We kids all knew it was somewhere out there, in the bush to the north and west of us, but we didn’t know absolutely for certain. You heard stories about it and that was all.
Nobody in Crooked River liked talking about Bad Vermilion, and when they did their voices dropped till they were almost whispers. They said that before the mine came to Crooked River, it was the big town in these parts – compared to Crooked River, anyhow. It was the only other town in these parts, so I guess there wasn’t a bunch of competition. They’d found some gold there a few years after Clarence arrived in Crooked River, and it’d grown fast, until it had two hotels and two stores and its own road. Then the gold had run out and because the railroad didn’t run close to it, there was no reason for it being there anymore. And that was that. It just sort of faded away. And ever since then it was considered pretty unlucky to even mention its name in Crooked River, as if its bad luck might rub off on us somehow, as if people didn’t want reminding that things like that could happen to places. ‘Ah, Bad Vermilion – our memento mori,’ Virgil used to say, which he told me was a fancy way of saying, ‘Remember – this could happen to you!’
George had made plans to find it once. He said we should go on an expedition to ‘unearth’ it, like some old cities in South America he’d read about in his National Geographics. But in the end we didn’t bother. It was a ways off in the bush and after a while he had to give up on the idea.
You can imagine how pleased he was to find the road to it now, though. A big grin spread right across his face and he kept hopping from one side of the road to the other, through the bushes and the saplings.
‘I knew it was here,’ he said. ‘I found it, Eli. I found it.’
He was right. We had been heading north. But I was right too, because we’d gone west as well.
‘I knew it was here,’ he said.
George looked a bit surprised when I reminded him we were supposed to be trying to find the river and getting back home. Then he started talking like this had been part of his plan all along. ‘That’s the thing, Eli. We know where the river is now,’ he said. ‘We know this road goes north so we know the river’s over that way. But we’ll never be able to reach it and get back today, will we?’
He was right about that too. The sun was beginning to dip down towards the horizon. There was probably only three hours or so of good daylight left.
‘The way I see it we can either camp out here in the open in the bush, or push on till we reach Bad Vermilion. There’ll probably be places for us to stay there.’
‘But no one lives there no more,’ I said. ‘We don’t know what’s there.’
‘There’s got to be something,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be better than being stuck in the bush. We can find the river first thing tomorrow. We know where it is now, don’t we?’
The way he was eyeing the road in front of him I knew there was no use arguing. And so off we set, along the lost highway, towards Bad Vermilion.
After a mile or two I’d forgotten my doubts about George’s plan. There was a sweet spring smell in the air, of fresh leaves and pine needles, and the hum and bustle of everything beginning to wake up from the winter. George was so excited it was kind of catching. He’d got hold of a stick and was prodding the bush on the sides of the road, looking for stuff, and talking in his National Geographic voice about us unearthing things. It made me feel curious too, like him, and I hardly noticed my stomach grumbling. It’d been a while since I’d eaten. I pictured a bowl of porridge. In the back of my mind was the thought that Nana and Dad and Virgil would be worrying about me – but I’d be back tomorrow, I thought. It wouldn’t be long. I was imagining me walking in through the porch with George beside me and everyone saying, ‘You found him, Eli. Would you believe it? Eli’s found him.’ Nana would give me a bowl of porridge. Virgil would slap me on the back. Dad would smile. It’d be like I’d caught the best fish in the world.
‘Just think,’ George said. ‘If we kept following this road we’d reach the real north.’
He’d put his stick down by this point and we were walking side by side.
‘I guess,’ I said.
‘We could walk and walk and eventually there’d be icebergs and frozen seas and the only people would be Eskimos. We could spear seals and live in igloos and find places nobody had ever been before.’
‘I guess,’ I said again. I wasn’t so sure about the icebergs and igloos. The sun was dropping fast and I was already beginning to feel pretty chilly.
‘And this time of year it’d be light all through the night. It’d never get dark. We could get dogs and sleds and ride for as long and as far as we wanted and there’d be no one to stop us. We could go all the way to the North Pole if we wanted to.’ He made it sound just like Big Rock Candy Mountain: somewhere you could have everything you wanted.
When I looked over at him, I saw George’s eyes had gone kind of red and watery and bloodshot. I guess it must have been from the sun. He didn’t have a hat to keep the light off them.
‘I don’t want to live in Crooked River anymore, Eli,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to.’
I gave him my baseball cap. He looked at me with his funny red eyes and his white face.
‘Thank you, Eli,’ he said.
There wasn’t any sign saying welcome to Bad Vermilion. And if there had been, it would’ve said Population 0.
At first we didn’t even know we’d reached it. We’d passed a few shacks off the edge of the road, and when we went to look at them we found their roofs had fallen through and bushes and grass were growing up through the floorboards. They didn’t look too promising.
‘These must be the outskirts,’ George said. ‘There’ll be better places in the centre.’
So we went back to the road and carried on following it. We’d only gone a few hundred yards further along when it ended at the shore of a small lake. There were some mouldy old boards piled up in the woods beside it that must’ve been boats once. George and me both went a ways along the shore to look for the rest of Bad Vermilion but we didn’t find nothing.
‘That must’ve been it back there,’ I said.
‘All of it?’ George said, looking a bit bewildered.
‘I reckon so.’
Further back in the bush, behind the shacks we’d looked at first, we discovered a few more of them. One still had its roof on and pieces of glass in its windows. But there were no old hotels or stores or anything like that. Here and there we stumbled on the wrecks of old-fashioned cars and trucks, dark and cratered with rust and so overgrown with moss and grass and bushes that they looked more like weird-shaped plants. Moving around from shack to shack, we kept on finding other stuff too: a set of swings with pines growing up beneath the poles and a seat hanging off one of the branches; a pair of sneakers that a squirrel had filled with pine cones; an old-time radio with a bent aerial and chewed-up wires sticking out the back. George put that aside for keeping.
We settled on the place with a roof to stay in. The door fell off its hinges with the first push we gave it. Inside the air was still and chilly, as if it hadn’t quite shook off the winter yet. There was a table and chairs in the middle of the front room; one of the chairs was pulled out from the table like someone had just that second got up from eating. In the corner was a wood stove, and when we opened it a squirrel scampered out from the nest it’d made in there, stopping for a moment in the middle of the room to give us a disapproving stare before heading out the door.
There were two other small rooms at the back, each with an iron bed frame and a half-eaten mattress on it. There were pieces of pine cone scattered everywhere and in one of the mattresses there was a nest made out of the pages of a chewed-up Bible.
‘This’ll be perfect,’ George said.
I wasn’t so sure about that. I couldn’t shake off the chill of the place. And when I br
eathed the air in there it felt strange and stale and thick, like it was full of the spores of someone else’s leftover and forgotten life. The light from outside came through the dirty windows and settled in ragged patches on the floor. It was fading. It was getting late.
‘I’m hungry,’ I said.
‘I’ll go rustle something up,’ George said, bounding out the door.
‘Where you going?’ I shouted after him.
‘Nature, to the well-trained eye, is a fully stocked larder,’ he called back.
I checked out a cupboard in the corner and found a few old cans of beans.
It was getting near dark when George came back. He was carrying an armload of twigs and roots and leaves.
‘There,’ he said, dropping them on the floor. ‘Dinner is served.’
‘I’m not eating them,’ I said.
‘They’re all edible.’
‘For bears, I reckon. I found these,’ I said, pointing to the beans.
‘Suit yourself.’
But instead of eating his roots and twigs George just stood there, shifting from foot to foot, with his hands in his pockets and a sideways smile on his face. I knew he’d found something else then, besides the leaves.
‘What you find?’ I asked.
‘Come and see,’ he said. ‘Before it gets too dark.’
Near the end of the road, about five hundred yards or so into the bush, was the remains of a wide clearing. On one side of it was a stagnant-looking pool surrounded by piles of gravel and stones, on the other was a long building made of sheets of corrugated iron, and in between you could see the shapes of rusting pieces of machinery half-hidden beneath bushes and saplings. At the very back of the clearing were the collapsed timbers of a head frame and the big iron drum of a hoist.
‘It’s the gold mine,’ George announced, as if it were probably still filled with gold.
We walked a little ways around the edge of the clearing, with George pointing out all the old pieces of machinery and guessing what they’d been for. It was like he was already writing up the cards for them for his collection. When we got to the pool you could see how its waters were streaked a puke-coloured green and orange, like they were sick.
‘There’s loads of stuff left behind in the building too,’ George said. ‘The door’s open. I tried it.’
When we got up close to it the head frame looked like a tower made of huge matchsticks that someone had pushed over. The hoist lay just beside it like a giant iron log. And right at the base of the frame you could see the black circle of the mineshaft through the tufts of grass and fireweed that surrounded its edges.
‘There’s even more stuff further back in the woods,’ George said.
Under the trees the shadows had thickened and it was hard to see anything properly. Here and there you could make out other piles of old timber and dark lumps that might have been more pieces of machinery or drums – but you couldn’t really tell what anything was in there. Further on there were patches of weak light that could have been other clearings, but the light was fading so fast by then it would have gone by the time you’d have reached them.
‘Let’s have a look,’ George said.
‘It’s too late,’ I said.
‘There’s still some light.’
‘Not enough,’ I said, starting to walk back.
George lingered for a few more seconds, and then followed slowly after me as though he didn’t really want to.
‘You can’t keep one eye on the ground in the dark,’ I told him.
I didn’t get much sleep that night. George went out like a light almost the moment we got into the building and I could hear him breathing peacefully in the corner of the room. But I was cold and the floorboards under me were hard and uncomfortable, and I could hear the squirrels scrabbling around in the other rooms. Lying there awake, I got to thinking about the clearing. There’d been something not quite right about it but I couldn’t work out exactly what it was. And then one of the squirrels ran past my feet and I heard an owl hooting outside the window. I knew what it was then. I knew what hadn’t seemed quite right.
I hadn’t heard a single sound when we walked through it – no crickets, no birds, no frogs, no nothing. Only a weird, still quiet that seemed to hang over it. I thought about the sick little pool of water lying out there, in the quiet and the dark, and suddenly felt just about as lonely as could be. I rolled over the floor until I was next to George and snuggled up beside him. Then I listened to his breathing until I fell asleep.
I was woken up by the sound of George pacing noisily about the room. The first light of day was coming in through the windows and when I stretched my arm out I could feel where the floorboards were still warm from where he’d slept on them.
‘You ready?’ he said. He must have been waiting for me to open my eyes.
‘Ready for what?’
‘For some exploring. There’s loads of stuff past where we stopped yesterday.’
‘But we’ve got to get home,’ I said. I was thinking of everyone in the kitchen at number one O’Callaghan Street, looking at maps and worrying. I wished I could be walking in there already.
‘There’s lots of time for getting home,’ George said impatiently. ‘We’ve got this far already – it’d be stupid not to look around and see what’s here. We won’t be long.’
My whole body was stiff and sore from sleeping on the boards. My stomach was rumbling. I’d had enough of exploring. ‘I don’t want to be here no more, George. I don’t like it. I want to go back.’
‘George McKenzie could see they’d reached a difficult juncture in their journey and impressed on Mr. O’Callaghan the importance of pushing forward with their expedition. To have come this far … ’
‘I mean it, George. I don’t care about that National Geographic shit. It’s dumb. It’s got shit-all to do with us being stuck out here. I want to go back.’
For a second George looked at me like I’d just punched him in the stomach and I was sorry I’d said all that.
‘They’ll all be worrying. They’ve been searching for you for days, George – Virgil and Dad and everybody.’
‘Everybody?’
And then he didn’t say nothing. His face had gone all loose and scared and blank, the same as when he’d first come out of the underground place. His eyelids blinked fast. And then his expression settled back to normal again and turned hard and determined. His lips were pushed together. When they opened he said, ‘George McKenzie decided to pursue his course north – alone if need be. There was much to be discovered. The terrain ahead of him had hardly been touched by human feet before, not for many years. It was an almost new land. Nobody knew what was out there.’
I walked with George as far as the edge of the clearing. When we got there it was the same as the day before, just as still and quiet and forsaken. The sun was coming up over the tops of the trees and lit up the lonely pool with its sick waters and the rusty shapes of the old machines and the timbers of the fallen tower. You couldn’t hear nothing, not a single bird or insect or frog. It was like the world at the very beginning, I thought. Before anything had been made to live in it. Before any creature had tried making it its home.
We stopped and stood there for a bit.
‘I don’t want to go no further,’ I told George. ‘I’ll wait for you on the road.’
‘That’s okay, Eli,’ George said.
‘You won’t be long?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll just have a look and then I’ll come right back.’
And then he was walking around the edge of the clearing. I watched him go past the pool and the machines, his head moving from side to side, still looking, still curious, still trying to find things, his skin paler than the pale morning light, his lips turned up on one side, smiling his sideways smile. When he r
eached the other side of the clearing he stopped for a moment by the edge of the treeline. He turned around and looked back at me and his face was like a moth’s wing against the green shadows of the woods. And then he was off again, flitting between the trunks and branches. Sometimes I could see him and sometimes I couldn’t.
And then I couldn’t anymore. He was gone.
I couldn’t tell how much time went by before I finally went back to the clearing. I sat on a fallen tree trunk by the road for what felt like hours and hours but there was no way of telling how many. I waited until I couldn’t any longer and then walked back to look. The sun was high above the clearing but apart from that nothing had changed.
‘George,’ I shouted. My voice seemed to get swallowed up the moment it came out of my mouth. It was like a drip of water falling onto dry dirt. It barely carried to the other side. There was no answer.
‘George.’
It was no use. I’d have to look for him.
When I reached the other side and came to the treeline I began looking for signs. At first there was nothing, but after walking through the trees for a bit I picked up a few footprints in some muddy ground. They led off to the left, towards where I’d thought I’d seen those other clearings the day before.
Sure enough, after a few hundred yards I came to a second clearing. It was smaller than the first and more overgrown. The bushes and saplings were higher. Some were close to being full trees. I reckoned it must’ve been abandoned before the other one. It was hard work making my way across it – I had to inch my way bit by bit, pushing through the bushes and saplings and trying to keep my eye on the ground. Here and there I’d manage to pick up signs of George’s trail, like footprints and snapped twigs – in one place I even found a little piece of his shirt he’d torn off and tied to a branch as a marker, to help him find his way back – but about halfway across they ran out. I stopped and went back a ways and made a wide circle through the clearing, trying to pick it up again, but all I found were the remains of some old timber and machinery. And it was a good thing I was watching the ground because just beyond them, tucked away behind a fringe of grass and fireweed, was an old mineshaft. When I’d pushed through the grass and fireweed I’d found it right there below my feet, staring back up at me like a big black eye. I started making my way round it real slow and careful and it was then I picked up George’s trail again. There was a set of his footprints near the edge. And then there was nothing.
Eye Lake Page 18
