White Heat

by Melanie McGrath

  Much later that evening, after she'd finished checking her snowbie and packed for the morning, Edie finally sat down to watch The General. Of all the great comic movies of the silent screen, this was her favourite. There was something life-affirming in Buster Keaton's daring, the way he cheerfully launched himself off skyscrapers, dodged oncoming trains and ran into the path of runaway horses, brushing death off over and over again as though it had no more power over him than a light spring shower. Edie found that however many times she watched it, her pleasurable anticipation of the scenes ahead never dimmed.

  Time bypassed her altogether, so she had no idea how long she had been watching when there was a knock on the door. She knew at once that it must be one or other of the qalunaat — Inuit considered knocking an insult, an acknowledgement that the visit might not be wholly welcome — and shouted for whoever it was to come right in. An instant later, Andy Taylor's face appeared around the snow porch door, smelling of whisky, a can of Budweiser in his hand.

  'A word?'

  'Sure,' she said, keeping her eye on the screen, hoping that he'd pick up the message. 'Come in.'

  He stood before her, lank and anxious-seeming, a diamond stud twinkling in his right ear. He'd come to make his peace and wasn't sure how he'd be received.

  'You probably didn't expect to see me.'

  'No,' she said. She felt a little disgusted by him.

  'What are you after?' she asked.

  He took a long gulp of his beer and put the can down on the table. He seemed a little unsteady on his feet.

  'Like the man said, a documentary.'

  'Musk-ox shit.'

  'Fact is, I'm broke.' He shrugged his shoulders apologetically. 'Wagner's widow, that bitch, she refused to pay me.' Edie noticed that his fingernails were bitten to the nub. He seemed keyed, like a hunted thing. 'You think I'm a whore, I get it, but there's no high ground here, lady Look at you, playing at being an authentic Eskimo. You and me, we're both in the same game.'

  'Maybe,' Edie said. 'I don't care what your motivation is, but you behave with Joe out on the land the way you behaved with me a few weeks back, and you can be sure your career, or whatever it is you're doing here, is over.'

  'Three days,' he said, 'then I'm out of your hair.'

  She got to her feet and went to the door.

  'See you in the morning.'

  He took the hint, smiled as he passed her and went into the porch to put on his snow boots.

  When he'd gone, she picked up the can of Budweiser and shook it. The base of the can felt heavy and its contents swooshed softly, a sweet, hoppy swoosh. She went to the kitchen and poured the remains down the sink. At that moment she heard the door swing open and Joe came in. She hastily threw the empty can in the trash and covered it over before he could see it.

  'Been with your father?'

  Joe came through to the kitchen and opened the fridge. 'Uh huh. We checked over the snowbies, sorted the equipment out. I lent Andy one of my leisters so he can get some proper ice fishing in.'

  For the first time since the Felix Wagner affair, he seemed relaxed and happy. He didn't ask about the boot tracks leading up to the door and she didn't tell him. He needs this, she thought, a good, simple trip, no one dying on his watch.

  'Eat already?'

  'I guess,' he said. It was what he always said when he'd filled up on junk food at his father's house.

  'Listen,' she said. 'That skinny qalunaat? Be careful with him. He's slippery.'

  'Kigga,' he said, touching her nose with his finger. 'I'm all grown up now.'

  The next day the party left early and took the snowmobiles across the shore-fast ice ridge and the rim of ice heaves to the flat expanse of the year ice. By mid-morning the few thin ladders of low cloud had burned off, leaving the air clear and dry, perfect travelling weather.

  By mid-morning the travellers had split into two parties, Joe leading the way towards the west coast of Craig and

  Edie following the well-worn hunting paths across the ice dunes towards Fritjof in the east. Twice they stopped briefly to eat and drink hot tea, before setting out once more across the ice desert. Visibility remained superb throughout the afternoon and into the evening, illuminating the long, craggy outline of Taluritut, which southerners called Devon Island, to the south. As they travelled, Edie could hear Fairfax behind her, whooping like a child.

  In the sparkling light of the late High Arctic spring evening, they set up camp on the shore-fast ice, feasting on duck stew and oatcakes. For a while they watched the sun circling the horizon, exhausted.

  'Tell me something, Edie,' Fairfax began.

  'About what?'

  'Oh, I don't know, something about the Arctic.'

  Edie thought for a moment: how to begin? She flipped through her mental file of Arctic facts. 'Arctic rainbows are circles.'

  'That so?' Fairfax laughed, a great, relaxed, wide laugh, a different man from the one she met at the airstrip yesterday. 'I guess there's no pot of gold at the end, then.'

  'I guess not.'

  A pair of eiders flew by, lost maybe or just very early. All the migratory birds were coming in earlier now. Edie followed them with her eye until they disappeared in the faint gloaming that served both for twilight and dawn at this time of year.

  'Before I came up here the first time, I never understood why in God's name my great-great-grandfather kept returning to the north; the frostbite, snowblindness, living on frozen whale blood and ship's biscuit.'

  Edie half-listened to the white man, but her thoughts were with Joe. He and Taylor would have set camp on Craig by now. She imagined Joe fixing the white man's supper.

  Perhaps she'd overstated her case a little to Taylor last night, but that's how she was when it came to her stepson: a mother bear protecting her cub. Everything about Taylor told her not to trust him. On the other hand, Sammy and Joe were both right: it was time she put more trust in her boy. It seemed no time since she was helping him with his schoolwork but she had to accept he was twenty years old now. Plenty old enough to look after himself.

  'I guess you've read your ancestor's diaries, you know he was guided by Welatok.'

  'Sure, but they fell out. Sir James mentioned that in the penultimate diary, said if he was going to come again, he'd probably have to find another guide.'

  'Yes,' Edie said. 'I know.'

  'You do?' Fairfax looked puzzled.

  'Welatok was my great-great-great-grandfather.'

  'Ha, that right? Hey, we could include you in the doc,' Fairfax beamed. 'The descendant of Sir James Fairfax's guide, guiding the great-great-grandson of the great man himself.'

  Edie shook her head.

  Fairfax looked whipped. 'There'd be a fee in it for you.'

  Edie smiled blankly. Qalunaat just didn't get it. Wasn't it enough that she sold herself? What, she should sell her ancestors now, too?

  Fairfax sucked his teeth. 'Simeonie told me all you folk got moved up here by the Canadian government in the fifties from Quebec?'

  'Uh huh,' she said.

  The episode was still too painful to talk about much. It had happened because the Americans were sniffing around the area after the war and the government wanted Canadians on the land. Only people they figured might survive up there were Inuit, so they'd persuaded nineteen families to make the twelve-hundred-mile trip by telling them they'd be able to hunt whatever they liked and come back home when they were done. It was only after they'd arrived, seen the barren rock and had to find a way to survive through the first winter in twenty-four-hour darkness and with temperatures hitting -50C that they realized they'd been had. Most of them never got to see the families they'd left behind again. Lot of people said the problems they had with alcohol, the suicides, you could trace them right back to this one traumatic event.

  Edie explained that her own grandmother on her mother's side, Anna, had been one of the original exiles, but her grandfather was a descendant of Welatok. He'd been born in Greenland and had come acros
s to Ellesmere to trade with the new arrivals there.

  The following morning they set off and reached Fritjof Fiord around lunchtime. The fiord was still very iced up and they were forced to hack out a path through some new pressure ridges with picks. After an hour, they made their way through onto the other side.

  'My God,' Fairfax sighed, carried away by the sight before them.

  It was astonishing. The interior of the fiord stretched into the far distance: windless, white and magical. Layer upon layer of snow had fallen over the course of the long winter and lay packed into dense, creamy undulations, interrupted here and there by bear, musk ox or human tracks.

  The spot Fairfax had marked, the place he reckoned most coincided with the place his great-great-grandfather had marked out for overwintering, was a wide gravel beach huddling beneath granite cliffs half a kilometre into the fiord, away from the worst of the tide and sheltered by the rocks behind it. Here Edie started the work of setting up ramp while Fairfax went off to survey the surrounding area on foot, returning several hours later with photographs and measurements.

  'You were right about the body.' This over a supper of caribou steaks. 'Perfect excuse to come back in the summer with a film crew.'

  They passed the remainder of the evening in their separate tents, Edie turning stories over in her mind while Fairfax sat in his sleeping bag a few feet away, frantically scribbling in his notebook.

  The following morning, after a breakfast of seal-meat porridge, they broke camp and headed back towards Autisaq. The journey was uneventful and they reached the settlement late that evening. While Bill went back to the hotel to change out of his travelling clothes, Edie took off home for a hot shower then drove round to Sammy's house to ask after Joe's expedition. She'd been hoping to see her stepson's snowbie parked outside her house but it wasn't there and there were no tracks to indicate anyone had come by that way. On the way to Sammy's she passed by Minnie's house just in case he'd decided to stay with her, but his snowbie wasn't there either. Sammy's place smelled of the usual blend of stale booze and junk food.

  'See Joe yet?'

  'Nope,' he said. He was sitting on the sofa watching an episode of Columbo and didn't look up. 'Don't expect to, least not for a day or two.'

  'They get bad weather?'

  Sammy nodded. He didn't seem too bothered.

  'How bad?' Her voice sounded calm. She reminded herself to keep it that way.

  'Bad enough we can't reach them on the sat phone.'

  'A spotter plane go out yet?'

  'Maybe,' Sammy said in a vague tone, his eye still half on the cop show. 'Poor visibility over there today but it'll clear, always does in Craig this time of year. Don't worry so much.'

  Edie envied Sammy his cool-headedness. Inuit men were brought up that way, to save the worrying for the things they could actually do something about. Everything else stayed buried under the surface. Joe was the same. She didn't know why she worried so much - perhaps it was the qalunaat in her, perhaps it was just part of being a woman.

  She went across to the hotel to check on Fairfax and give him the news, and found him in the communal area, drinking a large mug of hot chocolate and making notes in a fancy-looking hardbound book. He was immersed in his own discoveries and, she thought, didn't seem particularly concerned about the situation, except in so far as it might delay his return home. He had family business to attend to. If Taylor was delayed too long, he would have to leave without him.

  'It was his idea anyway.'

  Edie raised her eyebrows.

  'You thought I put up the money?'

  'Actually, yes.'

  Fairfax shook his head. 'Andy contacted me, said he had interest from some TV outfit, but their schedules meant we'd have to go up on a recce right away.'

  She recalled what Taylor had said about being broke. Maybe he was just the hustler for the TV company.

  'No offence, why did he need you?'

  Fairfax looked up, a little offended all the same. 'The name,' he said. 'I'm the name.'

  Sleep eluded Edie that night. She passed the long hours touring the list of rational explanations for Joe's absence.

  Trips got weathered out all the time. The ice shifted, some large leads unexpectedly opened up, the wind started gusting badly, the air whited out. It was nothing—nothing—to be two, three, even four days late on even the shortest trip. All these things she told herself, over and over, until by the time the morning came she felt exhausted by them.

  It was hard to concentrate on her teaching that day and the children sensed it. As a result, the lessons went badly; the class was bored and played up. Edie felt rotten for letting them down but didn't seem able to pull herself together. The moment the final bell rang, she yanked on her outdoor boots and went to the mayor's office. No further news of the Craig Island expedition.

  At four the supply plane came in, unloaded its cargo, loaded up the mail and a few bits and pieces of electrical plant being sent away for repair. Fairfax took his seat beside the pilot and was gone.

  On her way home, Edie was taken with a sudden impulse to search Andy Taylor's room in the hotel. It was unethical, but right now she didn't care. Padding upstairs and along the corridor, she nosed through the doors to the rooms until she found the only one currently inhabited. There was a lock, but the key had long since been lost and no one had bothered to replace it. Aside from what he'd taken to Craig, Taylor didn't have much with him: a couple of magazines, an empty notebook, a tape recorder and an iPod. Edie picked up the headphones, caught a snatch of a Guns N' Roses track, then replaced the player on the table. In a leather pouch she found a spare pair of glasses and, wrapped in foil, presumably to fox the drug dogs, a thumbnail-sized piece of dope. A half-empty whisky bottle sat on the chest of drawers.

  Something about the bleakness of the hotel room gave her new purpose but she knew that if she went back to Sammy, or to the mayor's office, she'd be told to stop worrying. She didn't want to hear any of that now. Sure, Joe was only twenty-four hours late, but in Edie's mind that was twenty-four hours too long. From the hotel she walked directly to Minnie and Willa's house and found Willa in front of the TV playing Grand Theft Auto.

  'I need you to come out to Craig with me tomorrow and look for Joe.'

  Willa glanced up sufficiently to register her presence but did not otherwise respond. He was like that with her now, sullen and uncooperative. She strode over to him and grabbed the joystick.

  'Not a request, Willa.'

  Willa reached for the joystick, but she held it out of his reach. For a moment they were locked in a humiliating game of snatch.

  'Look, Joe got weathered out. Big fucking deal.' His voice was petulant and full of resentment. 'Why do you always treat him like he's still a kid? Your kid? He's not, OK? He's Minnie and Sammy's kid and, by the way, he's not a kid any more.'

  She handed him the joystick back. The tinny sound of cars colliding emanated from the machine.

  'Why don't you pay for my training?'

  Edie took a breath. This was all so familiar, so painfully hopeless. Edie had taught Willa for a while at high school. He'd been an indolent student, playing up to his friends and acting as though it was all too much hassle. He didn't graduate.

  'Huvamiaq,' he said finally. Whatever. 'But I'm doing this for my brother, not for you. Now get off my back.'

  'Early start.' Her voice softened. 'Make sure you look your snowbie over.'

  The remainder of the evening passed in a blur of indecision and self-doubt. Edie lay in bed, alone and sleepless, in the bright light of the spring night. At some point she must have drifted off because she was woken in the middle of a dream by Sammy's voice.

  'Hey, Edie. Get up. Up!' He was standing in the room in his outdoor gear. Joe had returned. He was at the nursing station.

  She pushed off the cover and sprang from the bed, aware of being naked but not caring, pulling on her clothes.

  As they marched up towards the medical building, Sammy expla
ined that Joe had pitched up at his house an hour earlier. He'd lost Taylor in the blizzard then his snowbie had broken down, so he'd skied all the way back from Craig. The journey had taken him two days and a night. He was weak and distressed and hypothermia had set in, so he wasn't making a great deal of sense.

  From what Sammy could make out he and Taylor had gone to investigate separate cairns. He was up on the high tundra there when the blizzard came down. Taylor was on lower ground. Joe managed to make his way through the whiteout back to the beach where he and Taylor had agreed to rendezvous, but by then the visibility was terrible and he couldn't see any signs of his companion. His own tracks were being covered with new snow almost instantly, so he knew it was pointless trying to look for footprints. He'd tried to call home but he couldn't get the sat phone to work.

  He was rambling, repeating himself, Sammy explained. He said he'd seen his ancestor, Welatok, walking through the snow towards him but when he got closer, Welatok became a bear and ran away. At one point, Joe said, the cloud had lifted and he'd spotted a green plane. He waved and shouted, and the plane dropped height and came in close but then just as suddenly it seemed to veer away. He went back inside the makeshift shelter he'd built, convinced that the plane would make a second pass, looking for somewhere to land, but when he next went out he realized what he'd thought was a plane was actually a rocky overhang on the cliffs opposite and he figured that the engine he thought he'd heard must have been the roar of the wind. Sensing himself gradually becoming less rational, he decided to get back to Autisaq for help before the hypothermia rendered him completely crazy. It was then he discovered his snowbie wouldn't start. The journey on skis had taken him so long that he was worried that Taylor would be dead.

  They reached the clinic and clattered up the stairs. Robert Patma was waiting for them just inside the door.

  'I just went over to wake the mayor,' he said. 'Simeonie's already spoken with Sergeant Palliser. He's going to get an S&R plane out.'

  'Let me see him,' was all Edie said.

  Joe was lying asleep on a gurney in the nursing station under a fluorescent light with his black hair flipped across his forehead, his mouth slightly open. His nose was greyish from frostbite, but not alarmingly so.