Inukshuk by Gregory Spatz Read Free Book Online

page. Dive into his storyboard notebooks awhile and see if he could draw some of the fight scene into frames—Braine versus Work. Hartnell in some of the background shots. It was too bad about Jill, yes—but probably a good thing, too. Skinny-legged Jill with her bare shins swallowed up in her black plastic snow boots and that blue-brown-red stain down her face. A kid, too young for him. Anyway, he’d survived plenty of afternoons without her already. He’d survive plenty more.
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    ONE THING HE’D LEARNED from his son’s obsession with their namesakes, the Franklins of Arctic lore: Lady Jane, Sir John’s wife, once traveled as far north as Muckle Flugga, in the Shetland Isles, then considered the northernmost point in the British Isles, in order to gaze longingly to sea after her husband’s lost ships—to be as close to him as she might get without leaving British soil. A publicity stunt to gain attention and fund yet another search party, Thomas assured
him—she’d even (according to rumor) invited her new friend Charles Dickens and her nephew Alfred, Lord Tennyson, along to write about it for the Times —but John Franklin the school-teacher imagined it differently. He’d been to Shetland once himself and knew you didn’t make that sick crossing without a genuine incentive. His own had been a girl, of course, decades ago—a Dutch girl he’d traveled with for weeks through Spain and the UK, when without warning she’d given him the slip. Left him a note at the hostel’s front desk, saying he should catch up with her when he was ready, and the address. Baltasound Unst. So he had his own picture of Lady Jane just north of Unst, prelighthouse, and staring out to sea from a deserted pile of wave-encircled rocks after Sir John. For him, it was not just more lore of the explorer: He’d seen those rocks and heard the gulls and looked straight north to nothing but more and more open sea (the Dutch girl, of course, long gone). Regardless, factual or mythic, because of his personal connection with it, the story of Jane and Muckle Flugga formed a kind of emotional touchstone for him, icon, whatever you wanted to call it, like his father’s absurd dashboard Jesus figurines: something to look at and conjure as needed, to set on the horizon and steer yourself toward. Also a way of giving his own refusal to leave Alberta and move back to California a shape or explanation. (His mother’s words to him just the previous week: Honey, you’re north of North Dakota! No, we’re not visiting this year. You just come on home when you’re ready. ) What kept him here? An oath, a personal resolution he mentioned rarely, if at all: He would not leave until Thomas had finished high school; he would wait at least that long so as to protect Thomas from having fully lost his mother, and to leave open for Jane the possibility of return. The chance for Thomas to visit her, too, though as yet that hadn’t happened. If he pictured Lady Jane at Muckle Flugga, looking north after John, still hopeful after how many years, it almost made sense. So long as he and Thomas were here, they were that much closer to her. One day’s travel instead of three. There was still the chance of patching it up.
    Now he was in the parking lot at the end of the school day, done his classes, done the debate team, done grading, done with
everything until tomorrow morning—familiar, happy release into the evening—hearing the wind bang and buffet the streetlight beside his car, the school-yard flagpole bare now but the halyard still chiming and chattering spastically against the pole, and thinking about Jane and Muckle Flugga and personal resolutions, because Moira had been text-messaging him every half hour or so since just after the end of classes. Three times, to be exact. Once just to pass him her number—a new one. Then the messages. Call here when u can. Not