Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  The door swooshed behind him and he stood in the cold, seeing the way that her face had looked, lost and dazed, as if she’d been travelling for ever. He walked back to his car, boots crunching in an inch of new snow. Then he remembered the cigarettes. The stores would be open in town.

  He found her again at the back of the terminal, staring up at a stuffed polar bear. She didn’t seem to notice him until he was right by her side.

  ‘I can give you a ride after all,’ he said. ‘I have to go back into town.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you.’ She didn’t seem surprised to see him again. ‘My name’s Fay.’

  Her hand was quite cold though the building was well heated.

  ‘Nelson,’ he said. ‘Let me help you with your bag.’

  She gasped as the January air burned her lungs. The cold turned her face pink, brought it to life again. Nelson put her bag in the trunk of his old Ford Taurus. When he closed it again she was waiting on the driver’s side: she must have come here straight from England, he guessed.

  ‘Lady? You’re on the wrong side of the car.’

  She was staring at the willows which grew beside the parking lot. They were curdled with snow, bowed by the weight of it. She turned and frowned at him, as if she’d forgotten he was there, then came around the hood while he crossed behind the back, keeping the car between them.

  ‘That’s stupid of me.’ She got in the passenger seat. ‘I’ve been travelling for ages. I can’t believe that I’m finally here.’

  She said she had a booking at the Eskimo Inn so he parked outside and carried her bag up to the lobby and then he said goodbye. Crossing Mackenzie Road, he bought a carton of cigarettes at the Mid Town Market, and because he’d be late on the road, and you never knew up here, you might get stuck, he also bought some nuts and raisins and chocolate and potato chips, and a couple of bottles of water and two three-packs of Red Bull to keep him awake at the wheel. Outside, he lit a cigarette and watched cars come and go from the North Mart, lights flaring across its windowless wall. A group of boys and girls came out of the food court, their outsize snow-boots clomping down the metal stairs. They bunched together on the pavement’s dirty snow and he heard them laughing though he couldn’t make out words. Their eyes passed over Nelson without seeming to notice him. They won’t see me, he thought, because they think I don’t belong here. They’re right about that.

  He tossed the cigarette, ready to go. Then he looked across the street and saw her again, standing on the stoop of the Eskimo Inn, her bag beside her, looking hopefully about. Oh Christ, he thought. Will I ever get out of here?

  ‘I’m really sorry to impose on you again,’ she said, as he carried her bag down the steps. ‘They say that when they tried to confirm my reservation last week the computer wouldn’t accept my credit card. So they just cancelled the booking without letting me know. Now the hotel is booked out for some engineering conference. Something to do with a new road they’re building.’

  The Mackenzie Hotel was also booked out, for the same reason. But a desk clerk mentioned another place, an off-season tourist resort. Nelson drove her back out of town, past boxy public buildings and snow-shrouded truck lots and new subdivisions of small vinyl houses, all built up on stilts to stop the ground melting. It was five in the evening, the twilight long gone, and traffic was quiet. They met a snowplough on the outskirts, grading the verge between the road and the trees. Their headlights made rainbows as they passed through its plume.

  The sign they were looking for said ‘Northern Villas’. It pointed down a side road to a clearing in the spruces. A few log cabins stood around the clearing, also mounted on stilts above the permafrost. There were lights in a couple of them, trucks parked outside, but the rest were dark and empty. A larger house stood by the entrance, evidently a residence, but with a reception room built to one side.

  Pulling up the car, Nelson felt his front wheels crunch pleasingly into a snow drift. The woman, Fay, was asleep now, her chin tucked into her chest. Her face was blue from the lights in the clearing.

  Maybe, he thought, I should leave her to sleep for a bit, go in there myself to see if they have a room. But he thought better of it: If they say no, then I’ll still be stuck with her. He knew from experience that they’d be more likely to say no to him than to someone like her. And he ached to drive south without stopping. He touched her shoulder to wake her up.

  A buzzer on the counter summoned a big, rugged-faced man from the back of the house. Nelson guessed he’d been eating his dinner in back.

  ‘I can help you tonight,’ said the owner. ‘Tomorrow and the next day too, most likely. After that I don’t know. I have bookings for all the cabins – engineers for the new overland road from here to Tuktoyaktuk. But I’m not sure when they’ll turn up.’

  ‘Two or three nights is all I need,’ she said.

  The owner woke up his computer, began to jab it with two fingers. ‘I’m not saying you’ll definitely have to check out in three days, if you don’t want to. It just depends how long the flights are grounded and the highway stays closed.’

  Nelson, who had been waiting for a chance to say goodbye, stepped back to the counter. ‘The highway’s closed?’

  The owner didn’t look up. ‘Fresh snow in the Richardson Mountains. Storms came earlier than they predicted. My engineers just called from Eagle Plains to say they got stopped at the boom. It went down about a quarter-hour ago, just as they were leaving. Otherwise they’d have been here late tonight.’ He looked up at Fay. ‘I’m giving you their chalet. Name, please?’

  ‘It’s Morgan, Fay. Fay Morgan.’

  ‘Sam Ringnes.’ They shook hands. ‘And your friend’s name?’

  ‘He’s not staying. He was kind enough to give me a lift.’

  Nelson did his calculations. The booms had gone down only fifteen minutes ago. If I’d’ve taken the right road, or if I’d’ve left her at the airport, I would have made it past Fort McPherson before they closed the boom there. I could have crossed the Arctic Circle tonight and seen the sun come up tomorrow.

  He wanted to curse, to turn and walk out of there, but her bags were still in the boot of his car.

  The owner stopped typing. ‘I can’t get this registration form to load. I guess I’ll do it later.’ He looked up at Fay. ‘Do you have a ride of your own? We’re two miles out of town here.’

  ‘I was going to ask you about that. I want to go north to Tuktoyak­tuk tomorrow, but I don’t drive. Could you recommend a taxi?’

  ‘Want to drive the famous ice-road, huh? It’s usually guys who come here for that. They see it on TV.’

  ‘It’s not that. I just want to look around.’

  Ringnes set both hands on the counter. ‘There’s the minibus taxis, I guess. They run back and forth on the ice-road when they can fill enough seats. I could give you a couple of numbers.’

  ‘I was hoping for a private hire.’

  ‘NorCan Hire is just across the road there. But you say you don’t drive.’ Ringnes took a slow look at Nelson. ‘You need someone who’s got some free time on his hands. And who could possibly use a little cash.’

  Her back was turned to him but Nelson could tell from the tilt of her head that she was waiting. She doesn’t want to ask me herself. She’s embarrassed, or afraid of me. She thinks she made me miss my chance to get out of here. So she’d rather I’d just leave now, so she can find someone else.

  The office was a lean-to built onto the side of the house, with triple-glazed sides and a glass pane in the roof. Looking up, Nelson saw the wind stir patterns in the snow dust on the glass. The tank in his old Taurus was one quarter full. He had in his pocket three hundred and seventy dollars, the last of the money he’d found in his brother’s apartment. Three thousand kilometres, at say thirteen kilometres per litre, It might just get him to Edmonton if he drove really smoothly and slept in the car. But what woul
d he do when he got there?

  ‘I can drive you for a couple of days. At least until the highway’s clear.’ He needed an out so he reached for a lie. ‘As soon as the road’s clear I have to go south . . . I have a job interview down in Whitehorse.’

  Nelson dragged his bag across the threshold of his brother’s apartment, then stopped, the hall door still open. When he’d left this place that afternoon he’d had no intention of ever coming back here.

  The town’s hospital stood across the road from the apartment and its lights shone through the curtains, the same nylon curtains, printed with bright summer flowers, that hung in every window of his brother’s short-let building. The light seeped onto the cheap nylon couch, the beige nylon carpet, the cluttered desk and the maps on the wall.

  It came to this, thought Nelson. Any way you looked at it, this is what it came to. Swimming in Saskatoon Lake as boys in the summer. Piano lessons. The five-day drive across the whole country, him and his parents, all the way from Grande Prairie to Montreal to see Bert graduate college. As kids, Bert and Nelson had dreamed of making that drive across the country, the forests and silos and wheat fields. It hadn’t worked out as planned. His brother hadn’t driven with them. He had been waiting for them at McGill University, in that other life he was now going to have. And that too must not have worked out as planned, because the scholarships, the prizes, the good looks and the girlfriends should have led to something better than a lonely place like this.

  And yet, Nelson thought, remembering himself with a hard sense of relief, for me this is pretty sweet. There was cable and internet, heat and light and hot water, his brother’s bed to sleep in, clean sheets, until or unless his brother came back from wherever he’d gone. There was the money his brother had left for him, waiting in an envelope on the coffee table. He hadn’t asked for it but there it was, and he certainly needed it.

  He had the keys to the apartment and to his brother’s SUV – ‘If Im not home when u get there keys in tail pipe burgundy equinox ab plates back of basement.’ They had been there in the tail pipe, just as the SMS said. He had the driver’s licence, the credit cards, the library passes, all the odds and ends that Bert had left in his wallet on the shelf beside the door.

  Why had Bert left his wallet on the shelf beside the door?

  But no room-mates, no cold, no sleeping on couches or the back of his car, making excuses, behind with the bills . . . Nelson was in a home here, a retreat, sheltered accommodation. The only problem was that he had no idea where his big brother was, or why he had invited Nelson to come and stay with him on the Mackenzie delta, as far north in Canada as it was possible to drive. Bert had been gone for over a week now without an explanation; he’d already been gone when Nelson had got here. But his cell phone still sat on the desk, fully charged and plugged into the wall.

  Nelson meant to call the cops to tell them Bert was missing. He had meant to call them days ago. But there were a few unpaid traffic tickets, and a long-ago fight in Fort McMurray might still be a problem. One day turned into the next. He watched TV, drank Bert’s whisky, asked about work, went to the town’s only bar. He told himself he was waiting for Bert to come back. And as time went on the task grew in its enormity. Nelson came to believe, or half believe, that to tell the cops about his brother would be a kind of betrayal: as long as Bert was missing, Bert was still alive.

  Nelson turned on the light and went over to the desk. Bert had set it in a corner facing the wall, beneath a cork-board covered in letters and Post-its and printouts and notes.

  On either side of the cork-board were maps of the Yukon and the Mackenzie delta, showing relief and drainage and roads and old trails. Both maps were covered with cellophane overlays, a trick their granddad had taught them from his time in the signal corps: you wrote on the overlay with pencil or felt-tip, traced your routes and objectives, made observations, then when you were done you could wipe the map clean again. You could cover your tracks, their granddad had joked. Or at least Nelson had assumed he’d been joking. These particular overlays were still scribbled with crosses and arrows, illegible notes, scrawled dates from the 1920s and 1930s, winding up the Yukon valley then across the divide to the edge of the sea.

  There was a black-and-white photograph too, reproduced from some old newspaper or magazine, blown up so much that you could see each fuzzy grain. It showed two men in winter clothing standing at the door of an old-fashioned ski-plane. It was not these men who had interested Bert, it seemed, but two shadows, one on either side of them, cast by figures just out of the frame. Bert had circled both shadows several times with a marker pen.

  None of this made any sense to Nelson. But then his brother had long been a stranger, and his interests had long been obscure.

  He pulled out the swivel-chair and sat facing away from the desk. The furniture, the shelves of books, the TV and the coffee table, all were now exactly as he’d found them when he came into the north ten days before. He’d made a point of tidying up before he’d fled the place that afternoon, meaning never to return. It would look as if he’d never been there, except for the note that he’d left on the coffee table.

  Dear Bert. I waited ten days but no sign of you. I have to go south again. I couldn’t find work up here – it’s not like they say it is. Please call: I’m worried about you. Thanks for the money – I’ll pay you back. Love, Nelson.

  How he had torn himself over that word ‘love’, though no doubt it was true.

  Nelson swung the chair around to face the desk. This too

  he had left as he’d found it, more or less; the sleeping laptop

  computer, the heaps of books and notes and cardboard files,

  the Post-its and chewed-up old pens. He found it hard to believe that Bert would have kept his desk that way. Maybe the desk had been tidy the last time his brother had sat there. Maybe this disorder was itself a kind of clue. Bert might have had some ­sudden fit of rage or despair, thrown everything about the desk, then stormed out the door.

  Carefully, so as not to disturb the layers of scattered papers, Nelson peeled them apart and took out the note he’d only found that afternoon. Maybe Bert had originally meant for the note to be lying on top of the other folders and papers, not hidden among them, where Nelson had found it.

  It was addressed to no one, signed by no one.

  When you hold this note please don’t be angry or sad. I’ll sleep on it tonight – I always have before – the lure of a warm sleep. I know it’s selfish. I’m sorry – it’s been a long time coming but the notion has come calling many times before. I can’t imagine moving forward in life and for as long as I can remember I haven’t been able to. There have been pipe-dreams which offered an imaginative buzz from time to time but they don’t translate to reality. When that’s a state of being with no avenues out, best to close the chapter.

  And then on the back, in a different ink:

  I may, however, have some real life ahead of me. Alaska through the mountains – set up where you can dog-sled into Alaska from the Canadian side in the heart of winter. Build igloos and sleep with the dogs for warmth. VHF/short wave for communication. Grow a beard. Night-lights. Allsorts.

  Night-lights: their glow. Radio pulses across the cold distance. Allsorts: their mother loved liquorice candy, but Nelson wouldn’t eat it. Bert always took his share.

  Alaska. Bert’s last dream was to search for lost warmth in the wilderness. Was Alaska any wilder than here? It seemed to Nelson, the first time that he read that note, that his brother was out in the woods somewhere, snug in a snowdrift, where the ravens would find him in spring.

  So Nelson had packed his bag and fled, then somehow missed the turn-off, and now he was back here, for another day, maybe two or three, until the road crews from Fort McPherson and Eagle Plains had cleared the passes in the mountains. Then he really would pull the plug on his brother. Meanwhile, he would work for that lady for gas money,
drive her wherever she wanted to go. And he would use Bert’s car, the newish SUV in the basement with the nice high ride and the all-wheel-drive. Better that on the ice-roads than his own clapped-out Taurus. Bert owed him the use of that car. The cash in the envelope wasn’t payment enough for what he was doing to Nelson.

  Nelson closed his eyes for a long moment, squeezing them tight until the dancing grains turned red. When he was sure that he wouldn’t cry again he looked at the books and papers scattered on the desk. At the top of the heap was a Manila folder filled with blue-lined pages of Bert’s pencilled writing. The cover sheet was blank apart from some kind of reference number and a single line of writing, also in Bert’s tidy hand. Nelson had time on his hands again. He might as well start here: ‘Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier: from Room 38.’

  Tuktoyaktuk, North West Territories

  It was at Margate Sands, in a pedal boat with her mother, that Fay first learned she was prone to motion sickness. Her mother had noticed the change in her even before she did so herself. At six years of age, all Fay knew was that the best day of her life had sunk into dismay, and that she was no longer excited by the ice cream she’d been promised when this, her first sea voyage, was over. Her mother stopped pedalling, letting the little swan-shaped craft bob on the oily skin of the windless estuary. She wrapped her bare arms around her only child. Her dark hair, still wet from swimming, plastered itself to Fay’s face.

  ‘You’ve been watching your feet on the pedals and it’s making you ill,’ Alice whispered. ‘Keep your eyes out of the cockpit. That’s what my dad learned in the air force. Fix your eyes on the horizon. It always worked for him.’

  Fay had tried it and it had worked, long enough for them both to get back to the beach. She had enjoyed her ice cream.

  Keep your eyes out of the cockpit. Well, it didn’t work up here on the ice-road, a mile out from the shore. A haze had softened the stars and now Fay could see neither coast nor horizon; she couldn’t tell where the sky met the frozen sea or where the sea met the frozen land. It was this lack of reference that dizzied her; the car hardly seemed to be moving, its wheels humming evenly over the graded sea ice. She shut her eyes for a moment, trying to stop the sickness from rising in her stomach, and when she opened them again she was looking at her feet. Funny. The snow she had walked into the footwell two hours earlier, when Nelson had picked her up from her chalet on the outskirts of Inuvik, still hadn’t melted though the heater was on full. When she looked at the dashboard it said ninety kilometres per and thirty below. The sickness eased as she looked at the numbers. So keep your eyes inside the cockpit. It’s upside down up here.