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Under my feet the path was cool and damp, covered with pine needles that made walking soft and silent. I waded into the pond carefully because the water on this side was shaded and dark, making it hard to see the bottom. I pushed off, gasping as the cold water enveloped me, and swam toward the falls. The current was surprisingly strong, but not threatening. The sun on the foaming water of the falls turned it milk-white as it thundered into the pool. I swam against the current and pulled myself up to lie on a flat rock next to the falls. The sun against my back felt good. There’s something about water and sun that usually opens a tap and drains all the tension out of me. Not this time, though.

My mind returned to my old man. I already dreaded sitting around with him during and after supper with nothing to do except read my book. Then after dark, what? Go to bed at nine o’clock and lie there staring at the ceiling like last night?

Maybe I’d ask him about himself. But now I wasn’t sure I felt like going into all that. He’d start digging up the past, and I wanted to do anything but. Why open it all up again? It was over.

Except I wasn’t doing a very good job of forgetting.

I gingerly lowered myself into the cold water. As I struck out I noticed the old man on the far shore, turning and taking the path back to the campsite. He had been watching me.

We had supper in silence, mostly because I brought my novel to the table and read while I ate so I wouldn’t have to make lame conversation. The meal was stew mixed with pork and beans. I hated to admit it, but the stuff didn’t taste too bad. After we had eaten, the old man chopped up some firewood while I did the dishes. He said it was a nice night for the fire, and besides, it would keep the bugs away.

I was sitting across the flames from him in a lawn chair, struggling to read in the waning light. He was on his third beer. He had peeled the bark off a thick stick and was carving grooves and shapes into it with his pocket knife. The little fire popped and crackled every once in a while—because he was burning hemlock, he told me.

“Mind if I ask you somethin?” he asked, tossing the stick into the fire and folding up his knife.

I looked up from
Shogun
, but held it open. “Yeah?”

“What’s eatin’ you, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

He stuffed the knife into his hip pocket. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.” I looked down at the page.

“That. Just like that.”

I looked up again. His mouth was set in a firm line. He drained his beer and dropped the can beside his chair. He pulled his pipe out of the pocket of his bush shirt, and pointed the stem at me.

“Im tryin’ to talk to you and you look at your book. That’s good manners, is it?”

“Sorry,” I said. I closed the book and stared at
the flames. They were orange-yellow-red, but blue where they separated themselves from the whitened ash of the wood. I waited.

“What’s the problem that you can’t at least be polite? I mean, okay, we haven’t seen each other for a long time. I know it hasn’t been easy for you. But I’ve waited a couple of days. You’re not just shy, you’re rude.”

Rude
. That was the kind of word my elementary school teachers used.

“Can’t you talk to me?” he went on. “I was hopin’ we could be … I don’t know … friends.”

Yeah, right, I thought. You turn up from out of nowhere and all of a sudden we’re pals.

“Well?” he said, his voice edged with anger now.

“Well what? What do you want me to say? This wasn’t my idea, this trip. I didn’t even want to come,” I said.

“Why did you then?”

“Mom made me.”

He got up out of the lawn chair and got another beer out of the fridge. Great, I thought, maybe he’ll leave me alone. I opened my book. No such luck.

“She made you?” he asked as he sat down. “You’re a little old for that, aren’t you? What do you mean she
made
you?”

“She can get pretty stubborn sometimes.”

“That’s for sure,” he said, “she sure can.”

That made me mad, but I kept my mouth shut.

He puffed away for a few moments. “Look,” he tried again, “why can’t we make this a nice trip? Have some fun. Get to know each other.”

“If you wanted to get to know me maybe you
shouldn’t have taken off when I was a kid.”

Even in the fading light I could see his face redden. He looked away, as if there was something in the trees that suddenly caught his attention, and stayed like that awhile. Then he nodded. When he started talking again his voice shook, and he kept his eyes on the darkened trees.

“I guess this was a bad idea, this trip. I … maybe I didn’t think it through good enough. You’re right.” He turned and faced me. “It was a bad idea. Tomorrow we’ll get to the Soo. There’s someplace I want to take you, if it’s okay with you. It won’t take long. Then I’ll get you a bus ticket to Thunder Bay.”

He stood up and walked slowly, as if he was carrying something heavy, to the back of the van. I heard the rear door open and then slam shut. When he came back to the fire there was a bottle of whiskey in his hand.

The old man stopped beside me. I looked up at him, but he kept his face averted. His voice was quiet and trembled even more than before.

“Just for the record, Steve, there’s somethin’ you ought to know. I suffered too.”

Slowly, holding the bottle by the neck, he walked into the trees, along the path that led to the pond.

I closed my book and looked into the fire. In
Shogun
, somebody, one of the Japanese, explained to Blackthorne how the Japanese handled their problems. He said that they put the problem “in a box” in their mind and didn’t think about it for a while. When the time seemed right they got out the box and took out the problem, looked it over, then put it away again if no solution suggested itself.

I tried clearing my mind the way some of the characters in the novel seemed able to do. No way. My thoughts zapped around like pinballs in a speeded-up game, lighting up posts, buzzing and ringing. The higher the score got, the tighter I felt.

So he had suffered too. Then why did he abandon me like one of his empty beer cans? Why did he stay away?
Why
did he come back?

I went into the van, closing the slider behind me because a damp chilly breeze had sprung up. I clicked on the little light above the sink so the old man could see when he got back from the pond, then climbed up to my bed.

I lay there for a long time, listening to the waterfall and the wind moaning out of the night sky.

I decided to take a run after the final wrestling practice of the school year. Leonard had pushed me hard, knowing I’d have no formal practice again before the tournament in Thunder Bay, and I was tired and stiff. I took a long slow jog, enjoying the warm sun and the fragrant early summer breeze as I loped through the streets.

When I got back to the school I saw a bunch of the other wrestlers turning onto Birmingham Street, walking with their heads together as if they were sharing a secret. I yelled to them but they didn’t hear me. Too tired to catch up with them, I entered the school.

The large L-shaped locker room was almost dark and the odour of sweat hung like smoke in the damp air. From around the corner at the far end of the room a
shower hissed. As I groped my way down the main part of the room and around the corner of the L, a strange sound gradually separated itself from the hiss and gurgle of the shower. Somebody was crying. I felt along the wall for the switch. The fluorescent tubes flickered and buzzed, flooding the room with hard white light.

In the corner, behind an overturned bench, a kid lay facing the wall, curled up like a foetus. He was wearing a black singlet.

Only one wrestler on our team had a black singlet.
GO ANIMAL
was stencilled across the front.

“Hawk!” I cried, rushing over to him.

My first thought was that the other guys had ganged up on him. But nobody I knew would want to hurt Hawk. And nobody I knew would have had the guts to try.

He didn’t respond at first, just pulled his knees up closer to his chest. Bits of paper littered the floor around him and speckled his singlet. More bits were stuck in his hair.

I threw the bench aside and grabbed his arm. “Hawk! Hawk, what’s going on?”

He flinched and pulled away. “No more!” he whined. His eyes were screwed shut, like a little kid at a horror movie. I couldn’t believe what I saw and heard. This was no little kid. This was almost seventy kilos of bone and muscle. This was the guy who turned into an electrified devil whenever he was in a fight.

“It’s Wick,” I shouted, scared by the stranger cowering in front of me. “Come on! Quit fooling around!”

I seized him again, roughly, and hauled him into
a sitting position. His chin was jammed to his chest, his arms covered his head, and he was sobbing so hard the words seemed to be jerked from his body.

“I’m … o-okay … Go on home now, Wick. I’ll be all right. I’ll … catch you later.”

“Hawk, stop crying,” I tried again, calmer now. “Look at me. Open your eyes.
Who
did this to you?” I asked, not even knowing what the “this” was. By the looks of him he hadn’t been fighting. There were no scrapes or bruises, no blood.

“What the hell is this stuff, anyway?” I asked, picking up a few bits of the stiff paper. They looked like pieces torn from photographs.

Hawk was still hiding his face in his arms. “They … they found them,” he sobbed in a voice that wasn’t his. “They found them. Damn it!
Why
didn’t I leave them at home?”

“Leave what at home? What are you talking about? What’s wrong?” I shook him, trying to pry his arms away from his head, to make him look at me, but he was too strong.

“Wick, you’re the only friend I have,” he said desperately. “The only one left. Oh god, it’s gonna be all over the school!”

I sat back on the wooden bench and leaned forward on my knees. I took a deep breath. Go easy, I said to myself. “Look, Hawk, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. So listen, try to calm down, okay? Take your time and tell me what’s the matter.”

He still wouldn’t look at me, but his voice had a little more control when he whispered, “The guys found these … sex pictures.”

I was relieved in a way, thinking, is this all it is? Hawk is ashamed he’s human like the rest of us? I began to feel a little better, as if the universe was heading toward normal. I remembered how Hawk would never join the locker room sex talk, the bragging about girls, the constant trading of insults that the other guys kept up, calling each other fag every few seconds. I also remembered that I was always in on it, telling lies and acting big. “You talk about women as if they were meat,” Hawk had said many times, so many that the guys thought he was some kind of sour-faced puritan.

I brushed some of the paper bits from his shoulder. “Relax, Hawk. Lots of the guys have pictures. Every guy I know likes pictures of naked women. It’s natural. It’s no big deal.”

“They were pictures,” came a voice so choked with sobbing that I could barely make it out, “of guys.”

“What? I thought you said
guys.”
This was really getting crazy.

He took his arms away from his face, but he still wouldn’t look up. “They were pictures of men.”

“Let me get this straight, You’re telling me that you had some sex pictures of men.”

He nodded.

“So …” My mind began to race over strange ground, the way it does when you’re in unknown territory and you’re trying to find a landmark to get your bearings. “So they said … so they razzed you and said ‘Hawk’s a fag,’ right? Is that why you’re so upset?”

At last he raised his head and looked at me, straight into my eyes, his own eyes so full of fear they seemed to vibrate with energy. I had never seen his face
like that—terrified, wounded, beaten.

“Wick,” he said thickly, “I
am
gay.”

It was like a full-out punch to my solar plexus. I couldn’t breathe. A sick burning fear rushed in where my breath had been. I slowly rose from the bench.

“Yeah, right. Very funny, Hawk. You’re a panic.”

But it wasn’t funny. The tears streaming from his eyes and the sobs wracking his body told me more than his words could do.

I stepped back.

“Wick, please,
please!”

Blindly I moved away from him, grabbed my gym bag, tore my clothes from the hook on the wall, backing away as if he was a leper and if I touched him or even breathed the same air I’d be contaminated. I turned and ran.

The wail of pain chased me through the locker room, slamming off the walls, echoing inside my skull. “Wick!” he screamed. “Wick, please!”

T
HE ECHO BECAME THE ROAR
of wind punctuated by a low uneven booming, like the irregular heartbeat of a huge beast. I jerked upright, suddenly awake.

Rain pounded on the roof of the van. The canvas sides of the pop top boomed as they flexed and snapped with each powerful gust of the wind.

I climbed down from the bed and knuckled the sleep from my eyes. It was still dark outside. I looked at my watch. Two a.m.

The old man wasn’t there. His bed wasn’t pulled out.

I drew on my clothes and rummaged around for a flashlight, finding one under the driver’s seat. When I yanked open the side door the wind gushed in, bringing rain. I jumped out and quickly pulled the door closed. Within seconds I was soaked to the skin. I swept the campsite with the light, saw the two overturned lawn chairs, the dead wet ashes of the fire, the hatchet stuck in a log.

The weak yellow light-beam bounced ahead of me as I made my way through the tossing evergreens down to the water. Whipped by the rainy wind, I played the light back and forth along the shore until the faint yellow circle found him. He was lying half under the boughs of an evergreen on the edge of the bush, legs drawn up to his chest, arms crossed, one hand clutching
the almost empty bottle. Tears of rain coursed in tiny rivulets across his face. I pulled the bottle out of his grip and tossed it aside.

“Hey, wake up.”

He groaned as I dragged him to a sitting position. Great, I thought. I managed to haul him to his feet and picked him up in a fireman’s carry and slowly worked my way back along the path to the van. He wasn’t very heavy.