Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  “No!” the man cried. “Your mind is clouded by Satan. Love is what makes everything work.”

  “You can get some love in there, Sammy,” said one of the stocky toqued men, climbing into a truck. “Get some real love for a change.”

  “God’s character.” Sammy flicked the coon’s tail at double speed, eyes roving between the men. “Love and purity, purity and love.”

  “And what is Yahweh’s character?” Rooke said. “Murderous. Jealous. At times out of control with his own furious passions.”

  “He’s pure, he’s pure.” Now yanking the coon’s tail.

  Rooke reached to pick up the Bible. He dusted snow from its covers, then handed it back to the young man. “Many events in your Bible are connected with impurity. Jesus’ own bloodline is salted with harlots, seducers, tricksters.”

  The truck roared, backfired. “Get some love, Sammy,” the man yelled through the open window.

  Rooke continued to speak in low tones, partly obscured by the truck’s roar. “Joseph marries the daughter of an Egyptian high priest. Lot’s daughters commit incest with their father. Tamar seduces Judah. Ruth seduces Boaz.”

  The young man plunged and re-plunged the sign into snow. “These are vile acts, not loved by God.”

  Rooke squinted. “Nonsense. These are men and women favoured by God, favoured for their impure charisma.”

  The man flushed further. “How can you say these things? I thought you agreed that the strippers here were . . . I thought you said. . . .”

  Rooke smiled. “I’m telling the story backwards, remember? I’m telling it from behind.”

  The truck honked, spit rocks from spinning tires.

  “Love, Sammy!”

  “Yahweh was pure.” Sammy removed his hat, revealing a head of blond quills.

  “What is purity?” Rooke said. “Purity is death.”

  Sammy shook his head violently. “Yahweh was life. Yahweh was love.”

  “Yahweh was a trickster with a mean streak. Remember Moses? God didn’t even let him get into the Promised Land.”

  “Ted,” Seri said. “Come on.” But she smiled. He was good.

  “Think about it, Sammy,” Rooke stepped forward.

  Sammy stepped back, clutching the Bible to his heart. “The Bible says—I am the way, the truth and the life.”

  Rooke grinned. “The Tao Te Ching says—the way that can be spoken of is not the true way.”

  “Paganism! Awake from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”

  “Only within the dim and dark is true essence.”

  Sammy dropped his hat. “Set your heart on things above, not on earthly things.”

  “The spirit is not above this world, but within the flesh.”

  “No!” Tears in the young man’s eyes. “Our conversation is in heaven, from whence we look for the saviour.”

  “Look not, for the net of heaven is cast wide.”

  Fiery pinks torched the skyline. Seri was stunned by the beauty.

  Sammy tried again. “The truth shall set you free.”

  Rooke raised a gloved hand, fingers splayed. “Truthful words are not beautiful, beautiful words not true.”

  “Lies. Why have you abandoned Jesus?’

  “He has abandoned me.”

  “No!” Sammy fled the lot, pressing the Bible to his forehead.

  “Sammy,” Seri called. “Come back.”

  “They’re in there right now!” he cried. “Dancing with the devil!” He looked back and tripped. The Bible pitched into the air and spun comically, gold leaf catching sparks of light. He dove, caught the Bible, then scrambled to his feet, veered left, and sprinted down the road.

  “Come back.” Rooke spoke to himself. “God has forgotten us all, my friend. Nobody gets into the promised land.”

  He pointed at the sky, stroking the fading pinks.

  “Nobody.” He dropped his arm. “You forgot your hat.”

  † † †

  Seri sat at a pine table with crooked legs and sipped orange soda through a straw. Wet wood smoked in the hearth and grimed the tiny stage, which was set with cheap flashing lights, pink and blue. Rooke leaned back in a polished wooden chair and cracked ice between his back teeth, fishing from a glass tumbler.

  Seri nodded at in the direction of the stage. “Penalty Box.”

  Rooke smiled. Almost in good humour. “Rather a fetching pun for those whose education is sure to be somewhat . . . threadbare.”

  Seri swirled the straw, watched the fizz. Rooke fingered an ice cube. She watched it melt, water beading along his fingernail, droplets rolling through his palm.

  Three young women emerged from a back door and climbed the stage, six feet from the table. One wore a spidery pair of reading glasses.

  “Hopeless,” Rooke whispered.

  “Even a punk holds on to hope,” Seri whispered back.

  “How pagan,” said the stripper in the reading glasses, winking.

  Rooke nodded.

  “Well so what?” Seri said. “Everybody finds hope in their own way, even you.”

  “No!” Rooke smashed the glass against the table.

  “Fine.” Seri leaned back until her spine cracked. She had never heard Rooke raise his voice.

  Without warning he stood and smashed his glass until it cracked in razor webs. His cheekbones purpled.

  “Ted, sit down.” Seri pinched her cheek. “You’re ridiculous.”

  Rooke’s old knuckle cuts reopened. Blood traced the cup’s zigzag fractures, mingled with spilled water.

  “His hope,” Rooke’s voice cracked, “is an abomination.”

  Fine, Seri thought. Settle down—her head snapped up. “His? Your brother? The man in the picture?”

  Rooke shook the tumbler at her, bits of glass falling. Seri poked her straw at the soda, while the few patrons stared over pints and jiggers. Rooke let the glass fall, gazed at his bloody knucklebones.

  “You done, sweetie?” The stripper with the spectacles. “Do we need to cuff you to the pole?”

  † † †

  During the show, Rooke composed himself by folding bloody napkins, while Seri nursed three warm sodas and steered him back with her silence. After the mandatory slow dance on the blanket, the mischievous dancer strode over to the table, still undressed except for her glasses.

  “You want to talk to me,” she said.

  Seri nodded. “How do you know?”

  “You’re not here to watch the show.”

  Rooke put down a napkin. “Sit.”

  “I’ll stand.”

  “Very well.” Rooke rose to conduct his interview with the naked dancer. Seri let him go. To his credit, he never once looked down.

  “How did you find me?” the dancer said.

  “Your manager gave us an itinerary. We’re looking for someone.”

  “Lor,” the dancer said.

  Rooke’s eyebrows raised, then lowered. “Why do you say that name?”

  “Pretty obvious someone was chasing him.” She stroked her stomach.

  Rooke maintained a level gaze. He tapped two fingers on his wrist. “You don’t like him, do you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I see.” Rooke raised his gaze to her hairline. “Was this Lor accompanied by a companion, a tall man?”

  The dancer stared back, silent. Then, “Yes.”

  Rooke’s fingers tapped faster. His left eye twitched, one jolt. “Silvery hair?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Rooke raised a heel, crunched a few splinters of glass. “And do you know where these men went?”

  She set her glasses on the table, then surveyed him again, looked him up and down from black hair to buckled shoe. “They went south. Back to Lethbridge.”

  “You’re sure?” Fingers tapping rapidly.

  “Quite sure.”

  Seri watched them size each other. Rooke looked more eager than he usually did, fingers snapping steadily. She was beginning to more fully understand his
patterns of conversation. She realized that his cruel questions outside were directed at her, not at the unfortunate young man. Rooke had been trying to crack her faith ever since Kresge’s, and this was to be a contest of wills after all, no surprise there. She was going to have to fight to keep him on the straight and narrow.

  Still, Rooke’s self-control, here in the bar, had been considerable.

  “Will that be all?” the dancer said. “You can look now. They’re real.”

  † † †

  Seri spun the car out of the lot, sped down the road recently fled by Sammy the Christian, then turned left towards the lake.

  “Ted, you were a little nervous in there, a little over-anxious.”

  “An act.” His smile slid up over his top teeth. “Serves me well from time to time when dealing with a difficult subject.”

  Seri nodded. He was good, fires burning a little too hot at the moment.

  Again she felt the turning within her, the wheeling flame, and this time knew it. A feeling not unlike her Christian conversion experience years ago: not a sudden jolt, not a bolt from the sky, not a weight lifted from her shoulders. Just quiet certainty. This journey was personal for her, too: God was using Rooke to awaken her, to test and measure her faith.

  “It was a lie,” Rooke said.

  “Sorry?” She realized suddenly, with a twinkle of unease, that her own symbols were all from the Old Testament, the book of blood and judgment. What about the New Testament, the book of love and forgiveness?

  “I said it was a lie,” Rooke repeated. “That bespectacled dancer was lying. She sensed my eagerness, tried to use the force of it against me. But I was more subtle.”

  His skill was impressive.

  “Turn around,” he said. “North, toward the lake. To the ice road.”

  “She said south.”

  “So we go north.”

  Seri nodded. Good call, beyond her own talents.

  Rooke tugged his collar, as if it were too tight. Then, abruptly, he slumped. “Perhaps we should reconsider. This gateway will be closed to us, once we pass through.”

  “Nonsense.” Seri was already turning the car. “You outfoxed her. Now we have to move.” Damn, that was too brusque. “What I mean, Ted, is I think your first instincts were dead on.”

  Rooke watched her, eyes tapered. He was right about the gateway closing behind. This was definitely a node, a possibility point in their journey. She needed to move him with delicacy.

  She lowered her voice. “Remember when Abraham and Lot were trying to choose—”

  “Oh, Serendipity.” He sighed.

  Opportunity slipping. She winged through possible tactics, any ideas Lord?

  “Seri—”

  “You know, it’s funny,” she said quickly. “But the further north we go, the more I wonder. . . .” This was a risky gambit, a lie. No, not a lie. It just wasn’t true in the way he’d hear it.

  “The more I wonder about my faith,” Seri said.

  Rooke’s eyes flickered, like she had just re-lit the pilot light.

  Bingo. She grinned. Rooke, too, smiled. Then he put on the stripper’s reading glasses, roosting them at the tip of his nose.

  “Now we’ll see,” he said.

  “Ted! You stole them?”

  The tongue of fire slowed its orbit, exchanging colours, paring her life—fire to snow, orange to white, apprentice to spy. She hammered the gas, and, for the first time in her life, like a joyful teen, like an angry schoolgirl, actually burned rubber.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  What Sharp Teeth

  Air flowed over the dashboard and tickled Lor’s unshaven cheeks. His neck and jaw muscles unkinked. He hadn’t realized how knotted they were. He sighed, smelled something delicious.

  “Here, punchinello.” Alistair’s shoulder touched his own. “From my thermos.” He handed Lor a mug foamed with emerald liquid.

  Lor took it, felt his palms warm. “Where’s Rusty?”

  “Rusty.” Alistair screwed the thermos lid. “Well, he kind of lost his way ’round Yellowknife, developed every one of the French diseases of the soul, like, all the psychic pricks and scratches whereby hope—”

  “He quit,” Ballooni said from the front passenger seat.

  Alistair nodded. “He quit.”

  Lor didn’t care. This band was none of his business. He leaned back and sipped, watching convection currents of light. Beyond, aurora borealis swirled the sky’s deep waters, sea-greens roiling to primrose and lemon.

  “You’ll pick up the slack, mon amigo. We still got his bass.”

  “I’m not going. Come on.” Lor swallowed the last beads of green foam. “I’ve got my own business. I’ve kept my end of the bargain.”

  Alistair took the mug. “What exactly is your business?”

  Lor gave him a glare.

  “Oh, ’course, amigo, the continued vagaries of the psychedelic, the persistent portals of madness, the spirit world come a-knocking.”

  A blue Camaro passed, honked. Lor shuddered. “There is no spirit world.”

  “Listen, mooncalf.” Alistair adjusted his hat. “We’ll take a detour through Inuvik, where I know a witch, old friend from Vancouver. She can look into your, er, condition, and offer some practical magic, some—”

  “Forget it.”

  “’Migo?”

  “Forget that horseshit. This is a brain chemistry problem.”

  Ballooni glared back at Alistair. Suddenly Lor felt enmeshed in a delicate root-system of hostilities, grown over many weeks, ready to flower.

  Alistair clicked the mug on his knee. “Bet you’d come if it was Franklin’s idea.”

  “You’re not Franklin.”

  Ballooni snorted and turned back. “You guys are all nuts. This is a tour full of nuts.”

  “Shut up,” Fatty whispered, steering with one hand, twiddling the radio dial with the other.

  “And stop twiddling.” Ballooni slapped Fatty’s fingers. “There’s nothing but static up here.”

  “Actually.” Alistair leaned between the front seats and clicked his teeth around a pipe. “Some say there’s a pirate radio station originating somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle, plays only the heart’s desire.”

  Ballooni coughed. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “Shut your pie-hole.” Fatty’s voice barely audible.

  Alistair lit his pipe and gusted a blue cloud. “Come on, rattlepates.” He put a hand on each of their shoulders. “Supposed to be a kind of band camraderie here, like, a kind of family.”

  “How come you always get to be the dad?” Ballooni folded his arms.

  Alistair laughed and sat back. “And Lor here the perpetual prodigal son. If you ain’t going to join the family, sparky, where will you go?”

  “Just get me north,” Lor said. “I’ll figure it out.”

  “You’ll come around,” Alistair said. “Meanwhile, where do we meet these exotic dancers to get our gear?”

  Lor gasped. He turned to the frosty window and stared at the sky’s spectral light. “They’re gone.”

  “Gone?”

  Lor watched draperies of pale green ripple in waves. “Yeah. I kind of . . .”

  “What?” Ballooni turned, bear-hugged the seat.

  “Kind of pissed them off.”

  “Where did they go?” Ballooni demanded.

  Lor shrugged.

  “Let me get this straight.” Ballooni ground his teeth. “Somewhere up north there’s three dancers driving around in a van, with my stagelights, PA, and a whole shitload of temple blocks and percussion?”

  Lor scratched the window’s frost.

  “That’s it, fuckleheads,” Ballooni said. “My lights alone are worth thousands. That is it.”

  “I have their coat,” Lor ventured. “Did.”

  Ballooni sounded like he was choking. “Stop the car.”

  Alistair leaned forward. “Now wait a minute, sticklebrick, you can’t just go—”

 
“Stop the fucklebruckin’ car.”

  “It’s a truck.” Fatty shrugged and hit the brake. Ballooni buttoned his coat with shaky fingers and kicked at the door.

  “Oh, come on, amigo. Where will you go, and—the better question—how will you get there?”

  “I’ll hitchhike all the way back to Lethbridge if I have to.” He pulled on thick mitts. “Give me my mixing board.”

  He reached back and yanked the board from between Lor and Alistair, then booted the door open. Chilly air rushed in as he stomped out, board over shoulder.

  Alistair spread his hands. “Alvin. Come on.”

  Ballooni punched the door closed and walked into the headlights, then beyond, kicking up a dusty cloud of snow that wreathed and followed him.

  “Wo,” Fatty muttered. “Could have seen that coming.”

  Alistair chomped his pipe. “He’ll be back. What’s he going to do, like, call a taxi?”

  New headlights shimmered through ice fog, brightened. A car crept from the mist. Ballooni, just beyond the compass of illumination, reached a hand and signalled. The car slowed, stopped. Fatty flicked on his brights.

  Alistair’s teeth cracked the pipestem. “Holy fucking . . . uh, cow.”

  Ballooni bundled his mixing board into the back seat of the cab, then hunched and climbed into the front. Lor squinted: a yellow car, Falias Taxi on the door. Wheels skidded, churning a snow-cloud, and the taxi inched by the truck. When the two were parallel, Ballooni gave them the finger. Lor briefly saw a string of beads dangling from the rearview mirror.

  “Hol-ee shit.” Alistair at his shoulder.

  The cabbie reached to steady the beads, turned to glare. A woman in full niqab, posture perfect. One green eye. One blue.

  † † †

  “Where we going now?” Fatty drove the truck at a crawl.

  Alistair tapped his chin. “We still have a bass, drums, and a harp. And Lor his guitar, if he’d ever let go of it.”

  “No sound, no lights? No soundman,” Lor said. “What kind of a show is that going to be?”

  The heater was going cold. The seat digging into Lor’s back, seatbelt too tight.

  Alistair flared a match to his pipe. “Come on, this is the summons, the call, and, like—dig me now—what finer, sharper opportunity to drive life into a corner, what brighter test: we play stripped down like a crack fighting unit, filled with fire and menace, lean as wolves in midwinter, and what sharp teeth we have, the better to dig in, the better to bite your ears, dears.”