As supervisor of the district's mail, Derek occasionally spoke with Mike about any unusual, valuable or dangerous packages, including game trophies and pelts expected to arrive or leave on the supply plane out of Autisaq.
'Not this time.'
Mike sounded disappointed. 'Only I thought it might be the election posters.' Mike explained that Simeonie Inukpuk had asked him to look out for a consignment of posters he was having printed and air-freighted up from Ottawa.
Derek said: 'I think I'm missing something here. We got kids taking drugs, we got kids killing themselves because they don't see any future. And Simeonie's making posters?'
Mike said: 'He didn't make them, he's having them shipped up.'
Derek realized this line of discussion wasn't going anywhere. There was a pause.
Mike said: 'But that's not what you called about, right?'
'No.'
Derek said he was signing off his report into Joe Inukpuk's suicide and needed to clarify a couple of things with the young man's stepmother.
'Just routine stuff. Only, between us, eh? I don't want to upset the blood family.'
Phone call over, Derek put on the kettle and checked his emails and the fax machine, but nothing whatsoever had happened in the period he'd been away. It was only when he was going back to the kitchen to make his brew that he noticed a piece of paper lying on the floor: a copy of his official report into Andy Taylor's disappearance. The coroner had signed it and faxed it back for filing with his English spelling mistakes corrected. He threw it on his desk, thinking the coroner ought to try out Inuktitut sometime.
Fetching his tea he went and sat in his office chair, letting his mind wander, leafing through the week's Circular and noting down the editorial number. Should he call them to suggest an interview or write a short news piece and fax it to them? Figuring he'd sit on it for a couple of days, until he'd got his breath back from patrol, he finished his tea, went outside and took Piecrust for a quick spin around Kuujuaq, looking for, but not finding, any loose dogs. Then he made his way to the store and stocked up on groceries.
Back in his apartment he realized how exhausted he was and went directly to bed without bothering to get himself any supper. He was woken by the sound of knocking and, glancing over at his bedside clock, saw with a thump that it was mid-morning and he'd overslept by hours. The knocking continued. Whoever it was wouldn't go away. He felt a thin needle of irritation somewhere at the back of his head. Why wasn't Stevie on it? Then he remembered that he'd given his constable the day off.
Swinging himself out of bed, he pulled on his uniform, slapped cold water over his face and made a cursory attempt to smooth his hair, shouting for whoever it was to wait, and thinking it was almost certainly some busybody or other wanting to know why he hadn't opened up yet.
He loped across the office and unlocked the front porch. At first he thought he was experiencing some kind of flashback, a result, perhaps, of the recent surfeit of mai tais. But no, there she was, standing on the steps smiling at him.
Misha.
She was wearing a fox-trim parka with the zip partially open, revealing the supple curves of her breasts. For an instant he thought he might buckle or burst out crying or in some other way humiliate himself. In the year since he'd seen her, she'd grown more beautiful. Her face was like a spring sun halo, otherworldly in its perfection. There was only one word to describe her: astonishing.
'I catch you at a bad time?' Her voice, inflected with remnants of what always seemed to him to be a dozen accents, stole over him like a spring breeze full of ice crystals and he had to look away, instantly and hopelessly aroused.
For a second the whole awful, cringe-making business of Agent Palakakika flashed into his mind and he had to swallow hard to make it go away. Misha moved towards him and he held the door open as she walked through. For a moment they simply looked at one another. The strength of his feeling floored him. He knew he should be angry with her, but he didn't have it in him. He felt like a hopeless teenager.
When she offered a hand, he took it without thinking and as she pulled him into her he could feel her breath on his lips and his heart in his mouth. It was suddenly clear to him that the months of torturing himself over the Dane no longer mattered in the least. She was here, with him.
'You living in the apartment now?'
He nodded, feeling himself blush. The second summer they were together, they had moved out of the apartment into a more spacious house. Derek had retreated back to the apartment not long after Misha left.
Walking across the office to the apartment entrance, she said, 'You can bring my bag.'
And so, in the hours and days that followed Derek Palliser emptied himself of lemming swarms and suicides. He told Stevie to take the week off. He forgot the Dane and Copenhagen. He forgot Agent Whatever and the urgency of letting the Arctic Circular know about his research. He even forgot to ask himself whether the timing of Misha's arrival was purely coincidental. And three or four times, when the radio beeped, and the phone rang, he forgot that anyone was trying to reach him.
* * *
Chapter Nine
Edie went to her meat store to check Andy Taylor's bones were still in the two old pemmican tins where she'd put them and to chip off a couple of shards of iceberg. Then she went inside with the tin containing the cut marked bones and the ice and poured herself a large glass of Canadian Mist on the rocks. She took out the skull fragment and slid her pinky into the bullet hole. She poured herself another drink, picked up a pen lying on the table and pushed it through the hole. As she followed the angle of it upwards with her finger, a series of thoughts came into her mind. The fragment was from the bone around the crown which could only mean that the shot had come from above. The angle of the pen gave a degree nearly perpendicular to the skull itself. She thought back to the low-lying land around Bone Beach, as she now thought of the place, and turned the fragment of skull around in her hand, but she couldn't figure out how the shot could have hit the skull from such a wide angle. Was it possible that Andy Taylor had been shot from the air?
It was past midnight when she went back out to the meat store with Andy Taylor's bones, but it could have been any time; the sky never darkened now and the sun never set. A raven flew past. Edie idly followed its progress, wondering why Derek Palliser had not answered her radio calls. No particular reason for him to be avoiding her, except that he'd done it before, during the Ida Brown case. Something in the man resisted action until it was forced upon him. What was the animal they always said had its head in the sand? Ostrich, that was it. Derek Palliser was an ostrich.
She, on the other hand, had to resist the impulse to rush at everything. Once she went out with her father, Peter, and her mother, Maggie, for a few days' ice fishing. She must have been very young, four or five, but she could still remember it as though it had happened a week ago. The weather was calm, and the sun was shining, but it was so cold her tear ducts filled with ice pebbles. They caught three char, then her mother went inside the tent to lay out the sleeping skins. She didn't know where her father was. Maybe he'd gone to collect sweet water. She was playing on the ice when her eye was drawn to something shining. Driven, perhaps, by the smell of the char, a young jar seal had come up through the ice hole and was looking about, its chin resting on the surface of the ice, the water droplets in its fur catching the sun. Without a second thought, Edie picked up her father's harpoon and threw it, embedding the barb in the seal's side. The animal dived, pulling the weapon and its rope down with it. Edie remembered seeing the rope whip by her and grabbing for it. She clung on, spinning along the ice so fast she had no time even to cry out. Down she went, into the water under the ice. For a long time she seemed to be buried, then, blood humming in her head, her mother's screams reached her from somewhere distant.
'You're a good hunter,' her mother said, afterwards. 'But until you learn anuqsusaarniq, to wait patiently, you will never be a great one.'
Another raven landed on a
drying rack and pecked at a sealskin. It made her think about the raven on the back of the twenty dollar bill, the Trickster Raven of the Haida Indian legend, sitting in the Haida canoe, his wing on the steering rudder. It was the Trickster Raven who was steering her back to her old, reckless, hard-drinking self. Where had that old version of Edie ever got her? By her mid-twenties, she'd already drunk away her hunting career and was well on the way to drinking away her life. It was Joe who'd saved her, Joe who had taken the rudder from the Raven and given it back to her. 'I hate it when you drink because you won't come out and hunt with me,' he'd said. Simple, true, like a spear to the heart. Not long after that, she'd stopped drinking.
Joe had given her back her life and she had given him what? Now she wondered if that death wish she had carried was infectious, some terrible, unintended legacy she'd passed on to her stepson.
The bird rose up from the drying rack and flapped off to the south. Edie went back inside and poured another double shot of Canadian Mist, flipped on the DVD and used the remote to skip to the scene in Safety Last! where Harold Lloyd climbs the outer wall of the department store. How many times had she sat through that scene since her father first put her in front of a movie projector? But still she got a kick out of it, Harold in his boater and his glasses ascending the sheer wall of rock, the world below him gradually shrinking away. It made you want to cry with the sheer fragile pleasure of being alive.
She poured herself another shot, and closed her eyes to make the feeling last. When she opened them, she thought she saw the puikaktuq staring in at the window.
When she woke on the sofa later that morning, Harold Lloyd was still climbing his walls. She reached out for the remote and shut the power. Her tongue felt like an angry walrus and her head thrummed. She took herself to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet.
At the end of the day, she took herself directly home from school, mugged up and pulled down the blinds. From the meat store she took out the two cans containing Andy Taylor's bones and brought them inside.
If you've got something to tell me, she said to the bones, now would be a good time. She waited, but the bones remained silent. Those few facts she knew about the qalunaat's death seemed like an ice pack in formation, fragmented, insubstantial and unable to bear any weight. But she remembered the lesson of the seal at the ice-fishing hole. Anuqsusaarniq. Patience.
The following day she struggled through her classes with a hangover, then went home, and was frying tunusitaq, caribou guts, for her supper when Sammy breezed in, blowing the ice crystals from his nose.
'Great smell.'
'You always did have good timing, Sammy Inukpuk.'
He chuckled. 'I brought a half-sack.' He'd come to make his peace with beer, as he always did.
They sat on the sofa watching TV and drinking, just like old times.
He said: 'The reason I came . . .'
'Oh,' she said, disappointed and not even trying to hide it. 'And here was me thinking you liked my company.'
He flashed her a look that said, Stop right there, sister, you abandoned me, remember?
He said, 'I wanted to tell you, so you didn't get it from someone else: I'm guiding a trip, a couple of qalunaat, tourists. They wanna go eider hunting.'
'You taking them down to Goose Fiord?' Best eider hunting on Ellesmere there.
'Maybe.' Sammy blushed and fixed his gaze on the TV. To his credit he'd always been a lousy liar.
'I get it,' she said. 'You're going to Craig.'
He nodded, a little shamefaced, and Edie felt a thickening in her throat. Now she understood why he'd come. The council of Elders usually divvied up the guiding jobs and in the past, it had always been understood that Edie would have first pick of any involving Craig Island. She and Joe knew the place better than anyone in Autisaq, with the exception perhaps of Old Man Koperkuj, but Simeonie had cut her out and given the job to her ex-husband. Sammy was here to get her blessing and, maybe, her forgiveness. She patted his thigh.
She said: 'Thanks for letting me know.' A pause. 'Why Craig though? This time of year, eider hunting's lousy there.'
He shrugged. 'That's where they wanted to go.'
Funny how popular the place had got with qalunaat all of a sudden.
The following morning, as she was walking to the store, a green Twin Otter flew overhead: the qalunaat tourists Sammy spoke about. The Otter's livery didn't belong to any of the charter companies operating out of Iqaluit or Resolute Bay. She wondered if someone new had set up and hoped they wouldn't kill off Martie's business.
Later, while she was teaching, she spotted the Inuk pilot out of the window, strolling along the path towards the store with two tall qalunaat, one of whom was skinny, like Taylor, the other with such light blond hair it looked like a clump of cotton grass growing on his head.
The plane came by again a couple of days later and took the tourists back down south. During the school lunch break Edie walked over to Sammy's to see how the trip had gone - she'd missed him, it was no fun drinking alone - but he'd already dumped his bags inside the house and gone out, so she left a note, inviting him for supper. She noticed he'd turned his Bible face inwards. That only ever meant one thing: he was drinking heavily again and didn't want God to see. Her heart went out to him then. What kind of god did he think he was being loyal to? One who would condemn a man who had lost his son from trying to find comfort where he could?
In her short absence from the school, someone had been in and put up posters in the corridors announcing Simeonie Inukpuk's candidacy for re-election as mayor. No one had ever held an election campaign like this. It was troubling and bizarre. Inuit didn't do business that way, pitting one candidate against another. Sure, there was a vote, but everyone knew the real decision emerged slowly from discussions in the community. Nothing got decided until a consensus had been reached which everybody could live with. Besides, if there was any money to spare, the last thing it should be spent on was election posters.
She made her way back to class, set an assignment, put Pauloosie in charge, marched directly to the head's office and swung open the door without knocking. John Tisdale looked up from his desk and raised his hands in surrender.
'Don't shoot!'
She didn't smile. His face fell. He knew exactly why she was there.
'Look, Edie, it's not my fault, it's just the way Simeonie wants things done from now on.'
Edie let out a snort: 'What Simeonie wants is for someone to do him the courtesy of letting him know what an asshole he's being.'
'He does?' Tisdale screwed up his face.
She turned on her heels and shut the door, a little too firmly. The posters had been stuck on with some kind of putty and came off easily, particularly once she got the class involved. When all the posters were down, she handed one to each of her pupils and explained what they were going to do and why they were going to do it. Protest, she called it. Civil disobedience.
Ten minutes later, twelve children were waiting outside the mayor's office with excited, expectant looks on their faces. At the secretarial desk, Sheila Silliq ummed and tutted.
'I know you have your own way of doing things, Edie, but I wish you'd left my two out of this.'
'It's what's known as a class action,' Edie said. She patted the two Silliq children on the head to reassure them. 'You should be proud.'
Simeonie Inukpuk poked his head around the door and raised his eyes to heaven.
'You got five minutes.' He held up one hand.
As Edie ushered the class towards the mayor's office, he palmed a stop sign. 'Uh nuh,' he said, pointing a finger at Edie. 'Just you.'
He closed the door behind her and took up his position behind the desk without inviting her to sit.
'You're a disgrace, using the kids to fight your battles.'
'Me?' she said. His hypocrisy was breathtaking. 'This isn't about Craig, if that's what you think, it's about using the school to play politics.'
'I don't care what it's "about". Y
ou're point-scoring.' He shook his head in a gesture of condescending disapproval that made her want to jump on his skull and tear out his hair. 'You always were a hothead, Edie Kiglatuk, and for some reason you've decided to become a troublemaker too.'
For a moment they stood facing one another off.
'Ai, brother-in-law,' she said, hoping that reminding him of their family connection might soften him a little. 'Election posters? This is Autisaq, Nunavut, not Atlanta, Georgia.'
Sheila's head appeared behind the door. Someone was on the phone from London, England.
Simeonie settled himself into his chair and adopted an expression of grand detachment.
'It's a lady selling the diary of one of those old explorer fellows.' Simeonie, who had been hoping for something more substantial, just shook his head and waved the call away.
'I'll talk to her,' Edie said. It was as good a way as any to call time on her audience with the mayor.
She picked up the phone on Sheila's desk and introduced herself. The woman on the other line had an accent, but Edie couldn't tell what it was. She explained she was a researcher at Sotheby's auction house. They were selling the diary of Sir James Fairfax's penultimate voyage and the researcher was after what she referred to as 'the native perspective'; an anecdote about the old times, maybe.
'If Fairfax had spent more time hunting and fishing like the locals and less time writing a diary, his explorer's career might have gone on longer,' Edie said. She felt vaguely pleased with herself. 'How's that for the "native perspective"?'
The woman coughed politely. Edie could tell from her voice she was young and probably not all that certain of herself.
'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I haven't really read the whole thing. It only came to us very recently and the owner . . .'
Edie interrupted.'... Bill Fairfax?'
'Mr Fairfax, yes. You know him?' She sounded taken aback.
Edie explained how she and Fairfax had met. The woman listened, then, lowering her voice, she said, 'He needs a quick sale.' She coughed again. 'We were hoping someone your end might be able to fill in a bit of the story. The diary isn't quite complete. When Mr Fairfax found it among his great-aunt's things, there seemed to be three pages missing. Our paper expert says the pages were excised not long ago but the great-aunt's dead so there's no knowing exactly when or why If we could get hold . . .'
White Heat Page 16
