The Darkening Archipelago (24 page)

He took a deep breath and exhaled, blowing the mist far out into the night. That a life should end with such violence was hard for Cole to accept. But then, he had seen it before, hadn't he?

Hadn't he seen the blood of the man murdered in Oracle? Plenty of it, Cole recalled.

And he had seen his father's blood, too.

He suppressed a wave of anger that started just below his gut and rose up through him, wrapping itself around his heart. That anger flowed like molten magma, down the length of his arms and into his hands, which instinctively balled into fists.

Cole wanted to kill that man the other night. Dan Campbell. The bigoted, inbred, degenerate, redneck hillbilly who had called Cole an “Indian lover,” as if that, somehow, was the worst thing Campbell could call Blackwater. While they were fighting, Cole fantasized about punching the man again and again in the face. Mashing his nose and lips and cheeks to a pulp. Cole drew a sharp breath. He flexed his hands. The anger eased a little, slipping from his extended fingers like water might drip from a man standing in the rain. He both loved and hated the feeling it gave him. It was a drug, no doubt about it. It coursed through his veins, and it made him feel powerful and vulnerable at the same time.

Anger was the fuel that Cole Blackwater used to propel himself through his days.

His mind searched for the origin of it. It wasn't hard to find. It was a voice. A face. An odour. A presence, large and looming. A jar of moonshine. A set of balled fists.

Cole walked down the metal ramp and onto the pier, toward where the
Inlet Dancer
was still moored on the docks.

It had been a lot of blood, guessed Cole. Too much blood, he kept thinking to himself. Archie would have had to have hit his head really hard to produce a wound that bled like that, especially with the sea washing over the boat. He would have bled himself dry, thought Cole, his eyes hard on the far end of the pier, where the
Inlet Dancer
bobbed in the moonlight.

It had been a lot of blood. A shotgun at close range is a crude, rudimentary weapon. It produces a combination of devastating, blunt force and the staccato sharpness of a thousand tiny knives. They are tightly clustered. Thousands of tiny ball bearings racing at the speed of sound. Each of them with enough cutting power to inflict a tiny wound, but, when clustered together tightly, they form a steel fist that can reduce a person's body, face, life, to a pasty mess. Cole found it amazing that there are only five pints of blood in the whole human body, because he was certain that he had seen so much more come out of his father when he had been cut down by the blast of the 12-gauge shotgun that night in the barn.

Cole stood before the
Inlet Dancer
. A sawhorse with a Keep Out By Order of RCMP sign stood between him and the boat, but there was no officer present. It might be a matter of a few minutes before an RCMP officer returned to watch over Archie's boat. He looked around for any sign that he was being watched. No one. He stepped around the sign and onto the bow. The boat nodded on the flat water. Cole could see the curving bay that flanked the tiny port town, and he could see the distant lights of Port Mc-Neill. In the narrow channel between Cormorant Island and the Nimpkish River on Vancouver Island, Cole could see the lights of a small cruise ship making its way along the darkened coast.

For all his sight, Cole at times seemed puzzled at the lack of
insight
into the roots of the anger that burned inside of him. But when he considered this under the unflinching glare of moon and stars, he knew this wasn't true. Cole knew that he
had
insight enough, and that he hid behind his own ignorance to keep from facing the truth. Cole knew exactly where his anger came from. It was hereditary. Not passed down through genealogy, but learned. Through behaviour. He took a sharp breath and moved around the boat in the dark, stepped toward the anger that burrowed within him, and the violence that had taken Archie Ravenwing's life.

All souls are one, someone had once told him. He closed his

eyes to recall where he had been when he heard that. Cortes Island.
Of course
. A political strategy session turned group hug. He had been sitting on the beach, drinking out of a bottle of wine, while others in the group danced around a blazing fire to the sound of an African rhythm.

“Our souls are like the Milky Way,” a man said, sitting next to him, uninvited, unwelcome. “Seen from a great distance they appear as if they are one great light. It's only close up that individuals appear. All our thoughts, and all our actions, arise from that common place among us all.”

Cole had continued to stare across Desolation Sound toward the lights of Powell River. He took a deep pull on the bottle of wine, then another, and indeed the stars did all fade into one.

Now Cole looked up at the sky from the deck of the
Inlet Dancer
.

All souls are one, eh, he thought. All thoughts and action arise from that common place between us? All anger, all hatred, all cruelty, all violence, all lust, all greed, all fear is born there and wells up though an individual to come into the world? Why does it pick one man over another? And why does all love, all peace, all joy, all fortune, and all compassion choose differently?

He moved to the stern of the boat, to the pilothouse. The faint glow of the moon left the cabin in dark shadow. Cole sat on the high seat and took the wheel in his hands. He closed his eyes. Imagined the storm. He stood. Archie would have been standing. He took the wheel and played it back and forth. He let his body roll as if he too were on the sea. He turned to look behind him at the engines' hatch engines. Five feet, maybe six, he guessed. He rolled again and imagined a wave breaking against the side of the boat and let his body float sideways, as if thrown by the force of the water crashing onto the deck.

Archie was six inches shorter than Cole, so he crouched a little and rolled again, holding on to the wheel as he imagined Archie would have. What would Archie have hit his head against? Cole pitched again, letting his legs buckle. There was a rib of metal on the casing of the pilothouse that was an inch thick. A heavy handle was welded on either side of the opening to allow a mariner to steady himself moving in or out of the cockpit. Cole let himself press up against that rib of metal, imagining a giant wave catching him from the side and pushing him there. Where would his head connect? He guessed that it would be about four feet above the deck. That is, if Archie had been standing when he hit his head. Cole let his hand trace the cool metal, looking for any sign that this might have been where Archie had suffered the mortal wound that spilt so much of his blood onto the deck of the
Inlet Dancer
.

There was no mark. No indentation. Nothing. The metal was cool and smooth and unmarked.

He did the same on the other side, running his hand softly down the smoothness of the metal, as if caressing the smooth skin of a lover.

Cole stood again. If Archie was making for home, as Bertrand had suggested, and his boat was found on Protection Point, at the mouth of Knight Inlet, the waves would not have taken him on the side, but head on. Cole knew very little about the sea, but he guessed that Archie would have wanted to hit the coming waves with the bow, or risk capsizing.

Cole gripped the wheel and then let himself fall backward, as if a great wave had crashed across the bow of the boat and jarred its very foundation. He caught his back on the seat and let himself fall forward. His head touched the metal below the wheel. He knelt there, searching in the darkness for something that could have caused such a wound on Archie Ravenwing's head. There was a small compartment under the wheel, like the glove box in a car, but rather than being closed, it was open for easy access. Cole felt around it with his fingers. Could this have been where Archie contracted his fatal wound?

Cole's fingers touched something plastic. He took it by the tips of his fingers and pulled. It was a heavy plastic pouch with a zipper that sealed as it was drawn closed. He held it up to the moonlight to see its contents through the opaque plastic, but could not make it out. He looked around the pilothouse for a flashlight, and remembered that Grace had looked under the seat. He popped the seat open and found a heavy flashlight near the top of the contents of the storage container. He looked around the dock again. Still alone, he flicked it on and opened the bag. Inside was a map: it was the marine chart that included parts of Knight Inlet and Tribune Channel, where Archie could well have spent part of his last day on this earth. Also in the pouch were a red and a blue Sharpie marker and a pencil that had been sharpened with a pocket knife. Cole flipped the bench seat down and sat again, unfolding the map on his lap, keeping the light low lest he be seen by a passerby.

The chart had prominent red Xs at Doctor Islets, Sergeant Pass, and Jeopardy Rock. Blue Xs pocked the page, extending up from the mouth of Knight Inlet, beyond Sergeant Pass, and as far up Tribune Channel as Jeopardy Rock. Each blue X had a date beside it. Cole read the dates, following Archie's progress with the blue Xs from late in the fall of last year to March, and the day of the heavy storm believed to have claimed Archie's life. The blue X with the March date was located just a half mile beyond Jeopardy Rock.

Cole knew that the red Xs were salmon farms. He'd seen such a map on the sos website. But what were the blue Xs? He'd have to ask Cassandra Petrel. Maybe she would know.

Cole studied the chart. He was about the fold it back into its waterproof pouch when he saw, written in the margin, something that caught his eye. It was his name. He held the light closer to see the faint scratch of the pencil. “Call sos , call Cole, call the media,” he read.

“Call Cole,” he said under his breath. “Call Cole. You didn't get the chance, Archie. What was it you were going to tell me?” Cole pleaded.

Cole stood and flicked off the flashlight, returning it under the seat and folding the map into its pouch. He was about to slip it back beneath the pilot wheel, but decided that he would keep it instead.

Cole looked back at the deck of the boat, and at the gunwales. A wave large enough to float a bleeding man's body off the floor and over the side of the
Inlet Dancer
would have been large enough to carry everything else on the deck with it — but Jacob, Grace, and Darren had cleaned up fishing gear and floats from the deck. And Archie's thermos. Had a rogue wave caught Archie by surprise and flipped him over the edge?

Or had something else caught him by surprise?

What are you thinking? Cole Blackwater asked himself. What
exactly
are you thinking? The blood didn't lie. You couldn't conceal its meaning, try as you might.

Cole had spent the last four years trying to erase the image of the blood leaping from his father's head. Cole had pushed that memory so far down inside the dark recesses of his mind that he had almost convinced himself it hadn't happened. That he had stopped it. That his old man — that angry, dangerous man who beat his own son, and later turned his fists on his wife, on Cole Blackwater's mother — was somewhere, alive. But blood didn't lie.

Blood didn't lie. He stepped from the
Inlet Dancer
, the crescent moon low on the horizon now, casting a pale shadow of Blackwater along the length of the dock. He saw a man walk up the metal ramp far at the end of the pier, where it met the walkway along the main road through town. Another restless soul who could not, or would, not sleep.

Cole awoke late in the morning. Though he hadn't had a drink the night before, he felt hungover with the weight of what had been revealed. He sat up in bed, his face still tender from the blows that Dan Campbell had delivered, his fist still aching from the beating he had given Campbell in return. Two angry men meeting head-on like freight trains in the night. “Still having our way with them” was what Dan had said about the people of Port Lostcoast. His was an attitude leftover from two centuries of abuse, officially expunged but unofficially living on in the bigoted, twisted hearts of a few men who hadn't, and never would, join the rest of Canadian society in the twenty-first century.

Two angry men.

How angry? thought Cole, standing up, stretching. His body felt half decent, a change from years of sluggish decline. He dropped to the floor and did twenty push-ups. He tapped his stomach, which still slumped a little over the elastic of his briefs but was starting to show some definition again.

How angry was Dan Campbell? “Fucked over,” he had said. Archie had gone up against Campbell on every major environmental issue to hit the coast of British Columbia. Grizzly bear hunting, logging, fish farming, you name it.

Cole closed his eyes and saw the stern of the
Inlet Dancer
. How angry? Angry enough to step onto Archie Ravenwing's boat, and what? Cole swallowed hard at the image.

He sat down on the bed, suddenly light-headed. He held out his hand and it trembled.

“Get a hold of yourself, man.”

But there was no denying it. He looked at the pile of clothes on the floor where he had dumped them the night before. On top was the sealed map pouch. No denying it. Archie was onto something. But he hadn't made it back from Tribune Channel and Jeopardy Rock in time to make his calls.

He needed help sorting through this tangled mess. His thoughts were clouded. Did he dare burden Grace with his suspicions? No. She had suffered too much. And Darren, while affable, was too simple to provide the tough questions that Cole required to unravel and understand what really happened on the
Inlet Dancer
the night Archie Ravenwing went missing. No, there was only one person, and Cole knew it. He picked up the phone on the stand next to his bed and dialled. He waited through four rings and was about to hang up.