This Location of Unknown Possibilities (24 page)

Marta had read enough to recognize that a leap into the dark void came freighted with implications, soulful and profound. If in a novel, the catharsis of the leap and the immersion into the water would be a complex, essay-worthy set of associations that might reference baptism rituals or the Freudian unconscious; she'd analyze the passage in a classroom expertly. The difference was, jumping off the ledge and sinking into the roaring current tonight wouldn't announce any breakthrough. Inky water here simply meant dangerous, not symbolic; and if surviving the plunge turned out to be the lucky outcome, the arrival on shore would presage the mood of a wet cat only. The literary moment—doused with a convenient new outlook, now weightless and ready to grab life by the horns after the special audience with Platonic truth—would prove wishful thinking. She'd be cold and uncomfortable, and flustered later while driving on empty roads in damp undergarments clamped to puckered skin. She hadn't even brought a towel.

Chaz floated otter-like below. He let himself drift for a moment with the current and then kicked frantically to return to territory he'd already claimed.

Marta waved again and walked toward the car. Staring into the murky thicket hollow where Chaz had disappeared, she began to discern a crude pathway. Branches jabbed and the granite bank tricked her feet, but the current's silvery reflections guided her forward. No sandy shore met her: rock one step, canal the next. Alert for the insidious hum of ravening mosquitoes Marta crouched on a flat boulder, pondering whether to dip a toe into the frigid water.

“How's the water out there,” Marta yelled over the current.

“Invigorating!” Chaz turned over and began swimming toward the bank. “Actually, it's cold as a witch's tit. That was my Dad's favourite.”

“Colourful. Mine still says, ‘Cold as a well-digger's ass.'”

“And ‘Don't know shit from Shinola,
'” Chaz said. “Never knew what that meant.”

“My mother preferred ‘chewed dates.'” Marta ran fingertips along the surface of the water. “My father's comparison was—well, is—always ‘ass' and ‘a hole in the ground.'”

“Wow, ‘Good grief, Charles' for my mom. The foulest thing out of her mouth is ‘Cripes!' And that's when she's really ‘browned off' about something. It's time-warpy, but kinda cute.”

“My mother grew up in a Prairie household of hockey player brothers.”

“It's weird that our generation doesn't have better sayings.” He paddled near the shore. “Saying ‘dude' all the time doesn't count.” The current mellowed at the water's edge and Chaz corrected the drifting with an occasional kick.

“Cold as a stock-trader's eyes?”

“That's not bad,” Chaz said. “I was thinking of something to do with terrorists, but it seemed too obvious and Republican. Phew, that's enough for me.
With all the shrinkage, I'm starting to feel peewee league!”

“Your clothes are where you left them on the car hood.” She could feel the water-cooled air passing though the cotton's light weave. “Do you want me to grab them?”

“Nah, they'll be warm. I'll make a run for it.”

Marta guessed they were both conscious of the scene's picturesque oddity, Chaz the au naturel elephant in the room. Knee-jerk propriety occurred to her as she stood: fig-leaf hands over the groin for the man; and for the woman averted eyes, or, perhaps, nurse-like efficiency, as though a nude body—a mere object to be shaved, wiped, or prodded—existed as part of a routine, as unnoticed a line in the job description as beeping heart rate monitors.

Comic relief slipped out instead. “This way, Sir,” she said, gesturing with the bland helpfulness of a flight attendant.

“Thank you, Miss.” Chaz slipped out of the canal and into the trail with a motion whose fluidity was broken by yelps and grumbling caused by pokes of angular gravel and sharp webs of branches.

Though she'd never stood at this exact location and hadn't ever conceived of sneaking out to the canal deep into the night, Marta inhaled deeply and, facing the water, surrendered to a contentment cousin to nostalgia. Cascading swirls of moist and warm air, enveloping murmur of current, mobile chiaroscuro along the surface: the bubble of time exceptional and perfect, otherworldly yet as rooted as ivy.

With the headlights illuminating the return climb, Marta avoided the snags along the path.

“Hey, I should have mentioned it earlier, but I looked online. There's a twenty-four-hour truck stop-style restaurant ten minutes south of the motel,” Chaz said as Marta emerged from the darkness. “It's either that or the dregs of the BBQ chips.”

“I'm officially starving, so chips won't cut it.”

“Pedal to the metal?”

“Okay, for you. Just once.”

“Let's go,” he said. “I'm buying.”

“As you wish, Charles.”

“Ha ha, let's not go there. Just my mom calls me that.”

“I understand you completely.”

COLOSSUS

1.

J
ake's chest nudged the steering wheel as he scrutinized the poker-faced landscape: one sliver-thin dirt road looked no different from the next, and the solid blocks of orchard between them helped him in no way. He felt elderly slowing to catch sight of the dwarf road signs. At least no other drivers zoomed by and registered—
honk, hooonnnkkk
—the crawling speed, stops and starts, and brake light frequency. Jake, almost positive he was pointed in the right direction, fretted about the sketchy details; he thought enviously of scouts and trackers in movies—never having met one in real life—who could glance at a patch of dirt and verify who'd been there, what went down, and how long ago. Close to the real McCoy, Nicos would have sniffed out the location in a heartbeat.

Reaching the summit of the low rise, Jake spotted the landmark he'd been told to watch for—a small plywood fruit stand whose roof-top sign trumpeted fertility: a basket-weave cornucopia spilling over with plump ripe produce. Supposedly, the rendezvous location stood just inside the next roadway.

A minute too early, Jake spat gum out the window and popped in two fresh cinnamon pieces, hoping that the courtesy would be reciprocated. He'd walked away from breath-of-the-damned types before; and he'd head for the nearest exit if up close and personal with any body's rank orifices and funky pits. He riffled through the messenger bag for lube. Spending next to no time on trivial chat and negotiations would be key tonight.

Tractor-wide, the target road stretched out, as nondescript as the rest. Jake braked to a crawl. Since parking on the puny road shoulder was out of the question, process of elimination led him to the orchard itself. If anything went wrong, he'd tell Old MacDonald or Officer Joe that he'd pulled over to take a leak: tired, a long day on the road, etc, etc, no harm, no foul.

Positioned at the edge of the neat tree line, Jake flicked off the headlights and waited. Short minutes later he swung open the door—a furtive stranger inside a dark car could be intimidating, after all, shorthand for danger. Leaning against the grille with crossed arms, he saw shadowy forms and detected no sound except rustling leaves and the guttural croaking of distant toads. A cattle-hauling semi sped by, illuminating the arbour, for that instant a diorama at a natural history museum: “The Age of Agribusiness,” complete with an old-fashioned thresher and piped-in livestock pong. During the headlight flash Jake darted his eyes from one tree trunk to the next. Not a soul. And when darkness returned he was blind for a half minute and anticipated the snap of a twig or a voice—“Hey, man”—from the near distance. Still nothing save for the sound of his breathing. The butt of a joke, he predicted, the sensation unwelcome.

2
.

I
t's time to take the bull by the horns
, Jake thought. “Hey, anyone there?” he asked, voice low but friendly, as when approaching a dog. Jokily: “I can't see past my nose.”

The breeze cutting through the trees answered enigmatically.

He sighed a gambler's lament, pissed about wasted time and squashed expectations. Ecstasy's possible, Jake had been shown time and again, as is being stood up, running into a repulsive case of false advertising, or coming face to face with a thudding lack of chemistry despite everything lining up on paper.

Buttressed and warmed by the vehicle, the idiocy of trying but failing to attain a cool, devil-may-care pose struck him.

Jake's eureka called for the lowering of jeans; he'd work his tool to optimal hardness and jack with teasing showy gusto. A proud Colossus of Rhodes stance might entice the shy watcher; that manly siren's call never failed to work in porn. Outside of porn, the spectacle played out differently: a comic set-up with a punch line about Pee-wee Herman and being caught, or worse, a crushing indictment—the mark of a sex offender, a solitary loser, a characterless nobody with an overgrown fantasy life who can't disguise the fact that the very existence of the bad habit is third-rate, less a proud enlightened choice than a pathetic last resort.

With the tumult of thoughts he kept the jeans buttoned.

Why did the act need to mean anything, Jake wondered. Nobody thought scratching an itch harboured deep implications, or stood for loneliness, laughable social skills, or butt ugliness.
Philosophy in the dark
, he thought,
what's up with that?

He squinted into the murk of the rustling tree rows, expectations dwindling and spiky anger rising.

Exhaling sharply—annoyed, dissatisfied, insulted—Jake returned to the vehicle and backed up, momentarily pondering the hotel visitor he'd brushed off earlier. “Cursed hellhole,” he said, “no wonder people go to real cities.” He turned right at the highway. Despite the black cloud mood he drove off slowly. Someone might be there, hidden and watching—a coward or a sadist—and he refused to give the game-playing asswipe the satisfaction of catching any sign of his short-lived but intense regret.

COMMONER ELEMENTS

1.

P
erspiration rivulets tickled Marta as she signaled at the
24–
hour Husky pillar, the towering red plastic portrait of the gas station's trustworthy namesake atop a secondary invitation: an electric blue circle at whose centre stood utensils—fork, knife, spoon—in giant silhouette. Shivering, Chaz had admitted the canal water to be far nearer to antarctic than arctic, and requested heat blasts along with sealed windows for the drive. The scent of vegetable broth filled the cabin as he thawed.

“Cool, Peterbilts, look at all that chrome,” Chaz said during Marta's tour of the parking lot. Cooling and leonine, a few semis were sprawled near the highway; Marta, braking to survey the options, swerved toward a third-rate spot facing the toilets. A stop for truckers, she reasoned, so the might-is-right rule must apply.

“That'd be the life, eh? ‘I don't pay no union dues,'” Chaz sang.

“I think that song is about being a tramp.” Marta pondered the likely cleanliness of the women's washroom.

“Same idea: no fuzzy cubicle, no telephone noose, no nothing to tie you down.” Chaz twisted around to survey the trailers. “‘Believe in the holy contour of life,' right?”

“Men seem keen on that Kerouac mystique. When I think of him, I picture debt, a string of bad marriages, and death by alcohol before reaching fifty, an esophagus filled with blood. Not very romantic.” Marta checked the parking brake. “As for the truck-driving life, sorry but I just don't get that, either. Sitting in a loud vibrating metal box all day, working for a quota-spouting boss, popping NoDoz. That sounds no better than an office, only with hemorrhoids and high cholesterol from a diet of fried food.”

“Okay, Professor Killjoy.
You're right, but every job is just a job when it comes down to it.” He swung open his door. “You gotta admit, there's something about a shiny big rig on the open road.”

“There used to be a drive-in right over there, the Silver Sage,” Marta pointed, in no spirit to admit anything. The night air, summery but overlaid with acrid notes of gasoline fumes, was refreshing after the sultry automobile interior.

“I'll join you inside. I want to take a closer look at those babies.”

Marta wandered toward the coffee shop under the metallic orange glare of mercury vapour lighting, each lamp's output, she guessed, as blinding as the sun. The canopy was deserted; weary families did not fill tanks at this hour. The Peterbilt drivers likewise stood out of sight, apparently in sleeper cabins or eating inside.

When Chaz bounded in Marta returned the sample menu to the cashier's stand. “Look who's here,” Chaz said, pointing. “Hey, Jake! Let's go in.”

“The sign says ‘Please wait to be seated.'”

“That's different. We'll be with Jake, so it's like we're meeting somebody at our table.” Chaz had already begun crossing the room.

While Marta felt no desire to sit across from Jake, a way out failed to materialize. Choosing a separate table would appear impolite. Reluctantly, she trailed behind Chaz.

“Small world, eh?” Chaz slipped into the booth. “What brings you here?”

“I went out for a drink with the AD and some crew. They're staying at the Watermark, down on the lake.” Jake twisted a thumb toward Osoyoos.

“Ah, so that's where the A-listers are.”

Marta looked around as the men talked shop. Solitary nighthawks comprised the Husky's population; a few thin men—plaid shirts, faded denim, cowboy hats—looked pallid and worn, yet held animated exchanged with the waitress and the line-cook as they sat at the long wood grain counter. Up close the restaurant's lighting, a beacon to drooping-eyed drivers on the highway, beamed harsh and unforgiving.
The floor, seating, and tabletops were moulded from plastics, Marta observed; an industrial product, the pre-fab room expressed durability and efficiency. Barring fire, the formica would be wiped by generations of waitresses. If replaced, scavengers in the distant future would yank the eternal woodgrain from landfills and speculate in awe about the wondrous era before the Great Disaster.

Chaz pitched a career-growing strategy to Jake. “It's branding, right. You are your own brand, it's your skill-set as a product that's marketable.”

“You mean like your porn name?”

“Huh,” Chaz said.

“You know, that old joke—you take your first pet's name and a street you grew up on, and that's your nom de porn.”

“Cinders Dupree,” Chaz said.

“Rex Magnolia,” Jake nodded with approval.

“Spotty Ponderosa.” Marta pictured insects that devastated vast forest swaths.

“No, this is serious. I went to a seminar about this in the city. You choose two words that best describe you, professionally I mean. The idea is to distinguish yourself from the nameless horde, and to specialize as a way to define your niche.”

“Are you sure it wasn't a cult, like that thing Lora joined?” Jake said. “Sounds idiotic.”

Marta agreed. “What use does it have after you've defined your two characteristics? Do you print cards that say ‘Chaz Murphy X and Y' and network with them at parties?”

“Hey, baby, what's your sign? I'm a Taurus with Scorpio rising,” Jake said. “Man, that's just like movie Indian names. ‘Pleased to meet you, I'm Big Sweating Bear.'”

In classrooms no one would throw the I-word into a conversation without carefully announced precaution and distancing finger-quotes; Marta kept quiet with the hope of discouraging Jake's insensitivity.

The waitress, buxom but haggard, slammed two sweating glasses of water on the table. “Ready to order?”

“The pie, is it locally made?” Marta asked, no stranger to buyer's remorse. “I wonder if there's lard in the dough.”

“Um, let me check with Julia Child in the back,” the waitress huffed, on hold for further tourist demands. Her tone edged toward exasperation:
the hoops I jump through for a lousy tip
.

“Thank you.”

“The truck came from Spokane,” the waitress answered when she returned. Marta caught the woman exchanging a glance with Jake.
Is this chick for real?

“Oh, okay,” Marta said, peevish. She had passed by at least half a dozen roadside fruit stands minutes before, but the pies on display here arrived boxed and frozen in a long haul trailer. And though the cherries might have been picked and processed by seasonal workers in one of the nearby orchards, the relentless logic of capitalism demanded pie production elsewhere.
Small wonder there's global warming
, she thought. “I'll try a slice of cherry, thank you.”

“Whip?”

“No, thank you. Plain is fine.” Marta added “whip” to the inventory of laboratory discoveries in her midst.

“Can you ask Wolfgang Puck back there if the gravy's organic and locally-sourced?” Chaz directed a full grin at Marta.
“And can you tell me the cow's name?”

“Get a room or something, you guys, Christ.”

“Maybe I'll have a Royale with cheese,” Chaz said.

“Hamburger with cheese,” the waitress said. “Fries or slaw?”

“Fries with gravy. On the side, okay?”

“Right.” She turned to bark at the kitchen, “Yeah, alright, alright, in a minute, okay?” Facing Jake with raised eyebrows she asked, “You done?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

The waitress frowned at the half-eaten meal and walked away.

“Looks like someone's taken a shine to you,” Chaz said to Marta.

“You know, Chaz, the dangerous part of trying to be a hipster,” Jake paused to drink, “is that the trying portion is way more obvious than the hipster portion and you end up looking like a total wanking loser, some lame wannabe in an entourage that thinks cool will miraculously rub off if he makes the right purchase. It's like those douche bags wearing Ed Hardy shit from head to toe and saying ‘dude' and ‘peace out, bro' every five seconds. I mean, c'mon, it's fucking pathetic. Every wannabe's been quoting that one scene since
1994
. Christ, even the waitress knew it. Maybe you can bring back ‘chillaxin' while you're at it,
dude
.”

Marta shifted on the bench to measure Chaz's reaction. Masculine posturing in seminars wasn't new to her and, as a result, she counted temperate refereeing as a skill. She felt blood surging nonetheless and imagined a hot pink flame of anger streaking across her cheeks.

“Ouch, man, that's harsh. Next time, be sure to tell me what you really think.” Signing defeat, Chaz extended his hands, palms up. “You're my boss, including after hours, so I guess I'll just bend over and take it. Hope you enjoy the ride.”

“I guess anyone could be seen as making a sad grab for hipster status,” Marta said, moved to defend the underdog. “For instance, a tattoo in Helvetica on one's forearm. How unique is that?”

Jake replied after several beats. “Touché, Professor.” He couldn't even drag in the excuse that it stood for a folly of youth. “Look, I'm wound up and irritable, it brings out the dick in me.” He stared out the window. “You're not a douche bag, man. Okay? I gotta get back to Kaleden. Eat up, the food's on me.” Jake slid out from the booth and strode toward the cash register.

“He kinda walks like Chuck Heston, don't you think? ‘You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!'”

“Pardon?”

“
Planet of the Apes
. That's not entourage-y is it?”

“I really couldn't say.”