THE SUV bucked hard on the pineforest dirt road. The driver, Paul, had the vehicle leased and paid for by the pharmaceutical company he worked for. In the back were stacked bags of fertilizer and three massive ceramic plantpots. Three cases of beer with the bottles rattling. There was a large cardboard box on the backseat, a lid over top to hide a large plastic pot crowded with young weed plants. Tupperware containers filled with some kind of mulch. Paul’s friend Bill had come along to help out. He was just back from the west coast and jobless since.
“It reeks worse than the shitcorner of a pigpen in here,” Bill said.
“I know. I’m gonna have to air it out for hours.”
Sunlight stabbed through the row-laid firs and strobed the backs of their heads and necks. Bill had his window down and humid morning air blew in. He had a head shaved to stubble, huge forearms of muscle and cord, a ragged beard. Paul was smaller by shades, shorter, softer around the middle. Combed hair, his squared jaw shaved clean. The speakers pumped Wu-Tang and couldn’t handle the volume. Paul tried to tinker with the EQ but he couldn’t get anything better out of it.
“That bass sounds like my mom’s ass,” he said.
Bill broke out laughing.
“Jesus,” he said.
The truck took a final hop over the rough ground and then passed onto a length of flattened gravel road. Up ahead was a break in the treecover and a clearing with cars parked sparsely. Beyond lay downsloping marina grounds, baywater and lengths of wooden dockpiers, small boats in their slips.
Paul parked the truck on the far side of the lot and both men got out. They stretched their legs and Bill studied the marina office, no more than a long, wood-slatted cabin with a window-counter cut in one end for rentals. Nobody there to work it. The main office door was wide open. Out front sat the dockmaster, slumped down in a deckchair with a bottle of beer in his hand and a Tilley hat covering the most of his face. A weathered sign stood above the place, fixed there atop two-by-fours pinned to the roofing. Dog Bay Marina.
“Old Bert’s into the beer already,” Paul said.
“Old Bert looks like a fuckin’ champion,” Bill said. “But how curious is the guy?”
“Not enough to get up outta that chair, for the most part. Don’t worry. He’s good shit.”
Paul went into the truck and hefted a case of beer out from the backseat. He carried the case up to the office. Called out the boatmaster’s name on the way. The old man rose and narrowed eyes on him. Looked out to Bill, back to Paul. Wideset man with a beergut pulling at his faded golf-shirt, salt and pepper stubble over his neck and jaw. He started to grin. Paul set the beercase down and shook Bert’s hand and talked some. He waved for Bill to come up. When Bill got there he shook the old man’s calloused hand.
“I gotta talk to Bert a minute,” Paul said. “You wanna back the truck up to the end of that quay. That’s where we’ll load up.”
Bill nodded and Paul handed him the keys. Then he picked up the case of beer and followed Old Bert inside the building.
• • •
Bill unloaded the bags of fertilizer first, right at the brink of the quay. Then the cases of beer and a small red cooler of food. He left the pots for last. They were all three of them stacked and weighed a good deal. He sat on the lip of the SUV’s trunk and waited for Paul to unhitch his craft from the slip. Soon enough the fifteen-foot aluminum fishing boat came whipping around the far end of the dock, 9.9 horsepower outboard chugging hard in the water. Paul faced forward, grinning wide with one arm angled back to where he held the tiller. The boat slowed and Paul turned the throttle to reverse for a few seconds. Nearly sideways as it came gliding in toward the low pier. He stood in the deck took and hold of a rope-cleat fixed to the end of the quay, steadied the little boat. He started pulling the bags down into the hull of the craft, laying them out evenly so she wouldn’t keel or take water in the front. He left a space in the middle of the boat, between the two wooden benches fore and aft, and there he set the pots, taking them down one by one from Bill and restacking them in the gap.
“Man, I didn’t think that was gonna work,” Bill said.
“This boat is a sturdy little fucker,” Paul said. “Plus I’m probably the best boater in all of North America.”
“That is retarded.”
Paul stood and looked up over the concrete, eyeballed the marina grounds.
“Throw me the other stuff now,” he said.
Bill went into the truck again and took up the cardboard box. He hustled over to Paul and handed it over. Paul set the box down carefully in the boat.
“Ah. My little beautiful babies,” he said.
“Good God,” Bill said.
Paul laughed all the while as he took the beer cases and the little red cooler into the boat.
“I’ll meet you over at the end of the dock,” he said, and then he pulled the ripcord and the engine growled. He motored off. Bill shook his head and shut the truck’s rear hatch. He got in and drove to the far end of the lot. Parked there under the meager shade of an old beech tree.
• • •
The boat ploughed low through the blue-green baywater. The surface ran not three inches below the gunwales. Both men sat on the bench nearest the engine so that the bow would not dip under the small, oncoming waves. Their shirts and shorts were damp from the lapping water, drying fast under the hot late-morning rays. The men were drinking beer after beer and the bottles were strewn about the deck, recapped and glinting in the sun. They closed distance on a series of interconnected shieldrock islands, bowed pines jutting out crazily from land’s edge. A clearing where a com-tower stood, generations of satellite dishes and antennae fixed to the tower’s top half. Paul raised the engine and they drifted over shallows where they could see wide sandbars below, the scattering of smallmouth bass and outsized crayfish. The boat entered a narrow freshwater channel and Paul dropped the engine again. They followed a winding route with thirty-foot rockfaces on either side, great jagged boulders in the channel that Paul knew by heart and parried easily. He smiled little until they were clear. Then they were.
By noon the two men were unloading the boat at a cottage that belonged to Paul’s father. A bungalow made of fine logtimber, insulated and outfitted with all the amenities, furnished throughout. They had tied off to a dock that couldn’t have been more than two years old, the varnish barely flawed or seawashed.
“This ain’t really a cottage,” Bill said. “Not in the way that a cottage is a cottage.”
“He lives up here in the summers. Used to anyway. He’s gettin’ old and his hip is fucked.”
“He know you come up here?”
Paul made a fart sound over his lips.
“Fuck no. He’d shit a brick. I stole the keys one day and made a copy.”
“When?”
“Ten years ago maybe. Longer. Back in high school.”
“Wouldn’t dirty old Bert say somethin’ to your pops?”
“Fuck no,” Paul said, chuckling. “Old Bert hates his guts.”
“You think anyone’ll come by.”
Paul stood there at the end of the dock and scoped the grounds, the waters, the islands without. He pointed.
“You see that break in the treeline way up there. On that far island.”
Bill nodded.
“That’s the nearest neighbour. That’s the only neighbour. And they are about a hundred and twelve and could be dust and bones on a couch in there for all I know.”
They piled most of the fertilizer in a toolshed made of the same fine lumber, stained and roof-shingled. Paul showed Bill around back of the cottage where a great swatch of blue tarpaulin covered a six-foot set of racking. He unfastened the bungie-cords that held it in place, and there they found two upended canoes, one wood and one aluminum. The two men lifted the canoes one at a time and carried each to the water atop their heads. They took the topsoil bags and lined the inside of the wooden canoe with the most of them. The Tupperware containers were set on top. Two bags of fertilizer went aboard the other vessel, along with the ceramic pots. When they had the canoes loaded the men took sandwiches from the red cooler and wolfed them down as they stood dockside.
“You gonna be able to maneuver that thing without going in?” Bill said.
He nodded at the aluminum canoe with the pots in it.
“I hope so. I don’t want to have to go after that shit if she tips.”
“Well. You are the best boatman on the continent, from what I hear. So, if you do go under, I’m not gonna lie to you, I’ll probably laugh.”
• • •
Long they paddled through treed-in shallows, passes that wound between knobbled cuts of rock, slowly over a loose marsh with cattails drumming the sides of their canoes. Frogs cannonballed from the banks, skittered on. One toadling leapt into Paul’s boat and he picked it up and tossed it backwards overhead without looking. Bill all but dropped the paddle when he saw the thing flying and he got the hem of his shirt and pulled the cotton out like a breakfall. The frog landed in the dip and rolled up to his chest. Bill palmed it and put his hand in the water. Let go. The frog kicked off and dove. Bill got control of the paddle again and ran his wet otherhand over the back of his neck.
Soon they came out into a round pool with a beachhead to the west. Paul turned for shore and went hard. Bill followed. The canoes barely broke sand and the men had to get out and wade up through the mud before they could pull ashore. Out came the pots and the topsoil bags and a half-case of beer. Bill was already burnt about the forehead and neck and Paul had probably taken too much sun himself. They each took a beer and sat on the beach. Swatted sandfleas from their bare feet.
“Don’t worry,” Paul said. “We just gotta go up this hill about fifty feet. An’ its all shade up there.”
He didn’t lie. They went up a narrow footpath that had been claimed back by the brush and bracken. Over a short rise and down onto a flat of clay and crabgrass. And there in the clearing a field of three and four-foot plants built in dozens of ceramic pots, ringed three or fours rows deep around the trunks of the bordering trees. Canopy rustling softly on the breeze, sunlight leaking through the trimmed and shear-clipped branches to warm the buds and leaves below.
• • •
They worked hard through the afternoon. Dug out pots of dead plants and filled them with topsoil along with the new ones. Paul blended fertilizer in with the soil, scoop by scoop. Mixed a foul smelling batch of mulch and manure into the top-layer, plantfood he had made at home and kept in Tupperware tubs. Bill carried water by the bucketful from a nearby purespring. Poured it into the pots evenly, save for the new planters. Paul worked meticulously with his plants, trimming leaves and measuring flowerlength, marking a small notebook with figures and observations. They did not quit until the sun had sunk behind the treetops, threw long shadows in the clearing. There were only five bottles of beer left so they split one and stowed the rest for the trip back.
The two men sat there on the hard clay ground and passed the beer bottle. Hands dark with muck and grit, black below their fingernails. Paul flexed his right knee joint and pawed at it. He cringed. Let it out flat on the ground.
“That knee still bothers you,” Bill said.
“Yep.”
“They ever get that fork out of it?”
“Who knows? The way Karen stuck it in there.”
“Good Lord.”
Four tiny divots above his kneecap, a little off-colour. Paul rubbed at the skin of his knee once more. As if he might wipe them clear. He stopped and shook his head. Bill handed him the beer.
“She was a unique snowflake, that one,” Bill said.
Paul shook his head again. He started to say something and then stopped. Deep distant sputter of airplane propellers. Wavering louder and louder until the little plane passed over as but a spec in the pale blue.
“How often they do flyovers like that?” Bill said.
“More’n you’d think.”
Bill turned around and studied the planters and their treecover.
“Pretty fuckin’ crafty,” he said.
• • •
At dusk they were gliding up to the cottage dock. Filthy and sunburnt, sweatsoaked shirtfabric dried in spots and cooling on the breeze. Crickets and toads sung at the shore. The men grounded and covered the canoes while bats flew from their anchors and wheeled crazily in the half-light. Paul went inside to turn some of the cottage lights on and he came back with the other case of beer, chilled overnight in the fridge. He had changed into a pair of boardshorts and he held out a set for Bill.
“You want to wash up we gotta just use the lake. The old man sees one thing outta place and he’ll know I was up here.”
“I thought he don’t come up.”
“I ain’t takin’ any chances. Not least ’til I harvest that crop.”
“Fair enough.”
“Lucky he keeps the power on.”
“Where do I change into these?”
“That bunkroom of the front of the house. That’s where we gotta sleep. That was mine and my sister’s. Nobody else goes in there.”
Bill went inside and changed. When he came out Paul was in the water, forearms flat to the dock where his beer rested. He drank from the bottle. Recapped it. The air was thick with mosquitoes and they alit on Bill by the dozen.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said. “I forgot about these fuckin’ things.”
“You tellin’ me you didn’t have no mosquitoes out west?”
“Not so much where I was. There ain’t no water out there.”
Bill swatted one last round of pests and then he ran to the end of the dock and launched himself spinning into the lake. Cool, calm waters. Blackness under his kicking feet. He broke the surface and hauled air.
• • •
Paul washed himself with shampoo while Bill swam circles out in the lake, treaded water and scanned the ragged silhouette of rockbound jackpines. He came back to the dock for the shampoo and took a handful. Tried to get as much as he could in his hair and beard and somehow clean the rest of his parts before the soap was washed from his hands. He sunk and lost the stuff in his hair. Gave it another go-round. Paul had lit a series of citronella torches on the patch of grass near the dock. The torches circled two muskoka chairs and the red cooler that held beer in cold tankwater. Each man clung to a corner of the dockend and lined up empties. Sweet scented smoke trailed skyward from the torchflames.
By true night they were very drunk and sat there in the wooden chairs cussing and hollering at the dark. There might have been nobody left on the mainland but they would never have known it. They got to the telling of old stories, accounts of friends they still had and others long gone. Girls they had known.
“You ever talk to Karen?” Bill said.
“Not in years.”
“Huh.”
Paul took a long drink. Spilled some beer down the sides of his jaw. He tossed the bottle sidelong into the grass and took up another.
“It’s too bad what happened to her,” Bill said.
Paul coughed while he was taking a pull. Wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand.
“I just wish she hadn’t fucked everybody,” he said.
Bill sat up in the chair. Stared over.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “Everyone got out alive.”
“We weren’t ever the same after I found out. Then I kept finding out.”
“At least it wasn’t when you were together.”
“We were broken up for all of three weeks.”
“You were bouncin’ around from broad to broad like your dick had an expiry date. It’s not exactly like that little experiment of hers worked out in the end anyway.”
“Yeah, well. You two must have talked about it a lot. I forgot how close you all were.”
Bill didn’t say anything. The world got very quiet.
“It would just be nice if you hadn’t decided to fuck her. Or if you could’ve owned up to it inside of a year.”
“I didn’t think it was any of your fuckin’ business at the time.”
“How’s that?”
“I was in love with her. That’s how.”
Paul chugged his beer down and eyeballed Bill sideways.
“Don’t do it,” Bill said. “I’m tellin’ ya.”
The bottle flew over Bill’s head and Paul came behind it. Bill stood up in time to get hold of him but he was coming hard and they both went over the chair backwards. Spilled out onto the grass, pulling at limbs and fighting for position. No punches were thrown but each man weighed better than two hundred pounds apiece and they flung each other around the site, hands around each others necks and trunks and their arms and legs flying wild. They went over the red cooler and through the line of bug lanterns. Two of the wooden stalks snapped off at the middle and the torch-heads fell onto Bill’s back and rolled clear. His shirtcloth set aflame, one crooked line of fire from shoulderblade to tailbone. Bill stood up and tried to bat his hands at the shirt. Paul was on his feet and he started to pick up the cooler but Bill had already made a run for the lake. He was partway through a feral stream of curses when he went under.
• • •
In the small hours of morning Bill woke up cold and grabbed at the hand that was jostling him. He had the cardboard beercase over his head like a mask and he batted it clear. Looked around confusedly.
“Hey buddy,” Paul said. “It’s just me. Easy on.”
Bill had been sleeping out in the open on a half-filled air mattress. He wore his jeans and his dirty shoes and they stuck out from under his sleeping bag. He wasn’t even inside the thing. It had just been pulled up over top of him, still zippered. Bill sat up and a stuck beercap fell from the skin of his collarbone. He ogled his campsite and then looked at the man who was squatting there on the grass.
“I’m sorry, buddy” Paul said. “How about let’s get inside the fucking house.”
Paul smiled and then they both started laughing. Bill rolled to his side and saw a full beer on its side near the mattress. He grabbed it and scrambled up to his feet. Took a long drink.
“Holy Hannah,” he said.
• • •
By mid-morning they were back in the narrows, both of them in the aluminum canoe with the rest of the fertilizer and topsoil. The box of young plantlings had been set between the benches and the lid left behind so they could take the sunlight. The men paddled lazily and made bad time. They drank beer the whole way.
It took them the better part of the afternoon to do their work at the field. Paul mixed soil for the new plants and transferred them to the big pots. He took to his notebook again. Bill finished tending to the other plants and then he laid himself out on the ground in the middle of the clearing. When they were ready to leave they took all the empty containers and the dead plants and carried them out through the overgrown bush-path. Bill walked ahead and Paul trailed him. They were maybe ten feet from the beach-end treeline when Paul heard rattling in the brush. He held up but Bill didn’t. Paul saw the snake shifting its wide body in the weeds and he dropped what he was carrying and reached out. Got hold of Bill’s shirt and tried to tear him clear. Too late. Bill planted his foot trailside and the rattler lunged, bit deep into the calve meat outside his shinbone. He made a funny sound and kicked and the snake came up with his leg, shot loose and went sailing to the side. Bill sat down on the forest floor and stared at the wound. Thin trickle of red from each fanghole.
“Fuckin’ shit,” he said.
Paul dragged Bill back from where the snake had landed and looked quickly at the leg. Back into the thick green. The rattle kept on.
“You got a knife,” Bill said.
“You don’t cut it open. That’s a fuckin’ myth.”
“What the fuck?”
“Just wait here,” Paul yelled.
He went off the path to a sandy patch of ground, bent and came back carrying a rock the size of a basketball. He lifted it to his chest and went quick to where the snake coiled and rattled on. When he saw the black blotch pattern through the brush he raised the rock and threw it down on an angle, had already wheeled away when the stone dug the earth with a thud and went rolling. Paul backpedalled to the other side of the trail and stopped. Again came the sound.
“My God, you fuckin’ missed it,” Bill called.
“I didn’t. Jesus shit.”
Paul crouched low and then got back up. He highstepped over the trail and could not see the snake anywhere. The rock lay near and he took it up again. Held it to his shoulder at the ready. He listened for the rattle. Turned. There the snake lay. Split to shreds at the middle with puss and gunk seeping down to the grey soil under it. The broken stalk of a tiny sapling had gone through the snake and tethered it to the spot. The animal had its diamond head pulled back, vertical eyeslits ever watching.
“Die you little shit,” Paul said. And he threw the rock again and saw it land on the snake flush before carrying on down the grade into the deeper wood. Paul came in closer and he didn’t hear the rattle anymore and he couldn’t see the snake.
• • •
Paul knelt in the fore of the Canoe and paddled hard, even strokes left to right. Bill sat on the backbench and he would not quit paddling himself. Paul had hollered at him to stop earlier but they were far from the cottage and they needed to move. The leg had been splinted with a length of treebranch fastened on with strips torn from Paul’s shirt. Another band of ripped shirtcloth had been tied around Bill’s leg just below the knee. The leg had swollen and purpled in parts near to the bite. Bill gritted his teeth hard as he tried to shift in his seat. He had gone pale. His shirt was soaked in sweat and his face was slick with it.
“How d’you feel, bud?” Paul said.
“Fuckin’ weird,” Bill said.
“How bad does it hurt?”
Bill took a few deep breaths.
“It don’t feel good. Let me tell you.”
“Okay. We’re not ten minutes from the cottage. Then we’ll haul ass to Dog Bay. Old Bert has some antivenin stored in the fridge there.”
“You sure he’s got somethin’?”
“He had a mutt got bit once. He carried the stuff ever since. I heard the story more than a few times.”
“How is the dog now?”
“What?”
“What happened to the mutt?”
“Just hold on and keep the leg still.”
By the time they tied off to the cottage dock Bill had slumped in the canoe. He whiteknuckled the paddle with his left hand and the other trailed in the water. Paul helped his bitten friend up onto the dock and laid the leg flat on the planking. He ran to the house for his phone and called ahead to the marina. Told Bert to get an ambulance out there. He came back at a run. Jumped down into the fishing boat and lowered Bill down onto the deck. They used a bunch of lifejackets for cushions and got Bill into a position where he could rest with the leg straight and lower than the rest of him. Paul untied the line from the dockcleat and took it aboard. Fired the engine and took off.
The marina sat on the distant shore, small as a toy at first and then bigger and bigger until the sign could be made out. The boat was lighter than before and the bow skipped hard through the baywater. Paul kept checking with Bill to see how he was.
“How long since I was bit?” Bill said.
“About an hour.”
“That ain’t good.”
“Don’t worry. Only two people ever died of a bite from that kind of rattler.”
“That’s ’cause those rattlers are supposed to be smaller, less mean. Ain’t that right?”
“Mostly. You ain’t small either, buddy. Quit worrying about it. We’re nearly there.”
Paul cranked the throttle but the little boat had nothing left to give. They were flat out with the engine whining high. Bill grumbled in the front and kept touching the distended and foul-coloured meat around the bite. Paul swatted at Bill’s hand and told him stop it, but he wouldn’t much look at his friend’s leg. Bill tried to see over his right shoulder to where they were going. He cussed himself hoarse at one point. Went calm again. Spray flew up around the gunwales and caught sunlight in the waterbeads.
“Hey man,” Bill said. “Don’t lie to me. There’s no way I’m gonna die from this shit, right?”
The bitten man sat up all at once and reached out. Paul leaned in and clasped Bill’s right hand. Held it fast with his other hand on the tiller, the throttle still pinned.
“No way in hell, buddy. But we gotta save the leg.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kevin Hardcastle is a fiction writer from Simcoe County, Ontario. He studied writing at the University of Toronto and at Cardiff University. Hardcastle was a finalist for the 24th annual Journey Prize, and his short stories have been published or are forthcoming in The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Joyland, PRISM international, Shenandoah, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories, and The Walrus. Hardcastle’s debut short story collection, Debris, is out now from Biblioasis. His novel, In the Cage, will also be published by Biblioasis, likely in fall 2016.
LF #043 © Kevin Hardcastle. Published by Little Fiction | Big Truths, June 2013.
