The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  In the elevator, with mirrors warped and stained from age and collapse, Amy and her mother were captured in an endless accordion of reflection, their similarities transmogrified by repetition and the degradation of the glass, their four black eyes troubled and multiplying into infinity as they stared at the ground, fuming.

  III

  A mid-November snowstorm nearly buried the horses in one weekend. The tips of their ears poked out of the drifts, but the snow was heavy and wet. None of the kids dug them out, and before long they disappeared for the season.

  The kids were into winter games now, clambering up snowbanks made by the town’s ploughs. The roughest boys made the summit. They hurled their opponents to the boot-tracked ground. The girls set up camp farther into the playground, in the tree-well of a bristling pine, but close enough to the action to absorb its heat and tension. They watched the boys nervously, ready to scatter if one should rush them: pull their hair, administer a face wash.

  Amy joined the group through social osmosis. She inhaled tentatively on the cigarette a white girl stole from her older brother, couldn’t stop coughing for the next five minutes. In the school bathroom, before class, she applied a friend’s lipstick, puckered her lips in the mirror and giggled. When she returned to class, she took her seat and doodled in the margins of her notebook: stars and crescent moons. Nervous, she ignored inquisitive looks from her teacher. Was he angry about the lipstick? Her inattention? Did she smell like smoke? Would he call her mother at home? Would he call Charlie at work?

  She imagined him dialling from the office, the phone balanced between his neck and shoulder, sweat drizzling down his ribs and forehead because he wore too many underclothes in the winter, couldn’t seem to strike a balance between warm outside and comfortable inside, and so his blotchy face and stained armpits and ludicrous bald head gave the children something to snigger about.

  Over Christmas holidays, Charlie and her mother had several parties. At the start of each, Amy was allowed to join in. The parties were fun. Charlie wore a stuffed antler headband and brought out his guitar. He played the rock ’n roll versions of Christmas carols, stuff like “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”

  Amy and her mother sang along. Charlie bit his lips when he changed chords. Amy was allowed small sips of wine, but only a couple, and she didn’t like it anyway. Later, Charlie’s fingers became clumsy. He fretted the wrong notes and got frustrated. He snapped at Amy when she made the same song request over and over. He roughly shoved the guitar in its case and put it away.

  More and more people came to the door. Some knocked. Most didn’t. They crowded into the apartment and lit up cigarettes. Amy recognized some of them from when she lived on the reserve and she thought maybe they brought their kids along. She was excited to see her old friends, but no, these people came alone, which stung a little, but it was okay, because she was making new friends now.

  A fight broke out and the coffee table was broken. A cross-eyed woman with blotchy lipstick grabbed Amy by the shoulders and extolled her long black hair and coal-dark eyes, caressed her cheeks with funereal remorse.

  Then Amy’s mother grabbed her by the wrist and twisted her away to her room, where she came from, and she had to stay there for the rest of the party, so she lay in bed as the apartment lurched deeper into the night.

  In the sky above the playground, the aurora was spiralling like a staircase of green and purple whispers. Slushy, red power-steering fluid had leaked across the roads. Ice crystals drifted through town.

  In the morning, her mother’s head dangled over the back of the couch. She was slumped on Charlie’s legs. He’d passed out face down on the cushions. Her mother’s eyes were slightly open, but she wasn’t awake. The floor was covered in sleeping adults and a fog of smoke stuck to the ceiling.

  A bra hung from the arm of the couch. It was hot pink with polka dots, and Amy imagined showing it off to the older girls at school. Furtively, she snatched it and skulked to her room, stashed it under her mattress, tiptoed back through the living room and into the kitchen.

  Shaking hair out of her face, Amy drank a glass of water over the sink. She gulped and swallowed and jolted. There was a man hunched over the sticky kitchen table, shoulders tense, pupils wide and vacant. He nodded, creepy, unsmiling.

  It was safer outside. Night lingered late into the morning. The town hibernated into the start of the weekend. Activity from the night before had left impressions in the snow—tire tracks and footprints and furious gouges in the ice—but there was no one around, only Amy.

  Her snow pants whispered as she hurried to the schoolyard all covered in snowdrifts and tried to guess where the carousel was buried. She thought she found the place and, without a shovel, with only her mittened hands and the heels of her boots, she started digging.

  She had to pierce the outer crust and hollow out a layer of snow, toss it aside by the handful, her wrists occasionally bared and nipped by cold, until finally she hit another layer of ice, this one thinner, but the snow beneath was dense and packed, the result of an early storm, a wet one, and she had to kick her heels, break it into squares and triangles and throw it over her shoulders piece by piece.

  The sun was an orange haze singeing the horizon, and Amy, exhausted, with burning lungs, slumped into the big, square hole she dug. Here, finally, was a horse up close. She caught her breath and took off her gloves. With steaming hands, she scratched away snow packed into the horse’s ears, in between the locks of its mane and the grooves of its muzzle. Cautiously, she picked away the build-up around its eyes.

  They were troubled eyes. They pled. Its body was frozen in winter, a fossil of its summer self, unable to trot, canter, gallop, and Amy pitied its predicament. She twirled on the horse’s behalf, arms stuck straight out, feet crunching as clouds blew in from the west, laden with snow, and it was like the sun had lit the sky on fire, and now ashes were drifting from heaven, all of which swirled above, until Amy became dizzy and lost her footing, crossed her ankles and fell.

  Slowly, the horse was covered again—at first just a coating, but the storm was gathering strength. Clouds surrounded the sun and buried it, and Amy, still dizzy and now drained and defeated, too, made her way back to the high-rise, where she came from. The next morning the horse was gone until spring.

  IV

  The seasons had begun to overlap. There was a violent bashing of patterns. Rain clouds drifted into winter months. They pressed a mild spring onto the calendar in fits and starts. A week of rain, by turns drizzling and pouring, and the carousel emerged almost completely. It was in the centre of a huge, round puddle, and no one could wade to the horses through the biting water and treacherous, subsurface ice. Boys who’d been tricked by the weather wore jeans and runners to school and they crowded around the puddle’s perimeter, threatening to push one another into the water. Girls didn’t dare risk the likelihood of a soaker, the rush of pinching cold water against their legs and down the tops of their boots.

  But Amy didn’t care. Near the end of lunch hour, a fine rain in the air, she slogged into the icy slough and sloshed up to the carousel, her classmates jeering her, one boy, or maybe a girl, hitting her between the shoulder blades with a chunk of ice. Socially, this passion to be near her horses would be costly. She would lose the standing lent by makeup and cigarettes and the polka-dot bra. But it’d be worth it.

  Water streamed off her snow pants as she pulled herself up onto the nearest steed, his red saddle encrusted in a skin of frozen rainwater. She threw her weight backwards and forwards, trying to dislodge the carousel from its seasonal inertia. The metal groaned and the ice crackled. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the horses took up a trot, rotating in a languid circle.

  The end-of-lunch bell sounded. Amy was the subject of still more harassing taunts from classmates and other children, but the idea of hanging out too long past the bell unnerved them. They drifted back inside, one by one. Amy stayed on her horse, tapped her heels
into his flank.

  The rain picked up. It lashed Amy’s back, hollered across her hood. Wind whipped about the playground, and she, like a sail, caught the gusts. The carousel rotated faster in the rain. The horses were galloping.

  It was easy to imagine the horse now leaping off its metal frame, wooden body filling with warmth and rushing with blood, its mane luxurious and free, and the two of them headed south, out from under the shadow of the high-rise and through the prowling-wolf forests of the north. The sun would rise and set a bonfire of scarlet and rouge. There would be a farm, a husband, two children. The nights would be dark and the stars would be many, and always there would be a perfect balance between wilderness and domicile. She would come back to Fort Fierce each Christmas and help Charlie clean up the mess from their parties. Her mother would understand, and eventually she might succeed in her own search for happiness, whatever it was, wherever.

  Amy was lost in this reverie when Charlie appeared with her mother and bundled up teacher. They shouted at her from the edge of the puddle, the three of them ridiculous, waving their hands, trying to focus her attention. The odd flake of snow twisted through the rain now, and the temperature tumbling back into seasonal register. For a moment, the weather was sleet. Then, with a terrible moan, it became blizzard.

  Amy didn’t resist when Charlie’s arms slipped out of the storm and encompassed her waist. Slackly, she leaned into his fleshy chest as he carried her, stumbling, away from the carousel. His neck smelled of grease and sweat. His stubble turned to ice as his breath wafted between them. From over his shoulder, she saw the horse vanish in the whiteout. The wind slapped at their clothes and millions of snowflakes corkscrewed past. Amy’s mother was quiet, furious, relieved, and the three of them headed back to the high-rise again.

  V

  Mercurial weather was hard on the horses. The wood sealant cracked up, fell away. During mild spells, moisture seeped into the grain of the wood, and the sodden statues burst at next freezing, their details marred by expanding ice. When spring settled for true, the horses were weather blasted and the carousel frame was rusted, its rotations jerky and squealing. Before summer, when it was still a little dark at night, vandals descended on the playground with hatchets, and the next morning, all that was left were multicoloured wood chips and the bare, metal frame of the carousel.

  In the forest around town, wooden horses hung from trees, ropes around their necks and tails. Their flanks bore gashes from the axes. They were ridden by drunks and druggies and sniffed at by deer and pissed on by wolves. Clouds of sandflies harassed them endlessly. The ropes broke and they were lost amid copses, forgotten in the understorey.

  But not by Amy. She was twelve now and she still remembered them. She twirled around the high-rise parking lot, and the air was thick with fluttering ashes from Alberta’s forest fires, blown north for yet another season.

  I

  There it is now, he said, pointing to the southern sky. He dipped his chin into the shell of his jacket to hide his lips from the wind, so cold and prickly on the roof of the high-rise. The dog, with vapour pluming from her muzzle, raised her front paws up to the ledge, followed his finger with her snout, and wagged her tail. Sirius was bright in the still-dark sky of morning, and as usual he bent over his telescope and sighted the star in its lenses. His feet crunched the snow as he shifted. It was romantic to consider himself a distant brother in a fraternity of observers, lonely men and women stationed on mountains and towers with instruments pointing into space, watching the light show as much of it drifted forever away, and it was like the universe was conducting a great and complicated orchestra of self-isolating cellos, quietly violent, but beautiful.

  That’s your star, sweetie, he said, and the dog sneezed, blew snow off the ledge of the building and into the wind. As usual, he explained to her that Sirius was actually approaching our solar system, like a good girl sniffing her way home, but that eventually she would pass it by, off to play beyond the limits of his imagination, though maybe not hers.

  She was slow on the way back in, even by the standards of a creature with just three legs. She’d been that way for the past week. An unsettling lethargy, the vet not due in town for nearly a month. There was a huge plaster bubble on the wall next to the fridge, and the dog had been sniffing at it, which made him wonder, what was behind it, and was it toxic? He waited for her, holding open the roof-access door and letting the animal shuffle in ahead of him, then locking up, because Norman Franklin would’ve been furious if he ever forgot, and this because you never knew when someone might get the idea to climb up there and jump. He didn’t want to make Norman upset, because Norman was a man abandoned, and he sympathized with that. He pitied Norman, and he pitied himself too.

  In his apartment, he and the dog ate breakfast without talking. Once, he would’ve been getting ready for work at this time, a shift at the fish plant. But that was before the forklift mishap. Now, he had nothing to get ready for. Or almost nothing. He could do what he wanted, more or less.

  The dog chewed loudest, but her appetite had been flagging. She left her meal unfinished and ambled underneath the table, settling on the floor with a heavy sigh blown through her nose. He peeked under the crusty tablecloth. Are you okay, sweetie? Are you okay?

  He wanted to say something to Norman about the plaster, but was that wise? If he pestered him, Norman might’ve taken the roof-access keys away, and then what would they do, him and his dog?

  II

  Sometimes, he went to events at the library. These were abysmally stupid, these affairs, attended by a cross-section of the town’s most trying losers: doddering ancients moving like glaciers through the vestibule doors; keening European volunteers with accents like tea cozies or maybe chest colds; piss-poor parents and their blaring children; Indians ensconced in Ski-Doo jackets taking turns at the computer terminal; unmarried and unattractive representatives of the municipality or some civil society group. He sat alone in the rear row, knobby spine grinding into the orange, plastic, bucket-back chairs. He crossed his legs and exhaled impatiently. Truly, he had fallen through the cracks of his community, a stranger even to weirdoes and outsiders.

  This night was “Aboriginal Night.” This night was storytelling, an Indian woman from Yellowknife at ease as she strolled in front of the small crowd. He knew anger when he saw it. She didn’t smile, was somehow poised, her brown face dark as she studied the white bodies in front of her while her people stuck to the back, playing on the internet, just inside from the cold.

  “We have a language, we Dene, older than the English spoken in this room.” She pointed her finger at various people seated in the front row. “And our language is just one of over fifty spoken in what you people refer to as Canada. What a tragedy no one would understand even a word or two. Let’s have a show of hands to prove me wrong.”

  He noticed an old woman’s hand stir in her lap, as if she might lift it, because maybe she spent the morning trying to memorize hello and how are you and now she was going to make things right with this angry squaw from Yellowknife. But she scanned the room, saw no one else shared her knowledge, and looked doubtfully into her lap. Her hand went still. He smirked.

  The squaw went on to say that her language was a filter through which she experienced the world, that form made content. He was the only one of the white people who didn’t nod. He refused. She said that English speakers were also forming their own content, that most—no, all—Western-language speakers were the same, and this content was obsessed with taxonomy. Here, he got up and walked to the reference section, took a dictionary off the shelf, and looked up the word; he shook his head in disgust—things needed to be arranged, didn’t they? And then she said English content was further obsessed with industry and conflict and Christianity, but so what, lady? So fucking what?

  He slammed the dictionary’s cardboard covers. The sound resounded. But no one looked, not even the lady giving her speech. He considered throwing the book, possibly through the fucking
window, but decided against it and hurried instead to the exit. He stopped before leaving, whirled around to glare at the audience.

  They didn’t return his attention. Were they ignoring him? Or was he invisible? The Indian kids at the computer started giggling, but not, as for a second he thought, at him. They were laughing at something on the internet, something far away.

  His feet squeaked and crunched against the snow as he walked back to the high-rise. The ground knew he was there, at least. His dog, too.

  III

  His dog was a survivor. She was a northern mutt, a mix of husky and shepherd. She was born farther up, where the trees were short and thin and lost dogs packed together to fend off wolves.

  A man who worked for the local government shot her mother for thirty dollars but couldn’t get a bead on her or her siblings, all of them puppies, she the biggest and strongest. They fled through sparse summer marshes. The runt of the litter couldn’t keep up, yelping in the muck, so she doubled back and carried the little one by the scruff. A spruce beside them was blown to splinters before they even heard the shot. She held fast to the runt and led the rest to the landfill. They scraped out a corner of the dump and kept clear of the bears.

  Later that summer, after people in pickup trucks had killed all her siblings and she was alone, a wolf, too submissive for its own kind, made her pregnant. The dog nursed six half-blood pups in a nest of mouldy blankets gathered in a TV box. Bulldog flies descended on them in a stormy cloud. The mother flattened her ears and snapped at the ones bold enough to land on her pups. Their little dead bodies collected in the blanket folds. The litter learned to eat them while she kept an eye out for bears and trucks. When the area was safe, she showed them how to forage for dead lemmings and rotten vegetables.