Inukshuk (8 page)

He shrugged. “Storyboard notebook stuff.”

“For the movie?”

“Not exactly. More like research.”

“Do I get to see?”

Thomas groaned. “Come on, Pop. I told you. When it's done. If you're lucky.” He held out a hand, let his father pull him up, and they embraced lightly, each patting the other's shoulder blades, his father's parka making a faint hissing noise against Thomas's shirt as they separated.

“So.” Here his father took a step back and squared his shoulders, hands on his hips, belt buckle showing, and moved to block Thomas's exit. He smiled and relaxed his shoulders. “Today, there at school . . . care to let me in on exactly what transpired?” But it was all wrong: The body language had the same fatherly, authoritative vibe as ever
but not the vocal inflection. Thomas couldn't put a finger on it, but something had changed: He seemed overly judicious, too obviously concerned about something he wasn't mentioning yet—maybe like he was laying traps, getting ready to spring the big one on him later? “The fight?”

“It wasn't a fight, Dad. Just some really stupid grade-school antics from some of the school's lower life-forms.”

His father nodded. “I understand, but it looked fairly serious, as well. You were bleeding.”

“That wasn't related.”

“How's that?”

“Probably.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

“Answer my question.”

He sighed, touched a hand lightly to his nose. “I've been having this thing lately. Like from the dryness or the wind or whatever. Nosebleeds.”

“Really? It wasn't . . .”

Thomas shook his head.

His father drew a breath, annoyed now and apparently trying to calculate the phrasing of what he said next in order not to show it. “But would you say . . . was it Jeremy Malloy, primarily, instigating things?”

“He's . . . I couldn't tell you, to be honest. They were like all going at it at once and I couldn't see. They were mostly trying to get behind me anyway to . . . you know.”

“Understood. But you wouldn't say . . .”

“Knowing Jeremy Malloy? Sure. I'm sure it was him. The rest of them are just like his minions. His little followers. Anyway, the whole nature-boy wedgie thing—that's totally jock behavior. Total jock homosadism, or whatever you want to call it. No one else gets up to that kind of crap.”

“OK, but . . .”

“That's really about all I know, Dad. Sorry. No one to rat out here.”

“That's not what I'm after. Because the other thing—other question, of course. The bigger thing . . .” His father sighed. “You kind of abandoned ship on us there, kiddo. Remember? Gave us the old slip? On the way to Vice Principal Legere's?”

Thomas thought about this a moment, scratching his head. He remembered the burning in his face and nostrils, the ridiculous feeling of his pants falling down at school while his underwear chafed and rode around, making him feel as if his whole back end were on display; his father's herding them to the building's double doors and then through and inside, and the sudden crash as the inner doors hit the wall, and his father yelling,
Any of you others want a piece of me?
His own father, that easily provoked and stooping to their level. But he hadn't seen this part of it because he'd already been making his way hurriedly from them along the north corridor to class. First, though, another hard left and a duck into the stall of the nearest boys' washroom for an adjustment to his destroyed underwear. What to do: fold them over the top of his pants? Tuck them down? Rip the elastic off all the way around and pray the things stayed up? Go commando? For a horrible few moments alone in the dented sheet-metal toilet stall, he could not tell what to do, his vision doubled up and speckling from sinus trauma and now tears, someone's enormous turd like a headless sea monster left in the bowl of the seatless toilet, and his blood dripping, huge splattering drops onto the bathroom tiling, all of it so incredibly awful and degrading. And then gradually he figured it out, rolled the elastic down, straightened things and cinched his belt another notch or two tighter. Went to class.

“What do you mean, ‘abandoned ship'? I had class. I thought—”

“We were on our way to Legere's office.”

“
You
were. But I thought—”

“No, we
all
were. You as well, ostensibly . . .”

“Why?”

“Look! I'm not angry, all right? I'm just saying—just asking.”

Thomas nodded; scratched at his bare arm a moment and watched as his father's eyes followed the movement with something beyond mere curiosity. He looked closer at his own arm to guess what that
might be about, but nothing suggested itself. Just his arm, vaguely red, with faint scratch marks; his usual bitten fingernails.

“I thought I should just go to class, Dad. Maybe the nurse's office.”

“Yes, the nurse, that would have been a good idea.”

“But I have biology fourth, so I don't know. I went to class. What, am I, like, in trouble?”

“No, no. I said . . .” His father trailed off, exasperated, and raked a hand back through his hair, pausing a moment, forehead in his palm. “It would have been a help, had you been there. That's all. Representing your side of things. A huge help, actually. But never mind. You're probably right—the more appropriate thing was a visit to the nurse. It just looked kinda . . . dumb. Your giving us all the slip.”

“I didn't
give
you the slip. I told you. I went to class. I thought you were, like, making sure I was OK getting inside and that nothing else happened, and then once I was inside and everything, I could just . . . you know. It was so not a big
deal
.”

“Right. Of course. Let's just . . .” He trailed off again. “Did you see the nurse?”

“No. I already said. I went to class.”

Even more than usual, his father seemed unable to pursue any line of thought to a logical finish or full stop. “Well, let's forget it for now. There may be consequences. Let's . . . I could use some help with dinner.”

“Sure. In a sec.”

At the doorway, his father stopped and leaned in again toward Thomas, grinning, not meeting his eyes: “Avast, ye scurvy dogs. There's work awaitin' in the galley.”

“Aye-aye, Cap'n. Down in a second.”

He wanted a last peek at those drawings, a brief revisitation with Franklin and Hoar in Franklin's quarters, but he found, once his father had left, he didn't have the heart for it: That world, so contained and confined, destination coordinates set, a place for everything and everything in its place, each day known and accounted for, each scene and interaction in its frame—once he was inside it, the temptation was to stay there. Never leave, if he could help it. But getting
back in sometimes, often, like now, when whatever was happening in his actual day-to-day life kicked him out this suddenly, could seem impossible. He'd find himself standing outside the imagined world of the movie and almost angry enough at himself and the whole stupid, fraudulent enterprise that he wanted to tear up the pages and walk away for good. He gritted his teeth, ground them together, and drove his fingernails into the palms of his hands to keep himself from doing anything stupid. Glimpsed himself in the window reflection: skewed black hair the same as his father's, skinny, pale arms sticking out of a misshapen bowl-necked brown-yellow T-shirt he'd been wearing since about grade six, pants still lopsided at the waistline. Had he ever even changed out of his destroyed briefs? No. But no time for that now. He went jogging after the clatter of his father's footsteps downstairs, realizing as he went how pressingly, urgently hungry he'd become—the thing making him woozy and sleepy with somewhat nauseated desire as he approached its cause and cure in the kitchen: food! Hunger. Rations and provisions. Salt pork and a lump of hardtack? Was today a flour day? He pinched his arm where he'd been scratching previously to see if it'd draw blood—
hemorrhagic sores
—see if he felt anything at all, and remembered then the other thing he'd been forgetting since coming in the front door.

“Dad,” he said, and waited for his father, still wearing his parka, to stand back from the fridge, face him. “Any mail for me?”

 

 

AS USUAL, THEY STOOD AT OPPOSITE SIDES of the kitchen counter in the murky light and ate facing each other without looking up much or talking. For the umpteenth time, Franklin reminded himself, between bites, that more lightbulbs from the Superstore would be a really good idea; and sometime soon, this weekend maybe, he should try to remember to take down the kitchen light fixture for a scrub. Empty it of dead bugs, moths, and dust and replace the burned-out bulbs so he and Thomas would have more than this shadowy orange-tinged burnt umber light in the kitchen by which to eat and cook. The meat loaf was not quite hot, the salad limp and slippery with pickled
green beans and olives—maybe it was for the best that they didn't see anything too clearly. If Moira were here . . . He glanced around briefly, wondering. What else? Many of the items they'd moved here from the house in Calgary a year and a half ago still had not found permanent places: the dingy, knife-marked cutting board always out on the range top; the mixing bowls shoved under the mug cupboard's overhang, unused for an eternity; the coffeemaker stranded at the wrong end of the counter, nowhere near the toaster or microwave, and splattered with old coffee.
If,
he thought . . . and almost killed the thought before it could swing broadside to its conclusion:
If
she were here for dinner one night, breakfast the next morning, he'd have a lot of housekeeping to do beforehand. Sort through the junk mail by the telephone, too. Figure out where the phone books belonged. Throw out those expired coupons piled on the windowsill and the Allen wrench orphaned from some repair job of a month or more ago. Was that all it took to start seeing things fresh and consider putting your house in order? The projected imaginary presence of a woman?

“Anything else new and exciting?” he asked. He knew it sounded as if he were trying hard to check back in and show an interest, and cleared his throat to mask that. Blinked and fixed his face into what he hoped was an attentive expression. But Thomas was already shaking his head no and helping himself to thirds on the cold meat loaf. “How about the big research project for Cullen? How's that coming?”

Thomas shrugged. “Mostly that's a rehash of the Franklin history project from last quarter. I think I'll throw in some more about Tennyson and Dickens to meet some of the assignment objectives, change some wording a little, but basically, it's totally done.”

“Franklin—your all-in-one topic.”

“Yeah, I could probably even get my biology term paper out of it, too, if I wanted, if I can find enough facts on botulism and lead poisoning and ice-core sampling.”

“Devon's your go-to man there.”

Thomas grunted in agreement.

“So, what's the Dickens connection?”

“Friends. No real personal connection. He wrote that insanely
racist thing against John Rae, about the cannibalism, all because Jane Franklin asked. Or maybe Sophia Cracoft asked. Her niece or whatever. Everyone was in love with Sophia, right? But Tennyson—he was her nephew. He wrote the poem on the Franklin monument.”

“Yes, I know. . . .” He closed his eyes, remembering. “. . .
the white north has thy bones; and thou/Heroic sailor-soul/Art passing. . . .
” He opened his eyes again and paused long enough to allow Thomas to jump in with the rest of it. In the beginning of Thomas's Arctic obsession, this had been more often Franklin's approach—share facts and information, stay attuned, involved, keep it from becoming a “thing” for Thomas to escape into ever more deeply and obsessively in order to distance himself. Maybe that's all he needed now was to pick up more of that former attitude. Neutralize the obsession with coolness.

“Just think,” Thomas forked up a mouthful of meat loaf. “Our distant long-lost cousin, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.”

“They are
not
our relatives, Thomas.”

Thomas continued chewing and did not meet eyes.

“Thomas, seriously.”

“OK, give it a rest. You think what
you
want, I'll think what I—”

“I think you're deluding yourself.” So much for coolness.

“Fine then, I'm deluding myself.” Thomas sniffed and wiped a hand under his nose. “So what?”

“Do you need a napkin?”

“I'm fine.”

“Anyway, it's what, like twenty years ago now since I was there, but I wish . . . I mean, if anyone had told me one day I'd be sharing quarters with a young man so obsessed by the Arctic and convinced of a personal connection with the legend of his tragic namesake . . . well, for one thing I doubt I would have believed it. But if I
had
believed, I'm sure I would have taken better notes. Fact is, though . . .” He trailed off, distracted by the recollected singsong rhythm of Tennyson's lines, and thinking, not for the first time, how much harder it was anymore to strike the rhetorical stance of the versifier, tinkerer with lines, the one with anything relevant to say in poetic form for the masses. Who cared about poets? Just beneath this was the ghost of the
girl he'd followed north to Shetland and their day together in Westminster Abbey, home of the Franklin monument—a day when the potency of poets and poetry had seemed to him anything
but
remote or obsolete; had seemed, in fact, palpably, terrifyingly real. Odd to be recollecting her a second time in so few hours when typically he did not think of her at all. Or, no, he thought of her constantly, often anyway, but never so directly—never the concrete image of her that now presented itself: the gauzy Indian skirts and loops of springy, dirty red-brown hair; the always intense and patchouli-covered, unwashed-hair smell of her, of both of them together, and their endless shared hand-rolled cigarettes. The whole Sule Skerry project had come to life there in that trip with her, or had its roots anyway in that much younger version of himself blown north of Unst to find her, and reading about changelings, selkies, betrayal, murder, sunlight hot on every stone. Yes, though surely he'd had no intention at the time of staking the next twenty-odd years of his so-called poetic ambitions teasing it out piece by piece, line by line, between jobs, marriage, children. Interruption upon interruption.