— It means about as much as the next thing.
— You’re keeping something back, aren’t you. You’ve got some information up your sleeve. That’s cool.
— Jesus. Look, are you hungry?
— I’m getting to be.
They had an early lunch in Smooth Rock Falls. Veda told him a little bit about Hearst. A logging town. Her father was a sawyer at a mill. Theirs was one of the few families in town for whom French was not their first language. She’d grown up with a lot of native kids and she spoke of a few who had taken their own lives. But she said there were worse places to have to hide out for awhile. She said Hearst had its charms.
— There’s this giant crosscut saw people take pictures of. You’ll see. You can stay for Canada Day. My dad is always happy to entertain. He doesn’t need much of an excuse.
They got going again. Sometime after Cochrane, he looked over and saw she’d kicked off her tennis shoes and leaned her seat back. Her feet were white against the brown of her legs. One of the toenails was black. As they drove, she took out a small zippered pouch and opened it and brought out the makings of a joint and rolled it.
— I’m guessing you’re one of those people who want things to mean something, she said.
— I’m not sure what you mean by that.
— I’m not so, you know, good at saying what I think. So never mind.
— No no, said Pete. Tell me.
— Well, that one thing happens and it means something. Or, let me see if I can explain this better: one thing happens because something else happened before it to make it happen.
— But doesn’t that make sense? You know, one thing leads to another. Like, I could stick my leg out and I trip you, you fall down. That’s one thing leading to the next.
— Yeah, then I get up and I bust your nose. Again, by the looks of it.
Without thinking, he touched his nose. It had reset crookedly. He was never sure how apparent it was to people who saw it.
— What was it? said Veda. Hockey?
— No.
— Anyway, that example, that’s all that is. You can’t look for a bigger plan there.
— Well, yeah. I guess there’s nothing bigger in that. Okay.
— So do you believe in God?
— Do I what?
— It’s an easy question, dude.
— I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about it.
— Well, that’s disappointing.
— Yeah, well, the house where I grew up, there was a lot of talk about God all the time. And not much talk about anything else. I think whatever it is I do believe is kind of based on the opposite of everything that was talked about at home, because all I could ever think about was what didn’t add up and where the holes were. And, no, that’s not me saying I don’t believe in anything at all, either. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you.
— It makes enough sense for now. Okay. You haven’t let me down as bad.
— I’m glad I got your approval. But is this something you believe in? God?
She shrugged. It was a full, exaggerated roll of the shoulders. She crossed her eyes and said: I don’t know about God but there’s always the bet.
— The bet?
— This French guy I knew, he told me about it? So basically there’s a coin toss and you got to bet on it, heads or tails-this is what he told me-and if you bet on heads, or God, you win everything. All that stuff about heaven, right? But if you bet on tails, that there isn’t any God, and you lose, you lose it all.
— This doesn’t seem like much of a bet, really. Why would you make this kind of a bet?
— Well, it goes like this. If what you stand to lose is everything, and what you can win is also everything-or, well, heaven-you have unlimited reasons to make the bet.
Veda lit the joint. She took a few hauls and handed it over to him. He toked and coughed and passed it back.
— I just don’t know if I’m convinced, said Pete. This coin toss. Anything about believing. My stepdad is a pastor and he and the people at his church have a whole lot of answers that work fine for them. But they never worked for me. It took me awhile to realize that. And you talk about just believing, well, I’m not convinced.
— Me neither. Like if God’s up there, how can everything in life be so shitty?
— I guess that’s assuming that you and me and everybody else should be happy all the time. If he’s up there, maybe that’s not what he even has in mind. Us being happy all the time.
— If.
— Yep.
— We’re about half an hour away, said Veda. This is country I know. It’s been awhile since I saw it but I know it. Anyway it’s hot as hell. I want to go swimming first. Come on, I’ll show you a good place up here. But you got to be man enough.
— Man enough. What do you mean?
— You’ll see.
She told him to turn off the highway onto a side road. Scarcely more than a gravel trail through the bush. The side road tapered past a few properties and went on for awhile and came finally to a dead end at a railbed.
They got out of the car. Pete stretched. When he turned around he saw she was removing her shorts and her T-shirt. She was wearing a swimsuit underneath. She caught him looking. All she said was: Summertime in this country-it’s a day wasted if you don’t swim, you know?
The Adidas shorts he was wearing would do as a swimsuit. He hesitated for a moment and then took off his own T-shirt and tossed it onto the driver’s seat. The sun was hot on his shoulders and the back of his neck.
She led him down the tracks, telling him it was an abandoned line. As they walked, she brought out another skinny joint and they smoked it. A sign standing to the side of the railbed exclaimed No TRESPASSING in letters partly obscured by rust. They rounded a final bend and the bush receded on slabs of exposed bedrock. Up ahead was a wide blue creek and spanning the water was the bulk of an old train trestle. The girders were gaunt, all browns and blacks. It had to be forty feet from the girder framing the top of the trestle to the surface of the water.
— That thing? said Pete.
— You bet. Best view in the world up there.
Pete looked into the river below. The water was the same breathless monochrome as the sky. But where it flowed under the trestle, the water was shadowed in depths of green-black. He watched as a long walleye arrowed lazily into the shade. It lingered and then it darted away. Pete felt reluctant to look at the trestle itself.
— Well?
— What do you do, you just climb it?
— Right up the side. All us kids have been climbing that thing as long as I remember. I might have been eight years old first time I jumped off.
— You’re fucking crazy.
— Oh … I wondered if you’d be man enough.
— I’m not sure why you think this has to be a test of whether I’m man enough.
— But isn’t that how it works for men? Physical challenges and all that?
— So they tell me.
She was ambling over to the angled upright. She stepped out of her tennis shoes.
— Anyways, good fortune comes to those who prove themselves.
— What is that supposed to mean?
But she’d already begun climbing. She moved like a spider, hands gripping the wings of the I-beam, toes curling on the rounded bolt-heads. She scaled the upright and moved fluidly over the triangular brace at the top.
Pete stepped across the concrete pad where the upright was anchored. He took off his sneakers and stashed his car keys in one of them. He grasped the sides of the girder. He could feel his sweat gelling against the rusty metal. He climbed. As long as he stared directly ahead, he was okay. But looking left or right, to where the
