Medicine Walk (3 page)

“That your woman?” the kid asked.

“Told you,” his father said, poking at his hair with a comb. “She’s a whore.”

His father sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on a pair of work boots and laced them up halfway so that the tongues hung out and flapped. Then he picked up a tattered old denim
jacket and swung it on, stood and wriggled his shoulders, and looked at the kid.

“Take ya to eat,” he said. “My treat.”

“Guess you’re doing your father thing now.”

“Not especially. It’s a belly thing is all.”

He tapped another cigarette loose from the pack on the bedside table and tucked it behind an ear then walked past the kid, opened the door, and stepped out into the hallway. The kid watched him walk away. He turned to look at the room, shook his head sadly, and walked into the hallway, pulling the door shut behind him. His father was a dim shadow at the head of the stairs. The kid followed him out into the street.

THE PLACE WAS A DANK HOVEL
. It had the look of an old garage or warehouse, a low-slung one-storey joint that hadn’t seen paint in years. There was a hand-painted sign under a lone spotlight on a rickety pole held in place by guy wires run to the roof. The sign said
Charlie’s
. The windows were swing outs and one of them was held open by a broomstick. Sounds from a jukebox and the garble of voices and the clink of glasses, and when they stepped through the door the kid saw a plywood bar set up on old barrels and mismatched tables and chairs strewn haphazardly around the room. The lights were dim, giving the faces that turned to look them over a pall as if they were shrouded by shadow, and the talk lowered. As
the kid followed his father across the room, the weight of their eyes on him was like the feeling of being watched by something unseen on a mountain trail. His father strode through the room, merely flicking a wrist in greeting to those who spoke to him, and opened a door at the far end and stepped out onto a deck. It was suspended over the dark push of the river by huge pilings and the kid could hear the hiss and gurgle of it from beneath the boards. There were propane heaters set around and there were knots of men at the tables. His father walked to an empty table close to the railing and hauled a chair back and sat looking out over the water. The kid shook his head and when his father still did not speak he took his makings out and began to twist a smoke. He drummed his fingers on the table. After a moment he lit up and took a draw and looked out at the river streaming past like a long black train. When he turned back he saw a tall, gangly man step through the door with a bottle on a tray and walk quickly to their table, set the bottle down and then stand and look at his father, who continued to look at the river.

“Twinkles,” he said finally.

“I’m right here.”

“You still owe.”

“I know. I’m good for it.”

“You ain’t workin’ no more.”

“I’m still good for it.”

The tall man looked at him and squinted and studied him a moment.

The kid smoked and looked away. “How much?” he asked.

“He owes thirty,” the man said.

The kid put the smoke in the ashtray and dug in his pocket for the cash the old man had given him. He counted out forty
dollars and handed them to the man, who looked at the bills as though they were foreign things.

“Change?” he asked.

“How much for the hooch?”

“You can have it for the ten.”

“He wants to eat,” his father said.

“All’s we got left is the chicken and some beans.”

“Put it on my tab.”

“I don’t know, Eldon.”

“Hey, I made up what I owed.”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

The man set the tray down and folded the money and tucked it in his pocket. He looked at the kid, who finished his smoke, ground it out on the deck, and stashed the butt in his chest pocket. “You want a drink with that?”

“Coffee,” the kid said.

“And you?”

“I ate,” his father said.

He nodded and walked back across the deck and the kid turned and looked at his father, who sat with his chin in one hand. “Your treat, huh?”

The kid smirked and put his feet up on the chair across from him. His father opened the bottle and raised it and took a couple of heavy swallows and set the bottle down and wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. The plume from the stack downriver was like a ghostly geyser and the lights of the mill all orange and hazed like a carnival lot. On the far shore the town disappeared into the shadows thrown by the dim run of lights along the thin streets. The line of mountain was a black seam above it all.

The man returned with his coffee. The kid drank and waited, feeling angry and impatient. His father was silent. For a while there was only the garrulous talk of the men in the background, the high arch of a fiddle on the juke, and the swish of the river beneath them. The coffee was bitter and hot and he cradled the cup in his palms and watched his father.

“So how come they call you Twinkles?” he asked.

“It’s bullshit.”

“What?”

“Starlight. Twinkle, twinkle. You get it.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t exactly the twinkly sort.”

“What am I then?”

“How in hell would I know? Cloudy, I guess.”

His father shook his head and took another drink, smaller, more deliberate. “How I feel, I suppose.”

“You fixin’ to die?”

“Jesus. How’d you get so hard-assed?”

“Just asking a question.”

The man brought the chicken and beans and a tortilla, and the kid dug into them and ate hungrily while his father watched him and nursed the bottle along. It was good chicken and he slopped up the beans with the tortilla and washed them down with the coffee. He sat back in his chair. His father stared at him with flat eyes and for a moment the kid thought he was stone drunk. They sat wordlessly and looked at the river.

“She cuts right through past the mill. Picks up speed and rolls out into the valley thirty miles or so downstream. You know it. Same valley leads to the old man’s. You come up that way?” his father said and pointed at the line of mountain.

“I know it. I hunted that whole territory,” the kid said.

“She’s a good river. I been on her most of my life one way or
another. Used to be in the old days we’d float log booms down from the falls. Mile long, some of them booms. Me and a pike pole walkin’ the length of them, keepin’ them movin’ right down to here. Then after a couple days we’d head back up and do ’er all over again. Right to freeze-up. But that was years ago.”

“You lumberjack?”

“Some. I liked it better on the water but you had to cut and fall in order to get out there. Got to be a boomer if you worked out well enough.” He shook his head sadly. “Nowadays they use trucks. Takes the heart out of it.”

“When was this?”

“Hell, I was young. Your age. I went to work when I was fourteen.”

“So I guess you called me here to tell me that?”

His father sipped from the bottle. “You get right to it, don’t you?”

“Got to. Winter’s coming. Stuff needs doing.”

“I got to ask you a favour.”

“Seems to me you’re the one who owes.”

“I do. I know that. Sometimes though, you got to give to get.”

“I already give forty.”

“I ain’t talking about money. Money’s no use in this particular thing.”

“What then?”

“I want you to head into the backcountry with me.”

“You must be drunker than I thought.”

“I want you to take me out into that territory you come through. The one you hunted all your life. There’s a ridge back forty mile. Sits above a narrow valley with a high range behind it, facing east.”

“I know it.”

“I want you to take me there.”

“Why would you want to go out there in your condition?”

“Because I need you to bury me there.”

The kid sat with the coffee cup half raised to his mouth and he felt the urge to laugh and stand up and walk out and head back to the old farm. But his father looked at him earnestly and he could see pain in his eyes and something leaner, sorrow maybe, regret, or some ragged woe tattered by years. His father twirled the bottle slowly with a thumb and two fingers.

“You won’t make it forty miles,” the kid said.

“You didn’t walk here, did you?”

“Well?”

“I’ll ride your horse.”

“So it’s my walk then?”

“Jesus, kid. I’m dying. Where’s your heart?”

He turned from his father and looked out across the slick black of the water.

“All right,” his father said. “You won’t do it.”

The kid slapped at the table with one hand. He stood up and there was silence behind him as everyone stopped their talk to watch. He shook his head and rubbed at his chin with one hand.

His father sat leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and lit another smoke. “There’s things need sayin’.” He said it flatly, looking down at his shoes.

“Why? So you can feel better?”

“I was thinking about you.”

“You never thought of me before.”

“I did so.”

“Yeah. Right.” He reached out and took the bottle off the table and held it up and studied the level of it, sniffing at the top of it before setting it back down and kicking at his father’s
chair. His father raised his head slowly and peered at him sideways. The kid sat down.

“I need you to bury me facing east,” he said. “Sitting up, in the warrior way.”

“You ain’t no warrior.”

His father sat and sucked at the smoke between the pinched ends of his fingers then tossed it over the railing. He stood and reached out and took the bottle and raised it to his mouth and swallowed twice, hard, and then pitched the bottle over the railing too. He turned to the kid and he weaved some but put a hand down on the tabletop to steady himself and looked at his son with half-closed eyes. “I was once,” he said. “Need to tell you about that. Need to tell you a lot of things.”

“So you want to walk and talk about the good old days?”

“Weren’t no good old days. But you need to hear still. It’s all I got to give ya.”

“Ain’t never gonna be enough.”

He looked at the kid and there was no more talk so he turned and made his way slowly across the deck and through the door into the barroom. The men at the other tables watched him go. They looked at the kid. He sat with his feet propped on the chair his father had just occupied and rolled a smoke. When he was finished he set it between his lips and held it there without lighting it, content to stare away across the water to the black hulk of the mountain. Then after a few minutes he stood up slowly and made his way to the door and walked through the bar without looking at anyone and out into the flat dark of the street. He looked up for the shape of his father making his way back to the house but he was nowhere to be seen. There were few people on the street. The kid stood there looking at the outline of his shadow spilling
across the street. He could smell sulphur from the mill and the mouldy smell of cheap beer and he turned finally and followed the stars north through town, stopping to buy a few sour apples that he fed to the mare before bedding down beside her in the familiar dilapidated warmth of the barn.

HE COULD SEE THE MOON
through the slats of the barn when he woke. It was early morning and it was in its descent but it hung in the sky like a glacier pouring down light with the sheen of melting ice. There were shadows everywhere. It was bright enough that he could see his way to the back door of the old barn and he got up and walked there to smoke. There were coyotes in the field. He could see the sleek shape of them trotting and bounding near the fence. Six of them. Cavorting. Celebrating moonlight. From where he stood leaning on the bottom half of the door he could see the huff of their breath. Clouds of it roiling then dissipating in the early morning air as they chased each other, and the kid thought of fog and the way it shrouded the land in the frosted wet of spring and autumn, the punch of ridge or scarp or mountain behind it sudden as a bear. They wheeled and dashed and now and then they yipped at each other and then stopped suddenly and looked at him. He cupped the smoke in his hand and turned his wrist so the lighted end of it pointed behind him. They waited. Silent. Still as the air around them. In the phosphorescent
glow of the moon he thought he could see their eyes, dilating, peering hard at him with the ancient light of the wild in them, measuring and judging him in the dim distance. They lowered their heads, their snouts poking near the ground, and watched him. And then they began to dance, or at least that’s how it seemed to him. One by one they began to weave sinuously back and forth, cutting between each other, snout to tail, a walk then a half-trot until one of them nipped at the tail of another and they exploded into a frenzy of playfulness, abandon, and a joy so sudden and pure that the kid smiled and leaned harder on the door to watch it. Then the largest one broke the dash, halted, raised its nose to the air, whirled, and loped to the trees. The others followed in a dark line. They vanished into the trees, winked out of view as though the woods had folded itself around them, cocooned them, the chrysalis impermeable, whole, wound of the fibres of time, and the kid wondered what shape they would bear when they emerged into the moonstruck glades.

It was cold and he shivered. There was some sacking hung on the near stall and he pulled it around his shoulders. It smelled of grain. The horse nickered behind him. He pushed the door open and stepped out into the barnyard. There was a scrim of frost on the rippled mud of it and his footsteps crunched some when he walked. When he got to the rail fence at the far end he straddled it and hung his boot heels on either side of the middle rail and looked around at the town and the mill and the mountains behind it that led to the valley above the river where his father wanted to go.

His father. The kid thought of him with the whore in the sad little room in the house that leaned toward the water. It was a ragged life. To die in it seemed more sorrowful than he could
imagine. If he simply left him to die he could go back to the farm and work it and hope for the best. Nothing would be different. There was nothing else for him. Truth was, he wanted nothing else because that life was all he’d known and there was a comfort in the idea of farming. He knew the rhythms of it, could feel the arrival of the next thing long before it arrived, and he knew the feel of time around those eighty acres like he knew hunger, thirst, and the feel of coming weather on his skin. Memory for the kid kicked in with the smell of the barn and the old man teaching him to milk and plow and seed and pluck a chicken. His father had drifted in and out of that life randomly and the kid recalled the first sense of him as the thin prick of the sawn door frame in the kitchen on his shoulder, leaning there, watching him smoke and drink and talk with the old man, trading furtive glances with him and then staring down shyly at his boot tops. The voice of him gruff and garbled with drink. When he disappeared again he always left money in a jam jar behind the sink. “Your pap,” the old man said whenever he doled out money from it, and for the longest time the kid had thought he meant the jar.