Talking at the Woodpile

by David Thompson

  He invited me in for coffee. His one-room cabin was neatly organized with bookshelves on the walls, a colourful patchwork quilt on the bed and a table in the middle of the room covered by a worn oilcloth. A large window above the sink allowed the bright sun to light up the room. In the middle of the table sat the white skull of a grizzly. Its impressive incisors hung over each side of the bottom jaw, touching the table.

  “Interesting centrepiece,” I said. “What’s the story behind that?”

  Arnold didn’t answer right away but said, “Hold on a second. I’ll make coffee and tell you.”

  Arnold was about sixty years old. He had close-cropped grey hair, and stubble covered his creased face. His woollen shirt and pants with suspenders were clean but worn. His appearance, like his home, was typical for a bachelor miner.

  Arnold set a cup of coffee and a plate of Oreo cookies—my favourites—in front of me.

  He picked up the skull and handed it to me. “That, my boy, is a grizzly I shot on the front lawn outside this cabin about thirty years ago.”

  Bingo, I thought. I’d hit the motherlode of stories.

  I never let on that I knew about the bear, and Arnold spun the tale almost exactly as my father had told it to me. It was interesting to hear it from the man who was there.

  I didn’t want to confront him directly about the supposed accident that took the life of his partner, so I casually asked, “After you and your partner split over the bear, did you take on anyone else?”

  “I told the RCMP everything about that.”

  I thought it was an odd response. We talked a bit more, and after thanking him for the story, I left. I walked around town, took a few pictures and said hello once again to the old lady in her garden. She never even looked up this time.

  As I walked toward the store to pick up the Rambler, I saw Alice, Bob and Arnold standing on the timber loading dock. Alice was standing between Arnold and Bob. She had her back to Arnold and her arms held out as if protecting him. They were deep in a heated argument.

  As I approached, Alice was saying, “Stop it, Bob. You have it all wrong.”

  They heard me coming, and all three looked my way and immediately stopped. Alice stepped away from Arnold and straightened her smock. I didn’t say a word but got into the car and drove to the gas pumps. Bob came over muttering curses.

  “Good afternoon,” I said.

  “Noon,” he said. He pumped the gas and ignored me.

  I figured that if I became a citizen of Keno City and lived there the rest of my life, Bob and his curly-haired wife would never speak two words to me again.

  I camped out another night in the gravel pit and finished up my notes for Arnold’s bear story. I wanted a picture of Arnold with the skull, so I drove over about eight o’clock in the morning and knocked on the door. It opened immediately, and Arnold stood there unsteadily. His hair was messed, and his eyes were bloodshot and jaundiced. I could smell liquor.

  “Morn, Arnold,” I said, thinking I might as well use the local dialect.

  “Morn,” he said, rubbing the top of his head.

  “Can I take a picture of you and the skull for a story?” I asked.

  “Sure, hang on a sec while I get my slippers,” he said and went back inside, closing the door partway behind him. I heard a woman’s voice, and then Arnold said, “It’s the young guy from Dawson.”

  He brought the skull outside, closing the door behind him. He stood on the boardwalk, flanked by the gardens, and held it waist high. I snapped three pictures, shook his hand and left.

  I hung around until the evening, then drove back to Dawson. I slowed down at the Mayo turnoff to see if anyone was hitching a ride, but no one was. I stopped at the Stewart Bridge and walked down to where I thought the hitchhikers must have found the beer. The water was clear and swift. I could see why someone would want to cool beer in it. I looked around but couldn’t see if more was stashed. If I had found beer, I wouldn’t have drunk it but would have left it for the owner.

  As I stood on the rocks near the waterline, I looked up and saw a body floating face down with its arms and legs outstretched. The man wore blue jeans and a white shirt, and one shoe was missing. The body bobbed along the surface with the current. In an instant it was under the bridge and out of sight. I couldn’t believe I’d really seen it, so I ran up the bank and across the road to watch it float away.

  I sat down on the guardrail with my back to the river. The question was what to do. I could walk across the bridge and tell the people at the Stewart Crossing Lodge, and they would call the police. Then those poor overworked and underpaid devils would have to drop everything, recruit help, load their boat and patrol miles and miles of the river for God knows how many days and still find nothing; everyone would expect it of them, and there would be hell to pay if they didn’t do it. Or I could do nothing and let the rivers give up their dead, as they historically do, on a sandbar below Forty Mile.

  I thought for a moment, and with a clear conscious, chose the latter. I was confident in my father’s belief that everything in this universe will come to light, even to the extent of a mustard seed, and I thought surely that’s true for a dead man floating down the Yukon River.

  When I got home, I said nothing of the body. I focussed on my writing. I was pleased that I’d gotten Arnold’s story, and when I read it to my dad, he said, “That’s it, all right.”

  The accuracy of my father’s original reporting impressed me.

  My mother took her car shopping, and when she got back, she asked, “Tobias, why does my car smell of beer?”

  One evening a month after I returned from Keno, my father was sitting at the table reading a newspaper as my mother prepared food at the kitchen sink. My father put his paper down and took the pipe from his mouth.

  “They found a body,” he said.

  “Below Forty Mile. It was hung up on a sandbar,” Mom said. “They were talking about it at the grocery store.”

  “They had trouble identifying it because of the wrong name tag on the clothing,” Dad said.

  “It was that poor grocer from Keno, you know the one with the little store?” Mom said. “His name was Bob something or other.”

  “Bob Harmond,” I said as I poured a glass of milk.

  “You knew him?” My mother asked.

  “Well, I didn’t exactly know him,” I said, “but I met him and his lovely wife.”

  “Apparently a grizzly got him,” Mom said and grimaced in sympathetic pain. “It bit his head really hard.”

  “Yeah, of all things. One of the bear’s teeth was embedded in his skull. Must have been an old bear,” Dad said. “The RCMP are saying it’s the oddest thing.”

  “No one has ever seen anything like it,” Mom said.

  I’d just taken a mouthful of milk when I remembered Arnold and the pictures I had taken. I choked, and milk sprayed out both nostrils and my mouth. Coughing and spitting, I stood over the sink and washed my face and hands. My mother grabbed a cloth and wiped the fridge door, countertop and floor.

  “You have to be more careful and drink slowly, Tobias. One of these days you’re going to choke to death,” she said.

  I excused myself and hurried to my room, where I tore out the file for Keno City and rifled through the papers and pictures. There was Arnold standing in front of the cabin, looking half-asleep and holding the skull. The left incisor was clearly missing. I looked at Arnold’s smile, and I knew where that tooth had gone.

  I never told anyone. I had bouts of paranoia with my depression. It shook my confidence, and sometimes I questioned my own reasoning.

  I went to Keno again to try to interview that old lady in her rhubarb patch but I missed her again. For some reason she stuck in my mind; I knew she had a story to tell. I slowed down at Mayo and Stewart to look for hitchhikers but I didn’t see any.

  The store was now managed by Alice. She was happy as a lark and looked twenty years younger. She’d changed her eye makeup and lost weight and
actually looked pretty. Arnold was helping her out. He’d gained weight and now shaved every day.

  “Good morning,” they said.

  They offered me coffee at Arnold’s cabin. A Chinese inscribed sugar bowl sat where the skull once did. When Arnold saw me looking at it, he gave me that smile again.

  Brian’s Epiphany

  I drove over to Brian’s house on a sunny Saturday morning. He’d been acting a little strangely, and I wanted to make sure he and Maude were all right.

  Maude answered the door in her housecoat, then yawned and stretched. “He’s out somewhere. Maybe he’s walking Miami down at the river.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to leave.

  “He’s upset and acting real serious about something,” she called after me. Slowly she stepped back inside the house, closing the door.

  I wound my way through the tall stands of willows along the shore and found him sitting by the water’s edge. Maude was right, he looked tired. He was throwing sticks for her small white poodle to fetch.

  I sat down beside him. “I came down to see how you were doing. Maude says you might be upset about something.”

  Holding his head in his hands, he ignored Miami. The little dog stood in front of him stomping her feet, eagerly waiting for him to throw the stick again.

  “I might be totally wrong about this alien thing. In fact, I know I am. There is no doubt about it. All I have ever done was look for the truth and I think I got off track.” He stared off in the distance as if looking for an answer.

  “Really?” I never thought I’d hear him say this.

  Brian plucked pieces of grass and threw them in the direction of the river. The wind blew them back. Miami tried to catch them both coming and going, jumping up and snapping her teeth in the air.

  “The conference attracted hundreds of people, but what did we prove? The dance and banquet were fun, and we made loads of money, but some of those people were just plain nuts.” He threw his hands in the air and shook his head. “Their theories were so convoluted they came across as being weird. That Madame Merch should never have been allowed into the country. I’m embarrassed I associated with them.”

  “I didn’t see any brilliant truths discovered either. In fact, to be honest, Brian, I thought it was a load of garbage,” I said.

  Miami barked as if in agreement.

  “Thanks, Tobias—and Miami. I knew I could count on you to tell the truth.” He didn’t sound too happy about it and pulled grass with more determination. “The truth is, I was like a mad scientist in a science fiction movie. I invented everything. There were no facts. You sat there—you heard what Joseph Copper had to say. I listened to every word, and to tell you the truth, he was right. We are acting like a bunch of crazies.”

  “But Joseph didn’t say it in a mean way.”

  “I know, but sometimes the truth hurts,” Brian said. “When I was young, I devoted all my energies to the aliens. I was influenced by my friend Gregg, a real Lex Luthor egghead. I think he eventually went to jail for impersonating royalty in Europe. He called himself the Duke of Earl after the pop song. A real original, he was. He was convinced that aliens had opened trapdoors on their spaceships and unloaded surplus DNA into the primeval soup, and from that, man evolved. It fascinated me to think that aliens were involved in our creation. It explained everything so easily—the Egyptian pyramids, the Bermuda Triangle, the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, the Abominable Snowman, Albert Einstein and Jerry Lewis. Why didn’t I listen to my parents and stay away from that guy?”

  “Jerry Lewis?”

  “No, Gregg.”

  “Amelia Earhart, eh? You figured she was kidnapped by aliens? I’m a great fan of hers. I love her,” I said.

  Brian looked at me. “Sometimes, Tobias, the line between truth and fiction still gets a little blurry, don’t you think? Help me out. I’m trying to get some clarity here.”

  “Okay,” I said, my cheeks burning a little for having slipped back into the world of aliens.

  “Last night I reached across the dinner table and took Maude’s hand. I asked her, ‘Honey sugar, you’re not really an alien, are you?’ Do you know what she said, Tobias?”

  “No.”

  “She said, ‘No dear, now eat your salad. It’s good for you.’ She didn’t even blink an eye—just went on cutting her steak. I’m so embarrassed. How could I carry on like that? How crazy is it that you think your wife is an alien? Eh? Tobias, how crazy is that?”

  I didn’t answer, because it was really crazy, and I didn’t want to make him feel any worse than he already did. I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking his wife was an alien. I expected to be married someday, and I made a vow to never think my wife was an alien.

  “Well, it must have made for an interesting relationship,” I said.

  “I thought her home was the planet Yammy in the distant A1689-ZD1 galaxy.” His cheeks went red. “Boy, was I off.”

  Trying to make a joke of it, I said, “Yeah, you were way off. She is actually from the planet Zammy in the A1689-ZD1 galaxy.”

  That seemed to cheer him up. When he laughed, he seemed like the old Brian again.

  “The planet Yammy—where does stuff like that come from?” I asked.

  “I made it up. Imagined every bit of it,” he tapped himself on the head with his index finger. “I convinced myself it was all very scientific, but it’s all fiction—except for the one-legged raven and three-legged dog, of course. That’s true.”

  “Of course,” I said, “and the line between truth and fiction just got blurred again, Brian.”

  Over the next few months, Brian carried his space library out to the garage and dumped everything in a corner. A few times I helped him pack the boxes of files out of the house. Maude had a smile for every trip he took. “Now I can put up family pictures,” she said. She took stacks of pictures out of storage boxes and covered the walls with many generations of her relatives and friends.

  “Brian, honey, I never realized until I saw these pictures again just how much I miss my folks back home. We have to make plans to visit them real soon. We could load up the Winnebago, and the three of us will just go.” She was sitting on the couch holding a picture of her mother, and her eyes looked damp.

  I was glad this was over. I’d always thought the belief in aliens was immature and showed that people weren’t really thinking the whole thing through. It made for interesting stories, but the nagging thought of the folly of it all was always in the back of my mind.

  Brian eventually burned his Roswell files and numerous boxes in the wood stove. The rest we piled high in the back of his pickup truck and drove to the city dump at the north end of town. Brian backed the truck to the water’s edge, and we shovelled everything directly into the Yukon River. He stood on the tailgate watching the boxes float downstream.

  “There goes my life, Tobias,” he said raising a hand in a mock toast. “Here’s to a new one, whatever that might be.”

  I couldn’t even imagine what might come next.

  Brian and Winch stopped seeing each other. Winch had enjoyed the status of working with Brian, but without him, he had no choice but to abandon the alien cause.

  “Enough of that idiot stuff,” he told me one day at the garage.

  This pleased everyone at Rock Creek immensely, and the Halloos’ family relationships started to fall back into place. OP and Clutch always seemed to be laughing. They were happy now that they had their brother back. They gleefully slapped each other on the back, thinking that they had something to do with it.

  “I told you those questions we asked at the convention would help bring Winch to his senses,” Clutch announced to anyone who would listen.

  “Your questions were just as stupid as the answers,” Uncle Zak said, but Clutch and OP didn’t listen.

  Two weeks after the reuniting, the Halloos organized a big, smoky barbecue to celebrate Winch’s homecoming. Many folks turned out, drawn by the promise of a barbecued pig.

  After
dinner, people watched in horror as the three brothers leaped arm in arm across the blazing bonfire in a ritual of unity, only to stumble and crash back onto the burning logs. A cloud of sparks and smoke leaped high into the overhanging trees. With their hair, beards and clothing singed or on fire, the three men bolted for the river, still locked arm in arm and laughing their fool heads off. Patches of flames and smoke streamed off their backs as they threw themselves into the water before there was any serious damage.

  “You’re ruining your clothes!” Stella yelled as she ran after them down to the river.

  Winch pulled her in, sputtering and laughing. Others dived in and joined the thrashing and splashing. Then, in a chorus from the water, the brothers started hollering over and over at the top of their lungs, “Yahoo hullabaloo Halloo! Yahoo hullabaloo Halloo!” as if it was a national anthem. The women who came near were pulled into the water, and soon kids and dogs joined in the fray.

  I took a few pictures of it all. I was glad things had gotten back to normal—for the Halloos—and there seemed no permanent harm to the family relationships.

  As the months went by, I saw less of Brian. He went from home to work, then back again. His life had toned down dramatically.

  He did confide in me. “Tobias, you know how some men have women on their mind? Well, I have something on mine, and it’s causing me a lot of concern.”

  A shiver went through my body. My God, I thought, Brian is stepping out on Maude. She and that dog will kill him.

  I was greatly relieved when he said, “I’ve been reading the Bible, Tobias, but I can’t say I understand it, especially Revelations and the Old Testament.”

  “I tried reading Revelations when I was about twelve,” I said, “but all the stuff about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the destruction of the world scared me.”

  “I found a Quran in the library and took it out. It’s interesting and understandable if you study it along with Islamic history. And Joshua gave me a Baha’i book called The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, which refers to Sufi poetry,” he said.

  “I don’t know much about any of that but I agree it’s interesting,” I said. “To tell the truth, I’ve had an interest in the Eastern world since I was young but never pursued it.”