and an undisturbed hour in a sleeping bag. I can’t afford Hawaii or even Mexico. This is a mini-holiday for me, to doze in this honey-coloured sunlight with only the voices of lake gulls and a squirrel for company and the faraway drone of a truck downshifting on the highway. S.B. heaves a big sigh and stretches out below me. My lungs fill up with a big whiff of lake water and cottonwood sap. Heaven on earth, yes indeed, heaven...
The big Balm of Gilead rolls toward her, half its leaves and branches underwater and its huge clump of roots covered with dirt, small rocks and grass. Her breathing hurts, big ragged gasps, her arms flail at what looks like a branch. The tree rolls again. She finds one foot wedged in some of its unseen branches. She kicks free, grabbing onto a big branch, dripping with muddy river water. She gropes her way along the trunk, stepping underwater most of the way. The tree must be thirty metres long! It seems to be slipping sideways into a backwater, no, a small dead-end canyon with steep shale cliffs rising up. She looks up, sees a maroon truck, 1950s vintage with a gleaming paint job, tilting nose-down into the saskatoon bushes, dangerously close to the cliffs. A man in a green workshirt slumps over the steering wheel.
“Look out!” shrieks a dirty white gull perching on top of the roots.
“Mind yer own damn business!” squawks another who lands beside the first one.
She looks up at the cliffs again to find the truck but she has to concentrate on hanging on as the tree starts a sickening sideways roll, the upper end of its leaves and branches sucked back into the main current, its clump of roots an anchor in the backwaters. Then she sees the police cruiser and two people, a woman and a man in khaki uniforms, passing binoculars between them directly across the small coulee from the crashed truck. The man inside the truck is beginning to move but they’re looking at her, not at him.
“Truck! Crash!” she shouts, using her left hand to point at the truck. The binoculars stay fixed in her direction.
“Truck, there!” she yells again, as the man in the maroon truck starts to crawl out the driver’s side window and collapses.
The tree trunk straightens out and she has to use both hands to grab on as it picks up speed. Ahead, there is nothing but brown water, wide as a lake, filled with uprooted trees like hers and big chunks of ice. The riverbanks rise up steeply through a misty green haze of trees and bushes.
Beside her swims a green and yellow garter snake, a puzzled look on its petite reptile face. She straddles the tree trunk and leans over to pick up the snake at the place where its neck should be. It goes limp. She places it gently in front of her on the massive trunk where it busies itself into a neat coil with its head looking her way and its tiny forked tongue hanging off to one side.
“Thank you, you really didn’t need to do that but I’m truly grateful,” says the snake, in a voice belonging to Aunt Ginger. She/it heaves a wheezy sigh of relief. All those slim port cigarillos.
The tree starts to roll again and she and the snake exchange startled looks. She climbs to her feet, crouching over like a circus horse rider. Two deer swim past, a doe and a young buck with velvet horns, eyes flashing white. They are all heading for a steep bank, which the river is carving away in big chunks. The deer reach it first, their shining black hooves daintily battering at the cutbank, trying to gain a foothold. The bank keeps caving in. The river sucks them back away from the land and she starts to scream now, feeling the icy water for the first time, feeling trapped by something relentless. Her tree smashes into another tree, an even larger one. Her wretched knees lock instead of buckling to absorb the impact and then, oh no, she pitches forward into the cold blackness.
I smash my head on the teapot, spilling lukewarm liquid down my neck. My arms are trapped and so are my legs. Sleeping bag. I remember now. I extract my left arm and roll away from the spilled tea and crushed biscuits on the floor beside the chaise lounge. Good grief. I finally pry myself out of the sleeping bag and head for the porch door, tripping on the compost pail and knocking over the tin watering can half-full of diluted Alaska fish fertilizer.
“No!” I wail and haul myself up, reaching for the mop in the far corner of the deck. Sadie Brown jumps around me and sticks her nose into the smelly brown stuff and is about to take an experimental slurp.
“No!” I screech at her. “Get out of it, go on!” She slinks around to the armchair on the deck. “Get off that chair!” I yell. She claws the screen door open and scuttles into the cottage.
I mop up and go out on the deck. I plop down on the wicker armchair, to recover and to apologize to my dog.
“Come here, darling dog,” I warble soothingly. No toenails clicking on hardwood floors.
“S.B., I’m sorry, come here and I’ll give you a paw massage.” After several long seconds I hear a series of subdued clicks, then the squeak of the screen door. She is holding the door open with her nose and giving me a reproachful sidelong look. I use both palms to beat out an enthusiastic drum roll on my knees. Even this does not move her.
“Come here, best buddy, I done you wrong, I bamboozled my brain with a big, bad bang, I butter you up bountifully for being such a bag!”
All the “b” words are her favourites—don’t ask me why—and I succeed with this big batch of them. She pads over, tail still tucked under in disgrace mode.
I hug her with gusto, skunk smell and all. The cider vinegar anti-skunk rinse and herbal dog shampoo compete for olfactory points. True to my word, I deliver a paw massage. Shiatsu for canines. I really should patent it, write a book. People would line up in droves to buy it. Full colour illustrations. How-To Shiatsu For Your Familiar And You. S.B. pants happily. A dog smile returns to her long black lips and the eyes I adore return my loveshine a hundred-fold.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered the floating tree, the flooding river or the squawking gulls. I think I dreamt some of it last night too. This whole scenario feels very fresh. I don’t like this movie. I don’t care to see how it ends, thank you very much. But I’d better send it up to Norman. It’s a live one.
Three
I look at the screen, scroll through the two-page report for Norman Szabo one more time and send it off.
In less than five minutes, my phone rings. “Hiya, Norman,” I say.
“Yikes! You’re really getting good at this stuff!” A small amount of static interferes with the wires from Whitehorse but there is no mistaking the bass rumble of Norman Joe Szabo.
“Nah, you know I’m the ultra-rational type, eh? I figured if you were home from work by six o’clock, chances were very good I’d hear from you pronto.”
“Yes, ma’am. You’re the third report in today, two yesterday and...I’ve got another one on the go here.”
Norman is the only person in the world who calls me “ma’am” besides store clerks who size me up and figure, quite rightly, that I’m past the “May I help you, Miss?” stage of life. But with Norman, it’s okay. It makes me feel like Miss Kitty to his Matt Dillon. I’ve never met Norman except via our correspondence and the telephone. He’s got a great voice.
“Mercy? Are you still there? Can you hear me?” The great voice is talking. The great daydreamer wafts back to earth.
“Yes, I’m here. Sorry.”
“Okay, good. Now, I’m just curious. Is this one a night incident or daytime?”
“Both,
