When Is a Man Page 4

“Actually, I wouldn’t find it funny,” she said. “It’d be a colossal fuck-up.”

  He laughed softly, trying to reassure her. “I’ll be all recharged, get a whole new perspective on my work. Much better than me serving up some bullshit about Guy Debord and dérive.”

  Later, too late, he would realize he’d made the classic male mistake of thinking that if she didn’t want anything serious with him, then she didn’t want anything serious at all, with anyone. There was a line in a movie he’d liked—something about how you end up hating the person for the same reasons you fell in love with them.

  In May he withdrew his conference paper at the last moment, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Stockholm.

  5

  In the morning, Tanner checked the ratio of clove oil to water in the cooler, Paul’s tagging technique, and all the other details that would make the job run more smoothly. They processed the handful of trout in the traps, then entered the data and made their eggs and oatmeal to eat on the edge of a small but sheer bank at the confluence of Basket Creek and the Immitoin. The river was three times as wide as the creek and ran different shades of blue and silver midstream, steel grey and pale green along the forested banks on the other side. Paul watched a slate-coloured dipper bob from stone to stone and then plunge underwater.

  “So, you feel comfortable with everything?” Tanner asked.

  The thrill of finally being abandoned and left alone jolted through him. “Sure,” he said. Anyone, really, could do this job as long as they didn’t mind being alone or working outside at night. If a person actually understood fish, or even liked them, that would be better, but anyway, here he was.

  Tanner crouched, swished his plate in the creek, and then dipped his mug into the river. He rose and drank deeply, eyes closed. “Okay.” He grinned and tugged at an imaginary cap on his head. “Time to put on the film critic hat. Try not to screw anything up.” They walked back to camp, where Tanner packed up and drove away.

  For a while, Paul wandered in circles around the camp, unsure what to do with himself. Before he could properly register his being alone, vehicles rumbled up the road. Their approach was slow, and the violent shake of equipment and the laboured mutter of truck engines in low gear echoed through the valley. He could see the road through the trees, a hundred metres or so uphill from where he stood beside the camper. Two large crew cabs hauled long white trailers, followed by some smaller trucks, their cargo boxes loaded with chainsaws, shovels, jerry cans, and other gear. Clouds of dust drifted through the trees, and by the time the air settled, the last rattles and engine noise had faded.

  First task: clean the fence. He grabbed his waders from where they hung drying beneath the camper’s awning and went to the measuring station. Except for the weirs near the shore, the fence ran across fast-moving, choppy water and sizable rocks where the female trout wouldn’t lay their eggs, so there would be no redds to disturb as he followed the length of the fence.

  He picked at the twigs and bark bits piled against the mesh, grabbed handfuls of alder and aspen leaves and tossed them downstream. Then he scrubbed the mesh with a wire brush until the matted leaves had flaked away. There were branches stripped of bark and nibbled to sharp points by what he guessed were beavers. Tanner had warned him that after several days of bad weather there’d be so much debris piled up that either the fence would be blown out or the creek would flood. A chainsaw was stored in one of the camper’s bins in case a tree swept against the fence. He’d never used a chainsaw and thought that standing knee-deep in storm-tossed currents wouldn’t be the best place to learn.

  Midstream, a small fish, a rainbow or cutthroat, had wedged its sloped head in the fencing wire and snapped its spine, the body rubbery and clammy. A sad waste, but learning to gut and cook a fish was beyond him today—another foreign, unfamiliar task. He threw the trout downstream, and it floated on the surface for a moment, pale underside flashing in the sun, then disappeared.

  Ten o’clock. Waders off, and his work done until nightfall. Now what the hell was he supposed to do? He returned to where they’d eaten breakfast at the confluence and crouched on the shore to absently scoop warm pebbles and sift them through his fingers.

  On the other side of the Immitoin, a broad, flat forest stretched along the shore before it ran into the hills and mountains beyond, a range of conical and boxy peaks with snow-covered ridges and cols, suspended in hazy air. The woods across the river were dense and marshy, a place where a hundred elk could disappear.

  His thoughts were erratic, flighty. Whatever he wanted from his mind, it was impossible to access. He became drawn in—downward, it felt like—by the sound of the river, the rhythms and counter-rhythms, the layers of melodic and discordant voices created by unexplainable surges and shifts among different currents. The noise pulled his mind along, stripped it of language, and left him with a tattered patchwork of disturbing and fleeting images. White, claustrophobic images: hospital rooms and hospital sheets, a toilet bowl with a trace of blood spiralling in the water, snow falling in late May outside a bar in Skinnskatteberg.

  The report of stones hitting stones made him jump, and he spun to face upstream. A woman stood on a dirt bank undercut by the Immitoin, her hands shoved in the back pockets of her cargo shorts, a ball cap shielding her face. She was nudging small rocks with the toe of her boot, pushing them off the bank and into the water. Or no—she stepped back to reveal a boy, about four or five years old, trying to throw stones that slipped from his small hands. Paul waved once, a little reluctantly, and walked over to them, tripping here and there over exposed willow roots.

  “Usually a different guy up here,” she said. “A skinny man.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m the substitute, I guess.”

  There was something solid about her. Not that she was stocky, exactly, but she wouldn’t be easily knocked off her feet. Tanned, freckled—an outdoorsy woman. About his age, faint crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes, laughter lines around her mouth, a strand or two of grey in the dark hair that stuck out from under her cap.

  The boy wanted to show him a stick, and squinted up at him, sandy-coloured hair draped over his forehead and eyebrows, a slight scowl.

  “This is Shane,” the woman said. “I’m Gina. Hubert.”

  “Were you cooking hot dogs?” the boy asked. He held up the stick, a thin willow branch whittled to a point at one end, and whipped it back and forth like a fencing foil. “It’s nice and bendy.”

  “Paul,” he said. “So, are you . . . what brings you . . . ?”

  “On our way up to camp,” she said. “I’m a camp cook for Pinewoods Forestry.”

  “Tree planters,” said Shane. His r’s came out as w’s.

  “Spacing this time,” Gina corrected him. “Chainsaw work.” The child had sauntered off and was wildly swinging the willow branch at a tree stump.

  “I don’t even know what spacing—okay,” Paul said. “So you’re part of that convoy from earlier. Thought they were loggers.”

  “No, the mill’s shutting down again. Trucks are still hauling, but most loggers are on their boats floating around the reservoir and drinking beer.” Her eyebrows narrowed a moment, annoyed at something, then she shook her head and laughed. “I should be ahead of everyone, but it’s a pretty bumpy road for a kid. Shane needed a break.”

  “I had to go poop,” Shane said. Pewp.

  “How far up is the camp?” he asked, looking upriver. Worried they would be around the corner, within shouting distance.

  “Another fifteen K.” She turned and led them back toward the site. “Where are you from?”

  “The coast.” He waved his hand in a vague direction.

  “We saw police cars,” Shane interrupted. He was tapping his finger against the camper’s propane tank.

  “We did, didn’t we?” Gina said. She looked at Paul. “Know what happened at that cabin down the road?”

  “No.” He suddenly felt drained.

  “Drive down and check i
t out. You look like someone desperate to keep himself amused.” She laughed. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I meant bush work’s kind of tough if you’re not used to it. I’d invite you up to camp to share dinners with the crew, but the foreman wouldn’t like it. Lunch, though. No one’s around for lunch.”

  Maybe he’d slept even worse than he thought—he was growing resentful of their presence, the energy he had to expend. What was it, exactly, that kept normal conversation going? What was the impetus, the drive that allowed strangers to lob words back and forth? But her offer was remarkably generous when they’d only just met. “Hey. I should show you two the fish fence. It’s kinda neat,” he said to the boy.

  “It’s a fence,” Shane said.

  “We should go. Got a kitchen to put together,” she said. She opened the truck and helped Shane into his seat. “We’re at the end of Branch 65. Swing by for a coffee some afternoon. Keep yourself from getting bushed.”

  “Bushed?”

  “Thinking yourself to death,” she said, then started the engine. Paul gave her a weak, uncertain smile and wave, baffled by her friendliness.

  After, he put together a simple lunch and thought again about the sheer effort of conversation. Was this his future with women from now on, a series of emasculated exchanges? Or was he just being paranoid? After all, whatever impression he’d made on her, she’d gone and made a neighbour out of him anyway.

  When he closed his eyes after his first night alone at the measuring station, the scene played out on the back of his eyelids as though he were coming down from some sketchy drug. The slime on the bodies of each fish, their haloed spots, their ivory mess of teeth. Out of the weir, into the cooler, onto the scale, back into the dark. He could both hear and feel the dull piercing of the Floy gun’s metal tip through fatty flesh, and the unfamiliar weight against his forehead where his headlamp had rested. Everything smelled of clove oil, and the lantern’s ambient hiss, long extinguished, carried on in his ears.

  He’d spent a half-hour before bed entering measurements and tag numbers into the laptop while he drank his herbal tea. Then he’d gone outside to shut off the generator, and the sound of the river and creek had immediately filled in the lost noise. If the generator sounded like civilization, like humans, then the water was the babble of fish heading for the fence. The alien, unblinking trout.

  So much could go wrong. He could kill a fish with too much anesthetic, or maim it with the tagging gun. If he released it into the main current too soon, the trout would drift helplessly and smash into boulders and log jams. Fish were hard to relate to as living things, so cold and robotic and unceasingly one-minded, so given over to their constant movement. And yet, it was the fact of their aliveness, the specks of dark blood that sometimes appeared when he punctured them with the Floy gun, their mouths and gills desperately working at the air, that kept Paul awake.

  He rolled over and the camper swayed, the plastic and vinyl components creaking. He hadn’t taken any time to sort through the cupboards, take a few of his less vital belongings out of their bags, or do anything that would make himself feel at home. He’d eaten his dinner outside, tin plate on his lap. The evening air had been warm and sweet with the scent of tree pitch, and sparrows, thrushes, and juncos came down from the trees and pecked and scratched at the edge of the clearing. If only everything he saw or did wasn’t shot through with the anxiety of handling fish, he might have been content, almost blissful, a man on a camping trip.

  He’d imagined his days here would be exactly like a vacation, free of worrying about his future or his past. He’d forgotten, though, that a person goes into vacations backward, feet first, the head still back at home or at the office, still stuck in traffic. His troubles followed him to the outhouse or along the path to the river, finding fertile soil in the solitude he’d been so eagerly anticipating.

  The Vastmanland excavation took place on a hobby farm several kilometres outside the city of Skinnskatteberg. The field school concentrated its search on the far corner of the property, where rolling fields softened into a schwingmoor, a quaking bog. The excavation faced an enormous obstacle: the owners of the farm had forbidden any dredging or draining of the bog. A crude system of boardwalks had been built, a grid established, and the students took turns using a long, thin metal pole to probe the deceptively thin mats of vegetation, searching by feel the black murk beneath.

  The most common finds in that part of Sweden were burial sites, artifacts and weaponry from the Iron Age, and petroglyphs from the Bronze Age. The property was filled with signs of past civilizations, once you knew to look for them. Foundation stones lay randomly around the fields, the crumbling, hand-chiselled granite squares hidden by tangled grasses and sedges still brown from winter. Each time Paul pushed aside the weeds to examine a stone’s markings, midges swarmed his face. The air was filled with the songs of insects, thrushes, and cuckoos.

  One of the organizers casually mentioned bog mummies, dismissing the possibility of finding one here. Too far north, not the right tribal history. Paul detected a wistful tone and suspected that bog mummies were precisely what the professor was hoping for. From his lesson plans and slides, he remembered Dan Boothwell, who wrote about Lindow Man, and P.V. Glob, who had investigated Tollund Man and Grauballe Man, the two men forever connected to some of the most famous artifacts in anthropology. He felt for the professor, for the sheer romantic folly of his secret ambition, the audacity of betting on near-impossible odds.

  The landscape, though, invited belief. In spots along the narrow boardwalk, the blanket of reeds and heathers on either side of them rippled, a quagmire sloshing beneath. He could have punched through the illusion of solid ground. The dead could be down there, centuries old and perfectly preserved in their tannic state, resting among the weaponry and tools the field school hoped to find. The mummies might have been thieves, farmers, or priests, sacrificed to pagan gods—ritually fed and then strangled, throats slit. Was the ritual meant to sustain the bog itself, the corpse a homunculus that kept the wheels of the land turning, the plants growing, the birds and animals returning? And if you pulled out the body, took it away, did that mean everything would wilt and die?

  He’d travelled very little in his life, apart from some family trips to Mexico and the States, and he enjoyed the energy of the field school—the near-manic camaraderie, the swiftness with which friendships were made. Nearly everyone admitted that, like him, they’d left behind some sort of responsibility at home. The girls were excitable and flirtatious, and there was talk about spending Friday night at the campus pub in Skinnskatteberg.

  Paul, along with some other male students, shunned the boardwalks as much as possible and moved through the grid by hopping from one hummock of earth to another. The dangerous gaps between solid ground enlivened him. Once, the soil gave way beneath his feet when he landed, and he pitched himself forward, the reeds and grasses cushioning his roll. The solidity of each mound was an illusion: his impact shook a stunted birch six metres away. When the whole field school descended on the bog each morning, the land shook like the hide of a dreaming animal.

  On the Thursday afternoon, Paul struck something four metres down, near the end of the probe’s reach. It was a large object, at least a metre and a half long, solid but slightly spongy. The field school spent the rest of that day securing the object with ropes and slings, and then setting up a winch and platform that would allow them to pull it onto the boardwalk. It proved to be a tremendously difficult and exhausting operation. At twilight, the object finally surfaced with a great sucking sound, wrenched through the immense weight of mud and tannin-coloured water. The students shovelled away mud and grasses to ease the strain on the winch. The rope was black with peat rot, silt, and muck. The thing came to rest with a sodden thump.

  “Wood, I think.” Two of the professors cautiously scraped the object clean with trowels and wire brushes. “A log of some kind.” A few of the students groaned with a giddy sort of disappointment.

 
One professor said, “Both ends are even, smooth. This wood may have been cut for posts and beams. Carved, perhaps, with an adze. So it might be an artifact. Of a sort.” The other professor, the hopeful one Paul had spoken to earlier, shrugged and wiped his hands on his jeans, his weathered face glum beneath his thick eyebrows.

  Some of the students were billeted in farms near the excavation site, but Paul stayed at a hotel in Skinnskatteberg, in a room that had a small sauna off the bathroom. That night, he scrubbed himself with a coarse loofah in the shower, then sat in the sauna, exhausted from the hours of shovel work. He held his right arm out and turned it back and forth in hypnotic half-circles, noted the veins that protruded, the shadowed definition of biceps and triceps. His legs, pressed against the cedar bench, revealed the curved, impressive knolls of his quadriceps, his thighs yielding only the slightest undercarriage of fat. The orange, fire-like glow forgave every blemish and mole, the wiry copses and ridgelines of body hair. His member was thick and partially engorged from the pleasurable heat, his scrotum relaxed and heavy between his legs. In that moment, Paul thought he understood something about an athlete—how his body, unlike his mind, didn’t differentiate between victory and defeat. His body felt the deep satisfaction of physical labour, it wanted to celebrate and find release. It was amazing, all things considered, how good he felt right now. Physically, at least.

  He was finished with the dig. The moment that waterlogged piece of wood hit the boardwalk, he’d lost all interest. All that remained was the pointless folly of coming here, the comedy of self-deception. The trip had cost him dearly, and not just the money he’d thrown away. There would be repercussions at home, even beyond the ones he could easily guess.

  Something surged through him, a deep, wild impatience—he needed to seek a crowd, noise, women. There’d be lots of students from the local college as well as the field school and instructors at the pub. Tomorrow it would be time to go home and take his punishment. But right now, he would give himself a night out, while he was still an ocean away from the consequences.