When he had been up here on a hike a couple of years back, Cardinal had crossed the creek stone by stone, but now the stones were submerged in froth. Luckily, beavers had been busy nearby and there was a birch tree sprawled across the water. Cardinal stepped on to the trunk, and it crumbled under his foot. It was stronger higher up. When he had a good footing, he edged his way out across the water. A fly bit into his neck and he cuffed at it, nearly toppling.
As soon as he was near enough, he leaped to solid ground and went after the flies in a fury, slapping his neck, the side of his face, the crown of his head. Anger and frustration were aggravated by the consciousness of looking ridiculous, even though there was no one to see. He climbed a series of boulders and then he was at the edge of the pool with the falls before him. He stepped under the overhang and right away he could smell the sickly odour of rotting meat.
Cardinal edged between a rock and the falling water. He stopped again and listened. The black flies had abandoned him now, driven back by the spray. Something else had Cardinal’s attention. The granite face of the wall behind him was defaced, not with the usual graffiti, but with long columns of hieroglyphics. They looked ancient, but Cardinal knew they had not been there two years ago.
There were pictographs of arrows three or four inches long that intersected each other in weird patterns. Others were heaped in bunches with one longer arrow extruding, as if indicating a direction. Along the edges of the rock, there were drawings of the moon in various stages – full, half, three-quarter, new – and everywhere there were numbers, inscribed in coloured chalk.
Cardinal moved away from the rock face and stepped around a sharp corner of granite. The smell on the other side was nauseating. He pulled out his shirttail and covered his mouth and nose.
The thing on the floor of the cave had once been human but there was nothing lifelike about it now. The body was naked, male, with muscular arms and legs. All that working out hadn’t come to much, though: a pale heap of flesh in a dark, cold cave. However this human being had lived, his death had been savage. The hands and feet were missing, as was the head. Maggots heaved on the major wounds, giving the appearance of movement.
There was a noise, and Cardinal whirled around.
Delorme was staring at the body from behind the corner of granite.
‘I don’t know about you,’ she said. ‘But me, I don’t think the black flies did that.’
Kevin Tait picked up the fly-swatter and moved with great stealth to the window. The fly that had just taken a piece out of his ankle was trying repeatedly to fly through the glass. Kevin brought the fly-swatter down, and the fly went to its reward. Using the swatter like a spatula, he scooped up the tiny corpse and carried it to the cabin door. He opened the door just long enough to fling the dead fly outside without inviting any of its cousins to the Kevin Tait smorgasbord.
He cleaned the little smear from the windowpane with a Kleenex. Across the field, Red Bear was arriving in his black BMW. You had to hand it to Red Bear, the guy knew how to live. Dressed in white from head to toe, all six feet of him, and then he’s got that glossy black hair down to his shoulders and the Wayfarers dark as outer space. He climbed out of the Beamer and two nifty-looking babes got out with him, a blonde and a brunette with the kind of bodies that spoke of hours in the gym.
The three of them walked across the former baseball diamond to Red Bear’s cabin, by far the nicest in this crumbling old camp. Kevin watched them from his window, the tall Indian all in white, like Elvis in his last years, an arm around each of the women. Red Bear wore so many beads and bracelets he rattled as he walked. Somehow he overcame the vulgarity with his good looks and his aura of power.
Kevin Tait was not the kind of young man who believed in personal power or charisma, perhaps because he sensed that he possessed none. Oh, he knew he could be charming. Women have always had a weak spot for penniless poets, and the erotic power of melancholy is well known.
Kevin flopped across the bed and opened his notebook. He pulled out the black pen Terri had given him for his twenty-first birthday. He thought he might start a poem about misery and lust, but the pen remained inert.
He flipped through the notebook, browsing through jottings he’d made over the past months musings, observations, bits of verse.
Her first love was a captain For whom she would become The muse of Navigation The smoke of opium
Just a fragment, and too Leonard Cohenish at that.
A wizard turning wisdom into wine…
God knows where he had been heading with that one. It seemed ages since he’d finished anything substantial. There had been a poem in March, but he hadn’t bothered to send it out to the small magazines; it needed another polish or two. The last few months he’d been conserving his strength, lying fallow, waiting for just the right idea; he’d know it when it came along. It would go off like a roman candle, sparks pinwheeling across the jet-black sky of his mind.
‘Kevin Tait, good to have you on the show.’
Kevin liked to do this thing in his head where he was being interviewed by David Letterman, even though he knew Letterman never interviewed poets. He figured he would be the first.
‘Kevin Tait,’ he said again. ‘Here you are, your last volume of poems sold a gazillion copies. People quote your lines to each other day in and day out. You’re not just a poet, any more, you’re a force in the culture. And – I don’t know how to put this gently – you’re hanging out with scumbags. N’er-do-wells. Drug dealers. What are you thinking?’ Letterman’s fratboy grin took the sting out of the question.
‘Drug dealers, Dave, provide a much-needed service to a, let’s face it, underappreciated crowd. People have used drugs down the centuries, and they always will. Look at Coleridge. Look at Rimbaud. A little disorder in the senses never hurt anybody. And not just artists. It’s a long dark night out there, Dave, and everyone needs a little help getting through.’
(Applause. Letterman ignored it.)
‘But you’re a poet. And you’re hanging out with thugs. Doesn’t that make you nervous?’
‘Nervous? Not really.’ Kevin gave it a beat. ‘I’m actually terrified.’
(Laughter.)
‘So give us the big picture, here. How does this – sorry, I gotta say it – oddball behaviour fit into your grand plan?’
‘My plan, Dave, is to make a lot of money by selling as much contraband as possible in as short a time as possible. Then I’m heading off to Greece for a few years to write the big one. Maybe Barcelona, Tangiers, I’m not sure.’
Letterman then had him read his latest poem. There was a respectful pause when he read the last line, then a balmy wave of applause.
The plan had a flaw that Letterman didn’t know about: Kevin had a weakness for the product he sold. He liked to think his personal appreciation of his wares was what made him an exceptional salesman. In any case, he was clean these days; just a little skin-popping now and again. Nobody ever came to grief by skin-popping. Besides, he knew he could quit the skin-popping, too. It was just a matter of getting back to twelve-step.
So that was his plan: keep clean and stow away a ton of cash over the next year. Then he’d hightail it to – who knew? Greece, Tangiers, Barcelona – and spend his time in creative isolation, doing nothing but drinking strong coffee and writing poems. He’d mail them back to Terri one by one, so she’d know he was doing fine. Otherwise, she was likely to chase him around the world, trying to look after him.
Terri had always had a tendency to mother