The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  Norman’s dad stared at his hands during dinner, his lips moving, chin bobbing ten times, over and over, as if he were counting and recounting. He kept gesturing with his fork, asking partially phrased questions, then cutting himself off with a shake of his head.

  “So,” he finally declared, putting down his utensils and palming his bottle of beer. “What do you think of the building?” Norman looked for words. Gentle ones. “Different than I remember,” he said, pushing his lower lip into his moustache. “The lobby. Thought I seen, like, silt on the walls. Or something.”

  “Yeah.” Billy sneezed and wiped his nose with his sleeve. “Flooding. It’s been coming into the building the past five years, now and then. Maybe three of those springs. This year was really bad. Water came right up inside the lobby, flooded some of the ground units.”

  Norman nodded.

  “They say it’s the flow.” He reached out, held onto the bottle of beer next to his plate. “Scientists and people. Environmentalists and that. River flows too fast now, jams the ice up at the mouth of the lake. It gets hotter every spring, they say. I think I notice it, too.”

  They lurched along like that all night. His dad told him a story about a severed finger found in a can of corn, and Norman struggled to keep his face neutral. They emptied their plates. Steak sauce hardened on the tines of their forks. Empty bottles amassed between them. Norman saw the topic of his mother in the corners of his dad’s mouth, on the tip of his tongue, in the way he kept lifting his eyebrows during silences. But neither of them got started on her.

  Around midnight, when they’d drunk all the beer and were starting to feel maudlin, when either one of them might’ve spoken her name, might’ve conjured her a seat at the table, hair swirling like an angry spirit, they stood up and went to bed.

  Norman slept where his grandmother died, the same room he grew up in. He stared at the little Inukshuk on the nightstand—Welcome—and tossed himself into a cramped and wooden sleep.

  It had been important, that Inukshuk, when he was growing up. He’d take it off the windowsill and turn it over in his hands, and it seemed familiar to him even before he touched it, just as the word etched into the bottom—Lake Abitibi—seemed familiar, too. He looked it up at school in the atlases, on the maps, but he couldn’t find it until he asked one of his teachers. It wasn’t a tropical destination. It wasn’t a lake on top of a misty mountain. It was just some place in Ontario. That’s how his teacher described it: just some place. But Norman didn’t care. He wanted to go. It was all he could think about.

  He left home when he was nineteen, jumped a train in the middle of the summer, an empty freight car, no clue where it was going exactly, but vaguely south: an infinity of farmland streaming by, sparrows diving along the horizon and herds of cattle swinging their tails.

  A drifter woke him up, said his name was Ronny: a patchy black beard all shot through with grey hair, knobby fingers dangling from the sleeves of a black wool sweater, and no front teeth. The train was picking up speed. They passed a bottle back and forth, moonshine, said Ronny, and he had brown bag full of cigarette butts, a pack of mostly wet rolling papers, and they smoked butt bombs as the train clacked through the night.

  Norman didn’t remember falling back asleep. The sun was rising when he woke up, rouge blooming at the bottom of the sky, reaching into the train car, and Ronny was standing a few feet away, swaying on the spot, very drunk as he masturbated. Norman rushed past him and leapt from the train, a bullwhip of pain in his ankle as he crashed into the landscape, and when he looked back, there was Ronny hanging out of the freight car, waving.

  He was in Saskatchewan somewhere and he walked for half a day, dragging his feet along a rural road, ditches and barbwire on either side of him, until a dented black van pulled up and a girl with purple dreadlocks in the passenger seat told him to jump in. Her name was Sammy. Her boyfriend was Lewis and he had dreadlocks as well, but only a few mixed into his otherwise plain blond hair, and they swung ever so slightly when he braked for prairie dogs. The two of them stank of sweat, and they kept glancing at Norman in the rearview mirror. When Sammy asked him if he wanted to smoke a joint, he cleared his throat but didn’t say yes or no.

  “Are you Native?” She’d twisted around in her seat and sort of jerked her thumb at a dream catcher hanging from the rear-view mirror.

  He shrugged. Was he? Sort of. His dad said he had his mother’s skin, but lighter. Maybe that counted. He held his hand out and made a so-so gesture, which Sammy absorbed with an enthusiastic nod. She turned to Lewis. “He is!”

  They seemed intensely southern to him, all decked out in obscure band T-shirts and torn jeans, weird piercings around their mouths. There were people like that in Fort Fierce, but only one or two. You didn’t see them around town very much, and when you did they were in the back of the family van, not driving their own.

  They took him as a refugee from rural Romantica, from an ice floe, all saddled with colonial injustices and rebel allure, charming in spite of his thin moustache and mullet hair, the lingering acne on his cheeks and forehead.

  He stayed with them for months. They brewed their own beer in the back of the van, rushing through the process, and sometimes they stole from the rural liquor board outlets with slack security. They had a map of all the Indian reserves in northern Saskatchewan and they did the rounds bootlegging. They slept in the van or in abandoned farmhouses all over the countryside and once on the riverbank outside North Battleford. Another time, stoned and drunk, they fell asleep around a cooking fire they’d lit inside a derelict barn. It was too late by the time Sammy woke up coughing. There was no saving the barn. They ran to the road as the roof belched flames and the grass caught fire.

  Then it was late fall, near the border with Manitoba, and Lewis traded two gallons of beer for half an ounce of magic mushrooms. Norman had heard about mushrooms in Fort Fierce. He even knew a few people who said they’d done them. But he was never the kind of kid anyone sold drugs to.

  They tasted so bad he almost puked. Up on the roof of a shack beside another long-forgotten barn, the sky above was hammered with stars. His stomach lurched as he tried to choke down another handful of brown caps and beige stems.

  Almost an hour later, he started to yawn and giggle. The stars wept light and he mistook a stand of trees for people. Sammy made the first move, her rough-skinned hand on the knee of his jeans, lips wet against his ear. He lay back on rotten shingles as she climbed on top, was dimly aware of Lewis grunting beside them, couldn’t tell whose hands caressed his cheeks and was unable to determine gender or personality in the bolts of flesh flashing through the night.

  At some point, Lewis began to scream, and when Norman and Sammy finally heard him, finally registered his tears and the blood dripping from the corner of his mouth, they were naked and cold and a soaking darkness had eaten the stars. Lewis pointed, boiling with accusation, and Norman saw himself from a vantage elsewhere: in his hands, cradled between his palms, he held Sammy’s moaning face, her eyes savage with lust and her body twitching between his open legs, a sucking sound, colossal in volume.

  “Exclusion!” Lewis roared. “Insanity! Betrayal!” And then the ground inhaled him, because he dropped rapidly from the roof and was submerged to his chest, pulsating with resentment in whatever swamp of shadows had gathered below.

  Hours later, maybe days, maybe years, Norman achieved the simple understanding that he was on the roof of a barn in the Prairies, naked with a girl he’d met four or five months before, devirginized in the pong of her unwashed flesh, and her boyfriend, who had the keys to a suspicious black van, had fled the situation in a pique of jealousy—and Norman had maybe kissed him at some point before losing himself to the girl.

  He didn’t relate these details to his dad the day after he came back to Fort Fierce. The two of them were renovating a room on the ground floor, scraping away the build-up of water mould on the bathroom ceiling, touching up the paint in the living room, and Norman didn�
�t tell his dad about the eighteen months he’d spent with Sammy on the streets of Winnipeg, long months during which she slept with spoiled athletes, lucky gamblers, sneaky husbands, stuffing their money inside a tiny black purse that clashed completely with her punk-rock getup. Norman made his cash selling booze after hours. They lived in cheap hotel rooms, and when they couldn’t afford those, they slept in the streets or in shelters.

  When his dad dropped his tools, literally dropped them, and told Norman to follow him, led him in to the utility room, past the fuse boxes and hanging brooms, the questions about Norman’s mom were all but asked. She was his dad’s singular focus. They would have to talk about her, openly now, not in code as they had before. It was uncomfortable but also a relief, because his dad’s obsession with his mom meant Norman wouldn’t have to explain how Sammy just vanished one winter, no trace of her ever again, and Norman had remembered his destination—Welcome!—only after he’d been robbed at gunpoint by three guys in an alleyway, the booze trade no longer a viable future.

  “I guess it’s time you saw this,” his dad said, crouching and pulling back the rubber mat to reveal a trap door underneath.

  After the robbery, purpose renewed, Norman had bused directly from Winnipeg to Iroquois Falls, a little town not far from Lake Abitibi. He met his mom on the first day, but he had no memory of how she looked. She left when he was a baby. There were no pictures of her in the apartment. He’d heard about her, from his dad and from the occasional tenant of Franklin Place, but she was an uncomfortable topic, seldom broached directly, and so he didn’t recognize her when she reached across the counter of a local hotel and handed him a room key. He’d been too tired to notice her eyes widen when he signed his name, and when she knocked on the door an hour later, he was fast asleep.

  He woke up the next day at noon. Kristen tailed him to a diner and waited until he was served an all-day breakfast, coffee so sickly sweet it hurt his teeth, and then she burst through the doors and sat down across from him, literally crashed into the booth, one feather earring swinging and her black hair all hurricane-blown and her eyes puffy, red, frightened.

  “Did she ask about me?” his dad blurted. “Was she with Dylan Perrin?”

  Norman followed his dad down the steps and into the underground. They sat side by side on the cot and his dad cleared his throat and made a hand gesture, but he didn’t speak, just nodded and smiled and then frowned, and Norman felt his dad’s understanding suddenly fill the room, or maybe it had always been there, but small, huddled in the corner, and now it spread out across the floor and rose up to the ceiling and took up every space in between: Norman had tracked down his mother, and his dad knew it.

  He put his hand on his dad’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze. He said his mom came alone and she stank of cigarettes and she crossed her arms on the table and asked him, “What took you so long?”

  He tilted his head, was about to get up and switch tables. But he recognized her somehow, like there was just some cosmic clicking of complicated machinery, and poof! here was his mother, and of course she’d been the one who inscribed the bottom of the Inukshuk, and maybe she’d done it in front of him, when he was just a little baby, because he could almost remember it, the way she leaned over him, tapped the bottom of the thing with her finger, winked and smiled. This understanding overtook him with total tranquility. He just smiled at her and nodded. He stuck his fork in his eggs, took a bite, and with his mouth full he said, “I got lost.”

  And she said, “No shit.”

  They didn’t talk much while he finished his breakfast, and when he was done she paid the bill and led him to her ancient, shuddering Datsun. There were two cold coffees in the cup holder and the ashtray was full from the pack of cigarettes she’d smoked while waiting for him to wake up.

  She drove him around and told him a story about the town. Once, it was Huron land. Then the Iroquois invaded. They captured an old woman and took her away in their canoes. They’d tortured and killed her family and now they intended to use her as bait in the raiding of another village. As they approached the rapids, the men asked if they had to portage. The woman said the passage was safe but shallow, and it’d be better if she got out and walked ahead, so she wouldn’t weigh down the boat. The men trained their arrows on her back and followed without looking past her.

  Their boats were swept off a cliff on founts of thrashing water and they were dashed against the rocks below, ruined bodies floating dead in the roaring shadows of the cataract. The old woman, justified in her actions, still felt guilty about the loss of life, the doom of the long fall and the smash of impact, so when the next group of invaders arrived, oars splashing in the river, she warned them away, telling them the waterfall was impassable and pointing to the lost spirits of their brothers haunting the shoreline in forms forlorn. The men were overcome with homesickness and turned their canoes around, but a harsh and unforgiving vengeance pursued them and killed them as they paddled, and this vengeance was the old woman herself. She couldn’t get over her anger.

  “She said she was sorry for what she put us through,” Norman told his father. “She said she didn’t mean anything by it. She just got lost in herself sometimes. That’s all.”

  Norman moved his stuff into his mother’s house that afternoon, and it was messy. Outrageously messy. Cats crawling all over the place and dream catchers hanging in the windows. Magazines piled up on tables and books falling off the shelves. The floor was strewn with throw pillows, and Kristen would plop down in the strangest places—in the hallway or the kitchen or the front entrance—and she would stare at the ceiling and lightly move her lips.

  She convinced her boss to hire Norman part-time—just so you have structure, because everything for you here is free—and Norman learned how to run a hotel, clean rooms, collect keys, process payments.

  He kept to himself, just as he had in Fort Fierce. He stayed in the living room and watched TV. He realized he was very interested in the world, always had been, but he didn’t want to read about it, found it more rewarding to watch the world on screen, to actually see it: documentaries, talk shows, news hours, recreations, dramas. He spent whole nights in front of the television watching the world, and when the shows were over, he went online and watched slow-loading video clips.

  Then Kristen didn’t show up at work one day. And she wasn’t at home, either. She called from a pay phone the next morning and told him she’d be in Manitoba for a couple weeks. She asked him to look after the cats, said she’d be back soon. Norman waited six months before things began to change.

  But he was comfortable while he waited. He cleaned her apartment, organized her collections of books and magazines, and felt himself settling into the atmosphere. He might’ve stayed there forever, inching back and forth between the television and the hotel, a life of quiet simplicity. But when his mom didn’t come back, when it seemed like she might never come back, the hotel owner fired Norman, out of spite. He knew his mom had been sleeping with the guy, because before she left he found one of her earrings and his wristwatch in a vacant room, and he left both items on the nightstand, because even though it was obvious, he didn’t want them to think so. He guessed she was sleeping with her landlord, too, because after eight months or so of her absence, the rent in arrears all that time, Norman was evicted, so he let the cats loose and gave up. He was no longer comfortable, and he didn’t bother to look for his mom when he passed through Manitoba on his way home.

  Back in Fort Fierce, it took a few hours to get the whole story out in the underground, and once he did, his dad put his arm around his shoulders and pointed at the walls and said, “See that mould? It’s from the flooding. We’ll have to clean it before it spreads.”

  V

  Of course Billy went to find her. Manitoba wasn’t that big, not really, and so Kristen couldn’t be that far. Not really. They could’ve bumped into each other. She could’ve apologized in person. The time had come for a vacation anyway, and so he looked around town for
a second-hand truck, and he bought maps from the gas station, and he taught Norman how to look after the building and who to call when he couldn’t. After a few months of training, when Norman had learned as much as necessary, Billy climbed into his truck, put his key in the ignition, and drove south to Alberta, down the only road out.

  Four days later, he pulled into the parking lot of a motel between Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie. He was too scared to go the whole way into Winnipeg because of the traffic and the bustle and all the turns he’d have to make before finding a place to sleep, so Portage la Prairie would have to do. It was winter, mild and drizzling, bright and grey for the whole long day. He lay in bed and watched the local news, focused intently on the TV screen, tried hard to anchor himself in the world south of sixty, where he hadn’t been since his parents abandoned Toronto a generation before. He stayed inside for three days, ordering pizza for lunch and dinner, eating it cold for breakfast.

  He hunkered down for a week, and then there was a knock at the door. He jolted in bed, heaved himself upright, and brushed the crumbs off his chest. He caught sight of himself in the mirror over the dresser a nd cringed: a face that only Kristen had loved.

  But it wasn’t her. The maid, a stocky woman with bushy eyebrows and a tiny smile she was trying to hide. Her name was Gwen. She wanted to give him fresh towels and clean sheets. She asked him to pay for another week at reception. He nodded and accidentally rubbed against her on his way past.

  In the lobby, a rangy man with uneven sideburns and a long, open coat filled the room with anger. He gestured at the clerk with an umbrella, water splattering the desk and spotting both their shirts. The man was the owner. The boss. He kept saying so, kept insisting. He accused the clerk of stealing, said he would never hire a teenager again—they smoked dope and filched money to feed the habit. He would go through the books and press charges. He was calling the police right now. The clerk jumped up, spat on the desk, marched out the door.