Architects Are Here by Michael Winter Page B

the freezer. Mr Durdle played cribbage and in the afternoon his brother came over with his family and they had a turkey for fourteen. In the living room an entire wall was a wallpaper mural of a riverbank in fall with a road beside it. The windows had white sheers and every house around had white vinyl siding. On Boxing Day the air base had a meet-and-greet and they rolled up the hangar door to seven American fighter jets and the pilots let the land crew sit on the wings and they served them cans of Milwaukee beer. These men were being trained to service the space shuttle, for Stephenville was one of three bases in the world on alert for an emergency shuttle landing. They had photos of the shuttle taped above red shelves of tools and, while they fixed and flew jetfighters, they sometimes talked about an afternoon when they might welcome the heavy fuselage gliding in for a quiet landing.
    S PRING, THEN SUMMER . In July, just three weeks before her due date, Nell made an appointment with social services. She signed the papers and she did it alone. She had a coldness, or perhaps it was distance. She saw the writing hand and it was not the hand that belonged to her eyes. I will live on no matter what happens to the people around me. A nurse nudged her while she was sitting there signing the paper. The nurse needed a sink to wipe grease off her hand. They were not being respectful. She met the doctor who would deliver the baby, Dr Manamperi. He sat down to talk to her, and as they spoke he took a mango out of his pocket and cut it in half with a scalpel. Then he peeled the mango and he offered some to her. My brother was visiting, he said. He brought these from Chicago.
    She ate the mango. Youre not from here, are you, he said. And then he laughed.
    This was my way into Canada, he said. Two years in this hospital. And now I’ve been here five years.
    He had been written about in the paper. He had survived a skiing mishap. Dr Manamperi and two colleagues were to spend five days in the woods. His friends were on snowmobile and he was to meet them on skis. He was flown in by a bush plane. They had the frozen pond marked where the plane was to land, and Dr Manamperi would ski all day and meet his friends on another pond thirty miles to the west. They had his supplies. It was a cold bright December morning. He skied all day. He had a topo map in a clear plastic bag strung around his neck. He had an apple and a chunk of cheese and a mango. He was aiming for a knoll on the horizon. And when the sun touched the knoll he stopped skiing and checked his map and looked at the hills around him and the path he’d taken all morning. By four oclock he knew something was wrong. He had been forcing the landscape to agree with his map, but now he knew that he wasnt where he was supposed to be. The men on snowmobiles should be on that knoll, and there were no tracks or any sign of anyone. It was getting dark. He had no matches and no tent. He checked his compass and he skied on until midnight. And now he understood the mistake. The bush plane had dropped him on the wrong pond, though he did not know which one. He did not know where exactly he was. The men could be twenty miles away, but in what direction.
    He built a snow wall and slept out of the wind. The stars were bright and very cold but he took the cold. He preferred the cold to the wet. If it warmed up he would be in trouble.
    He studied his map. There was a grey line that dropped south of the highway and crossed the lakes. If he made for that line he would intersect it at some point, and then he might find help. He would have to ski for three days to meet the grey line.
    He peeled and ate the mango. He pushed snow into his water bottle and melted it in his chest pocket. But it did not melt fast enough so he had to find brooks that were running into the ponds. He skied night and day, resting for an hour every four hours. He was afraid to fall asleep and he hoped it would not get mild and rain