Read Online The Dead Are More Visible by Steven Heighton - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Steven Heighton
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guessed they were the victims of some psycho. It turned out they were killed by a fisher—a kind of large, nocturnal weasel—that had come down out of the woods along the Cataraqui.
Maybe too the nickname stuck because it sounds a bit like “pusher.”
When the Fisher comes walking toward you up the dry streambed, tracing the path your own boots have left in the dirt, you are not surprised. In fact youhave the feeling you’ve summoned him here, though even now—after three days alone in the wilds above Osoyoos in a heat wave, parched and hungry—you’re sufficiently self-aware to wonder if it’s really him. Really anyone at all.
It was not supposed to be this hot, even here, in mid-July, but the Program doesn’t cancel its “client” OutTrips. Rain or shine. (You’ve never seen rain here.) Your first OutTrip was three days, in June. Afternoons on the desert floor were smelter hot and after midnight you shivered in your thermal blanket. Still, there was never a moment when you feared you wouldn’t make it out alive. This five-day trip—the climax of the Program, after which you’ll debrief and fly east to face a few months’ probation and then, supposedly, get on with your life—is different. Though you’re way, way fitter and tougher now than when you arrived sick and skinny at the camp, you’ve been struggling. By the end of day 2 you were struggling. The “staple quotient” of water was challenge enough on OutTrip 1. This time you guess it’s dangerous. If it gets too hot, travel at night and sleep through the day—that was the instruction, and starting tonight you mean to follow it.
It’s around five p.m., you guess, and with hours to go until dusk you’re resting in the louvered shade of a stand of stunted firs. You can see down the streambed to the valley, a full day’s walk away, where irrigated vineyards roll greenly to a cool blue lake: a small, V-shaped vision of the promised land. Not even abreath of breeze. Sweat pearls on your face and trickles from your armpits to the waistband of your boxer shorts; as if you can afford to lose fluid. In the silence you think you hear the needles of the firs drying up and falling onto the dead ones with the sub-audible ticking that ice crystals make as they form from your breath and fall on the coldest winter nights, back east.
You keep dreaming of such cold.
You plan to walk by the light of the moon—not much of a moon these nights, but it’ll have to do—using your map and compass. The next cache of water and food is fifteen kilometres from here. All you want is the water. In this ragged terrain it’ll take you until five or six in the morning, just after sunrise.
What are you doing here? you ask, your voice hoarse and corroded.
Serious efforts were required to locate you, the Fisher says as he slows and stops, spotlit by the sun behind you and this puny, pathetic brake of firs. He looks unfazed by the incinerating heat. He has on black sport loafers, designer jeans manufactured to look worn and ripped, and a form-fitting, large-collared yellow shirt he wears open to the third button and tucked stringently into his jeans. He’s older, maybe forty, but that doesn’t fully explain the tight tuck; a lot of guys his age dress loosely, like teenagers. He seems to model his look on porn stars of the ’80s—a compact, gelled helmet of ginger hair, ample sideburns, aviator shades with red lenses that allow just the slightest glimpse ofthe eyes behind. He wears a black belt, thick, an ostentatious silver buckle. The gold Rolex is likely real.
He looks down at you speculatively. Slowly he bares those even teeth with the large, jeering gap between the front incisors. It’s a smile that always enjoys itself a little too much. A coarse smile, a cannibal’s wide rictus; every time he smiles, he belies his pretensions to refinement.
You ran, Ben, even though I told you Upper Mongolia wouldn’t be far enough. (A classic Fisherism. He sees himself
Maybe too the nickname stuck because it sounds a bit like “pusher.”
When the Fisher comes walking toward you up the dry streambed, tracing the path your own boots have left in the dirt, you are not surprised. In fact youhave the feeling you’ve summoned him here, though even now—after three days alone in the wilds above Osoyoos in a heat wave, parched and hungry—you’re sufficiently self-aware to wonder if it’s really him. Really anyone at all.
It was not supposed to be this hot, even here, in mid-July, but the Program doesn’t cancel its “client” OutTrips. Rain or shine. (You’ve never seen rain here.) Your first OutTrip was three days, in June. Afternoons on the desert floor were smelter hot and after midnight you shivered in your thermal blanket. Still, there was never a moment when you feared you wouldn’t make it out alive. This five-day trip—the climax of the Program, after which you’ll debrief and fly east to face a few months’ probation and then, supposedly, get on with your life—is different. Though you’re way, way fitter and tougher now than when you arrived sick and skinny at the camp, you’ve been struggling. By the end of day 2 you were struggling. The “staple quotient” of water was challenge enough on OutTrip 1. This time you guess it’s dangerous. If it gets too hot, travel at night and sleep through the day—that was the instruction, and starting tonight you mean to follow it.
It’s around five p.m., you guess, and with hours to go until dusk you’re resting in the louvered shade of a stand of stunted firs. You can see down the streambed to the valley, a full day’s walk away, where irrigated vineyards roll greenly to a cool blue lake: a small, V-shaped vision of the promised land. Not even abreath of breeze. Sweat pearls on your face and trickles from your armpits to the waistband of your boxer shorts; as if you can afford to lose fluid. In the silence you think you hear the needles of the firs drying up and falling onto the dead ones with the sub-audible ticking that ice crystals make as they form from your breath and fall on the coldest winter nights, back east.
You keep dreaming of such cold.
You plan to walk by the light of the moon—not much of a moon these nights, but it’ll have to do—using your map and compass. The next cache of water and food is fifteen kilometres from here. All you want is the water. In this ragged terrain it’ll take you until five or six in the morning, just after sunrise.
What are you doing here? you ask, your voice hoarse and corroded.
Serious efforts were required to locate you, the Fisher says as he slows and stops, spotlit by the sun behind you and this puny, pathetic brake of firs. He looks unfazed by the incinerating heat. He has on black sport loafers, designer jeans manufactured to look worn and ripped, and a form-fitting, large-collared yellow shirt he wears open to the third button and tucked stringently into his jeans. He’s older, maybe forty, but that doesn’t fully explain the tight tuck; a lot of guys his age dress loosely, like teenagers. He seems to model his look on porn stars of the ’80s—a compact, gelled helmet of ginger hair, ample sideburns, aviator shades with red lenses that allow just the slightest glimpse ofthe eyes behind. He wears a black belt, thick, an ostentatious silver buckle. The gold Rolex is likely real.
He looks down at you speculatively. Slowly he bares those even teeth with the large, jeering gap between the front incisors. It’s a smile that always enjoys itself a little too much. A coarse smile, a cannibal’s wide rictus; every time he smiles, he belies his pretensions to refinement.
You ran, Ben, even though I told you Upper Mongolia wouldn’t be far enough. (A classic Fisherism. He sees himself
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