The Retreat

by David Bergen

  He didn’t move. He was humming and touching the down on her arms.

  She put out her cigarette. Everett had arrived earlier, wheeling Harris to the edge of the pond, and now Harris had swivelled his chair so that he was facing her and she caught him sneaking looks at her legs and breasts. “Go,” Lizzy said, and she gave Fish a push. He stumbled upwards and walked over to Everett and sat on the sand beside him. “Ev,” he said.

  Harris called out that he wanted to move away from the edge of the pond. Lizzy stood and went to him.

  “Sorry,” he said. Since the night of the dance, they had not really talked again. It was as if after sharing an intimacy there was nothing left to say between them and they were strangers again. They had seemed to avoid each other. A door had opened and then been slammed shut, and in some way she felt bad.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said. “You have no reason to be sorry. You need someone to help you and so I’m helping you. Where’s Emma this morning?”

  “She went out early to paint. She likes the morning light.”

  Lizzy snapped back the brakes and spun the wheelchair so that Harris’s feet dragged through the sand. She wondered if it hurt him, but he didn’t say anything.

  “This okay?” She had placed Harris so he was facing the sun. She set the brakes. He observed the sky.

  She told Fish she was going back to the cabin to read. Did he want to go see Dad or did he want to stay?

  “Stay,” he said.

  “Don’t go in the water without Ev.” She turned to Everett. “That all right?”

  “Fine.”

  The skin on her back and shoulders was breaking out again. Tiny bumps, a form of acne that she couldn’t get rid of. Her mother had once asked if she wanted to go on the pill, but Lizzy had refused. She pulled on her shorts over her bathing suit, and she picked up her shirt, and walked up the path through the clearing and past the outhouse and the garden where the Doctor’s wife was tending her vegetables. Her father was standing beside her, hands in his pockets, talking. He didn’t see Lizzy, and she didn’t call out or wave. She passed the Hall, imagining that she heard her mother’s sharp, bright laugh. Instead, she heard the Doctor’s voice, low and lisping, and then Franz’s Teutonic tones, which is what her father had said one day when he had been mocking the German. “Listen to the Teutonic tones,” he’d said, and he had compared the man to a finely tuned Mercedes-Benz.

  When she saw Vernon standing by his pickup at the edge of the clearing she realized he had been watching her for a while. She paused, and when he waved, she went to him and said, “What’s wrong?” She had panicked and thought that something terrible might have happened to Raymond. “Nothing wrong,” he said. “I’m off today and was passing by and I thought I’d see what a little hippie girl does with her time.”

  Lizzy did not speak, nor did she acknowledge what seemed to be a mocking flirtation in his voice. She realized how bare her midriff was, and how slight her bathing-suit top must seem, and so she slipped on her shirt and buttoned it up.

  “You’re so straight,” he said, and grinned. He was out of uniform and was wearing jeans and a light blue shirt with short sleeves. The shirt was tucked in. His right forearm was tattooed with a bullet. His hands were big. “Come for a ride,” he said.

  She shrugged and said that she wasn’t dressed to go anywhere.

  “Just a drive. I saw Raymond yesterday, at the park. I’ll tell you all about him.” He grinned.

  “Tell me about him here.”

  He shook his head, motioned at his watch and said he’d have her back in an hour. “Trust me,” he said. “I’m a cop.”

  Lizzy looked back at her father and Margaret, then she went around to the passenger door and climbed in. He drove to town, talking about the house he’d just bought, a bungalow with two bedrooms and a finished rec room. He said that it felt good to be a landowner. He hit at his chest once, twice. Lizzy studied the tattoo on his forearm. She asked him if he had cigarettes.

  “Don’t smoke,” he said. His right wrist hung over the steering wheel. The air, hot and humid, pushed in through the open windows. Lizzy felt sweat rolling down between her breasts. She touched her upper lip. “What about Raymond,” she said.

  Vernon parked on a side street and pointed at a grey house. “That’s it.” He shut the engine down. “I’m gonna gut the kitchen, make myself a nice island and put in cherry cabinets and a new range. The previous owner was an old woman. Wanna beer?”

  Lizzy shook her head.

  “Come on.” He climbed out and walked towards the house. Called back to her, “The beer’s cold.”

  Lizzy watched him disappear inside. She was curious about Vernon and she wondered if it was because of his relationship to Alice. Or perhaps it was something murkier, maybe his connection to Constable Hart. She wondered if Vernon knew what Hart had done to Raymond. She felt strangely guilty as she got out and went up the walk. Inside, she smelled old carpet. They walked through the foyer and went into the kitchen. Vernon took a beer from the fridge and sat down on a stool, looking out at the backyard. “Hey,” he said, as if this were exactly what they both wanted. He pushed a second stool her way and she sat as he went to the fridge and pulled out another beer and passed it to her. She was aware of his height and how he could look down the front of her shirt. She shifted slightly and held a hand to her throat and drank, and after she had swallowed she said, “Thank you,” and looked about.

  The cabinets had been ripped from the walls and the sink was gone and there were wood scraps on the floor. The room smelled mouldy and dusty. There were boards with nails leaning up against one wall. She looked at her bare feet.

  “Yeah, I was gonna warn you,” Vernon said. “Watch for nails.” He motioned at her feet and said that she had really nice arches. He held a finger in the air and closed one eye and moved his hand as if tracing her foot.

  “Don’t get weird,” Lizzy said. She made a face.

  “I like feet,” Vernon said, and he bent over and touched her foot and said, “There.”

  “Don’t,” Lizzy said. She swivelled away from him and in doing so realized that she still had on her bathing-suit bottom beneath her shorts and her bum was still damp. Her bare legs seemed far too long and far too bare. She pressed them together. She asked where Alice was.

  “What do you know about Alice?” Vernon smiled.

  “You’re gonna marry her. That’s what she said.”

  “That a fact. And when did she say this?”

  Lizzy saw Vernon’s blond eyebrows and the freckles on his nose and brow. He was sweating. The underarms of his shirt were wet. She could smell him, a slight body odour, not bad, but definitely peculiar to him. “At the bar one night. She was there and she came over to talk and said she was getting married to Vernon. That would’ve been you, right?”

  “We’re not. Least, not yet. Maybe won’t at all. Things change, right?”

  “Does she know this?” Lizzy asked. She sensed Vernon’s bravado disappearing.

  He wiped at his face. “She knows what she wants to know.”

  “Funny. That’s how everybody seems to live. Ears and eyes closed. Don’t tell me if it’s going to hurt. I don’t want to know.” She pointed the beer at Vernon. “Bet she’d be really happy to know that I was here in this house.”

  “She doesn’t have to know.”

  Lizzy grimaced. “You trying to seduce me?”

  “I don’t know. Is it working?” He said she had the best eyes, really sleepy and wide set, and he stepped forward with his hand up as if to verify something about her face, or perhaps her eyes, and he took her jaw and leaned down and kissed her, roughly and quickly. She put a hand to his chest and stood. Her back was against the wall. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. He said that he was sorry, that he had miscalculated.

  Lizzy repeated the word, miscalculated, and she nodded. “So did I,” she said. And then she talked about Raymond. She said that she was in love with him. He was a better person tha
n she was. She said that she wasn’t trying to convince Vernon of her own goodness but sometimes goodness was evident in a person and this was the case with Raymond. She said that last year Raymond had been taken out to an island by Constable Hart and left there, then after nine days he had been rescued by a passing barge. “But you know the story,” she said.

  Vernon shook his head. He said that Raymond Seymour had capsized his boat and ended up on the island and almost died. Hart had had nothing to do with it. That was just a tall tale and she was gullible if she believed it.

  “I believe it,” she said. She looked back at the living room and beyond that, the two bedrooms. “I hope you have a good life here. With Alice.” She put her beer down on the floor. Said that she’d hitchhike home. Okay? He shrugged. She turned and walked out expecting Vernon to follow her and offer her a ride, but he didn’t. She walked past his pickup and up over the hill and down into the town, and just east of the movie theatre a woman in a camper picked her up and drove her home.

  Raymond bought Corn Flakes, powdered milk, baby formula, apples, twenty tins of creamed corn, six pounds of bulk wieners, a dozen loaves of bread, eggs, syrup, margarine, camp-stove fuel, four jerry cans of gasoline, ten cartons of cigarettes, and fifteen boxes of .22 shells. He bought toilet paper and disposable diapers. He piled the supplies into the back of his pickup and covered them with a blue tarp, tying it down with pieces of rope he’d found behind the bench seat of his pickup. He drove out of town and through the reserve and on up to Bare Point where he unloaded the supplies and laid them out in the bottom of his boat.

  He left in the dark and approached the landing at the back of the park without the aid of a light. As he rounded the point that led past Coney Island, he cut his engine and sat silently on the water. A fire burned on the shore. Figures gathered around the fire and then moved away. The water slapped the hull. He heard voices and saw the light of a police boat off to the left. He raised his engine and locked it into place. He picked up an oar and rowed his way through the channel and on towards the landing. The bow of the boat scraped the sand and he climbed out onto the shore. Two men appeared and pulled the boat up to secure it. Then the supplies were carried up to the camp.

  Gary was pleased. He said so. Then he handed Raymond another list and another bundle of money and he told him that he should bring the next shipment in several days, and he shouldn’t hang around the park. Gary squatted beside him, his knees cracking. He grunted. “Not the most exciting work, but necessary. You’re the guy.” He patted Raymond’s shoulder, reached into his pocket and pulled out his cigarettes and handed one to Raymond. He stayed squatting and Raymond sat, holding his knees to his chest. They smoked and looked out at the dark lake. Lights glowed over on Coney Island. The flash of light from a police boat. A man calling out, and then silence. Gary put out his cigarette and lit another and he began to talk. It didn’t appear that he was addressing Raymond in any way, but more that he had begun to talk to himself, or to some larger crowd. He said that the cowardly had their shenanigans. They weren’t real. Weren’t grounded. He said that he had great sympathy for the white man, who was limited in his knowledge of how to deal with the Indian, and it wasn’t the white man’s fault that he was ignorant, but sometimes you had to yell at him in order to get his attention. Like now, with the occupation. You had to shake people up. The Indian was a slave, had always been a slave of the invader, and would never understand that he was a slave. “We have to find again the place where we come from,” he said. He looked at Raymond as if his had suddenly become a singular face in the larger crowd, and he said, “And you, Raymond. You need to find that place too. You need to let go of this need for the wider world. That white girl, that life over there.” He stood, crushed his cigarette beneath his boot heel, and told Raymond that it was time.

  Riding back to Bare Point, a strong westerly came up and carried with it heavy clouds and the smell of rain. The waves were high and walloped the bow, throwing water up over the gunnels and into the bottom of the boat. Raymond turned the stern to the wind and then aimed for shore. In the shelter of the shoreline he coasted, putting along slowly as he bailed water. He was wearing a thin jacket and the water had soaked him through. He began to shiver. The sound of his engine lifted into the air and was quickly caught and thrown elsewhere. When he reached Bare Point he moored the boat on the leeward side of the dock and then he walked up to his pickup and turned the key in the ignition and waited for the heat to blow as he rubbed his hands together, water dripping off of him and gathering at his feet.

  He recalled Gary’s words, that he needed to find the place where he’d come from. Raymond hadn’t understood what he meant. And he hadn’t asked.

  When he was fourteen, Raymond’s uncle Jackson invited him up north for part of the winter. He spent his days checking traps and learning how to set snares. He learned the value of skinning muskrat and sucking marrow from the bones, and he learned to give thanks to the animal he had killed. He was taught that wolves are attracted to caribou intestines, and he learned that snares could also trap fox or coyotes and sometimes moose. There were moments, riding the traplines, when he thought of home. He missed Kenora, and he missed his grandmother, and he missed the possibility of walking into town to watch a movie or buy a hamburger. In the evenings he played cards with his uncle and then they sat, without talking, before the stove, and while his uncle smoked, Raymond waited. Or he imagined he was waiting, though he could not have said what it was exactly he was waiting for.

  In late December, Raymond and his uncle went out by snowmobile to check the traplines, and they got caught in a snowstorm. The storm blew in around noon, and by mid-afternoon, visibility was zero. Raymond was riding behind his uncle, his face pressed against his parka, and the wind and snow blew up under his hood and against his neck. At some point, the snowmobile stopped and his uncle climbed off, stood in the howling wind, and then leaned towards Raymond and said that they would stay here. He gestured at the ground and fell to his knees and began to dig. Raymond joined him and together they dug a tunnel in the snow and hollowed out a space at the end of the tunnel. This took somewhere near an hour, and by the time they were done, Raymond was sweating. They crawled down through the tunnel into the larger space, which was big enough to sit in. With the rifle that he always carried, Jackson fashioned an air hole, stuffing the barrel with a piece of cloth so as not to ruin it, and pushing the barrel up to the surface and wiggling it slightly. He chuckled, as if amused by his own ingenuity, or as if he was pleased to have arrived at this place. He crawled back through the tunnel and covered the opening with loose snow, packing it, and immediately the sound of the wind disappeared and with it the light. Raymond heard him remove his parka. He told Raymond to do the same, and to use it under his bum. They sat cross-legged, knees touching. Raymond could not see his uncle, but he heard him breathing. His uncle lit a match and in the brief flare Raymond saw his uncle’s face and his missing teeth and he saw his own hands. Perhaps his uncle saw fear in Raymond’s eyes, because he began to hum something. It wasn’t particularly musical, and Raymond didn’t recognize any tune, but the sound his uncle made was comforting and it carried him away to a place where there was no danger. Even when his uncle stopped humming, the sound continued, until at some point Raymond realized that the noise was the wail of the wind above them, now audible again. They slept, and woke, and slept some more. His uncle had, in his pack, two chocolate bars, and they ate those slowly. They took snow and ate it, letting it melt in their mouths. When they had to pee, they knelt with their heads bent, and aimed at the walls that surrounded them. The stream of pee produced immediate warmth, and then it dissipated just as quickly.

  When he was not sleeping, Raymond listened to the wind and to his uncle breathing and sometimes he asked questions, though his uncle was not given to lengthy answers. When he asked if they were going to die, his uncle laughed. He said that dying or not dying was not the point. He was quiet, and finally he said that he had lived out
numerous storms, many worse than this. He asked Raymond if he was afraid to die. Raymond lied and said that he wasn’t. His uncle chuckled. He said that fear of something only made you panic. He said that when a wolf was caught in a snare, like the one they caught the other day, it was the panic and fear that killed the wolf, not the snare. He said that he had once found the leg of a wolf beside a snare. The wolf had been caught by his hind leg and gnawed through the muscle and bone and taken its own leg off in order to survive. His uncle said that they might lose a finger or a foot to frostbite, but that was all. At about this point Raymond began to shiver. His whole body shook, and when he tried to speak, his voice rattled along with his jaw. His uncle asked him if he could feel his feet. Raymond wiggled his toes inside his boots and said he could feel them, though they were numb. His uncle told him to hit them together. His hands as well. He moved closer to Raymond and put his arms around him and pushed Raymond’s head against his chest. He breathed on the top of his skull and Raymond felt the heat of his uncle’s breath and he smelled him, a mix of wood smoke and sweat and grease. He eventually stopped shaking and he fell asleep in his uncle’s arms. When he woke he was alone. Light fell in through the open hole and when Raymond climbed up into the sunshine he discovered a lake of snow and in the distance, a single line out on that bright lake, his uncle stood, head raised, talking to the sky.

  III

  The Clearing

  In 1964, at the age of ten, Nelson Seymour was taken from his grandmother’s house on the reserve near Kenora and placed with a Mennonite family in a small town called Lesser, south of Winnipeg. A white man and a white woman came to the reserve in a blue Ford Galaxy looking for two brothers, Raymond and Nelson, but Nelson was the only one home with his grandmother at the time. He was taken immediately. His grandmother tried to stop them but her pleas were ineffectual. The man was wearing a fedora and he took it off and held it at his hip and he said, “Where is the other boy, Raymond?” The grandmother looked at the floor. Then she lied and said that he was away, up north with his father. The man in the fedora looked around at the bicycles in the yard and the old swing. It was autumn and the leaves were gone from the trees and the wind was sharp and cold. The man looked down at a piece of paper that he held in his hand. “It says here that Raymond Seymour has been attending school. How is that?”