Country of Cold (23 page)

Her roommate was Carole Lévesque, who was from Jonquière and spoke almost no English whatever and was not at all certain how she had wound up here, but had decided to ride it out and see where it led her. She chatted on and on about her boyfriend, Réal, back in Jonquière, and how the first leave she was given, she would fly back to see him, or maybe he would come here, they would hole up in a hotel in Winnipeg for a week, or, if they gave it to her, two weeks. Monique
listened to this as she lay on her back on her bunk and wondered just how hysterical Carole would get and how long it would take.

The rest of that week was filled with all of them getting issued their gear and with sorting out the administrative blunders that had put three prospective F-18 mechanics on the same base as these woebegone artillerymen. Artillerypeople. The aircraft-mechanics-to-be extricated themselves with relief and said goodbye to the hollow-eyed recruits who were scheduled to go into the field the following week, thirty-two below and wind like a power tool. Their bus pulled away and Lefevre watched it go and decided to walk across the street to the gas station, where there was a pay telephone that you could talk on with some expectation of privacy. She thought her father would be wondering how she was doing by now.

When Joly met Monique Lefevre she lay weeping on a stretcher, in the arms of Carole Lévesque. She had bruises on both her cheeks, mud pressed into her oily blond hair, and dried blood at the side of her mouth.
Soldat
Carole Lévesque knew little about her except that she had been homesick and had sneaked out to use the phone and had been found outside the sergeants’ and warrant officers’ mess screaming in the snow with her trousers around her knees. A military policeman sat in a chair outside the examining room.

The nurse on duty, Lieutenant Ridgeway, concluded what she knew of the story with a snort. “Some asshole from the regiment, I guess. Fuckers should all be locked up.”

“Do we know if penetration took place?” Joly asked.

“No, we don’t.”

“I guess I’m going to have to do swabs.”

“I guess you are.”

“Did you get the rape kit?”

“It’s right here.”

“Jeez.”

“Let’s get this over with, poor thing shouldn’t have to lie here all night.”

“No, she shouldn’t.”

Joly stepped outside the examining room to take a breath of air and to wash his hands. As he opened the door, Lieutenant Ridgeway turned to the girl. “Okay, private, we’re going to have to get you into this gown now. There you go. Here, you can cover yourself with this.”

The “assault kit” was an attempt by the military police to ensure that all necessary evidence was gathered by the doctor. The attacker’s pubic hair, bite marks, and ejaculate all linger after him for at least a short while and, if recorded, may make the difference between a conviction or not. The post-assault assessment took about an hour to perform and included combing, swabbing, photographing, and sketching.
About ten of the victim’s pubic hairs were required as well. Plucked, not cut.

Joly stepped back into the room, his hands shining pink. He put on a pair of sterile gloves.
“Il faut que je vous examine,”
he said apologetically to the young weeping woman.

“Comment?”
she said to her friend.

“She doesn’t consent, doctor,” Lieutenant Ridgeway said.

“There’s no way he’ll be convicted if she doesn’t let me examine her.”

“Il faut qu’il t’examine,”
Carole said to her friend, stroking her face.

“Non, non, non,”
Lefevre said, rolling away toward the wall.

Joly sat down in the one remaining chair. Then to Lefevre: “If you want to stay here tonight I can admit you.” Lefevre made no audible reply. Lévesque stroked her back. Ridgeway chewed her lip.

A week later, at a follow-up appointment, Lefevre sat in her chair staring at the floor.

“If you want to proceed with the charge it’s never too late. Of course, you’d have to tell them who did it.”

No answer.

“I know these combat arms guys can be pretty intimidating, but you can put this guy away if you want. He’d never be able to get at you again.”

No answer.

“Do you have any vaginal discharge or pain upon urination?”

Outside you could hear the wind slamming some door someplace. It seemed to go on forever.

For Lefevre the winter passed like she was on a motorized treadmill that dragged her along in a precisely choreographed minuet of tedium and routine. She passed whole days where it seemed to her that she hadn’t had a conscious thought. She could have returned to the Magdalens but there she would have had unlimited time to sit in that damn coffee shop and stare out at the snow. So she stayed on the base and polished her boots every night until nine and then she went to sleep and arose at five. The drill staff thought highly of her, but for obvious reasons—no one wanted to single her out, or even look her in the eye for that matter—the award for top recruit went to a speckle-faced boy from Saskatoon who could do eighty-four push-ups in a row without stopping. They took their places in the regiment in mid-March and Carole’s boyfriend never did show up and Monique’s predictions were wrong, there were no histrionics at all.

In the spring they deployed a thousand miles to the west, to Alberta. There a small detachment continued up to the Kicking Horse Pass, where it set up its guns under
the direction of civilian forest rangers and fired rounds into the glaciers, setting off small avalanches in order that very large ones might be averted. This had been one of the regiment’s duties for fifty years. It was called Av-Con, for avalanche control.

Soldats
Lefevre and Lévesque were among those assigned to Av-Con; the remainder of the regiment stopped two hundred kilometres south of Calgary. It would spend the rest of the summer there, engaged in field exercises on the badlands.

For those soldiers sent up to the mountains, the spring was hallucinogenically strange. For officers and senior NCOs the task was a rebuke, an indication that they were thought to be unpromising commanders. Generally, the junior lieutenants would spend the mornings reading the want ads in the newspaper. Every military convention eroded out from under the watchful eyes of the ambitious and longtime-indoctrinated. In the morning the privates would emerge from the cabins they slept in, walk across the street to the one open-all-year café, and order breakfast. Out the windows of the Horseshoe Café the mountains could be seen shining silver and bright. At times it was almost as beautiful as the Magdalen Islands, and many days passed for Lefevre in which she was perfectly content. The waitresses at the café came to know the soldiers by name and soon it was as if they were residents. When heavy snow came, the soldiers knew that they would likely be called to roll out
their guns and unpack the shells, but even this was welcome and pleasant work with a usefulness utterly unknown in usual military life. There were no concerns about camouflage nets or counterbattery fire. Leisurely and carefully, coordinates and gun settings were called out. Three or four or five rounds were fired, the whole valley rang with the explosions, and then there was a dull rumble. The avalanches were watched carefully through telescopes, to see that they did not extend to the slopes above the gun positions, and then more coffees were ordered at the Horseshoe Café.

Most days Lefevre slipped away from the town to sit on a tree stump she had found where the whole valley was stretched out before her. She could see the CN trains rumbling along the track, and elk, one by one, crossing open areas, stopping to paw at the snow and snort in the frigid crystalline air. They seemed to her unreasonably beautiful animals. Even from that distance their bearing and grace were excessive.

Lefevre wondered that those creatures could stay alive in snow so deep as this. She wondered if they were ever caught in the avalanches she had helped set off. She realized that they probably were. Of course, there would be avalanches anyway, even if they didn’t set them off, and this made her feel better.

Since she had arrived in the mountains, her mother had written to her. She had been thinking that maybe Monique should come home. She seemed different, over
the telephone, since she had left. She shouldn’t just remain there because she was afraid of quitting, if she didn’t want to be a soldier. There wasn’t any point in struggling against the world just for the sake of struggle. Lefevre found herself appalled by this statement of her mother’s, but unable to reply to it directly. She wrote back and told her mother that she thought staying in the army was a very pragmatic thing to be doing. For one thing, there was the pension plan.

The exercise range at Suffield seems even more unremittingly huge than either the mountains or the base in Manitoba. Five hundred wild horses live there, and most of the surviving pronghorn antelope as well. There are sufficiently few trees that they are marked individually even on the smallest-scale maps. Park an ambulance out here, climb up on its roof to sunbathe, and it’s as if the world falls away beneath you. All there is is sky. Every couple of mornings someone comes by with food. Those loaves of Wonder bread and eggs and sausages are the only evidence available that the medical section hasn’t been forgotten entirely. The radio crackles and hums but nobody calls for Starlight. Starlight awakes at irregular intervals with drool dripping onto the roof of the ambulance, wondering where he is.

The regimental aid station was the only portion of the regiment that knew such peace; the gun batteries split apart on arrival, like an angry family, and spent the
whole spring charging about the range in their self-propelled howitzers as if in amphetamine-induced agitation. The staccato thump of sod, blown high into the air, never let up, even for a moment, and after a while it sounded like the wind, or surf, maybe—inaudible until it was listened for. The soldiers driving the ammunition trucks followed the guns around with maps taped to their dashes; they drove a steady circuit from supply point to gun emplacement, sleeping only when the trucks were being loaded or when, mercifully, they broke. The mechanics spent day and night repairing the disassembling machinery and the cooks travelled back and forth thirty and forty kilometres between the to-be-fed and the supply points. Nevertheless, as vigorous as the training might be, the effects of incoming artillery fire could not be sanely duplicated and the only casualties the medics saw were exhaustion and sprained ankles. A couple of snakebites. Dehydration, heat stroke. Just enough work to keep Docteur Joly from achieving total union with the roof of his ambulance.

Artillery rounds differ from one another in both the size and the nature of the projectile: the size is strictly a function of the gun doing the firing, but even for any given gun there was a diabolic array of options for the battery commander. Mostly, they fired off high-explosive rounds, for reasons of economy and the fact that it was easy to see them hit (because of all the sod in the air),
and that made it easy to tell how close or how far you were from your target. But also available were illumination rounds, which lit up the night sky in a dull crump of eerie blue-green flare light, descending by miniature parachute onto the flammable prairie below. And white phosphorus, or Willie Pete, which erupted in a thousand streaking blazing shards outward from the impact crater, little clumps of burning pebbles which, it was said, burrowed into flesh like a dentist’s drill. Really, more of a morale buster than anything else—couldn’t penetrate even light armour, after all. And finally, there was the beehive round. This one was structured like a conical honeycomb made out of steel—at the core of the round was a charge of high explosive and in the compartments in the honeycomb sat ten thousand steel darts with razor-edged wings. The artillerymen spoke in awed tones of this device—takes the kill radius out to two hundred metres, the danger radius to four hundred. Imagine it.

By late June the threat of avalanche had diminished and the detachment was returned to the regiment in the desert.
Soldats
Lévesque and Lefevre were not pleased by this development and anyone working with them knew this within minutes of their arrival. Joly considered approaching Lefevre to see how she was doing, but decided against it. To make that kind of fuss—having her brought over from thirty miles away—he’d have to be more than curious, he decided. Anyway, she was always free to ask to see him. He talked the matter over with his
sergeant, Roger Martin, who suggested he leave the matter alone. “Everyone gets over these things in their own way, doc,” Martin said. “You can’t go pushin’ help on anyone.”

Martin struck Joly as being one of the few sensible people he had met since joining the army. He had an understated reasonableness about him that left the doctor wondering what he was doing in the army in the first place. Joly decided to take his advice and not pursue the matter.

A couple of weeks later, the first real medical problem emerged in the form of one of the administrative clerks and an IUD-induced case of pelvic inflammatory disease, which was one of the possible complications, Joly remembered having explained when he put it in. Sergeant Martin and he had done the pelvic examination in the back of the platoon tent, and it was quickly clear that the clerk needed to be evacuated to the field hospital at brigade headquarters. It was the middle of the night and they were facing a thirty-mile drive over dirt track roads—easily an hour each way—and Sergeant Martin tightened his mouth as he radioed their intent to regimental headquarters. When he got off the radio he kicked the barracks box nearest to him so hard it cracked with a loud snap. Everyone in the tent turned to look at him. Martin walked into the back of the tent, where the woman lay on a cot. “Right then, soldier, you’ve got your way. Make sure your kit is packed. You’ll
be leaving within the hour. And stop that whimpering.” Joly didn’t know what his sergeant was carrying on about. It was three in the morning and all he wanted was what everyone wanted, to sleep.

Headquarters came back with permission to travel and a safe route, which was to say a series of roads that weren’t being shelled at the time of their intended travel. After dropping off the by-then vomiting clerk at the field hospital, taking out the IUD, and writing some admission orders for intravenous hydration and antibiotics, Joly and Sergeant Martin found a couple of vacant stretchers in a storeroom and grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep. At breakfast they were standing in line waiting for eggs when Lévesque and Lefevre fell in behind them. “Private Lévesque, Lefevre! How are things?” Joly asked. The two women interrupted the conversation they were having and blinked at them.