Country of Cold (25 page)

It seemed incomprehensible to Jim now that he had ever imagined his life to be more interesting than anyone else’s. They lived in Etobicoke, just outside of Toronto. Which had many more expensive coffee shops and several imported furniture dealers, it was true, but look at what he had become there—the withdrawn bookkeeper of Robinson’s Plumbing Supply. Preoccupied with computer games and Internet sex sites. As pale and soft as Oreo cookie filling. A man sandwiched between two chocolate wafers.

He had thought that he would recognize more people here. But while the place was staggeringly unchanged, he didn’t remember a soul. Jim had imagined Margaret Huebsch would be here, in the bar beside Nancy Gustafson and Phillip Campbell, all laughing loudly and confident of the string of victories that lay in their futures and immediate pasts, stretching from hockey rinks to summer cabins, graduate schools or eponymous car dealerships, to security and the admiration of all.

They weren’t, of course, nor was anyone else at all that Jim had ever seen before. He remembered whole nights spent at exactly this table in the Wagon Wheel, chipping exactly this paint with his thumbnail. He had thought that coming here would help him get back on track, resume the direction that he ought to have been headed these last half-dozen, dozen, dozen and a half, years. It occurred to him now that perhaps he had never actually ever gotten off track, that he was now where he had been headed, twenty years previously.

Jim missed his wife. He drank his rye slowly. He hadn’t been up to that life, with that family, that situation, but he missed Carol. He didn’t blame her for taking off. They both had, after all. She had thought Dunsmuir a hilarious town, and would have enjoyed the reunion in an ironic way. He had learned irony from her. She had never lived outside of Toronto, and for her irony was like faith. A whole way of looking at the world. Viewed through that lens, Garth Brooks, for instance, became
entertaining rather than inevitable. Seagram’s Five Star became something to laugh about. In Dunsmuir, among Dunsmuirites, Five Star was no joking matter. Dunsmuir was generally a no-go zone for irony. Goddammit.

Jim shook his head. He lived in Etobicoke.

Lester walked into the Wagon Wheel and surveyed the thin crowd, recognizing a half-dozen faces he thought he knew for a moment, but did not. Jim saw him walk in and look around expectantly. Jim was sure he would recognize him in a moment but he couldn’t quite recall those features buried within that encasement of flesh. Lester approached Jim.

“You must be here for the reunion.”

Jim rising, extending his hand. “How could you tell?”

“Body language or something.”

“I know what you mean.” They exchanged names and thought they remembered one another. Was there a geography class they had both been in? Not sure. Anyway. Seen anyone else you remember? Me neither. Just in tonight.

“In Etobicoke. I work in a plumbing and heating store there. Retail. I, uh, went there to launch my career.”

“Huh. I’m up from Rushing River. I’ve been living there since I finished high school. Work in a bar there. I like it. Nice town.”

“Did you know that guy who went over the falls a few years ago and drowned?”

“Vaguely.”

“That was crazy.”

“Yep.”

“Does anyone ever try that anymore?”

“No.”

“I guess they were put off by that attempt. I heard he had made quite a barrel for himself. I guess if he didn’t make it in that thing, no one could.”

“I think that’s the general impression.”

“Did it break up or flood or what?”

“The barrel?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not sure of the details.”

“Interesting.”

“Stupid.”

“I suppose. Still, you can’t help admiring him a little.”

“I guess.”

“So have you been back here since you left?”

“Not for more than a few hours.”

“Why did you decide to come to this?”

“I’m not sure. Curiosity, I suppose.”

“About our classmates.”

“Yeah, or something. To see how much I’ve aged, maybe.”

“Them, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

Albert sat at the Riverside Grill eating a grilled cheese sandwich. He recalled the elderly Ukrainian man who had taken his order and prepared his sandwich. He had come here often to eat, especially on his lunch breaks from the Esso station, after the Dairy Queen had become too embarrassing.

He lived now in Toronto and hadn’t been back to Dunsmuir in six years. Each Christmas he had dithered over whether or not to come home to his parents, but in the end had never managed to summon up sufficient strength. In Toronto he worked in a publishing house as a copy editor. His company specialized in coffee-table books, and he had flipped through proofs of many aerial studies of the prairies, glowing amber with rising or falling light. How beautiful this part of the world seemed to him then, in his office overlooking that tolerant and anonymous city. His lover, a Portuguese man named João, had not come with him. His observation, about the coffee-table books and nostalgic exercises such as this reunion, was that beauty lives in representations more vibrantly than it does in the actual. Albert thought this an unnecessarily pessimistic idea. In response, João showed him photographs of Portugal and told him stories of his childhood there.

The Ukrainian man’s wife arrived and she smiled at Albert, not recognizing him after all, and she and her husband disappeared into the kitchen. Albert was the
only other person in the Riverside Grill that afternoon. He wore a camel coat over an expensive black sweater, and his shoes gleamed self-consciously beneath the table.

His brother had not showed up yet, which hadn’t surprised him. Albert had checked with his parents and on his voice mail, and there was no word from him. Robert had said he was coming a dozen times over the previous three months, but he had said it in the hurried way that Albert recognized from years of self-absorbed fiascos. His brother was in Montreal, supposedly doing another fellowship. He had constructed his life around grant applications, which, it appeared, he was quite adept at writing. There had been a winter in Paris and a couple more in Toronto and many years of lucrative lounging in Montreal. After many, many attempts to understand, Albert had stopped asking Robert to explain what he was working on, exactly. His brother had not noticed this yet, but would soon, presumably. Albert suspected that his success with grant applications lay in that same doggedness.

Albert’s reasons for coming to the reunion were as opaque as he suspected those of the other attendees were; in high school he had had a crush on a boy named James Wilson and in subsequent years had heard from mutual friends—Cora, among others—that James had come out and was living in Vancouver. For many years Albert had wanted to meet this man. They had come from the same place, after all, and each had endured his
own circumstances privately, certain that he was unique. Albert thought about the movie scene, the one with the man in the hole, tapping away at the wall with his spoon, happy when he finally heard someone tap back. One of the invitation flyers he had received listed confirmed attendees and Wilson’s name had been on it. Albert had decided to go. If Wilson could go, Albert could, he figured. It was like a dare. And anyway, his brother was coming for sure, he had said.

Cora checked into a room above the Wagon Wheel Restaurant, where she had lived during her last year of high school. She left home as a consequence of domestic discord, like industrial solvent in the eyes, and her own strength of will, which had found its full expression early in life. She and Albert had spent many hours up here—she wasn’t sure if this was the actual room she had had but it certainly could have been—and the television, carpet, and wall covering (she hestitated to call it wallpaper, it was more like a rind) had remained unaltered from her time here.

She was not unaltered, though; she had not quite appreciated the scope and nature of how she had changed until the drive up here. It was, oddly, the first time she had ever really considered what she was becoming, had become, living there in Pigeon River, working hard and known by everyone. She served the purposes of the town, clearly. She was a part of it, and it
was assumed that she would remain there for many years yet. Neither Cora nor anyone else had reason to doubt that. It wasn’t so odd. All the women in her extended family had constructed lives around taking care of a group of people—generally a smaller group than a full town, admittedly, but the concept was the same. She had conceived of herself as being fundamentally different from her mother, aunts, and sisters but that, it appeared, was only vanity.

There was meaning and worth to what she did; she had told herself this enough times that she stopped challenging the point. It was only when she stopped viewing herself from afar that the limitations of this life revealed themselves to her.

The first few years, she had driven into the city every couple of months, for the weekend. She went to art films and galleries and hung out at bars. She took people back to her hotel room with her. In the morning she ordered room-service breakfast and exchanged demographic information. There had been a couple of men, and a woman, who had delighted her. The subsequent pattern of petering-out correspondence wore on her a little, and she stopped doing this so much. It seemed slight to dwell upon what she missed: coffee of a certain strength, restaurant meals, bookstores, a sense of urgency, unselfconscious beauty, sex. Sex.

Sex. The television noises coming into her room were unattenuated by their passage through the few
millimetres of particleboard and everyone adjoining her was watching something that was shot in poorly lit video, with monotonous musical tracks and sets that might possibly have seemed plausible in Miami in 1987 but not subsequently or elsewhere. That was the loosest approximation of what she longed for, but it was not unrelated. To just know desire again would be almost enough. Uncooked want, either hers or someone else’s. She prodded herself. Nothing.

She walked out into the night, locking her door behind her, and wondering for a moment whether there was any point to that. It might reduce the number of drunks who would otherwise pass out on the bed, she concluded, and walked down the stairs into the prairie evening.

This part of the prairies serves as a feedlot and nursery for the cities: its young people leave these places for grey and various regional centres in the east, and within a dozen years of high school, Cora, who had imagined herself the least likely to remain here, was one of only a couple dozen of her graduating class to live here still—Pigeon River being Dunsmuir, in every beer-bottled and self-righteous way she could think of. She disliked the old woman she envisioned Pigeon River as, but she liked tending her.

She walked past the Riverside Grill and looked inside. At the table nearest the window was Paul Joly, whom she did not recognize, and Daphne Hainscotter,
whom she did, barely. She stopped and waved. They could not have been more obviously from the city if they had been wearing tails. There was a child with them. Cora remembered hearing about Daphne’s having a baby but had thought the father was uninvolved. They looked up, finally, and stared, smiling hesitantly.

Cora ordered a milkshake. They were nearly finished with their uneaten sandwiches, but the boy, a five-year-old named Richmond, was very pleased with his french fries. It had taken a moment for Daphne to place her. Paul and Daphne had met at a gastroenterology update in Denver, imagine that, and were now living in Montreal.

“Pigeon River is close to where I was posted when I was in the army,” Paul said.

“Shilo?”

“Ten of the three longest years of my life.”

“When were you there?”

“Right after medical school.”

“Wasn’t there an accident around then, some artillery misfire or something?”

“Maybe after I left.…”

“Could be, was a while ago.”

The Meet ‘n’ Greet was held in the gymnasium. There was a thin crowd of people who mostly kept their distance. Daphne and Cora found one another smiling insincerely and wishing they were elsewhere. The boy
was sick, from the french fries perhaps, and he and Paul were back at the hotel room. There was baby-sitting available but Richmond was vomiting a great deal, Daphne explained. Cora nodded.

“Listen,” Cora asked, “how was your time in the Arctic? I heard you were up there and tried to call you a few times, to find out what the work situation was like up there, but never got ahold of you. Did you like it?”

“It was amazing work,” Daphne said reverentially, trying to gauge whether or not Cora had heard of the trouble she got into up there. “It’s tough, though, working without any backup at all. When things get out of hand there’s no one you can call.” She looked at Cora. “Sometimes they did get out of hand.”

“I heard.”

“I figured.”

“Things work out, though, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw you once in that sports bar.”

“Yeah.”

“Could have been any of us.”

“Paul doesn’t know much about all that.”

“No problem.”

After the Meet ‘n’ Greet there was a meal and dance at the Dunsmuir and District Community Hall. Jim sat between Cora and Lester, each of them there alone and trying to remember one another. Lester recalled Cora
through her affiliation with his friend Bob’s twin brother, but Cora couldn’t place either of them. Jim, it appeared, had walked through high school both invisible and entirely, but unknowingly, blind. He recalled almost no one at all, and the few friends whose names he could remember had not come to the reunion. He wondered why his wife had stayed with him as long as she did.

James Wilson did not appear at the Meet ‘n’ Greet, had not, actually, shown up or registered, notwithstanding his confirmation of his attendance more than four months ago. Albert left a few minutes after his conversation with the lacquered woman at the information table, the one who asked him where he had bought his coat, and if he went to a tanning salon or was that natural. He returned to his motel room and packed his bag, but he was too tired to leave just then and the hotel room was too oppressive to spend the evening in.