Eye Lake

by Tristan Hughes

  At that Mr. Haney handed Buddy a big key made out of iron. It must have been pretty heavy because you could see him stoop when he took hold of it. Maybe he didn’t appreciate that so much. Most of us thought he was going to drop it, and the crowd kind of held their breath. Then, with a grimace, he managed to lift it up for a second before putting it down on his chair and the people all clapped. I could see Brenda right at the front by the platform with the biggest smile on her face I’d ever seen, but I couldn’t see Billy anywhere. Buddy turned to face them then, beaming through his wrinkles like I remembered him beaming at the table in front of the Halloween candy all those years ago, like he was the king of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  After the presentation there was a parade organized for Main Street and everyone began drifting over there. Sarah, Bobby and me drifted with them for a bit, but then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Billy sitting in his truck in the museum parking lot, drinking a bottle of beer and staring right at us.

  ‘Maybe it’d be nice to go the other way,’ I told Sarah and Bobby. ‘Down along the river. They won’t be starting the parade for a bit.’

  ‘That a great idea, Eli,’ Sarah said. I figured she’d seen Billy too.

  When we got to the river I noticed straight away how low it was. This early in the summer the water should have been a lot higher. I stopped by the old railroad bridge, where the trunk line had gone across to the mine site, and looked down at the pools behind the iron pylons where George and me used to fish with red and white bobbers. They were hardly deep enough to fish in now, and the current was so weak it wouldn’t have even shifted a bobber.

  ‘What you looking at?’ Bobby asked.

  ‘Just an old fishing spot,’ I said.

  ‘What did you used to catch there?’

  ‘Just slubes, mostly. And walleyes too, sometimes – early on after the ice melted in the spring, when they’re moving after spawning.’

  ‘What’s spawning?’

  ‘That’s them making more fish,’ I said.

  Sarah sat behind us on the grass, staring at the river with her black eyes. Bobby walked up and down the bank a bit, looking into the water trying to see if he could spot fish between the thin weeds that moved this way and that in the current like long human hair, the same as I used to do when I was a kid. But I doubted there were many down there: all the cover for them was stranded out in the air because the water was so low.

  They’d made a real effort with Main Street, as much as they could do. There was bunting hanging off most of the storefronts, even the ones that were just fronts and nothing else, and a big ‘Happy Birthday’ sign hanging across the street. It was cheerful and bright as long as you didn’t look too close, or sideways – onto the empty lots with the weeds and brush growing over them, and the broken-down cars and trucks, and the waiting green gums of the woods. I guess I must’ve been thinking about the remains in the police station – I’d told Bobby I wasn’t in the mood for a party – but for a moment I looked at all the decorations and thought it was kind of like someone had put makeup on a skeleton.

  The parade was called Crooked River’s Living History and mostly it was people dressed up and driving down Main Street in the backs of trucks. An Indian family went first, in their native costumes, beating a pow-wow drum and singing. Then came Mr. Haney, with two other men, dressed as voyageurs. They were holding paddles, pretending to paddle the truck along, and singing French songs. One of their hats fell off when the truck’s wheels went into a pothole. The trappers came next, with buckskins and beaver hats, and then a truck with a canoe on it. Wade Magnussen, who worked at the gas station, was standing beside the canoe holding an axe in one hand and a sign saying Pioneer Hotel in the other. He was meant to be Clarence.

  As each truck went past someone in the front threw handfuls of candy out the window onto the sidewalk for the kids to collect. There were hardly enough kids to collect it all and Bobby was having a field day picking it up. He must’ve filled two bagfuls in the first five minutes. By the time the miners’ and loggers’ trucks went past he was bugging Sarah and me to get him another bag. It was then that Billy arrived on the back of the floatplane truck, with two other bush pilots who worked for Buddy. They were wearing white scarves and leather hats with goggles resting on top of them like real old-fashioned pilots. The two other pilots were waving and smiling at the people clapping and cheering them, but Billy wasn’t. He was staring right at the three of us.

  When the truck came up opposite us he started shouting. At first you couldn’t hear him properly because of the clapping and cheering but after a second or two the clapping and cheering died right down. Bradley Cain, who was driving, must’ve thought something had happened and stopped the truck.

  ‘It’s a disgrace, a fucking disgrace, you flaunting it in front of me like this in public – playing happy frigging families with that retard. That’s my kid, you bitch, and I don’t give a flying fuck what you say about it. He’s mine and I’m allowed to take him whenever I frigging want. There’s no law … ’

  And he would’ve carried on except the crash flung him and one of the other pilots right off the side of the truck.

  The last truck was made up to look like a train car. They’d collected some old iron ore pellets and filled the back with them. Buddy was sitting on top of them on a chair holding his key. Clyde Fraser, who was driving, must’ve been so busy throwing candy out the window he hadn’t noticed the pilots’ truck stopped in front of him and ploughed right on into the back of it. It was lucky he was going slow, but it still hit hard enough to send Billy and the other pilot flying. And Buddy had got flung right off the back of the truck and was sitting there in the middle of a pothole in Main, holding his key. He wasn’t beaming anymore and he sure didn’t look like no king of Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  When I turned around I found that Sarah and Bobby had gone. They must’ve gone in a real hurry because Bobby had dropped his bags of candy and they were lying on the sidewalk, half-spilled. I gathered them up for him and was going to start heading back to the Poplars but instead I found my footsteps taking me back towards the river and then to number one O’Callaghan Street. It was like I couldn’t help it, like they just took me there of their own accord. I went through the gate, into the garden, past the old boards left over from the hotel, in through the porch, and then sat down in the living room beneath the Helsinki picture. The sky hadn’t changed in the picture, it never does – it was as blue and perfect and full of light as ever and the stars still shone on the cathedral’s dome.

  I was thinking of my dad then, even though I always try my best not to. Sometimes if I try real hard it’s like he isn’t there – or only a bit there, like a drawing someone’s half-rubbed out with an eraser. Sometimes he’d been like that in real life. I remember once how, when his circle of tempers was getting so bad he couldn’t come down from his room upstairs, he called me up there. When I went in I found him sitting in a rocking chair, going back and forth with his head cupped in his hands. I could see he was crying because his fingers were wet.

  ‘Eli,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry, Eli. I’m so sorry.’

  I didn’t say nothing. I was scared of him because he was crying.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Eli. I’ve not been here for you. I know that. I’ve not been a proper father to you. But I’m trying, I promise you. Jesus Christ I’m trying.’

  And I still couldn’t say nothing because I was scared and he just kept rocking back and forth.

  The stars were still shining on the dome and the sky was its perfect blue the same as it always was and I was thinking, even though I didn’t want to, what it was that he found so dark in a picture so full of light. And suddenly it came to me: it was that it never changed; he hated it because it never changed. I thought I could understand it now. He’d seen it for real and it must have looked even more perfect to him than it did in the picture. He’d
just got married and was there on his honeymoon. Why don’t you go somewhere warm, everyone had said when he and my mom decided to go. But her grandfather was from Finland, the same as my nana, so they went to Helsinki.

  I never knew my mom. I guess I must have seen her but I don’t remember it. After I came out all weak and blue with the cord wrapped around my neck I got better but she got worse. Maybe it was the fifty below and her not being able to be in the hospital. I don’t know why. Nobody ever talked about it. Nobody ever mentioned her. My dad wouldn’t let them. I had a mom for a few weeks and then she was gone. It was like she’d never even existed. There wasn’t any trunk in the basement that was hers, packed with her special things and looking like she might come back and say, ‘I forgot my trunk.’ There was nothing. Dad got rid of everything – everything except the Helsinki picture, which wasn’t hers in any case.

  Virgil told me once that that was just his way of trying not to look back. But I don’t reckon it ever worked for him. I could sort of understand that now, looking at the picture. He couldn’t stop his circle of tempers and they were always spinning him around this perfect place and time he could see and remember but was never able to go back to. And the perfect place never changed. He could see and remember it but he could never change it – make it not so perfect, the same as real life – until it became like his own Bermuda Triangle and he couldn’t get out of it. Not until the day he took Clarence’s Luger out of the trunk and shot himself with it.

  Nana, Virgil and me were all in the kitchen when we heard the shot. Nana sort of crumpled when she heard it, like she’d been shot. Virgil ran upstairs. The chair was still rocking back and forth when he went in and found him.

  Don’t look back. I think I know that now, Virgil. I think I understand that. If something can’t be changed then it’s best not to look for it. Sometimes you’ve got to leave the lost things hidden.

  That night I tried to sleep on the porch. I hadn’t slept there in a long time, not since I’d gone to live at the Poplars, and part of me kept worrying I should be heading back there. I had Bobby’s candy and he’d be wanting it. And then there was Sarah and what Billy had shouted. But I reckoned nothing would be happening with Billy: he wouldn’t be giving her any more black eyes tonight; I could hear Buddy and him hollering at each other over the fence at number two O’Callaghan Street.

  It was warm on the couch and the screens were still good enough to keep most of the bugs out, but I missed the night trains going through and the sounds of the others being shunted on the tracks.

  I missed Virgil and Jim too, sitting out on the porch talking. If I closed my eyes and concentrated real hard, though, it was like I could hear them again and even smell the whiskey in their glasses: Virgil asking about Clarence and Jim answering him. That’s the way it usually went. It was Virgil’s way of looking for him. He must’ve started out looking for him for real, with the search parties, and then afterwards on his own in the bush, but by the time I was around this asking questions must’ve seemed the only way left. It was as if it were a riddle or something, as if he’d found one of his books with a bunch of its pages missing.

  ‘So when did he start building it?’ Virgil asked.

  ‘I can’t be a hundred percent on that front, Virgil,’ Jim said. ‘I reckon a week or two after she left. But I couldn’t be sure, nobody could. He didn’t tell nobody what he was up to.’

  ‘But somebody must’ve noticed. Somebody must’ve noticed something.’

  ‘We started guessing something was up pretty soon, but nothing definite, nothing for sure. It was a different place back then, Virgil, you’ve got to understand that. There was, what, maybe a hundred and fifty of us living here – at most. When you went out into the bush that was your business. Nobody was going to ask you why and where. And there wasn’t such a big chance you were going to bump into anybody out there neither. I mean, there were shackers who lived nothing more than a couple of miles out of town who I only saw once or twice a year when they came in to Schieder’s store to buy supplies. And don’t forget, it was before the diversion, before the mine. Eye Lake wasn’t no lake then, Virgil, with a road going to it and everything. It was just a part of the bush that the Crooked River ran through before it flowed into Red Rock Lake and then back out again and through town. They hadn’t dammed it yet and detoured it into the loop round Red Rock.’

  ‘So when did people start noticing something was up?’ Virgil asked.

  ‘I reckon it would have been when he started neglecting the hotel. It wasn’t anything big or nothing, not to begin with, not the first few years. It was only little things – like forgetting to fix a leak or two in the roof or a creaking floorboard here and there – things you maybe wouldn’t have even noticed somewhere else. But your dad was real proud of that hotel, Virgil. He’d built it with his bare hands, in the middle of nowhere, and he was proud of every board and beam of it. Sometimes you’d hear him saying to the railroad men in the dining room how if he hadn’t taken the chance and built it he’d still have been picking tobacco down there in Sarnia. He’d made something of himself here and he was happy with what he’d made. There might’ve been bears and wolves roaming about outside in the garden but he made sure there wasn’t a fork out of place in the kitchen. So we noticed when them little things weren’t getting done. He’d always spent time out in the bush – doing a bit of prospecting and trapping and hunting on the side, the same as most men here did – but before he’d always paid his full attention to his hotel.’

  ‘So you knew something was up but you didn’t know exactly what.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s the nail on the head. There was a bunch of little things but we didn’t know what they were adding up to. Like there was the time me and Jake Ottertale went fishing up the Crooked River. We’d gone a few miles up – further than we normally did: we were looking for new spots, out towards where the eastern shore of Eye Lake is now. We were casting from the banks of the river when Jake says to me that he hears a noise. I listened for a bit, and sure enough I could hear it too: a sawing noise. “They aren’t cutting this side of the river?” I asked Jake, and he said no, they weren’t even planning to. So both of us head into the bush, following the noise, and we haven’t gone far when we come upon Clarence, sawing away at a big red pine with his old bow saw (there weren’t many who had their own chainsaws back then, mostly just the lumberjacks), his shirtsleeves rolled up and about a million bugs taking a dip in the sweat dripping down his face and neck.

  ‘“Hey there, Clarence,” we said, kind of sheepish. “How’s she going?”

  ‘And he turns his head around like he isn’t even surprised to see us and says, “Hi there, boys. You’ve come a long ways up river today.” He doesn’t even stop his sawing.

  ‘“Just looking for new fishing spots,” I told him.

  ‘“Well,” he says, stopping his sawing for a second and rubbing a few hundred of the bugs off his neck, “I’ll be honest with you boys. I’ve tried this stretch myself and I’ve never had much luck at all. One or two at most. Hardly bigger than minnows.” Which, as you well know, is what every fisherman tells you if he’s got his own eye on a spot and wants to keep it to himself.

  ‘“I hear they’re catching a ton down by the narrows on the other side of town,” he says. “Can barely get their hooks in the water before they get bitten – that’s what they been telling me.”

  ‘And Jake and me stood there for a moment or two longer until we started to get the feeling Clarence didn’t want us around, like we were a couple of those bugs and he was trying to brush us off. He wasn’t being unfriendly or nothing like that: he just looked like a man who had a hell of a lot to do.

  ‘That was a month or so after the picnic and we didn’t think much of it at the time. We didn’t even get around to asking what he was doing. He was chopping wood. There was nothing special about a man chopping wood in Crooked River,
especially one who had a whole hotel to keep heated. He’d found himself a good stand of tall red pines there by the river. It was only afterwards it occurred to us that usually you wouldn’t cut good lumber like that for burning. And besides, in Crooked River terms that was a hell of a long ways to go to get firewood.

  ‘And then, of course, there was his correspondence.’

  ‘His correspondence,’ Virgil said. ‘With who? About what?’

  ‘Well,’ Jim said, ‘it was easy enough to figure some of that out afterwards, the same as everything else, but at the time we didn’t have much of a clue. All we knew was that every Friday afternoon, at five minutes to five on the button, Clarence would walk the twenty feet from the front step of his hotel to Schieder’s store and hand Schieder a letter and the money for a stamp. The highway didn’t reach us then so all our mail came and went by train five o’clock Friday. There was always quite a bustle around Schieder’s at that time, with everyone coming to send or collect their mail. One of the railroad men would bring the sack of incoming mail from the train to Schieder’s, and Jake, who used to help out in the store, would take the sack of outgoing mail over to the train. It was a real social occasion, with everyone hovering about the store waiting to see if they’d got something and, if they had, oftentimes reading it then and there and sharing their news with others. The mail was a big deal back then. We didn’t have no TV and there was only two radios in town, so whatever news you had of the world came in that sack.

  ‘Clarence treated the occasion different from everyone else though. For a start, it was only twenty feet for him to walk but he got real dressed up for the journey. He’d wear his Sunday finest – a black suit, polished shoes, a hat … hell, even his buttons were polished. You’d see them glinting like pieces of silver as he walked across the dirt of the road. It was as if whoever he was sending his letter to would know just what he looked like when he sent it. And when he got to the store he wouldn’t say anything, only nod politely at the people grouped outside who said hello to him, and he’d look so serious and determined and solemn that when he got near the door they’d sort of open a path through for him, like the parting of the Red Sea. Then he’d hand his letter – always just the one letter – over the counter to Schieder, as if he were trusting him with a nugget of gold.