enRoute

We pull up in our Honda Odyssey, park beside the barrage of half-ton, one-ton, two-ton trucks at Lake Byrne. Not a lake found on any map but a trout-stocked irrigation pond on Byrne’s back forty near Caroline; Byrne, the brother of my girlfriend’s husband. We go despite the flat white on the horizon, the glittering ice crystals in the still, sunless air, the hard cold of a minus-20 day, frost clinging to the looped barbwire around the perimeter of the lake to keep the cows or the RCMP out, we don’t know which, the pungent odour of pot lingering in the air as my husband unsnaps Jaxen and Chase from their car seats, the large bonfire on the edge of a mapless lake, the smash of white strangers around the fire we don’t know save for my girlfriend Ella and her husband, and barely-the-brother Byrne. Nary the hint of colour beneath their skin, third-generation yellow beneath ours.

We pass a running Plymouth, the windows dressed in rime. Inside: two steamy, half-dressed teenagers ravaging one another. My husband raises a brow at me. Avert, avert, I want to say to my boys: Chase, who is two, Jaxen, four. Avert your eyes; turn away, this knowledge not yet for you. Instead I point toward the frozen lake where a group of boys are ice fishing, a crack-the-whip line of girl skaters fishtail by us, some older boys playing hockey.

“We should have brought our skates,” I say, lifting Chase in my arms because the snow is two-feet deep and he’s three-feet small. Jaxen in his orange fluorescent parka and Buzz Lightyear boots stomps the ground in anticipation of ice and augers, metal hooks and cutthroat trout.

“Mind if we fish?” my husband asks Byrne, locating him in the crowd around the bonfire by the Daliesque handlebar moustache that is his moniker, a cattle buyer by trade, man of few words in his off time.

“Have at ’er,” Bill says, sweeping his fleshy hand over the frozen vista. “Mind the other end.”

He points to the far end of the lake: black open water, the chug chug chug of a pump. Faint trace of alcohol about him, the sharp scent of pot on Byrne’s mackinaw too, and him some fifty years old.

“Busted for dealing,” Ella told me years back. “He spent some time away.”

“Hmm,” I said, having stopped all that nonsense decades ago. “Makes you kinda thick, don’t you think?”

Ella didn’t reply. She still smokes pot with her husband who doesn’t drink anymore because he’s a recovering alcoholic. Recovering from what? I’d like to ask but don’t. Life likely.

Ella wanders down to the ice with us, a beer bottle hanging loosely from her left thumb. Byrne’s two razor-eared Dobermans run sideways along the shore, zigzagging up and down the bank and around to the far end of the lake where the pump is – black open water.

“Stay away from there,” I point, pinpointing danger’s exact location. Chase pushes his cold nose into my cheek, tightens his Winnie-the-Pooh mittens around my neck. Jaxen is pulling at the canvas bag with the hand auger that my husband brought along.

“Slow going,” my husband says after fifteen minutes work, his breath corporeal, a pallid cloud expanding around his head. He turns it over to Jaxen who turns turns turns the red-handled auger on the white waxy ice in his blue mittens with all his four-year-old might – the surface barely scratched.

Ella takes a long swallow, wags her empty beer bottle.

“Want one?” she asks.

My husband declines, I shake my head. She goes off in search of Byrne’s gas-powered auger, another beer.

Byrne and some of the men come down from the bonfire: faces unshaven like stubble wheat, their eyes distant, dark like the open water beyond, dead-serious like Byrne, a funeral of men. Beside Byrne, a six-foot-five Goliath with a shaved head and the incongruity of Bic blue-lettered “L O V E ” etched into the scabbed knuckles of his gloveless hands. He eyeballs us. Him I could imagine burning white crosses on his back forty in Caroline.

Goliath and the men stand as a city crew, watch Byrne position the gas-powered auger on the ice. My husband holds Jaxen back by his shoulders. Byrne pulls the cord and pushes down on the auger. At first the ice resists, bold retaliation, causes the auger to buck and rear under Byrne’s sizeable weight like an edgy steer. And for one splendid moment between the awful rip of noise in the otherwise silent air, amid the burly-shouldered men of few words, between the white spray of impenetrable ice and the purple wheeze of farm gas, when it seems neither one will give way, then the frozen lake relents, groaning uncle as it gives in to the auger making headway, tossing shards of ice like incidental shrapnel at the lot of us.

And in the shatter of a moment, it’s done: two dark-mouthed holes in Lake Byrne, one for Chase, one for Jaxen. I smile; my husband shakes Byrne’s reluctant hand. Chase squirms from my arms and on hands and knees, tiny face pressed to the ice, peers down into the black holes. The men, Goliath and Byrne, retreat back to the bonfire. No words exchanged.

My husband ties J-curved hooks on strands of invisible fish line, so that when Chase and Jaxen raise their poplar branches, the metal-barbed hooks hang in the air as if suspended by magic, by mind freak, some freak of mind you couldn’t otherwise imagine. On the horizon the sky is white, the white air the same temperature as the ice, the white strangers around the fire – enough to turn the rose of your flattish cheeks, the tips of your exposed fingers white white white, frostbite white.

While the boys fish, I go ashore to the bonfire, the smash of people I don’t know save for Ella, her husband, barely-the-brother Byrne. She links her arm in mine, lights a cigarette. The teenage boy and girl finished ravaging one another emerge from the steamy Plymouth and stand dishevelled, replete in their open Hurley/Nikita hoodies around the blazing fire. The boy tosses in bits of wood, wrecked lawn furniture, and as the day progresses/digresses, something inappropriate like a car or one of the broken-down quads will also end up in the fire. There’ll likely be a fight afterwards.

The boy’s mother in the crowd is easy to pick out; she looks exactly like him except for the hailed-out look on her face. The boy rummages through her purse for a lighter but finds an aerosol can of Final Net instead. He looks at his mother before tossing it into the fire. The crowd steps back. No one says anything. The mother draws on her filterless Player’s between the straight lines of her wordless lips. I glance at Ella. She’s filling a red plastic cup with hot chocolate, the piquant pulse of peppermint schnapps. No words, no raised brow for her. The worlds we straddle for one another.

I go back to my husband. My yellow boys are curled around black holes, poplar sticks with line flashing visible/invisible in the murky light, gold-barbed hooks beneath the surface, danger for the trout below. Then a whoop and a holler from a boy in a black jacket, his over-large jeans cinched around his groin, grey tartan boxers, age ten at most. He’s caught a cutthroat. The boy pulls it out, red and yellow-green, silver, the only colour of the day. The fish lands on the ice with a dull meaty thud, thrashes wildly until Byrne comes down and thwacks it on the head with his beer bottle: Canadian I am, he is, fish wasn’t. The boy grins. The other kids squeal in mock horror, but Jaxen’s shock is unfeigned.

“Better that way,” my husband explains to Jaxen’s sickened face. “The water their air, our air their demise.”

Chase, too young or unfazed, goes over to admire the swiftly fading colours on the cutthroat along with the crack-the-whip line of girls. The teenage hockey players swoop in for a look, then blur off across the ice. Jaxen stands apart.

“Home?” I ask my husband.

“Not yet,” he says.

And indeed, despite himself, Jaxen can’t help but be drawn into the circle. He leans down to examine the silver-dead mercury of the cutthroat’s eye.

The razor-eared Dobermans come barrelling across the lake to the circle of children. My husband blocks the black, lean-muscled animals, tries to shoo them away. The dogs stand ten feet out, watch the children, but mostly the whereabouts of the fish that the kids pass back and forth amongst themselves like a treasure, the younger ones running their bare fingertips over the slick silvery scales, awed by the red violent slash like blood beneath the cutthroat’s gills.

The Dobermans tire of waiting and lope off to the other end of the lake where they wrap themselves in the fishing line of an elderly woman in a blue parka with matching hair. No doubt Byrne’s mother from the dire expression on his already-funeral face as he sprints past us, surprisingly agile for a man his size. He loses his beer bottle in the process. Byrne bellows at the dogs that immediately cease their whining, their brutish jumping about. The dogs lie at the feet of Byrne’s mother while Byrne expertly cuts the tangled fishing line from around his mother’s legs with a bowie knife he produced from the shank of his left boot; the knife’s end is curved up, dangerous-looking, designed to finish more efficiently.

The mother straightens up, smoothes her parka over her body. The Dobermans take off running the quarter section that is Byrne’s, and soon they are only two black dots/dogs on the white horizon. Byrne gathers his mother and on the way past us retrieves his beer bottle/fish killer, which he hands over to the ten-year-old boy in the black jacket like a rite of passage.

The kids scatter back to their respective holes. And while Chase can’t see beneath the surface, he knows the fish are there from the yelps of the other children, the despondent dance of coloured fish caught in the air that is not theirs. The hockey players rip over, stopping precariously close, snowing the children in a spray of white in order to witness the number of thwacks required to make a fish say uncle.

Jaxen averts his gaze from the other children, fixes his eyes on the hole cut into the ice just for him, maintains the law of himself. Chase jerks his poplar stick in and out of the hole. His eyes burn with anticipation.

“Patience,” I say.

“Neath?” he asks.

I nod. He gets down on his belly to check the hole once more. After a moment he jerks his head up.

“Neath!” he yells.

A cutthroat must have swum past. He looks confused, too young yet to comprehend the dark live things that swim beneath the surface. The hockey players flash past too close, then seeing no fish, continue on.

“Watch out,” I warn Chase. “Stay close.”

Chase grins up at me from the ice, two tiny rows of white teeth. I nudge him gently with my Sorrels across the surface like a curling rock.

Then Jaxen yelps, his face ablaze. My husband goes over and tests the line.

“Yeppers,” he confirms.

Jaxen tugs the poplar stick once, twice, five times and out comes the cutthroat, its body ablaze with hoary-steaming colour. My husband removes the J hook from its mouth with a pair of needle-nose pliers; the fish falls the short distance to the ice and thrashes about. Jaxen’s grin broad on his small face.

“Wait,” my husband says. “We need a picture.”

He looks around; we left the camera in the van.

He heads towards the shore.

The three of us stand, watch the fish hammer about on the ice. No Byrne in sight, no beer bottles, nothing but the dilemma of fish versus fate versus cruelty versus kindness. The smile on Jaxen’s face ebbs and flows as the cutthroat struggles. Regardless, he and Chase dance on the surface of Lake Byrne in their small booted feet, no weight to speak of yet, barely a footprint on this immense, round earth. They take turns petting it, Chase speaking softly in his two-year-old gibberish, Jaxen laying his mittened hand on the flank of the fish as if to keep it warm, ease its suffering. Gradually the thrashing subsides, the colours fade to silver, and it looks then as if made of metal, a metal cutthroat, invincible, indestructible, can swim through the muddy heart of the underworld earth and rock and soil.

Jaxen picks up the fading fish. He’s taking it back to the hole.

“Neath?” Chase asks, ruddy child-cheeks.

Jaxen looks at me, searches the shore for his father. He wants a picture but he wants even more to take the fish back. I nod. Beaming, Jaxen starts towards the cylindrical hole in the ice, the underworld below, and the fish flops in his hands, one final attempt. Jaxen loses his grip. The cutthroat drops neatly to the ice like a puck, like Hockey Night in Canada in slow-mo replay, perfectly timed for the show of white, the glint of steel blades, the wooden sticks of the hockey players. Up close: their teenage faces intense, pimply, a film of freezing sweat on their brows, faraway eyes already marked by life. Fish on the ice, fair game – the dark of their pubescent laughter. In the splinter of a second they whiz across the ice, passing the still-live cutthroat efficiently back and forth between their sticks. Jaxen in his Buzz Lightyear boots, Chase in his matching Pooh Bear hat and mittens watch as the teenagers spread out to the far side of Lake Byrne. In the distance we can see the Dobermans running towards them.

“Hey!” my husband shouts across the ice.

Chase and Jaxen look up at me: grave, funeral faces. We stand in the still sunless air of a hard, cold minus-20 day, surrounded by roiled barbwire, the flat horizon on the white prairie, the still-flat earth of white Caroline. We witness fish/live/puck. Jaxen’s eyes well up, Chase’s too – even he understands there is no taking it back now.

I pick up Chase. My husband gathers Jaxen. We walk to the shore; find Ella in the smash of people. I lightly brush my wordless lips against her cheek; my husband declines the peppermint hot chocolate she offers. A collective cloud of smoke, pot, filterless Player’s, the cold breath of white strangers hangs tangibly in the air above the fire. Someone has thrown something in the fire, not a car or a quad but a winter boot so that the smoke blackens, smells like burning soles.

Over the past 18 years, Lee Kvern says she has written “full-time, part-time and, for a period, no-time.” Her novella, Afterall, was nominated for an Alberta Book Award in 2006. Based in Okotoks, Alberta, Kvern is working on her next book, The Matter of Sylvie.

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The views expressed by the writer do not represent the views of enRoute, Spafax or Air Canada. Certain readers may be offended by the contents.