The Journey Prize Stories 25 (5 page)

“Don’t see his truck,” Marty muttered, lifting his bottle to his lips.

“Whose truck?” I asked, but Marty was pitching his bottle across the gritty parking lot and striding toward the Starlite’s front door. If he heard me he ignored the question.

Inside it was dark and musty with a checkerboard linoleum floor that might once have been black and white, but had gone grey and yellow many years ago. There were about a dozen patrons scattered about, most of them in high-backed booths, while three men in plaid shirts and leather vests slumped over the bar. The walls were wood panelled, but the chintzy variety of wood panelling, the kind your dad might have installed in your basement. It was warped in several spots. It had been a year or two since they’d got rid of smoking everywhere, but you could still smell the stale tobacco coming out of the Starlite’s every plank and fibre. I imagined the bar stools’ stuffing exhaling it every time another ass applied pressure to them.

Marty strode to the bar and took a stool, and I followed. The man behind the bar wasn’t very interested in our being there. He was having a conversation with one of the other men sitting at the bar. But in a moment he came to us and we ordered beers. Above the bartender’s head a small television
perched on a wobbly looking shelf played a hockey game. The Flames were in L.A. The men at the bar were looking up at that through their eyebrows.

We slumped over the bar and half watched the hockey game and drank beer for an hour or so. There wasn’t much conversation between us. Just quiet drinking. Then Marty stood up and excused himself to the men’s.

I watched him go in the mirror over the bar. Then a moment later I watched that big steel door open and let in a blast of cool air. Riding it were a strange pair, a man and a woman, she taller than him, who nodded to the bartender, then walked past me to a booth in the corner. As they passed me I could smell them: she wore flowery perfume, and he smelled sour and pungently of pot. They took off their coats and hung them on hooks near the mouth of their booth. Then the man came to the bar, chatted with the keeper, and got them a pitcher of beer and a couple of glasses.

The man wore a knit Rastafarian hat, green, yellow, red, beneath which lay a long, dark ponytail. He wore an open plaid shirt with a black T-shirt beneath, from the front of which smiled Mr. Bob Marley.

The woman was tall and thin. If they were to make a movie about this whole incident they’d probably cast Katherine Heigl to play her, and that could work, but only if Katherine Heigl was falling apart a bit. The skin of her face was sagging a little, her elbows were bony, and her hair looked sort of like straw. But she was still pretty, there was no seeing around that. Probably as pretty or prettier a woman as either Marty or I would ever know again. She looked nice in her jeans, and she was a good three or four inches taller than Bob Marley. It was
obvious to everyone present that our little Bob was punching well above his weight.

They settled into their booth and I more or less forgot about them. Marty was taking his sweet time, I thought, and a moment later I saw the light leak out from the bathroom door as it swung open. Marty’s path back to our stools took him right by Bob and Broken Katherine, and on the way by he said, loud enough for the whole bar to hear, “Good to see you again, asshole!”

Why would he have done that? I wondered.

Marty fell down onto his stool and I could smell the drink on him. I realized that he’d lapped me several times over in terms of consumption. He was close to drunk; if he wasn’t already there, he was on the outskirts. I thought maybe that had something to do with his greeting to Bob Marley.

“How do you feel tonight?” he boomed at me.

“I feel pretty good, Marty,” I said.

“That’s good. That’s frickin’ good,” he said. “I gotta say, though, our evening might be about to change.”

“How so, Marty?”

“I might have to beat that little guy to death,” he said, and he was smiling broadly. His face was red, his ears and his neck. Something was racing through him.

“Why’s that, Marty?”

“Oh, that don’t frickin’ matter now,” he said, and he swivelled around to face the bar. He was finishing a beer and then he ordered a shot of vodka. Then a second.

“You want anything?” he asked me, but I just tilted my half-full beer glass to show its contents. “Fair enough,” he said.

After a third shot he spun back around and faced the corner where the couple sat. He was looking at them over my
shoulder and grinning. He watched them a moment and he moved his mouth like he was looking for something to say. He chuckled to himself.

“You need a ladder to kiss her?” he shouted.

“Fuck you,” someone shouted back, but it didn’t seem to me that it was Bob. He might have a defender in this, I remember thinking.

“How do
you
fuck
her
?” Marty shouted to the whole barroom.

I wished to hide then in my glass of beer. “Marty,” I asked, “do you know those two?”

“I might’ve run into them before. Here.” Then he laughed like a clown might before it touches you in the funhouse.

“On the way into town, am I right?” I asked.

“Sure, sure,” Marty said. Then he shouted, “Look at him! Look at you! You look like her kid brother!” The couple was trying their best to ignore all of this. I don’t imagine they were successful. Everyone else in the Starlite had gone quiet, like villagers waiting for a bombing run to end.

“You don’t talk much,” he said to me.

“I don’t have much to say,” I responded. “Not much important, anyway. I don’t really know what’s going on here.”

“What’s frickin’ going on here is that I stopped by for a sip on Saturday afternoon, stopped right here at this establishment, and I was enjoying myself, talking to blondie there. Seemed to me we were getting on great. Then her fella there comes in and starts saying some unkind things, and I got agitated because it seemed to me that if he and I were laid out on a buffet, at best he’d be an appetizer, where I’d be the main course. I could see she might feel that way too, and I was about to do something about it when I was advised that the
gentleman a few stools down was a police officer. That changed my plans somewhat. So I said I’d come back and we’d finish.”

“And you brought me.”

“You weren’t busy, were you?”

“Suppose not.”

After Marty’s speech I decided I’d have a double Canadian Club, no ice, and as I ordered that I happened to glance in the mirror and notice their booth had gone empty.

Then I heard a microsecond of shouting. My jaw went electric and the stool I’d been sitting on was suddenly beside and above me. Marty’s head was nearly staved in by the thick glass bottom of an empty pitcher, whereas I think Katherine Heigl had walloped me with a plate.

There were shattered bits of light in my eyes, on the floor. The linoleum down there smelled of winter and salt.

I was still trying to move my face when I heard Marty get to his feet and start to shuffle after our Bonnie and Clyde, who’d retreated to the other side of the room. Bob Marley was holding a stool in front of him and Marty, whose face was bloody, was headed over there with his fists loaded. But the bartender shouted, “Hey!” and when I could see over the bar I noticed the shotgun in his hands. There wasn’t any doubting who it was pointed at. In fact the whole room of people was lined up against Marty and, to a lesser degree, me. Clearly the other two had thrown the first, but they were local and we weren’t. We weren’t even Albertans. And we probably didn’t vote the same way either. They had their reasons is what I’m getting at.

“Christ!” Marty shouted, then reached down to yank me up. When we got to the truck it just worked out that I climbed
into the driver’s seat, though I had no business being there. I felt like someone had packed cotton balls into my skull. There was a sharp pain where my teeth ought to have been and I couldn’t speak.

In my dreams of that happier life, things like this were securely in my past. They weren’t adventures to me anymore; they caused my heart to ache. I’d look at myself and shake my head. That happier life – the hope of it, the possibility of it – came to me in sparing moments now, like when I’d eaten that breakfast Marty had made, or when we stood in the blue twilight in the Starlite’s parking lot earlier and it seemed like maybe we had a good evening ahead of us. But every time one of those moments sprang up it was gone again just as fast, and that happy life got further and further away, like a thing you watch blow away in a storm.

It was full on night now, the roads bare but for my sweeping headlights. I didn’t feel as though I was driving, but rather that the truck was driving me. I felt safe. That’s why it was so surprising to me when that tree came up. I thought, who’d put a tree there? But of course it was that we’d left the road behind. The truck wasn’t saving us, and Marty reached over for the steering wheel. He was saying something but I couldn’t hear it because of the wind whistling in the hole where the windshield used to be.

There was an interval when I was aware of darkness, but not of anything else. I don’t know if I was conscious or not, or just what state I was in. When I came to and tried to open my eyes there was a dazzling spray of light. What was interesting was that I couldn’t be sure if the light originated inside my head or if it came from somewhere else. I knew there was a helicopter,
and quickly reckoned that I was in it. The copter’s blades sounded like a series of pops. Pop-pop-pop-pop, in a sort of fast slow motion. With each pop it felt as though my head might implode. I tried to look at myself but came to find that I was strapped down. I wanted then to throw up because my feet were above my head and the level earth was a distant memory.

I wondered about my truck, and in fact I must have asked aloud, because someone said it was gone. I thought that was too bad, because I felt a great sense of loyalty to that blue 1988 GMC, the truck that Marty had driven to the hospital after our ill-fated duck expedition, as I sat in the passenger seat and my head lolled around like a pinball and the pain felt like it had a centre and a million radiant arms. Our borrowed shotguns rattled around in the bed. It had been a good truck.

My blood felt milky. The helicopter rose and rose, as though it was going to take me over the mountains, or into the clouds. What happened then was that I had a flashback to the moment before we’d left the road, Marty and I, in my blue truck. I had been thinking that sometimes your life isn’t the one you want to be living, even if it isn’t terrible or dire. There was nothing I wouldn’t mind seeing the end of, I had said to myself. That included Marty.

Now in the ascending helicopter, still going up, I didn’t know if Marty was alive or dead, and I didn’t want to ask. I knew he wasn’t nearby, in my helicopter, but maybe he was in his own, thumping similarly heavenward. I wondered if we’d both wake up in the same ward, a mint-green curtain separating our mechanical beds, and laugh about all this. But I hoped not. I hoped I wouldn’t see Marty on the other side of this. It was all his doing; I couldn’t see any other way. My head
was enduring a slow explosion and my eyes didn’t seem to be working quite right. The rest of my body was at that moment either a rumour or a memory and I had to face the reality that Alberta wasn’t really working out for me. And goddamn Marty, I thought. The mountains had sent him, and it was my great desire that the mountains should take him back.

The child had a thought like a nail through the sole of her foot, stuck. The hatted aunt with lips like scrambled egg looked at the child but could not see the thought; she saw only the child, staring into the corner at the floor where, the hatted aunt proved with a glance, there was nothing except off-yellow off-white smears six inches up from the floor, and dust.

Are you hungry at all, she said to the child.

But the staring seated child with the thought like a nail through the sole of her foot went sit, sit, sit.

So the hatted aunt with lips like scrambled egg and eyes like boiled eggs sat and watched the wall.

The uncle of the child came now tall and smear-coloured from the office halfway down the hall, and he said to the hatted aunt, Thank you for waiting. If we hurry we can make it there by seven. And the hatted aunt said, I wish we had gone to your – and the child could not hear what the hatted aunt said to the uncle after that, for she said it with her face hidden
behind her hat and her mouth hidden up against the uncle’s smear-coloured coat.

The uncle said, Come, Emily, and he reached his sallow fingers out at the child until she peered up from the thought she was having, and laid her hand in his fingers to hold. She followed the uncle into the elevator and the hatted aunt followed after them.

Outside it was all evening, and shadows rising like deep pooling water between the buildings, and the child was caught again on the thought like a nail. The uncle did not notice it so much except that now and again he had to tug the child by the hand when she forgot to walk. The hatted aunt did not notice it because she had her purse open in front of her as she walked and she was searching through it and saying, Herbert, where did I.

Meanwhile the child almost did not notice the dark rising purple from the storm drains, and she almost did not feel the uncle’s fingers around her hand, and she almost forgot to cross her eyes at the yellow dog graffitied in the alley between the corner store and the hardware store, but at the last moment she did remember and the yellow dog did not try to follow them. But the thought like a nail caught and caught and caught, and she looked down at her hand, and wondered.

When they rounded the corner and there on the side of a building was the twenty-foot man, slick like wet soap and drinking a wet cold glass of milk and saying BONES NEED MILK
^©
, the uncle did not feel what happened inside the child’s thought. He only pushed open the door of a restaurant called Minelli’s and held it for the hatted aunt as he said to her, I don’t even think I spoke to him during the trip. And the
hatted aunt might have replied, but the child did not hear her, because the thought like a nail through the sole of her foot went
twist
.