Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  On the desk a telephone rang.

  They both turned and looked for it. It rang again, but they still couldn’t see it. The apartment’s cordless landline phone sat silent on the coffee table.

  ‘It’s Bert’s cell phone,’ said Nelson. He swept aside a clutter of files and there it was, plugged in and charging, just as he’d found it when he arrived. It rang for a third time, vibrating on the desk.

  ‘Have you heard it it ring like that before?’

  He thought of the night after he found Bert’s maybe-suicide-note, when he’d got drunk and used the cordless phone to call Bert’s cell phone. He had listened to it ringing on the desk until the call timed out and went to voicemail. Then he could hear Bert’s voice again, saying ‘Hi please leave a message’.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Answer it.’

  ‘It’s password-protected. I already tried to get into it.’

  ‘But you can answer an incoming call without knowing the password, right?’

  It rang again.

  ‘Put it on speaker,’ she said.

  Fay stared at the screen as he held the phone between them.

  ‘Hello?’

  There was a pause and then a man spoke. ‘Mr Nilsson?

  Fay nodded at him.

  ‘Yes. Who’s this?’

  ‘Hello, Mr Nilsson. My name is James and I’m calling from MasterCard lost and stolen cards.’ He had an odd accent – English, well-spoken. ‘There’s been some unusual activity on your account which we need to check with you. But first, to establish your identity, may I ask you some security questions?’

  Nelson began to feel uneasy. He had never defrauded the credit-card companies – or at least, not in any way out of the ordinary. But he knew people who had, and that it seldom ended well for them. Nelson looked at Fay and shook his head. She nodded emphatically.

  ‘Okay. Go ahead.’

  ‘Your full name, please.’

  ‘Albert Henry Nilsson.’

  ‘Your birthday.’

  ‘January twenty-sixth.’

  ‘Your mother’s maiden name.’

  ‘Armstrong.’

  ‘Right . . . Well, that’s all in order, Mr Nilsson. Now, because we’ve been seeing some unusual activity on your card, may I ask you in which town or city you are at the present time?’

  Before he could answer, Fay took the phone from his hand. She killed the call and brought the screen up to her face.

  ‘What?’ Nelson could think of nothing else to say.

  ‘Shit.’ She dropped the phone back on the desk. ‘It’s gone back to lock-screen. Now I can’t see the rest of the number.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing? It was only the credit-card company. Why did you hang up on them like that?’

  ‘If that was the credit-card company, why did the caller ID show a number in England?’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Allow me to know. I’m from there. The country code is forty-four.’

  ‘Then who was it?’

  ‘Someone who wanted you to tell them exactly where you are.’

  ‘Why would anyone care where I am?’

  She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Because they think that you’re Bert!’

  He picked up the phone again. It had gone back to lock-screen and could tell him nothing more. Then he thought of a flaw in her argument.

  ‘What if the strange credit-card activity is in England, and that’s why they’re calling from there?’

  ‘Because you have his credit cards. Have you been using them?’

  ‘No.’ Though it had crossed his mind.

  ‘Then nobody’s using them. They’re making that up.’

  She went back to the couch, sat down, then stood up again. ‘This doesn’t feel right. Who would be looking for your brother, apart from you? Who would be prepared to lie to try and find him?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  She walked over to the window, opened the curtain a crack and looked out into the snow. ‘This isn’t right.’ She closed the curtain and turned to Nelson. ‘At least there’s one bit of comfort. From the drift of their questions they don’t know where we are.’

  The landline phone buzzed on the coffee table.

  Nelson loaded his old Taurus and shifted Bert’s Equinox into its rightful place in the garage. He took nothing from the apartment except for Bert’s Antarctic parka. The rest of Bert’s stuff was left for the cops or whoever else might come snooping after they’d gone.

  Ringnes had left a note for Fay on the locked door of her chalet. He had gone to catch his flight. If his manager wasn’t around Fay would find her bags at reception, which he’d left unlocked. ‘Don’t worry about the money. Good luck with being dead.’

  On the highway Nelson missed the sign again, the one that showed the airport turn-off. By the time he remembered to look for it – if it had ever existed at all – they were on the right road anyway. Second time lucky, he guessed. And now there was someone else with him. She sat on his right, looking out at the aspens bent under the snow. If he stopped the car now, if he pulled a U-turn and went back to look for the airport, would it still be there? Or would it have vanished, a High Brazil or Shangri-La from which he should never have taken her, stranding her here on the wrong side of time. She wouldn’t last long here. Whitehorse was only a day away.

  The road wound south in long bending coils through the forest of dwarf spruces. Every now and then a car or truck overtook them and Fay would see patterns in the snow sucked up behind it, ghostly shapes whipped high in the air, then slowly dissipating. Ahead, bare mountain peaks glowed in the twilight. Beyond those smooth passes, a few hours’ drive from here, they would cross the Arctic Circle and she would see the sun again. There, in a day or two at the most, they would go their separate ways.

  After Fort McPherson the road began a steady climb into the mountains. The spruces shrank and gave way to bare tundra. Funnelled by the passes, the westerly wind spattered ice against the windshield and buffeted the springs. Snowdrifts appeared on the iced-over highway, creeping out from the rocks that had sheltered their birth.

  The road rose higher still into unobstructed uplands. Now the wind tore at doors and windows, found gaps in perished rubber seals. It seeped into the footwells and crept up around their kidneys. Fay pulled her knees up to her chin, hoping to find a layer of warmer air to thaw her feet. Sometimes, when the road curved back in a hairpin, she could see a dim panorama of the land they had just left, forests and valleys and snow-covered rivers forming and dissolving in gaps of the wind. So that was it. The true north. The place or idea that had haunted her mother, where her grandfather had disappeared. By leaving it now am I saying goodbye to them? She clutched her knees so hard that her thighs began to cramp.

  ‘Can we stop for minute?’ It was the first time either of them had spoken in a while.

  ‘Sure. Why?’

  ‘I want to get out.’

  He took his eyes from the road. ‘What? Here?’

  ‘Up ahead, maybe. Wherever there’s shelter . . . I want a cigarette.’

  ‘You can smoke in my car. I don’t mind.’

  ‘I want to stretch my legs.’

  They stopped in the lee of an outcrop where the road carved through a rib of the mountain. Nelson watched her button her coat and put on her gloves. When she was ready she pushed her door but the wind held it shut. He put his hands on the wheel and looked through the windscreen, his foot hovering just above the gas. A few feet ahead, just beyond their sheltering outcrop, the blizzard scorched the highway like a flame.

  He lit two cigarettes, gave her one, zipped his own coat and put up the hood. ‘Slide over and get out on my side.’

  He had to hold the door with both hands to prevent it being wrenched away in the backwash of wind.

  They hunkered
together with their backs to the side of the car, looking down the mountain. Beyond the torrents of wind that roared down the passes the landscape was silent and still. As far as he could see, for hundreds of miles, there were no houses, no antennae, no sign of the road that had brought them here, just snow-covered rivers and rashes of trees. If they find Bert, what will they make me do with him? Will I have to go back there to bury him? Or should I bring him south to be with Mom and Dad in Grande Prairie? How would I pay for that? I guess he’ll leave some money. Who would he leave it to but me?

  What if he makes me rich for a while? What would I do with the money?

  He thought of Lizzie, the kid he had tried to raise. He could send some money to BC to help her education. She would be going to college in ten years or so, if she was smart enough and not screwed up. He could send the money anonymously maybe, or make Donna swear to keep it secret from the kid. He didn’t want to try and make Lizzie think of him. By now, if she remembered him at all, she would certainly know what he had found out a year before Donna threw him out, that the child he had loved wasn’t his.

  They got back in the car. It’s funny, she thought, but I don’t feel cold. A minute later she began to shiver violently. Her hands and feet burned as the blood flow returned to them.

  They reached the head of the pass, a wind-torn saddle between lunar summits. A sign said ‘Welcome to the Yukon Territory’. They had gone a little way down the other side of the divide, to a point where the road began to drop steeply, when they turned a bend and found a snowplough blocking their way, its beacon flashing in the gloom. Seeing them approach, the snowplough halted in the middle of the road. Unable to pass, Nelson stopped too. The door opened and the driver climbed down into the sheltered side of the plough, beckoning to Nelson.

  The driver was a woman, elderly and small. She wore a set of old tan Carhartts and her muskrat hat was rammed down as far as it would go. Reaching for his shoulder, she pulled his head down to shout in his ear.

  ‘What time did you pass McPherson?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . More than two hours ago, I guess.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She seemed quietly angry. ‘It took you that long to get this far? You’re driving pretty slow, aren’t you?’

  He turned and looked back at the Ford, where Fay was watching. ‘My friend is from England. I’m driving her down to the airport at Whitehorse. She’s enjoying the view. She’ll never come this way again.’

  The old woman peered up at him suspiciously. ‘Two hours? You sure about that?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure. What’s the problem? Was there an accident or something?’

  ‘We closed the highway at McPherson two hours back because of the new storm.’ She looked across at Fay. ‘You’re on vacation up here? In the winter?’

  ‘She is. I’m not. She’s going home.’

  ‘Okay.’ She was still watching Fay. ‘Okay. I’ll believe you. You just missed the lights. But you’re lucky you already made it over the pass. If not, I’d have sent you back to McPherson.’ She nodded back down the road she had come up. ‘Right this moment there’s a long line of truckers waiting back at Eagle Plains, pissed as all hell cos I closed the gates until I could run the plough through. When they see you come down the road all alone they’re going to be even madder. If anyone gives you trouble you can tell them that Laurie let you through. They know not to bitch at me.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘The road shouldn’t be too bad from here on. I’ve already cleared most of it. But if you hit the rhubarb or get stuck in a drift make sure you stay with your car. There’ll be someone along presently.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Better give me your names, in case you get stuck and we have to come look for you. And tell your girlfriend from me to enjoy her vacation.’

  The plough pulled over a couple of feet until there was just enough room for Nelson to pass.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘To send us back to Fort McPherson. The road’s closed again. She thought we ran the boom.’

  ‘But she let us go anyway?’

  ‘She thinks that we’re sweethearts.’

  Just short of Eagle Plains, near the marker that showed where they crossed the Arctic Circle, two wolves came out of the trees. They stopped in the middle of the highway, staring at the approaching car, their breaths coiling around them. Then they turned, looked back towards the next bend in the road and vanished again. A moment later a long line of trucks appeared round the bend, headlights shining in the night. The snowplough lady had reopened the road.

  The Eagle Plains rest stop was built on a plateau where the highway turned south parallel to the mountains. It consisted of a hotel, a garage and a transport depot standing in line along a siding off the highway. The buildings looked east across falling ground towards a line of low foothills. Beyond them the mountains rose pale in the night. To the south a black cloud was eating the stars.

  Dawson City was a whole tank of gas away on the far side of the Ogilvies. If they wanted to drive on to Whitehorse that night they would have to reach Dawson before midnight, when the gas stations closed. There was little time to spare: Nelson took the car to the gas station while Fay ordered food in the hotel.

  The dining room, recently abandoned by the stranded truckers, was littered with the wreckage of half-eaten meals. A picture window showed snow and black spruces. Every spare bit of wall was decorated with relics of the past – old photographs, wicker snowshoes, picks and shovels, antique leg-hold traps, trophy heads, a stuffed caribou. Having ordered two meals from the counter, Fay went over to look at the photos on the walls.

  Time showed her its faces. A group of Norwegian sailors glared from the deck of a sloop wintering at Herschel Island. Two Indian boys and a whiskery storekeeper stood outside a store in Fort McPherson. Constable Edgar Millen of Arctic Red River, hatless, smiling, not yet killed in a gun battle with Albert Johnson, displayed the jug ears that would soon no longer be funny. Albert Johnson’s frost-blackened face showed his teeth to the Aklavik inquest. He looked almost cheerful, winning his game of Guess Who. But she’d already given up on that one. A voice called from the counter; their food was ready.

  Turning away from the wall, her eyes slipped across another photograph, one she thought she’d seen before. She took a couple of steps towards the lunch counter then stopped and went back.

  It was the same photograph she’d seen in Bert Nilsson’s apartment, pinned to the cork-board over the desk: a black-and-white photograph of Wilfrid ‘Wop’ May, the famous bush pilot and war ace who’d helped to hunt down Albert Johnson. He was standing with his mechanic by the door of their ski-plane. Or rather, it was almost the same photograph as the one she’d seen in Bert’s place. This one must have been taken just before that one, because there were two other men in the frame. The photograph in Bert’s apartment, she recalled, had only two shadows where the men were now standing, shadows which Bert had circled several times.

  These two extra men must have fled the frame after this ­photograph was taken: they already seemed to recoil from the camera. Fay leaned in closer to look.

  The older of the two men, hatless, was almost bald, with a trimmed moustache and a thin, time-worn face. His eyes were sidling away from the camera lens as if to say, ‘Who, me? You don’t want me.’ The younger man wore a leather hat pulled low over his forehead. His scarf, wrapped loosely around his neck, hid his mouth. He squinted at the camera as if saddened by it; his hand was frozen for ever in a failed attempt to block the lens.

  There was a caption under the photograph, reproduced from the long-forgotten true detective magazine from which it had been cut.

  Bush pilot Wilfrid ‘Wop’ May and party about to fly north to hunt for ‘The Mad Trapper of Rat River’. This photograph was taken at Fort McMurray, Alberta on February 3rd, 1932. Captain Wilfrid May (centre left), Air North mechanic Jack Bowen ­(cent
re right), and two unknown men who joined them from a flight from Vancouver. These were listed on the Vancouver manifest as a Mr C. Meares and a Mr H. Morgan.

  There were footsteps behind her. She ignored them, still staring at the caption. She heard Nelson speak.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said.

  She thought, You want to bet?

  ‘I’d just finished gassing up the car when the highway guy came over. He said the road is blocked again, but this time it’s south of here. Three feet of snow just dumped in the Ogilvie Mountains between here and Dawson. It’ll take at least a day to clear the drifts.’

  He waited for her to show some response. But she just turned away from him, back to some old picture on the wall.

  He tried again. ‘The joke is, the road back north is open again.’

  Of course it is. She touched a finger to the glass which protected the photograph. She covered the young man’s face until she could only see his eyes. She had seen them many times before on the wall of a flat in Lewisham.

  ‘I want to go back north. I want to go to Aklavik.’

  ‘Why? We’re already a quarter way to Whitehorse!’

  She showed him the caption. ‘Because my grandfather went there.’

  He thought about what she had said to him two days before, about stories converging at the poles, like meridians. Or like the meshes of a net. They had both assumed she was humouring him.

  ‘We can’t drive to Aklavik without passing through Inuvik. There’s an ice-road from there across the delta. We’d have to stay in Bert’s apartment again.’

  ‘Do we have any choice? If the road south is closed?’

  He looked more closely at the photograph. So that was the famous Meares. And Fay’s granddad had really existed.

  ‘What did your grandfather do in the air force?’

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, 1948

  It was a warm day for July, a little over twelve degrees centigrade. The mild air sucked water from Frobisher Bay, raising a fog that shut down operations. The Lancasters and Cansos of Number 9 Detachment, 413 Squadron Royal Canadian Air Force, drawn up in line on the Crystal Two apron, swam in and out of the mist like fish half glimpsed in the depths of a pond. The aircraft were all in good order, ready for the fog to lift, if it ever did. There was nothing for their Canadian crews to do but laze about the hangar and stare at the curtain of grey.