Northward to the Moon (4 page)

“Some spent shotgun shells,” admits Ned. “Anyhow, he took me with him. He even had cigarettes.”
Ned looks blissful at the memory. “He brought me back to his village, where they let me bunk down with them. They had traplines and were netting fish and trapping animals and hunting from their summer camp. They didn’t mind or care or even question my sudden appearance but just sort of moved over and made room for me. That’s where I met Mary. She had an extra room in her cabin and she made a bed for me there. It was my first introduction to the Carrier people. Their whole way of life fascinated me. I learned to hunt with the men. The women smoked the fish and skinned and tanned the moose hides and cared for the children. They lived as they had for hundreds of years. I stayed on with them for a while.”

“What happened to your job as a fire lookout?” I ask.

“Well, technically I couldn’t return because I had no idea where that lookout tower was anymore. But to be honest, I didn’t try very hard.”

“But what if there had been a fire?” I ask.

“I knew that if I didn’t check in, they’d phone me and if I didn’t answer they would send the helicopter. I was more concerned about people fruitlessly
searching for me, so I went into town and called them to let them know I was okay.”

“Were they mad at you?” I ask.

“I suspect they were mostly glad that I was still alive. Otherwise it would have been tough recruiting the next guy. No one wants a job where the previous employee has disappeared.”

The waitress is back and lays down the check. “Anything else?”

Ned looks at us but we shake our heads. I suspect we would all like a little pie but so it goes. Ned pays the bill and puts a toothpick in his mouth and we pile back into the car and hit the road.

“Have you even been in touch since then?” my mother asks Ned quietly as we drive along.

“No,” says Ned. “That’s the odd thing. I haven’t talked to any of them in twenty years, so what in the world could have inspired Mary to suddenly remember me? I was just some kid who wandered into their camp, stayed awhile and wandered out.”

“It’s a mystery to be solved,” I say. “Maybe, Ned, we should switch from outlaws to detectives.”

“Maybe we could be outlaw detectives,” says Ned. “Bandanas and fedoras.”

“I still don’t get why we are going at all,” says Maya. “If you haven’t even talked to her in twenty years. Couldn’t you just phone her?”

“You don’t just phone someone who is dying,” I say to Maya. I don’t actually know this but it is nice to be the expert for a change. I can change Gunderson to Fielding, my last name, and create my own Ms. Fieldingland.

“I owe her,” says Ned to Maya. Then he goes back into his head, into the slumbering tangled thoughts of the road.

For a long time we drive in silence.

“Well,” says my mother at last. The sun is at a springtime slant and the light is soaking into fields, filling them with energy. “Maybe the mountain passes won’t be too difficult after all.”

My mother has been a little worried about driving through the Rockies if the roads are icy.

“If the weather is nice maybe we’ll get to your friend even sooner,” says Maya. I think this is uncharacteristically considerate of Maya until she adds, “And we can leave sooner.”

“Maybe,” says Ned. The straight roads are giving way to curves as the prairies disappear and the land rises to its gently lifting hills.

My mother, who is looking dreamily on, murmurs, “But who can tell what’s just around the bend?”

O
ver the next two days the scenery changes. Where there has been flat land there are now mountains. Where there have been grasslands there are now woods. We go north, deeper into the trees, leaving civilization for longer and longer stretches of wilderness highway where the blackness of the forest is compensated for by the brilliance of the night sky. Stars reign here unquashed by human light. Birds’ song breaks silence.

We have been driving a very long time on this stretch of tree-lined highway. At night the moon dangles tantalizingly at the end of the road as if it hangs just beyond the earth’s edge. I imagine a highway that few know about that runs up to the
Yukon, then heads not just northward but upward to the moon. And the astronauts who set foot there find some old Chevys. Inside them are girls still in 1960s mod minidresses, pageboy haircuts and pink lipstick, and guys in bell-bottoms. Only very mod mods are daring and stylish enough to take the moon drive. But it’s easier to find your way to the moon than back again and so they are stuck circling, the way Ned circled in the woods before a Carrier found him.

“Their clothes would be very out of date because there aren’t many shopping malls on the moon,” I say to Maya as I explain all this.

“How do they stay alive?” she asks skeptically. “If there are no grocery stores, what would they eat?”

“Green cheese,” I say.

“Feh,” she says.
Now
the idea is ridiculous.

“Moon milk,” I say. I am quite taken by this idea.

“Moon milk.” My mother has overheard. “Moon milk.” Sometimes she just likes the sounds of words, the way sometimes she will stand very still, just liking the feel of the air. She used to do this in
the soft warm boggy mudflats, when steam rose off the wet sand in little wisps. But I have seen her do it on the prairies as well, when arctic air was coming down to us from Russia and bathing us in stinging sprays of wind ice.

The car stops. We all sit there as if it will start again on its own.

Finally Max says, “The car stopped.”

“It’s out of gas,” says Ned, and sighs. “We’re fifty miles out of town and seventy-five or so from the Carrier camp and we’re out of gas.”

“How is that possible?” asks my mother.

“That’s not possible but moon milk is?” says Maya in disgust.

“Hush, Maya, not now,” says my mother. “What are we going to do?”

Ned heaves a huge sigh and opens the door. He walks around to my mother’s window and signals for her to roll it down. “I’m going to hitchhike into the next town and get some gas and come back.”

“Is that safe, Ned?” asks my mother.

“You have a better idea?” he asks. “I thought we could get through on our tank but I forget what rotten mileage this thing gets. I miscalculated.” He
sounds irritated. I think he blames himself but his tone is a warning not to say that we do too.

“Well!” says my mother. “That’s what I thought too. That we’d be in town before the gas ran out.”

“It’s these darn northern roads. You forget they go on and on without even small towns or gas stations between,” says Ned. Then when no one says anything, he sighs.

“All right,” he says, sighing again, enormously this time, and he starts ambling away a bit from the car, his blue jeans frayed around the tops of his tennis shoes. There is a hole in the toe of one of them.

“Ned needs new tennis shoes,” I say to my mother.

“I know,” she says. “But he won’t buy a pair unless he can find some that cost less than ten dollars like the ones he is wearing now.”

“Did he buy them twenty years ago?” I say. “When tennis shoes cost that? It looks like it.”

“I know,” says my mother again. “But the quest for tennis shoes that cost less than ten dollars makes him happy.”

“His toes are sticking out,” says Maya.

“Cold but happy,” I say to her.

Ned stands looking hopefully down the road for the longest time. The rest of us don’t know what to do. It seems cruel to engage in anything while he waits there alone and yet we can’t go out and stand with him or it will look like we want the passing car to pick us
all
up, which will certainly cut down on the chances of anyone stopping.

Finally a huge semi pulls to a noisy halt. It takes so long that Ned has to run up the road to get to it. He steps up to the window of the cab and leans in and then makes a thumbs-up gesture to us. He climbs in and that’s the last we see of him for a while.

We sit still until all the car’s heat is gone and we have to rely on our own. It is chilly but not the bitter cold of the prairies. There are buds on some trees, even on stretches dusted with snow. As if spring is putting out feelers, trying to find out if it’s okay to emerge and show its face.

“I’m bored,” says Maya.

“Let’s get out!” yells Max.

“Let’s take a walk,” says my mother.

We leave the car and stroll down the road together.

“But not in the woods!” says Hershel. “Never in the woods. Never ever ever in the woods. Never in the woods.”

“Never in the woods. Never in the woods,” chants Max with him.

“Oh no,” I say in low tones to Maya. “They’re bored. Now they are going to be obnoxious. They will chant nonsense things endlessly and run around screaming.”

“Good. Maybe it will keep the bears away,” says Maya.

I glance at her with scorn but it startles my mother and she suddenly looks worried.

“I don’t see any bears,” I say to Maya.

“It doesn’t mean they don’t see
you,”
she says.

I’ll be glad when Maya finally has a friend. This constant sourness is wearing. But I know this isn’t who she really is. She’s just unhappy these days.

The boys want to get their trucks out of the car and run them down the road. My mother looks like she is about to protest the safety of this but a look in either direction tells us that we will not see a car for a long time and when we do, will have plenty of time to warn the boys.

My mother and Maya and I walk back and forth. Mostly to keep warm.

“Listen to that bird, Jane,” my mother says. “What do you think it can be?”

We look up. It is an eagle but it is a sound all wrong for an eagle. It makes me wonder if eagles are all they’re cracked up to be—if I’ve endowed them with noble characteristics they entirely lack. Perhaps they are cowardly whiny birds, burdened with legendary qualities they never wanted to assume.

Just then we hear the long slow clear call of a wolf. It makes a tunnel through the air right to my heart.

“That’s it. Get in the car, all of you,” says my mother.

“There are no such things as wolves,” says Maya stoutly after we have stopped holding our breaths, listening for the next howl. “It was probably a dog.”

“I love wolves,” I say to her. “Only maybe not too close to the car.”

We sit there and shiver until Ned returns. He is in a pickup truck with a large muscly young Native man. Although snow is beginning to drift gently
down, the guy doesn’t wear a coat. Flakes fall on his bare arms and he doesn’t seem to notice. Perhaps because his arms are, as they appear, made of iron. He doesn’t come to the car to meet us but he and Ned immediately open the gas cap and pour in gas from a can they take out of the back of the pickup.

My mother leaps out of the car and there is a lot of polite laughter and shaking of hands. Then Ned leads the man to the back window and motions for Hershel to roll it down. He introduces the man to us as Jim. Ned says he is a Carrier and is going to take us to the Carrier camp.

“Mary just got out of the hospital. Good timing,” says Jim.

“That’s wonderful,” says my mother. “She’s much better, then?”

“Nah, I think they just sent her to die at home,” says Jim.

My mother looks startled.

Then, as if no one has any idea what to say next, the man takes the empty gas can and gets into his pickup and my mother and Ned jump back into the car to follow him.

My mother turns to see me staring at the muscly
man in the pickup and looks thoughtful, as if something new has just occurred to her. I don’t want to be caught staring. For heaven’s sake, I want to say, we’ve been sitting here with nothing but woods for what seems like forever. Sensorily deprived, really. I am suddenly disgusted with both my mother and Ned and the things they put us through sometimes. There really has not been enough privacy on this trip. I look stonily out the back window, embarrassed.

We drive right through the town. It takes about half a minute and then we are in pitch dark again going down the highway.

“If she’s out of the hospital she must be functioning better,” says my mother to Ned.

“Jim says she insisted on going home,” says Ned. “She insists there’s nothing much wrong with her. Anyhow, he says she’s at least conscious now. But they all think she’s going to die.”

“So did they ask her why she kept calling your name?”

“He said they thought they’d let me ask her. In case it was personal.”

“Did they tell her you were coming?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say to that?”

“I don’t know.”

When we finally turn off the highway, night has placed us deeply and darkly into the universe. Every star sits millimeters from every other so that the sky is a dome of pinpricks of light.

“Oh man,” says Ned as we drive a little ways down what appears to be an old logging road. The road stops abruptly and we are left with just woods. “Now I remember this place. This road. I remember the way everything smells like pine. Oh man, I love this smell. Bibles, this is the best smell in the world.”

But he is wrong. The best smell in the world is low tide and the slightly musty smell of our house on the beach.