Last Exit to Pine Lake Read online

  But there is an explanation, if you want it. Gottsen had burned his past and reduced his existence to himself, his canoe, and the universe. He had spent his last day of life, ridden by his hurting mind, portaging over to Pine Lake and watching the sun cross the sky for his last time. Why would he not want to clutch one last night to his heart as well?

  Night in the wilderness is not like night in “civilized” locales. But, if there’s someone with you, you can ignore that. If you’re all alone, you can’t.

  Most people can’t sleep for much of the night when alone in the wilderness. Something primeval takes over the human spirit. You watch the dark creep across the landscape, and try to think of it as just the same, only dark.

  It’s not, and your brain knows it. The trees, like the ones in Disney’s Snow White, stop being inanimate objects and become a crowd of strangers wondering what you’re doing there. The waters are home to depths unknown as fish – and who knows what else – move out of the deeps towards the shore. There will be splashes, and your mind will say, “Oh, yes. A bass taking a bug.” But there will be noises on the water and in the swamps along the shore that defy explanation. You know that people don’t disappear without explanation out there, but you have to repeat that to yourself, often. Some ancestor of yours, deep in the ganglion cells of your brain, stays awake, and nervous.

  And, eventually, you fall asleep.

  We can assume Paul fell asleep several times, woken by the cold as his fire died down, or by the growing pain winding along his spine. It’s cold on a clear night in October, and pain makes for poor sleeping, but he was exhausted by disease and a long trek.

  It was his last night, and he, among few others, felt no fear of the dark.

  At some point he woke up, cold, the fire down to a glow. He went to the water’s edge for a drink from the darkness. Behind him, the faint glow of coals. Earth, air, fire, water, on a little island. It was death and magic: it was an incantation to things he had given up on some time before. A large splash came from the shore at the other end of the island, and from the swamp near the shore came three strange sounds. Then the silence came back.

  Above him the stars stretched away, unfeeling and unwarming and uncaring, to infinity.

  He put a few more twigs on the fire, blowing it into flame again like Prometheus, then watched the darkness until the hills to the east began to form silhouettes against the coming light.

  He was lying beside the remnants of the fire, the sun finally bringing warmth, when Kimberly Molley’s red canoe appeared on the lake.

  The student had got up early on Sparkler Lake, restless and unwilling to stay beside a lake so small that it held no mysteries. She’d packed up quickly, making breakfast of some energy bars, then made the crossing to Pine Lake as soon as it was light enough to see.

  As she paddled from the portage site down the lake, she noted the canoe on the rocky little island. Normally, she’d have paddled past silently, not wanting to awake other campers. But there was no tent on the island, just an overturned canoe, a smouldering fire, and a man lying on his back, unmoving. Concerned, she gave the paddle a twist and let the canoe drift closer.

  ****

  Rollie Speaks

  Goddam it, man, that’s a rough way to go. I mean everybody’s gotta die some time, but some ways are better than others. I mean, we were neighbours and went fishing together, and maybe we didn’t see eye to eye on all things, but I respected his opinions and at the end I respected his wishes, too, hard as it was.

  He learned to love water maybe as much as me. It’s always changing, water. Fascinates me. He got a boat, then a canoe. Later he traded the canoe in for a lighter one – I helped him pick one out – and after that we didn’t go out on the lake as much any more. He liked to go off to other lakes and all that. I just liked being on the lake, fishing. Actually, he caught as many fish as me, because he’d go out there in the dead of night and fish. Caught a few lunkers that way, on worms and gold lures.

  Call me a realist in this life. He was a writer and his world was fiction. I don’t read fiction. The people around me do, but we’re all different, so I let it go.

  He was famous for a while, in his own way, and I guess that’s an attractive lure. I respected him, in my own way, but I never convinced him people are clowns and society is a circus and you’re better off not caring about it. He cared, even if he didn’t say he did. We made him cookies and sandwiches for a while after he moved in; a kitchen is creation, too, but that didn’t seem useful after a while; just caused problems. Some people should be left alone until they want company. He took his canoe and went out over the hills to the little lakes.

  Sometimes you’d see him coming or going with a girlfriend, paddling across the lake. Maybe they brought sandwiches. Would be gone for a couple of days at most. Hope he had fun out there, but he never looked much happier when he got back.

  It’s all like last year’s water, I guess, now that he’s gone. I understood him, but Tam doesn’t think I did. But I never understood the appeal of kittens, so maybe she’s right. Was right. Hope he found the God he never believed in. We have copies of all his books. I read part of one, once, just to find out what Tam found in there.

  ****

  Bancroft OPP. Day After Fire Day.

  The plane took off west, into a light wind, then turned south, towards Long Lake. “Just point at what you want to see,” the pilot said in a loud voice, to be heard over the motor, “and tell me which way you want to go.”

  “That’s Long Lake”? the constable asked. It was long, but so were a lot of lakes in the area. Some of the early explorers didn’t have a lot of imagination when it came to naming landscape features. When it came time to name more lakes in the north of the province, the cartographers used the names of airmen who’d died in the second world war, but here in the more southern areas there was a ready duplication of names such as long, round, loon, dark, and pine.

  The constable figured out where he was by spotting the remains of the burned cottage, then said, “Follow the shoreline.” He had to repeat it with more volume, but the pilot was good enough to keep the edge of the lake out the policeman’s window, tilting the plane and flying as slowly as was safe.

  The constable was looking for an abandoned blue canoe, but no such luck. He figured he’d have to repeat the search with a motorboat in a day or two, but he wasn’t optimistic; if a guy didn’t want to be found, it was easy enough to hide beneath a canopy of pines or hemlock. It wasn’t likely he’d be out in plain view.

  After they came back over the ashes of Gottsen’s cabin, with Tam raising her arm to wave hello at them as she got into her car, the constable pointed the way to Sparkler Lake, easily visible even from this height. It was, however, the least used of three known portages out of Long Lake.

  They passed Sparkler within seconds, not seeing Peter Finer carrying a yellow canoe up through a stand of birches, their leaves putting human paint jobs to shame. The constable asked for a loop over Pine Lake. Again, the little red airplane did a slow shoreline search. The constable waved at the couple on the island. One tent, one red canoe, two people, and sleeping bags stretched out to dry. Not what they were looking for. They followed the creek and marsh to Osprey Lake, then circled back to Long Lake to follow the portage trail to Turtle Lake and its twin, Triangle Lake.

  ****

  Pine Lake. Day After Fire Day.

  Both Paul and Kimberley remained still for a very long time, watching the airplane disappear and waiting for it to return. It had taken them by surprise; the sound a single-engine plane makes in the distance is almost identical to that of a large outboard motor on some lake not far away.

  Paul was close to panic, but Kimberley felt a shocking sense of relief, like an elephant moving off her soul.

  “Not a float plane.” Paul said, loudly, turning his head to get focus.

  Kimberley looked at him blankly.

  “No pontoons.”

  Kimberley blinked but s
aid nothing, still rigid.

  “They couldn’t land. Not here.”

  “Maybe they weren’t looking for us. For you.”

  “They were flying as slow as they could, and watching. Looking at everything.” Paul set the pills in front of him.

  “They’ll come back?”

  “Maybe not,” the writer said. “If they knew I was gone, they’d know I was in a blue canoe.” He nodded at his canoe. “You covered it with the sleeping bag and the tent. I think if they’d thought it was me, they’d have been back to double check. Listen – you can hear them still checking the other lakes.” They both listened to the faraway drone, like escapees hearing the sound of bloodhounds far away, getting closer, then disappearing.

  “But don’t they have to keep looking?” Kimberley wanted to pack up and be halfway back to Sparkler before anyone else came.

  Paul shrugged. “They’ll think I filled the canoe full of rocks and paddled out to the deep hole and went down like I should have done.” He closed his eyes. “I hurt, Miss Kimberley. I hurt beyond hope and I’m ready to die.”

  “Alone?”

  “Fuckin’ A. Rollie says people are clowns who don’t know it and humanity’s a cancer that doesn’t know it, but I think you know you’ve been an angel.” He sat, head pointed towards the morning sun and his eyes closed. “A better angel that I ever deserved. Go, now. Be gone. Vamoose. There must be fifty ways to leave your writer.”

  “So much for the interview that you promised me.” she said.

  “Oh, yeah.” It came out as a whisper.

  “Well?” She couldn’t go; she couldn’t stay. There were no good options, including sitting on her canoe and crying.

  “It doesn’t seem relevant.” He waited into the silence. “How many of my books have you read?”

  “One.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It impressed me.”

  After another long silence, broken only by the sound of more geese going by, he said, “I’ll tell you a story or two. You can make of them what you want.”

  “Okay.” She sat beside him.

  “Fucking right.”

  “Have any pain pills?”

  He shook his head, but she didn’t know if that was a “no” or a refusal to answer. “Can I start my story?” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “They met,” he said, “in a lighthouse on a weekday, in the rain. It was in the off season, so there weren’t many other people around. There was only one other car, a rental, like his, in the gravel lot. He parked his car paid an entrance fee at the tourist shop, then entered the lighthouse.

  “He shook the rain off his umbrella, and set it by the door. As he began to climb the circular stairs, he heard footsteps above him. He looked up. The footsteps stopped, and a woman’s face appeared over the railing, far above, then disappeared. He continued up.”

  “Is this a true story, or a mythological one?” Kimberley looked at him sideways.

  “There are several paths to the truth. When he reached the top, she was watching the nothing that was visible in the rain. There was the muted sound of surf and the noise the rain made on the roof and windows. The rain had increased suddenly in intensity. Without a word, she turned and left. Young, he noted, with glasses.

  “After a couple of minutes he started to retrace his steps down. He’d made only a couple of cycles when he looked down and saw her face looking up at him. Before he could do anything, the face again disappeared. He made his way steadily to the ground level, wondering if, like flying crows, it meant anything or nothing.”

  “Sounds like a story from high school,” Kimberley said.

  “Things change so little as one ages. She was waiting at the bottom. ‘Can I get you to shelter me?’ she asked. ‘Back to my car, I mean.’

  But when they got to the car, he pointed to a seafood restaurant across the street. ‘Chowder?’ he asked.

  “‘I’ve heard clams can dangerous,’ she said. ‘Things happen in restaurants, my mother said.’

  “’That’s oysters, you’re thinking of,’ he said.

  “They had scallops sautéed in drawn butter with the soup, in a restaurant where they were the only customers. He paid, over her objections. They talked about the weather and lighthouses, nothing more. Both loved the sound of rain against the glass, and the way the world seemed to come to an end there, with no way to see further than that.

  “Back at her car, he paused.

  “’We have gone round and round,’ she said, ‘at the end of the world. We have tasted pleasure on a blue checked tablecloth together. Fate may bring us together again. Or not.’ And she drove away.”

  Gottsen stopped, closing his eyes. There was a long silence.

  “You never saw her again,” Kimberley said.

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t know,” Kimberley said, finally. “I think so too, but sometimes there are coincidences too strange to accept, and I wonder if there is some plan, after all. You’ve had other women.”

  “Or they had me. Women avoided me until the Globe called Four Wanton Valleys” a work of genius.”

  “Poor you. Having to fight them off like that. Did any come here, to this island.”

  “When the sun goes down,” he said, “the day is done and it gone forever. Memory is an illusion.”

  “So someday I can tell myself this has been all a hallucination?” Kimberley got the fire going again. When there’s nothing to say at a campsite, you can always get a fire going.

  “I do feel sorry for you. You’re in a bind. Of course, from your point of view, the best outcome would be for someone to come and haul me off alive to the hospital.”

  “You think?” Kimberley flipped the sleeping bag and tent to let the other side dry. A beaver swam by, then disappeared with a tail splash.

  “That was my conclusion.” His head finally hurt enough to take away the pain in his body. He had another drink, sipping slowly.

  “That stuff hurt your stomach, you said?” Kimberley watched the expressions on his face.

  “Like a knife. It makes me want to vomit.:

  Kimberley reached into her pack. “Here’s some antacid pills and Gravol. Might help.”

  “Actually, they’d be perfect.” He swallowed two. “Now you can tell me a story.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Increases your odds of a helicopter coming in and bringing this writer back alive, doesn’t it?”

  “What story?” Kimberley could see his logic, but didn’t think that fast.

  “I don’t care. You’re young; tell me lies if you want. Tell me in the person of someone you know well, if you don’t want to include yourself, don’t. There must be a fairy tale you remember.” He took another sip. “Better. Want some?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Interesting. College kid; doesn’t drink. Strange.”

  “Once upon a time, in a faraway land,” Kimberley began, poking at the fire, “there was a woman so constructed that no part of her leaned into darkness.”

  “I knew her once,” he said.

  “Shut up. Deal with your own darkness. You want me to go on, or not?”

  “Sorry. I really am a smartass some times.”

  “She went into the darkest forest but found only shade. Peter Pan had no shadow once; she had no darkness. It’s not natural to go without darkness in your soul.” She paused.

  He opened his good eye, saw her watching him, and asked, “Was she happy, then?”

  “No. She always knew she was different, and wanted friends. But who would share secrets with a woman who had no darkness in her? She paged through the biggest catalogues, but there was no darkness for sale.

  “Those who knew her said she must be a pure being, and that maybe she’d accidentally had an immaculate conception or something.

  “But what will happen if God comes back,” she asked. “How will I know which way to look?”

  “Eventually, she married a man whose soul was l
ike the underside of a log. She was much happier. When he was drinking his morning coffee, she had only to turn away to know she was facing toward God.”

  “That’s it,” she added, after a silence.

  “Did this woman have a daughter?”

  “In her second marriage. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondering.” He looked at the bottle, angry that it was doing so little. “We get to ask questions of these stories?”

  “You started it,” she said.

  “Would we tell different stories if we didn’t tell them in retrospect? If we imagined them into the future.”

  “For sure. But only by looking back can we mix truth in with fantasy, like vinegar with oil.”

  “The future would be all oil?”

  “Not for you,” she said. “I do believe your future’s all used up. But for me, when the future got here and it wasn’t like I imagined it, I’d be bitter, I expect.”

  “More bitter than the stories we just told?”

  She thought about that. “I don’t know.”

  ****

  Bancroft OPP. Day After Fire Day.

  The constable parked the black and white car in the gravel lot at the end of Long Lake. Like all good cops he surveyed the area once from his car, and once more as he got out. The only thing happening was a smallish houseboat being put onto blocks for the winter. “Season’s over, I guess,” he said to the woman supervising, as much to see if anyone wanted to talk to the police as to make conversation.

  The woman looked him over, then nodded at the boat. “It is a sanctuary,” she said, “from all responsibility and mind chatter. It is a floating balm to earth-weary. The water laps, the loons call, the work is trifling to maintain and privacy stokes the creative fire. All else becomes frivolous in the union of sky, water, and hungry spirit.” She eyed him to see if he objected, then added, “Nice clean boat too.” He had to agree. Nice boat; nice lake. But winter was coming even to poets and boats.

  He walked across the parking lot and into the lodge The operator, a middle-aged woman, came out from a back room. She didn’t hesitate when she saw him. Ninety-eight times out of a hundred a cop would be needing help. A canoer overdue and missing or a cottage looted and was any suspicious car seen?