by Giles Blunt
“They’re not married,” Delorme said.
The woman laughed. “Guess it shows, huh?”
“Really?” Heidi tottered a little, pulling a shoe off. “Sometimes I’m so dumb I amaze myself.”
“You gonna keep the underwear on?” the woman said to Delorme. “I think we’re allowed to.”
The third floor was designed for sex and nothing else. There were no chairs. All the surfaces were meant for lying down, not for sitting. The colour scheme was devoted entirely to the red end of the spectrum, the darkness relieved by sconces turned low.
Delorme thought she had thrown her numbness switch upon ascending to this floor, but the sight of a naked couple engaged in slow, quiet but unmistakable sex shorted that particular circuit. A hot blush, invisible in this place, spread upward from her rib cage. Her face burned with it and a fine sweat broke out across her shoulders.
Other men and women were arranged on the floor around the couple. None of the men wore clothes. Two of the women had tops on, the rest wore microscopic panties.
“Why don’t we sit over there?” Heidi pointed to the far side, where there was a gap in the circle.
The fluttering in Delorme’s stomach was not going to settle down. She had never even glimpsed a couple having sex before, let alone watched one. Thanks to the tastes of more than one boyfriend, she had seen porn movies. She had found them exciting in parts, though those parts depicted things she did not necessarily want to engage in herself, no matter what ideas the boyfriends might have had.
“Do they know each other?” she heard someone ask.
“Just met,” came the hushed reply.
The couple were in their early thirties, and they went at it with a kind of solemn devotion, aware of their audience but focused on each other. They were lying on their sides now, facing each other. A woman in the outer circle reached out and caressed the man’s back. If he made any response, Delorme didn’t hear it.
Delorme was surprised at how unsexy it was. Perhaps this was due to the complete absence of fantasy. These were real people, and Delorme found their realness constricting in a way that fantasy was not. She found herself looking at the floor in an effort to avoid eye contact. She could feel the pulses in her wrists and ankles. How strange that, while seeing the couple engaged in sex was not wildly arousing, the fact that they were doing it was. The fact that this attractive young woman was opening her legs to someone she had just met. That this well-built young man, probably with a responsible job and a good income, possibly a good father and kind to animals, was willing to share the sight of his erect member in action with a group of naked strangers. It was not what they were doing but the fact they were doing it that was rearranging the tumblers in some heretofore unseen lock on Delorme’s self-knowledge.
A cool hand touched her upper back.
“Okay?”
Delorme looked back over her shoulder. Janey was looking at her, eyebrows raised. Behind her, Heidi had fastened her mouth to Ron’s, her bra already abandoned.
Bruce Turcotte stopped his snowmobile and sat for a few minutes just looking up at the magnificent fire tower before him. Middle of the bush, and here you have this perfect structure-not beautiful, but completely suited to its purpose, and built with an economy and integrity that spoke to the engineer in him. He had made his preliminary inspection a few days before and had been looking forward to the return trip.
Turcotte had been employed by the Ministry of Natural Resources for over twenty years, and in that time he had suffered his share of lousy assignments. He’d nearly frozen to death in James Bay one year, all but perished of boredom carrying out projects near communities so small they hardly deserved a name, and been driven half mad by blackflies more often than he cared to remember.
This assignment was a peach. In the days before satellites, the Ontario government had addressed the issue of forest fire prevention with the construction of more than a hundred lookout towers. Anywhere from eighty to a hundred feet tall, these mini-Eiffels were set atop the highest elevations in the province. The earliest ones were wooden and had long ago been torn down for safety reasons. During the fifties they had been replaced with steel towers, and these were the subject of Turcotte’s current assignment, which was to inspect each one and make a recommendation based on his engineering expertise as to whether it should be torn down, preserved for restricted duty as an unmanned fire alert outpost (webcam only), or refurbished for recreational value in the ever-growing system of hiking trails that were replacing the province’s extinct railroad, logging and mining operations.
The project required the collective wisdom of a small team of experts: a retired fire warden whose blood pressure gave him the face of a candy apple, a railroad executive whose first response to every request was no, and several representatives from Parks and Rec, including a dry stick of a woman, a vegan whose every utterance had the narcoleptic power he had formerly associated solely with the heavier opiates-not least because she spoke so slowly.
“Honestly,” he told his wife, “when this woman starts to talk, I feel like I should go out, get in the car, drive to the beer store, maybe fill out a couple of lottery tickets, pick up the dry cleaning and stop off at the hardware store while I’m at it. And then maybe, just maybe, when I get back to the table, she’ll have got to the end of her sentence. She must be from one of those planets that have an orbit of ten Earth years-and that’s when she’s talking about something interesting.”
But the team entered the picture only after Bruce had come to his decision about structural safety, and to make that decision required a couple of solo trips. He had been to some wild places, seen many beautiful sights in his years with the ministry, but nothing had prepared him for how this new experience would resonate within him.
Each tower was crowned with a cupola, a more or less hexagonal structure with windows on all sides. The vistas he made him silent and thoughtful in a way nothing in his life ever had. “I’m a chatty guy,” he said to his wife. “I don’t have to tell you. Not the most introspective bastard you’re ever going to meet…”
They were lying in bed and his wife had closed her Patricia Cornwell novel and turned on her side to listen to him. She touched his arm, encouraging him to continue.
“But something about these towers, the view from them, it shuts me right up. I just want to sit right down and think-except I don’t actually have any thoughts. It’s, I don’t know-just suddenly I got a sense of how nothing I am. How small. The one I was in the other day-Algonquin Bay? — elevation puts me seven hundred feet higher than the town. Twenty-three hundred feet above sea level. All I can see, every direction, is sky and lakes, woods and mountains, and they’re just standing up under all those winters and cold and… and time. And they go on forever. I’m talking sixty, seventy kilometres minimum. The scale of it. This is the earth I’m looking at, the way it was made, the way it was before I was born, the way it’ll be after I die, the way it always was-well, for millions of winters anyway. And forty-seven, eh? I’m forty-seven years old, and for the first time in my life I know where they got the word breathtaking, because this tower, this view, it just took my breath. You think I’m being sappy?”
His wife had smiled at him, shaken her head.
He told her what was special about the Algonquin Bay tower, a “total honey,” as he’d put it to his boss. It still had a table and chairs, still had the tower man’s bunk, and even the plotting table with its turntable for triangulating the location of a fire or a wisp of smoke relative to the adjacent towers-adjacent in this case meaning forty kilometres away. The windows were intact and the hardwood floor in good shape.
He told his wife how the guys who had worked this one had been lucky. It boasted its own generator, and there was even a TV aerial attached to the roof a few feet from the anemometer. The place hadn’t been manned since the fifties, and television wasn’t much in those days.
“I’d like to meet one of these tower men,” he said, “talk to hi
m.” You had to be some kind of philosopher to work in that beaut. You couldn’t look out at the platinum plain of Lake Nipissing, the black gleam of highways threading through the hills, the clouds flat as tables over the valleys, and not become a thinker, even if you weren’t one before you agreed to become a professional hermit.
The old Decca radio unit had looked as if it might crackle to life at any minute-beautiful thing. Turcotte had opened the back to look for tubes, but they were missing. The telephone was an old black dial type. When he blew the dust off, he saw that the number had only five digits: GRover 2-4348.
Now here he was once again at the foot of this tower, some twelve kilometres northwest of Algonquin Bay, sitting in the sudden silence that followed the roar of his snowmobile. Struts of galvanized steel glinted in the sunlight, the day so bright his eyes watered. He counted it a piece of excellent good fortune that his work required a second trip to install equipment.
He climbed off the machine and slung his backpack over his shoulders. It was relatively light, containing mostly a turret-mounted webcam system. This was just a test model. If it proved to be useful in filling in gaps in the satellite data, they would mount a proper all-directional system, replace the anemometer and get this place back online.
There was no question the Algonquin Bay tower would be a prime tourist draw. Aside from the spectacular view and the great condition, it was only a couple of kilometres from a main highway and not far from the old logging roads. Kids would love it. The vegan bore would probably declare it a global warming hazard, but by the time she finished making her point, everyone would be dead anyway.
Exhilarated by the crisp sky and the tart breeze, Turcotte actually spoke out loud. “You’re a keeper, sweetheart. I’m gonna make you a star. But what I want to know just now, honey, is who cut this damn fence. I don’t like it one damn bit.”
It wasn’t just the fence. Someone had managed to pull down the inner stairs, which you were not supposed to be able to do without the proper part-a removable crank. As he walked under the lower struts, Turcotte realized with a pang of guilt that he must have left the crank in place. And the hoist had been raised, too. The previous week it had been docked just above ground level’ now it was way up beside the cupola door.
“So help me, if they’ve trashed the place, I’m going to bust some heads,” Turcotte said. “I don’t know whose, but heads will be busted.”
He started up the stairs, patting his pockets for his cellphone. Then he remembered it was in his backpack. He unhooked it from his shoulders as he climbed, already beginning to sweat. He stopped a quarter of the way up and leaned against the safety rail to dial. Not much of a view from here, still below the treetops. When he got his boss’s voice mail, he said, “Looks like someone has been up the structure. I’ll call again when I get to the top.”
He continued up the stairs, undoing his parka. He sensed the vista unfolding around him as he climbed, but he didn’t look just yet. He wanted to save it for the top, to feel that feeling again. For now, he stared at his boots as they raised him step by step.
He had to pause halfway up, and again at three-quarters. An excellent way to give yourself a heart attack, he told himself. This is what comes of not going to the fitness club. Angina, tachycardia, and whatchacallits-infarctions. There’s something you don’t want to have. No one wants to infarc.
He didn’t like the look of the door. Whoever had broken in had ruined the latch. It was not even fully closed. The window next to it had been smashed, the glass broken away right to the frames. I can understand all kinds of bad behaviour, Turcotte thought. Bank robbery, even murder if I was mad enough. But vandalism to me is just an out-and-out mystery.
He sat on the top step, pulled out his phone and hit the speed-dial. “I’m about to go in,” he said to his boss. “Just from the outside, we got problems. Some yahoo’s been up here and screwed up the door and smashed a window to smithereens.”
“Why the hell would they smash the window? You break into the place, presumably you don’t want to freeze. You said it was in great shape last week.”
“I know. Makes you sick.” Turcotte looked out through the Xs of the struts into triangles of sky and cloud, too winded to appreciate them. “Hold on, I’m gonna go in. Christ, I hope they haven’t emptied the place out. I mean, this is history. Hold on.”
He put the phone, still live, in his pocket, pushed the door inward and stepped inside.
His boss, desk-bound seven floors above smoggy Bay Street in Toronto, squeezed the receiver between shoulder and ear as he packed hard copies of his PowerPoint presentation into his shiny ministry pocket folder. He had exactly seven and a half minutes to get to the fifth floor. “Bruce? Bruce, you there? Listen, I can’t sit here. I have to go and impress a bunch of ecofreaks, and I-”
Turcotte was yelling at him now, cellphone overmodulating like crazy. He couldn’t have heard him right. The man was up an abandoned fire tower out in the bush and he’s yelling something about a woman.
“Throw the book at her, Bruce. Destruction of government property, trespassing, vandalism, the works. She’s going to court and then she’s going to jail. But I’m late, and I-”
But Turcotte-probably the most unflappable, down-to-earth, call-a-spade-a-spade kind of guy you could ever hope to meet-is telling him in tones of strangled hysteria that they won’t be charging this woman with one damn thing, and the only place she’s going is the morgue.
Delorme’s house was dark, the curtains pulled. She always closed them early in the evening, even in summer, as soon as she got home. Her house was on a quiet little crescent, but the front window was wide and low and easy to see into.
Her car was in the drive, the afternoon snow on its roof and rear window undisturbed. No fresh tire tracks in the drive. No foot tracks either, on the front walk or on the stoop. Either she hadn’t stirred all day or she had gone out in the morning-perhaps having been picked up by a cab-and had not yet returned. It could be someone else, it didn’t have to be a cab.
Cardinal checked his watch. Nine-thirty is early to be in bed, though perhaps not if you’re really sick.
The snow had stopped falling. He turned and headed back down the hill toward his place. He took off his glove, pulled out his cellphone and held his thumb over the dial button. He wanted to talk to her, see how she was doing, but he had a feeling she didn’t want to hear from him right now. If she did, she would have called. He crossed Rayne Street and put the phone back into his pocket.
Giles Blunt
Until the Night
From the Blue Notebook
For the next forty-eight hours, Ray Deville remained curled up in his cabin.
Moment this bloody fog lifts, I want him out of here, Vanderbyl said.
I’ve already requested transport, Jens said without looking up. I didn’t tell them who for. He was making notes in his group nutrition records, consulting Paul’s recipes for the past few days and working out calories with a calculator.
It won’t do his career any good, Vanderbyl said, but nobody wants him committing suicide either. He turned to Rebecca. When’s this stupid fog going to lift? You’re the cloud expert, tell us something useful for once.
Rebecca took her jacket down from a peg and left the mess.
That was uncalled for, I said.
Don’t you tell me what’s uncalled for, Vanderbyl said.
All right, all right, peacemaker Wyndham put in. Let’s keep things civilized, shall we?
Too late for that, Vanderbyl said. Some people don’t know what the word means.
Calm down, Kurt. It’s just the damn fog getting to everyone.
Wyndham got Kurt’s jacket and handed it to him-the temperature had warmed so much in the past few days that we had abandoned parkas for lighter clothing-and the two of them went out.
Jens, I said, did Kurt tell you what happened at the remote navigation shack?
Jens raised his Viking eyebrows. I’ve worked with Vanderbyl at half a
dozen stations and I’ve never seen him like this. Don’t you think you have rather a lot to apologize for?
I’ve never seen me like this either. Did he tell you about the navigation shack?
No.
They radioed in yesterday. One of them stumbled over-literally, that is-one of them stumbled over a dead polar bear. Nine bullets in him. That’s a full clip.
Do we know Ray did it?
His automatic was empty when he finally decided to stagger back here.
Well, if his life was in danger…
He had a flare gun, he could have scared it off with that. Yes, I know-maybe it was past that stage. Except it wasn’t. All of the bullets caught the animal in the back. It was apparently dining on a baby seal when Ray decided to kill it.
Dear God, Jens said. Well, he’ll be leaving us soon enough. And I’m asking you and everyone else to be discreet about it. The pilot will be expecting a passenger, but he won’t know why. Base doesn’t even know why, other than “medical reasons.”
Rebecca came to my cabin that night, the first time in more than a week. She made a valiant effort at passion and lust, tearing her clothes off without a word. And then, amid all the sweat and cries and breathlessness, she suddenly went limp and rolled away from me, sobbing into the pillow. Why does he hate me so much? It devastates me. He has nothing but contempt for me.
I held her lightly from behind and kissed the back of her neck. He doesn’t hate you. He wouldn’t be in such pain if he hated you. It’s me he hates.
I’ve only ever wanted his love and respect. And for a time I thought I had it. I think I did have it. I did.
You mustn’t mind what he says. He’s in pain, that’s all.
I know, she said, and wept again. That’s the terrible thing-I deserve his contempt. If it were totally unjust, I could live with it, live with myself. But I deserve it. Why do you want me? You see how horrible I am.
No, I said, kissing her shoulder, I see how perfect you are-how tender and hurt and perfect and good-and I want to be with you always.
How does one measure love, the emotional current flowing through the connection of one human being to another? The instruments have yet to be invented. Were it to be measured in kisses, ours would not have come to much. But in tears…
