If you don't like me, it's OK, he said. I'll give you some money for the hotel and then go away. Yes or no?
I don't know, she wrote on a piece of paper.
Reepah, I love you.
Same here, she wrote.
Reepah, I want you happy. I want everything for you.
I like Montréal. I am sad I don't have money.
Don't be sad. I don't have much money but I'll give you a little bit.
I want some beer, please.
In our room at the hotel, he said, not wanting to have to get her at the police station.
Way not read now? I am sick. I am tired.
They went walking late after midnight down to Chinatown and then back up the hill to Sherbrooke Street and she cried: Wow! Look at those lights! Just like good orange Inukjuak berries!
That was about the only time she sounded happy over anything but beer. He had wanted to give her something good and she had wanted to come there, but nothing that came from him could reach her, not even Montréal's streets, which were a guitar of light.
Thirty or forty feet high, and therefore up in the clouds, a small lake had been set in rock by God. The rapids from this made a foamy white fall as soft and pure as caribou hair. Crowberries, grasses and lichens grew on and between the rock shapes around the pool, so that the grayness of the place was softened by green, red and yellow. A cool wind blew away some of the clouds like smoke, leaving zones of blue as sweet as anything in Italy. It seemed here above the bog of caribou skulls (the place so lovely with grass-antlers nodding even on foam-sprayed rock) that the foreverness of the Barren Lands was something lovely like the eternal echo of a bell — something secret, too, like whatever sensibility she had — her consciousness or integrity, both of which were either eroding or else withdrawing from his like those shrinking clouds.
In the lake itself, just where the falls commenced, rose a low rock-island, faceless like an irregular crystal (in other words, shaped just like any other rock-mass hereabouts), and it was close enough to the bank that a strong man might be able to leap onto it. He was not a strong man but he wasn't weak, either. On that day when he had walked away from Reepah's house because they loved each other in a sad and terrible way that made her steal his blue pills until she passed out snoring while the baby cried and shat on the floor, he proposed a contest with himself to see if he could reach that rock with a running lunge — the loser being by definition he who missed, and was therefore whirled down the rapids. He landed on the rock, had no sensation of winning, paced awhile, turned, jumped back, and missed, of course. For an instant, just before the cold water got him, he saw Reepah's face shining as if in darkness, watching him with hurt black eyes, her lips slightly parted as if she were about to scream in pain and terror. Then the falls had him, and every stone he grabbed slipped out of his hands, and he was thumped and choked and chilled and bruised all the way down. It was a warm and windy day, so when he got out he didn't shiver much. He walked back to Reepah's house, squish-squish-squish. .
Reepah?
Reepah, why did you come to Montréal with me?
I don't know.
Reepah, today you don't talk to me. So I get afraid you don't like me.
I want drunk.
You don't like me. You only like drunk.
She was clapping all by herself on the balcony, smiling and nodding and in the street below her people were beginning to jump up and down in the happiness that the music gave them and the musicians were stamping their feet and dry ice smoked in all colors from the stage and the musicians whirled their arms and everyone went: Aaaaaah!
Aah, whispered Reepah on the balcony, not looking at him.
The next morning she slept until checkout time, and when he woke her up so that he wouldn't have to pay for another day she cried: Aaah! Doan' wake up me! I'm hot. I doan' like you.
Eureka Sound, Ellesmere Island, Northwest
Before he ever met Reepah he'd been farther north at summer's end where the ripples in the leads flowed like chevrons, like herringbones. At the edge of a gray ice-islet, slush crumbled steadily into the water with a hissing noise.
In the evening there was a pencil-thick line of clear sky across the fjord, and he could see the white streak of ice in the middle and the white and brown land to the south, amputated miraculously flat and even by the fog-knife, and a steady steam noise came from the weather station, the buildings and petrol towers standing silhouetted in the fog like a great city. A streetlight glowed in front of the dome of the H building, and other lights glowed behind it — as his joy would do in Inukjuak when she held him sleeping in the tent with the baby between them; when she actually loved and trusted him. A truck rolled across the red and blue pontoon bridge. It was the Inuk handyman again taking him and many friendly soldiers to the dump to feed slops to the wolves, but there was only one fox and one seagull and the soldiers stood with their cameras dangling in disappointment. They were scheduled to fly to Alert on the thirteenth and back to Ottawa on the fifteenth. They worried about the pastries, wishing that they could lose twenty pounds. (Shivering in his tent, he wished that he could gain twenty pounds. It was very gray in there and he could see his breath and his iron-frozen boots hurt to touch.)
He was at the end of a long journey, waiting for the supply plane to come and take him home. He'd been far from the soldiers in a country that began with a lake which was a gray mirror the color of the sky, with nothing else but a low ridge-horizon. From this lake he'd walked up the ridge that was very snowy and white and gently treacherous because he could not see the top of it in the fog (although he kept thinking that he could), and half-frozen tussocks burst out of it, half-soft, but crushed hard and slippery so that his feet glided off and fell hard in an ankle-deep snowhole, over and over, every few steps. Reepah never fell when she was sober. A low ridge of cloud circumnavigated him. Pastel-white mountains pulsed in the yellow light. It was 26° F. Half a month later he'd come back and the gray lake was frozen. He'd wanted to drink from it before. It was supper-time, and he was thirsty so he chopped a piece out and melted it on his stove. It tasted like burned desolation. He was lonely but not yet thinking of Reepah because he didn't know her, and he wasn't thinking of the lake in Inukjuak because he hadn't been there; later he'd say to himself: those two lakes were the same. They were one lake, the lake of my wrongdoing. What did I do wrong?