Travelling Light (9 page)

I pounded on the roof and the truck skidded to a stop. Calisha wanted to jump down but I held her arm. We could see the young
vaquero
kneeling on the ground, stunned. He was the one who had put on the show outside the cantina.

His horse struggled to its feet, shook itself, and trotted away.

The boatman got out of the truck, walked up to the young
vaquero
, and began slapping him on the head and shoulders. The other rider, who had pulled up his horse, watched impassively. The young
vaquero
crawled around looking for his hat, trying to dodge the blows. After grabbing his hat he got to his feet and started to brush the dust from his clothes. Ignoring the boatman, who was still slapping him, he limped to the other horse, grabbed the rider's arm, and swung up behind. They wheeled and started back towards the village. The boatman spat on the ground then climbed back into his truck.

The boy who was guarding the boat had caught a string of catfish he wanted to sell but I said I'd spent all my money. We took our seats and the boy shoved us off. There was the sound of the paddle dipping in and out of the river, then a hollow noise as we bumped the other side.

MERMAIDS
TOO

Jay was twenty-two and just out of jail when he left for Alberta in a drive-away car with a girl called Betty. They travelled with two suitcases and a valuable 1938 Gibson guitar Betty's great-grandmother had bequeathed her. The country was pure Canadian Shield and Jay set the cruise control for sevety-five miles per hour. There were no towns that weren't mining or pulp towns. There were long stretches of emptiness with gas stations every few hours and narrow side roads leading into fishing camps.

Then, just after dawn, the little red hot light on the instrument panel started blinking. Jay pulled over quickly. Betty woke up as soon as the tires bit gravel.

Dust and coolant steam drifted around them after Jay shut down the engine. The only noise was dripping and hissing. Jay got out, threw open the hood, and let the steam flow. He looked to check if there were any burst hoses. It was all too hot to touch and he could not see what was wrong.

Back inside the car, he found Betty scribbling postcards to her boys. Kyle was five and Duffy was four. Jay and Betty were the same age exactly, and there wasn't much grounding them except their love for each other and for those boys. Their father was a fisherman who had deserted Betty when she was eighteen and drowned on the Grand Banks the winter before Jay met her.

Jay asked if she wanted him to write something to the boys, but Betty looked at him as though he'd gone crazy. “It would only confuse them,” she said.

“Did you even tell them it was me you were travelling with?” he asked. “Don't you think it'd be better if they started getting used to the idea? Just what did you tell them, Betty?”

She took stamps from her purse and applied them to the postcards. The boys had been left with their granny. Betty wanted Kyle to be able to finish his kindergarten in one place, and she didn't want to separate little Duffy from his brother.

Jay and Betty had met at a health club, where he noticed her standing at the juice bar in a blue leotard and looking like a million dollars. He'd been working out on the free weights mostly, plus running four miles in the morning and four more in the afternoon. He had started weight training in jail and was determined to keep it up. It was important to him to feel physically powerful.

“You can't be thinking of yourself as their father — that's just jumping the gun,” she said, dropping the postcards into her purse. She yawned and stretched. “I'm wide awake now, and I thought I'd never be wide awake again.” She twisted the rear-view mirror so she could examine her face. “Do my eyes look terrible?”

“You look nice.”

They had been driving nonstop. And he knew she was right about the boys; they weren't his boys. He also knew he had it in him to love those kids and do well for them, and it seemed to him that with all the risks he and Betty were taking together, travelling west with very little cash, and with the trust they had placed in each other from the very earliest days of their love, he had earned the right to sign one or two postcards. Not that he would have signed
Daddy
.

But they were her kids and she was their loving mother, and he didn't press the point. He just felt a little disappointed as he watched clouds of tiny blackflies batting themselves against the windshield. He hoped the engine would cool down on its own. They were supposed to deliver the car to a used-car dealer in Calgary, who was supposed to refund their security deposit of three hundred dollars.

She began brushing her hair. “I need to get out of these clothes,” she said. “They're starting to feel itchy.”

As long as they were moving he had been able to put aside and ignore his desire, but now that they were stopped he had to lean over and kiss her. She put down her hairbrush and began rubbing the back of his neck, and he started plucking at the buttons of her shirt.

Someone had carved the silhouette of a beautiful girl on the wall of Jay's cell and written beneath it
mon rêve de tendresse,
my dream of tenderness. Jay had served two months in jail for getting into a traffic accident and a fight. The accident had not been his fault.

“Not here. Let's get out and go into the woods,” Betty said. “I want to be with you in nature.”

There was bush on either side of the highway, stunted spruce and birch mostly. Jay took a blanket out of the trunk and Betty brought along the Thermos of coffee they had filled up past midnight somewhere. They walked up the highway, but the small trees were packed so densely it seemed there was no way into the forest. The blackflies began to cloud around their faces and hair. Finally they gave up. They began running to escape the flies, and when they reached the car, he couldn't find the keys. He asked Betty if she had them.

“I didn't even touch the goddamn keys!” she cried.

Those blackflies were really after them. Then he remembered taking the blanket out of the trunk, and saw the keys dangling there.

He tried to start the car but it wouldn't. They drank some coffee. After an hour or so a provincial police cruiser stopped and the policeman put out a radio call for a tow truck, which arrived after another hour.

At the garage the mechanic lifted up the hood and told them they needed a new water pump. They followed him into the office, where he checked a parts catalogue and said it would come to $225, ordered from the parts store in Kenora, delivered on the Greyhound, and installed.

“The Greyhound?”

The mechanic looked at the clock on the wall. “They will put it on the noon bus. It will be here by three.”

Jay looked at Betty. She shrugged and stared out the plate-glass window. Where they were was not a town, just a few buildings scattered in a clearing along the highway.

“Before I can place an order for what you need,” the mechanic said, not looking at Jay but studying the yellow skin on his own hands, “I have to have the cash in hand. That's policy.”

Jay took out his wallet and counted out ten twenties, two tens, and a five, laying the bills on the desk. The used-car dealer in Calgary was supposed to reimburse the cost of any repairs, but who knew what would really happen.

The mechanic picked up the phone, punched a number, and began talking with whoever it was who answered at the parts store as if they were old fishing buddies and the best of friends, which maybe they were.

Across the highway Jay saw a motel. A sign out front said
FISHERMEN WELCOME MERMAIDS TOO
.
There was a café next to the motel.

The mechanic hung up the phone and leaned back in his squeaking chair, placing his motorcycle boots on the desk. Jay thanked him for locating the part and for being willing to work on the car. The mechanic didn't respond. He was working on a toothpick as if he wasn't even listening, but Jay knew that if he did not abase himself a little, nothing much would get done.

They ate breakfast in the café, then sat on its porch in sunshine, watching cars and trucks pass by. There wasn't much traffic.

A hundred yards farther up the highway, a steel bridge crossed a river. The breeze had picked up. The bugs had disappeared.

“Betty, you ought to get out your guitar and sing a little,” he suggested. “This is a good place for it.”

“Too tired,” she said. She was reading a magazine about trout fishing.

He stepped off the porch and went for a walk up the highway. With the sun out it wasn't such bad-looking country. He stood on the steel bridge and looked down at the river. When an eighteen-wheeler thundered past, he felt the bridge tremble. He was in his heart very anxious over the small amount of cash they had left, and thought it likely they would be stealing gas sooner or later if they were going to make it all the way to Calgary. He didn't like to steal but what else were they going to do — beg for fuel? Once they delivered the car they would get back their deposit plus the $225, and with that, he told himself, they ought to be able to make a clean, fresh start.

He walked back to the café and found Betty sunning herself on the porch.

“Think I'll go fishing,” he told her. “Catch supper. Would you like that?”

There was a little store in one corner of the café, with a few shelves of clothes, some rubber boots, tins of food, and cardboard cards stuck with fishing lures. An old woman who looked like an Indian stood watching him.

“Good fishing in the river?”

“Not bad.”

For ten dollars plus a twenty-dollar deposit she rented him a rod and some tackle. For another two dollars she sold him a plastic cup of worms. He filled out the form for the fishing licence, then walked down the highway carrying the gear. Betty came with him. They scrambled down the steep bank just below the bridge. He didn't know the first thing about fishing but he was hoping he could haul something good out of that little river. He could see himself pan-frying a nice little brook trout late at night, at a campsite somewhere far to the west. They'd build themselves a little fire, fry their fish in butter, and eat it with their fingers.

He practised casting, then set his sights on a calm eddy behind some white rocks. He jabbed a worm on his hook and cast four or five times before he was able to land the hook in the eddy. He let it float there a while and watched his bobbin. He reeled in line slowly, then cast again. He wondered what it would feel like to get a bite. Betty lay in the grass with her shirt off and her white breasts exposed to the sun as he moved up and down the bank, looking for more calm spots, eddies, fishing still pools behind rocks and stray logs. Occasionally his line snagged in submerged branches but he was always able to tug it free.

When the sun was high in the sky, Betty moved into the shade of big white pine and fell asleep. He hooked and landed four fish, two of them good-sized, and two tiny ones, which he threw back.

When a cloud covered the sun, it got cold again, and Betty woke up and started buttoning her shirt, saying she was hungry. He showed her the fish.

“Beautiful,” she said. Kneeling on the grass, she studied them. “They're perfect little beauties. What kind are they?”

“Trout, I guess.”

“Trout!”

“We'll cook them up tonight, fry them.”

“Yes!” she said.

He used his pocketknife to clean the fish and they tore up handfuls of long grasses to put on newspaper to wrap the fish in.

He heard the bus approaching as they were walking back to the café; it didn't sound quite like a truck. Betty heard it too. They both turned around.

“I don't think he's going to stop,” she said.

The bus was still a couple of hundred yards away but it wasn't showing any signs of slowing down. Betty clutched his arm. He waited for the whine of the engine or transmission to change, but it didn't. She was right. The bus wasn't slowing. They began waving frantically but the Greyhound whipped right by them and past the little settlement.

Jay ran the rest of the way to the garage and found the mechanic in the office, eating a hamburger.

“Those bus drivers,” the mechanic said.

He was a little, wiry fellow and he reminded Jay of a sternman who a long time before had been a friend, or acquaintance, of his father. The mechanic had rough, strong-looking hands. He wore blue coveralls, and his steel-capped motorcycle boots were propped up on the desk.

“I'll phone Thunder Bay; they can ship it back this way on the next bus. For tonight just get yourselves a motel room,” the mechanic advised.

“When do you think we might get out of here?”

The mechanic stood up, still chewing his hamburger, and kicked open the back door. On a stretch of tarred gravel overgrown with weeds were twenty or so car hulks, streaked and stained with rust. From where he stood Jay could smell rotting rubber and faded paint, mouldy upholstery and old brown engine oil lying in pools.

“Have a look,” said the mechanic. “Five years' worth of breakdowns out there, mister.”

They had a little tent, but the flies were so bad he knew he couldn't ask Betty to sleep outdoors. He asked at the café if he could store his fish in the refrigerator, and the waitress said he could and took his fish into the kitchen.

After returning the fishing gear he walked over to the motel office and rented the cheapest room available. It cost eighty dollars. Beyond the motel parking lot was a ditch with standing water. The bush began on the other side of the ditch. It looked thick, shaggy, and impossible to penetrate. The ground would be muskeg, sour, spongy, and black.

He went back into the café and asked the waitress to bring him a cup of coffee. Betty was sitting in a booth. Along with a hamburger, she had ordered a glass of tomato juice that cost three dollars.

“We can't afford that,” he told her.

“I need my vitamin C.”

Her hamburger was half raw and half burnt. The tomato juice came in a plastic cup not much bigger than a thimble.

“You can't take all our money and give us just this,” he said to the waitress. “Just because we're stranded here doesn't mean you can treat us this way.”

“Aw, be quiet, Jay,” Betty said, sprinkling pepper onto her juice.

The waitress went away without pouring him any coffee.

“Why fuss?” Betty said.

When she finished eating, he took out his wallet, counted out money carefully, and put down just enough to cover the check.

“You have to leave a tip,” said Betty.

“Why?”

“For God's sake, what's the matter with you?”

“There's nothing the matter with me,” he said, “that a
maudite chienne
like you would understand.”

Betty sat very still for a few seconds. Then she crumpled her paper napkin, dropped it on the table, stood up, and walked out of the café.

He sat there breaking toothpicks. He didn't want to chase after her. His wallet was on the table and he started flipping through the cash that was left, studying the face of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Including pocket change, he had $178.92. He tried to imagine it in terms of a budget: so much per day, so much per mile. He didn't see how it was going to last.