by Peter Unwin
Passing beyond the Sibley Pennisula, if in fact the float direction was counter-clockwise, he would bump into the old voyageur stomping joints from Pigeon River to Grand Marais. There he would stop to give impromptu readings to the gulls and the sumac trees and whatever else remained that possessed an interest in text-based matters.
DURING THE COURSE OF these arrangements Petro had lapsed into an increasingly gloomy mood. He had realized, thanks to me, that even seasoned ocean-going mariners considered Lake Superior, after the Cape of Good Hope, the most dangerous body of water on the planet. He had gone so far as to cultivate what he seemed to think was a seaman’s moustache and for the last several days his head remained stuck in a stack of second-hand sea yarns by Joseph Conrad. He’d even begun to sound like the guy.
“The sea, Jack …” It was the day before launch and he let forth a funnel of smoke and revealed the barest hint of what he seemed to think was a Polish accent but which to me sounded Lithuanian. We were sitting in the front seat of the car sharing a few joints and a quart of cold milk, watching eighteen-wheel freighters downbound from the prairies. “Don’t get me wrong, Jack, I’ve known the sea too long to entertain any notion of its fundamental respect for decency.” He shook his head. “I know its roaring lusts, the depths. Aye, the sea tragic, the sea comic. The sea …” He paused on a half-smoked joint, then looked at me with his ravaged and childlike face. “The sea has its horrors, Jack, its peculiar scandals, its passions and dark perversions. It’s like you and me that way only it’s a great big mother of an unforgiving wetness. It can blot you out. It can suck you up and spit you out faster than a —” He struggled for the word here. “An acquisitions editor,” he tried.
“Let’s not go there, Petro.”
“You’re right.”
Petro stared out the window at the dark blue water of Superior fingering its way into the crevices at the bottom of the cliff, frothing there before getting sucked back out. On the horizon the water shone solid white. “Is it true she doesn’t give up her dead? You always hear that.”
Petro was surrendering to an old instinct to feminize water, and I thought that given his history this was not such a good idea.
I nodded.
“Jealous, is she?”
“Not jealous. Cold. You don’t rot properly. Your flesh, I mean, it doesn’t putrefy in accordance with the universal laws of putrefaction. It’s actually too cold for the maggots to breed in your intestines. You don’t bubble up the way a properly drowned person bubbles up.”
“Bubbles up?”
“No gaseous eruptions beneath the skin. Almost none.”
“Jesus, Jack. Gaseous eruptions beneath the skin?”
“It’s true. Too cold for your flesh to bubble so instead of floating up to the top, you sink to the bottom. Perfectly preserved, well, not perfect, you get all white and blue and waxy and stuff, but you don’t bloat. I mean maybe you bloat a little bit, but not enough to float you up to the top. You end up bumping around with the rest of them down there. It’s like being at the Press Club at a free bar.”
“That’s good to know, Jack, really.” Petro conjured another joint from behind his ear and gulped it down. “Shelley loved the water. You know that. Crazy about it. Boats water women drugs. Small animals. Things like that. He was a man whose name was writ on water.”
“Keats,” I said, “that was Keats.”
“Oh. Yeah, I knew that.” Petro cleared his throat:
“We have scarcely time to tell thee
Of the strange and gifted Shelley
Kind-hearted man but ill-fated
So youthful, drowned and cremated.”
He loosed a mushroom cloud of smoke and became for a moment what Shelley might have been had he preferred Canadian marijuana to Chinese opium and trained with a boom box and a drum machine instead of Greek and Latin. Petro started in, unsteadily at first, then gaining speed:
“Yeah, oh yeah, the skaa of yeah, out heah
where the fiercest war among the waves is calm,
the balm of war is found unbound, Promethean man
in the rock and sand,
lovers we go hand in hand
to pay the man,
a billion
bucks
we pay the man,
we pay the scam
that’s who we am, the de-pearled clam
no eggs and ham, just pay the man
he gets the green he gets the ham
me and you we get the slam
the waves that slam the unfathomable stream,
the beatniks they still make the scene
the Big Hair Poets who sing obscene and curl up tight in
their banker’s dream, their dreams unclean,
out here where the flood’s enormous volume fell
straight from hell
the body in a sack, I tell you Jack,
despite the endless miracle of ass and tit,
the world I love
has gone to shit.”
He stopped keeping time on his knee, exhaled and grimly fixed his eyes on the dark surface of Lake Superior. “How many people drowned out there?”
“Counting Indians?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean counting Indians, or not?”
“Why wouldn’t you count Indians?”
“I don’t know. They never do.”
“Who?”
“Who what?”
“Who never counts Indians?”
“You know, the people who count things. Historians or whatever they’re called. It’s always, like, lost with all the hands the Chicora, lost with all hands the Hamonic, lost with all hands the Edmund Fitzgerald. It’s never, like, lost with all hands, birch bark canoe northbound with seven Chippewa kids, three adults, and a dog. Never, it’s always, you know, the Plymouth, lost with all hands, the James Carruthers, lost —”
“Okay,” said Petro. “I get it. You could write a book.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Me?” I looked at him. “Would you roll down the window? It’s getting a little smoky in here.”
Petro rolled down the window. “Ten thousand drowned people,” he said. “And they don’t rot? They’re still floating around out there? Ten thousand dead people bumping into each other?”
“Yes.”
“What about the fish?”
“What about the fish?”
“They don’t chomp on them? Take a bite out every now and then? Nibble their eyeballs, gnaw their lips off? The tip of the penis maybe?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
Petro went silent.
“They ate Shelley’s face right off, Jack. Right off the bone. The bastards.”
“Who did?”
“The fish.”
“Yeah, I read that somewhere.”
“He was a good-looking guy until that happened. Washed up rotted in the Gulf of Spezia without a face. Imagine that.”
Petro tentatively touched his face with the fingers of both hands, exploring what he might look like in the event that it was eaten away by fish.
THE WORLD’S FIRST AND ONLY attempt to circumnavigate Lake Superior in an inner tube took place at twelve noon at the wharf at Rossport, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Superior. In an attempt to reboot Petro’s status I had written indiscreet media releases in which I may have implied that Petronius Totem had co-authored the Old Testament or at least written the screenplay. It was a measure of Petro’s fading celebrity value following the Road Book/Book Road fiasco that the media scrum I’d tried to organize consisted of a seventeen-year-old intern from the Terrace Bay Tattle, a part-time radio reporter from CBC Thunder Bay, and a glassy-eyed woman who claimed to be a human rights observer for an Anti-Sealing Organization. It did not help that behind the wharf a crew of construction workers pounded away on the foundations of a new Leggit cybernetic takeout chicken kiosk. A banner stretched over top proclaimed:
Get Ready for It:
> Downloadable Sweet & Cyber Chicken Balls
Taste the Future.
Petro was not entirely sober for the event, nor was his fly done up to the level that one usually expects a man’s fly to be done up. Gamely, he gave a fractured speech about the importance of a continuous iconoclastic Canadian narrative that began with the Iroquois Book of Rites and ended — it was not clear exactly where it ended. Petro fell off the wharf before he finished and was hauled out of the water by myself and two grizzled locals who were waiting for fish and chip dinners on the wharf beside the Rossport fish and chip shack. Both of them looked a healthy two hundred years old and were mightily amused. They seemed to have done this sort of thing before.
“You boys from Toronto?” one of them asked.
“Hamilton,” I said, grimly. I don’t think he believed me.
Shortly after noon Petro officially drifted off from the Rossport wharf wearing a wetsuit and a ridiculous grin, and fitted snugly into an inner tube. On Petro’s feet were attached a pair of flippers, and by kicking he was able to power himself away from the dock. As he drifted away he threw up both fists, like a rock star, and pointed triumphantly to the horizon beyond Slate Islands. “See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!” he cried. It was a familiar cry with him. In that very moment a streak of what looked like blood stigmatized itself on the blue veneer of the sky and seemed to point Petro to his destiny.
Like the ten thousand tragic sailors of old, not counting Indians, he sailed out through the gap between two small weathered islands. As I watched him drift into his oblivion I sensed that the sea tossed tempest of his own slings and arrows was about to get him thoroughly whipped and cracked again.
After a few minutes of lusty strokes with his legs Petro became minuscule on the great water. I looked around, hopeful that Elaine might appear. But she was noticeably keeping her distance. She had made it a rule to boycott Petronius and was quite possibly preparing to apply the same rule to me. At that point in time I had not yet aimed the video camera at the catastrophic young breasts of Maddy’s ballet instructor. But that day was coming. We were already on the way out, me and Elaine, and as I watched Petro drift helplessly beyond Slate Islands I knew he was on the way out too.
9.2
WASHED UP
AT SEVENTEEN HUNDRED HOURS on that same morning, the US marine weather bureau in L’Anse, Michigan, issued its first weather advisory of the day. Meteorologists tracking moderate to brisk winds in the Mississippi Valley issued their first storm warnings some fifteen minutes before Petro’s wobbly launch on the other side of Superior. By the time of their second warning Petro had drifted beyond Slate Islands and was sucking on a bottle of Canadian rye inserted upside down into his IV pole and draining into his mouth through four feet of household aquarium tubing.
The third warning instructed motorists on the Mackinac Bridge to be on the lookout for water coming over the ramparts. An hour later the bridge was closed.
I knew none of this. I’m not a meteorologist or a weatherman or even a very astute observer of nature. I understand that hot and cold sometimes collide, and not just in bedrooms and locked saunas, but out there in the cosmos. I also know that when that happens there are consequences that are not always orgasmic. There are consequences that result in restraining orders and confused policemen standing in doors and triumphantly nasty words hurled into the faces of those that we once loved almost to death. Sprigs of lightning penetrate the world. Ships go down, doors are slammed, chief executive officers are pardoned, half-continents are hacked away by tsunami or cyclone. Children are hauled from the family home clutching their favourite stuffed toy and so on.
None of these catastrophes appeared possible on that day. A blue and marvellous sky, genie-like in its airiness, had settled on the north shore. Large birds, including a lone eagle, drifted up and out on the thermals. Mergansers huddled on the water. I’d been tracking Petro from the highway; he was just a dot on the seas, a bit of insignificant human flotsam. For a moment the rocks blocked the view, and when I pulled over to the side of the highway and aimed the binoculars, I managed to locate him some two hundred yards out, now sucking from the hookah we’d lashed to the inner tube next to the IV pole. Little puffs of white smoke followed him like doves. With regularity he disappeared into the trough of deep but gentle swells, coming out the other end with a Georges Simenon novel in his hand and one or more plastic tubes stuck into his mouth, his fishing rod dangling off over the side. As I watched he withdrew the liquor tube from his mouth, tossed the Georges Simenon novel over the side, and picked up the non-functioning bullhorn and began to address the sky with great gesticulations of hand, arm, and lips.
A half mile past an immense rock cut I stopped again and parked the car in a flattened patch of blueberries and waited on a rock slab. Petronius did not appear this time. Instead a few pigeons shot the escarpment like pellets. In the south, in the vicinity of Marquette, Michigan, I saw the first glimpse of dirty weather welling up on the horizon: a thin strip of black pressing close to the surface of the lake and advancing skyward to the north. When I glassed it I saw a dark tumour of storm und drang, and the flashing of lightning from inside it as it drew its ferocity across an otherwise stunning summer day. There was a tempest brewing over America; once again nature itself was winding up to throw a drunken American-style punch. A bank of obscenely white thunderheads stretched one above the other, jostling to take the juiciest suck out of the day. I flipped on the car radio and was met at once with a hard cough of static that choked and farted into silence.
By the time I drove back to the Sportsman Motel the rain was starting to cleave the air. More than cleave the air. Nature was getting shredded, nature was falling apart at the seams; birds skidded in reverse through a smoky dark sky. The gulls wheeled by only to be flung backward against the sky along with the dust, the popsicle wrappers, the discarded lottery tickets, and the shopping receipts. Out on the lake the water started to erupt skyward in boiling spires. On land the crowns of great trees tossed insanely among themselves, hissing and re-wrapping in grotesque windblown positions.
I managed to get the car parked in front of the yellow motel door with the number 17 screwed to it. By this time the potted geraniums that hung down from the porch roof were swinging like church sensors. Marbles of rain gouged into me, and bounced off the asphalt, pinging toward the road where they eventually rolled to a stop. The day had gone as dark as night. The End Time loomed. In the parking lot a full-sized trash can, bulging with garbage, began to advance in the wind, almost elegantly moon-dancing off toward the bush.
The vision of a moon-dancing trash can made me realize suddenly that my friend, the boy I knew as Pete Tidecaster, the boy with the gap between his teeth whose mother, when she was coherent, slid pizza-sized peanut butter cookies beneath our noses, was about to die. My colleague and coconspirator was drowning for real, in real time, in the real world where real things happen. Reality was taking it in the ear. Petronius was drowning in the drunk aloneness of his times, demented, yammering to no one, like those people on the TV news who say things no matter what.
The treetops hissed. The dark fell. I stepped through the door.
Maddy was on the other bed, fast asleep. Elaine stood in front of me in the middle of the room, looking dangerous, and marvellous, and slightly overweight. Did I mention that her eyes were green? They were still green.
“In all likelihood that little rinky-dink boyfriend of yours has already drowned. But in case he hasn’t you might consider phoning 911.”
She was right. Elaine was always right about such things. Even when she was wrong she was right. Suffering from the glum premonition that Petro was about to die in the black wilds of Gitche Gumee while reciting something arcane and incomprehensible from the mystical works of Cecco D’Ascoli, I went to the phone, punched the buttons.
I was met at once by the voice of an Institution-with-a-capital-I, a thin, papery voice from which all humanity had been long sq
ueezed. Not one drip was left.
“Please state the nature of your emergency.”
“Petronius Totem has gone missing,” I spoke grandly, breathlessly even.
“Who?”
“Petronius Totem.”
“Is that a rock band, sir?”
“No, ma’am. Petronius Totem. The author.”
“Pardon me?”
“The author.”
“Sir?”
“Author,” I said loudly. “One who writes books. Author.”
“There’s no need to shout, sir, I know what an author is.”
“Of course you do.”
“Ernest Buckler. Now there was an author. The Mountain and the Valley. That was a book.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I had a bad feeling about where this was going.
“This Pedro whatever-his-name-is, this foreigner? Is he an author the way Ernest Buckler was an author?”
“No, ma’am. Ernest Buckler was an anthropomorphic monumentalist who was not equipped to confront a world in which God is dead.”
“Excuse me?”
“Not just dead but in fact murdered, shot in the back of the head, and thrown into a mass grave at Katyn.”
There was a long silence.
“Or Srebrenica,” I continued, “or Sand Creek or Batoche, Potsdam, or Dresden or Maribor or Rumbala or Anatolia, or Wounded Knee or Sabra or Shatila or Rwanda or —”
“Sir, are you messing with me?”
