Travelling Light Page 6

  “Six,” said Mike. “Up to the summit and twice around.” He dropped into a chair and Mr. Heaney reached across the table to give his son’s biceps a squeeze.

  “What will you have?” said Alix. “Let me scramble some eggs.”

  “You’re going to have to put on weight, Mike,” his father said. “I was skinny until I started rowing. That’s when I put on some good, hard weight.”

  “I got these pains in my side.”

  “Did you stretch?”

  “Nope.”

  “You have to stretch.”

  Alix broke eggs into a bowl, added milk, stirred, and poured them into a pan.

  “Are you all packed up?” Mr. Heaney said. “Remember what I said about driving after dark. Better to get a good start, quit at sunset, and find a good place to camp. After dark is when all the nut-jobs are out on the road.”

  Alix put bread into the toaster. “How far will you get tonight, Mike?”

  “Maybe Sault Ste. Marie?”

  “Will you please phone us from wherever you are,” Alix said.

  Mike looked at his father and shrugged. “Sure.”

  The day they heard about Bobby, Mike’s father was waiting in the living room when he got home from school. After he’d been told he wanted to go someplace to be alone, someplace he wouldn’t have to believe Bobby was dead, but his father held him close and wouldn’t even let him go up to his room until he promised that he understood. He had promised, but even then his father kept hugging him and wouldn’t let him go, and then Mike realized his father was crying, and then he had really felt scared.

  Mr. Heaney shook open the Gazette to the financial section. “Wasn’t Clare going to call?” he asked.

  Alix dished Mike’s scrambled eggs onto a plate. Their oldest daughter had promised to call before Mike left, even though it was awfully early in California. Alix took a sip of coffee and summoned a mental picture of Clare in her bedroom in the purple darkness that must still be covering the Pacific coast.

  Jean, their younger daughter, was most likely still in bed in her little apartment in Toronto, probably with her latest bearded boyfriend.

  Since Bobby, Alix had always been aware that her children, separated from the house, might cease to exist, and if it happened she wouldn’t even know until someone — some stranger — called to tell her.

  For a long time after his death she’d had nightmares of her son trapped in a burrow in the millions of tons of ice and glacial till that had consumed him. The glaciers were melting, shrinking by inches every year. Six years after Bobby’s accident there was an item on the CBC News about a hiker who’d fallen into a crevasse in the 1920s and been rescued but left his knapsack and skis behind. Half a century later the knapsack turned up at the foot of a retreating glacier, and the sandwiches inside were still frozen, perfectly preserved.

  “Dome Petroleum’s down, Alix,” Mr. Heaney said. “I wish we’d sold those shares of yours last month.”

  Many times in the years since Bobby’s death they had reassured themselves they were doing all they could for their surviving children. They’d always wanted children in their own image of themselves — magnetic, wilful, tough — but Alix wondered if they had been fooling themselves and all that they’d had to offer as parents had been taken from them and not replaced. She needed to hold Clare, Jean, and Mike close, not because she loved them but because she was terrified of losing them. Terror took up space that should have been filled with love, just love, pure and simple. She did love them, but it was never simple and direct, the way it had been with Bobby.

  Mike finished breakfast and went upstairs. Alix was washing dishes in the sink and Mr. Heaney was sipping a third cup of coffee when their daughter finally telephoned.

  “Mike’s still in the shower,” Alix said over the phone, “but Daddy is right here and he’s not leaving for the office until Mike’s gone.”

  “Let me speak to her,” Mr. Heaney said.

  Alix handed him the receiver and went back to the stove and tried to adjust the flame beneath the coffee pot. The pilot had gone out. As she struck a match and held it to the pilot she noticed her hands were trembling.

  Mr. Heaney covered the receiver and said, “Give Mike a shout, would you? He must be out of the shower by now.”

  Alix walked slowly to the front of the house. She glanced into the living room, which had been redecorated over the winter. She had studied hundreds of fabric swatches and paint chips, determined to get the room exactly as she had always wanted it. Walls and carpets were pale grey and the furniture was upholstered in heavy Irish linen. She could hardly remember what it had looked like before the renovation. On the ninth anniversary of Bobby’s death her husband had suffered his heart attack lying on the old sofa. She’d knelt beside him, loosened his collar, and kissed his hands. Her gesture had frightened him and he’d pulled his hands away.

  Michael heard the phone ringing as he stepped from the shower. Towelling his hair, he went to his bedroom and started getting dressed. From the window he could see his car out in the driveway. He studied it for a moment, pleased with the way the paint gleamed, then he sat down on the corner of his bed. In the shower it had occurred to him that maybe he was being born now, this morning, this actual hour. He let the feeling soak in further as he sat on the bed. How great — if he could only believe in it. If only he could trust that it was, in some sense, true.

  His mother knocked on the door. “California on the phone!”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it in your room.”

  As he passed his mother he deftly kissed her cheek. In his parents’ bedroom he picked up the bedside phone. He intended to tell his sister about his plan to visit the glaciers but before he could mention it their father was back on the line. He began asking Clare about her pregnancy. Mike said goodbye and went back to his own room.

  It had once been Bobby’s room and, in some indefinable way, still was. Anyway, it had never felt to him like his room.

  Sometimes he wondered if his brother would have been as large a presence in their lives if he were still alive. Bobby had become something more than a person, but no one could give a name to what he actually was.

  Gathering up a few last things, he stuffed them into a small backpack. He had already decided to skip the goodbyes if he could get away without them. He would spare his parents all the emotion and just slide away. That would be easiest on everyone, especially his mother.

  He silently went down the hallway carrying his shoes, then down a set of back stairs they called the servants’ way, though they’d never had servants, except burly old Mme Poliquin, who came once a week to clean the house. His sisters used to sneak up the servants’ way coming home late from a date. Maybe Bobby had too — Mike couldn’t remember. The stairs led down to the basement and a door that opened to the driveway. As he was going down the stairs he could hear his father on the kitchen phone still talking to California.

  It was early enough so that the driveway was still shaded and the air almost blue. He’d polished and waxed his car and in the morning light it shone the same blood red as the tulips in the flowerbeds.

  He unlocked the driver’s door, eased it open. Tossing in his shoes and backpack, he slid behind the wheel. Then he released the parking brake and pushed out the clutch and the car started rolling silently towards the street. A neighbour getting into his own car across the street waved and Mike waved back. The neighbour looked surprised.

  Michael turned the key and the engine fired. He suddenly felt an urge to roll down the window and yell to his parents, or to the house — yell something spirited, and reassuring, but he couldn’t think what. He could smell fresh exhaust jetting from his tailpipes, moist and sweet and promising, and he let in the clutch and drove away.

  That night Mike slept on the ground beside a lake in northern Ontario. He’d meant to phone home from a gas stati
on but forgot about it while paying for the gas and only remembered as he was unrolling his sleeping bag and swatting mosquitoes. And by then the last payphone was probably twenty miles back.

  Alix finally went to bed at midnight and dreamed the house was destroyed and nothing was left but a pile of empty glass bottles.

  And Mr. Heaney sat in the kitchen with a shining glass of whisky, neat, wondering if his dead father and himself and his dead son were in some ways the same person. The dead were joined to the living. They would always be powerfully connected. Or was that just hocus-pocus?

  His throat narrowed and for a few seconds he felt very close to tears. But instead of giving in, which would have been weak and pointless, he sat up straight, poured another finger of golden whisky, then raised his glass and took a sip.

  AWAY

  INTERSTATE HEAVEN

  “I hate this stuff,” said Olsen, the younger of the brothers, maybe nineteen.

  I was in a coffee shop at Elko, Nevada, with two brothers who had picked me up out in the desert. On the table between us was a bowl with little plastic tubs of coffee creamer, and Olsen was reading the label on one of the tubs.

  “‘Non-dairy product,’ that’s what it says. Cancer for sure.”

  “Quit your complaining,” said Timothy. He was maybe twenty-one.

  “Would you drink this stuff, professor?” Olsen said.

  “I have in the past,” I told him. “But no, I don’t think so.”

  Olsen was looking around for the waitress. “Where’s the bitch?”

  “Leave her be,” said Timothy. He stirred his coffee and began scribbling lines on a napkin. He had told me he was a poet. While he jotted what could have been verses, his pencil point kept making gashes in the soft, fibrous paper. He tore the lid off a creamer and a jet of the milky white gunk hit his brother on the chin.

  “Bastard!” Olsen jerked a napkin from the steel container and wiped himself furiously. He needed a shave, and the paper made a rasping sound.

  “Sorry,” said Timothy, laughing. “But hey, it was an accident.”

  The manager, behind the cash, squinted at us. The waitress with green eyes came over to stand by our table, her hip cocked, balancing a tray and a plastic coffee pot.

  “Refill?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Please.”

  “Fuck you, toots,” Olsen said, crumpling the napkin and throwing it at her feet.

  “Shut your mouth,” said Timothy.

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “Don’t tell me to shut up, big brother,” said Olsen, clutching his mug. I noticed the star-shaped earring in his left ear.

  “I’d be happy to shut it for you,” said Timothy.

  They had been working in the oilfields of Wyoming and were headed home to California, they said. I could imagine the brawls Timothy had fought and won in the oilfields over the writing of poetry. His writing, he said, was all about young women. He wrote at night and made Olsen sleep in a tent outside their trailer.

  Timothy suddenly broke the pencil in half and dropped both halves into his brother’s coffee mug. Olsen shoved the mug across the table and it slid off the edge and broke on the floor. I could see the manager coming around from behind the cash. Timothy reached over and wrapped his hands around his brother’s throat. The manager pushed the green-eyed waitress out of the way and pointed a pistol at my heart.

  “Get out of my place,” he said. “Get out right now.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” I told the brothers. “I’ll pay for the coffee.”

  I laid money on the table and followed them towards the door. The manager trailed me, occasionally poking my shoulder with the pistol. Looking back, I saw the waitress starting to clear off the table. I was about to wave to her but knew the gesture might be misread, so I just followed the brothers out into the colourless daylight. As soon as we were outside Olsen kicked over the USA Today vending machine. The manager rapped on the plate-glass window with his pistol. Olsen whirled around and ripped open his shirt. The buttons went skittering. “Do it to me then, big man!” he screamed, thrusting out his bare white chest.

  From the other side of the glass the manager just stared.

  Olsen cackled. “What a chickenshit, what a big fat slice of bird pie!”

  A lot of the desert was military test range. As we walked towards the brothers’ white Falcon, a flock of fighters came in quickly, dropping from the sky like stones. “F-16s!” Timothy shouted. The brothers began shouting and waving as the jets swept overhead. Timothy aimed both index fingers and made machine-gunning noises and Olsen whooped like an epileptic Comanche, pulling pins from imaginary hand grenades and lobbing them skywards. The jets swiftly disappeared, leaving contrails like white claw marks on the sky. The noise faded until it was lost in the pell of traffic from the interstate.

  Timothy held open the driver’s-side door and I scrambled into the back seat. Timothy got behind the wheel. Olsen stood on the passenger side, drumming his fingers on the roof.

  “You want to walk to California?” Timothy said.

  Olsen leaned down to address his brother through the open window. “Your wife’s a whore. The only home you’ll ever have is a trailer at Rock Springs.”

  Timothy hardened as if a piece of wire had been inserted into his body. His neck became stiff and his head cocked aggressively, like a large fist.

  “Your mind’s a slave,” Olsen said.

  Timothy jumped out, walked around quickly, and threw open the trunk. He lifted something out and slammed the lid. I saw him holding a canvas seabag. Olsen stopped his drumming on the roof. Timothy whirled the bag around his head a few times, then flung it as far as he could. It landed on the asphalt twenty yards away. Jingling keys, Timothy got behind the wheel, slammed his door, and fired up the engine. Olsen reached in through the window and pulled an automatic pistol from under the passenger seat. I saw his earring sparkle. Timothy reached over, rolled up the passenger window, and locked the door. Olsen started banging on the window with the pistol butt. He began moving around the car, striking the fenders with the pistol.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  “Hold your horses, professor.” Timothy shifted into reverse and the Falcon rocked backwards, grazing Olsen, who barely had time to skip out of the way. We began chasing him across the parking lot. He dodged and twisted like a matador. He managed to get behind the car and break the taillights. Timothy went into reverse again and backed up over the seabag. Olsen leapt onto the hood and started banging on the windshield with his pistol. Timothy jerked and swerved, trying to shake him off the car, but he held on by clutching the stem of a windshield wiper. Timothy slammed on the brakes and he tumbled off, landing on hands and knees on the asphalt.

  We started driving away. I looked back and saw Olsen scrambling to his feet. He crouched and took aim, gripping the pistol with both hands just like a policeman in a movie. I saw the pistol buck and flame but didn’t hear the shots. Timothy hit the gas and we went screeching out of the parking lot, bouncing over the curb and thrusting into the hectic traffic on the boulevard.

  I could see the big green sign for the I-80 but at the last moment Timothy changed his mind, and instead of joining the entrance lane we stayed on the overpass. On the other side of the interstate the boulevard was immediately narrower and dustier, lined with furniture stores, auto-supply stores, churches, gun shops. At the first big intersection Timothy made a U-turn, and I knew we were heading back to the parking lot and Olsen. Timothy said now I would have something to write about. I imagined him in the library of a great university, poring over all the wrong books, noting their wrongheaded anti-wisdom in a ledger he’d keep tucked inside his shirt.

  We passed over the interstate once again. Up ahead I saw Olsen hiking alongside the road, seabag on his shoulder, pausing only to stick out his thumb. We passed him and made a U-turn, th
en passed him again, then pulled over. As Olsen approached the car Timothy reached over and unlocked the passenger door.

  Olsen got in.

  “Don’t ever put a fucking piece in my car without telling me,” said Timothy.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said his brother, twisting around to drop his seabag on the back seat beside me. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I heard you the first time,” said Olsen.

  Between Winnemucca and Reno the Falcon blew a front tire. Timothy wrestled the car to the shoulder and we all got out. Timothy opened the trunk and dragged out the jack and the spare. They both took off their shirts. The same eagle tattoo was scribed on both their backs. They knew how to use tools and worked fast, wrenching off the shredded tire. While they were fitting on the spare I saw my backpack nestled in the trunk. I decided I would grab it, dash across the interstate, and try hitching another ride. It didn’t matter if I was going in the wrong direction: I needed to get away from these two. Olsen was torquing lug nuts. Timothy was cranking down the jack.

  As I reached for my pack I heard a rustling. Looking up, I saw a pair of needle-shaped fighters. As I watched they launched missiles from their wings, and I watched the missiles trace incisions on the sky.

  LYLE

  Jerry watched his father dashing his horse around in the corral muck, cutting out the animals he wanted, running them through the gate Jerry held open.

  At noon Jerry’s mother called them in for dinner. He ate lentil soup while his parents listened to the livestock report on CKRD Red Deer. His parents loved listening to the radio. His mother had it on in the house all day and his father kept a Japanese transistor radio in the barn. They loved rock and roll. They had met at a high school dance in Caroline and married a week after graduation. Late at night they sometimes danced with each other in the kitchen. They liked to jitterbug. His father whirled his mother around until she gave a little scream. Then he would release her and let her spin away, catching her hand at the last second. He’d pull her towards him and lift her off the floor while Jerry watched, feeling curious, and embarrassed.