Travelling Light

by Peter Behrens

  We are asleep in California six weeks past when wham! bam! on the doors, and deputies are there all of a sudden, like out of your dreams, and arrest Daddy and haul him off to jail. I am in jail too, alone and so lonesome, but they don’t hold me for long; they turn me loose, which is worse until I meet Johnboy at the church. He now takes care of me and I take care of him and he tells me, Forget Daddy, put that right out of your mind. But I can’t. He says, You are a pore little orphan Vetnamee girl. Pretty little slant-eyes. They send him back to Folsom, Johnboy say, for years. My Daddy.

  What I liked best was driving at night, me and Daddy both behind the wheel. On the great black roads out there, somewhere empty, Nebraska, Canada.

  This past weekend, finally, month and a half after they take Daddy and stick him in jail, me and Johnboy finally get out on the road together. We go up to Tahoe in his van. We’re getting married.

  Johnboy says, Ah, little Vetnamee girl, I love your tiny feet! ’Cause I like to ride at night with my shoes off and my feet resting up on the dash. I like to steer too, like I done with my Daddy, but Johnboy won’t let me behind the wheel of his van. Not yet, anyways.

  After our wedding we spend the weekend up there in the trees and mountains, sleeping at nights in the back of the van. Johnboy keeps saying he’s going to go fishing but doesn’t. Instead he unfolds the beach chair he bought at Walmart outside Stockton, $19.99, and sits and swallows beer with the tape deck playing Rolling Stones. He says sixties songs all remind him of his tour. For dinner we have no fish but food, store bought, I fry up on the Coleman. At night it is peaceful. But it’s not like being out on the road.

  The best of our weekend is the drive home Sunday night. We come down alongside the Merced River and all the lupines are in bloom. They are my favourite night-driving flower: you can see ’em by moonlight and by headlight, little reflectors out there in the fields. Such white and spooky little flowers, millions of them, waxy, glowing. I would like to weave a great big chain of them and send them to my Daddy, back suffering prison time in Folsom.

  They say to me, policemen judges caseworkers, what will become of you? and I say I have Johnboy to take care of me now. And Johnboy is deacon of the church, VFW chapter VP, auxiliary deputy, and has the preacher as witness. I am legal age now. I am an American just like you. Americans can do what we like.

  What I don’t tell them is I will just wait for Daddy. I’ll stay here with Johnboy, who takes care of me, and be good. I like to sing in church and wax his van, but don’t tell me to stop thinking of Daddy. Daddy is the one planted inside of me.

  We sleep near roadside always, in the Pontiac; we drive off into some little dark corner of a field about two hours before dawn. Beneath cottonwoods, near riverbanks, is where we like to park. We get out and swim in the river. Daddy tells me stories. We laugh and have jokes. We go to sleep.

  I hate to remember them wrestling Daddy away, Daddy yelling while they shove him in their car, No peace for the wicked!

  The trail out of Tahoe with Johnboy Sunday night comes from the mountain in steep canyon walls and gorge, winds down the river for miles and miles until the valley flattens it out to a road just like any other. Then the lupines disappear and we have the night smells, manure, crops, irrigation ditches.

  I was a little girl, we liked the straight highways, my Daddy and me. Daddy says, On a straight road, Face, we make time.

  Johnboy is a much softer person than my Daddy. By far. Big and soft and easy, which is why I like him so. He’s a locksmith. I like the little tufts of beard he has grown all along the line of his chin. His hair to me is the colour of honey. And his cheeks, all pink. His mouth happy, especially sucking on a beer. My Daddy will drink too but in a different style. Such as one afternoon, when we were staying in Montana, Daddy working housepainter up in Flathead Valley for the Swede — I remember the Swede well: big, floppy moustache and skin speckled with white paint. Next to him my Daddy looks like a brown stick. What happens is, after a couple of weeks the Swede owes Daddy money and we want to leave. We go looking for the Swede one afternoon. We go to a house to collect but the Swede ain’t there. We go to another house — ain’t there either. We start in on roadside bars where the Swede likes to drink. I wait in the car. At each bar we stop at my Daddy walks inside, madder and madder, and has a drink, looking for the Swede. Then he gets back in the Pontiac and we race down the highway, still looking. Finally Daddy gets fighting with an Indian near Missoula, after almost sixty miles of bars, and hits the Indian with a bottle out there in the parking lot. Out cold. Jumps into the Pontiac, where I’m waiting, scared, and we take off out of there and drive all the way to Oregon, I think.

  In Coeur d’Alene a trucker tries to get me up into his cab while Daddy’s in the truck-stop shower. “Little Vetnamee girl, Cambojan, suckee suckee,” trucker says. Disgusts me. Daddy comes out, his hair all slicked back, wet and shiny looking, looking so young and handsome in fresh white tee and jeans; you can see the little scar inside his forearm he picked up on R&R, Sydney Australia. He steps up behind the fat trucker and chops him with his bare hand. We roll him over then, take his wallet, go on our way.

  Now I know my Johnboy ain’t like that. He’s more gentle, like a great big, soft bear. He’s deacon in the church. When we lie together he pretends to growl. He says he respects me ’cause of all the people in Visalia I am the one who has travelled the most and experienced things.

  Most of all I am the one who thinks. Thinking is something I learned from my Daddy; I learned it in my all-night driving. Daddy says, You see, in some ways it is a marvellous and wonderful, rich experience for a child, driving.

  When Johnboy and me drive home in the van through the lupine fields and then across the wide, flat, sweet-smelling valley with irrigation hissing from big pipes rolled out in the fields and the sound of things out there growing — why, I am the one most at home and he is the one always has a secret little bit of wishing that he was back at the condo, with beer, hot dogs, tacos, cake, stucco, waterbed, La-Z-Boy. We live in the development outside of Visalia.

  When I first met Johnboy that night at the church, I think he’s a richie. He wears a tie and jacket to church, jacket powder blue. When he offers me a ride back to the motel, I go with him and we drive around in the van, and then instead of the motel he brings me out to his condo. Outside Visalia. To me it’s a castle.

  My Daddy raised me without religion. On the trunks of our cars he always paints in big, bright red letters ANYONE CAN READ, FEAR NOT! He would say, We’re on the road now, Babyface; we worship wide-open spaces; none of these towns and eyesores is right for us. We get all the Lord Almighty we need driving ourselves into sunset each evening. This way he’d talk when feeling especial good and roll down the window on his side, stick out his head, and yell, Yip, yip, yippee.

  Which was right, because things didn’t go well for us in the towns. We met in Bakersfield, where I was working in the little Vetnamee store, not even going to school, sweeping up, selling jujubes. Daddy pays ’em just to take me out of there, but even so there’s a fight.

  Once my Daddy got a job on a sewer crew, Casper Wyoming. We live there five weeks. He’s not the same man in the towns. They start him feeling bad. Itchy-twitchy, he calls it. Sundays he’s off work and we drive around looking for something, neither of us knows what. We drive to the edge of the town, Casper Wyoming, turn around, drive to the end on the other side, turn around again. We go home watch TV. Monday, Daddy goes back off to work. He says, No one bother you. Tell ’em you’re my wife — no one knows the age of Vetnamee girls anyhow. Besides, I love you, he says. I take care of you, Babyface, Sugarpie, Sweetheart.

  He never talked this way except when we were in the towns. At night he would cry. I try to cook him dinners when he comes home but he likes better we go up to the highway, eat in one of our truck stops out there on the edge of town. Casper Wyoming. Where we bought the Pontiac.

  Drivi
ng at night makes me sad, with sadness sweet as honey I can’t stop eating. Daddy and me have gone through weather in all sorts of places: Dakota snowstorms, midnight hundred degrees in places like Barstow. I tell Johnboy now, sometimes when I’m feeling blue, just what Daddy used to sometimes say—Baby, let’s drive to Texas! I say it this morning just before Johnboy leaves for work.

  Johnboy gets all hot. He says, Drive to Texas! Ain’t you grateful? I have saved you from your Daddy. I have give you room to grow. I have brought you to the grace of the Lord.

  I am not really serious, but still. It wouldn’t have to be Texas. Could be anywhere at all.

  He just ties on his tool belt and stomps out the door. He loves his job; he’s always first on the whole street to leave for work. First in all Visalia maybe. I go out through the sliding glass door onto the little porch where the Hibachi sits, look down and watch him cross the parking lot. It’s early day and the sun throws a long shadow cross the cement. Johnboy’s the only one out there. No one else goes to work this early; their cars are still scattered all over — vans, Trans Ams, pickups — and bikes and plastic tricycles on the lawns, and flagpoles, and grass hissed at night by the sprinkler or otherwise it gets burnt into prickly little stubs. Sprinkler shuts off a little time before dawn.

  Oftentimes me and Daddy roll right through these farm towns, these valley towns at night and pull up curbside or in some driveway. We tug off our clothes and go lie out there on the thick, sweet, wet lawns and let the mist of water soak right through us. We lie there looking up at the stars while the poor ones like Johnboy are in their houses asleep.

  What can I say? I stand there on the porch in the morning sun with a mug of coffee, wearing a new nightgown, peek-a-boo, he bought me on Victoria Secret, watching him fiddling with the keys of his van, trying to get the door open. He’ll look up at me.

  You’re a misfit, that’s what you are, he’ll yell. You make sure to lock up that porch door when you go inside!

  I wave and he heaves into the front seat and drives away.

  In towns at night, when we were feeling clean and empty, Daddy and me liked to slip into homes on little missions. Roll past a home and Daddy points and says, That one. Lets me out at the corner, all dark and quiet, and tells me what he wants. Sometimes it’s something easy: rake from the garden, kitchen knife. Sometimes harder. He’ll say, Get me a bar of bathroom soap, little one. Or, Fetch me a bedside clock.

  I like to slip into the houses, darkness, stay low on the floor. No one ever wakes. I’m good now but Daddy’s the best. Once he comes back with a dog collar, big one too, like a Dobie, something mean; says Rexie on the collar. Daddy has a way with animals.

  Johnboy has lived in this wonder valley all his life; his mom and pop and sisters live in a deluxe trailer park, other side of the city of Visalia from us, work in a factory, work in a health-care centre. We don’t see ’em much. They are backsliders. John’s Born Again, and the Church, the Pentecostals, now they are his family.

  Last night, Sunday night, we drove down, twisting alongside the Merced River past little meadows and hillsides of shiny lupine. I got my toes curled on the cool edge of the dash like I like; we stop at the store coming out of Yosemite for Fritos and beer. I am listening to the sounds of the night driving, crackling of the cellophane bag, when Johnboy reaches in for another handful, radio noise, wind slipping in through loose corners of shut windows. Johnboy reaches over to pat my feet. I am convinced in these kinds of moments that I have waiting for me a destiny, just like my Daddy said when we first met, Bakersfield; the way he would tell me and make me believe, over campfires we set up in little roadside pull-ins in the Rocky Mountains.

  Johnboy always trying to get me to tell about life with Daddy. What did he do with you? What did he like? How old was you when you met up with him?

  I liked to lean over the fires when they were almost out so I could smell the smoke and get a little of it in my hair and see the last coals glowing. The red embers looked like cities burning and flickering from a plane up high above.

  They let me see Daddy just the once, while he’s still at county jail.

  Locksmith, he says. Ha ha.

  I think of our poor Pontiac parked off somewhere in some sheriff’s lot, getting dusty and hungry for the road. Probably sold by now, Johnboy says: auction, convict goods. Daddy says nonetheless he’ll come to fetch me. Nonetheless, Babyface. Just be ready.

  A destiny is something like the stars you see twinkling in the midnight sky when you are travelling across Wyoming. A destiny is the place where you will end up, says Daddy, all happy, with problems forgot and sorrows eased. It is the place you lie with all your friends around, sipping drinks, with the smell of flowers. There’ll be a soft little stream and more flowers floating by.

  I feel I am getting closer to it while I am travelling at night. Even with Johnboy. My destiny is a seed that the night and all the trips I’ve taken with Daddy has planted in me. Even if the destiny dries up and hides whenever we stop, and in the daytime. Even if I can’t show it to Johnboy, can’t tell him what it is when he asks — he’ll never understand, I think sometimes. But I will love and try to teach him like Daddy taught me. Like when we’d stop at gas stations somewhere after midnight — Spearfish, Moline, Shelby, Farmington — they would wipe the windshield of the Pontiac and say to Daddy as he was about to pay, Where you going, mister? and Daddy’d look them straight in the eye and say, Up and beyond now, up and beyond is where I’m headed.

  The idea is a precious seed Daddy gave me, and all the night and all the travelling will be sure to land me at the one, the only place.

  At night out here, outside Visalia, when Johnboy rolls over and presses me against the wall, snoring, I crawl out from under and go stand at the window just to check that it is off the latch. I can see orange lights out on the highway. I look back at Johnboy’s bulk on the bed, asleep in pyjamas, hear slurp and sloshing of the waterbed when he rolls again, and the sound of trucks out on the road. Sleep, baby, sleep, I whisper to him.

  FATHER’S SON

  When my father had his first heart attack, the winter I was fifteen, I felt relieved. I thought it might weaken him a little, even the scales between us.

  He was still in the intensive care unit when a massive snowstorm shut down the city. As his only son, I thought it was my duty to ski across Montreal that night to see him. I felt like a coureur de bois traversing our silent, boreal city. Stars sparked above Westmount Mountain. My skis left fresh, frail tracks on buried streets: the Boulevard, Côte-des-Neiges, Pine Avenue.

  I found him on a narrow bed in the ICU, wires glued to his chest. A cardiac monitor spat green light in the room. An intravenous feeder was plugged into his forearm, plastic tubing shoved up his nose. He was so glad to see me. I don’t think I had ever seen him unshaven before. The white beard rasped my lips when I leaned over to kiss him. At that moment, in his helplessness, I loved him as much as I ever had, or would.

  The ICU nurses adored his elegant manners, weird ice-blue eyes, beautiful hands. In a hospital bed my father looked nothing like what he was: an executive in a midsize conglomerate that manufactured industrial chemicals and newsprint. No, he was an old Viking. A comitatus elder. An ancient warrior with the North Sea flowing in his veins—along with the IV glop.

  He was sprung from ICU at the end of the week, briskly dealing with office paperwork from his private room in the Royal Victoria Hospital. He bounced back fitter, twenty pounds lighter, and I came to understand that I had to get away or he was going to eat my life. Nothing grisly, only a kind of painless ingestion. Afterwards I might be spat out at business school, law school. If I was not sharp enough for the practice of law, I would doubtless prove capable of some position requiring a well-tailored suit. Something respectable, reliable, and offering total security. A job that didn’t really exist, outside my father’s imagination.

  The ranch was where my life star
ted. Everything before that felt like someone else’s history.

  On my first morning I was introduced to the top hand. A loose-limbed, sun-flayed man name of Rick Bean. The first cowboy I ever met. I had expected a big hat, tooled leather boots, spurs. Rick Bean wore spurs, but they were strapped on over Canadian Tire rubber boots. Instead of a Stetson, a nylon mesh cap from a farm equipment dealership in Red Deer.

  He stood beside the corral, rolling a cigarette. We solemnly shook hands. His posture was awkward, tentative, as though he had broken bones that had never quite knitted together. His hand felt big, bony, and dry. He hadn’t shaved, and his chin was covered with silver stubble. He licked the cigarette and stuck it between his lips. I struck him a match. He asked to keep the matchbook, from a Montreal bar — Sweet Mama’s, on Mackay Street. He wanted it to show to his kids.

  Everything he did superbly was done from horseback. Rick Bean, I learned, had no feel for machinery. He distrusted loud noises and gearshifts. Brake levers and starter buttons never seemed to work for him. In the operator’s seat of a swather, the machine buzzing and clattering like a giant insect, his eyes narrowed to worried slits. His brown face wrinkled in all its creases.

  He had been a rodeo cowboy, had raced chuckwagons at the Calgary Stampede. He had won many events, taken some bad spills, and married a waitress met in the Stampede beer tent. She bore six children, not all of them his.

  The Beans wintered at Pincher Creek and came up to the ranch every spring. They arrived in a smoking Plymouth Belvedere crowded with skinny children, towing a horse trailer, car and trailer crusted with pale grey mud. They settled into an old squared-timber cabin. The rancher advanced wages so Mrs. Bean could buy groceries. The local store did not extend credit to the Beans.