by Various Orca
I set down the front of the canoe and let him stagger dangerously close to a patch of poison ivy. It would serve him right if he stepped in it. When he whined at me to help him, I told him to help himself because I was through. He dropped the canoe, putting a great big dent into one side of it, which was going to make it a bear to paddle when—or should I say, if—we ever saw water again. We were so far behind everyone else that no one even noticed. I told him what a loser he was. I gave him a hard time for being short (not his fault, I know), stupid (probably not his fault) and irritating (definitely his fault). Result: he took a swing at me. Not a good idea. Not only am I taller, but I am also smarter and I know a thing or three about combat.
When we finally reached the top of the hill we had been climbing—all day—Gerard and the other three guys were like cartoon characters come to life. First, they all gave themselves whiplash from the double take they did, in almost perfect unison. Second, their eyes all sproinged out of their heads. Then third, they all started to laugh, even Gerard, although he caught himself pretty fast and switched to a stern look. I guess I can’t blame him, because there was Worm with a sleeping bag duct-taped to his head to make him more or less the same height as me, his hands duct-taped to the crossbars of the canoe so he wouldn’t be tempted to put it down again and duct tape over his mouth so he couldn’t complain.
Anyway, it was that night, while we were putting up our tents and getting ready to cook our chow, that Gerard said, “Rennie, if they could fuel cars with what you’re fueled with, we wouldn’t have an energy crisis.” Turns out he wasn’t supposed to share that kind of opinion with me. Turns out he’s supposed to leave the analysis to the real shrinks who swanned into camp once every two weeks to update their assessments of the “funsters” (read: inmates).
The way they—the shrinks—talked about it, being fueled by rage was a bad thing. But, if you ask me (and they did), the most important stuff I ever accomplished happened when I was good and angry. Like when Mr. Dickhead—er, Dickson—my grade-nine math teacher, picked on me every day, making me go up to the board and do math problems even though he knew I would get them wrong. One day—there’s always that one day—I’d had enough. The whole class had had enough. No one thought it was funny anymore except, I guess, Mr. Dickhead. I decided to get even.
I grabbed Randall Schtirr that Friday after school, made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and holed up with him all weekend. When Monday morning math class rolled around, I slumped at my desk, as usual. I got called on, as usual. I slouched my way to the chalkboard, as usual. Mr. Dickhead stood there, back to me, arms crossed over his chest, smug expression on his face (also as usual, although I didn’t know that until later) until he heard me put down the chalk. He turned. He looked at the chalkboard. The expression on his face was what they call in those credit-card commercials “priceless.” I know because Randall captured the whole thing on his phone. You can check it out on the web if you’re interested.
Everyone in the whole class laughed when they saw that look on his face, like he was staring at an equation written by the guy in the movie about the crazy math genius. Then he got mad and—get this—accused me of cheating. Even kids who didn’t particularly like me got their backs up at that.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Search me.” He wasn’t going to find any crib notes on me. The whole thing was in my head. For a change, I’d done my homework—with a lot of help from Randall.
He searched me anyway. Made me turn out my pockets right there in front of the class. Made me roll up my sleeves to prove I didn’t have anything written on my arms. Made me hitch up my shirt to check my belly. Was ready, I’m sure of it, to make me drop my pants, except that when I bared my stomach, Megan Lindover said, “I don’t think you’re allowed to do that, sir.”
Mr. Dickhead exploded and sent me to the office for “cheating and being a general pain in the a**.” Randall trotted behind me, which, I think, confused Mr. Dickhead.
Mr. Ashton, the principal, freaked when he saw the video on Randall’s phone. I think he was imagining what the Major would say when he saw it. He put Mr. Dickhead on suspension—paid, of course. Then other kids started to complain to their parents about Mr. Dickhead. The parents went to the principal. Mr. Dickhead got fired. I was, briefly, a hero at school.
So, you see, anger isn’t so bad.
Neither is revenge.
It works for me. All I have to do now is get out of here alive.
By now you’re probably wondering: How did he get there in the first place? And where, exactly, is here?
Last question first. “Here” is Iceland, a small island just east of Greenland. When I say small, I mean 103,000 square kilometers—or about the size of the state of Kentucky. A grand total of 313,000 people live here, most of whom (200,000) live in or around the capital, Reykjavik, which is in the extreme southwest of the island. Everyone else is scattered around the edges of the island on farms or in tiny villages. It’s the kind of place where, in the winter, it’s dark all day except for maybe three hours. No wonder people here have all these crazy stories about trolls and invisible people living in rocks—and believe me, there’s a lot of rock in Iceland, thanks to all the volcanoes, which have a habit of erupting and causing widespread devastation, not to mention vast lava fields. Yeah, it’s quite the place.
So what am I doing here?
It all started ten days ago—exactly three weeks after I got back from my summer in Northern Ontario, a fun time away from my current fun home at Canadian Forces Base Borden.
THREE
Part of me wanted to run faster, but it was just a small part. The rest of me wanted not to run at all. I mean, why rush into the arms of grief if you don’t have to, especially if the person on grief-distribution duty is a certain Major André Charbonneau, ex-soldier, ex-cop, currently employed by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service, the armed forces equivalent of a major crimes unit of a large police force. One tough guy—that’s my dad, the Major.
And what had I done to deserve grief, you might ask? My current crime was tardiness. Yeah, you heard it right. I was running a little late, which, for anyone in the armed forces, is a major crime. Unless I missed my guess—and I hardly ever do when it comes to my dad—the Major was standing at attention on the front walk of the crappy little house we’d been assigned for this posting, his head swiveling from side to side like he was watching a tennis match, scanning the environs for Yours Truly while steam blew out of his ears.
The first words out of his mouth, when he finally saw me, would be: “You see that thing on your wrist? That’s a watch.”
At least, that’s what he’d start to say. But the Major is excellent at his job. When lesser CFNIS members talk shop over brewskis at the end of the day, they talk about the legendary Major Charbonneau. He never misses a thing. Also, he’s used to giving orders. Used to having them obeyed. Used to interrogating people. Used to getting answers. Used to winning.
The Major would notice right away that my watch, the one he gave me when I turned thirteen, the one that was supposed to guarantee that I was never late, wasn’t on my wrist. He’d switch his priorities from chewing me out for being late to demanding, “Where’s your watch, mister?” He called me mister whenever he was revving himself up on the pissed-off-o-meter. He only used my real name, which he insisted on pronouncing as if it were French—René, instead of Rennie—when he was in a good mood. For the Major, that meant when he wasn’t preoccupied, overworked, exhausted, impatient, annoyed, or any combination thereof. In other words, hardly ever. My name, like everything else between my mom and the Major, was a compromise. The Major’s dad’s name had been René. Mom said no one would ever pronounce it right in Alberta, where the Major was stationed at the time, so why not make life easier on me? According to the Major, on those rare—as in, once-in-a-blue-moon—occasions when he was feeling mellow, my mom was the only nonmilitary person on the planet who consistently got her way with him. She must have used up
the Major’s entire compromise quota, because I had never won an argument with him in my life. Not that I didn’t try.
I didn’t turn on the speed, because the faster I ran, the sooner the Major would get fixated on my bare wrist—bare, that is, except for the rattlesnake tattoo that he hated—and the sooner he’d third-degree me until I’d finally have to tell him (just to get him off my back) that I’d traded my watch to a guy for a first-generation iPod. I could save him a lot of misery by telling him right away what I’d done. But—you probably don’t know this—jazzing an army cop when you’re not in the army can be a lot of fun. At least, it can if you’re me.
I hadn’t set out to be late, although I’m sure the shrink I used to see would have disagreed. He would have said that, subconsciously, I was going for that edgy thrill you get when you purposely fly up the nose of a guy who’s twice as strong as you are and has a short fuse. The Major would have said that, subconsciously, I was late because I loved to piss him off. But that wasn’t true. There was nothing subconscious about it.
Surprise number one: the Major wasn’t standing on the front walk when I finally rounded the corner onto our street.
Surprise number two: he didn’t start hollering at me the moment I came through the front door.
Surprise number three: he wasn’t alone. There was some old guy with him. He had gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard, and he was wearing a dark suit. He smiled when he saw me.
“You must be Rennie,” he said, thrusting out a hand.
“The late Rennie.” The Major scowled disapprovingly at me. His eyes went to my wrist—See what I mean?—and his scowl deepened. “I told you four o’clock, mister.”
I mumbled an insincere-sounding sorry and turned to look at the old guy.
“I’m John Devine,” he said. “I was your grandfather’s lawyer.”
I was pretty sure he wasn’t talking about the grandfather I’d sort-of been named after. He had died right before I was born. He had to mean the other one, the one I only found out about after my mom died.
“Was his lawyer?” I said.
“He passed away. I’m sorry.”
“When?”
“A little over two months ago.”
“Two months ago?” I turned furiously to the Major.
“I didn’t know, Rennie,” he said. “The first I heard of it was fifteen minutes ago when Mr. Devine arrived.”
I believed him. One thing the Major never did was lie, not even to me.
“Perhaps we can all sit down,” Mr. Devine said.
We went into the living room. Mr. Devine sat on the couch. I sat on an armchair. The Major grabbed the remote from the top of the TV and took another armchair.
“What happened?” I asked. “How did he die?”
“Natural causes,” Mr. Devine said. “At his age, things just give out.” I guessed that was true. The old guy had been pretty slow by the time I’d met him.
Mr. Devine set his briefcase in his lap and clicked open the hasps. He took out an envelope, closed the case again and put the envelope facedown on the coffee table. “I’ll answer all of your questions in due course,” he said. “Major, if you wouldn’t mind, perhaps we could watch that DVD now.”
The Major held out the remote and pressed one button to turn on the TV and another to start the DVD. Suddenly, there was my grandfather on the screen, looking pretty much the same as he had the last—and first—time I’d seen him.
“I’m not sure why I have to be wearing makeup,” he said, turning to face somebody off camera. “This is my will, not some late-night talk show… and it’s certainly not a live taping.”
A couple of people laughed offscreen. My grandfather turned to the camera.
“Good morning…or afternoon, boys,” he began.
Boys? Who was he talking to?
“If you’re watching this, I must be dead, although on this fine afternoon I feel very much alive.”
I peered at the face on the screen. It was impossible to tell when he’d made the recording. For all I knew, it could have been a year ago or even longer. Or—I swallowed hard—it could have been just before I met him back in early spring. Or just after. Had he known then that he wouldn’t be around now? Had he been sick, had things been giving out, and I’d been too stupid or too self-absorbed to notice?
“I want to start off by saying that I don’t want you to be too sad,” he said, as if he was right there in front of me, reading my mind the way he’d seemed to during my unexpected stay with him. “I had a good life and I wouldn’t change a minute of it. That said, I still hope that you are at least a little sad and that you miss having me around. After all, I was one spectacular grandpa!”
He wasn’t kidding! Five minutes after I’d met him, I’d found myself wishing I’d known him my whole life.
“And you were simply the best grandsons a man could ever have.”
Oh, he was talking to my cousins. And to me, I guess, which was why Mr. Devine was here.
Maybe the others had been fantastic grandsons—I didn’t know them, so I couldn’t say. If he was including me, it wasn’t because of anything I had done. It was because that’s the kind of guy he was. At least, it was the kind of guy he had seemed like to me, a guy who treats a garbageman the same way he’d treat Bill Gates—with warmth and dignity.
“I want you to know that of all the joys in my life, you were among my greatest. From the first time I met each of you to the last moments I spent with you—and of course I don’t know what those last moments were, but I know they were wonderful—I want to thank you all for being part of my life. A very big, special, wonderful, warm part of my life.”
Okay, that didn’t refer to me.
His hand shook as he took a sip from a glass of water.
“I wanted to record this rather than just have my lawyer read it out to you. Hello, Johnnie.”
I glanced at Mr. Devine. He was smiling fondly at the image on the screen.
“Johnnie, I hope you appreciate that twenty-year-old bottle of Scotch I left you,” he said. “And you better not have had more than one snort of it before the reading of my will! But knowing you the way I do, I suspect you would have had two.”
Mr. Devine chuckled.
“I just wanted—needed—to say goodbye to all of you in person, or at least as in person as this allows.” His hand was still shaking as he took another sip from his glass.
“Life is an interesting journey, one that seldom takes you where you think you might be going. Certainly I never expected that I was going to become an old man. In fact, there were more than a few times when I was a boy that I didn’t believe I was going to live to see another day, never mind live long enough to grow old.”
I knew what he meant. He’d told me a lot about his life. He’d been a pilot during World War II and traveled a lot after that. He’d been in more than a few scrapes, and the way he’d described them, most of them had been more serious than any mess I’d ever been in.
“But I did live a long and wonderful life. I was blessed to meet the love of my life, your grandmother Vera. It’s so sad that she passed on before any of you had a chance to meet her.”
He didn’t mean my grandmother. He meant the woman he’d actually been married to. That was okay too. He’d been pretty upfront with me about her. He’d told me how much he’d loved her. He’d met my grandmother after his wife died, and he’d loved her too. But she didn’t want to get married, not then anyway, and she’d never told him that she was already pregnant when she left him. He didn’t know about my mom at all until he read about her death in the national newspaper and saw my grandma’s name. Then he’d done the math.
I zoned out after that because he wasn’t talking about my grandma; he was talking about his wife. I didn’t tune back in until he said, “You boys, you wonderful, incredible, lovely boys, have been such a blessing…seven blessings. Some blessings come later than others.”
Did he mean me? So now my cousins knew about me too. I
nteresting.
“I’ve done a lot, but it doesn’t seem that time is going to permit me the luxury of doing everything I wished for. So, I have some requests, some last requests. In the possession of my lawyer are some envelopes. One for each of you.”
I glanced at Mr. Devine. He nodded. There was one for me too.
“Each of these requests, these tasks, has been specifically selected for you to fulfill. All of the things you will need to complete your task will be provided—money, tickets, guides. Everything.”
Guides? What would I need a guide for?
“I am not asking any of you to do anything stupid or unnecessarily reckless—certainly nothing as stupid or reckless as I did at your ages. Your parents may be worried, but I have no doubts. Just as I have no doubts that you will all become fine young men. I am sad that I will not be there to watch you all grow into the incredible men I know you will become. But I don’t need to be there to know that will happen. I am so certain of that. As certain as I am that I will be there with you as you complete my last requests, as you continue your life journeys.”
Grandfather lifted up his glass.
“A final toast. To the best grandsons a man could ever have. I love you all so much. Good luck.”
