North Portal, SK

FRASER CALDERWOOD

Jaime tried not to blame the woman. The mistake had been his. He got sloppy when he crossed into what felt like a less menacing country. Or, after everything, he was still too trusting. Or simply he was tired from living like a rabbit so long.

The town to which this remote house belonged was called North Portal. Jaime had hitched his way to its twin on the North Dakota side, walked in the borderless darkness until he thought he counted enough steps that he must be across.

Then he walked another two hundred steps.

When he’d been forced to walk through the fields before, near Sioux Falls, a brittle snow crust covered the ground. Now it was swampy, blotted with ponds where the earth underneath had not thawed. The night in this season was so still that as he listened for any whir of drones overhead, the smoosh of his own feet in the mud was the loudest and only sound. He’d rationed what food he’d managed to slip into his knapsack at the Walmart in Minot. He looked for shelter.

The absolute cold had yet to settle. He’d heard stories of people freezing to death as they walked. A night could turn murderous, and no jacket they sold south of here could prepare a body for it, even in spring.

The only lights were the gibbous moon and the single yellow pixels of distant windows. Between this field and the one adjacent, leafless trees reached up like the hands of buried giants. The next field looked like it had been left fallow. He passed by three great heaps of dead brush: they would be burned there and the ash spread over the field.

The row of little outbuildings was scarved with stands of aspens, the land around them sculpted by many years of wide-turning tractor wheels. Workers slept here in season, he guessed; the cabins would be deserted now. He tried two doors before one was unlatched. The light switch did nothing but this made him feel safer. For maybe an hour he slumped in the entrance, before searching out a soft place to rest. There was a couch, sunken in the middle. Away in its own tiny room, an unsheeted bed. The little window didn’t look like it opened wide enough for a man. He let himself fall into the couch.

He had set out across the fields as soon as the sun went down, so it would not be very late now, but he had been on the move so long that stillness was a distant memory. In Fargo, he had planned to go straight north and cross near Emerson, Manitoba, a route that was well known. A truck driver who spoke Spanish told him this route was only for those seeking to be apprehended, to claim asylum in Canada. Jaime couldn’t afford to be caught this time, so he set out with the driver west to Minot.

Luis, who was working these days in Alberta, told Jaime there was work there, more money to be made there than elsewhere. Luis was from Guatemala but couldn’t go back. Before Jaime was caught the first time, he and Luis worked a ranch together in Texas, cowboying in heat that was visible rising from the dirt. Luis was older, but his face wore no marks of the life that had been thrown to him. Only his eyes revealed it—so that he looked like a boy who had experienced many past lives. Luis was kind, and soft, and afraid of the cows. However many ranches he drifted between, he couldn’t keep in his head that horses kicked if you surprised them from behind and cows kicked if you came at them from the side, or if they were just irritable.

Jaime’s shoulders and his calves felt like he’d only just lain down, but he must have slept, for the woman when she burst through the door of the cabin woke him up. There was the banging of her boots and then there was a tiny light flicking around, like one of those fish from sunless undersea trenches.

He couldn’t think what to do. Should he bolt? Find a road into a settlement and run until he came upon a church? He didn’t know whether churches here followed the same rules, acted on the same sympathies.

He lay still, breath cupped in his ribs. The swish of his quilted jacket might give him up.

Still she caught him in the light. She was obviously frightened. She had, he thought, a soft look like a mother of young children. Like the mother of his children. No, she was older than Mathilde. Then he remembered. He put his hand out, signalling a halt. Would she let him be in charge of the moment? She flinched when he reached into a pocket. He’d been saving the battery but now he turned the phone on and waited the tense minute for it to work.

Doubtless she had her own phone.

Would Jaime pulling out his remind her—prompt her to call for the police?

“Please,” he croaked. The driver from Minot spoke no Spanish and Jaime hadn’t used his vocal cords all that day.

She said something to him but must have sensed he didn’t comprehend.

He selected what he wanted and trusted her to hold the phone. Mathilde, their daughters, Jeovani. “Please,” he implored. She handed him back the phone. He had to be disciplined to have made it so far, and he shut it off before tucking it way.

He took the gesture to mean “stay.” She shut the door. In the stillness Jaime heard the sink of her boots, a truck motor.

So that’s how it went. All he had to go on was this one gesture that he kept replaying in his mind. And he had to trust the woman because he needed to rest. He had to trust her because he had to lie down and let the bad humours of the stress pour out of him, the bile

that chewed his esophagus like a dog, the poison blood that eroded his strength. He had to trust her because he needed to wait out the daylight to walk to Estevan. The highway from there would take him into Alberta. Luis joked that he could be a cowboy in Alberta if he wanted. He’d do what paid; he’d be happy to be with Luis again. If he trusted the woman, he could feel safe for the first time since leaving home.

He discovered that he was weeping. It was a thing he had not done all this time, not since Texas, when the first plan failed. All the way through deportation

and transit and even when he was home with Mathilde and the children, he still couldn’t relax enough to cry. He never talked to Mathilde about it, about how he had failed. She knew what they owed on the land; his family’s land was collateral on the loan for Jaime’s passage. It didn’t produce reliably anymore. There had been a substantial change in the climate, and it was never right since. He’d known from the time he could walk what to do on the farm, the blood and bone and shit that went into the soil, but nothing he could do could make up for the change.

Some hours later he pulled back the old orange curtain to look out on the day. The bleached stems of last year’s wheat stuck up from the ground like fish bones. Against the blue towered a white grain elevator. The painted logo was a giant eye that seemed to surveil him. Jaime shut the curtain.

Mathilde worked in a factory, stitching clothes. Her bus left while the light was still blue and dim and it took an hour and a half. The plan that failed had been for Jaime to find stable work and then send for the family. This could be difficult, too—he knew of a woman who’d travelled up with her husband and found work at a burger franchise in Salt Lake City. On her way home from work a car struck her. They didn’t know she was undocumented, the franchise owner said. Probably she should go back to her own country to recover from the broken pelvis.

When Mathilde saw him walking up to the house (upon which they now owed ten thousand American

for his botched plan) he spied the dismay on her face immediately. But what could she do? She told the whole community her dear husband was back. They threw a party, which sang and groaned and sweated long into the night and overran the morning, the rum endless. Jeovani was born nine months after. There weren’t choices. Women had been jailed even for miscarrying. This is how it had been the first time as well, when they’d had to marry.

He woke again and went to look out the other side of the little house to see any obstacles on the path ahead. Some of the ground ahead looked black but and he thought it was burned or blighted, but then the light shifted and he saw it was under the shadow of a cloud. There was just no other distinction in the landscape.

It must have been late in the afternoon. The sun looked like it was moving faster through the sky than it had when he looked out earlier. The iris of that big searching “eye” on the grain elevator was actually a P, for Paterson. Jaime lay down again.

The second journey was inevitable. As soon as he was arrested he’d known he would be coming up along these same routes again. There was nothing else for it: they would lose the land if he didn’t send money back fast. America seemed a more hostile place on the second trip, but it was a tribulation he had to pass through. He would not be bringing Mathilde and the children. Jaime would work up north and send them all the money he could. It was a more efficient way out of their trouble, he assured Mathilde. He could stay in the small apartment with Luis and pay hardly any rent, work a morning job and an evening one if he could get them.

Night was coming on when he heard the vehicle approach.

Jaime had felt the air change, like swimming off a shelf into deeper water.

In the purple dusk the police lights kaleidoscoped over bare walls.

Should he run now? Would there be enough light to see him slip over the fields?

If she had called the police immediately, he could have forgiven her. To be afraid, Jaime understood. More so in such dark. A woman alone, no electricity. Jaime stood taller even than Luis. He remembered the way the man’s chin pestled his collarbone, their last rough embrace before Jaime was arrested.

If she had called the police as soon as she shut him in the cabin, Jaime would have understood. He thought about her again; in his memory her body looked like a pile of sandbags.

If she had acted merely out of fear…

But she had gone home. She had waited all night and all day. This was her reasoned-out idea of what was moral.

Jaime had waited too long and now he was caught for sure.

The pickup was stopped. Jaime peered out. The cop looked like a child to him. He was doing whatever it was cops did before stepping out of their vehicles. Texting a mistress. Filling in paperwork. Clicking off the safety on his weapon.

He heard the door open and then clunk shut. The bootsteps moved away, toward the other cabin. This cop was here on faulty information, anyway.

Jaime might still get out. He checked the zippers on the knapsack, threw his coat on. There was only the front door or a window if there was one wide enough. He’d do best to go while the cop searched one of the adjacent cabins. Yet as he went for the door he heard the young cop again outside.

He was circling the other cabin or coming this way, it was hard to tell.

Even on a still night, a man still had to pause a step or two to light a smoke. Jaime heard the gap in the rhythm of his steps, the flick of the lighter. Through the space between the curtain and the edge of the window, Jaime could see the young cop praying into his hands.

And then.

Jaime would have laughed if he had not bitten his tongue.

The smoke, when it slipped into his nostrils: mari- juana. The police had sent some burnout stoner kid to deal with the threat. This kid was out here, thinking he was alone in this field, getting stoned on a call.

Jaime watched the guy go and perch on the bump- er of his pickup. The flint clicked and the flame sprang up again and he sucked a breath deep into his lungs and savoured it there.

He was so long smoking this joint that the last light emptied from the sky. The guy didn’t turn when Jaime slipped out onto the little covered porch, though Jaime feared he hadn’t been stealthy enough. He wondered if the cop was trying to recall constellations. Again he feared he’d be caught when he disturbed an animal in the field. He thought it was a yellow dog but as it loped away he knew it was a coyote, and he was lucky.

He picked his way through fields, only soaking one foot in a pond through it all. He skirted the few hous- es in Estevan while everyone still slept, was out on the highway for the dawn. The driver who slowed down for him looked South Asian. How did such a man end up out here, doing this? he wondered. The two men under- stood they had no ability to communicate with one an- other. It didn’t matter. Jaime was on his way west now to where Luis waited. How frivolous a thing among all these mortal concerns: to be so in love for the first time in his life.