Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley Page A

nostalgia was a less polished brand. He talked about Kristjan like Kristjan was in the room and Ed was bringing up these stories with me to razz him. Like we were all shooting the shit over beers, recalling the glory days, the three of us. There was a kind of recklessness around the edges of his stories that I hadn’t heard before, that made me wary. But I listened. I nodded my head and asked small questions and let Kristjan spill, drunk and disorderly, into the room.
    Ed stopped talking suddenly and cocked his head to the side. He put a finger to his ear. ‘You hear that?’
    Just the mosquito song of the fluorescent light. I shook my head.
    ‘Quiet, right?’ he said. We listened again and now I heard that the Peewees’ high-pitched shouts, the puck tocks and blade rasps, were gone. Ed’s office flooded with the absence.
    ‘That means I’m on.’ He grinned quickly, feeling the pocket of his old dress shirt, and then grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair.
    I watched him pull the Zamboni out of its bay, his palm drawing the steering wheel in a slow circle, popping the gears, the Zamboni’s black bulk jumping slightly and then falling into a sluggish pace, trailing a tail of gleaming ice behind it. Ed looked over and steered toward me. He shouted down from the high black chair, over the boards, ‘Talk to you again soon, Norse.’ Then he winked and drove off. The Zamboni ambled slow across the empty rink. In its wake, strips of licked-raw ice, perfectly aligned.
    ‘S hove over, then,’ Sig said and perched awkwardly on the bed’s edge. I wormed over to the other side and Sig paused, my expectant breath at her elbow. I reached beside my bed and hauled up a photo album, the blue one all cracked at the corners like dry lips.
    ‘I’ve got one,’ Sig said and shuffled around in the album until she found the newspaper clipping the colour of a nicotine stain.
    Norse Giant Crushes Pykes.
Kristjan, a teenager, winced, crunching a wan-faced opponent along the boards.
    ‘I’ve heard this one,’ I said gently. ‘I think.’
    ‘No, no,’ Sig was impatient; I could hear the words building up gritty in her throat. ‘You haven’t heard this one. Just listen.’
    She cleared her throat, a loose rattle. This sound made goose-bumps wave up along my arms, underneath the flannel pyjamas. Sig’s Ready-Go whistle. Her voice would change now; it would get bigger. She’d be a different person.
    ‘Well, then. You see, Kristjan, he wasn’t always this big.’ Sig tapped the photo with her wedding band. ‘In fact, when he was your age, he was smaller than most kids. A real runt, you know? Much smaller than you. And he was probably about your age when he met the bear.’ Sig paused for dramatic effect, and I didn’t move, breaths long and sleep-heavy, eyes measuring Sig’s mouth in dreamy sweeps.
    ‘Well, so Kristjan was taking Elskin for a run, out back of the Keewatin baseball diamonds – that old path where we saw the beaver with its babies and the snapping turtle last summer? You know the one. I warned Kristjan not to go back there. “You’ll be eaten by a bear,” I told him, but when he started running, that boy, it’s like his legs kidnapped the rest of his body, mind of their own, you know. So he finds himself on this path, sun going down. “You be back before sunset,” I told him, but his legs wouldn’t listen. And it’s real quiet on the path, just old Elskin panting and Kristjan’s heart going
ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.
And the path runs beside the lake, so he can see it the whole time, and you know how when you see the lake, it’s as though it’s watching you and Kristjan feels safe.
    ‘It starts with a rustling in the bush, like it always does, in all the scary movies. But it’s real this time. Kristjan looks up to the treetops, and I’d always told him, “If you see one tree shaking when there isn’t any wind, that’s a bear scratching its back on the bark.” And sure enough, there’s