Nancy kept her focus on the distant peaks. “Did he hit your mom?”
He sighed. “I think so. In the later years. After Cole left he seemed to lose much of his rage. It was like the wind went out of his sails. But as he got older, it seemed to fester again, that anger. I only learned about it by accident. I saw Mom covering up a bruise with some makeup. She said she had fallen. But I’ve spent enough time reading people’s eyes that I know when they’re lying,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure she was.”
“Did you tell Cole?”
Walter sighed again. “No. Not me. I only found out after the old man died. I think our mom let it slip. When Cole was back here.”
“How did he take it?”
“How do you think? You know Cole.”
“Not well.”
“He confronted the old man. The rest is history.” Walter stood up, dusted off his Wranglers, and extended a hand to Nancy. “What went on between Cole and our old man that day in the barn is between the old man, Cole, and whatever god he’s currently aligned with, if any at all.”
Nancy took Walter’s hand and stood. “Something is eating away at Cole, Walter. He’s shut down. He’s put up a wall between whatever it is that’s eating him and the rest of us. He’s closed down from everybody who cares for him. He’s terrified and angry. I’m afraid of what it might do to him, Walter.”
Walter looked across to the Livingstone Range in the distance, that space filled with golden light, deep shadows, and only a few places left unknown to a man who had lived his life exploring these hills and valleys. “I’m afraid, too,” said Walter when he finally turned to step back onto the trail that led back to the ranch house. “I’m afraid, too.”
Nancy looked up at the white cinder block wall of the Four Winds Café. Her hands were tightly wrapped around the wheel of her car. Her knuckles white. Cole, you bastard, you need to come clean, she thought to herself, or it’s going to kill you. Or someone else.
Now what? she thought. Now where? I’m no farther ahead than I was when Cole called me on Saturday morning. I’m supposed to be back in Edmonton today, or I’m going to lose another reporting job. Whose fault will that be? Cole Blackwater’s, she thought, tightening the grip on the wheel. She checked the time on her cellphone. It was ten-thirty in the morning. A long day already. Bloody ranchers getting up before the sun. And her with miles to go before she slept. But miles to go where?
When her cellphone rang, she screamed and jolted her arm violently, knocking it against the driver’s side door, dropping the cell to the floor. She bent forward to get it and bumped her head on the steering wheel. “Jesus Christ,” she said, blindly retrieving the phone from the floor. “Webber,” she said, snapping the phone open.
“Nancy, it’s Cole.”
Speak of the devil. Her mind raced. “Cole, hi. How are things in Port Lostcoast? How is Archie’s family?”
“They’re fine, Nancy. Things are fine. Well, not exactly fine.
Nancy, I have a problem and I need some help.”
17
The night had grown colder still. The sky was clear of clouds. To the north and west, the dim lights of Port McNeill glowed faintly on the horizon. Beyond that intrusion, Cole Blackwater could see stars beyond counting. The smear of the Milky Way was painted across the heavens, a broad tapestry behind which hung a million galaxies. Each star nothing more than a pinprick of light seen from the government dock on an island off an island on the far western shore of North America.
It had been a few hours since Constable Derek Johns had ushered him, Grace, Jacob, and Darren from the Inlet Dancer.
“What happens next?” Cole had asked Johns.
Johns looked at the boat from the dock while he spoke. “We bring in the forensic id section from Campbell River. We’ll work with the harbour master to find a dry dock for the boat, and we’ll go over it with a fine-toothed comb. The forensics team has a trained serologist on staff — that’s someone who specializes in things like blood — and they will do some tests on the boat. If it is blood, we’ll first determine if it’s human, and then if it’s from Mr. Ravenwing. If we get that far, we’ll need a dna sample. A hairbrush or toothbrush.”
The four friends were silent.
Cole turned to look from Constable Winters to the Inlet Dancer. “Does this mean you’re changing the nature of the investigation?”
“No. But it does mean that the boat is off-limits now. Blood indicates trauma, and we’ll need to make sure it doesn’t come from fish he had on board before he went missing, that it’s not a result of any … foul play.”
After leaving the Inlet Dancer, Cole, Grace, Jacob, and Darren ate dinner together at a pub, then found accommodation. Grace and Jacob bunked with a cousin who lived on the hilltop near the Big House on the west side of town. Darren opted to sleep on Jacob’s boat. Cole found a bed and breakfast near the centre of town.
“Will you be all right?” he asked Grace.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Fine.”
But he didn’t believe her. The image of Derek Johns’ tacky red fingertips kept Cole awake that night. So violent an end for Archie Ravenwing. A man who had made the sea his life should be consigned to it, thought Cole Blackwater, his breath forming vapour clouds before him as he stood at the top of the metal ramp that led to the wooden pier. But why so violently?
He took a deep breath and exhaled, blowing the mist far out into the night. That a life should end with such violence was hard for Cole to accept. But then, he had seen it before, hadn’t he?
Hadn’t he seen the blood of the man murdered in Oracle? Plenty of it, Cole recalled.
And he had seen his father’s blood, too.
He suppressed a wave of anger that started just below his gut and rose up through him, wrapping itself around his heart. That anger flowed like molten magma, down the length of his arms and into his hands, which instinctively balled into fists.
Cole wanted to kill that man the other night. Dan Campbell. The bigoted, inbred, degenerate, redneck hillbilly who had called Cole an “Indian lover,” as if that, somehow, was the worst thing Campbell could call Blackwater. While they were fighting, Cole fantasized about punching the man again and again in the face. Mashing his nose and lips and cheeks to a pulp. Cole drew a sharp breath. He flexed his hands. The anger eased a little, slipping from his extended fingers like water might drip from a man standing in the rain. He both loved and hated the feeling it gave him. It was a drug, no doubt about it. It coursed through his veins, and it made him feel powerful and vulnerable at the same time.
Anger was the fuel that Cole Blackwater used to propel himself through his days.
His mind searched for the origin of it. It wasn’t hard to find. It was a voice. A face. An odour. A presence, large and looming. A jar of moonshine. A set of balled fists.
Cole walked down the metal ramp and onto the pier, toward where the Inlet Dancer was still moored on the docks.
It had been a lot of blood, guessed Cole. Too much blood, he kept thinking to himself. Archie would have had to have hit his head really hard to produce a wound that bled like that, especially with the sea washing over the boat. He would have bled himself dry, thought Cole, his eyes hard on the far end of the pier, where the Inlet Dancer bobbed in the moonlight.
It had been a lot of blood. A shotgun at close range is a crude, rudimentary weapon. It produces a combination of devastating, blunt force and the staccato sharpness of a thousand tiny knives. They are tightly clustered. Thousands of tiny ball bearings racing at the speed of sound. Each of them with enough cutting power to inflict a tiny wound, but, when clustered together tightly, they form a steel fist that can reduce a person’s body, face, life, to a pasty mess. Cole found it amazing that there are only five pints of blood in the whole human body, because he was certain that he had seen so much more come out of his father when he had been cut down by the blast of the 12-gauge shotgun that night in the barn.
Cole stood before the Inlet Dancer.
A sawhorse with a Keep Out By Order of RCMP sign stood between him and the boat, but there was no officer present. It might be a matter of a few minutes before an RCMP officer returned to watch over Archie’s boat. He looked around for any sign that he was being watched. No one. He stepped around the sign and onto the bow. The boat nodded on the flat water. Cole could see the curving bay that flanked the tiny port town, and he could see the distant lights of Port Mc-Neill. In the narrow channel between Cormorant Island and the Nimpkish River on Vancouver Island, Cole could see the lights of a small cruise ship making its way along the darkened coast.
For all his sight, Cole at times seemed puzzled at the lack of insight into the roots of the anger that burned inside of him. But when he considered this under the unflinching glare of moon and stars, he knew this wasn’t true. Cole knew that he had insight enough, and that he hid behind his own ignorance to keep from facing the truth. Cole knew exactly where his anger came from. It was hereditary. Not passed down through genealogy, but learned. Through behaviour. He took a sharp breath and moved around the boat in the dark, stepped toward the anger that burrowed within him, and the violence that had taken Archie Ravenwing’s life.
All souls are one, someone had once told him. He closed his
eyes to recall where he had been when he heard that. Cortes Island. Of course. A political strategy session turned group hug. He had been sitting on the beach, drinking out of a bottle of wine, while others in the group danced around a blazing fire to the sound of an African rhythm.
“Our souls are like the Milky Way,” a man said, sitting next to him, uninvited, unwelcome. “Seen from a great distance they appear as if they are one great light. It’s only close up that individuals appear. All our thoughts, and all our actions, arise from that common place among us all.”
Cole had continued to stare across Desolation Sound toward the lights of Powell River. He took a deep pull on the bottle of wine, then another, and indeed the stars did all fade into one.
Now Cole looked up at the sky from the deck of the Inlet Dancer.
All souls are one, eh, he thought. All thoughts and action arise from that common place between us? All anger, all hatred, all cruelty, all violence, all lust, all greed, all fear is born there and wells up though an individual to come into the world? Why does it pick one man over another? And why does all love, all peace, all joy, all fortune, and all compassion choose differently?
He moved to the stern of the boat, to the pilothouse. The faint glow of the moon left the cabin in dark shadow. Cole sat on the high seat and took the wheel in his hands. He closed his eyes. Imagined the storm. He stood. Archie would have been standing. He took the wheel and played it back and forth. He let his body roll as if he too were on the sea. He turned to look behind him at the engines’ hatch engines. Five feet, maybe six, he guessed. He rolled again and imagined a wave breaking against the side of the boat and let his body float sideways, as if thrown by the force of the water crashing onto the deck.
Archie was six inches shorter than Cole, so he crouched a little and rolled again, holding on to the wheel as he imagined Archie would have. What would Archie have hit his head against? Cole pitched again, letting his legs buckle. There was a rib of metal on the casing of the pilothouse that was an inch thick. A heavy handle was welded on either side of the opening to allow a mariner to steady himself moving in or out of the cockpit. Cole let himself press up against that rib of metal, imagining a giant wave catching him from the side and pushing him there. Where would his head connect? He guessed that it would be about four feet above the deck. That is, if Archie had been standing when he hit his head. Cole let his hand trace the cool metal, looking for any sign that this might have been where Archie had suffered the mortal wound that spilt so much of his blood onto the deck of the Inlet Dancer.
There was no mark. No indentation. Nothing. The metal was cool and smooth and unmarked.
He did the same on the other side, running his hand softly down the smoothness of the metal, as if caressing the smooth skin of a lover.
Cole stood again. If Archie was making for home, as Bertrand had suggested, and his boat was found on Protection Point, at the mouth of Knight Inlet, the waves would not have taken him on the side, but head on. Cole knew very little about the sea, but he guessed that Archie would have wanted to hit the coming waves with the bow, or risk capsizing.
Cole gripped the wheel and then let himself fall backward, as if a great wave had crashed across the bow of the boat and jarred its very foundation. He caught his back on the seat and let himself fall forward. His head touched the metal below the wheel. He knelt there, searching in the darkness for something that could have caused such a wound on Archie Ravenwing’s head. There was a small compartment under the wheel, like the glove box in a car, but rather than being closed, it was open for easy access. Cole felt around it with his fingers. Could this have been where Archie contracted his fatal wound?
Cole’s fingers touched something plastic. He took it by the tips of his fingers and pulled. It was a heavy plastic pouch with a zipper that sealed as it was drawn closed. He held it up to the moonlight to see its contents through the opaque plastic, but could not make it out. He looked around the pilothouse for a flashlight, and remembered that Grace had looked under the seat. He popped the seat open and found a heavy flashlight near the top of the contents of the storage container. He looked around the dock again. Still alone, he flicked it on and opened the bag. Inside was a map: it was the marine chart that included parts of Knight Inlet and Tribune Channel, where Archie could well have spent part of his last day on this earth. Also in the pouch were a red and a blue Sharpie marker and a pencil that had been sharpened with a pocket knife. Cole flipped the bench seat down and sat again, unfolding the map on his lap, keeping the light low lest he be seen by a passerby.
The chart had prominent red Xs at Doctor Islets, Sergeant Pass, and Jeopardy Rock. Blue Xs pocked the page, extending up from the mouth of Knight Inlet, beyond Sergeant Pass, and as far up Tribune Channel as Jeopardy Rock. Each blue X had a date beside it. Cole read the dates, following Archie’s progress with the blue Xs from late in the fall of last year to March, and the day of the heavy storm believed to have claimed Archie’s life. The blue X with the March date was located just a half mile beyond Jeopardy Rock.
Cole knew that the red Xs were salmon farms. He’d seen such a map on the sos website. But what were the blue Xs? He’d have to ask Cassandra Petrel. Maybe she would know.
Cole studied the chart. He was about the fold it back into its waterproof pouch when he saw, written in the margin, something that caught his eye. It was his name. He held the light closer to see the faint scratch of the pencil. “Call sos , call Cole, call the media,” he read.
“Call Cole,” he said under his breath. “Call Cole. You didn’t get the chance, Archie. What was it you were going to tell me?” Cole pleaded.
Cole stood and flicked off the flashlight, returning it under the seat and folding the map into its pouch. He was about to slip it back beneath the pilot wheel, but decided that he would keep it instead.
Cole looked back at the deck of the boat, and at the gunwales. A wave large enough to float a bleeding man’s body off the floor and over the side of the Inlet Dancer would have been large enough to carry everything else on the deck with it — but Jacob, Grace, and Darren had cleaned up fishing gear and floats from the deck. And Archie’s thermos. Had a rogue wave caught Archie by surprise and flipped him over the edge?
Or had something else caught him by surprise?
What are you thinking? Cole Blackwater asked himself. What exactly are you thinking? The blood didn’t lie. You couldn’t conceal its meaning, try as you might.
Cole had spent the last four years trying to erase the image of the blood leaping from his father’s head. Cole had pushed that memory so far down inside the dark recesses of his mind that he had almost convinced himself it hadn’t happened. That he had stopped it. That his old man — that angry, dang
erous man who beat his own son, and later turned his fists on his wife, on Cole Blackwater’s mother — was somewhere, alive. But blood didn’t lie.
Blood didn’t lie. He stepped from the Inlet Dancer, the crescent moon low on the horizon now, casting a pale shadow of Blackwater along the length of the dock. He saw a man walk up the metal ramp far at the end of the pier, where it met the walkway along the main road through town. Another restless soul who could not, or would, not sleep.
Cole awoke late in the morning. Though he hadn’t had a drink the night before, he felt hungover with the weight of what had been revealed. He sat up in bed, his face still tender from the blows that Dan Campbell had delivered, his fist still aching from the beating he had given Campbell in return. Two angry men meeting head-on like freight trains in the night. “Still having our way with them” was what Dan had said about the people of Port Lostcoast. His was an attitude leftover from two centuries of abuse, officially expunged but unofficially living on in the bigoted, twisted hearts of a few men who hadn’t, and never would, join the rest of Canadian society in the twenty-first century.
Two angry men.
How angry? thought Cole, standing up, stretching. His body felt half decent, a change from years of sluggish decline. He dropped to the floor and did twenty push-ups. He tapped his stomach, which still slumped a little over the elastic of his briefs but was starting to show some definition again.
How angry was Dan Campbell? “Fucked over,” he had said. Archie had gone up against Campbell on every major environmental issue to hit the coast of British Columbia. Grizzly bear hunting, logging, fish farming, you name it.
Cole closed his eyes and saw the stern of the Inlet Dancer. How angry? Angry enough to step onto Archie Ravenwing’s boat, and what? Cole swallowed hard at the image.
He sat down on the bed, suddenly light-headed. He held out his hand and it trembled.
The Darkening Archipelago Page 17
