The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  “But Papa,” I wrote in one of my letters (we never used email; too easy to trace, according to Papa). “They’ll just do X-rays and CT scans. Maybe a blood test. It’s not that invasive.”

  “C’est plus compliqué que ça,” he wrote back. “I don’t care for so much exposure. I don’t care to be a see-through man, Jean-Paul. I don’t like for them to find something between me. I don’t like for even myself to know what’s all inside.”

  We went back and forth like that for a couple months, and all throughout I could feel the entreaties coming. Would I move up there and look after him? Just until it was over? And what about Jen? Could I convince her to come, too? I was a security guard at a mall in Mississauga and my boss was one of those thin, little, bald guys with a neat moustache, and he wouldn’t give me time off. He had a track-and-field trophy on his desk and he picked it up and hefted it while I told my story, then he nodded and put the trophy back on the edge of his desk and said I had to do what I had to do, he’d put in a good word if anyone called.

  I showed up alone, no Jen, and I could see why Papa liked it there, even though he’d spent most of his time at the bottom of a mine shaft. Everyone was a mess, even normal people. He fit right in.

  Papa and I, we assumed he had cancer, what with all the smoking. Also, we assumed he didn’t have much time left. We assumed he was dying, any day, right about now.

  “Jean-Paul,” he wheezed. “Please. Come and sit beside me.”

  I left the balcony door open so the smell could get in. We didn’t communicate in French anymore. It was code when I was growing up and Jen and I went to visit him, a way to talk about her without her knowing, and later, after we stopped going to see him, it was the language of choice in his occasional correspondence. I felt special at the time. Chosen. Papa didn’t teach it to Jen. And Mamma never bothered to learn, mainly because their marriage didn’t last long enough to warrant the effort. But we weren’t doing it anymore, Papa’s special request, because he wanted to make sure Jen understood every word when she got here.

  “So she’s coming today, no? You will get her from the airport? You can use my car.”

  He hauled on the jay and a second later his cheeks billowed like balloons. He coughed and doubled over and spat on the floor again. Papa would rather smoke dope than eat it. Ditch weed. He started scoring off one of his tenants in the trailer park the year before I came. He wouldn’t buy from anyone in the high-rise, said he’d had an incident on six, wouldn’t elaborate. He got weed by the quarter and dozens of OxyContins a week. He blew more tokes than he inhaled, smoke drifting across the few light bulbs I hadn’t unscrewed.

  I watched his cheeks flush with pain. I told him she’d be here later that evening and his eyeballs bulged. He was happy. He had thin purple veins branching all over his lips and cheeks. His flesh was so grey it looked like smoke. You saw this fading Papa, this withering Papa with his sickly affectations, his one-track mind of mortal reckoning, and it was like there never was any other Papa, no wilderness-ranging Papa with adventure intrigues, no babysitter Papa with his cigarettes and candy bars, no insidious Papa with his sticky fingertips. You saw this Papa, and you wondered what all the fuss was about, all the fear. And you wondered why Jen wasn’t falling over herself to come see it firsthand.

  “Good, good, good,” he praised me between wheezes. “And for summer solstice, too. It is going to be her favourite time to be here, eh Jean-Paul? You told her all what is happening, yeah?”

  III

  When we were kids, we spent summers with Papa at his house in a little fishing village called Swisha. It was just east of the border with Ontario, but completely cut off from Quebec’s road system. Papa worked out there first as a logger, felling trees in the throbbing sun, then later as a hunting guide, leading parties through the shadows of the muffled bush.

  On weekends, he would take us out on the Ottawa River. We’d go early in the morning, the air puffing blackflies, mosquitoes droning as he paddled all by himself, the light soft and shimmering on the orange-boiled wake of the canoe.

  Jen loved getting up early, but she hated the fishing trips. She would look sheepishly at the margarine container full of wet, black soil, worms writhing like slick little fingers. Her tiny nose would crinkle, lips mashed, and she’d turn her face up to the sun. She’d close her eyes and summon a tan.

  Me, I loved the fishing trips, even though I couldn’t stand getting up early, and even though it took me years to catch anything. I loved squeezing the worms into a bulge and shoving the hook through, that brief resistance before the thing’s flesh gave way to puncture and it twisted in dumb agony around the breadth of the barb.

  Papa would let the canoe drift along the reedy shores of the river, birch trees leaning in from the banks, their peeling trunks, rolls of bark spinning in the eddies. He’d twist his own cigarettes and study us, smiling at my enthusiasm, muttering in French at Jen’s squeamish reluctance. He was always pungent with sweat and bug spray. His hairy toes curled around the ends of his sandals, craggy nails cracked and yellow.

  When I was thirteen and Jen was twelve, I pulled a pickerel out of the river. It was my first big bite. Jen had been leaning back in the stern of the canoe, her faded green T-shirt pulled up around her ribs, sun beating off her belly and the split ends of her long blonde hair dangling in the current. Papa was watching her, mumbling, frowning. He was shirtless and hauling on one of his cigarettes, the thick shaft black with resin and smoke pluming past the stubble on his cheeks.

  They both jerked forward as I instinctively snapped my wrist and started to reel in my catch. Jen tried to lock eyes with me, her chin bobbing encouragement, her face popping with it, but I ignored her and looked to Papa instead. He gripped his knee, hunched in my direction. The fish’s tail thrashed the surface and the line sliced through the morning’s mellow waves. Jen shrieked as I pulled it struggling out of the water and swung it into the canoe. Monstrous. It was slick and somehow perverted, mouth winking wickedly.

  “C’est ca!” Papa thundered. “Pick it up and show the fucking thing to us, Jean-Paul. It is a trophy!”

  It thumped against the floor of the canoe between me and Papa. Jen peered over his sun-brown shoulders, her face torqued with revulsion. I panicked, leaned forward from the prow bench and accidentally stuck my hand in its jagged mouth, my fingers instantly bleeding and the fish still drumming fear and anger off the fiberglass bottom of the canoe. Papa shoved me back in my seat, laughing and scolding, burning my shoulder just barely with his cigarette as he dipped down, hand clenched into a claw, and stabbed two fingers into the pickerel’s eyes, hoisting it upwards, the thin and twisting line catching the sun and the canoe sloshing in the water and me and Jen at either end, both coiled up in fear, mine elated and hers elemental.

  “We are two men together now, Jean-Paul,” Papa declared, the thing suffering against his forearm. “Je vais te montrer comment le vider. But for now take your shirt off and enjoy the sun.”

  I did, exposed my ribs to the river, my bone-white flesh to the shore. Jen sniggered at my complexion. She and Papa were like bronzed beings from a land of sunshine, and I was this pallid creature emerging for the first time from my textile cocoon. Papa hurled the fish against the bottom of the canoe. I thought we might tip over as he grabbed for a broken axe handle and bashed it twice. Jen jerked her head the other way, retching.

  “Calme-toi,” he said to me, and I was suddenly exhausted.

  I leaned back against the prow and watched Papa coax Jen onto the middle bench, between his legs, her arms stabbing outward to keep her balance as the haul squirmed in the water. He muttered in his French, occasionally catching my tired eyes and winking at me. Papa squeezed Jen’s hands around the handle of his fishing rod, laughing for both of them, Jen biting her lips as Papa snapped the line across the water.

  Mosquitoes landed in the sweat on my back. They bit me and I let them. Jen didn’t catch anything, even though they tried for hours, right into the blazing after
noon, their sweat pooling together on the floor of the canoe beside my dead fish.

  I was burnt by the time we got to shore. Welts sprung out across my neck and shoulders, and pus wept down my back. Papa gutted the fish by himself. I hid in the guest bedroom Jen and I slept in, the walls studded with antlers and patchy with animal furs, a rusted axe mounted on an oak panel over the door. I writhed around my pillow in stupid agony, tears running down my cheeks.

  After a while, I smelled them cooking my fish on a fire in the backyard. I watched them through the window, Papa tending the flames while Jen danced in circles around the fire, hands stretched out and blonde hair just flying, funnels of smoke billowing after her, only inches behind, until a gust of wind laid them flat. Tiny clouds of pollen spiralled through the air and the late evening sun lit them up like stars. The hem of Jen’s T-shirt was bunched up and pulled through her neckline, an awkward knot of fabric in the middle of her flat chest. I fell asleep, exhausted from trying not to cry.

  When I woke up, Papa was sitting on the edge of Jen’s bed. It was early morning, and he was staring at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke. He wore a red plaid shirt unbuttoned around the neck, black-and-grey hairs coiling out of his collar. Jen was curled up in a lump behind him. She was covered in all her blankets, even a duvet, despite the heat. I could just barely see her breathe.

  “It was a tasty fish, Jean-Paul. Super bon. Quelle dommage que tu n’as pas eu de goût.”

  My sheets stuck to me where my welts had oozed. I sat up, wincing, and they hung from me like a putrid cape.

  “Come on,” he said, pulling a Snickers out of his breast pocket and setting it on Jen’s bedside table. “Get yourself up. This morning, we don’t fish. This morning, we learn to speak a little bit French.”

  In the water, he handed me a paddle, told me to take the bow and practise J-strokes. My shirt was like sandpaper grating my flesh. The knuckles on my right hand were black with scabs from where the fish had bitten me.

  “Bon,” he said. “Arrète. Look at your Papa, Jean-Paul.”

  The canoe sloshed in the water as he rotated on the prow bench. Papa had a fresh scratch on his cheek, shaped like a J. He was smiling at me, his eyes too. He lit a cigarette and handed it across the canoe. I felt clumsy with it burning between my fingers.

  “Qu’est-ce que tu fais maintenant? What are you doing right now? Tu fumes. You smoke. Tu fumes. Say it.”

  “Two foom.”

  He laughed and deftly snatched the cigarette away, just a puff of ashes dangling in the air above my knuckles.

  “You are embarrassed, aren’t you, Jean-Paul? Because you could not finish the fish yesterday? Aha, don’t worry, young man. You get better when you get older. You learn to take whatever you want. Fish. Woman. Money. It’s already belong to you, anyway. C’est tout a toi, mon gars.”

  When we returned to shore, Papa went to prepare his little hatchback to drive us back to Ontario. He told me to go wake up Jen. He said she went to bed feeling sick last night. He said she’d even fallen around the fire, not burning herself, but cutting her elbow on the hard grey ground. It was my job to make sure she felt better before we met up with Mamma across the border. Otherwise, Papa might get in trouble.

  “And we don’t want that, non? ”

  I shook my head, because I could already imagine myself coming back next year, older and stronger, to finish off a fish without his help.

  The guest bedroom was stifling hot, but Jen still hadn’t emerged from her cocoon of blankets. On the night table beside her, the Snickers had melted and lost its shape, even housed in its wrapper. I crawled onto the same spot where Papa had been sitting that morning, and I reached out to touch her, my palm pressing against something that felt like her waist. She jerked away from me, the lump of her sliding beneath the blankets.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said, her voice dry and foreign. “I feel sick.”

  “Come on,” I said, trying to yank the blankets away. “We have to go. You need to feel better, so Papa doesn’t get in trouble. So we can for sure come back next summer.”

  She resisted but I managed to pull her covers off. She was naked. There was dirt scuffed into the flesh around her hairline, a couple scratches on her chest from where she’d fallen. Her tiny nipples looked soft and pink, an untanned stripe of skin leading through and around them, and she stank of sweat. She shielded herself with one arm, groped around for the blankets with the other.

  “Sorry about that,” I said, turning my back as she tried to rebuild her cocoon. “I didn’t know. Papa is waiting, though. You’ll feel better when we get home.”

  IV

  Blood speckled the bathroom mirror. I stood behind Papa, his head bowed as he swiped a red-shot rope of phlegm off his chin. I had his eyes, almond brown with self-applauding cynicism, and my reflection stared back through a spraypattern of blood and toothpaste. Papa exhaled wearily and turned away from the mirror without looking at himself. His ratty toothbrush lay across the drain in the sink, the bristle-tips beaded red.

  Papa walked through the kitchen: fruit drawing flies on the counter, chunks of crushed OxyContins across the cutting board, lumpy teabags all dried out. He moved slowly, achingly, toward his room. He slept through most of the afternoon. I checked on him occasionally, saw his forehead broken out in sweat, dabbed it up with a washcloth and abided the awful smell of his room. Dank. Mouldy.

  I thought about staying for the winter. The bartenders said daylight hours fall off pretty quickly after summer. Pretty soon it’d be night all the time. The pub needed a cook. I could’ve run Papa’s trailers until I found someone to buy them, collected rent like Norman, bursting with my secrets. I could’ve sent the money to Mamma, but she probably wouldn’t have accepted it. I could’ve split it with Jen and said it came from somewhere else. Or I could’ve just kept it all for myself. I could’ve dragged a hut onto the ice and fished northern pike out of Little Raven. I could’ve slowly thrown out all of Papa’s belongings, probably found my letters in a box in his closet, postal codes following him all the way from Quebec to the Northwest Territories, increasingly alone and isolated and unforgiveable, deeper into one cup and one bowl and one fork, deeper into crumbs at the head of the table, into dirty footprints in the tub. Deeper into the groove in his leather couch. Grateful I was always there, waiting to come and watch him die.

  Sometime after noon, a wind came gusting from the north and cleared away the smoke. I closed the balcony door and sat in the gloom of the apartment. Papa whimpered in his sleep. He whimpered himself awake and called me into his room.

  “It will be nice, the three of us together again, eh, Jean-Paul?”

  He was a frail man now, almost invisible under his bed-sheets, just a vaguely humanoid impression leaking out of his grizzled neck. His eyes were delusional with painkillers and the end of his life. Settling in the chair next to his bed, reaching out to touch his hand, I felt like we would’ve played together if we were boys. Tag. I would’ve always been it, but we would’ve still had fun.

  “The river out there,” he said, giving my hand a feeble squeeze, “it is not like the Ottawa. Many times this month, when the smoke is clear, I look at it from the balcony, Jean-Paul. Many times I see angels of light looking back at me. They want me to do some work, I think.”

  I stroked his index finger with my thumb. “Just the medication.”

  He pointed to his window. “Please, you will have to take down the tinfoil so we three can watch the sun not set tonight.”

  I nodded and Papa exploded into a fit of coughing, red foam flecking from his lips and his cheeks flushed with stress and blood. I held his hand for about a minute of this. The ceiling above must’ve been spattered with blood. After he finally calmed down, Papa asked me to go to the trailer park and buy him more Oxy. He didn’t want his pain to distract him from Jen’s company tonight.

  In the elevator, I saw that Native girl who danced in the parking lot. She was staring at the numbers, running her fingers gen
tly across the buttons without actually pressing them. She was used to the awful look of the place, the chipped floor caked in waste, profanity etched into the banisters. The mess didn’t touch her.

  “Tu fumes?” I asked her.

  She looked at me with those glistening eyes and I saw myself in them, looking back. “Hunh?”

  “Didn’t think so.” I dug into my pockets and offered her a Snickers.

  V

  It was eleven thirty at night and the sun was shining through Papa’s window like a spotlight chasing him to his grave. I was wearing sunglasses and taking in details I hadn’t noticed before. On his bedside table was a Bible and a picture of Mamma. It had a seventies look to it, the colours soft and leaky and barrettes in her long blonde bangs pinning them aside, so they dangled down an orange-patterned plaid tucked into corduroy bell-bottoms. Her smile was more genuine than anything I remembered seeing. Next to it was a picture of me and Jen playing in Papa’s old front yard in Swisha. Neither of us was aware of the camera, each of us crouched over a rain puddle, me with my hands in it and Jen staring intently at my face, expecting something. Chocolate bar wrappers had settled in the corners of the room. He had nice furniture bought with money from the mines. There was no internet access. No computer or TV. The bushman ornaments from Quebec were all over the walls, and his duvet, pulled up to his chin despite the heat, was patterned with pine trees.

  All night, Papa had been in and out of a narcotic sleep. But the drugs were wearing off and his waking moments were increasingly lucid.

  “Jean-Paul,” he mumbled in a pleading voice. “But you said she will be here by now. Are you forgetting her at the airport? Why don’t you take my car?”

  Holding his hand from the chair next to his bed, I looked down on Papa, and my eyes watered behind my sunglasses. He knew for sure now. He tried to pull his hand away but didn’t have the strength. It took everything he had to turn away from me and face the sun. His tears reflected the light and ran down his face.