“Porter Cassel.”
Her hand is warm. “Christina. Nice to meet you.”
It all seems so formal. I think furiously about what to say next.
Telson offers me a conciliatory smile. “I’d better get going.”
“Why? That was nothing.”
She slides off the bench. “Thanks for the drink.”
Then she’s gone and the bar isn’t so much fun anymore. Some guy in the jukebox is wailing about having seven bullets in his six-gun. Where can I get a gun like that? My eyelids grow heavy, my speech slower. There’s a fight outside — the caveman has found someone else to play with — and Carl is helping me to my feet, the tassels of his buckskin coat in my face. We stagger home together, both too drunk to drive. I remember mumbling Nina’s name as Carl helped me to my room.
Carl’s house is quiet late the next morning when I stagger out of bed. I spend a half-hour in the bathroom, in long distance discussion with parties unknown over the big porcelain telephone. I haven’t had a night like that in over a year and I conclude my conversation with a familiar farewell. Never again. The operator gushes her condolences, but I know the phone bill is going to be a killer. Serves me right.
As penance, I saddle up my mountain bike.
My first stop is the parking lot of The Corral, where my Land Rover sits alone, dented and forlorn in the noonday sun. No new dents though. I make a loop around the squat little building, looking for what, I don’t know, and notice there’s fresh blood mixed with the gravel near the rear door. The Neanderthal’s handiwork. Have to remember not to point the next time.
I wheel onto the highway, cross the bridge over the Curtain River — the water level is low this early in the year, the channel braided, gravel bars exposed — and head into town. Like most of the towns I’ve worked in, back when I had steady work, the highway is mainstreet and it’s here the majority of the town is strung out: the bars, grocery stores and gas stations. The post office. It’s the sort of town where sideburns never went out of style. I veer right at a carwash, spend a few minutes in the backwaters of the town as my legs warm up. Half the population appear to live in trailers but, judging by the additions and the number of old cars in the yards, not many of them are in danger of going anywhere. I get lost in the crescents for a few minutes — an embarrassing feat in a town this small — find my way back to mainstreet.
An old Chevy pulls out from an alley behind me and follows uncomfortably close. I glance back, expecting a pass, but the driver, invisible behind the sun glint of the windshield, is in no hurry. The truck is on old Apache, a classic of sorts. But this one is a Frankenstein truck, the body put together from numerous carcasses. None of the colours match — the doors are red, the hood white, the fenders blue. Rust splotches and peeling paint complete the effect. It’s jacked-up, the tires as high as my bike. I’d noticed the truck twice before, behind the carwash and then barrelling through a vacant school zone. The owner must be some kid, burning gas and doing his part to run up the Gross Domestic Product. Not much else to do here. I turn onto the highway, pass the last gas station and head uphill, out of the Curtain River valley.
The truck is still behind me, which is odd given we’re both on the highway now and I’m doing about ten miles an hour. If this is a tail, the driver has a lot to learn. I glance back once more — the grille looks like the mouth of a monster with bad teeth. This idiot is way too close and I veer into the ditch, let him pass, crane my neck to see who’s driving. But the window is too high and the driver remains anonymous — hammering the gas and leaving me in a blue haze of exhaust fumes. I watch the truck roar up the highway, sounding like a badly tuned Harley, shake my head.
A slug of water from the bottle on my bike and I push on.
Downshift. The throbbing in my head assumes a nasty resonance and it occurs to me this wasn’t such a good idea. But I think of Nina and of last night, how the woman’s thigh felt under my hand. I deserve some punishment and lean into the hill, sweat running into my eyes. At the crest, I roll into the ditch, gasp, vomit, catch my breath. There’s a breeze up here and a view of the mountains, white and jagged against blue sky. I saddle up and keep going.
The highway is narrow, no shoulder, steep ditches. I occupy the last few inches of pavement — any farther and I’ll join the broken bottles and chip bags in the ditch. Loaded log trucks blast past in one direction while oversized motorhomes — worth more than the last house I lived in and driven by city dwellers intent on escape — swerve past me at the last second. I’m terrified I’ll become a stain on some Luxury Liner’s grille, or an unexpected speed bump.
I take the first gravel road heading generally west, thankful to be alive.
I’m in ranching country, rolling and fenced. Driveways are long and winding, framed by gateposts with the ranch’s brand burned into the wood. My lungs and legs are lobbying for a cessation of movement, my head seconding the motion, but I want to make it to the edge of the forest: a blanket of green on the slopes ahead, shimmering like a mirage. Amongst the trees, I can rest.
The road begins to rise. Ranches give way to scattered subdivisions filled with immense houses, so new the dirt at their foundations is still fresh. I think of the trailers in town and wonder who owns these mansions, then remember this area next to the mountains is only an hour from the city. Curtain River has been discovered and everyone wants a piece of the rock. Farther up the road, the mock ski lodges end and a sign in the ditch, put up by the Department of Public Lands, informs me I am now entering the Green Area of the Province — a Working Forest where timber is produced, cattle graze and non-renewable carbon deposits are siphoned off.
A 20-minute lounge in the shade and I feel better. Turn back? Shadow angles across the road ahead and I push on. Just another mile or two. The road is fairly level, it’s cool in the shade and gravel crunches satisfyingly under my tires. It would be pleasant if I wasn’t so hung over. I coast to a stop where the road forks. The main road veers to the left. The right arm of the fork is narrow, rutted and angles up a steep slope, switchbacking toward a hidden summit. I’m exhausted; the road is torture but something I don’t want to listen to is egging me on. Think of the top, it whispers. No, I mumble. I’m sick and I’m already 20 miles from town. You have to do this, the voice urges, and when I shake my head the voice becomes nasty, calls me a quitter, accuses me of cowardice.
I groan, start up the slope.
Pain and agony. My legs are filled with barbed wire, my chest is too small and my throat pinches so I can’t swallow. I downshift again, to the second easiest gear. I’ve never used the lowest gear — something always holds me back, no matter how difficult the slope. Maybe I want to have something in reserve. Maybe I’m just crazy. I look ahead — a mistake; the top of the road appears impossibly distant. I focus on the next switchback. My mind grows numb against the stress of forcing onward failing tissue and I hope for a sort of nirvana via necrosis. Finally, mercifully, the road flattens to a manageable grade and I’m at the top of a ridge.
There’s a small cabin with a rain barrel, generator shed and outhouse in a circular clearing. It’s a forestry lookout tower — a tiny red-and-white cupola at the top of a hundred-foot derrick — where there really is a guy with a scope and pair of binoculars who spends his day vigilantly scanning the forest. I drop the bike and stagger weak-kneed across rocky, manicured lawn to a handmade bench close to the edge of the ridge. If it was punishment I needed, then I’m purified. Ten minutes later, I can breathe again and the tune of my pulse has returned from an uneven hip-hop to a good old blues refrain. The door on the bottom of the cupola slaps open and the towerman — resigned to the fact that his visitor won’t leave without some prodding — descends the narrow ladder like an insect intent on escaping a spider’s web.
“How ya doin’?” he says, coming up behind me. He’s an old guy with a potbelly, long grey beard and sun-burned dome. His vintage tie-dyed shirt is so worn the colours have faded to the point of competing with the sweat stains under his arms. He’s short, wearing sandals, looks like a hobbit from the sixties. Tower people can get a little loopy if they stay in the profession too long, but he seems okay. Of course, it’s still early in the season.
He sticks out a hand. “Gabe Peterson.”
I stand up, introduce myself.
“Out for a little ride?” He’s looking at my abandoned mountain bike. “Get a few hardy souls like that every year. Most just drive up.” His eyes wander back to me. One eye is bright blue; the other, pale grey. It’s a little disconcerting, as though he were put together from spare parts — like the Chevy. “You want something to drink?” he asks. “I made a pitcher of lemonade this morning.”
At the mention of cold fluids, my knees go weak all over again. I follow Peterson into his cabin, which is crowded with stacks of boxes like he’s just moved in. But it’s not natural for a towerperson to have this much gear, even a tower with road access, and I wonder if Carl knows about this. The boxes are stacked to eye level and Peterson vanishes among them, a layer of boxes indented to allow passage for his midsection. One of the boxes is on its side and I can see bundles of little plastic sandwich bags. Curious, I tug a baggie part way out, expecting ganja or something like that. It’s filled with a flattened clod of hair — black mixed with grey — and has a date on it: August 14, 1982. Peterson might be going into the seniors toupee business, but I don’t think so. This is serious fetish material and I shudder to think what else he might have in these boxes.
Suddenly, I’m not so thirsty anymore.
“Yup,” he hollers from somewhere ahead, as though confirming an earlier statement, and I shove the hair back into its filing system.
“Been in this tower for 38 seasons now.” He comes around a corner in the labyrinth, sideways, chuckling, two glasses of cloudy liquid jostling in his hands. “I reckon they let me keep coming back so they don’t have to move all this stuff.”
I nod, take the offered glass, retreat outside.
We return to the bench — it’s so roomy out here — spend a few minutes staring across the valley at a puzzleboard of brown cut-blocks on a far slope. Gabe sets aside his drink, which makes me nervous. “You from the city?” he says.
“No. I’m a country boy.”
“Good for you. This place is too goddamn close to the city.”
There’s a pause. I used to take care of a half-dozen towers up north and would visit them once a month, to bring in groceries. Just as important for the towerperson were the few hours of human contact. Most would babble continuously, cram in an entire month’s conversation. Others would be sullen and taciturn, couldn’t wait for you to leave. “What do you do in the winter?” I ask politely.
“Guns,” he says, grinning. “I’m a gunsmith. Out of my garage.”
A gunsmith with a hair collection; I’ll sleep better knowing that.
“What about you?” he says. “What do you do?”
“I used to be a Ranger.”
Gabe nods and something passes across his face. I get the feeling he’s recognized me; my picture was in the papers quite a bit a few years ago. If he does, he’s polite enough not to say anything. We both gaze at the mountains. The cutblocks across the valley look familiar. The angle is different and I’m farther above them, but they look like the blocks I saw from the bombing site. Which means the site can’t be far away. “You notice anything strange in the past few days?”
Gabe scratches under his beard. “Not really.”
“Get any visitors?”
“Vistors?” He snorts, rubs a hand over the bald top of his head, like an amputee with a phantom itch, smoothing back imaginary hair. “Too many,” he grumbles. “You should see this place on a long weekend. Had one guy come walking up the hill one morning, wearing Hush Puppies and carrying a poodle. Got his motorhome stuck, rolled it halfway over a switchback. Said he wanted to camp up here. Heard the view was nice.”
“When was that?”
The old towerman slurps his lemonade. “About a week ago. Guy wanted me to give him a tow.” He chuckles, flops a meaty arm over the back of the bench. “Like I got some way of getting him outa there. I called the office and they called caa. Took a goddamn winch truck.” He shakes his head.
“But you didn’t have any visitors these past two days?”
“Just you. Heard those explosions though. Three of them. Woke me up.”
“Did you notice what time that was?”
“Naw. Middle of the night. Too dark.”
“You see any smoke in the morning?”
“A bit. Real black. Damn lucky it didn’t start a fire. It’s drier than hell out here.”
“I’ve noticed. What’s the hazard up to?”
Peterson shakes his head. “Been extreme damn near since the snow left. Not much of a snow pack and a dry fall. What little snow we had went into the air, not into the ground. Sublimated. If we don’t get some rain soon, it isn’t going to green up.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty dry.”
“Worst I’ve seen in 30 years.”
I point across the valley. “How far do you think those blocks are?”
“Eleven and a half miles to the top of the ridge,” he says without hesitation, like he’s making a report. Towermen have a good sense of distance. Some of them can read minds too. “A little less to the blocks. And the smoke from those explosions was even closer — about four miles.”
“That’s close.”
“You got that right,” he says. “Too damn close for me. With this hazard, a fire that close would be at my door before breakfast. I knew a guy in a tower up north who got burned out. Up in the sand country. Nothing but pine around him, just like here. Said he could see a wall of flame coming across the tops of the trees — like looking into hell. It’s not something I want to go through.”
“Keane Tower. I heard about that.”
A radio crackles over a loudspeaker, calling the tower for a weather report. Gabe swears, runs for the cabin and through the loudspeaker I hear him reading out a familiar prognosis. Moderate build-up to the west; winds light; good visibility. With the hot weather, it makes me feel like I should be working. I should head north, fight some fire, but I’m not quite ready to leave Curtain River.
I wait long enough to thank Gabe for the lemonade, then saddle up.
Part way down the slope, I stop and stash the bike in the bush.
After the bike ride up the hill, it’s a long hike. My hangover has reached stage two — sheer exhaustion — but in the trees it’s shady and I take plenty of rests. Up north, you couldn’t walk through the bush without a compass and map, but here ridges and mountain peaks simplify navigation. I hike downhill for an hour, spend another hour climbing a sidehill to a lesser ridge with a panoramic view where I fix my location. Then it’s downhill again, between slender, branchless stems. A half-hour later, I hit the upper edge of the cutblock where the feller-buncher was bombed.