Resurrection Pass

by Kurt Anderson

  “Don’t! Please Martin, don’t!”

  He had scrambled to his feet, his blankets pooling behind him. It was mid-February, the worst of the long winter months, and the house was cold. The wood fire in the Franklin stove had dwindled to embers, and the wooden floorboards were cold on his bare feet. Outside, the night was blue-black, sprinkled with brilliant cold pinpricks of light from the northern constellations. Ten feet away, through the uninsulated interior walls that separated his bedroom from theirs, Jake’s father was doing whatever it was his mother did not want him to, and Jake, only seven, was torn, unsure of what might or might not be happening in his parents’ bedroom, and equally unsure of his own ability to step in and assist. But as his mind cleared and he registered the emotion in his mother’s voice as what it was—terror, not outrage—he raced out his doorway and through the next, and found out that what Martin was doing was convulsing on his bed, his mother shaking his shoulders to stop him from doing what he was very nearly done with. Which was dying, at the age of thirty-one, from a brain aneurysm. And so Jake began his new life of being a son without a father, standing in a shaft of starlight filtering through the window and watching his mother shake his father’s shoulders as the lights in Martin’s blood-soaked brain blinked out one by one.

  He and his mother went through hard times after that, and although others did their best to help, there was not much in the community to share. Martin had worked in the timber camps, and he had also been a good hunter and an excellent trapper; Jake could still remember the silky marten pelts hanging on the wall, the occasional wolf or wolverine, the beautiful, tawny lynx hides. He knew his father loved the animals and did not like to kill them, but he liked to understand them, and catching them in his snares and leghold traps was one way of knowing the world in which they lived. It had not made perfect sense to Jake, not until he grew a bit older, but he had understood that the pelts brought in money. Money helped with store-bought food, and clothes, and sometimes Christmas presents. After Martin died there was no life insurance and no income, and when Jake turned nine his mother had conceded to several months of what passed for courtship and married Darren Lecoux, known locally as Coop.

  Coop had broken his right leg while working on the BNSF rail gang in southern Ontario a few years earlier. Apparently, it was negligence on the railroad’s part; the gang boss had sent Coop and his coworker in to uncouple a section of cars without informing the trainmaster and the brakeman that maintenance was being performed. It was cold, and the diesel engines were still running, and when the trainmaster put the engine in reverse, the hitch of the newly uncoupled car had caught Coop’s leg just above the knee, pulverizing the femur so quickly that there had been no pain, just the absence of structural strength, and Coop had fallen down onto the cold tracks, the skin on his cheek freezing to the rail before his good friend Max could pry him out of the way of the rolling car. The damage to his face had required skin grafts, and the damage to his leg had required eight surgeries, all so that Coop might be able to limp his way through the rest of his life.

  So there was a check, every month, and while Coop was not rich by most standards outside of Highbanks, he had a nice home, a nice truck, and even a Phowler johnboat with a surface-drive outboard that only required six inches of draft and could navigate all the backwaters and shallow streams up and down the Big and Little Glutton Rivers. He also had a fine collection of semiautomatic shotguns and bolt action rifles, which Jake was forbidden to use and would not have used if he had been granted access. He had kept his father’s rifles and the lone shotgun in the small closet of his new bedroom, and although they were older and of inferior quality to Coop’s, they were rust free and the barrels were not pitted nor scored. Coop’s arsenal, in comparison, was corroded and scratched, although the inherent quality of the firearms—and his ability to get into the backwaters where game wasn’t nearly as wary—meant his lack of attention to detail did not matter much.

  His mother was a good-looking woman, and for a while Coop had seemed a decent, if somewhat reserved, stepfather who was pleased with his catch (Dawn) if not the baggage (Jake). It was not until the great gears of the railroad bureaucracy got around to grinding away at Coop’s situation that things began to change. It seemed a Pinkerton detective had been dispatched to gauge Coop’s level of disability. The agent had been disguised as a tourist hunter, and Coop had taken the man’s five hundred dollars to deposit him on a sandbar where moose were known to cross the river. He had taken another five hundred to help haul the man’s moose back into Highbanks, and a photograph of Coop straining to lift the hindquarters of the bull moose over the gunnels of his johnboat had accompanied the letter informing him that his 75 percent disability had been reduced to 15 percent.

  Jake measured their deteriorating home life by the lines of color under his mother’s eyes. First it was just smudges of magenta from the all-night arguing sessions, then darker purple and black, the yellow bruises sometimes framing the more recent, vibrantly colored shiners. Empty cases of Silver Wolf vodka, which sold for six dollars, Canadian, for a 1.75 liter bottle, stacked up in the garage. Jake tried to help, his efforts culminating in a stint at the juvenile detention center in Potowatik. That had been the result of holding his skinning knife to Coop’s throat one night, the blade smeared with blood from skinning muskrats, Jake promising Coop that he would slide the point in right now if Coop didn’t promise to stop hitting his mother now and forevermore. Words to that effect. Coop had agreed, and the next morning the constable had been drinking coffee at the kitchen table with his mother when Jake came in from his trapline.

  Jake had come back from Potowatik with a very clear plan, and he was on his best behavior. He had learned in the detention center that he had a very deep pool of patience he could rely on, as long as it helped to deliver results. It was what had made him one of the best trappers around, and so what if the money from his lines, the early waterline for mink and the long landline he ran through the bitter winter, so what if that all went to his mother as her part of the rent? That the house was paid for didn’t matter; there was a cost to life, and Jake understood this now, or thought he did.

  Henry was Dawn’s sister’s ex-husband. He was not truly a friend of the family, but he had been good friends with Martin. He had been there when Jake, at age six, had leveled the little single-shot Rossi .410 at a ruffed grouse and made his first kill. Henry saw the change when Jake returned from Potowatik, saw something in Jake’s pleasant new behavior that Coop missed. Jake was never sure if his mother was as oblivious to his intentions as it seemed, or if she was simply waiting. Waiting for him to do something that his father would have wanted his son to do long ago.

  That fall, as Jake paddled up to check his pocket set for mink at the mouth of a small feeder stream, his plans nearly complete, he was surprised to see Henry sitting on the bank. Jake paused ten yards out in the river, feathering his paddle in the current. He had only a lone muskrat in the bow of the canoe; as his mind dwelled on plans for revenge, the concentration needed for making an animal place its paw on a one-inch circle of steel that formed a trap’s pan had waned.

  “You didn’t catch nothing in this one,” Henry had said, motioning toward the pocket set, a hole Jake had dug in the bank, baited with a chunk of fish and guarded with a 1½ coilspring trap. “But you got a nice buck mink in that blind set, down behind the big rock downriver.”

  Jake, now sixteen and broad-shouldered like his father, stared impassively at Henry, giving him the stink-eye, but not as upset as he would normally be. A year or two earlier he would have been furious at Henry, at anyone, for mussing up his sets. Mink did not have a great sense of smell, but other creatures did, and occasionally he pulled in a red fox or a fisher on his waterline. And everybody knew it was terribly bad manners—some thought downright criminal—to mess with another man’s trapline.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Henry stood. “What you mean is, how’d I know where you set your trap
s.”

  Jake frowned, started to reply, then stayed silent. He was normally a very good trapper; he took a lot of pelts and made a lot of money. There were others, mostly boys but a few men as well, who tried to follow him, perhaps to learn his secrets, perhaps to steal what he had taken. They were unsuccessful. Now, sitting in his canoe with the sun barely over the eastern horizon, he watched Henry, a man he knew and respected, and felt as though a great spotlight had been trained on him.

  “I know how trappers think,” Henry said. He motioned to the trap at his feet. “This one’s okay, it’ll take some fur. But that blind set—the one by the boulder? That’s craft, right there. That old boar mink, he thought he was all nice and safe where the boulder separated from the bank. Crawl back there, get him a mouse or a frog and—wham!” Henry snapped his fingers. “You get them when they aren’t expecting it, just like all the good ones do. Right? Yeah, you’re a good trapper, Jake. Martin would be proud.”

  Jake could feel the river, pulsing against the aluminum at his feet, vibrating up through the canoe’s ribs.

  “You stick with animals, Jake,” Henry said. He leaned down and brushed the dirt from his knees. “Mink and muskrats and fox. I can’t see like Elsie, but I see something bad in your eyes, the way you clench your fists around certain men.” He held up a hand. “Don’t say nothing, just listen. I don’t care what your life is like, if you go through with it I’ll tell on you. Do you understand? I’ll tell on you.”

  After a moment Jake let the river carry him downstream. His arms felt numb as he dipped the paddle in, drifting down the river, a boy-man who was simultaneously furious, confused, and terrified. Not terrified that Henry would do anything, or say anything, because Jake hadn’t actually done anything wrong, except, perhaps, in his heart. But in a way that was enough, because in his heart and his mind and his soul he had already committed to murdering his stepfather. The truly frightening part was that he had been so sure his well-thought-out plans were confined to his own mind that he had believed the consequences would be minimal, that nobody would even suspect, much less know. It was the great fear that comes to many teenagers when they realize that grown-ups are not nearly so dumb as they seem to be, and it came to Jake fairly early in his life and all at once, and on a subject that had consumed his past eighteen months.

  I’ll tell on you. It was a childish threat, and yet it had resonated deeply. As Henry must have known it would.

  When Jake reached the blind set there was indeed a dead mink in the Conibear 120, the bodycatch trap’s jaws nestled around the big boar’s throat. The animal was bent into an arch from rigor mortis, and its beady black eyes were open, tacky from the air. Jake pulled the trap free, the mink still attached, and went on to pull the rest of the fifty-one traps he had laid along clay banks of the streams and marshes of the northern wilderness.

  Three days later he left Highbanks.

  * * *

  Jake didn’t know the other men with Henry, and he avoided making eye contact with them. He wasn’t terribly surprised. Even without the smoke from the drill rig fire, it was only a matter of time before Warren’s activities would be found out. Hence the desire to get in and out, Jake supposed.

  “You lost your boots,” Henry said.

  Jake looked down. What was left of his socks was smeared with dirt and blood. He looked up. “What are you doing out here, Henry?”

  Henry shook his head. “This is the point where I tell you—we’re the ones asking the questions.”

  “You know this guy, Henry?” This question came from the man with a scar running through his eyebrow. They weren’t armed, but Jake could see the indents on their jackets where their rifle straps had been placed not very long ago. The absence of rifles, the thought that they might have hidden them, worried him more than if the four men had been carrying. This far out in the brush, almost everyone carried a rifle. He shifted a little, feeling the Winchester slide across his back. He had repositioned his sling on the climb up to run across his body, the strap running from his left shoulder across to his right hip. Instead of being able to simply shrug the rifle off his shoulder, he would have to pull it over his head,.

  “He’s a Trueblood,” Henry said. “I used to run with his old man. His ma is Dawn Lecoux.”

  “That old white lady?”

  “Yes,” Henry said. He turned back to Jake, his eyes flitting over the valley behind them. “What are you doing out here with them, Jake?”

  Jake glanced at the other four men. The one with the scar called Darius he didn’t know, and he didn’t know the beefy one. The younger man, Billy, was a Martineau, and the small, vicious-looking man stepping lightly from foot to foot he did know. Weasel had threatened to cut Jake’s throat once, when Jake was about five years old and had stepped out onto the muddy road by his house to retrieve a wooden arrow. Weasel had been driving his ATV down the road at about fifty kilometers per hour, a bottle of Labatt’s in one hand, the other pressed to the throttle. He had to brake hard and swerve into the ditch to avoid hitting Jake, nearly rolling the four-wheeler, his beer bottle shattering on the muddy road.

  “Carve yer goddamn Adam’s apple out, kid,” Weasel had said.

  “Answer him,” Darius said. “What are you doing out here?”

  Jake looked behind him, into the river valley. The river had come up several feet already, the soil too saturated to absorb any more moisture. The valley floor was scarred and marked by long, muddy fissures, but there was no movement. Darius stepped forward, unexpectedly quick for a large man. There was no time for Jake to do anything, not with his knife or his rifle. He expected some sort of violence, and it would be almost refreshing at this point; he might get his ass beat, if not by Darius then by his buddies, but at least that was something he could get his hands around.

  Darius looked at him from a distance of two feet, and Jake saw something else mixed in with the latent violence of the man: intelligence, and a healthy dose of curiosity. “You know what they call this valley in Cree, Trueblood?” His voice was low, not much louder than a whisper.

  “Sure. Asiskiwiw.”

  “The muddy valley,” Darius said. “You’re their guide, eh? What you guiding them for?”

  Jake stood eye-to-eye with Darius. There was no way to back up, because the edge of the cliff was just a few yards behind him. And he didn’t want to retreat, Jake realized. He was sick of running, more than a little tired of getting pushed around. He studied Darius’s face, then smiled.

  “Something funny?”

  “When you shoot up, say at a helicopter, it shrinks the relief distance.” Jake pantomimed bringing a rifle to his shoulder, jerking it up into the gray sky. Darius didn’t flinch. Jake brought the imaginary rifle down and rubbed at his eyebrow. “We learned that at Dwyer Hill. You’ve got to adjust for a target flying overhead when you got a scoped rifle, pull your head back a little more than you would with a shotgun. It’s not like duck hunting.”

  “Dwyer Hill?” Darius asked.

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a training base,” Henry said behind him. “For Joint Task Force 2 special ops. It was in the papers. K-Bar, all of that.”

  “You were with K-Bar?”

  Jake nodded, not sure why he brought it up. Dwyer Hill. He was surprised at the memories the name brought back. Not the bad memories—those came later. But the good ones, when they were all in it together, running and hiking and crawling, dehydrated and exhausted and sometimes triumphant. Later they were dehydrated and exhausted again, but that was when the killing had begun, deaths on both sides. Rather than triumph, he’d felt a slow deadening, his core calcifying in the world of blood and sand and shit.

  “You think that you were some special forces asshole scares me?”

  “Scare you?” Jake said. “I was just trying to teach you how to shoot.”

  Darius laughed and took a step back. “You aren’t going to provoke me that easy, Special Ops. We got all kinds of time, though . . .” His words trailed off, an
d he made a motion to his men. “I’d prefer not to waste any more. What was his mom’s name again, Henry? Dawn?”

  Henry nodded, slowly.

  “An old lady back in my village,” Darius mused. “What you guiding them for, Trueblood?”

  Jake felt a series of emotions swirl through him when Darius said his mother’s name. First came anger, cold and focusing, at the implied threat to his mother. Close on the heels of the anger was a deep sense of irony. He had spent the last five years deliberately distancing himself from everything and everybody. Even taking this job was a way of separating himself from his upbringing, working for a group that knew nothing about this land, a group that he had always suspected wasn’t playing by the rules. Now he was here, at the perfect place and time to be able to take unencumbered action, and the people he had run up against knew his mother, were threatening to hurt her if he didn’t cooperate. And if he was reading Darius’s eyes correctly, it wasn’t an idle threat.

  Nor, he supposed, was the threat confined to just his mother.

  He glanced at Rachel, tense and watchful where she still sat on the ground. He could tuck and roll and have the Winchester up and firing in a few seconds—if he didn’t get tangled up. This group, as vicious as they looked, probably hadn’t taken any fire in their lives. They might panic. But they would probably only panic after he started firing, and maybe only after he hit one of them. Part of him marveled at the ease with which his mind reverted back to the logistics around killing, just fell back into step with it, like walking with an old acquaintance. Not an old friend, maybe, but close. He wished he had a bit more real estate to work with.

  “He’s with us,” Rachel said. “Our guide.”

  “Rachel,” Warren warned.

  She went on. “We have a mineral lease for exploration. Our drill rig is down there. You probably saw the smoke.”

  “You have a lease,” Darius said. “From who?”