Travelling Light (10 page)

Leaving a two-dollar coin for a tip, he slid from the booth. Nodding at the waitress, he stepped outside. The car was in front of the garage across the highway, and Betty was kneeling beside it and repacking her suitcase. She'd changed into black jeans and a belt with a silver buckle and taken her great-grandmother's guitar from the trunk. The mechanic was just inside the garage bay, placing a tire on a remount machine.

As Jay crossed the highway, Betty snapped her suitcase shut. “Where do you think you're going?” he asked.

“Hitching a ride.”

The tire machine made a loud hiss, then a slamming noise.

“Catch!” Betty flipped Jay the car keys, then picked up her suitcase and guitar case and started walking down the highway, heading east. She walked fast on her high heels. He followed but kept twenty paces behind. There was no traffic in either direction. Fury sang in his blood like a dose of hot sauce. He had never felt so angry before, not in any of the fights he'd been in, not even the fight after the traffic accident that got him sent to jail.

“It's not me that's dragging you out west,” he called. “It's yourself that wanted to go in the first place.”

She turned to face him. “Won't you clear out of the way? Won't you leave me alone?”

“Betty, I can't let you do this.”

She shook her head and kept walking. He knew, the moment she put out her thumb, any logging truck, any local teenager, any car full of fishermen from the city would stop for her.

He didn't need her. The water pump would come through on the morning bus from Thunder Bay and the car would be fixed by noon. He could continue without her. He could cross the plains alone, out under a wide sky in perfect freedom. Before him, all the wonders of the world: meals, a job, a place to dream in Calgary.

“Betty,” he said. “Betty.”

Her suitcase was heavy; so was the guitar. She had left the gravel shoulder and strayed onto the asphalt, where her heels made a brisk tapping. He was thankful for the cold wind keeping the blackflies out of her hair.

He heard an eighteen-wheeler rumble over the bridge behind them. Betty stopped, put down her suitcase and guitar, and turned around. She glared at Jay, then stuck out her thumb.

He heard the truck drop a gear, air belching from the brakes. He gazed at Betty, thinking how proud she was and how beautiful, then he turned around. He could see the trucker leaning over his wheel, checking his mirrors as he applied brakes. The trailer wobbled as the whole rig slowed down violently. More air farted from the brakes.

Jay put his finger to his throat and cut it across. The truck instantly picked up speed and rolled right past them, the trucker pouring it on
—
Jay could hear him upshifting all the way down the highway, until the truck disappeared.

Betty was rubbing her palms, creased red by the hard plastic handles of her two cases.

“Have you mailed those postcards?” he asked. “Where's your purse?”

She groaned. “Oh shit.”

“Where is it?”

Another eighteen-wheeler was rumbling over the bridge but she paid no attention. “I must have left it in the restaurant.”

“Let's go back.”

She stood, rubbing the red creases on her palms.

“C'mon, Betty.” He reached for her cases but she snatched them up and took a couple of steps away from him.

“Betty,” he said, “I'm heading back now. Come with me. We have a motel room. We're out of here in the morning. Come with me. Our plans are intact.”

For a few seconds they gazed at each other, and then he turned and started walking back. He was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, shivering a little.

“Stop. Wait a minute. I've broken a heel.”

He turned around. She pulled off one shoe and waved it at him.

She might have had second thoughts, she might not have gotten into the truck, but he was glad he had gone after her. She wasn't really the type to back down. She might have climbed into the truck even if she hadn't really wanted to.

He walked up to her and put his arms around her. He held her a second or two so she could feel how strong his arms were and how tenderly they could hold her. He pressed her to his chest so she could feel the flutter of his heart. Then he leaned over, grabbed her behind her knees, and pushed his shoulder into her. She folded over him easily and giggled.

“Got you now, babe,” he told her.

“Put me down!”

“Hold on.” He picked up her suitcase, jamming it under his arm, then the guitar case.

She pitched her broken shoe into the woods. “Put me down,” she cried, laughing, whacking his back and shoulders with her fist.

Why does anyone go out west? To make himself into something better. Go out there with a girl, he can start a family. It's a big test. He has to take it.

After getting out of jail, Jay had lived in a rooming house next to what had once been a paper mill in what had once been the heart of their city. Betty's house was out near the harbour, where the air smelled of tides, where the breeze was sweeter than in other sections of town.

On mornings when he visited, her boys were always gone, the house was always quiet. Of course he visited at other times of the day just to see the boys, taking them to the park or around town, letting them get used to him,
as Betty kept saying — but as for love, they would rendezvous in the mornings, when Kyle was at kindergarten and Duffy was with his granny and the house by the harbour was so quiet Jay sometimes felt as if he were there to steal something.

At the motel they cranked open the windows to let in fresh air. Being in a rented room excited them both. They checked the supply of packaged soap and folded towels.

When they lay down on one of the beds and started making love, it was sweeter and better than it had ever been, though he knew he had to make it last as long as he could because when it was over, there was a good chance he'd feel terrible.

They made it last until it was dark, when headlights were flaring through the crisp nylon curtains and the
FISHERMEN WELCOME MERMAIDS TOO
sign was flashing green and red.

Then, when Betty was in the shower, he felt himself sinking into that feeling afraid.

These were his dreams:

First, to never be in jail again, to never let them take him down.

Second, to value life (lives).

Third, to move a little closer to the heart.

Fourth, to never live without women.

Fifth, to love as he was loved.

Sixth, to banish despondency.

Seventh, to keep looking good.

Eighth, to always be on the lookout for something better.

He could see now, coming down before him, all the mistakes made in his life so far: his love of mistakes, misfortune, incorrect choices. He was going west with a woman he loved, hoping to find a job in Calgary, intending to establish a family, but with no true idea of how it was going to happen.

He tried to tell himself there's nothing wrong with, say, construction, if a man wants to start an honest life. Go down to the hiring hall with two hundred dollars, get a ticket in the labourers' union. In a day or two you'll be riding out to a job. You'll be hauling lumber, jackhammering concrete, tying steel.

The bed rocked. He felt himself falling. He spread his arms on the sheets, clenched his fists, felt his biceps, triceps, and pectoral muscles bunching.

He could hear water drilling against the tin shower stall. Betty was singing. Love had always made her, unlike him, most content.

At the end of that day, he told himself, you shall come home. It shall be summer in Calgary. In the evening the sky cools, the moisture settles; you'll smell timothy and clover in the damp. From an upstairs window the Rocky Mountains will seem purple as the sun goes down. After dark, with the kids asleep, you'll lie in bed with the windows open, breathing good western air, arms around your wife.

He climbed slowly from the bed, feeling like an old, old man. Getting down on his knees, he fell forward onto his hands, dug his toes into the carpet, and started his first push-up. At that moment, Betty, in the shower, started singing one of her great-grandmother's songs — “Conor, my brave, my provider, Conor, my horseman, richest of all”
— and it reawakened a small amount of his hope. He lowered himself until his nose was touching the nylon carpet and began pressing with the strength in his upper arms, feeling cords of muscle working in his thighs and lower back, and as he counted “One!” he allowed himself to wonder if it was possible, just possible, that despite his poverty and errors, she was singing to him.

ALMOST CHRISTMAS,

WEST TEXAS

They spent the night in an abandoned farmhouse on the scrublands south of Pecos. They might have stayed in a motel — Jimmy Joe had all sorts of credit cards — but when they passed the farmhouse, Jimmy Joe had insisted Thomas stop and turn around. Jimmy Joe said he'd had a dream about the farmhouse, a vision he called it. He said he knew for a fact Bonnie and Clyde had hid out there from the law. Since leaving New York he had been talking a lot about Bonnie and Clyde and the posse that killed the Texas outlaws one hot, sunny morning as they were riding in their car. “That's the way I'd like it,” Jimmy Joe said. “Out of the blue. From the side of the road.
Bang bang bang
. Unexpected.”

Now Jimmy Joe was unzipping his sleeping bag and getting up, slowly as an old man. He stumbled to the empty window frame, where Thomas was looking out at the highway, and kissed him on the shoulder.

Jimmy Joe claimed he'd sniffed something snowy and western about Thomas the first time they met, in Sheridan Square. Thomas the runaway, the first-ever punker out of Casper, his head shaved in a mohawk strip, the strip waxed, dyed, coxcombed.

Now Jimmy Joe was peering outside, squinting in the light. “Hmm,” he said. “A case of early day, West Texas.”

The sun was a half-inch above the horizon, the sky pale blue and stretched flat. The only features in the landscape were derricks, and utility poles and wires along the highway. The morning smelled of gas.

“We're almost at the river,” said Thomas. “When we get there, there's a little hot springs I'll take you to.”

Jimmy Joe still had a headache. “It's okay so long as I don't move. Not as bad as a migraine.”

“We'll get you to the hot springs, you'll feel better.” Thomas knelt and began rolling up his sleeping bag.

“West Texas,” said Jimmy Joe reflectively. “I could probably make a wonderful, berserk painting of it. Plenty of hard edges for the sky, the way it meets the earth down here with such gosh darned precision —”

“Hey, we going to buy you boots today?” Thomas interrupted.

“You betcha.” Jimmy Joe started stretching like an old cat or a minor league ballplayer warming up for a game, loose and restless, almost healthy. Thomas finished rolling his bag and stood up, searching his pockets for cigarettes.

“Yeah,” said Jimmy Joe, “I need to prop myself up on that highway stripe. If I had the right materials with me I could render Texas whole, I could make you something better than it is. Those nice hard horizons, the enchiladas, that little señorita in the taquería last night —”

“Aw, come on,” said Thomas.

“You think I didn't see? That little
facilona
— and you with the aw-shucks swagger? You think I didn't notice? It's enough to make me sick!”

Thomas lit a cigarette. “Time to get back on the road,” he said.

“It stinks here, doesn't it,” Jimmy Joe said, sniffing. “So far it's not much cleaner than Brooklyn. The light's all right, but. Boyo, maybe things turn out all right, we'll ride the L train again. Does Wyoming smell this way?”

“Wyoming don't have a smell. Only when they're burning off gas. Sage maybe, after it rains.”

“Well, it gives me a headache. No epiphanies for Texas today. Got your stuff? Let's get moving.”

They walked out. Frost on the yellow grass. The Buick was concealed in a grove of cottonwoods.

“Christmas in a week,” said Thomas. His words came out like smoke in the chill air.

“Ah,” said Jimmy Joe. “Sweet sanctity, and the lambs at Bethlehem. Boyo, I could tell you a story.” He stumbled trying to keep up with Thomas, striding through the weeds like a Comanche warrior. “Hold on a sec,” Jimmy Joe called. “Time for a vision. Let me get my breath.”

Thomas halted in the middle of the field — once cotton, once pasture, once Comanche roaming ground.

“Holy birth!” said Jimmy Joe, puffing. “Let me give you a story. It's not set in old Judea or West Texas, where the spicy winds seep up from old Mexico and the air smells of cash. My little tale is set in upstate New York, way up there in the northeast snows —”

“I was in Buffalo once,” said Thomas. “It was on the way coming east. I-90 to Albany out of Chicago.”

“I was working on a dairy farm in the town where my parents lived,” said Jimmy Joe. “It was calving season and I had a job helping in the sheds. Do you know what a calf-puller is?”

“Kind of a winch.”

“Exactly. An assembly of pulleys and small-gauge chain. You harness your obstetrician self into a brace at one end and reach up inside the womb, loop the bloody chain around reluctant calf heels, and start winding the damn thing out.” Jimmy Joe shivered. “First calf I ever pulled was stillborn. We were all wearing rubber boots and the shed smelled of cows' breath and wet straw. Outside it was snowing. There were two witnesses: the farmer I worked for and a neighbour who'd stopped around to buy some hay bales.”

Thomas dropped his bedroll on the grass and unzipped his black leather jacket. “Cold?” he said. “Want my jacket?” He placed it around Jimmy Joe's shoulders.

“What a hero you are!” said Jimmy Joe. He struggled to get his arms into the sleeves and zip the jacket. “I wish there was a mirror. Oh, I love the clothes of war! Greeks going into battle, you know, wore leather. Where was I?”

“Calving shed,” said Thomas. He wore a dirty T-shirt; he'd always been more or less oblivious to cold.

“Yes,” said Jimmy Joe. “There were three of us, a trinity of wise men. The door at one end was open and you could see the Adirondacks, the grey air — the snow was falling. The stillborn calf was laid out on pink straw in a mess of afterbirth. I was kneeling over the thing for closer examination. The other two lit cigarettes and there was reflective silence for some moments, except for the mooing. Then my boss softly nudged the wet, dead thing with the toe of his boot and told me to be sure to bury it under rocks so the dogs wouldn't get at it.”

There was the sound of traffic humping the highway on the other side of the cottonwoods. One hundred and fifty miles to the Chisos Mountains, then Mexico. Dry yellow grasses sparkled in the sunshine.

“Is that it?” said Thomas. “Are you finished? I don't know, it's kind of a crazy story. What's it supposed to mean?” He picked up his bedroll and started walking towards the car. He opened the door, flipped the bedroll into the back seat. Jimmy Joe ran up and they stared at each other across the metal roof.

“Ever since I got sick,” said Jimmy Joe, “I always thought, you know, that it might have been a Jesus.”

“Don't be crazy,” Thomas said. “We'll get you better down there.”

“If you can just stay away from those
facilas
,” said Jimmy Joe. “Then we'll both maybe be all right.”

They had found the old Buick in Jackson Heights. It had needed two new tires in Louisiana and a rebuilt water pump in Odessa the day before. Thomas eased the car out of the cottonwoods and drove slowly towards the road. Once up on the highway he jumped on the gas pedal. The car accelerating had a tough, lonely sound that reminded him of elks bugling or grizzlies smashing through the woods, even though he had grown up in a housing project near the big mall on the east side of Casper. At exactly the right instant he booted in the clutch and slid the column shift into third.

“Whoo!” said Jimmy Joe. His window was cranked down and his hand out flapping in the breeze.

“Maybe we won't stop when we get to Mexico,” Thomas said. “We'll just keep on going — Guatemala, Patagonia, and all.”

“I'll be dead by then!” Jimmy Joe screamed out the window. “I'll probably die in Mexico City!”

“Then we won't go to Mexico City,” Thomas said. “We'll make a detour.”

They stopped for breakfast at Carmen's in Marfa, seat of Presidio County. In
Rio Bravo
John Wayne was sheriff of Presidio County, with Dean Martin for his drunken deputy — but Dean healed himself in the end. Jimmy Joe knew everything there was to know about Westerns, which was, Thomas figured, part of the reason they were making this trip.

The cottonwoods along the creek had come out pale green and Mexico was in the air, stronger than ever. They ordered huevos rancheros and Texas toast. Thomas liked the look of the waitress, her tight Levi 505s, her cowboy boots and braided hair. You couldn't stop the way your mind worked. He glanced at her breasts, small and round under the pockets of her western shirt. He'd been with girls in Wyoming and Brooklyn, and he liked the way it went with them, like a long fall from a high building.

Carmen herself stood by their table and asked where they were headed.

Thomas said, “We're going down to the Rio Grande to camp out there for a while, then head into the Sierra Madre.”

“Well,” said Carmen, a small woman with grey hair and crinkled face, “I promise you it's wild, wild,
wild
down there.”

“Wild,” said Jimmy Joe, “is just what we need.”

Thomas tried to catch the waitress's eye while she poured coffee but she wouldn't look at him. They finished breakfast and went outside. The old Buick had heated up in the sunshine and smelled of food wrappers, dust, and cigarettes. They drove around the courthouse square and past the Presidio County sheriff's office, where the Duke and Dean had made their stand against the powerful ranchers and Ricky Nelson had strummed a guitar. Headed south on Highland Avenue, they passed a shoe store.

“Hold on!” cried Jimmy Joe. “Stop right here!”

Thomas swung into a parking space. Ever since they had crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, Jimmy Joe had been wanting cowboy boots. They'd checked out a dozen shoe stores and western outfitters from Cajun country to the Permian Basin, but he hadn't found a pair that suited him.

Inside the store Jimmy Joe sprawled in a Naugahyde chair while the salesman knelt in front of him with a stack of boxes. Thomas lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall.

“You'll pardon my saying so,” the salesman said to Jimmy Joe, “but never have I seen a haircut like that one your young amigo is wearing. How's he keep it all stuck up in the middle like that, like a rooster?”

“He's a proud one,” said Jimmy Joe, smiling at Thomas. “I believe it's pride that makes his hair roil up like that. Pride and special waxes.”

“Never seen nothing like it. Is he some kind of star or something? Where you all from?”

“I'm a successful New York artist,” said Jimmy Joe primly. “My studio's in a former glove factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I have a number of assistants. I have a dealer, an agent, and a financial planner. I'm quite successful, if I may say so. I have collectors.”

The salesman was unwrapping tissue paper from around the stiff new boots. Jimmy Joe took off his high-tops and exposed his chubby pink feet.

“I think you'd better slip on socks before you try these on,” the salesman said. “Otherwise you can't judge the fit. Week from now you'd feel a little pinching
here
” — he slapped Jimmy Joe on the heel — “and you'd get a hot spot
here
” — he squeezed the flesh on the ball of the foot — “and you'd think back to me, who sold you a pair of boots that didn't fit. And you'd cuss me, now, wouldn't you?”

“Oh, I suppose. Perhaps.”

The salesman was cradling the successful artist's foot as tenderly as a kitten. “I have a pair of handmade boots here that an artist will surely appreciate. Let me fetch you a pair of socks and you try 'em on.”

Thomas was leaning against an entire wall of shoeboxes, smoking a cigarette and carefully licking his ashes in an old-fashioned ashtray on a steel stand. The ashtray was filled with clean white sand.

“Whatcha thinkin', boyo?” said Jimmy Joe. “Waitresses? Wonderful girls?”

Thomas blushed because he was thinking of the slender, small-breasted waitress and wondering how he could slip away for a few minutes and hurry back up the street and at least introduce himself.

“Whatcha thinkin'?” repeated Jimmy Joe with a sneer.

Thomas bent down to stub out his cigarette. “I'm thinkin' grains of sand,” he said. It was a lie he knew Jimmy Joe would enjoy, and it would probably start him in on something and allow him to forget the reasons they were travelling. “I'm thinking grains of sand. Thinking, who changes the sand? Or do they just screen the garbage out of it to keep it so white and soft and clean? How often do they do it? Has this same sand been here forever?”

“I'm thinking all the towns you've taken me through,” said Jimmy Joe happily. “I'm hallucinating Arkansas, I'm Kansas bop-kabala. But don't try and fool me, kiddo. I know what you're really thinking.”

The salesman had fetched socks from a drawer. Jimmy Joe slipped them on and whispered to the salesman, “You see, it is the week before Christmas, and we are travelling.” He shut his eyes and his voice got dreamy. “My young friend Thomas, Brooklyn warrior, Casper savage, it's all his idea —”

“He needed to get out of the city,” Thomas explained.

Jimmy Joe leaned back in the chair. “I'm not really a traveller,” he said. “Perhaps you can tell. I love to drink tea in my studio in Williamsburg. I have magnificent light and prefer to work bare-chested.”

The salesman was struggling to get the boot onto Jimmy Joe's foot. Jimmy Joe reached down and started tugging.

“Will I walk tall and dreamlike in Texas boots to the crooning of America?” said Jimmy Joe.

The salesman leaned back on his stool. “There! Take a few steps, try 'em out.”

“Will the earth tremble at my tread in these fine leather drumsticks?” Jimmy Joe asked.

The clerk smiled and shook his head.