The Atlas

AT THE BRIDGE

I came to the bridge and there was no one there. It was ten-o'-clock on a sunny night that echoed with seal-hunters' rifle-claps, and I needed water. That was why I'd turned my back on my tent beside the lake of howling dogs and set out for the noise of water. The river was very close. Children swam in it every day, although they allowed that it was not as warm as Fossil Creek where I had camped on the night that the wind blew my tent almost to pieces. The town had a swimming pool, but that year it was closed for repairs and so they swam by the bridge.

As I went I kept to the socket of high ground around the water (the rest would have engulfed me above the rubber of my tundra boots). That night the mosquitoes were so thick that I could literally snatch them out of the air, and the sun left double orange-egged reflections in two ponds. I scrambled onto the raised gravel dike they called a road, passed a pond of rich green grass as delicate as vermicelli, for all the world like a Cambodian ricefield, then turned off the road at the river, which sucked itself down from a glowing violet lake of eerie shallowness before it slithered toward an orange-painted bridge that said I LOVE YOU and NAKOOLAK and other things. The water shimmered orange with an indistinct reflection, a slightly pale water-color of the sun-trail, and then went under the bridge, around low rocks, and out to its mouth of ice.

And no one was there.

The children had finished swimming for the moment — no reason; they sometimes swam at midnight. But even had they been there it would still have proved too late for me, because I could not be a child anymore, although I passed well enough for children to like me; and even if I'd become one I would not have been able to kill birds in flight with a single stone; and so it was too late. As for the fullgrown ones, I was not of their kind, either. That afternoon I'd seen two beauties swimming. One had a boyfriend and one didn't. The one who was alone had smiled at me, and that was too late, too. Another true or false love would only make my soul more sadly vicious. Then there were the young men, to whom women and everything came easy. — You wanna catch a polar bear? they'd say. No problem. All you gotta do is get your gun and shoot. — So their company was also salveless to me, my jealousy being a ptarmigan always half-seen, half-buried in my mossy hopes. In short, it must have been only because I was a selfish spoiler that I stood lonely on the gravel below that empty bridge, watching the mosquitoes attack my knees, listening to the river flow out into Hudson Bay, where it was almost too late for ice.

I felt that I had to make something of my condition. Like the glowing gold outlines of grassheads, I was bordered by a trick of light — oh, a real border too, but nothing with the power to detain me in such brilliant monotony.

The people in the four-wheelers on the road above, their parkas open to the breeze they made, sometimes smiled and waved at me. But I was alone.

That was my difficulty. My circumstances were no different from anyone else's. A boy had come to my tent and I'd asked him what he would do that night. — Go to the bridge and watch people swimming, he said. He was happy, more or less.

They came back, two boys and two girls, and called my name. I was more lonely than before. I stood at the bridge and watched them playing. They were walking from shadow to sun, and they reached the rocks and then the water. They were wading, the girls carrying their shoes, the boys not. They'd gone to the mossy island. They were in the violet water, bending their knees and calling out in Inuk-titut as they picked their way between sharp stones.

Two more boys came running up the road.

Hi, called the girls. You gonna swim? You gonna swim?

I was watching them to see what it was that I had lost. They seemed to make no motion without a purpose, and to do nothing that they did not want to. They did nothing to fill time because they swam time and breathed it. They flapped their arms against sodden shirts, stood still, put bathing suits on, all with the quick confidence that doing these things was right and that afterward there would be other good things to do.

A truck went by and drenched me in white dust.

I knelt down to fill my water bottle from that stream well spiced with stones, that stream which curved around the curvy horizon. I felt the cold touch of a mosquito against my face. When my bottle had surrendered its last bubble of emptiness, I climbed back up to the road again. The bottle was very chilly and heavy in my hand. I stood at the bridge, and two couples I'd seen in church came on their four-wheelers and greeted me. They asked the children if the water was warm. With them it was different. They weighed possibilities, with easy indulgence. They could take or leave anything. But, just like the younger people, they owned their lives.

I was at the bridge and everyone was there. And I was alone.

All this changed on the first day that I went swimming. The coolness, the novelty, the loveliness, all these things engrossed me so that I was like them, learning the blue and green and brown lives of water, speaking with shouts and stone-splashes to the kids wrapped in towels like Arabs. Water ran from our lips. Happily straining reddish-orange faces swam around me and teased me. Little kids were riding me, clinging to me, calling my name in the water. A small girl braced her skinny brown knees against the current and crossed back and forth, dancing from stone to stone. We were always throwing stones at pop cans which we floated down the current, or trying to wing birds, though I made sure never to hit a living thing because I was not a hunter; my friends were quite good at striking a mark. They taught me about the strange current on the south side, right by the bridge where the little birds lived, so strong that you could not cross the creek without angling upstream. I let it catch me, and was caught up in life.

Boys kept diving off the bridge. The girls were dressing and undressing on their side. When they came out they shivered.

At ten or eleven at night, when dusk rose out of the island like fog, the river beneath the bridge darkened until it resembled the purple altar-hanging with its polar bear and stars, its two igloos, and its man and woman entering the yellow-windowed church. I had felt rejected by the Anglican god until the second Sunday, when the white-gowned priest shook my hand, and they sang one hymn in English; I realized that that was for me. On the third Sunday a man loaned me his battered hymnal, and the priest preached part of the sermon in my language. I loved that church. The youngest children were screaming, crying, talking, giggling, going in and out to their hearts' content, leaping into the arms of their parents and kissing them. People smiled at me at the church door. I was happy to be with them. That was how it was swimming, too. Entering the cool rocky water, trying not to stub my toe or be knocked backward when kids jumped onto my shoulders, I agreed to underwater contests with all comers, especially with the nine-year-old boy who chewed snuff and with the fat boy whose glistening black pants upturned as he stood on his head underwater, bringing up a rock, spouting through his mouth.

It was just before nine. The sky was pale blue, with a cold evening wind. The sun was somewhat low in the sky. The boys hunched over, pulling their caps lower against the mosquitoes. They kept asking questions about my Indian girl. They'd seen a nude I'd painted of her. Was she Inuk? Was she mine? What color were her pubic hairs? What color were her nipples? Was her hole thick? Did I lick her hole?

But I could handle them. One of them, the kindest ugliest one, had already confided to me: In this town, we answer a question only by I don't know and probably. — He was the plump shaggy one in coveralls who'd taught me that in the dialect of this town hello was kujalu, which actually meant let's have sex; he'd taught me that goodbye was iti-pau, which really meant your ass is full of coal. I'd said kujalu to a serious man on a four-wheeler; the man stopped, gazed at me, and inquired politely: Are you a prostitute? — The shaggy boy and his friends laughed so hard they fell down onto the tussocks frosted with pale green lichens. After that I saw the shaggy boy every day. He'd drive up in his Fourtrax, pink-brimmed cap pulled low and backward, stand on a rock, and ask all the shivering kids if the water was hot. No matter what they replied, he'd lean over, squinting at the water, blink, and drive off to get his bathing suit and towel. On that very first night when he'd teased me, he taught me about I don't know and probably.

So come on, aye? How deep was her hole?

I don't know, I said, poker-faced like him.

Did you get her pregnant?

Probably.

Yes or no?

I don't know.

Then they slowly grinned. I was one of them.

Maybe I'm gonna get one tonight, too, said a twelve-year-old.

I got fifty girlfriends and they're all pregnant from me! a nine-year-old cried proudly. (I'd met him on a hot day of grey dust and white dust when a wedding cavalcade set out for Fossil Creek. He was the one whose big brother had seen a polar bear that day about six miles out, just swimming.)

You gonna dive? said the shaggy boy.

Half a moment later, creamy white splashes formed around the reddish bodies. I flitted with them through the exquisitely cold water. I watched those kids throwing stones, crawling into shallows, calling: le's go, aye? back and forth between the two grassy gravelly shores under a chilly purple-colored wind.

It was a gray chilly evening and everyone was at the bridge. The girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid crouched on the railing, shouting: All right, you motherfuckers!

Come on, Lydia, jump! they shouted up from the water. Five, four, three, two, one!

If you talk like that I'll never fuckin' jump!

As I approached, she shouted at me: Get out of my fuckin' way!

She looked like a boy as she stood here on the bridge with her wet hair gray against the skull — very different from when she'd been in my tent, lounging so sexually, swearing and smoking cigarettes. — By now, practically everybody who swam had come to see me. The boys would visit my tent three or four at a time, burping and farting, drinking from my canteen and spitting jawbreakers into it when they talked, then sucking them out, trying on my hat and glasses, shouting with laughter at how stupid each one became in them, joking about fucking dead seals, telling me that if when I shat I wiped my ass with a rock then any seal I shot would sink, making hangman's nooses in the ceiling — good company, in short. The shaggy boy loaned me his favorite thing, his electronic keyboard, for a night and a day without my dreaming of asking for it, and I listened to it play "Ave Maria" over and over, the dogs pleading and cursing across the water. The ten- and twelve-year-old boys were always giving me snuff. A boy brought me a dried hunk of the caribou his brother had shot two weeks before in Arviat; another brought me a piece of his mother's fresh-baked bannock. He was the boy who collected the offerings in a vessel of sealskin, then held them high above the altar until the congregation had finished singing the hymn. — When you come back, we'll go out there to the place of birds with sharp tails and get their eggs! he promised me.

Beaks, not tails! said his friend.

No, tails. A beak is a tail. A bird got two tails.

Is that girl your girlfriend? a boy asked me. He was one of the ones I knew from backfloating and glistening, heads and bodies sparkling with windy light.

Probably.

Is she always naked?

Probably.

Is she pregnant from you?

No.

Why? he cried in surprise.

Sometimes girls came to visit, too. I lived in a fine spot that summer, in a place between two lakes where my friend was a chalk-yellow flower with the lemon-yellow center, and another friend was the long woolly sausage of a willow bud. Brown birds danced through the moss. When my guests got close I'd hear them exclaim at all the birds. — One girl said: My grandmother saw a big black bird in the morning when she was young. Bigger than this little house. It tried to catch kids. — I'd hear the girls unzipping my back doors since my front door was broken; I'd hear them unlacing their boots as they knelt upon the giving, prickly-brittle mound of lichens. I knew them; I'd seen them on Sundays listening to the the little white-robed trio at the altar; I knew those girls' slender arms and the way their shirts worked up to flash their bikini-breasts in the water. They called each other sluts and talked about the boys whom they wanted to fuck. They shot my pistol. They asked for liquor, which I didn't have. Sometimes boys and girls would come together. When my tent was crowded, a boy would just pull his coat over his shoulders and his girl's shoulders so that they could kiss in private. That reminded me of the bridge, too, where the women tented inside towels or quilts as they changed. Everything had begun to remind me of the bridge by then. It was as if this island where water pulsed around me between long blue windblown pond-fingers were inside a paperweight. There was nothing but this. Alone in my tent at night, chilly from my day's swim at the bridge, I dreamed of grabby willow-islands and also good flat stones to cross, but grassy mossy bogs on either side. The world went chill and grey as more clouds thrust their elbows across the sky. And in the morning when I heard my friends coming, I knew that we would go together to the bridge. I felt interested in their loves, being but a spinning camera eye which could not and must not love them because I would never come back. — The girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid and the boy who always got into trouble loved each other, I think, but they never visited me at the same time. My best Polaroid was of him, and that was why she stole it.

Do you swear? she'd said.

No.

Why? she said contemptuously. Do you use drugs?

Sometimes.

Why not all the time?

When at last she jumped, unannounced, long after everyone had given up on her, I saw the dance of her white breasts through her wet T-shirt, the fierce downward point of the running shoes she'd swiped from one of the younger kids and then she was in the air but still very far away and then with the ripping-cloth noise of a gyrfalcon swooping to protect its nest she plunged into the cold brown water with a roar and a splash, bobbing back up immediately among the other orange faces rising and falling in the dark water which was occasionally stained orange by the bridge's reflection.

The boy she loved, the one in the Polaroid, was the boy who'd slit his wrists because he was caught breaking into the mayor's office, "just to see what was there," and his mother (he was adopted) said that none of her real offspring would have done that, so he said: I'm gonna die, Mom.

He sat in my tent, playing with my scare pistol. — I think my uncle saw I slit my wrists, he beamed. I told my cousin if my Dad don't change, I'm gonna go all the way!

Minutes later he was swimming and laughing.

After the girl who loved him jumped, he clambered up the chickenwire-lined gravel wall of the bridge, passing the small girl who clung peering at a baby bird, until he stood beside me in the spot where his admirer had stood, and in lordly summer silence the two of us surveyed the black turtles' backs of rocks under the greenness and brownness, and kids' skinny phosphorescent bodies making waves like obsidian arrowheads.

Dive in, Jobie! cried she who loved him. Splash me good or I'm gonna quit!

He pretended to look away from her upturned face. Then, smiling, he dove. The river exploded with his splash (the lake where the river came from was a swollen gray cloud with orange bloodstains on it).

Oh, my toe hurts! cried a water-spouting girl.

What about my balls? he shouted, and they all laughed.

The girl who loved him stood where the water was only knee-deep, her wrists clasped across her breasts, watching him and shivering. — Let's go to the other side an' dive! she said. Then she crept all the way into the cold water.

The boy in the Polaroid's cousins were clinging to him and he was shouting: Get the hell off! and they were all laughing. He was so strong and perfect; he fought the strange current inch by inch with girls hanging on him and shouting: A world record! and when by dint of great shoulder-flashes and whirling arms, spray shooting from his rich black hair, he succeeded in touching the rock where the bird's nest was, he only smiled modestly and said: Clear water, anyway. — But the girl who loved him stood shyly on the other side where he had not come to dive, and she was alone.

The shaggy boy's little sister, kneeling in a wet blue shirt, was not alone although nobody kept her company down at the river's mouth where she could still see three figures poling very slowly out in an aluminum canoe, the bow tipping down almost to water level with every stroke of the tall figure, and then they vanished behind a sailing ship in the middle of the harbor. The shaggy boy's little sister was wringing out her swimming clothes in the brown water, tossing and turning them quietly as if she were cooking strips of bacon She was the ten-year-old who'd burned her nose smoking a cigarette. Water ran down her pouting lips.

Coming back from the river with the white crosses of the graveyard ahead of me, I found the sun more rubicund, fractured with splinters of dark cloud. I took the high road, the only road, already seeing the hemisphere of my tent across that lakey plain which was interrupted by half-sunken rocks, clumps of grass, tussocks shared by mossy lichens and flowers, and the occasional dwarf willow colony creeping across the flatness like sturdy wire unraveling leafily in any direction. Summer was rushing in tune with the yellow rhapsody of wind-dancing buttercups. The darkness was oozing back. I inhaled the reddish sun-jelly, the sweets of evening seemingly comprised of melted berries.

When I stepped on one gray slab it grated down upon another rock with a terrifying snarling laugh.

After half a dozen hours of being tentbound by a windy rain, I heard birds sing again and came out to find one of the strangest and most beautiful skies that I had ever seen: pale beams of light descending like spider-legs from a gray cloud's body, and then other patches and pools of the same light, more and more fantastic in shape, strings of flying pillars like leads in pack ice. Scarcely an exhalation of air. The birds called, the grasses did not flinch, and then a gust came after all.

I walked through town. The boy from Arviat had a brown bird in his hand, a little brown baby. He let it go. He said: Maybe if I keep it the mother is sad. And maybe in just a few minutes it will starve.

One time I was playing with a baby bird and it died so quickly from starving. — I went through that low flat town of small houses and passed the nursing station, the well-fenced reservoir (which still had chunks of ice inside), and came back to the open road, the bay on my right, a long low snowsquiggled purple cape on the horizon, and then clouds and wind.

They said that the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid liked to talk about suicide. They said that her parents were always drunk. They said that her parents didn't want her. (Sure, I know her Mom and Dad, said a white guy in town who always fed me on beef stew and pie because he pitied my tenty existence. He was a good and great and generous man who hated the notion that someone might see that he was good. He gave aw3y money and time left and right and flew into a rage when people thanked him. He sat in his coveralls of wrinkled water-metal, resting on his laurels, a veteran of forest fires, mining accidents, bar fights and bad acid trips, bored and weary in the overheated hotel, worried about his blood pressure, watching adventure videos, keeping count of the number of N.E.'s. — What are N.E.'s? I said. — Nipple erections, son, he explained. You must be a tenderfoot not to know that. Have some more pie. Yeah, I know her Mum and Dad. I know them, all right. Can't take care of their own children. They both work in my crew, when they work. I don't want to lay anybody off, 'cause they need the work. I hope I don't have to lay them off. But I hate these two lazy bastards. They should have their tubes tied. I hate this place. Soon as my contract's up, I'm out of here. I hate those fucking Inuktituks. They think this hellhole's the best place in the world and no one can tell 'em any different. Well, everyone shits on the Newfies, but one thing you gotta say for 'em: they don't got an Indian problem. Took care of that first thing.*) So that was the story of the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid. Her life was like some cold wide shallow pond rushing straight at her with fan-shaped waves, the wind picking up now, not yet strong enough to throw more than foam in her face.

That was all I learned, and I didn't see every twist her courtship took, because it wasn't my business and after all I had my own swimming to attend to. (One sign of spiritual development, Buddhists and Christians agree, is drinking more water and enjoying it more, so swimming must be good for you, too.) I swam until my hands went numb and red. They were fiery when I got out and started walking home, the sun low over heaps of rock. I had no towel, so the shaggy boy loaned me his. He was one of the many souls who seemed to be looking only into your eyes but who'd suddenly point off toward Hudson Bay and cry: Look, Bill, a weasel, weasel! There, there! — They could all see things which I couldn't. Sometimes they seemed uncanny to me. They lived on their island amidst the ruins of a race of giants. The boy from Arviat rode me on his four-wheeler out to Kirchoffer Falls, where the water was sea-green and seemingly gelid: transparent, swirly, filled with bubbles like bath gel. The mosquitoes did not find us right away. He showed me where to walk up and down the poppied stairs of cliff. I scanned the inukshuks* on the opposite bank, which was also a long cliff comprised of slabs of reddish rock, here and there a paler gravelfall; and then he showed me the Tuniit house, a rock-rimmed pit in the moss.

The Tuniit were strong, said the boy from Arviat. So strong they could lift a big rock or a polar bear with one hand.

What happened to them?

The Inuit killed them, I think, he said. A Tuniit man had sex with an Inuk woman, and an Inuk man got so mad he killed many, and the rest ran away.

When I asked the shaggy boy, he said: Some sailors came, and then they got sick. All their wives died, so they couldn't make new people.

So they're all dead?

All dead, except maybe one or two. They don't know they're Tuniit, 'cause they got adopted.

What would you do if you found out you were one of them?

I don't know. Nobody would touch me then because I'd be too strong.

The next day I saw that the girl who'd stolen my best Polaroid was holding hands with the boy she loved. I was happy for her. I went to her and said that she was the strongest diver I had ever seen. I said that she was so strong that she must have a drop or two of Tuniit blood, and she laughed proudly.

Do you think Lydia's pretty? the girl beside her said.

Sure. I mean probably.

Really? You really want to fuck Lydia?

Probably.

Do you like every girl in this town? said another girl in amazement.

Probably, I said.

Why?

I don't know.

Who do you like best?

You, of course.

If you come live here you'll get a girlfriend, said a girl comfortingly.

Probably, I said.

Now it was midnight. Three boys were silhouetted on the bridge railing against the yellow light. Lydia's cigarette illuminated the breast of her multicolored parka like a Christmas tree light. — Guess this'll freeze me or kill me, aye? said her new boyfriend, diving in. Soon everyone was peeling down, some entirely, and playing in the cool greenish water, boys and girls together and secret. Some came out to sit again on the gravel bank.

Lydia's boyfriend lit a match and said: I like it here, 'cause it's tundra, aye? We got the fattest caribou.

* The Indians of Newfoundland were hunted down and exterminated in the last century.

* The inukshuks around Coral Harbour were particularly well constructed. Their job had once been to scare caribou. They had no job now. Each one crouched with its stone arms extended and its stone knees bent, as if crossing a stream. Every time I looked at it, I thought that it had moved.