macCLOUD FALLS, page 39
‘I’m looking forward to seeing the sea again – and a proper coffee,’ she said, finally. And they hadn’t gone very much further before one of her wishes was granted, when out of nowhere, a billboard appeared, a large sign which said, simply, ESPRESSO 2km
‘Incredible,’ he laughed. ‘You really do have magic powers.’
‘I never did before,’ she replied. ‘Must be that four-leaf clover.’
Further billboards followed, each more tempting than the last, so they had their morning coffee on the western shores of Lac Du Roche at an Italian restaurant run by a family which had emigrated from Bergamo.
‘O Canada, you never fail to amaze,’ he said, as they set off again. The landscape changed subtly once more, becoming flatter than before, and every kilometre or so, there were numbered mailboxes by the roadside, suggesting homes or farms hidden from the motorist. The area seemed quite populous, though the highway itself was almost empty and had no houses on its fringe and they recalled Gordon had told them that the Cariboo plateau was the first part of the interior to be settled, from around the time of the gold rush. The habitations grew in frequency and pretty soon they saw signs for Lone Butte. He had his BC map out and was following the route that Gordon had indicated.
‘I think we’ve gone too far,’ he said, ‘If we want to see Green Lake, we don’t want to go to Lone Butte.’
‘Who does?’ she smiled. So they found their way onto a side road that would take them back towards the place Sara had said was one of her favourites. And it was very lovely when they reached it, green as promised. The land around its shores made sense of the term ‘alpine meadow’. Fattening cattle grazed among the bushes, or lay lazily in the sunshine, chewing their cud. Everything seemed to be in bloom.
‘I feel like Julie Andrews could come running across the fields towards us at any time,’ he said. Veronika asked if he meant Maria, and he said, yes, Maria von Trapp, that was it.
‘So you have at least seen one film?’
‘That was one of my mother’s favourites.’
‘Mine too!’
‘She took me to see it four times.’
‘We had the recording.’
‘So did we!’
‘I used to play it all the time when I was a girl.’ And so, as they drove through the beautiful flowering alpine meadows around Green Lake, they also ran through the ‘Sound of Music’ songbook, one by one. Veronika knew almost every lyric, and Gil knew plenty, but their best effort was ‘The Lonely Goatherd,’ where Hero joined in on the chorus. They sang it again, then again, and every time they came to the yodelling part, he did the same thing, a doggy howl that was surprisingly tuneful. They were sore with laughing by the time the road reached 70 Mile House, where she pulled in at the gas bar to refuel.
She took Hero in search of a patch of grass for him to do his business, while Gil pumped gas. 70 Mile House was a sudden and stark reminder of the modern world, where huge trucks lumbered by on the Cariboo Highway to and from the north, making the little intersection world shake with noise and vibration. There wasn’t much to it besides the store and one tired-looking roadhouse motel.
She walked a way back up the quieter road they’d come down, with Hero on the leash while he snooted around, and as she did, she felt a surge of sadness at the thought that their trip was nearly over, that soon she’d be back in Kitsilano and he’d be on a plane, heading for Scotland again. They had laughed so much on that last stretch, singing and listening to Hero’s howls. And then it struck her, that she could probably pick up a cell phone signal here. It seemed likely. Her hand went into her purse, found it there among the other things she carried, between her make-up bag and her hairbrush.
It was cold. Off.
He had filled the tank and gone inside to pay. It was quite a store, stocking just about everything imaginable, and had a great deli where you could have just about anything you liked on any kind of bread or roll. But as he queued to pay, he felt suddenly saddened after all their laughter. The road was almost done. Tonight he’d find a room somewhere in Vancouver, and she’d go home to her apartment with Hero and who knew who else? He didn’t feel ready to say goodbye.
He saw a stand full of CDs by the till and searched through the titles with his eyes, as the cashier took her time in selling the guy in front something that involved paperwork – a hunting permit, he thought. His gaze came to rest on one CD that interested him and he took it from the rack, to pay for it with the gas – The Man Comes Around.
She was waiting in the car when he came out, with Hero on her lap in the passenger seat. ‘So I’m driving?’ he said, as he got in.
‘Yeah. Your turn,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
‘On the busy highway?’
‘I trust you,’ she said, shoving Hero towards the back seat, where he scrambled unwillingly.
‘Well okay,’ he said, and pulled out onto the highway heading south, as trucks rumbled past. He settled back into the automatic drive position and followed the yellow lines south through a flat and fairly featureless territory.
‘So did the book come first?’ she asked him, after they’d gone a distance in silence.
‘What book?’
‘Your book. Did you start working on that idea before you got to know Gordon? Was it that that brought you over here, or him and that Burns’ book?’
‘I suppose it was around the same time. But it was a while before I did anything about coming over.’ He laughed. ‘You know what really triggered it?’
‘What?’
‘I bought a Stetson.’
She looked at him and laughed. ‘What?’
‘It was my last day of radiotherapy. The nurses and me were talking, and they asked what I was planning to do next. I said I just wanted to sit in the sun for a while, and they said I should take care not to let the sun get at my neck, you know, where I’d had the laser treatment. So I walked out of the hospital for the last time, went down to the nearest shops and into a charity shop – what you call a thrift store – to look at the books and there was this Stetson. A leather one. So I tried it on and it fitted perfectly. I thought I’d be able to wear it the garden in the sun, use it for shade.’
‘Huh,’ she said. ‘So where is it now, this Stetson?’
‘I left it out in the garden in the rain and it shrank. But by then I’d booked my flight. Talking of Stetsons, I bought you a present back there at the petrol station.’ He felt in his pocket and found the CD, then handed it to her.
‘Johnny Cash?’ she said, without much enthusiasm. ‘You still trying to convert me to Country music?’
‘Look at the tracklist,’ he said.
She ran her eyes over it. ‘Okay, interesting,’ she said.
‘It’s one of the last he did. With Rick Rubin producing. Very stripped back. A year after it came out, he died.’
‘That sounds cheery,’ she said, but took the CD from its case and put it into the player. ‘So when do you fly back?’ she asked, as the first chords emerged from the speakers.
‘Don’t know yet.’
‘What, you haven’t booked?’
‘No.’
‘And they let you through at passport control?’
‘I just said I was here to research a book and didn’t know how long it would take. I showed the man my card. You know, the one that says I’m a proper antiquarian bookseller. It looks quite smart.’
‘Huh,’ she said again, and leaned back in the passenger seat to listen.
‘He asked me what the book was about, and I told him. He seemed impressed.’
‘Must have been,’ she said, smiling to herself. So he wasn’t flying off right away. He’d be around a while. In Vancouver.
‘So what about tonight?’ she asked. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘Don’t know,’ he replied, without taking his eyes of the road. ‘I suppose I’ll find something.’
‘You really are flying by the seat of your pants, aren’t you?’ she teased. ‘But you know, I do have a couch. You could sleep there. If you’re very good. You’d have to share with Hero, though, but I don’t think he’ll mind, not after you saved his life.’
‘You saved my life, I saved his. Now all that’s left to complete the triangle is for him to save yours.’
‘Oh he already has, a thousand times over, haven’t you, lad?’ she said, turning to him and ruffling his head again. Hero smiled his doggy smile at her, scrambled his way into the space between their seats until all of their heads were lined up in a row of three, and he stood there gazing out the windshield, panting.
‘And if you don’t behave yourself, it’s not too far to the YMCA, is it, Hero?’
‘Hah, don’t think I’d qualify, being neither young nor Christian.’
She smiled. ‘And just how old are you, Mr. Johnson?
He snorted gently, in amusement. ‘I’m AC+1.’
With cold air blasting from the vents of the VW, all she could think of was ‘air-conditioning’. But when she said it, he laughed.
‘AC - After Cancer. I’ve been reborn.’
And she laughed too. ‘Then we’re the same age.’
But both of them knew that ‘after’ was too strong a word. The living ghost of recurrence was with them both, always.
The highway bent left and a sign flashed by – chasm, it read.
‘Now is that a place name or a warning?’ he asked.
‘I’ve heard of this,’ she answered. ‘It’s a national park.’
The road began to slope downwards steeply. To their left, an abyss began to open. He took his foot from the accelerator. Gravity alone was enough, even too much, and his foot went to the brake pedal, to control their progress.
‘It’s like we’re entering the underworld,’ she said.
And then the CD he’d bought at the gas station began a new track. At first she didn’t recognise it yet, once the lyrics started, she knew it well. But it wasn’t Art Garfunkel’s high reedy tenor singing about a bridge over troubled water, it was the gruff shot-to-pieces choking voice of a man close to death, who was savouring every single note, measuring it out like it could be the last his throat would issue.
The chasm opened, as if to swallow them. And then a female voice appeared, out of nowhere, coming in on the chorus, and there was someone, someone there with the dying man, hearing his vow, returning it, a companion, a harmony – someone holding his hand as he faced the inevitable.
‘His daughter,’ he said.
They listened, silently, as they descended. When at last the road began to flatten out, and the gaping chasm was behind them, the last note sounded and she looked at him, her eyes full of tears, and when he glanced back at her, sensing her gaze, she saw that he was crying too. But he couldn’t know the real cause of her crying, and she couldn’t guess at the true reason for his. What the song stirred in each of them was unspeakably deep, many strata of experience, as layered and complex as the geology of the chasm itself. Both were old enough to have known intimate loss first-hand, of family and friends, of lives left behind – or those which had left them. They had lived long enough to know how quickly the wilderness reclaimed the little clearings people made, how tenuous a human’s hold on life really was.
Another sign appeared, advertising the ‘Clinton Rodeo and Ball’. It was welcome distraction, and she said she’d heard that Clinton was nice from a friend, but the dates were already a week past, and the sign rather tattered and bleached out. Still, Clinton was indeed a pretty little town and he drove slowly through. She suggested they stop and find something to eat, as it was already after one o’clock, so he found a place next to a small park and she said she’d walk back into town to a shop she’d seen, if he took Hero for a walk.
The sun was high in the blue sky and it was hot, outside the AC of the VW. Around the perimeter of the park, a small stream ran slow, and Hero was happy to play there, though the flow was so slight there was little to bark at. Still, it was cooling, and he lapped the water, glad to be in the open air again.
It was a while before she reappeared, carrying a bag with sandwiches, bottles of water and a couple of ripe peaches. They sat on the grass to eat, and she produced a package from the bag which she handed to him.
‘It’s a gift,’ she said. ‘In return for the CD.’
It was about a foot long, and thin, wrapped in tissue paper, taped securely. He began to ease it open and pulled out a dark-stained piece of wood, carved with faces and heads like a tiny totem pole, but with a handle at the bottom. He looked puzzled at first.
‘It’s a talking stick,’ she informed him.
‘It talks?’
‘No, stupid. It’s...’ She was about to explain to him how it was used at pow-wows, but then realised he was teasing her. ‘You do know, don’t you?’
He waved the thing in the air in front of her face. ‘Ah ah…,’ he said in commanding tone, ‘I have the talking stick, so I do the talking.’ Then he began to study it closely. The carving was really very good. The head had canine ears, but a bird’s beak and body, and below that was something more like a bear, then another bird-like creature.
‘Like it?’
‘It’s great. Where’d you find this?’
‘There was an antique shop back there. I saw it in the window. Don’t think it’s actually an antique, but it’s First Nations. The carver’s name is on the tag.’
He looked, and saw it said ‘Bob Davidson’. ‘Sounds like another Scot,’ he smiled.
‘Or another residential school renaming,’ she said, more seriously. ‘So what I thought was, it can be like your writing stick. So whenever you’re in doubt about whether you can write, you have to take hold of this and remember that you can.’
‘I will do exactly that. It’s a real treasure, thank you.’
South of Clinton, the canyon proper began. The highway sloped down, down, down, and he barely used the accelerator at all. Trucks coming in the opposite direction strained and groaned, as if pulling the weight of the world below behind them. After a while, she put the passenger seat back and said she was going to take a nap as she hadn’t slept enough the night before.
The canyon went on, deeper down and deeper, the river at its bottom a long distance below the highway, railway tracks on the far side. The landscape changed into the dry desert he knew and, as the miles went by, he began to see place-names appear on road signs that he recognised from his time in Cloud Falls. They had almost completed the loop, arriving back where they’d started out from just a few days before. But it felt like weeks had passed. Here he was, steering a left-hand drive automatic on the wrong side of the road, with a beautiful sleeping woman next to him, and a sleeping dog on the back seat behind. He’d met the internet friend he’d made, at his home in the place that had been almost mythical to him beforehand, and had seen their pioneer existence for himself. He’d held a lost Kilmarnock Edition in his hands. He’d really been in New Caledonia. It barely seemed credible.
Down and further down he drove. When he’d pitched up in Cloud Falls on the Greyhound, it had seemed like he’d been travelling up the canyon forever, and that flat stretch of land alongside the Thompson river felt like the extremity, but now he understood that it was just a brief flat hardly midway, that there was even more to the north. And thinking about the interior plateau at the top, he wondered just what altitude that alpine meadow was at. Higher probably than any part of Scotland, even Ben Nevis.
She woke when they were about fifteen kilometres north of Cloud Falls, feeling groggy and confused. She drank almost half a bottle of water. Gil was still at the wheel, and they were still going down.
‘Where are we?’
‘Coming down to High Ridge. Remember, the fruit farm where Lyle’s children are buried?’
She nodded, groaned a little, then put her seat back in the upright position. ‘So almost back where we started?’
‘Yup.’
She saw the desert around them, the steep canyon sides with their sparse twisted trees, the sage growing everywhere, the river and the railway below. All the memories of those strange days they’d spent in the little settlement by the great river began to seep back into her consciousness. Gil being lost. The people mistaking her for a film star. The country and western night. The woman she’d talked with that evening on the bridge. The graves. The new wooden temple. It had all been so intense, so dream-like.
‘Do you want stop?’ she asked him.
‘Now?’
‘No, at Cloud Falls.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I could do with a break soon, but we don’t have to.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Half past three.’
‘Already? It’s about another five hours to Vancouver from here.’
‘Not according to Gordon, he said more like three and a half.’
‘He must drive a lot faster than you or me, then. Took me ages getting up here.’
The old colonial house above the fruit-stand at the side of the highway, where the guy on the mini-motorbike had met them, came into view on a ridge below. It was a splendid, commanding situation, above the valley where the two rivers met.
‘I’m not sure I want to see anyone here,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to start in with all that film stuff again.’
‘Well Ms Weaver, if you say so. I’m only your driver.’
‘Stop it. You better know who I am by now. No more ‘Martina’ or ‘Ms Weaver’ or any of that nonsense, okay?’
‘Do I know you? I’m not so sure. You’re just a strange woman I met on a plane. I haven’t any evidence.’
‘Stop it,’ she said again, grumpily. ‘I’ve just woken up and I’m really not in the mood.’
‘Whatever you say, madam,’ he answered, flatly, and tipped the brim of the Little Forks cap he had on his head, the one Gordon had given him.
And she began to laugh.
He pulled over at the abandoned Rumours restaurant, which was still advertising the best food in the canyon. No one had bought the cars that were for sale either. From there, they could see the whole of the settlement below, so they got out and stood in the warm canyon wind, which was blowing strong, following the river’s race to the south. The old bridge was still there, so too the inn on the far bank. The row of acacias that had once led to John MacLeod’s ranch house. The settler houses crowded around the bridge end, the tipi at Lyle’s house. The Apple Store. And in the distance, the little Indian church and the old reservation. But no one was to be seen, not a soul was moving, and the traffic on the highway just kept on going to wherever it was going, like the interminable flow of water and wind, the sun above moving through the blue summer sky.
