Excerpt
creak open and footsteps clumping through the house. Then Long John
appeared in the doorway.
“Leave him alone,” the woman said. “He’s better here than anywhere
else. He can stay here as long as he likes. He can stay here forever.”
Ken remained in the house for several days before going back to camp.
He moved like a robot, automatically performing his duties. When he
had arrived at the camp, he had weighed one hundred forty-five pounds
and had quickly filled out to one hundred ninety pounds. In a few short
months, he shrunk to his former weight. He couldn’t eat. He retched even
when he tried to drink water. He carried the vision of the truck – and the
charred bodies inside it – everywhere he went.
He worked as many hours a day as his body could bear and slept only
when he was too exhausted to keep his eyes open. His dreams were haunted
by the vision of the crushed and burning pickup truck. Long John,
the camp manager, the Portuguese workers, and almost everyone else in
camp, tried to console him. But Ken was like a feral animal; he preferred
to crawl into his room, shut the door, and nurse his wounds in private.
The only person he talked to was Jessica’s auntie, who had taken up
temporary residence at the ranch. It felt like home to him and he desperately
wanted to stay but knew that he would find no lasting peace there.
On his final visit, he took one of Jessica’s rifles, a pup tent, and an assortment
of camping gear.
His real solace was packing, unpacking, and repacking his gear into a
large rucksack, in preparation for his trip to the Arctic. Trying to make
the backpack light enough to shoulder, and yet contain all the items he
would need for a journey of about a year, became an all-consuming task.
Ken neatly solved the problem of bringing enough drawing materials by
packing several rolls of adding machine tape, which were small enough to
fit into the lab’s metal cylinders where they would stay dry. He rigged up
a system of unrolling the paper and re-rolling the used end over a small
wooden stick, to keep it compact and orderly. The only other drawing
tools he packed were a large quantity of ordinary HB pencils, and a pocket
knife donated by one of the Portuguese men “to sharpen the pencils.”
He gave his notice in June, packed the gear he couldn’t take with him
– including the money rolled in the tubes with the radioactive stickers –
and shipped it all to his parents, in Vancouver. He enclosed a long letter,
describing camp life and his plans for his trip, omitting all mention of
Jessica or her family.
Libros Libertad 