This River Awakens (8 page)

Their eyes met again, and again Jennifer looked away first. Around her the conversation stumbled off in a new direction, but it had become faint and distant as a storm thundered through Jennifer’s thoughts.
The bitch, she knows! Fuck!
A year’s difference in age meant everything. Being in the seventh grade was a whole lifetime away from being in Grade Six.
If Mark and Dave find out … fuck it!

The new girl knew the truth, only she wasn’t telling.
Why? Why not carve us up right now and get it done with? What the hell did that wink mean, anyway?
Jennifer scowled.
We got to talk, Debbie Brand. You and me. I got to know what kind of game you’re playing.
Once she knew that – Jennifer smiled to herself.
I don’t lose games. Ever.

CHAPTER THREE

I

It was Sunday, the day we declared war on the rats in the house. We began by rolling up the carpet in the living room. I helped Father carry it out to the service pick-up truck he had driven in from the gas station. While he took the carpet to the garage – where he’d clean it with a high-pressure water hose and heavy-duty soap – I was to place the traps and poison.

‘Figure you can match wits with rats?’ Father asked.

I grinned up at him. ‘Nobody better than me.’

He drove away, and I turned to face the house. Twenty traps to lay out; the poison would go into the crawlspace under the basement stairs, and into the attic. The traps, baited with Cheddar cheese, would go everywhere else.

Mother kept the twins in the kitchen, her two helpers in some baking venture. Debbie was visiting friends in the city. The rest of the house was mine.

The basement seemed the obvious place to start. As I descended the stairs, I listened for sounds from below. But there was nothing. I came to the bottom of the steps and paused, looking around.

A thousand places for rats to hide. Behind the washer, the dryer, the water heater, the furnace, all of our cardboard boxes from the move – some of them still packed.

After a moment I moved quietly forward, around the large freezer and into the laundry room. A basket of dirty clothes caught my eye and I thought of rat nests. A tingling feeling crept over me. Suddenly certain that pairs of black marble eyes watched me, I removed the first of the traps from my backpack.
Pull back on the stiff bar, set the catch, place the cheese on the pan. Simple, but be careful, Father said, ’cause these aren’t mouse-traps. These can break your fingers.

The concrete floor was cold under my hands and knees. I slid a trap down between the washer and dryer, reaching until it was against the back wall. A second one went behind the furnace, then I left the room and approached the small plywood door under the stairs.

If rats could build secret cities, they’d build them in the crawlspace. I crouched down and slowly opened the door. The basement’s light exposed only a few feet into the crawlspace. On the concrete floor was a scatter of bits of cotton-like material that I thought might be insulation, clots of hair and dust, and rat pellets.

Gotcha.

The image of the dying rat in the living room came back once again. Its death had left me feeling dulled inside, and now the sensation returned. Something older than pain, older than hurt. Something like those parents might be feeling even now about the son who’d been killed on the highway. A dullness that wouldn’t go away. And yet, here I was, armed with traps and poison. I had been given the job of killing rats.

Father would be checking on them. I wouldn’t have to see the results. Somehow, that made things easier. I removed the plastic bag containing the poisoned cheese from my backpack and opened it. A strong, bitter smell wafted up, burning the back of my throat – Father had said
don’t touch, just spill a few out.
I tilted the bag on its side and dumped out on to the crawlspace floor a clump of powdery cubes. With the corner of one of the traps I broke up the pile and flicked pieces into the darkness. Then I shut the door.

For the main floor, I was only supposed to set traps in the closet and the storage room. Once I had done this I ascended the stairs to the second floor. There were five rooms, each with a closet; and a hallway with a linen closet. I was to ignore the twins’ room.

For some reason, I felt certain that there weren’t any rats above the main floor. Though I hadn’t yet explored the attic, I envisioned a single, large empty room with an arched roof. A room with no hiding places.

At the top of the stairs, I gazed down the hallway. Ahead and to my right was the door to the guest room. We’d never lived in a place that had a guest room before now. The thought of having guests seemed strange.
Who? Nobody ever comes to visit us. Mother’s relatives live in the old country. Father’s relatives never even write him – they might be all dead, the way nobody ever talked about them.
I’d had sleep-overs when we’d lived in the city, and Debbie had done the same, but at those times everyone slept in the same room. Maybe guest rooms were just rooms that happened to be empty.

I walked into the guest room. No furniture, of course. We barely had enough to fill our own rooms. It seemed vast, too large to be a part of the house. Opposite me were two windows. I went over and looked out of the one on my right. Below ran the garage’s sloped roof, its green tiles battered and the gutter full of rotting leaves. Beyond the garage the driveway wound its way into and through the line of firs that marked the yard’s boundary. Through the branches was another yard, and another house. I had no idea who lived there.

A third window, to my left, looked out on the front yard. In the city I’d never imagined that someone could own so much land – except for farmers, but that was different. I counted seven trees, all thick-limbed and tall and widely spaced. This wasn’t a farm, just a house, on a lot that in the city would hold three or four houses.

Recalling my duty, I went to the closet and opened it. Dusty and empty. I set a single trap.

Past the guest room the hallway turned left and ran the length of the house. I walked past the first door, which was my own room – I planned to leave it for last since the attic’s trapdoor was in there. The next door led into Debbie’s room.

The Forbidden Zone, she called it.
Sorry, ma’am, but it’s my job.
Blacklight posters covered the walls. I recognised most of them: Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa sitting on a toilet; but others were more obscure. There were scenes of bridges over deep chasms, towering, jagged mountains beneath alien skies filled with moons, winged horses with single spiralling horns on their heads, and still other abstract designs that hurt my eyes.

There were no clothes on the floor. A record player sat on a stand, a large speaker to either side. Records waited in a neat stack beneath the stand. The Guess Who, Grand Funk, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Melanie. I recalled the only record I owned, a present from last Christmas, the Partridge Family, and I realised that I had never even played it yet. Debbie said it would destroy her record player. Unlikely.
Damage it, maybe, but not destroy it.
Music didn’t mean that much to me, though some songs from the radio had a way of haunting me, like ‘A Dog Named Boo’. All Debbie ever did these days was listen to records. Every night I’d lie in bed in the dark and listen to the bass notes thrum through the walls, deep like the beat of an exhausted heart. Those sounds carried me into sleep, eventually, but sometimes I’d stay awake, trying to guess which record she’d put on next. I usually guessed right, and that led me to certain theories about Debbie, especially the way the music changed from angry to depressing as the hours dragged on.

I opened the closet door. Her clothes smelled of perfume, a pungent, urgent smell. On the floor inside lay a half-dozen pairs of shoes – sneakers, high-heels, sandals. I pushed them aside and set a trap, wondering if Debbie took her shoes out of the closet before putting them on, or did she simply step into them?

Even with the authority of my mission, I was glad to leave Debbie’s room. Something about being in there made me feel guilty, as if everything in there was fragile, and that even the touch of my glance might shatter the world she’d made. I could already picture her outrage at discovering my intrusion.

The master bedroom was the next stop. It was hard to imagine there being rats in my parents’ room. The shelves in the double closet were precisely ordered, the clothes neatly folded. My father’s clothes occupied the left side of the closet, my mother’s the right. A fainter perfume mixed with cigarette smoke wafted from my mother’s dresses, more subtle than Debbie’s. From Father’s side the cologne was mixed with garage oil.

I set a trap down behind Father’s dress shoes, which he never wore anyway, then closed the door and swung around. At first the face staring at me was startling, but it was just the mirror. The face was my own, but as I studied it, I saw again a strangeness to it, echoing the reflection I had seen in the window of Gribbs’s shack. An expression all too serious stared back at me, the wide mouth drawn into an almost bloodless line, and on the forehead a growing frown. Abruptly I looked away, down at the double bed. There were no creases on the bedspread, just smooth perfection.

I left the room, quietly closing the door behind me.

Mother always called my room ‘frightening’. Her refusal to clean it was always voiced as a threat, though for me it was a personal victory – a view I kept to myself. I stood at the threshold, studying the mess. Piles of dirty clothes hid the floor, toppled stacks of comic books surrounded the unmade bed. Smudges and streaks relieved the plain white walls. On my desk waited a model ’55 Chevy, not yet finished, and on a shelf above it sat a ’32 Deuce, a 326 Hemi Model-A, and a Model-T roadster.

This room could easily hide rats. Warrens beneath the piled clothes, nests among the dustballs under the bed, baby rats in the back seat of the Chevy. I looked up at the B-27 bomber hanging from the ceiling, my eyes narrowing on the cockpit, but the plastic glass remained impenetrable.

The closet door was jammed open by socks snagged under the frame. Inside, stacked cardboard boxes containing old models leaned against one wall. Dozens of wire hangers hung bare and vaguely accusatory. I sniffed. The air was musty, reminding me of the crawlspace. I scanned the few areas of visible hardwood floor, hunting for rat pellets. None. This wasn’t very reassuring. Here on the second floor – I was suddenly convinced that there were rats here – they’d be smarter than their comrades in the basement. They’d take their pellets with them.

I went to work. Three traps under the bed, one beside the radiator, another beneath my desk. Three more in the closet. Within the biggest mound of clothing I fashioned a cave in the centre and a corridor leading out. I set a trap and pushed it down the corridor until it was inside the cave.

Satisfied, I turned my attention to the trapdoor in the ceiling. No handle was visible, so I assumed it would push upward. From my equipment bag I took out a flashlight. I pulled the desk chair over and stepped on to it. I paused. Through the window I could see the river between the trees. There was less ice now – the red-brown water was flat, unmarred for long stretches. Watching the inexorable current, I felt a moment of dizziness and put a hand against the wall for balance. Over the river two crows wheeled in low circles above something riding the current. Whatever it was bobbed once, then slipped beneath the surface again, leaving spinning eddies in its wake. The crows stayed above it.

I swung my attention to the trapdoor above me. It was beyond reach, so I stepped up on to the window sill. Father had said to use the stepladder if I had to, but from the sill I found I could push the door upward. Woodchips and sawdust drifted down. I pushed harder and it cleared the attic floor and slid to one side.

I hefted my knapsack and tossed it up through the opening. It disappeared into the darkness and I heard a thump. Then I gripped the edges and swung away from the sill, hanging a moment before pulling myself up.

The attic’s floor wasn’t flat, as I’d thought it would be. A grid-work of boards lay set on end about thirty inches apart, the spaces filled with woodchips. I flicked on the flashlight and directed the beam forward.

A narrow corridor ran no more than ten feet ahead, opening out into a larger space. An attic with tunnels. Tense with sudden excitement, I crawled forward.

II

In 1962, while towing an Iberian oil tanker into Halifax Harbour, a Samson cable snapped ten feet under water. The first indication Walter Gribbs, able-bodied seaman on the tug
Lifeliner,
had had of danger as he stood near the winch amidships was the growing shriek behind him. He awoke two days later in the Halifax General Hospital, suffering from a severe concussion and a partial loss of hearing in his left ear.

Suddenly freed from the tension created by the tanker’s weight, the cable had recoiled back to the tug. It swept three men from the deck in less than a second. Walter was the only one still breathing. One had gone down into the water, wrapped in the cable, where he drowned before anyone could get to him. The other man had been decapitated.

Nineteen sixty-two was also Walter’s last year at sea. After the accident he found it difficult to keep his balance on a sidewalk, much less a pitching deck. For him it was over. He soon realised that living close to the sea was like sleeping night after night beside a woman he couldn’t touch. He boarded a train bound for the centre of the continent, and eventually found a job at the Yacht Club. Once a seaman, now a grounds keeper.

Gribbs had always been a solitary man. Even among a crew months out at sea he remained a loner – it was never an obvious thing; it never led to discomfort or resentment. He was there when needed, ready with a smile, and somehow able to mend arguments as a healer mends broken bones, and though he didn’t say much, when he spoke he was listened to.

And yet there had always been a distance between him and everyone else. Not a wall – nothing so deliberately constructed – but a span of nothingness that no one could cross, and that distance had grown steadily for as long as he could remember. It had never left him feeling lonely, for inside his head there lived a rhythm, a slow music that gave every thought, every memory, the cadence of a poem, or a song. He’d heard stories told for most of his life, stories recounting the tragic lives of women in ports, stories told by old men in ship’s cabins and staterooms, who’d seen their share and more. He’d heard poems that lodged in his memory and stayed with him, and he’d seen things with his own eyes that were of themselves poetry.