Country of Cold (4 page)

“Are you okay?” Cindee asked.

“No,” Lester said.

“What’s the matter?” Sam asked. Lester didn’t reply. He shut his eyes tightly and swallowed repeatedly. Lester felt ridiculous and pathetic, a fat helpless man in a barrel, like a giant fish being transported by a zoo.

“Look, are you going to go through with this or not?” Sam asked. “Because if you won’t, I will.”

“What’s the matter?” Cindee repeated.

“I just have to adjust the harness,” Lester said. “I just need a minute.” He almost said he didn’t want to do it but then the familiar feeling of acquiescent helplessness swept through him and he thought that none of this mattered at all, he didn’t matter at all. Look at the last year of his life. “Okay,” he said, leaning his head back against the wall of the barrel. “Let’s go.”

“Okay,” Sam said. And he closed the hatch and locked it. Lester put the oxygen regulator into his
mouth. Sam knocked on the barrel and Lester knocked back twice, their signal to go ahead. Lester heard them clamping the steel ramp to the back of the truck and then the barrel began rolling onto the ramp and then quickly down and into the water.

He heard the water splashing around the barrel and it felt to him like he wasn’t moving but rather just bobbing up and down. He pressed the transmit button on the radio. “Guys, it feels like I’m hung up on something here, some bushes or something.”

Sam’s voice crackled back to him, “No, I’ve got you in sight, you’re in the current now and moving pretty quickly.”

“Are you sure? It doesn’t feel like it.”

“Yes, I’m sure. Remember what we said about staying loose.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re in the truck now and driving alongside the river. Jesus, you’re going fast. We’re going to run ahead now to get the boat into the water, so we might be out of range for a few minutes, but we’ll be waiting for you beneath the falls.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Just a second …” There was a pause. Cindee’s voice came over the radio.

“Lester, everything is going to be okay, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, Cindee, I do.”

“Good.”

“See you at the bottom,” Lester said. There was no reply. Probably the truck had already sped up, out of range.

What Lester hadn’t anticipated was how little there was to do. He couldn’t see out of his barrel, he had no idea how far he was from the falls, and it didn’t really matter anyway because here he was trussed up and unable to steer or do anything except wait for a sense of falling. His only contribution to this undertaking was to sit in this barrel and feel terrified. Just sit still and
feel
. Powerless and immobile.

The barrel should have had a rudder of some sort, some way that the barrel could be steered. He could have insisted on that. And a little window that he could look out of. If it had just those things then this would not be quite as preposterous a thing to be doing.

The barrel began slowly rotating. This was Lester’s first clue that he was entering the turbulent area above the falls. He didn’t know how long it would take now, and then the barrel began bucking up and down like a mechanical bull and then abruptly it stopped.

Cindee and Sam were already in the pool beneath the falls, in the Boston Whaler that Sam had rented. The barrel appeared as a tiny black dot far above them and they both sucked their breath in when they saw it. It hung for an instant at the lip of the falls and then it was in mid-air and it fell. Like it weighed four thousand
pounds. They both watched it closely through binoculars right up until the barrel disappeared in the foam. It was unexpectedly tiny-looking in the great plumes of water. Studying the bottom of the falls, they saw only water bouncing up and around more water, and there were no silver floating cylinders anywhere at all.

“Do you see it?” Sam called out.

“No, do you?” Cindee answered. They both searched the pool beneath the falls frantically. Both felt as though they couldn’t breathe. Over and over again they motored as close as they could to the whirlpool at the bottom of the falls and peered into the curtain of water and saw nothing at all. “Jesus Christ,” Sam said. They drove back and forth and around and around and did not speak to each other. They hung their heads over the gunwales of the boat until they were nearly underwater and the waves rose up and broke over them and Cindee and Sam were wiping water from their eyes. It seemed to Cindee that this could not be happening, but she had thought that about different things and of course it could be, and it was.

After two hours they gave up and motored back to shore to call the police. They climbed the stairs that led to the observation point. There was a pay phone there. They stopped and looked back at the water swirling around and around and not expelling Lester or the barrel.

“What do you think happened?” Cindee asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it fell too deep and hit bottom. I didn’t really take into account how fat he was.”

By this point Lester’s barrel was already five miles downriver, fetching up on a sandbar, and jerking to a halt. Blood oozed from Lester’s ears and ran over his face from the pressure of the air bags exploding and he could not see to turn on the radio. But he could reach the lock of the hatch, and when it fell open the barrel only half filled with water.

Cindee and Sam walked to the pay phone beside the rail. They stopped as Sam felt his pockets for a quarter. “You are such a sonofabitch,” Cindee said.

Sam turned his back on her and looked out at the water. He thought he saw something, and pointed. Cindee leaned forward over the rail. Sam climbed the rail and stood on it, shading his eyes and staring. Nothing. Just water glinting in the sun. Cindee reached over and pushed behind Sam’s knees. He looked down wildly, as he toppled. Sam grabbed for the rail as he fell but he had too much momentum to stop himself and he swept by, his chin hitting the lip of concrete beneath the rail. She watched as he hit the water, making a huge splash. She thought she saw his face staring upward for an instant and then he disappeared in the current.

Cindee wondered again that that could have just happened, but it had. She stood clutching the rail and stared at the water and the falls and all that mist. Then
she walked back to the pay phone to call 911 and report another drowning beneath the falls.

Lester pulled himself out and stood heaving and shivering on the riverbank. Every time he shivered his flesh rippled like a waterbed through his wet T-shirt. He wiped the blood from his face and pushed the barrel back into the current and watched it float away, filling with water through the open hatch. He lay back on the riverbank and looked at the sky.

This was in 1997.

When Cindee and Sam had first met they were very young and not conscious of their beauty. In those days she was disconcerted by admiration, found it suspect and threatening. In large groups—at church, for instance, when they both still went—they drew glances from everyone. It would not last. They knew that even then. The attention was not a function of their substance, she thought, and was meaningless. But she was wrong. Beauty is of the essence, is evidence of what lies beneath, and it bleeds into what lies beneath: either way, the beautiful are or become a certain way. They feel and think and act like beautiful people. They can easily be identified even by the blind, or over the telephone.

Later, after he was dead, she remembered what he had looked like, what she had looked like, in various mirrors in motel rooms and apartments around the prairie. She recalled sitting astride him and staring at
his neck, taut, like cable under load. She recalled watching him watch her in the ugly large and plastic-framed mirror in that furnished apartment they had rented. The rural Manitoba rental market being what it is, there wasn’t often much beauty in the linoleum and wood-panelled rooms they had lived in. But they could have sold tickets to the sight of them dressing in the morning.

In her neighbourhood she was as much a fixture as the
caserne de pompiers;
when she’d walk to a café, barks and whistles followed her like she was the sausage truck. Her daughter was nine years old and had thick black hair and long limbs like a marionette; on the street mother and child were constantly assailed by old women and street cleaners with their respective exclamations of approval. Mother and daughter bore these nuisances with equal equanimity and perfect poise. The child’s name was Giselle and she understood very well why she was fussed over.

The child’s father was Leonard, an engineer who had studied at MIT and then returned home to France with his American girlfriend in tow. It’s okay, my family will adore you and even if things are a little cool right at first, who cares, let’s just have some fun and enjoy ourselves.
Which is the sort of thing young men are prone to saying, for the first six months.

Paris is expensive, there is no escaping this. Tourists shake their heads at the ten-dollar sandwiches and just sort of assume that there is a secret menu for the locals, one that more closely approximates the Piggly Wiggly experience. But there isn’t, Paris is obscene, that’s all. And the French acknowledge this, once they’ve established that there are no social points to be made in impressing you. But, for them, Paris is also the only real city in the world, the only city that, in the end, isn’t provincial, and so the four-dollar cups of coffee are conceded as sort of a poll tax on sophistication—they go with the territory, but just look at the territory, will you? And they have a point.

To American art students who didn’t quite finish and now find themselves reading baby formula preparation instructions with a dictionary in hand, the poll tax seems a little more outrageous, and if the baby’s father wants her to live in this city, then she’s going to need a little more than five thousand lousy francs a month. Which, it seems, his family understands and so despite him, they reply with remarkable generosity and a matter-of-factness that shuts her up completely. Good Lord, must be some plumbing business.

Which brings her to the point of sitting in an old church by herself, listening to a harpsichord concert and wondering if people can tell just by looking at her how
ignorant she is. Even her daughter had heard of this guy and had seemed to understand what the big deal is.

And when I made a face at the pompous introductions she saw me and laughed. At the intermission she sidled up beside me, drink in hand, hat firmly in place, and said, in English, “Nice tapestries, huh?”

I said, “Is it that obvious?” And she nodded.

“The clothes,” she said. I looked down at them, unaware that the Gap had been betraying me.

“Is there no hope at all?”

“Wear primary colours only as a last resort and even then as a gesture of self-parody.”

“Maybe I should just go back home now.”

“Had you been planning on being around for a while?” she asked.

“My name is Robert.”

Her child flirted with me outrageously on our first meeting. Her eyes between her fingers, beside me on the couch, she laughed like a bebop jazz trumpeter, all uninhibited flights of exuberance. “This will last until she decides that you are a threat to her father,” her mother said. She waited for a response. I played some more with the child. “Which I am very careful about,” she added.

A month later: rising at four in the morning to sneak out before Giselle awoke, walking down rue St. André des Arts, the street cleaners soaking down the sidewalks,
which glisten like sweaty skin, our skin perhaps, a half hour previously. In midsummer in Paris the streets are the most comfortable place to spend the close, thick nights, and I did not hurry home. In Place St. Michel you can always get a croissant and
café crème
and so I stopped there to sit among drunken Scandinavians and derelicts and wait for the morning newspapers to be dropped off.

As I sat there, nursing my four-dollar cup of coffee, I thought of Leonard. He and I had not met but no day passed without a dozen references to him, by Giselle and her mother. It had been Leonard who had broken things off initially, before they had learned of the pregnancy. But he had adjusted more quickly to the prospect of being a father than he had to that of being a husband and before she knew it he had found her an apartment on rue de l’Éperon, two bedrooms, maybe five minutes from Place St. Michel, and he was there for the child’s birth and for another couple of months following, fixing meals, washing diapers, buying groceries. And she appreciated this help, she said, but after a while she was wondering how long he intended to stay—the apartment was in his name, incidentally—and eventually she had to ask him to leave.

Which he had done. But he still saw his daughter every few days and most weekends, and when Giselle spoke of her grandparents it was only his mother and father she meant and she loved him dearly and spoke often of how much she liked it when he spent the night.

As far as the child went, my periodic presence in the apartment was a matter to be approached with tremendous care. Leonard knew of my existence long before Giselle was allowed to see me kiss her mother. I recall taking Giselle to her little school at the end of the street some months after our first meeting—I’d been kicked out for an hour, to stand in a morning downpour underneath the awning in the courtyard, in order to return as Giselle was eating her cereal—she held my hand as we walked down the street and she sang a children’s song I didn’t recognize, in French. Her friends ran up to greet her and she let go my hand and went running to them without a word. I watched her run all the way down the street to the school. The parents of the other children were kissing them and patting down their hair as they squirmed. The parents nodded
bonjour
to me. I nodded back and watched to see if the child got in okay, to wave to her. She ran straight up the steps, lifting her knees high, like she was running through mud. Her eyes might have wavered five degrees from the door just as she disappeared. I turned to go back to her mother.

Eventually Leonard asked to meet me in one of those American bars on the right bank, in the Marais. This, I suppose, was a gesture of some sort. He was there already waiting for me and I was fifteen minutes early. He ordered whiskeys without asking.