Quilaq

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Quilaq - book excerpt

Stokeland. It sits at a fork between two roads, one a thick, commercial highway bedevilled by ice for ninety percent of the year; the other a stripped, frozen weave of a road, impassable for ten months out of twelve and huddled beneath wedges of brilliant white snow. It is a wonder that Stokeland has any inhabitants at all; but it does, over a hundred souls.

Angie Barker is one. She sits in Shay's, Stokeland’s only bar, watching the snow come again. It is just before lunch and a few townsfolk have made it in as well, their snow mobiles parked beside each other outside. They have come for the steamed moosemeat and sourdough, and some will chase it down with whiskey; Yukon Jack if they can afford it. Angie has cleaned the bar, ready for them, rinsing out the dirty glasses left from the night before and sweeping the sticky carpet, musky with sweat and the urgency of payday. Men come to the bar and spend their money from trapping or the zinc mines, as soon as they make it. They leave dull fingerprints on the pool table and the shiny surface of the bar, grubby reminders that they have yet to make enough to leave and head south where it is warmer.

Angie is thirty-nine and has been for a number of years. She is too heavy and her skin is too blotched for her to be anything other than a functional barmaid; the trappers and miners do not come into Shay's to see her, only to drink beer. She hasn’t had to slap a hand away from her breasts for over six months. Not even after Ray Sullivan’s divorce party. He’d been wanting to leave Wanda for an age and she finally let him after finding out he’d been seeing a stripper over in Tramper’s Creek, where he tried to trade with the Inuit.

Shay’s Bar had been packed the night of the divorce party. Jackie and Connor, men who worked down Stokeland’s zinc mine and were never apart, hugged a table, swaying together. Others, faces she couldn’t place, beamed over lines of shots. Shay’s Bar pulsed and throbbed the night Ray Sullivan’s divorce came through. By the time Angie stepped outside for a smoke, her shirt was damp from the unexpected exercise of running between kegs and optics.

In a roundabout way, Angie thinks as she wipes the bar, Ray’s divorce has led to her being here, right this moment, waiting for one particular fellow to show. Today was her day off; she didn’t have to be in. She could have stayed in her room above the bar, where a stove keeps ice at bay and she could watch Days of Our Lives on repeat. Instead she was passing the time, sweeping floors that had already been swept and washing glasses that were already clean, waiting for Gerry the Gin to make an appearance.

“I don’t actually like gin, but it’s a thing that’s stuck.” That had been the night of Ray’s party. Gerry the Gin had traded his furs to the Inuits that day and, like too many Stokelanders, had come to drink away his money before being driven back into the snow to snare more animals. His eyes had the sunken, overbright look of someone pinned into an addled, swilled-in-beer way of life, and the breath coming off him was foul. Angie had hung back at the bar, nudging the stubs of whiskey to him. But Gerry’s shirt was clean and he still had a rough edge of an accent. It was enough to intrigue, in the washed-up room.

“That so? Nickname like that and you don’t like gin.” Angie nodded conversationally but still kept back from the fetid plumes drifting from the man’s mouth. “Well, what else could it be?”

“Nickname? Hell, I don’t know. Why does a man need a nickname anyway? Foxes and hares I skin couldn’t give a tuppenny fuck what I’m called.”

“Right,” and Angie was about to move away, recognising the tipping point all men reached when booze had sloshed around in their stomachs for long enough.

“When’d you get here?” Gerry the Gin asked.

“When did I move to Stokeland?” Angie paused with her hand resting on a pump and thought hard. Santa Monica had been her home for the first thirty years, then Vancouver, with a man. That hadn’t worked out and he’d left her with a cracked rib and venereal disease. Bar jobs, drifting north. Then Stokeland. “Can’t remember, exactly. Five, six years, maybe.”

“Can’t remember either.” Gerry winked and downed the shot of whiskey. “Left Skye in the forties, that much I do know.”

“Skye?”

“The Isle of Skye. My dad was torpedoed at the end of 1944. Nothing else for my mother to do but start again somewhere. Canada as good a place as any.”

Someone shouted at that point, Angie remembered, and a glass had smashed. Paul Shay, owner of the bar and a definite non-taker of bullshit, swore loudly and marched round to where Ray Sullivan and his friends were shuffling their feet. Angie watched, their heads bobbing, slurred promises given. A brush appeared from somewhere and a chastened man began sweeping.

Gerry the Gin chuckled into his glass. “Aye, Stokeland is a good a place as any.” And then, “unless I were to ever find Quilaq.”

Wiping a cloth over a beer tap as she waited for Gerry to show, Angie remembers how she felt when he said that strange word. It was as though someone rubbed an ice cube behind her bellybutton: her stomach instantly began to ache, although the sensation was not exactly unpleasant. Quilaq. A word she somehow knew but had never said out-loud before. Qu-il-ack. And then, the night of Ray’s party the cold in her stomach seemed to spread and she felt swollen with a longing to find out more, to understand, to know about Quilaq. But Gerry the Gin had fallen asleep, propped against the bar, and then he left. So Angie now waits for him to appear again, so she can hear him say that word again. What does it mean? Is it a place? Quilaq.

* * *

And here he is again, Gerry the Gin. Angie has been waiting for him most of the morning, and finally sees him through the window of Shay’s Bar, his form braced against the snow, arms wrapped around his body in resignation as he climbs down from his battered old truck, which looks incongruous next to the snow mobiles. He tramps towards the door. A blast of cold air, white flakes skidding haphazardly across the floor, and the man is inside. It’s been a week since Ray Sullivan’s party and Gerry has been trapping again.

When Gerry first said that word, the night of Ray’s divorce party, Angie thought she’d misheard, or he really had toppled into the space laid bare by booze, the space where words make no sense. Quilaq. That wasn’t a word.

But he said it again and his face took on a dreamy yet clear kind of expression that pinned Angie to the floor.

“Quilaq. The Inuits say it’s a real place. A city in the clouds. Sometimes I reckon I seen it. Shadows, ken. And the smells. Baking. Meat, roasting.” Gerry’s eyes closed softly. He smiled. “Shangri-La. You never heard the stories?”

She has been waiting to see him all week. The night of Ray’s party, a moment after Gerry spoke, someone else had broken another glass and Paul Shay had started shouting. He was intolerant of breakages: glass was expensive to buy in Stokeland. Angie had to come from behind the bar to smooth things over and, when she was done, Gerry had folded into a heap on his barstool, a mozzarella thread of drool sliding down his arm. He had left soon after, blundering out into the night.

And now here he is, after seven long days spreading the length of his weight onto the snow, setting his snares so he can catch ptarmigan. Angie has spent that time with the word thrumming through her brain. Quilaq. When she cleaned the beer pumps. Quilaq. When she cooked up vats of chilli for the regulars. Quilaq. When she tried to sleep in her narrow bed, the television blinking out rolls of grey static.

Quilaq. It seems to speak to a part of her that she has tucked away so deeply she has forgotten it existed. It cracks open a compressed vault, allowing other memories to flow out: egg custard, the smell of rose water on fresh towels. The crease of her grandmother’s neck. With the scent of the old lady’s talcum powder in her nose, Angie searched for Gerry the Gin’s face each night amongst the men propping up Shay's Bar, disappointment when he didn’t show folding her stomach into a hot crush.

Now, after a long week, the old man crunches into Shay’s Bar and peels back his wet coat. His bones protrude from his pale skin and he has the look of hunger Angie has seen on other men who spend too long on their own. He pulls himself up onto a stool and raises an eyebrow when she pushes a plate of chilli across the bar.

“In all my years, a woman has never given me food freely,” he says.

“I want to talk about Quilaq,” Angie replies. She turns away and reappears with two shots of whiskey.

Gerry whistles when he sees them. “You really do.”

“It’s just – I haven’t heard the word before, I’m sure. But then I must have. Since you said it, I’ve not been able to think of anything else.”

Gerry says nothing until he has cleared his plate and knocked back the first shot of Yukon Jack. He breathes out heavily, gales of spiced foulness billowing into Angie’s face. She does not step back, though, and grips the beer pumps.

“I haven’t eaten for over a day,” and Gerry accepts an offered cigarette. “That was mighty welcome.”

Angie shrugs. They smoke, odd companions for a cold, snow-bitten afternoon.

“Most folk round here will have heard of Quilaq,” Gerry says, eventually. “But they’ll likely think it’s a story. Stuff you tell a kiddie at bedtime. You know. Like the big bad wolf or the witch. Those kinds of tales.”

“You didn’t talk the other night as though you thought it was a tale,” Angie says.

Gerry shrugs. “I spend too long out on the tundra. Sleeping on the ground, dirt for a pillow. Earth and moss in my mouth when I wake up.”

“But what about the Inuits? You said they believe Quilaq is real.”

“Girl, why do you want to know so much?”

To which, Angie does not have an answer. She cannot unlock the ravel of her tongue to smooth out a straight, linear answer: the truth – that Quilaq makes her think of her grandmother’s house, the one place she felt safe – sounds crazy. She can imagine a cautious look coming over Gerry’s face, falling shutter-like over his eyes. She can see him edge carefully to the door, waving away the offer of another drink or smoke.

So instead she picks up a cloth and begins wiping down the bar. “I thought I knew most of the places round here, is all.”

Gerry studies her for a long moment, rheumy eyes leaking down his cheeks. The glare off the snow can be eviscerating; Angie does not venture outside without her sunglasses. But crowsfeet around Gerry’s eyes show he wears no glasses and hunts his animals with a screwed-up face, a grimace against the balls of fur and feather giving him a livelihood. He peers at Angie in silence until her cheekbones ache with keeping still.

“Yeah, the folks I meet believe it’s a real place.” Gerry accepts another cigarette. “Not like our kind of real, ken. Not like being-on-a-map real.”

“What kind of real, then?”

“I don’t know. Look, this old native I see from time to time. One of the Inuits who live beyond the Kirk Straits, amongst the caribou. Well, you get this fellow drunk enough, or cold enough, and he’ll tell you about it.” Gerry glances at the whorls of snow gathering pace outside the window. “Put a frozen man by a fire and his mouth will warm up with his soul. He’s told me things about this place, Quilaq. The way it’s timeless.”

“Timeless?”

“It was hard to understand, ken. I don’t talk much in their way and he knew only bits and pieces of our way. But that’s what he meant. The years don’t matter there.”

Angie sighs and places a gathering hand over her face. The trapper made no sense.