The Mountain Can Wait (14 page)

“I'm Dan,” he said. “I knew your mom from when she was born. God, you're like a carbon copy, man.” He rubbed his scalp with both hands; the skin moved loosely over the bone. He closed his eyes as if he were remembering something. “I met you once, a long time ago. Your mom brought you here when you were a baby.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Well, that's understandable—you were just this tiny little baby, man!” Dan shook his head. “I had a feeling something was going to happen today.”

So Curtis had been to the island before. His dad had always told him otherwise, and used to say that if their grandmother wanted to see them there was nothing stopping her from coming up to Prince George.

“Here's what,” said Dan. “I've been meaning to go over there for a few weeks; Bobbie makes the most amazing sesame paste, and I need more. Why don't you let me run you over? She'll be pleased to see you; I know she will. But you showing up with that face of yours is going to scare the shit out of her. You can use me as a kind of middleman, you know?”

The gravel lane to Bobbie's house wound through open bush of aspen and birch. Dan pulled up to a low gate made of driftwood, which opened onto a path through a thicket of blackberry. He turned off the engine and looked at Curtis, as if to check that he was okay, then asked him to wait in the truck while he went in first.

The rain had stopped and Curtis rolled down his window. A banana-yellow slug, as fat and long as a finger, glided evenly along the top of the gate, feeling its way with slick tentacles. Curtis thought about the girl. From the time she was born, he decided, the moment of her death had been marked on the side of the road. Which meant that from the time he was born, the moment of her death was marked for him too. All the decisions he had ever made were leading him to that dip in the road. Their meeting at the party had been short and at the time seemed insignificant, but now he saw that it was all part of a plan. They would have talked to the same people, smoked from the same resin-black pipe that had been passed from mouth to mouth all night, their paths slowly converging toward the moment of impact. If there were such a thing as agents of fate, then they were tiny, rat-faced goblins scripting people's lives like jokes. They would have been lurking somewhere at the party—in the houseplants, behind the drapes—rubbing their thorny hands together and laughing their balls off.

Maybe his grandmother, Bobbie, would let him stay, maybe even until the snow began to fall in the mountains, and then he could go back, not to his mountain in Whistler but to some other one. Back to the safety of snow, powder so airy it looked blue, covering every leaf and rock. Filling every ditch. Until then he could hide on this spongy island, where the weeds grew so fast you could almost hear them climbing.

Dan beckoned to Curtis from the gate and then disappeared behind the blackberry bush. On the other side of the thicket, a wild lawn climbed a gentle rise to a small brick house that looked as if it were being consumed by the vegetation around it. Ivy climbed the walls and draped over the roof, fingers poking through a second-floor window. A bed of twiggy lavender bowed over the top of the porch railing. Plums and cherries hung maturely from hard-looking trees; the fruit that had fallen was rotting in the grass. Dan stood on the porch, holding open the screen door for a tall woman in a shapeless, flowery dress, with straight, bushy white hair parted down the middle. She squinted angrily in Curtis's direction.

“What did I tell you?” said Dan. “He looks just like her.” He turned to Curtis. “She thought I was fucking with her. But you see, Bobbie? Here he is in the flesh.”

Bobbie took a step forward and gripped the porch railing with both hands. Her eyes were heavy-lidded, sleepy. She tilted her head back and peered down her nose at Curtis.

“But he looks like his father too,” she said. “The cocky way he's standing there.” Her voice rang loudly, biting through the humidity.

“You going to invite him in?”

“Might as well.” She retreated into the house, and Dan waited for Curtis, holding open the screen door.

The house was stuffy, with low, exposed beams gray with dust. A blackened stone fireplace gaped from the left-hand wall. Damp spread up the walls in patches, leaving blooms of plaster, bubbled and flaky. Toward the back, Dan stood in the small kitchen filling up a kettle and Bobbie sat at a table in an adjoining, windowed nook. She glanced at Curtis and gestured with her head for him to join her. He made his way to the table, stopping at a crowded bookshelf to study a photograph of his mother in a tarnished silver frame. The picture showed her clinging with young arms and legs to a rope swing, suspended over water and riverbank. Her clear eyes were focused intently on a spot where she was probably intending to land. His image of her had been conjured from the few pictures that his dad had, mostly in shadow or out of focus, more like the negative of the photo than the photo itself.

He took a seat opposite Bobbie. From a fold in her dress, she took out a pack of rolling tobacco and cigarette papers. She squinted at her work, shaking a pinch of tobacco into the crease of a rolling paper. Closer up, she appeared boxy and strong, the muscles in her arms solid under thick, old skin.

“Bobbie,” Dan said, turning slowly in the middle of the kitchen. “Where do you keep your cups?”

Bobbie looked up, and all the tobacco fell from the paper she was mincing between her fingers. “On top of the fridge. Why? Where do you keep your cups?”

“Just brewing some tea,” Dan said, smiling.

“I've only got dandelion. I wasn't expecting anyone.” She put her hands flat on the table, exhaled slowly, and started again on her cigarette.

“Mind if I?” Curtis said, pointing to her bag of tobacco.

“Be my guest.”

“Since when do you smoke, Bobbie?” Dan called from the kitchen.

“About two months now. I can't believe I left it this long. It's frigging marvelous.”

Curtis deftly rolled a well-packed smoke and passed it to her while she still concentrated on her own. She waved his away impatiently with her elbow.

“The ritual of rolling the damn thing is why I started,” she explained, working the cigarette inches from her nose. She licked the paper and smoothed it down with her thumbs, gave the whole cigarette a twist, and held up the wrinkled thing for inspection. Nodded at it. “I have to earn the right to smoke each one.”

Dan brought in three mugs and sat down.

“You like that picture, eh? Of your mom?” she asked Curtis. “Her dad took that one.”

“She looks so different,” he said.

“Different from what?” Bobbie stared at him. “You barely got the chance to know her, you poor thing.” She tilted her head at him, and her smile was sad but also, though he couldn't be sure, a little smug. “When my daughter was little, she used to tear dandelion stems into strips and put them in a bowl of cold water.” She tucked her cigarette in the corner of her mouth, and with her eyes still on him, she searched the folds of her dress and produced a book of matches. “You know what happens when you do that?”

Curtis looked at Dan.

“They curl up, perfectly, into these tight little springs. They take on this pearly, silvery sheen. She would make dozens of them and tie them into her hair. My daughter was very good at that sort of thing, making things beautiful.” Bobbie lit her cigarette and inhaled deeply, and watched the smoke rise and curl from the cherry as if she were testing its quality.

Curtis blew across the surface of his tea. “I don't remember,” he said.

“Well, no, you wouldn't. Would you?” Bobbie adjusted her dress and pushed her brittle hair behind her ears. It fell back over her eyes. “I suppose you want to know why I haven't been in contact with you?”

He took a sip of tea, which was oily and coated his teeth and the edges of his tongue.

“My daughter brought you here to me when you were a baby. I don't know what went on in Prince George, but she was getting you away from your father. The two of you were going to stay here, and for a few days it was, as I recall, idyllic. We foraged together, with you tied to her back in a sling. I rocked you to sleep in this very kitchen. You were a cute kid. But then your dad came looking for you, with his dirty boots and his face all stony. He blamed me for everything, and convinced her to go back with him.”

“It wasn't really like that, was it, Bobbie?” Dan asked, his forehead creased.

“How the hell would you know?” she said.

Dan raised his palms apologetically, winking at Curtis.

“He hated me,” Bobbie said. “And I wasn't going to go into combat with that man.”

“He never told me any of this,” Curtis said.

“Well, no shock there. Not much of a talker, is he?” She looked out the window and delicately picked a shred of tobacco off her lip. When her gaze met his again, it was skeptical. “What were you expecting to find here?”

Curtis didn't know what to say. What he hadn't expected was for her to be so solid, to be so unnerving. And he hadn't expected to like her, but he thought that maybe he did.

“Is there something you want from me?” she asked.

“I need somewhere to crash for a bit,” he said, judging that it was better to be straight with this woman than not. “I could help you out around the yard or whatever.”

“It wouldn't hurt, Bobbie,” said Dan, coaxing. “Your fruit trees are breaking my heart, man. The Rainier is choking to death.”

Bobbie looked slowly from one of them to the other. “What in the hell are you people talking about?” She jutted her cigarette at Curtis. “You show up here out of the blue and I let you stay, and tonight you strangle this old woman in her bed!”

“Get off it, Bobbie,” Dan said, laughing. “This is Elka's kid here.”

“I don't need anyone's help.”

“I've got my tent,” Curtis said. “I don't have to stay in the house.”

To his relief, Dan got up and took Curtis's full mug to the kitchen. “You could use the company, Bobbie,” he called over his shoulder.

She stared at Curtis and sighed heavily. “Looking at you, I can't deny it's like I'm looking at her. She was perfect, you know, in every way. I suppose I could tolerate you for a short time because, some would say, your ever-loving father most certainly would say”—she closed her eyes and they fluttered under the heavy lids—“that I owed it to her. I'm sure she loved you dearly, though this was something we never spoke about. But I loved
her
dearly, so I know how it feels.” A thread of tobacco fluttered to the table as she brought her cigarette to her mouth. She squinted against the smoke. “Now. What do you know about rapeseed oil?”

He shrugged. “Nothing?”

Her top lip curled and she pushed back her chair, and stood up heavily from the table.

Tom watched
the checker's truck retreat down the road and he watched while the dust rose and then settled to nothing but a haze. A band of noseeums hung around his head; mosquitoes landed on his neck and shoulders and he slapped them off. His anger seemed to be concentrated in his mouth, in his teeth.

First he woke Roland, then Matt, giving them five minutes to be in his trailer.

“How many bundles did he bury?” Matt asked, looking at the map Tom had spread on the table. His meaty hand was cupped over his mouth, his eyes glittering. He and Roland sat side by side on the bench; Tom stood at the other side of the table.

“Enough to fill the back of her truck.”

“Shit, boss.”

“What do you think she'll do?” Roland asked. He was peeling an orange and carefully building a stack out of the concave disks of peel.

Tom shook his head. “Both of you look at the map one more time,” he said. “Before I do anything, I need to be sure.”

Roland and Matt bent over the table. Roland drew his finger over the red lines that delineated the blocked land that the company had already planted. The foremen's names had been penciled into the blocks that their crews had worked.

“I know this is right because Sweet was stuck in that draw for the first week and a half. You remember?” Roland said. “That's all we heard about every fucken time we sat down. Me and Matt were over here.” He pointed to the other end of the map. “Then Sweet moved his guys to that big block up the Sitlika. And I put him on that creamy one right next to it when you guys were in Minaret so I wouldn't have to listen to his babble all week.” He stretched out his chest and hung both hands off the back of his neck. “I don't know what to say.”

“That's where she found the stash,” said Tom. “That last block. He must have done it after we got back from Prince George.”

“You think he did it? You don't think it was one of his guys?” Matt said.

“I think he did it when we got back from town.” Tom leaned over the table and drew back the curtain by Matt's shoulder and looked out at camp, fallen to the color of sand under a dusk-white sky, the lake so calm it almost wasn't there. They would all be asleep now, ready to pull on their boots at 2 a.m. for their first night of fire hours. He was going to have to tell the people on Sweet's crew that they'd be working the next three or four nights without pay, replanting the seedlings that had gone into the ground so sloppily. Maybe Sweet had even encouraged the lazy work, but then he wouldn't have had to go that far. These were long, arduous days, one rolling into the next, broken only by the lacing and unlacing of boots, the taping of fingers, the washing of tin plates. Every day, slotting one or two thousand trees into the hard ground, trudging through unsympathetic terrain—it was easy to cut corners if you weren't being watched, prodded a little. Natural, even. Tom moved away from the window and leaned on the counter next to the sink. “Between the two of you,” he said, “you think you can handle his crew?”

“You're going to give him the boot?” said Matt, his voice hoarse.

“That's the only thing for it,” Tom said. He reached for the map and folded it.

Sweet's tent was pitched at the back end of camp, at the top of a grassy rise behind the cook van. His tent was an expensive-looking, four-man dome, around which he'd dug a deep trench for keeping back the rainwater. Two tightly bound tarpaulins were strung up to the surrounding alders, providing extra cover as well as an overhang, like a porch, which was furnished with ground sheets. There was enough room for two deck chairs and his bike, locked. Not a beer can or piece of garbage in sight.

Tom sat in one of the chairs, set at a friendly angle to the other. The view was good. The apex of the mess tent cut off some of the camp, but there was a clear view of the lake, and you could see more of the planters' tents in the trees. The low, resonant rhythm of deep snoring came from inside the tent like an underground train. Tom unfolded the map, shooed blackflies from his eyes. For a long time, Sweet had been part of the landscape here, same as the bugs and the thistles and the threat of fire. Maybe that was why Tom always asked him back. And sitting here now, he felt he had arrived at a place that was inevitable.

“Sweet. Wake up.”

The snoring continued, and then snagged.

“Sweet.”

The swish of a sleeping bag, then, “Fuck off.”

Tom looked across the water to the mountains, only a blue outline now under a darkening sky. “It's Tom. Come out here for a minute.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to come out here for a minute.”

Sweet cleared his throat, farted. Then came the muffled sounds of sleeping bag, of clothes being pulled on. Then silence. Tom was being made to wait. He sat back and breathed deeply.

“What time is it?”

Tom looked at his watch. “Just after eight.”

The tent flap zipped open and Sweet emerged, his eyes red, the top half of his hair pulled up tightly in an elastic band. He wore an orange hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and thick wool socks. He closed his tent flap and sat in the other chair, stretched out his legs, and dug his hands protectively into the front pouch of his sweatshirt, puffed mosquitoes from his face with his bottom lip. His eyes flicked to the map in Tom's hands and then he stared out at the lake.

“The checker's just left, irate.”

“Old Camel Toes?” Unsmiling, Sweet kept his gaze forward. He slowly raised his hood over his head and pulled the tie strings, then crawled his hands back into the pouch.

Tom leaned over and spread the map on Sweet's thighs. “She found J roots here, and here, and here.” He jabbed his finger at points on the map. “And she found a huge stash”—he pointed again—“here. A few thousand seedlings, at least.”

Sweet's mouth twitched, as if he were trying not to smile.

Tom took the map back. “This is funny?”

Sweet opened his arms wide, shook his head. Evidently it was too much for him, though, and he laughed, a crack opening in ice. “Boss,” he said, shaking, “I've always, ever since I was a kid, whenever I catch shit for something, I can't help it. I've had women…literally punching holes in walls…” He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and doubled over in his chair, drew up his knees. His back moved with deep breaths. A branch cracked far off in the trees, followed by the shudder of its echo.

“So you know these are all yours. This is no surprise.”

Sweet sat up, rubbed his hands up and down his face. His knuckles were etched with dry brown scabs.

“Yeah. Those are my blocks.” He had stopped laughing and was licking and puckering his lips, trying to straighten his face. “We'll do a replant, right? No harm, no foul.” He removed his hood, watched Tom from the corner of his eye.

“I pay you okay, don't I?”

“Your percentages are good, boss.”

“Treat you right? Treat you fair?”

“Well, now.”

Tom sat up, watched him steadily.

“Do you think I get fair treatment around here?” Sweet's face screwed up and he wagged his head, whined in the voice of a child: “Dig the shit holes, Sweet. Here's your crap land, Sweet. And while you're at it, have some more. Roland is in charge, Sweet.” With each point, he threw his hand like a conductor. He finished with a clap, looked at Tom, eyes wide. Something ticked a long way off in the bush.

“So you let this happen. You stashed those trees.”

“And then you go around fucking the cook. Not very professional.”

“Is this because of her?”

Sweet crossed his arms over his chest and looked away.

“You're ruining my company because of her?”

Sweet cocked his head to the side and winked. “You think I can't get what I want.”

Tom came closer in that moment than he ever had before to hitting a man. The punch was there, waiting in his throat and in his palms. He wanted to rip the obnoxious fountain of hair from the top of Sweet's head. He stood up, knocking the flimsy chair to its side. They stared at each other and in Sweet's blue eyes Tom saw a deep and uncomplicated hatred. There was nothing left to say and he'd run out of all equanimity, so he gripped his trembling hands together.

“You've got until the morning,” he said. “Once I've factored in what you've cost me, you'll get the rest of what I owe you by check. When we get back from the blocks tomorrow you won't be here. I see you again, I'll knock your head off.”

Sweet stood up, the knobs of his fists poking through his pouch. “You can't take my money. I'll sue you, for unfair dismissal.” His voice rose. “For intimidation!”

Tom headed down the hill into the quiet of camp, the only sound being the whine of mosquitoes at his ears.

He woke at two in the morning after four hours' sleep. He swung his legs over the edge of the bunk and stared ahead at nothing, rubbing his eyes, his head full of Sweet, as if there'd been no sleep at all. He stepped out of his trailer into the darkness and moved to the trees and pissed. The sky was clear and the stars were dizzy, a dome from end to end.

The lights were on in the cook van and the mess tent. Nix would have been up for at least an hour already. Someone stood at the water pump, in the band of light that spilled from the tent. Stood there in a woolly hat, spitting a gob of toothpaste into the dirt.

The back door to the cook van was propped open with a plastic crate and Tom could see Nix through the opening in the warm light. She wore a yellow bandanna in her hair and a long-sleeved wool shirt, army pants cut off at the knees. Her muscular calves were dotted with swollen, angry-looking bites. She worked in a cloud of steam. He stepped up to the door and opened it and leaned on the frame. She glanced at him quickly but continued to work, wheeling back and forth between either side of the van, where the counters were piled with loaves of bread, jars of jam and peanut butter, boxes of cereal. Water steamed in a large pot on the stove and she ladled whole eggs into it. She kept a cloth over her shoulder and stopped and wiped her face.

“You want some help?” he asked.

She turned back to the pot. “Nope.”

“You sure?”

She took a deep breath and he thought she was going to speak, but instead she moved down the counter and reached for a knife, and began to chop.

“Nix. You going to talk to me?”

She coughed and moved farther away.

Outside, whoever it was who'd been at the water pump was gone. No sign of life over by the tents. No bobbing lights or movement. He went to where the vehicles were parked together and saw that Sweet's truck was already gone. Tom sat in his own truck with the door open and, as a wake-up call, gunned the engine a few times, honked the horn. A flap of birds rose from the trees. In the dark he couldn't tell what kind, something small and fast—confused and angry at this invasion.

Within a few minutes, people stumbled dreamily from their tents. The first night was always the hardest. They ate, smoked, sat bleary-eyed at their tables. Somebody asked where Sweet was and it didn't take long for the news to spread.

Tom gathered Sweet's planters at one of the fire pits, white ash circled by stones black and cold. Some of them were complicit, he knew, but it didn't matter who. When he told them they'd all be working for nothing for the next few nights, one guy stood up, laughing, and quit on the spot. His laughter echoed across the camp as he made his way back to his tent. The rest sat slack-jawed, kicking the dirt. He sensed that some of them had known this was coming.

“This is a bastard of a situation,” Tom said. “I know it. And I apologize for letting it get so fucked-up. Some of you guys have nothing to do with this, but we get in there tonight and tomorrow night and rip into it, and it's done.” He looked at all of them and they stared back. And they looked at one another too. They would know soon enough, when they got back onto the land, whose hectares were planted badly and whose were done right. One of the other crew vans started up, the headlights beaming across the camp. “You think we could make a promise to each other?” he said.

Nobody said anything.

“Maybe we just get this work done and not talk about who's responsible for the bad roots, and who's hard done by? You guys think we can do that?”

“Probably not,” said Amy. She was sitting on her water jug, hands on her knees. “People might promise you that but they're full of shit.”

“It's got to get done. You either make it quick and painless or you stew in it. Your choice.” Tom stood.

“I've never planted a tree wrong,” Amy said, steadily.

“Fuck you, Amy,” someone else called. “In all your hundreds of thousands, not one bad tree?”

This brought a soft, communal laugh.

Sweet's crew worked in morose silence under stars that slipped across the sky. Sometime after five, light began to bloom in the east, and what was black and indefinable began to take shape, lightening to pale silver. They worked with headlamps and the going was easier because they had no bags to carry. Tom separated the crew into four teams that worked in lines on different patches of land. They crawled slowly over the terrain, lifting each seedling from the ground, straightening bent root plugs. Tom brought his shovel, jumping from team to team, and found LJ and Beautiful T sitting on a charcoal-black log at the edge of a huge, sandy ashpit, an old site where slash had once been burned. They sat and smoked, their nostrils black with dust from the burn.

“Where's the rest of your team?” he asked.

LJ gestured with the back of her hand to somewhere beyond her shoulder and threw her head back, exhaled smoke toward the sky.

“Probably a bad idea to stop when the others are still working.”

“We're only taking a quickie, chief,” she said.