Last Exit to Pine Lake Read online

  When she got out, there was a very large man sitting on a log. He wore a dark brown coat with darker stains. His jeans were worn, and his black army boots had a rip along one edge. On his head was a blue nylon head covering.

  “Paul is on the island,” she said. “He’s going to kill himself. He’s dying.” Then she just stood there, waiting. A few golden leaves fell.

  Mad Tom thought about this. He wrapped his arms tightly around himself. If it were a trap, it was a pretty ingenious one. Paul had explained his illness, and Tom had agreed that spending the last of your life unable to move, with tubes feeding you while your mind drove itself crazy wasn’t all that appealing. Although he still suspected the government had fed Paul some radioactive stuff as a way of getting rid of him. But they were pretty devious, you know. He decided that the whole thing was getting more suspicious every moment.

  “I don’t know what to do.” She looked at the island, deep in shadow.

  For Tom, that changed everything. The ones that he was hiding from always knew what to do. And when his father was dying, when Tom was young, those had been among his father’s last words. Tom had repeated them much of his life.

  “To thine own self be true,” Tom looked up at Kimberly. “I don’t know what to do, either.” His eyes filled with tears. “Don’t let him die alone.”

  “Do you want to be there?”

  “I can’t. Not in the dark.” Tom got up and walked into the long, long shadows.

  For a while Kimberley watched the island. Then she gathered more firewood. The lake grew black. The temperature dropped steadily. Then she paddled back across the lake.

  Paul was crouched near the remnants of the fire. He had dragged a dry branch close and was feeding the last few twigs into the tiny flame. When she approached, he said, “It’s time,” without turning his head. “Where are the pills?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “Why wait?”

  She dragged another, larger, branch close to the fire, and began adding pieces of it. The flame grew. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

  “You don’t have to do anything. Just give me the pills and go to bed.”

  “And listen to you die?”

  “I’ll try to be quiet,” he said.

  “I won’t sleep. There will be a dead man out in the dark beside my tent.”

  “I didn’t ask for you.” He sounded angry. “Go away. I want to die.” He poked the fire. “Now.”

  “Can’t you wait till tomorrow morning?” She wanted to put her hand on his back, but rejected the idea.

  “I’ll freeze here.” He shoved an ember deeper into the fires of burning Troy.

  “I have a sleeping bag. You can have it. Need to use the facilities first?” She waved towards a bush.

  “I’ll be fine. What will you do? If I use your sleeping bag?”

  “Sit up all night, maybe. Think a lot.” She looked across the lake, but the shoreline was swallowed in the darkness. The moon was coming up over the hills there, to judge by a rim of silver along the tops.

  “You’ll freeze. There’s not enough firewood around, and too dark now to get more.”

  “You’re awful considerate to the bitch who stole your suicide bottle.”

  “You got a point there.” He stood up, shakily, and let her flashlight guide him into the tent. “I have your promise?” he asked, as he slid into the sleeping bag. “This is a rather large bag.”

  “You can exit this planet at breakfast, if you want. Pills and whiskey should do it. My promise. Cross my heart and hope you die.”

  “God, I’m tired,” he said, closing his eyes. “Tired beyond redemption.” She turned out the flashlight, and waited for a few minutes. There was no noise but his breathing.

  She made her way to the edge of the lake, and sat, her feet almost to the edge of the liquid dark. There was no spark to mark a fire from Tom’s lean-to. A small wind stirred the fire behind her. She put her head down and began to cry, quietly and steadily.

  Later she sat beside what was left of the fire, a faint glow, and read a light romance novel by flashlight. She checked her watch a few times, until it was past nine. Fall evenings could be very long. When she discovered that she’d fallen asleep twice, she gave up and went to the tent.

  The sleeping bag was large and square. She and Fred had spent the night in it more than once, and she enjoyed the sense of space it gave her, compared to most sleeping bags. She slowly pulled one edge up, rolling Paul’s form, breathing unevenly, to one side. Then she slid in.

  It was close, but he didn’t move, and an eternity later it seemed, she drifted into sleep.

  ****

  Mad Tom’s Diary

  What if Paul dies before I get a chance to kill him? Do I have to kill the girl? That would make them hunt me like a cougar. Only if they come hunting me. I’ll wait. If they find me, they’ll have a fight on their hands!

  We the damned of earth persist. Some of us under branches and leaves, afraid to light a candle and eating stale bread. Fearing the winter, in case it drives him out, and they say, “There’s Mad Tom come staggering out of the woods finally!”

  More damned than that by far are those driving to work that winter day in salt-caked cars, their dreams of gathering stars in cupped hands whittled down to dreams of sleeping in on Saturdays.

  Who more damned than those waiting for the Jesus and after two thousand years a plastic Jesus for the car is all we can touch. Don’t condemn me! I tried. The church was big but the population on the main floor was me and echoes. I skulked down until the doors closed and went to see if this church had any foundations to its theology. Such was my need.

  In the crystalline minutes before midnight I was crawling along the west wall of St. Grotesque of the Subway's basement, My hands feeling for hidden panels, loose tiles, for carefully-hidden keyholes.

  A priest, flashlight wavering, knelt beside me, startling my seeker heart.

  "I've figured it out," I told him. "There's a passageway here, somewhere. It goes through God's orifice, and out His muzzle to streets of gold, pearly gates, platinum wings. The carpenter's son was devious, but I've figured the code."

  He turned off the flashlight, sat down. "Go ahead," he said. "It might work. God knows, nothing else has."

  I hope there’s no helicopters come seeking me in the morning, but I fear the girl and I may have been wrong about Paul all along. They won’t take me alive. If she were prettier, I could be more certain.

  ****

  Bancroft OPP. Fire Day. October 2.

  Just before eight o’clock the officer in charge of the fire investigation phoned the fire marshal for the county at home.

  “No change in your decision that the fire was deliberately set?” the constable asked.

  “Can’t see any reason to change my mind. You found the owner yet?” The fire marshal’s favourite program of the week was coming up in four minutes, and he had a beer and a bucket of popcorn beside him. His wife and kids knew better than to interrupt this ritual, but apparently, this policeman did not. The popcorn was getting cold and the beer was getting warm, and there wasn’t going to be any extra pay for this conversation. He regretted having asked the question. Or having answered the phone.

  “Nothing yet. We’ve got a helicopter coming in from Trenton.”

  “You think he’s back in the woods?” The show had started and the fire marshal turned the volume up, low.

  “Probably. Word is, he’s really sick – terminal, and may have gone out in the bush to do himself in.”

  “You’re not going to let him?”

  “We’d have to bring the body in anyway. I hate it when these fuckers do that. Nothing but trouble. You want to be part of the search?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll be back at the fire site again tomorrow but only for a few minutes.”

  “I’ll let you know what happens.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  ****

  News
Release: Bancroft Police Service

  Police Seek “Person of Interest”

  October 2

  For More Information contact Constable Bruce Knight, Bancroft Police Service 705-211-1508

  Police are asking the public’s help in locating Mr. Paul Gottsen, 62 owner of a cottage that was destroyed by fire this morning on Long Lake.

  Since there is the possibility that Mr. Gottsen may be camping in the interior, campers and cottage owners are asked to watch for him. He may be in a blue canoe.

  ****

  Peter Finer, Journalist

  From his book, Dark Waters: A Life of Paul Gottsen.

  Sooner or later, most of us will arrive at the place where we will die.

  For most of us, there will be at least an element of uncertainty. The hospital may cure us, however old an infirm we are. The Shady Pines Full Care Retirement Home may, at the last minute, ship us off to the hospital, via an ambulance and a couple of medical technicians who are duty-bound to detour us to the hospital and not drive us straight to the cemetery where they might more logically prop our wheezing person up against a tree, break out a case of Bud Light, and phone for a pizza.

  Paul Gottsen intended to join literary icons like Hemingway by pre-engineering the moment of his death.

  Hemingway, not ready to move his person across the river and into the trees, but knowing for whom this bell tolled, managed his welcome to arms (or at least to his shotgun), and arranged his own death in the afternoon, all in his own room. Handy that, if a bit lazy.

  Paul Gottsen, sick and staggering over the hills with a canoe on his back, chose, for some reason, to annoy a number of the nabobs of officialdom (who prefer one to die in a hospital, however long that takes after the terminal diagnosis is made) by getting himself to Pine Lake. Not coincidentally, that was the name of the seventh – and probably never finished – novel in his series.

  He probably wished that the critics of Stolen Rain would have to personally haul his ass back over the portage, but you can’t have everything.

  But, whatever his condition at the time, he dredged up the energy to cross two portages and paddle to an island in Pine Lake itself. When I told his doctor what he’d done, the doctor just shook his head in disbelief, and said Gottsen had been told to show up at a hospital two weeks before.

  Some people who have gone camping in the area on a fine autumn day have compared the experience to walking through a church and feeling the presence of God built everywhere in yellow leaf. Something in it – even I found this, a day later – impels belief. Each lake’s a chalice, full of time and fish and dreams, and reflects, in stillness, the heavens, renewing a promise that this world is more than what we can see.

  The route to Pine Lake passes through one stretch of beech that reminded me of the nave of a great Gothic cathedral. When I set the canoe down for a rest, I thought, all this place lacks is a choir. At that moment a long strand of Canada geese passed over, and I needed nothing more.

  Did Paul see this? I doubt it. Maybe several times in the past, but not this time. The colours were a farewell, not a welcome. I would have been more appropriate in a cold autumn rain instead of this blazing colour.

  We can imagine his state of mind as he paddled to the island, the last ripples of his canoe, of his life, fading and dying against the shores. He must have seen that as his life, convinced that he would be remembered only as a passing entry, in some list, under “other authors”.

  Since buying the cottage a few years before, he’d taken to the canoe and the lakelands with a vengeance, turning his back onto the literary world and exploring the hills and waters with his little blue canoe. He should have been writing Dark Lake, but there would have been no peace in his heart from that.

  He passed that day sitting with his back against the canoe, watching the movement of leaves in the wind and the sway of reeds. From time to time a skein of geese would pass over, or a few ducks. Once or twice, a flock of a thousand blackbirds would swirl in the skies, then disappear to the south.

  He contemplated the bottle of sleeping pills without emotion. Yet he didn’t swallow them. That’s the amazing part; all day he didn’t do what he’d come to do.

  Was he waiting for someone? There was only one person he knew of in the area: Tom Barents, known to the locals as “Mad Tom”. But, as far as Paul knew, Mad Tom was living some distance away, by the shores of Buzzard Lake.

  He didn’t know that Kimberley Molley had crossed Long Lake and was setting up camp at Sparkler Lake. Or that she planned to continue on to Pine Lake the next morning.

  And so the shadows along the eastern shore shortened then vanished, and the shadows from the trees on the western shore grew longer.

  In the evening he was hungry, but had brought no food. He dragged closer a small fallen tree. Breaking off the smallest branches he lit a tiny fire.

  Darkness washed in, and he saw the stars come out one by one and begin their slow transit of the sky. The trees along the ridges seemed to sift those stars, to tickle Jupiter, to touch the rising moon.

  It’s all new wood in the Kawartha forests. A century before there had been log shanties all winter on the lake, and men cutting the tall white pines. Laughter and card-playing, talk and boasting.

  But on Paul’s last night there was only darkness, the small slap of waves on rock, and the soft hoot of an owl.

  I believe that eventually he let the tiny fire die down to ashes, then go out. His own fire was scheduled for extinction, and while a fire stands between you and darkness, it also stands between you and the stars.

  There are lots of stars above Pine Lake in the hours before the moon comes up.

  Sitting with his back on the upturned canoe hull, time would speed up. He knew the stars didn’t move: it was the Earth that turned, with the writer stuck like a rider on a circus wheel. The pine-barbed eastern hills would drop, hell-bent, while the west would rise, climbing the ladder of night towards the stars. It was magic; it was beautiful; it would never be his again.

  For him, the whole world cartwheels around a now-hidden sun, pushing up through galactic dust, tilting towards Virgo, in a sandstorm of stars, burning themselves into rust, as he had done.

  But perhaps his vision was not that from the dark well of Pine Lake. Perhaps he could look down from above the Earth, from space, and try to see the tiny spark of his fire even before it turned itself to ashes.

  He’d see the ragged line of dusk sweeping Pacific islands into the darkness, the stars beyond turning slowly, and dawn creeping over Africa, still hours away. But the dying spark of his little fire is too small to see even in that darkness. Somewhere, a million people watch the television’s glow or surf the net. But he sits, hurting, in the dark, watching the galaxies slide by and hearing mysterious splashes in the lake. Eventually, the moon rises and moves slowly across the sky. At last, he has stopped thinking, stopped remembering, and just watches. The shadows move slowly as the moon crosses the sky.

  He held the bottle of pills in his hand and watched the world, passive. Finally, after all these years, he didn’t think of Willow, his second wife. He no longer felt the guilt, or the pain.

  ****

  How They Met

  I have received a number of requests for information on how some of the major characters in this narration met their significant others. Here are such details as I have available.

  Mad Tom and Zyla

  Tom met Zyla in the basement of a church one cold Thanksgiving evening in Toronto, on Jarvis Street. hey started talking in the line up for the free meal, then sat down together. She explained that she’d taken the name “Zyla” to ensure she would generally be chosen last in most things. She figured God would know better.

  Tom, of course, was not a big fan of the Deity, and denied that he would ever be chosen. Being dedicated to non sequiturs, he followed that with something like, “I am the wild pig skulking among lilacs, rooting in the memories you thought you'd forgotten. I am the angel of the strang
e heart, sitting in mud, covering myself with yellow leaves.”

  When Zyla looked puzzled – shelter people didn’t always make sense, but they were seldom this poetic about it, he added, “I am Adam's son in high leather boots, waltzing alone on a moonless night, under wringing clouds, wondering if anyone will ever speak my true name.” Then he shouted, “aieee! aieee! aieee! I am that I am!” to which a few murmured, “Amen!.”

  “You are many things, then?” Zyla laughed.

  He laughed, too, agreeing, “it would take me days, perhaps weeks just to haul all the costumes down to the Sally Ann.”

  Within eighteen minutes they had agreed to look for God in the churches of Toronto, but only in the basements and attics. Surprisingly, they kept up this quest for over a month before Zyla left him a note that she’d gone to Winnipeg for the winter. Tom found no trace of God in any of the churches.

  Paul and Willow

  Paul met Willow when he was 25, and divorced. He had a day job behind the counter of a Ministry of Transport outlet, writing his second novel (the first never having been published) at night. Willow came to get her driver’s license changed back to her maiden name. Paul whispered that he’d sure like the chance to change his name so his first wife would stop using it. Willow laughed, and Paul, despite the fact that he could have been fired for it, noted her phone number.

  During a conversation at a Williams Coffee Pub on Fairway Avenue, she asked him why he wrote novels, an unlikely endeavour for the hours it took.

  He told her that he wanted his thoughts to live when his body was cold. He wanted to be more than a shadow at three, and last summer’s waves on last summer’s shores, fading sound on a gray hill.

  She tilted her head and mentioned that most novelists die in obscurity, and perhaps God had other plans for him.

  “No,” he said. “I will get nothing from the tooth fairy when I spit out my last tooth, no praise from the nurses when they finally diaper me, and nothing when I say my last word. But they'll remember me; I was the one who ate his meals on a TV tray because I would not stop trying to carve my name into the oak dining table. Nobody discards fine oak.”