Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [11]
Claude comes back with the beer and I say “Thank you” and glance up at him and his face dissolves and re-forms, he was about eight the last time I was here; he used to peddle worms in rusted tin cans to the fishermen down by the government dock. He’s uneasy now, he can tell I recognize him.
“I’d like to go down the lake for a couple of days,” I say, to David because it’s his car. “I’d like to look around, if that’s okay.”
“Great,” says David, “I’m gonna get me one of them smart fish.” He brought along a borrowed fishing rod, though I warned him he might not have a chance to use it: if my father had turned up after all we would have gone away without letting him find out we were here. If he’s safe I don’t want to see him. There’s no point, they never forgave me, they didn’t understand the divorce; I don’t think they even understood the marriage, which wasn’t surprising since I didn’t understand it myself. What upset them was the way I did it, so suddenly, and then running off and leaving my husband and child, my attractive full-colour magazine illustrations, suitable for framing. Leaving my child, that was the unpardonable sin; it was no use trying to explain to them why it wasn’t really mine. But I admit I was stupid, stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results, and I didn’t have any excuses, I was never good at them. My brother was, he used to make them up in advance of the transgressions; that’s the logical way.
“Oh god,” Anna says, “David thinks he’s a great white hunter.” She’s teasing him, she does that a lot; but he doesn’t hear, he’s getting up, Claude is hustling him off to make him out a licence, it seems Claude is in charge of the licences. When David comes back I want to ask how much he paid, but he’s too pleased, I don’t want to spoil it. Claude is pleased also.
We find out from Claude we can hire Evans, who owns the Blue Moon Cabins, to run us down the lake. Paul would take us for nothing, he offered, but I wouldn’t feel right about it; also I’m sure he would misinterpret Joe’s amorphous beard and David’s moustache and Three Musketeers hair. They’re just a style now, like crew cuts, but Paul might feel they are dangerous, they mean riots.
David eases the car down the turnoff, two ruts and a rock hump in the centre that scrapes the car’s belly. We brake in front of the cabin marked OFFICE; Evans is there, a bulky laconic American in checked shirt and peaked cap and a thick knitted jacket with an eagle on the back. He knows where my father’s place is, all the older guides know every house on the lake. He moves his cigarette butt to the corner of his mouth and says he’ll take us there, ten miles, for five dollars; for another five he’ll pick us up two days from now, in the morning. That will give us the rest of the day to drive back to the city. He’s heard of the disappearance, of course, but he doesn’t mention it.
“A groovy old guy, eh?” David says when we’re outside. He’s enjoying himself, he thinks this is reality: a marginal economy and grizzled elderly men, it’s straight out of Depression photo essays. He spent four years in New York and became political, he was studying something; it was during the sixties, I’m not sure when. My friends’ pasts are vague to me and to each other also, any one of us could have amnesia for years and the others wouldn’t notice.
When David has backed the car down to the Blue Moon dock we unload our stuff, the packsacks of clothes, the camera equipment, the samsonite case with my career in it, the half dozen Red Caps they got at the