Everyday People Page 21

  “We’ll get it,” Sean said. He kissed me on the forehead.

  “Yeah.”

  The other couples are from Toronto, a zillion times more urban than we are. I don’t know why they don’t seem to have any trouble getting it. From the sound of it, they’re getting it constantly.

  • • •

  The river has slowed since we left Aberdeen Canyon; it’s big and sluggish and muddy now. For the most part, the only sound comes from the nattering of our fellow travelers, and this happens only when we’re rafting, the boats tied together. Sometimes the wings of birds make a whoop whoop whoop sound when we startle them into flight. The couples don’t mingle much anymore, and I’m not sure if that’s because we’re comfortable with one another now or because we’ve given up.

  • • •

  When we pull off the river, the moosehide is just lying there. God. Big, inflated lungs lying next to it, jiggling like jello. Intestines, veiny gray tubes.

  “Why is everything inflated?” I ask Sean.

  “Botulism,” somebody says.

  “Don’t poke a hole in them,” somebody says, “or the worst smell will come out.”

  How bad, I wonder?

  The worst.

  Brown-winged birds of prey circle above us.

  Everybody loves the hide, prodding and poking it with sticks. Stretching it out so they can see the full length of the inside, mucus membrane and pink blood, a skin cape cut ragged around the edges. I can’t look at it. I don’t see a dead moose, I see a live moose in the final moments of suffering before its life ends. That kind of empathy is stupid, I know. The moose is dead, and it’s feeding someone.

  Somebody’s going to notice that I’m the only one not looking and ask me why I’m such a wuss. So I make a big show of looking at other things: tiny plants at the river’s edge with ice globes surrounding the fruit, broken willow branches, rocks. Scarred rocks that look like patients in a hospital ward; what makes them look like that? I toss a few in the river. Each lands with a fat plunk.

  Sean’s talking to Eric about taking the moosehide with us, and I’m pissed at him for it. Surely bears would smell it and come looking for us, or lynx, or . . . whatever else is out here waiting to kill us. He wants to make something out of it. Whatever. I remember somebody in my Aboriginal Studies class saying that scraping a hide is much harder than it looks, even with expert hands, and we’re no experts. We have no tools for this. I may be a mixed-blood—Sean and I are both Cree Métis—but we were also both raised white. All we know are white-people things. But I do know that a perfectly good moosehide shouldn’t have been left here. Why did the hunters leave it? Skin it and leave it?

  “I think it’s female,” somebody says, poking around the ass end, playing the expert.

  “You’re not supposed to kill females,” somebody says.

  “That’s sexist,” somebody says.

  “The females make more moose, dumbass.”

  “Not without sperm they don’t.”

  “Maybe she attacked them.”

  God. It’s like reading the comments section on YouTube.

  I’m hungry.

  Somebody passes around a snack, just a big block of cheese cut into a million pieces with a dirty Leatherman. It clogs and sticks in my throat. We got fun size Mars bars, too. Chocolate and cheese. I put the Mars bar in my PFD pocket. My fingers can barely get the zipper down. My fingers, dirty for days despite a river of hand sanitizer. Bloated, with pus around the nails, one finger swollen so big I can barely move it. Rub Polysporin in the cracks before bedtime and hope for the best. I can still paddle just fine. I may have lost weight, but my shoulders are strong now. I can feel the muscle through my merino-wool bottom layer, though I haven’t seen much of my actual skin for fifteen days.

  “Can you help me with my PFD?” Sean asks. He looks like a little boy when he says it, and for some reason I choke up a little. Get it together, lady.

  “Sure,” I say. Tug the zipper down hard, even though my fingers might break off.

  “Do you want my Mars bar?” he asks.

  “Don’t drag that moosehide along with us,” I say.

  “I could make a drum from it.”

  I turn around so he doesn’t see how hard I’m rolling my eyes. A drum. We’re accountants.

  Now it’s pictures around the moose remnants, eight of us lined up like so many soldiers. Someone’s found an antler, too. Not from the carcass; this one’s older. And probably caribou, Eric tells us. People take turns with it, more photo opportunities.

  Sean’s arm around me, the other holding the antler up to my temple. We’ll get back to Vancouver and show this photo to our friends, and they’ll be jealous of us. I can’t even count how many times people used the word jealous, like we were going on an all-expenses-paid five-star Mediterranean yacht cruise or something. You’d have to be a masochist to want to trade places with us right now. There’s nothing easy about being out here, and there was nothing easy about getting here. Sean and I trained for months, saved for months. I guess it was good for us to have something to focus on. We barely fought at all. I’m not sure whether we picked the right kind of vacay. I’m not sure whether it’s just the tour we chose, because I’ve never done anything like this before. But I definitely didn’t expect things to be this hard. I pictured myself drinking wine and looking out at the river. I’d imagined calm, and a clearing-out of my mind that might make the future easier to see. Anyway. We’re doing it now. We’re committed.

  • • •

  Time to get back in the boats. It’s much warmer when I’m paddling, tied into the spray skirt with my neoprene gloves on. Sean and I always paddle together now. Early in the trip when there was some pretense of friendship among travelers, people switched up paddlemates and made small talk, but not anymore. I don’t really care. My friends back home told me this kind of trip forges lifelong connections, so maybe there’s something wrong with me.

  People take their last pokes at the moose bits. Somebody finally does poke a hole in the lung, and it deflates unceremoniously; no smell. One of the guides persuades Sean that bringing the pelt along is a stupid idea, but I’m still annoyed, so I’m not speaking to him. He points out the same shit we’ve seen for the last week: stunted trees, exfoliated hills, mud. I just paddle.

  • • •

  When it’s finally time to find camp for the night, the atmosphere is thick, the river so still it looks like mercury.

  “Taco Bar tomorrow,” Eric says.

  “Is that some kind of sick joke?” Sean asks. He gets grumpy when I give him the silent treatment.

  Eric laughs. “Taco Bar is a checkpoint,” he says. “If you need anything flown in or flown out, that’s the spot.”

  “How ’bout some tacos,” somebody says. “Hur hur hur.”

  “They’d be some pretty expensive tacos,” Eric says. “Airlift costs about three grand.”

  “That’s our way out,” I say to Sean. So much for the silent treatment.

  He snorts. “Kiss that ring good-bye, then.”

  I shrug, knowing it’s going to piss him off. He looks at me and laughs. People say traveling together is a true test of a relationship. Those people are correct.

  • • •

  “Smoke,” a voice bellows from a canoe behind me. “SMOKE.”

  I realize I’ve been looking right at the smoke for a few minutes, but it hasn’t registered. “Smoke,” I say to Sean.

  “No shit.”

  “Smoking Hill,” Eric says. “Lightning hit a coal seam in the mountain. It’s been burning ever since.” This generates a lot of delighted conversation. In the absence of Internet access, I guess we’re all pretty easily amused. “Let’s stop here tonight,” Eric says.

  We begin the transition back to being land-dwelling mammals: pull the boats up, loosen the spray skirt laces, pull out the gear. Although everyone is tired, this is when we work together best, since the end goal of sleep is finally in sight. The mud is too thick to slo
g through with a heavy pack, so a line forms, and we pass everything along. Bag after bag: tents, cooking gear, food. Empty boats carried safely above the waterline. Sean and I set up the camp kitchen. I find rocks for a hearth while he collects firewood. Then he builds the fire while I sort through the food barrels for tonight’s meal. When everyone else is done with their tasks, they’ll all come and circle us like vultures.

  “We could leave,” Sean says.

  “What?”

  “We could.” He blows into the fire, and sparks fly out. “We could split the three grand and get the fuck out of here.”

  The water is boiling. I measure out three cups of parboiled rice and dump it in. “Why?”

  Sean snorts. “It was your idea.”

  “We might be waiting a while; I doubt there’s a shuttle,” I say, watching the rice come to a boil. Fire cooking is not what you’d call precise, but I’m getting better at it.

  “I asked Eric,” Sean says. “He could call on the satellite phone.”

  “We could.” I think about what our friends would say. It would look like a failure. But they have no idea how hard every day has been. They probably wouldn’t say much at all, but they would think I’d failed.

  “I mean, this is our vacation,” Sean says. “It’s not supposed to be work.”

  “We could hit that spa in Whitehorse and get four-handed massages.”

  Sean laughs. “How about six-handed?”

  “I like the way you think,” I say. We kiss for the first time in a million years.

  “Woo, get a room, you two,” somebody calls. The vultures are descending.

  “A room,” Sean says. “We could get one. Think about it.”

  I do think about it. What heat would feel like. Electric light. Hot water on demand. Mealtime rolls into fire time; people roast marshmallows and laugh among themselves. In the distance, Smoking Hill is glowing a little and still sending a thin white plume up into the night sky. It’s a long time before the sky gets dark, and usually by then the northern lights are out. Green streaks across a deep blue twilight. They were so exciting at first; now we just expect them. But tonight, the idea that this could technically be my last night out here has got me looking around again, noticing things.

  “Meet you in the tent,” Sean says, kissing my cheek.

  “I’ll be there in a bit,” I say.

  “Don’t be too long; we’ve got stuff to discuss.” He lopes off toward our coffin-sized tent. Handsome.

  I leave my comrades at the campfire, but instead of going straight to the tent, I end up down at the edge of the river looking at the burning hill. Big moon. Me in the mud. It’s so shitty out here. But still, technically, this is romance. It’s hard to remember that, since we’re always moving on this stupid river, or too exhausted to think. I stand still for a while. Try to imagine getting picked up by an airplane tomorrow. Removing all future responsibility from ourselves in one simple but expensive maneuver. Crawling into the plane and laughing together like Benjamin and Elaine on the bus at the end of The Graduate. Escape! Ha ha ha. Ha ha.

  Ha.

  Well.

  What now?

  SURRENDER

  Hasanthika Sirisena

  AS SUNIL STOOD in his backyard staring at the carcass of the small unidentifiable animal—a cross between a rat and a Chihuahua—he realized he was missing something important. Tall concrete walls protected his compound from the surroundings, but every morning he still found empty arrack bottles, plastic bags filled with rotten smelling mud, decaying king coconut husks, and, now, a dead rodent.

  Sunil tried to ask the man he’d hired to guard his compound if a storm had dropped these things. Sunil had heard about such events: objects and animals caught in the eye of the storm and dumped somewhere far from their origin. The catcher stared at him, his broad face even more puckered and contorted than usual. Sunil used his best broken Sinhala to explain again, but the man’s eyes grew wider. Finally, Sunil gave up.

  Was it the monsoons that sent that stuff over the compound wall? Sunil demanded of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Emily.

  “Monsoon? Monsoon is months away.” Emily replied with that look of scorn, far too common these days.

  “Then what’s doing that? Leaving those things there.”

  “Boys from the village. They come at dawn.” Of course she was right. He’d seen the boys loitering on the beach, but had thought that they were only beachcombing.

  “Why?”

  “Because we have a swimming pool and they don’t.”

  Sunil rose very early the next morning and waited near the wall. The first bottle came over, silhouetted against the rising sun. “Stop,” Sunil cried out. Nothing happened for a few seconds, then he heard giggling. A boy called out something in Sinhala that Sunil did not understand but knew was a taunt. Sunil peered over the metal gate that separated his yard from the beach just in time to see five boys running across the sand.

  • • •

  Sunil was a thirty-five-year-old Sri Lankan–born American engineer. He had returned to the home country a year before to work for an American engineering firm based in the capital. So far, the one thing he loved about Sri Lanka was the house his company had placed him in. After he and Emily had spent eight months in a cramped company apartment in the middle of Colombo, they’d offered him this split-level outside a quiet fishing village a half hour from the capital. Located on a dirt road far from the village and close to the beach, with its air-conditioned office and private swimming pool, the house had felt a haven, the only haven he had in a country that seemed to assault him every day with things the meaning of which he could only barely comprehend. Then the boys started coming.

  Sunil decided to ignore them, but they didn’t go away. Instead, they became angrier. They stood on the beach each morning, demanding to use the pool. They taunted the catcher, an elderly Tamil man Sunil had hired to clean the grounds and guard the compound gate. The catcher left soon after. The Scotsman who owned the house next to his told Sunil to go to the station house. The chief inspector was a capable man.

  Sunil did as the Scotsman suggested. The chief inspector barely acknowledged Sunil as long as he thought Sunil was Sri Lankan, but when Sunil explained he was a supervisor at a foreign engineering firm, the inspector’s demeanor changed. Still, nothing was done, and when Sunil returned a week later, the chief inspector frowned. “What to do? This is the way here. They will get bored and go away, sooner or later.”

  It was a passing conversation that solved the problem. Sunil had complained about what was happening to the cook, Amara, for no other reason than that he had no one else to talk to. Amara had listened carefully and solemnly and had not said a word when Sunil finished. Sunil was sure that once again he had not made himself clear.

  Early the next morning, Sunil woke to see Amara standing in his backyard. As the first arrack bottle went sailing through the air, Amara made her way to the back gate and called to the boys. She whispered something to them, and they listened. Whatever Amara said worked. After that, the boys did not come back.

  • • •

  Sunil’s parents had immigrated to a small town in North Carolina when he was only four. When Sunil was old enough to make such choices, he’d thrown himself into fitting in. For most of his life, he’d referred to himself as a Southerner. He spoke in “y’alls” and qualified every other word with “real”: “Y’all have a real good day now.” Growing up, he’d listened to Cheap Trick, AC/DC, and Led Zeppelin and hid his parents’ baila records. His parents had struggled when they arrived in the States and had put all their energy into keeping the family from poverty; they threw what little they had into giving Sunil the chance to become a good American. They never visited the home country, so he never felt any strong ties.

  Two years ago, his parents decided to sell the family business. They packed up their entire life and retired to Boca Raton. The moment they did, Sunil realized he did not have a single connection to the small town in which
he’d spent his childhood and young adulthood. He had no friends left there. He had no deep attachment to or interest in Southern history and culture. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if he wasn’t already divorced, if he and Emily hadn’t spent their lives moving from one city to the next because of his work. Sunil felt suddenly rootless, bereft. When the position at the engineering firm came along, it seemed a sign: the homeland calling Sunil back, providing an answer to his loss. It would be an adventure for Sunil and his daughter, an opportunity for them both to discover a part of themselves.

  But things hadn’t quite worked out the way Sunil expected. Since arriving, he’d become isolated in a way he’d never predicted. Sunil’s coworkers were mostly Europeans or Sri Lankans. Even if they had shared a culture, Sunil felt as their boss a distance that precluded friendship. The Sri Lankans he met outside of work thought him odd; maybe if he hadn’t looked like them they would have tolerated the difference. Instead, there was a period of discomfited friendship before they’d drop away. He was close only to Sheila, the other American working at his company. He’d started seeing her in part because she reminded him of North Carolina.

  Sunil’s daughter, on the other hand, woke up one morning, a few months after arriving, able to speak Sinhala fluently. Sunil still tripped over words, so it was Emily who negotiated for him at the kadés and the fishermen’s market. Emily explained things to Sunil about the country and its culture. She coached him about the mores and values. He appreciated Emily’s intelligence and her willingness to help him, but at times it seemed to him that the country had grossly upended his role in Emily’s life. He was supposed to be the one who cared for her, protected her, sheltered her. Now it was the other way around. She was the parent and he was her child.