Deadroads

by Robin Riopelle

  “Mother’s paws up,” Wayne explained. “Maybe the cops can get Dad here.”

  “You get clean,” Marisol advised again, maybe thinking of those waiting out in the chairs, not wanting to horrify them. “There’s donuts over there, help yourself. You can hang out here if you like.”

  Sol didn’t feel like a donut, he wanted a smoke, so after he went to a sink in the staff washroom, he stepped outside into the snowy night, watched it come down, knew that he was going to stick around for a while, see if she made it. Wayne joined him for a bit, then went to the rig to get the end-of-shift paperwork started. The back of the rig, Sol knew, would be a catastrophic mess. He should get started on that, pick up a little.

  He lit another cigarette instead.

  Ice shards pelted down now, almost hail, dry and stinging. His bare fingers, clean and exposed, were frozen. He finished his cigarette, ground it out with his heel, rubbed his eyelids with his fingertips. It’s okay, he told himself, really, it’s okay.

  Then the little girl walked out through the double doors, looked around like she was lost, hair blonde and long and curly like a doll’s. Sol swallowed, tried to make peace with what turned inside him, what battered against his ribcage, at war with his salt blood. He had saved Marty today and you couldn’t win them all. He knew that. “Hé, chouette,” he called to her. Not her. Her ghost. “Sweetheart.” And the girl looked at him, confused.

  Sol bent down to a crouch, his breath crystallizing in the air, ice pellets unperturbed by the little girl’s apparition, passing right through it. The ghost was in the snowsuit still, and Sol was strangely comforted by that: At least she’s not cold, he thought. Not a ‘she’, an it, but he couldn’t think of her like that, not yet.

  He smiled, met the ghost’s eyes. With his right hand, he found the ground, touched it for one moment, as though declaring his intention. Then he shoved his hand under his parka, through the opening of his shirt, right to his chest against his heart. My aim is true. Withdrawing his hand, he brought his fingers to his lips, blew on them like he had a seedy dandelion head there, scattering his intent to the night, opening the way. “Go find your mom, mon p’tit chou. She isn’t far.”

  The ghost gave him a small smile, maybe to reassure him: Yes, I understand. Then it was gone, just like that. Sol tapped the ground lightly, three times, sealing it off, barely a ritual. Life was too fast and too heartless for trivial things like ritual, like ceremony. See need, deal with need. Do it in the most expedient fashion possible.

  Still, there was grace in this, and against his cynical nature, he knew it.

  He stood too fast, before his blood and heart could keep up with gravity, and the night swirled around him. It had been a long day, after all. Wearily, he went inside the hospital so he could be given news he already knew. So he could carry that weight and give it to Wayne. They would wait for the police, help piece together the sequence of events. He would do the paperwork. He would clean the rig, because he wasn’t going to leave her blood for anyone else. Hours to go before either of them would find bed.

  This was a terrible, terrible mistake. Funny how Baz only realized it now. This very instant, matter of fact.

  After all, he’d had the whole trip up to re-think this stupid, idiotic idea. The succession of truck stop rides from North Platte to Minneapolis, then the bus north across the border, change in Winnipeg for Brandon, followed by the shuttle service to CFB Shilo, all of it made with rising excitement, a kid’s countdown to Santa. Christmas Day stalled at the Brandon Super 8, not wanting to arrive in the middle of presents and turkey, whatever normal people did on that day. No matter the amount of time he’d been given, had taken, he still hadn’t thought it all the way through. Find Lutie, that had been the goal, and now it seemed that just making contact wasn’t the point at all. I am such a goddamn idiot.

  And there she was, eyes just the same color as his, as their mother’s had been, fair as summer grass, like her, so much like her. Looking at him as though he’d just strangled a kitten in her kitchen.

  Surrounded by these nice people, so concerned for her, for him, and Baz thought for one wild minute he might actually have a breakdown at the table. He kept his hands in his pockets, wishing for a pit to open up and swallow him whole.

  She hadn’t said a thing.

  “Lutie?” the man—Major McGregor, her foster father—prompted. “Sit down, both of you.” Baz caught the look exchanged between the woman—Karen, introduced as Lutie’s mother—and the Major: this was going downhill fast, was heading for out-of-bounds.

  Tears clawed at Baz’s throat, an early warning signal. He’d come here to tell her that her father was dead and why the hell did he think that would be welcome news?

  “Baz,” Lutie repeated, dumbstruck.

  “Lutie, sit.” Karen dragged out a chair, and Lutie looked at it. Finally, she took the seat, which meant Baz could sit too.

  They stared at each other across the newspaper-strewn kitchen table. Lutie was of course older than Baz had prepared himself for, if indeed he’d spent any time preparing for anything on the long ride north. But she was also younger, protected. Sheltered. Jesus wept, why had he come?

  “Why,” Lutie started, then stopped, unsure. “Why are you here?” Like she was reading his mind. But, no, wasn’t that the question anyone would ask?

  The Major was a profoundly nice man. Baz had decided that more or less instantly, from the moment the man had opened the door on Sapper Avenue, backlit like Jesus coming down from the cross. The Major placed one hand on Lutie’s, covering it like a winter blanket. “He’s got news, Lutie.”

  “How long’s he been here?” Lutie demanded, not meeting Baz’s eyes.

  Baz had told them, before he’d had his coat off, who he was and what he’d come to tell their daughter. They’d still let him in, given him a cup of tea, sat him down in the kitchen thick with the smell of cooking dinner. A couple of sentences before he’d figured out they were her foster parents, not enough time to wonder where his mother was. “He just got here, fifteen minutes maybe.”

  “You let him in? You knew who he was and you…” On par with shooting babies, apparently. She turned her attention to Baz. “What do you want?” Which was different from ‘why are you here?’

  Baz licked his lips, laughed on an exhale, nervous now that it was here. It had seemed so simple, such a great, easy plan: come up here, bring her back into the family, restring the beads of a broken necklace. “I, ah.” He swallowed. “It’s Dad. He died. Week before last. A train accident.”

  Lutie blinked, then shrugged, but it looked like it hurt her to do it. Behind her shoulder, where she wouldn’t notice, Baz saw Karen take a step forward, then check herself. “So? What do you want me to…” It might have occurred to her right then how she sounded, Baz thought. Not made of stone. “She’s dead too.” Lutie looked at the Major, then at Karen, who now leaned against the warm stove, arms crossed as though she didn’t trust herself to keep still. “You told him, right?” Back to Baz. “You know that.”

  Maybe being hit by lightning felt like this. Cold, followed by hot, a giddy light-headedness that immediately preceded a weightless fall, a void. He remained speechless, and in the silence he heard the breath Karen took.

  “He just got here, Lutie.” There was warning in it: Be nice.

  Baz froze, was frozen. Like he’d been robbed of his voice, of his ability to think. He just felt, that’s all he could do.

  Lutie was sturdily made, like their father, like Sol, all of them made for balancing in uncertain terrain, knowing where their feet were. Went through life as though they were taking a stand. Baz knew he didn’t have that, recognized that his center of gravity was up near his heart, that he moved like a kite on a string. He’d been wrong to come, to interfere. Maybe Sol had the right idea, shutting all this away.

  Baz watched his sister’s lips thin, grim humor lighting her eyes, honey hair pulled back in a ponytail, long high-bridged nose pointed directly at him. He ste
eled himself, mostly because he felt her do the same thing: hurt to say it, hurt to hear it.

  “She lay down in a bathtub and cut her own throat with a carving knife. I was nine. Nine. We were alone in some crappy New Brunswick town, and she checked out. No one ever came, no father ever contacted anyone, asking where the hell I’d gone. So,” and she caught herself, not on tears, but on a rising tide of anger, he could see it in her flushed pale face, “so don’t you come here expecting me to feel anything.” Lutie stood suddenly, the chair scraping back on the linoleum. “Get out of my house. Get—”

  Two voices, both sharp with parental authority: “Lutie!” Baz noticed two younger kids in the hallway—teenagers, curious. He didn’t know what to do, how to stop any of this. He’d lit the match, and the fuse was on slow burn, and he had no other role to play, other than to watch the whole thing explode.

  “I shouldn’t have come,” Baz stuttered, rising, wondering where Karen had put his coat, needing to be out the door. There was dynamite, after all. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—”

  All color drained from Lutie’s face, and she ran, pushing past the kids in the hallway, pounding up the stairs. A door slammed, distant and final.

  Baz looked into the Major’s eyes, blue as a bad bruise, steady. So different than Aurie’s, which had danced, rhythm of blood. Better, this steadiness, Baz knew. It had been needed, by all of them, though only Lutie had gotten it. But Baz didn’t know how much a steady hand would matter, coming so late. He kept his gaze there, even as everything else swam.

  The Major didn’t try to comfort. He seemed to be waiting for whatever was inside Baz to come out. Karen shooed the teens downstairs, and a television’s rude blare followed. She stayed, the post to which the Major’s line was tied; he, the lifesaver out at sea. And Baz? Drowning perhaps, tide running high in hurricane season, all known roads washed away. The moment held past breaking, through breaking, and Baz finally wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands.

  “I’ll give you a ride into town,” the Major said quietly. “How about that?”

  Wordlessly, Baz nodded, and Karen handed him a tissue without comment and went to get his coat from the hall closet.

  The cold air helped, Baz found, pulling the fur-lined hat over his ears, stepping out into the snow. He thanked Karen, a stammer of useless apology stuttered to the night air, then hauled up into the black SUV. The Major threw his wallet on the dashboard, checked the rearview mirror behind him. It was a clear night, no snow, so cold it hurt to breathe. Baz inhaled unsteadily, concentrated on the house in the headlights as they reversed out the driveway.

  “She’s prickly,” the Major started. “You know that.”

  Baz huffed an astonished laugh. “No, actually. I don’t.”

  The Major put the truck into gear and gently advanced down the icy road. “You will. She’s just surprised, and she doesn’t like surprises much. Likes things just so.”

  Baz took off the hat he’d bought in Minneapolis and worried it on his lap. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know that.” The houses were so similar as to be disorienting and Lutie’s foster father drove blessedly slow, taking his time.

  “I don’t know what I expected.”

  “Most people don’t, not until after it all goes south.” The Major glanced at Baz, then back at the road. “We can try this again.”

  Baz laughed low and it rattled in his throat, stuck. “I think it’s pretty clear—”

  “Pretty clear you surprised her, that’s all.” They slowed at the gate and the soldier stationed there waved them through, grin on his face. A well-liked man, Baz thought of the Major. “You didn’t know about what happened with your mother, did you?”

  God, there was that. On top of everything else. He shook his head, not trusting his voice.

  “Lutie came to us shortly after, a kid needing a foster home. Marshall and Bree were babies practically. We didn’t know how long it was going to be for. I was stationed at CFB Gagetown. Lutie,” and Baz heard the smile, the love, “Lutie’s English was all over the place back then, don’t know what francophones were doing in such an anglo area. We all learned from each other. The Children’s Aid people, they looked for you guys. But the records were spotty, and no one in Terrebonne Parish knew where you’d gone…”

  He left it hanging, waiting for Baz to fill in the enormous blank.

  Baz cleared his throat and obliged. “We left Louisiana right around then, no work, still recovering from Hurricane Andrew, I think, part of it anyway. We went to Texas for a while, and then north. Dad moved us a lot. After… after Mom left with Lutie. He was,” and it felt like a betrayal to say it, and so Baz didn’t. “Dad didn’t look for her, it was like she was dead. He always spoke about her like she was dead. I don’t know what he wanted for Lutie, what he was hoping for. I stopped asking, because he never answered. He didn’t have much education, not in the school sense, and he could never get decent work. It was like he was a foreigner, never fit in anywhere we were. We were… really poor. We didn’t have much.”

  The countryside wound past them like an ocean, thin line of pavement a dark ribbon among the waves.

  “Sounds like a hard way to grow up,” the Major finally said and Baz was aware that he was good at this, that this was the man’s job for God’s sake—being wise and calm. Getting people to talk. After what had just happened at the house, Baz didn’t care. In fact it was good he was here with someone whose main point in life was to listen.

  “Then Dad was in prison for a few years, got into some kind of argument at a party; a woman died and they blamed him.” Baz kept his gaze out the window, because it was safe. They went past a roadside shrine, a cross, plastic flowers, then gone. A marked death. The Major was leaving him room. “He didn’t do it. Wasn’t really his style, violence. One good thing about him.”

  “How old were you then?” Gentle, probing questions, maybe to check him out, make sure he wasn’t a raving lunatic. Protecting Lutie first, and Baz should remember that.

  “Thirteen, or thereabouts. We were in Colorado by then, in Denver.”

  “So, foster care for you, too?”

  There had been no relatives to call, Baz remembered. “No, we caught a break. We were renting rooms from a social worker. She convinced the courts that it would be better for me if she supervised Sol, who was seventeen then, or just about. So we stayed there, in her house, until Sol turned eighteen and could legally take care of me. Little bit of luck, for once.”

  “And he’s your brother, the oldest one?”

  Baz looked around in surprise, and the Major shrugged a little. “Lutie doesn’t talk about any of this. I didn’t even know your names, only that there’d been older brothers, and a father down in the States.”

  The Major might be protecting Lutie, and Baz couldn’t hold that against him. But with those words, he felt a huge wave come over him: Grief. Pride. “He was a good man, our dad. He might not have always been thinking clear, but he loved us. And Sol—” It was important, and Baz needed to say it, needed for this man, this gatekeeper, to hear it. “Sol took it on, even though he was just a kid himself. So—”

  “Okay, okay,” the Major said, unruffled. “I can’t imagine how hard that must of been. For all of you.” Emphasis on the ‘all’.

  It was okay, in this moving confessional booth, to talk. Baz forced his shoulders down, purposefully relaxed his clenched jaw. “It was. But there was good stuff, too. Dad was in for five years, and after he got out, the two of us went on the road, spent half our time touring around the Midwest. Sol stuck around Denver.” He wasn’t going to get into that, though. “Dad was a really great musician, that’s how he made his money, so we always had that.”

  The Major looked over briefly. “Well, that seems to have skipped over Lutie,” he said with a smile.

  Baz was grateful to have the opportunity to smile back. “It’s how I make a living, too, usually.” He shrugged. “I play fiddle, tour around a bit. You know.”

&nbs
p; “Cajun? Or Zydeco?” the Major asked.

  Baz laughed outright. “Hell, no. Neither. More what you’d call roots, I guess. The old country guys, but updated. Mostly around Chicago, Minneapolis, down to Nashville sometimes.”

  Baz had already told them that he was staying at the Super 8 and the Major remembered this, of course, wasn’t the kind of guy to forget much, something that Baz liked because it meant he didn’t have to worry himself with details. They stopped in the parking lot near the covered entrance, and Baz sat quietly, turning his plaid and rabbit fur hat over in his hands. Finally, he pulled the handle, not able to bear sitting there any more.

  “Does your brother know you’re here?” the Major asked, insightful eyes under dark brows; he’d waited until Baz had opened the door so the dome light was on. So he’d be able to see his answer, which he did. They shared the admission in silence. “You’re all alone. Okay. Tell you what. Give me your number and I’ll call in the morning. We can sort this out. You didn’t come all this way just to have our door slam in your face.”

  Baz nodded, not trusting himself to speak, though he stood at the door longer than was necessary. “Sure.” He gave the Major his number, which he wrote down on the back of a parking pass.

  As he wrote, the Major said, “You’ll be okay?”, like it was inconsequential. The voice was pitch-perfect: concerned, but allowing that Baz was a man who could take care of himself. Careful, that’s what this pastor was.

  “Yeah.” Baz paused, nodded again and Major McGregor looked up with a reassuring smile, put the number on the dash along with his wallet. “Merci beaucoup, padre.” Baz made to shut the door, a weight in his chest.

  “You know,” the Major stalled him. “We would have taken you all, if we’d known.”

  Baz found the smile, just where it always was, ready. “We had a dad. But thanks.” If the Major offered money, Baz thought he’d have to leave town tonight.