get across what he wants. He’s already made life hell for the guys that rescued him!”
Thorstad supposed this would eventually make sense. “You saw him?”
“Of course I saw him. Bloody. Filthy. At death’s door but fighting the guys that try to help. They should’ve left him where they found him.”
“He say who he is?”
“He said your name. Wouldn’t say his.”
With his corduroy pants pulled up, he carried his shirt and socks and shoes up the slope to the retaining wall and then up the steps to the grass. A distinct sense of foreboding had lodged somewhere inside him. He had come home from the world, for a while at least, but that didn’t mean the world wasn’t capable of following. “Did he say what he wants me for?”
“He wants us to bring him down to your shack, but I figured you’d want to have a look at him first.”
“And he’s in pretty bad shape, you say?”
“I could hardly force myself to look. Imagine a sick-and-dying man beaten to a pulp by a healthy gorilla. If he was mine I’d be bracing myself for the worst. A former student? He said a lot of things while they were bringing him in but most of it didn’t make sense. One thing they caught—he knows you been looking for him. Asking up and down the streets if anyone knew where he was. You can take my bike if you want.”
“You take it. Tell them I’m on my way.” If he walked he’d have a little more time to think. And to gain control of this tremor in his hands, the confusion in his head. “You sure you heard right? He said I’d been looking for him up and down the streets?”
Lisa dropped a foot to the ground and turned back. “Looked pretty pleased with himself for a man breathing his last. Like he figured he was bringing you a great big gift you never thought to ask for!”
Acknowledgements
The quotations in Chapter 1 are from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Cressida and Earle Birney’s poem “Bushed,” from Ghost in the Wheels, Selected Poems, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto.
The quotations in Chapters 4 and 12 are from Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem The Canterbury Tales.
The quotation in Chapter 8 is from Baba Brinkman’s The Rap Canterbury Tales, Talonbooks, Vancouver.
The plot of the fictitious play Returning to Troy is very loosely modelled on the Lena Grove story in William Faulkner’s Light in August, as well as Horton Foote’s Travelling Lady, in Collected Plays, Vol. II, A Smith and Kraus Book, Contemporary Playwrights Series (later a movie titled Baby the Rain Must Fall). Oonagh’s sentence “It’s all right, Ludie. I’ve had my trip” is from Horton Foote’s play The Trip to Bountiful.
The quotation in Chapter 13 is from Edgar Lee Masters’s poem “Lucinda Matlock,” in The Spoon River Anthology, The Macmillan Company.
The review of Matthew Schneider’s The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles was written by Dr. Kim Blank for the Victoria Times-Colonist.
“In Time of The Breaking of Nations” by Thomas Hardy was composed in 1915 and published in Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, London, 1932.
Estevan Island is a fiction and should not be identified with a real island.
The television network producing Forgotten River is also a fiction and not to be mistaken for a real network studio.
For advice, support, and other forms of assistance, I am grateful to Curtis Gillespie, Bill New, Shannon Hodgins, my agent, John Pearce, and my editor, Patrick Crean. I am enormously grateful to Brigitte and Hart Hanson and the generous actors, writers, producers, and crew members working on the Fox television series Bones. And again, as always, to Dianne.
