that her father clear-cut in the twenties, and how she hasn’t accepted a cent of his death-trip fortune since she dropped out of college. She describes the month-long solo camping trips she takes each summer, bouncing from national parks to secret plots of land, swimming holes, and hidden hot springs. “It’s just me, a few sacks of rice, soybeans, and chickpeas, my sleeping bag, and the great North American forests as my own personal rec room.”
“That sounds real nice,” her uncle says in a flat tone that suggests he’s not one for the outdoors.
“So where to?” Willow asks after the van coughs to life, realizing that she and Harris didn’t discuss where to deliver Everett once she’d retrieved him.
He shifts on the beaded seat cover. “There’s something I need to do in Saskatchewan,” he says, almost bashfully. “And I plan to hop one of those airplane flights to get there.”
Willow shakes her head. “Saskatchewan’s close. You’d be better off just taking the train east from here.”
At this, she swears he shudders. “I’ve had my fill of trains,” he says with a masklike expression. She remembers her father mentioning one Christmas after he’d drunk too much sake that Everett had been a hobo during the Great Depression, a train-hopper, and a veteran of the First World War before that, details that seemed utterly prehistoric. “And besides,” Everett adds. “I need to check in with my parole officer in Vancouver before I go anywhere.”
“Be warned: flying has got expensive since the oil crisis with the Middle East.”
“That’s fine,” he replies. “I did some carpentry work while I was in there. I probably built ten thousand birdhouses, and some shelves for the prison library. So I was able to sock some money away.”
“Vancouver it is,” she announces, with no small amount of dread at the idea of returning to the big city and once again exposing herself to the scrutiny of law enforcement. She lights a menthol and coaxes the Westfalia from the penitentiary’s parking lot, the ominous black sedan that was following her still creeping through the back alleys of her mind.
ALL THE YEARS IN BETWEEN
USUALLY, THE ENVIRONMENTALIST in Willow detests the fact that she finds the act of driving so profound, that such joy can be decanted from something that lays so much smog on the biosphere. Today, however, the drive is a drag. She’s unaccustomed to having a co-pilot, and it doesn’t help that Everett’s prison stint seems to have atrophied the knack for conversation he displayed in his letters. He’s too stiff. Too cordial. Too unwilling to meet her eyes. In the flesh, it seems that her mysterious outlaw uncle is about as much fun as her father. So after a few hours of silence—Everett staring with wonderment at the scrolling landscape like an acid-tripping freshman—Willow’s eyelids grow heavy. It’s then she remembers the white crosses in the glove box, leftover pills from that decadent final week with Sage. To perk herself up—and to compensate for Everett’s miserly way with words—she discreetly pops two.
“Thanks for doing this,” he says finally, after they’ve watched the highway’s lines arc and stutter for another hour, while Willow sucks down menthol after menthol, her smoke-scorched eyes darting to the rear-view mirror every few seconds to check for the black sedan. “I never learned to drive myself.”
“It’s my pleasure,” Willow says, trying not to grind her teeth.
“So how is old Harris holding up?”
“He and I don’t practise what you’d call regular contact,” she says, and for a second she’s forced to ponder once more the unprecedented sentimentality of their most recent interaction. “He’s fine, though, I suppose. He’s slowing down now that he’s retired. At least he’s not a full-time forest murderer anymore. He listens to birds now.”
“And that friend of his? What’s his name—Feeney?”
The question seems loaded in ways she can’t decipher, though the name is unknown to her. “Must be before my time,” she says. “Harris never had any friends. He prefers assistants. They’re much easier to order around.”
But her response only saddens her uncle, whose face clouds over, and he remains quiet for some time. “At least he has you,” he says.
She laughs bitterly. “I think I’ve been more of a headache to him than anything, especially since I dropped out of his alma mater.” With her tongue racing from the speed, she describes her brief stint at Yale—a final gambit for Harris’s impossible-to-attain approval—and how initially she loved the field trips to the woods of upstate New York and Maine,