Authors: Tim O'Brien
“You don’t understand. This is …” Harvey coughed and Perry pulled him forward and they moved down the river, rounding the bend, and they skied south.
The pines were high on both banks. Icicles dangled from the branches.
The white river sparkled ahead. “Eighty glide eighty, eighty-one
glide eighty-one, eighty-two glide eighty-two, eighty-three glide eighty-three.”
Far ahead, over the forest, a mammoth cloud hovered. It was the backside of the blizzard.
The river flowed south and Perry worried. They would have to leave it if it did not soon bend southeast.
The skiing was flat and easy. He glided along the frozen river, letting inertia carry him. Numbers flopped in his head. He counted aloud, counting for each skating motion, each breath. The mammoth cloud looked natural over the forest. It shifted, regenerated like an ameba. It was familiar. He’d seen it coming. Harvey had laughed. He counted numbers, hard numbers. Ninety glide ninety. He counted faults in the river crust, keeping his head down, a way to keep limbs functioning, methodically step by step, ninety-one glide ninety-one. He counted Harvey’s respiration behind him, turning the disease into dry numbers, counting the days they’d been lost. He concentrated, searching for something unique in each of the lost days. He counted to nineteen, juggling numbers, but finally losing track as the blizzard blended the days into an indistinguishable force, extinguished day and night and time and even number. At last the river turned. It was a slow arcing bend, and they rounded it and came to a bridge. The bridge was old, plank flooring and silver-iron railings, high enough to ski under without stooping. Perry stopped. He leaned on his poles and waited for Harvey. “Bridge,” he said. Harvey sat on the river. “There’s a road up there, Harv.” Perry unbuckled his skis. It was a steep, long climb up the riverbank, a sheer bluff that was iced and deliberately imposing. “I’m going up.” He tackled it without thinking, digging with his fingers and pushing against the bank for adhesion. Roots of old trees bulged from the bank and he used them as a ladder. He did not stop climbing until he’d scaled it. He rolled on to his back and spread his arms and lay still.
He was dizzy. He’d been dreaming. Not dreaming, thinking. And not thinking, a combination of dream and thought.
He could not remember. He may have slept, he did not know.
The sky was darker now. He was cold.
He pushed up, leaning on an elbow. He was very cold. He saw the bridge. “Gawwd,” he moaned, remembered, then quickly scrambled along the bank and got to the bridge. It carried a narrow trail across the river and into the far pines. Probably a logging trail, he thought; Harvey would know. It was a plain dirt road that emerged, crossed the river and submerged again.
He walked on to the bridge. The planks shivered. The frozen bolts creaked. He was very cold. He looked each way, hugging himself. He looked up to where the trail tunneled out of the forest and down to where it disappeared again in a mountain of pine. A crust of night grey was coming down the river. He was cold.
He leaned against the iron railing. He was hypnotized and cold.
Harvey lay on the river below.
Perry stared down. Harvey’s arms were splayed, disjointed, his skis jutted at two obtuse angles. His yellow parka shined. Snow spread out and out to the banks of river, climbing the banks, spreading out and out into the forest.
Perry gazed down.
Harvey’s brown beard had frosted. The gray crust came sliding up the river. The yellow parka shined. Making angels in the snow: Harvey as a kid, making angels in the snow, arms and legs splashing. The forest was closing up, all right. Perry gazed down. Harvey was still, frozen in the river, cemented in the frost. His bad eye was open, wide open, bulging out. “Hey, Harv!” he called. “Hey, Harvey. What you doing down there?”
The forest was closing up fast as the gray nightcrust came
sliding in. “Harvey!” he called, a war game or something, just a tattered remnant of childhood, there lay Harvey shot dead, tumbling dead to the river, freezing in fun. “Hey, Harv!” he called. Harvey looked young, even with the frosted beard and red skin and play-dead pose.
He was tired. He sat down. The day was brittle and the shadows were still coming. Had he slept? They needed a fire. He turned, saw that the river bent sharply, twisted once more, then continued south. They could not stay on the river. He got out the map. He unfolded it and spread it against the railing and began searching it for a bridge and a river and a road. He was tired and cold. Squinting and bending over the map, he searched it top to bottom. He stopped once to look down at Harvey. The bad eye was still open, dull. “It’s all right, Harv. Old Harv.”
The map was yellow, encased in plastic. It had belonged to their father. Scribblings and cryptic X’s and dotted lines had been traced on it. In red letters, stencilled across the western width of the map, it said:
World’s Greatest and Only Exclusive-Canoe Country
. Canoe country. Ski country. Indian country. Camping country, lake country, pine country, old forest, lost country. It confused him. His eyes hurt, he needed his glasses. It was too simple and easy. On the map, everything was unmistakable and clear, nothing dangled and no height or depth. The great forests were reduced to a pale green sheen. From bottom left to top right ran the sharp coastline of Lake Superior, a sheaf of blue that formed the Arrowhead’s cutting edge. At its tip was Grand Portage, stopping place for the voyagers, the Indian reservation. Fucking greasy Indians, the old Swedes said. A sliver of land, the tip of the Arrowhead stabbed into Superior at a place called Pigeon Point. Perry had once been there. With his father and Harvey. It was all rock and pine and still wild, and his father had pointed out at the lake and called it the cleanest lake in the
world. He’d taken them along the portage trail, lecturing, explaining that La Vérendrye landed there in August of 1731, that the French used the place as a launching pad for the great Northwest Passage quest, that later it became a bustling English fur outpost, stockaded, growing, doing big business in beaver hides and bear and moose. And they’d walked along the portage trail and his father had lectured and Harvey’s eyes gleamed and dreamed, and they came to the Pigeon River and the pathway west into rainy river country, saw old Fort Charlotte, the site anyway, and it was all history, the Glacial Age, the Stone Age, the French and British and the coming Swedes and Finns and Norwegians and Yankees, opening it up. Perry stared at the map. He was cold. Harvey lay on the river below, his yellow parka still shining. The map was a maze. The country was thick with lakes. He tried to count the blue splotches, forgetting himself, forgetting Harvey frosted below, and he counted until losing his way in a tangle of channels and unnamed lakes and long blue stretches of lakes merging with other lakes. The whole history was there, printed on the map, all the moraines and blazed boulders, the sweep of the giant glaciers. And the names, some Indian, Lake Kawishiur and Lake Gabimichigami. French names, like Caribou and Brule, and English names and Swedish names and half-breed names, and when all the names ran out and still other lakes were discovered, the lakes were called by number, Lake Number Three, Lake Number Four. A pity, Perry thought.
Entranced, he stared down at Lake Number Four, hypnotized. He darted back and forth in memory, and Lake Number Four intrigued him: not at all a small and unimportant lake, rather a very large and interesting chunk of blue on the map, shaped like an upside-down deer with small islands where the heart and kidneys would be. The name, Lake Number Four, thumped mechanically through his head, solid, a solid name,
countable. Number Four in the land of ten thousand lakes. An injustice. Deer Lake would be better. Peri Lake. No, deer-shaped, Deer Lake. He looked closer and found a dozen other Deer lakes; then Elk lakes and Moose lakes and Reindeer lakes and Beaver lakes and Bear lakes and White Bear lakes.
He was cold. The map shivered. Harvey was still down there, still on the frozen river.
It was so big. He looked to the cutting edge of the broadhead, the string of towns along the coast—Tofte, Lutsen, Silver Bay, Hovland, Grand Marais. And the starting point, Sawmill Landing, a black dot, inland slightly, a dot representing all those wooden buildings, the tar strip of Mainstreet, Route 18. He touched the dot. He traced his finger north, through the heart of the Arrowhead, up to the northern edge where a chain of lakes and rivers and portages formed the intricate border with Canada. Somewhere in the broadhead, between the cutting edges, somewhere along a river where there was a bridge and an old logging trail. He looked carefully, squinting, bending over the map. The wind began and the gray nightcrust swept down the river, across Harvey and then under the bridge.
“Harvey!” he called.
Hugging him like a doll, Perry pulled his brother up, removed his skis and made him walk.
The river ice snapped and the day was late and crystal sharp and cold. The snow cracked into sheets. They walked in a circle. Perry had no hope. Twice he stopped to massage his brother’s thighs.
Harvey’s arms dangled.
“Come on, Harv, come on,” Perry clucked. “One step one, two step two, three step three, easy, easy.” Morphia, each step.
Harvey began to cough. He held a choking grip on Perry’s throat.
“Harvey?” Perry at last stopped.
“I’m sick.”
Perry waited for the coughing to stop.
“I was sleeping. I’m sick.”
“We have to get off the river. We’re going up to the bridge.”
Harvey coughed. “I don’t … No, I don’t think so.” His voice had an icy, nasal tinkle. It was his old voice hollowed out.
“We have to climb the bank.”
“Shit.”
“I’ll help. Can’t stay on the river. Can you hear me? The river goes the wrong way. There’s a road up there. We’ll go up and make a fire and tomorrow we’ll take the road.”
“I’m hot.”
Perry kneeled and rubbed Harvey’s thighs and ankles. His own hands were getting numb. The winter moon was already up.
“Bloody hot,” Harvey coughed. “I’ll take the coat off.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I’m hot.”
“It’s the fever. You’re keeping the coat on. Later I’ll build us a fire. Take hold now.”
“I’m sick.”
“Yes. You’re climbing the bank. You’re leaving the coat on. Take hold.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Doesn’t matter. Take hold.”
Harvey pulled an arm from his parka. “I’m … let me get this coat off. I was sleeping, you know.”
“You were freezing.”
They stood facing each other. Harvey suddenly smiled. He started to laugh and the cough caught hold, a dry hack. “You …
You don’t know what you’re doing.” The bad eye shined. “You don’t know
what
you’re doing.”
“Take hold then.”
“You … You don’t know a hell of what you’re doing, do you?”
“You’re climbing that bank.”
“All right then. But you don’t know.”
Harvey climbed recklessly. It was Harvey, his old carelessness and certainty, climbing as though daring the bluff to cast him off. He climbed to the top and smiled down at Perry, then, grinning and coughing, he curled in the snow while Perry scaled the bank for the final time, bringing up the skis and poles.
Perry used the last light to gather wood. He shaved splinters from a rotted bridge plank and used it for kindling to build a fire.
He tied the nylon tarp to an iron railing, unrolled the sleeping bags. Harvey lay by the fire. His eyes were listless and wide open and he did not move.
As the night went on, Harvey’s breathing settled into the forest background, replacing the wind. From time to time Perry fed him hot water, holding the pot while Harvey breathed the steam.
Perry slept well. He woke once, rebuilt the fire, then slept again.
At dawn, he doused the fire and packed their gear. He was nervous. He would look for food during the day. Squirrels maybe. Harvey sat with his back against the bridge railing.
“Get up,” Perry said.
“This is the end.”
“What?”
“You aren’t facing it,” Harvey said.
“Get up.”
Harvey kept grinning. “You don’t even know the end. This is
the end, brother. I’m not going on, I’m sick.” Perry stood back. He watched and did not go close.
He watched until Harvey slumped against the railing.
“Get up.”
“You don’t even … don’t understand,” Harvey muttered. “This is, just look into it. For Christ sake, this is the whole purpose of it, don’t you see that? We did all right. This is forest here. This is wild stuff, don’t you see that?”
Perry blinked. “No.”
Harvey shrugged and grinned. “Well, I’m staying behind. I’m through.”
Perry put on his rucksack. “You’re not,” he said. “You’re coming.”
Harvey grinned like a wolf.
“You are coming,” Perry repeated.
“Don’t have to be so afraid.”
“What?”
“You can stop fearing it. You’re always so goddamned afraid.”
“Get up.”
Harvey began his cough and Perry took the chance to get him up and into the skis.
“You’re coming,” he said.
“You’re afraid of everything.”
“That’s right.”
“You’re lazy and you never learned a thing. You’re afraid, you’re afraid of everything,” then he coughed again and Perry strapped him into a rucksack.
“Don’t you like to talk?”
“No.”
“I want to talk,” Harvey said.
“Then you talk. Let’s go.”
“I want to talk about being brave and doing things.”
“We’ve done that before.” Perry started across the bridge.
“Let’s talk about you then,” Harvey grinned. “Let’s talk about brother Paul Milton Perry, how’s that? How’s that?” he crowed. “How’s that?”
Perry waited for Harvey to push off, then he skied off the bridge and on to the road and into the woods, checking to be sure Harvey followed.
“Yeah,” Harvey crowed behind him, then coughed, then crowed: “Let’s talk about you, brother. See? See here, brother. You came with me. Came along free and clear, you hear?”
Perry now led the way.
“Free and clear! You hear? You could have stayed home. Didn’t have to come, nobody forced you. Came free and clear. You hear me? Let’s talk about your shining moments in the great history of things. You hear? You hear me? Let’s talk about
you
awhile. Let’s talk … Let’s talk about your great shining love for your father. You hear me? You want to talk? Nobody forced you out here. You just came, you hear? Let’s talk about our father awhile. Let’s sit down and talk about how you treated him, your great love for him. Let’s just stop and talk about that … Nobody made you come out here. You think I feel sorry? Wrong! You’re wrong, buddy. You hear?”