Aickman's Heirs

by Simon Strantzas

  #

  “You two are beautiful,” said the man behind the wheel of the truck. “Don’t know if you knew that. But you’re goddamn beautiful. You’re glowing.”

  Paul leaned out the passenger window and smiled wide and toothy.

  “Just married,” he said. Beside him, in the driver’s seat, James grinned and waved and Paul wondered if that might just be that. The man was about seventy—with close-cropped hair and a deep tan over a heavily lined face. His beard was longer, and it was winter-white. Sharp blue eyes twinkled in deep-set lines. His own wife rode shotgun. She was plumper, and more tanned, with reddish hair pulled in a ponytail that reached out the back of her sun visor. How do a couple like them deal with a couple like us? Paul wondered.

  But when she said, “Honeymooners?” both Paul and James nodded and grinned.

  “Honeymooners,” he said, and James said again: “Just married.”

  The old man opened the door and stepped gingerly out of the cab. He was wearing a pair of walking shorts, and his legs were thin as sticks. Sandaled feet crunched on the gravel.

  “It’s not hard to tell,” he said, and grinned. “Did your wedding go well? I don’t even have to ask that, do I?”

  “Now you’re off on an adventure.” His wife came out from around the back of the truck. She had a canvas bag that looked like it was stuffed with other canvas bags. “Those are beautiful boats you have on your roof.” She and her husband made a show of admiring them.

  “They’re our wedding gift to each other,” said James, and explained that they were just the right size for hauling the two of them and a full camp kit, and how they hoped their camping trip wouldn’t be too much of an adventure. Paul started introductions, and it developed that they were talking to Stanley Green and his wife Nancy. Stanley once worked in natural resources. Nancy used to be a compositor for a newspaper. They had been married for 43 years. The last ten, they’d lived up here.

  “We bought an old YMCA camp on Scout Lake,” said Stanley, and Nancy said, “It was his idea,” and Paul said, “Oh, it was like that was it?” and everybody laughed.

  Paul leaned on the hood of the Honda, and James easily wended under his arm. It was getting cooler here than they were used to, although the late afternoon sun made the town look lovelier, warmer. Nancy brought out a silver steel thermos and four plastic travel mugs. IF YOU DON’T STAND BEHIND OUR TROOPS, WE CAN ARRANGE FOR YOU TO STAND IN FRONT OF THEM, was written on the side of Paul’s.

  She set them on the wheel well of the truck, and poured. Paul sipped his. It was Irish coffee, with an emphasis on the Irish. He grinned like a baby. James wasn’t as pleased—he had to drive, after all, and they weren’t planning on stopping. But like Paul, he liked the Greens. They’d seen a “glow” about them. Where was the harm, really, in a bit more glow from Nancy Green’s thermos?

  They finished their coffee, gave the mugs back and made it into the store just fifteen minutes before it closed and checked out with a box of supplies five minutes after it closed. Paul looked around for the truck—but it was long gone.

  “That’s too bad,” said James when Paul pointed that out. “They were nice folks. Would have been good to say a proper goodbye.” Then he craned his neck, looking at their car, and said, “What the fuck?”

  Paul set his box of groceries down in the gravel and pulled the folded sheet of paper from underneath their windshield wiper. He unfolded it.

  “It’s a map,” he said, and held it up. “Scout Tourist Region.” James checked it out. The lake was a maze of inlets and islands. It suggested the shape of a horse with a rider. Kind of like an old time scout, Paul thought. There was a big X on one of the islands, toward the western end. The highway was at the east. There was a note in a spot of clear water, written using the same thick pencil as the X.

  GREAT MEETING YOU 2! WHY DONT YOU JOIN US AT THE Y? BRING A BEDROLL & THOSE PRETTY KAYAKS—JUST SHOW UP & WE TAKE CARE OF THE REST! XOX YR HWY 11 FRIENDS STAN & NANC

  #

  The whiskey in the coffee made James too sleepy to drive and Paul couldn’t say he was in any better shape, so they found a little roadside motel twenty-odd kilometers on, and sacked out for the night.

  When they settled in, Paul opened up the map on the pine-covered breakfast table and did finger measurements. “Shit,” he said. “That’s about twelve kilometers in.”

  “Give or take a thumb,” said James. “You’re not seriously thinking about this?”

  “Scout Lake’s a lot closer than Quebec. Just another hour up the highway, the way you drive.”

  That drew a playful slap, and James bent over the map, made Paul show him what the route would be. He commented that it looked like a pretty run, but he counted more than twelve kilometers.

  “But that’s not here nor there,” said James. “Fact is, that’s a long way in. And we don’t know these people.”

  “Sure we do. Stanley worked in natural resources. Nancy... worked in newspapers or something. They carry open liquor in the cab of their truck.”

  “They pick up glowing men on the highway.”

  “I’d pick up glowing men on the highway. So would you.”

  “That’s why we’re together.”

  They laughed, but James wondered about that: whether they might just be old-school swingers with a dose of bi-curiosity. “I don’t want to go there just to find we have to sponge bath old Stan while Nancy watches on the webcam,” he said. Paul thought about that, and agreed: Yeah, it’s possible. But he didn’t take that impression from those two, and cornered on the subject, James admitted that he didn’t either. They both took another look at the map.

  Depending on the wind, they agreed that, twelve kilometers or fourteen, they could probably make the run in under four hours. Just to be on the safe side, they’d pack some food and a tent—the camp stove—the first aid kit—and the rifle. They could camp out on an island, if it turned out they had to.

  #

  The map showed the marina as being right on the highway’s edge, but that wasn’t how it played out. There was a little sign on the side of the road with an arrow pointing to a long dirt road, which first wound through bush, then dropped on a steep slope between high rounded rocks. Here and there, the dirt road passed a driveway that climbed those hills—and sometimes, Paul could peer up and see parts of houses poking out of the trees overhead. Twice, they had to deal with oncoming traffic: pickup trucks that appeared in front of them with terrifying suddenness and speed.

  But they made it. The rocks and trees finally spread, and the marina appeared, in a little natural harbour rimmed with low cliffs and right across from a pair of knuckly little islands. There was a place to park, and a boat launch, and a couple of long docks with outboard motor boats tied up. There was even a little general store that sold wine by the box.

  It wasn’t an hour before they were in the lake and paddling over still waters, to the sweet space between those first two islands.

  #

  After two hours on the lake, they stopped on a little island that seemed to have been furnished for the purpose—with a firepit and a weathered wooden bench for fish cleaning—a box with a toilet seat on it that was not, as it developed, a proper chemical toilet.

  The wind was picking up, and they were paddling into it. As they chewed on cold cuts and breakfast bars, James and Paul looked at their maps, and revised their estimated arrival time. Paul wished they could call ahead to say they were coming later—but as James reminded him, Stan and Nancy left no phone number on the map. Just the pencilled-in X.

  After lunch, they crossed from the horse’s tail to the wide expanse of Scout Lake’s belly. Here, the winds were fierce. They moved along the shore, taking shelter in tiny inlets where water lilies grew.

  A front blew in from the east and rain came and went, as they crossed the horse’s hind legs. This time, they didn’t take shelter, and the rain soaked them. The sun came out, and the wind died back, and they poached in their wet clothes as they pus
hed along low rock faces and cliffs.

  “Not far now!” shouted James, and Paul laughed, and James said, “Wow.”

  “What?” Paul shouted. They were maybe forty feet apart, drifting a moment in the stilled water.

  James pointed with his paddle, ahead of them. They were coming onto a promontory—a long tongue of rock and dirt, where a patch of tall, brambled branches—you wouldn’t call them trees—clustered. Although it was the height of the summer, their twisted limbs had no leaves. At every crook in the branches, they could see a black speck.

  The two kayaks drifted nearer one another as they watched. “Birds,” Paul opined, and James added that there were “a fuck of a lot of birds.” They dipped paddle and pushed nearer, and although they were as quiet as kayakers could be, before long it was clear they’d set off some sort of alarm. Black wings cut across the water and long sine waves of black-bodied birds emerged from the water. One snaked directly over James’ boat, and Paul looked closer and said: “Cormorants!”

  They both had a vague idea of what cormorants looked like. There had been a colony of the birds in the city, on some parkland near the lake. The birds were ugly up close, and they ate too much fish, and their shit killed trees, and there’d been a hand-wringing debate about whether to kill them off to save the waterfront and a long segment on the CBC with some breathtaking pictures.

  But what did James and Paul know about cormorants, really?

  They lifted their paddles from the water and sat still, watching as more of the birds took flight, spun off in lines around them—circling, as if the birds were watching them, making sure they didn’t tarry too close. Protecting their nests... their families.

  Paul wondered about adopting.

  “Where did that come from?” asked James—they hadn’t talked about having kids, not really—and Paul shrugged.

  “It’s the future,” he said. “It’d be nice, having a son. In the future.”

  A cloud thinned, and the sun came pale and yellow through it.

  “A son?”

  “Or a daughter. But if we get to pick—”

  “—a son.” James considered. “We’d need a bigger place,” he said.

  Paul thought their place was fine for raising a boy. There were three bedrooms and there could be one for the two of them, another one for the office, and a third for the boy. The place was small and there wasn’t much of a yard—but it wasn’t much of a hardship, surely it couldn’t be much of a hardship.

  Paul didn’t say any of that, though. He looked back at the shore, watched as the birds returned to their perches—to the bare soil and rock there. They had shapes like vases, standing upright.

  James dipped a paddle into the water and started to turn his kayak about. “We should keep moving,” he said, and Paul agreed. They both turned the boats away from the colony, and continued further along the shore of the lake.

  It was only when they were far away from the birds and their squawks and their black, jagged-looking wingspans, that it occurred to either of them: what a stench the colony carried. It was the foulest thing either of them had ever smelled.

  Although neither remarked on it, both of them thought it stank of death.

  #

  The sun came out past the noon hour, and all the clouds vanished, and the lake grew quite warm indeed. James stripped off his fleece, and lashed it to the front of the kayak. Paul kept his on just a little longer, and pulled off his and his shirt too, and strapped his lifejacket back on over bare skin.

  “Okay,” said Paul, “you win. No boy right now.”

  “I didn’t say we shouldn’t.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  They laughed, and Paul asked: “Where are we on the map?”

  James fumbled for the paper.

  He’d stuffed it in his fleece jacket’s pocket, which was lashed to the front of the boat. He raised up, and leaned forward—and took hold of the cloth. The kayak seemed to wriggle as he did so.

  Paul thought: Oh shit, just as James thought the same. And all at once, the kayak tilted.

  James threw himself back, slapped at the water with the flat of his paddle, and tried to twist his shoulders away from the tilt, reclaim his centre of gravity. It was no good. He started to pinwheel the oar, as though he thought he might paddle through air the same as water.

  The kayak pitched over. James shouted, maybe screamed, and splashed into the water as the kayak pitched the rest of the way.

  #

  It was very still, and hot. The two dry bags that were lashed to the kayak came loose, and bobbed up, one at a time, alongside the kayak’s sky-blue hull. James’ fleece spread just beneath the water, like a torso-shaped oil slick.

  Paul called out James’ name: first in the quit-fucking-around tone that James had used the day before, on the highway, when Paul was trying to prop his ass on the edge of the door.

  Except for the ripples radiating out from the dry bags, the kayak, the water was a looking glass.

  “James!”

  Paul shattered that glass with his paddle and drew himself closer to James’ still kayak. There had been no struggling, no bubbles, still, as there would have been, if James had pulled himself free of the cockpit, or even if he were trying.

  When Paul got close enough, he slid the paddle underneath the hull, where James would be. He might be able to catch hold of it—use it as leverage to pull himself up again, pull himself out. To safety.

  Paul didn’t let himself consider certain matters: there was no sign of his husband underneath the boat. Even if he were sitting as still as he could, inverted in the kayak, there would have to be some sign of it on the surface: some small stream of bubbles. But how could he be sitting still, under the lake in an inverted kayak? Why would he be sitting still, fully conscious, aware of the fact that he only had so much air, and not struggle to right the kayak—to get out and save himself, before his air ran out and he drowned?

  The paddle cut through empty water, and clunked against the plastic gunwales of the little boat, rocking it easily in the water, and this forced Paul to consider: nothing was underneath the boat.

  James was not under the boat. He was not, in fact, anywhere.

  #

  A dozen cormorants flew so low their feet trailed in the water. They came close to Paul—so close he might have caught one with the blade of his paddle. But he kept still, watched them until they passed, then returned to the water, which he regarded with empty fascination. The air grew cool as the sun fell beneath the line of trees. Insects buzzed in his ear as James’ kayak drifted off, the dry bags scattering in their own directions.

  As the first star emerged—probably not a star at all, but a planet, maybe Jupiter—in a deepened sky—Paul drew a breath.

  He thought it might have been his first.

  #

  He dipped his paddle into the water, and drew it to the kayak’s bow, and slid backward through the dark water. There was no moon. There were stars, scattering thick across the middle of the sky, but they weren’t enough. They left the world black.

  He paddled backward twice more, and turned himself in another direction—by how much, he couldn’t tell—and proceeded. James was gone. The dry bags, the kayak—he left them all.

  The night air was cool and numbing, and he warmed himself with exertion—paddling harder and driving the kayak faster across the lake. The water was still as it had been in the afternoon, and the stars reflected in it, dully, stretching infinity below him.

  And Paul shut his eyes against even the pale light of the twinning stars, and thought: It’s just me now.

  #

  Did he sleep?

  He must have, for when he opened his eyes, it was to a bloody red dawn. The air was hot, and mist rose off the water and swirled about him. He was near a shore, but not one he recognized—this was high, round rock, topped with trees that looked to have been denuded by fire. Nearer the waterline, sharp stumps and rocks like broken teeth rose out of the mist. In their mi
dst... a dock lolled, like a grey and splintered tongue, from the base of the rock.

  He guided the kayak through the rock and wood, until its tip touched the wood. A moment later, he was stretched on the dock, pulling the kinks from his legs.

  He lay back, and looked up the rock-face. It was a strange place to put a dock, for there was no easy way to get up the rock face; it was nearly sheer here, and a good 20 feet up to the remainder of the woods, branches peeking over the lip of the cliff like an untrimmed brow. He felt a smile grow on his face.

  And he thought again: I am alone.

  His smile wavered. He sat up. Looked out through the mist. Its slow swirl fascinated him, and he cocked his head to watch it turn and bend, and as he watched, his smile vanished, as thoughts of speeding down a highway—hanging out the car window, feeling the wind... laughing, with him...

  He bent his head away from the lake, and shut his eyes, and tensed, as a part of him fought... fought to return, to remember. He was having a difficult time remembering, anything really.

  He gripped his own thighs, and rocked, and his lips struggled with the word, with the name of what he’d lost...

  ... of what he’d come for...

  He opened his eyes, and stood on the dock. The kayak, he saw, was starting to drift off—so he bent over, and reached with his foot. He dragged it back, and took a breath, and put it together, and said it aloud: