Country of Cold (24 page)

“Très bien, merci, monsieur,”
Lévesque answered evenly. Lefevre said nothing at all, staring straight ahead. Sergeant Martin scooped his scrambled eggs onto his plate and shuffled away down the line.

“Well, if you ever need anything, drop by the aid post anytime, we always have coffee on,” Joly said with a smile that looked like it was propped up with little twigs.

“Yessir,” Lefevre finally answered.

“Okay then, take care now.” He turned and followed in the wake of Sergeant Martin.

When Joly caught up to the sergeant he was already half through his eggs and starting on his toast. “A word of advice, sir?”

“Sure.”

“You know, you don’t do them any favours when you talk to them like that in front of everybody. Those two already think they’re special from everyone else in the regiment, and when other people see an officer being friendly the way you were, things get harder for them. See what I’m sayin’?”

“What a fucked-up organization this is.”

“When is your time up, sir?”

“Two more years.”

“Same as for them. You should try and make it go smooth as possible. The army can be pretty unsmooth sometimes.”

The last three weeks of the deployment were reserved for the brigade commander’s exercise. It was largely on their performance during this period that the battalion commanders were recommended for promotion: the chain of ambition and threat worked down to the battery and troop commanders and everyone knew that a good performance could salvage much and an incompetent one imperil everything. Everyone got a little insane as this time approached: Joly kept to himself, up on the roof of his ambulance. His tanning time was interrupted only by the daily, and sometimes
twice-daily, briefings the colonel began giving the regimental officers. During these hour-long harangues under helmet, Joly mostly daydreamed. A few things he took in. Radio discipline and procedure was gonna fuckin’ improve around here or heads were gonna start gettin’ kicked. He took that in. And any forward observation officer who couldn’t get fire on target within three corrections could look forward to a summer in cadet camp, wiping noses. And even the slightest deviation from safe procedure would result in charges laid. Is that understood? He got all that.

Which set off a whole new round of lectures from the battery commander. Doc, don’t move the ambulance without talking to headquarters. Better yet don’t move it at all, get one of the medics to do all the driving, someone who knows the firing schedule and how to get clearance from base. And finally: Access to live fire areas will be controlled by sentries. If you come upon a checkpoint, stop and find out if any changes to the firing schedule have been made. And follow their directions. They’ll know the lay of the local area.

And then madness began. Joly was sleeping in the front seat of the ambulance, fully dressed, his knees against the dashboard, his chin tucked into his chest, when the packet of vehicles he was in started up as one and began to move. Four in the morning and they had been waiting at the rendezvous point for eight hours. His idea was, at least we’re into the last of it
now. I can’t wait to get where we’re going and set up camp again. A week later he was still sleeping with his knees against the dash of the truck, still wearing the same clothes, and still wondering when they were going to set up camp.

Sergeant Martin was driving with his forehead nearly on the windscreen, imagining that he could penetrate by proximity the vertical puddle that sat against the window, sloshed around by the ineffectual windshield wipers. His breath steamed against the glass and he would sporadically unroll his window and try to navigate with his head held out to the side, having forgotten perhaps the conclusion he had reached the last time, ten minutes previously, when he had attempted the same thing: fuck it’s raining hard. Joly exhaled slowly and leaned against his own window, his head bouncing back and forth with the involuting road and then with a reverberating thump into the door.

“Jeez, sarge, what’re you doing?”

“If you want to take over here, sir, be my guest.”

“Do we know where we are?”

“Fuckin’ rendezvous was supposed to be back three klicks, but there’s nothing there. I have no fuckin’ idea where we’re supposed to be.”

“Well, we’re on the right road anyway, eh?”

No answer.

“Sergeant, please tell me we know what road we’re on.”

“Let’s just keep going. We gotta come upon someone, sooner or later.”

Another hour, five kilometres and three deep-mud encounters later, they come to a crossroads and they stop and study the map. The doctor thinks he can see a line of hills through the rain, which would mean they were somewhere—there? The sergeant knows they are lost and is smoking his last dry cigarette, just staring, he’s so mad. They’re on strict radio silence but between the two of them they’re thinking that maybe they should call someone. But what good would that do? Sure, we’re reading you loud and clear. No, we don’t have any idea where you are. Pause. Don’t you?

From out of the night a rain-hooded face knocks on the driver-side window. Sergeant Martin unrolls it and recoils against the insurgent elements, the rain hood hollers something, “Where the fuck is the RV?” Sergeant Martin yells back.

The rain hood pushes some dripping blond hair to the side and hollers something more. Sergeant Martin leans forward trying to get a better look, the rain hood steps back and waves them forward.

“See, I told you we should just go straight,” the doctor says.

No answer.

In the passenger mirror the slight figure in the green poncho stands on the road for a moment and
then disappears in a gust of rain, Captain Joly and Sergeant Martin both watching in the mirror as the rain closes in around it.

Another five klicks and half an hour and this is clearly not the RV.
“Fuck. I have no idea and no cigarettes.”
The rain falls even harder and the thunder crashes. Sergeant Martin pricks up his ears. That one was close.

“That fucking bitch!”
Sergeant Martin throws the truck into reverse and turns it around. They’re plowing through mud like a tugboat and the lightning begins—great radiant streaks erupting like daddy longlegs spiders off to the right and omigod the left. Sergeant Martin hollers into the radio: “Zero, this is Starlight: Cease fire! Cease fire!” And the passenger-side front tire collapses as hail falls all around in another thunder and they careen off into the ditch on the right, the truck tipping onto its side and stopping, the sergeant sitting on top of the doctor when things stop moving. “You okay, sir?”

“You’re squishing me!”

The sergeant reaches above him and opens the driver-side door and begins to haul himself up and thunder again and nothing from the sky ever sounded like that: ten thousand shrieking steam whistles but thinner, briefer; and the sergeant falls back, now he’s lying on top of the doctor. He bucks and he gasps, leaking warm ooze onto the man beneath him, and then with a shudder he stops.

This was in 1995.

Cora had lived in Pigeon River for four years before she finally decided to try it. She signed up for hunter’s safety classes and bought herself a twenty-gauge shotgun. At first she went with the men she worked with at the clinic, and they showed her how to look for prairie chickens in the low branches of poplar trees and to wait until they had leaped and then to take a second before deciding whether or not to shoot.

She lagged behind them, to watch more carefully as they leaned into their shotguns and then fired. At their urging, she fired a few times, too, but she wasn’t really trying to hit anything and she thought they sensed that.

Later, she went by herself, and studied the cut-barley fields carefully as she walked along. The first time prairie chickens rose up around her she was too startled to do anything except gasp. They were so
much noisier when she was alone. And she was quieter, so she got closer.

The next time, she was prepared, and as she lifted the shotgun to her shoulder she saw the bird clearly and she swung the bead of the barrel through its path, and fired a little ahead of it, and it fell.

By the time the sun had begun to set she had four birds and she walked back toward her truck. She looked at the bloody little birds in her sack and looked away. She looked around at the swaths of cut grain and at the skeins of geese overhead and at her truck in the distance. It was where she was.

…was a beautiful stretch of 1940s architecture that could have been buried in a tar pond, so perfectly preserved were its painted wood and stucco features. Shelly’s Fabrics sat in all its lemon-yellow cheerfulness alongside the Riverside Grill, which shone with polished stainless steel and scrubbed Formica. Next was Dunsmuir Billiards, which had never, not for a moment, ever, shone with anything at all, but rather cast shadows within and without, even from the lights above the tables, and especially from Roddy Freeman, who sat in a debilitated and sullen mound behind the cash register, radiating anemic and unconvincing menace. The businesses of Manitoba Avenue had their own association, which met quarterly to discuss their declining fortunes, and to frame resolutions for the town council, to the effect that they were owed something, dammit, had been there long before all the highway strip malls and box
stores had crept up over the last half-dozen years, and surely the town wasn’t purposefully trying to destroy them? Roddy Freeman was the secretary-treasurer of the Manitoba Avenue Business Association and saw to it that these resolutions were published in the
Dunsmuir Post
each Tuesday, there to be read with inert sympathy by the townspeople, who, upon remembering which business he owned, wondered what he imagined they wanted their town to become. Or remain.

Across the street from the Riverside Grill and Dunsmuir Billiards was the Wagon Wheel, the bar of the employed. Jim remembered the place clearly, although it seemed to him he hadn’t so often perceived it clearly—from the inside anyway—when he had lived here. The dim red light and a lax institutional character had never allowed for fastidious age-checking and he had spent most Saturday nights here in his final year of high school, affecting knowledge of the world and a fondness for rye whisky.

Rye. The elixir of the Canadian prairie. The place, all these places, came back to him with its taste. Rye and ginger, rye and Coke: rye, rye, rye. Lovely little word when you said it fast. Ice cubes and smoked-glass tumblers. He hadn’t drunk rye or been back here in twenty years and hadn’t thought of that time or this place in any detail since he moved to Toronto, to launch his career in retail plumbing and heating. This was the joke he planned to use at the reunion, which was scheduled for the weekend.
He sipped his glass of rye and ginger, which he had been nursing all night, and watched Country Music Television above the bar. Garth Brooks was pumping his fist in the air and singing the praises of love.

The decision to attend the reunion had unfolded quickly. Carol had left him the summer before, after their daughter had taken off. Brandy had found herself a Children’s Aid Society worker who had placed her in about twenty different group homes for about an hour each, over the last year. He heard from her every few weeks, when she needed money. He gave her what she wanted, generally. Her mother was quickly emptying the bank account, too. It had turned into a race, between mother and daughter. Jim had adopted the posture of spectator, filling the account as quickly as it was emptied, by cashing in mutual funds and GICs. Come spring, he had taken out a second mortgage on the house and sold the car. Now that was gone. Apparently his wife was equipping a hardware depot in northern Manitoba somewhere. He was not particularly concerned about what either of them was doing with the money. When it ran out, which would be soon, it would be gone, and neither of them would have any further claim on him. Which would be a relief. He understood that this was an imperfect strategy for his complex family problems but it was the only one he had. Any endgame strategy, even a losing one, is better than none.
At least you have an idea how the whole business will conclude, he thought to himself.

Lovely Dunsmuir. He had visited his parents’ graves. He had gotten a motel room in the Aloha Motel. He had watched late-night pornography in his room and had tried to decide whether the sex sounds coming through the walls were the real thing or a different channel. On the basis of the vibrations transmitted through the wall from the apposed headboard, he had optimistically concluded that they were the former, but the next morning an aging man in blue Manitoba Hydro overalls had left his room the same time Jim did and they exchanged looks of mutual assessment, envy being replaced by doubt in the space of two slow seconds.

His parents had died three years ago, one after the other in a sequence of malignancies. He had not attended the funerals. At the time he was in the basement, paralyzed with desperation, and when his sister called he had told her he couldn’t get away from work. She didn’t press him on the matter. They had not spoken since his mother’s, the final, death. A little cheque followed in the mail a few months later. His sister had written a note, “Call if you have any questions.” No signature. After that business Carol had given up on him. She had company.

The graves were well tended. He stayed about fifteen minutes and did not know what to think. He kept waiting for a surge of emotion to come over him, but
the mosquitoes were biting him and there were other people in the cemetery, dropping off flowers. He bowed his head a little and looked respectful.

The invitation to the reunion had arrived that spring and sat on the table beside the front door for months, alongside an enormous mound of flyers and unopened junk mail, with stray gloves and ballpoint pens interspersed. Something called the Dunsmuir Alumni Committee had organized these things every few years for the last decade. He and Carol had snorted about them, wondering whose lives were so dull that their high school years seemed like a good thing to dwell upon. Who, that is, had never made it out of Dunsmuir and oh my God, could you imagine that? said the new residents of southern Ontario in their lovely new vinyl-sided signature residence, at the end of an attractive traffic-slowing cul-de-sac.