She seemed done with talking, thrust a notebook at them and said, “Write down your address. I’ll be in touch.” Then she sent them on their way.
70. moonlight
Autumn lurched clumsily out of the equinox, black ice one day, sunlight polishing tree branches the next. A few straggler tourists were still underfoot, as irritating as gravel. Jeanne, who worked weekends at an information kiosk, collected (as everyone did) their idiotic questions, especially those from the Americans who thought it might be shorter to drive from Halifax to Antigonish counting miles rather than kilometers.
“I’m late, I’m late,” muttered Felix, a white rabbit running through the kitchen, snatching a half-cooked pork chop from the pan and dashing up the stairs.
“Don’t eat that pork — it’s still raw,” shouted Alice. “Use some sense. And you got some mail.” Felix, simultaneously changing clothes and chewing on the red pork, looked at the clock. On his way to the back door through the kitchen he dropped the pork chop back in the pan and picked up the buff envelope, saw “Breitsprecher Tree Project” and a Chicago address in the upper left corner. He stopped, turned the envelope over.
“Jeanne get one, too, just like that,” said Alice, nodding at Jeanne’s plate, the envelope standing against it. “Late again — something she has to do at the school.”
Felix tore the end off the envelope and pulled out a letter. Something fell out as he unfolded it and fluttered under the table. He read the letter and read it again, not understanding. It informed him that he was the recipient of a five-thousand-dollar fellowship from the Breitsprecher Tree Project and was signed by someone named Jason Bloodroot. What did it mean? Once more he read the letter, retrieved the check from the floor. It was made out to Felix Sel, it looked real. The letter said he was to contact Dr. Sapatisia Sel within ten days for further information about the project.
“I’ll be double damn,” he said. “Doctor Sapatisia Sel.” There was her address and her cell phone number. He whooped so loudly that Jeanne, outside in the street, heard. She came in to find them dancing around the table, tore open her identical letter.
“You call her,” said Felix. “It’s you who connected us with her. So you phone.”
• • •
The next day over the supper plates Felix studied the provincial highway map looking for an alternate route. “The trip was too long last time. But how about this”—he jabbed his pencil into the map—“a shortcut.” Jeanne was old enough to know that no man on earth could be deterred from taking an unknown shortcut.
And now the lime-green rental car thumped into the darkening morning. The coast road would have been better. The shortcut was like driving up a dry river bed. Despite the rental car’s chopped-off look (as though a log slasher had got it), Jeanne thought it a technological marvel. She began poking at the GPS touch screen.
The back road was a roller coaster of broken asphalt. The car could not catch the rhythm of the frost heaves. There were no towns, no houses, only third-growth spruce and brush representing the great forest of an earlier century. At the height of land they could see the dulled ocean and its grey line of rain. Tiny drops speckled the windshield.
“I don’t think this is the tourist route,” said Felix, steering around a dead branch. “Not sure where we are. And this city car doesn’t like it.”
“But we can see the water, so the highway has to be between us and the shore. When you see a right turn, take it.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost eleven. We’ll be late.”
The car scraped through a series of potholes. Something dark and thin ran across the road.
“What was that?”
“Mink, one of those big escaped ones from the mink farms.”
“You remember what Dr. Onehube said about those farms — pollute the rivers and the minks get out and breed with wild minks and make bad genetic changes?” The road degenerated into a stew of stones and mud. Felix clenched the wheel, drove very slowly, and the car struggled forward.
“You know,” Felix said, “I found out something interesting about Dr. Sapatisia Sel. Guess.”
“What, she was elected prom queen back in the day?”
“Not likely. She was married. Married to somebody we know.”
“Who!” Jeanne did not believe it. How could her hero have married anyone?
“Well, not somebody we actually know — someone we heard talk.”
“No, you don’t mean that Onehube?”
“Yes. She was his student. And they got married.”
Jeanne shuddered. She preferred to think of Sapatisia as a Lone Heroine.
“Anyway, what difference does it make? They were divorced.”
Jeanne said nothing.
“Onehube’s okay. He got us going.”
“Wonder why they split up.”
• • •
They descended the hill, passed assemblages of motley boards and corrugated roofing, one with a hopeless FOR SALE sign. Abruptly the clouds began to rip open like rotten cloth, showing bright blue underskirts. As a slice of sunlight painted the drenched countryside, touched the sea, a flight of migrating birds cut the sky like crazy little scissors.
“We’ll get there pretty soon,” said Felix. “But I don’t know where we are.”
Jeanne began tracing her finger over the GPS touch screen. A tiny red dot on a crumpled string of a road appeared. “Look, Felix! It shows us on this road!”
“All right!” said Felix. Jeanne promised herself she would buy this model of car if she ever had the money. Suddenly a loud female voice said, “In a half kilometer turn right.” Jeanne shrieked.
“You don’t get out into the world enough,” said Felix, swinging onto the wet highway. The sun changed the macadam surface to black lacquer and in a few kilometers they passed the lighthouse.
• • •
There was Sapatisia Sel’s red pickup, beside it a rust-blotched sedan and a jeep so muddy it had no other color. Felix parked next to the jeep. At the lee side of the house they saw two large tents. A sign on one read MEN.
“The other one must be for women,” said Jeanne. “Are they toilets?”
“Now you sound like a tourist. The outhouse is over there,” he told her and jerked his thumb toward the unmistakable small building on the cliff. The northern harrier sat on its branch, eyeing them. “I say the tents are for sleeping.”
“Let’s go in.” The harrier rattled a loud tektektektek.
• • •
The room looked different, richer in a homely way. The stolen picnic table was cluttered with papers, two laptops, a carton of almond milk and some plastic plates. Sapatisia, two young women — one with elaborately coiffed black hair, the other white-blond — and a sun-darkened man in a checked lumberjack shirt sat at the table drinking tea — wintergreen, thought Jeanne, catching the sprightly aroma — and eating take-out fried chicken legs.
“You made it,” said Sapatisia. She was still in dirty jeans and the heavy grey sweater. “Sit down and have something. The coleslaw — where is it—” She half-rose.
“I’ve got it,” said the man. His eyes looked bruised. He was older than the others, tall and thin, with a scar that torqued his mouth into a crooked slant. He stretched out a long arm and pushed the coleslaw bowl down the table. He looked at Jeanne and Felix.