“Just for the one night. We’ve got a long way to go.”
“Where you headed?”
“Calgary,” said Melissa.
Zane closed his mouth in some confusion. Let this hard-luck dame do the talking. She’s the only cast member who’s actually read this particular screenplay.
The woman commenced to cluck again as she ran Zane’s credit card through the machine and put the slip on the counter for him to sign. She had heard Calgary was lovely but she didn’t think she’d like it so much in the winter. Not the cold, mind you, it was cold enough here, but you just couldn’t count on the weather. You would never know what to wear. Her neighbour’s son had gone off to work on some oil job and they said the weather was just terrible. One day it was snow and the next it was spring, then it was snow again.
Zane signed.
“Room fourteen. You call if you need anything.”
Melissa offered a wan smile and a promise.
This general flood of goodwill had left him high and dry. After that performance over the news you start to feel like a murder suspect. Time to demonstrate that you can still function normally. To this end, he addressed himself to the fish mounted on the wall over the window.
“That’s a heck of a fish.”
The fish was almost five feet long. Even stuffed, it had evil in its eyes, and its mouth was filled with long, needle sharp teeth.
“I wouldn’t want to get bit by that thing. It’s a pike?”
“A muskie. Pretty much like a pike.”
“A fish like that makes me think twice about going swimming.”
“Little girl got bit by one, last year.” A story retold, no doubt, to every visitor. “Lots of muskie around here, if you like fishing.”
“A fish like that makes me afraid to go fishing.”
He held the door open for Melissa and waved as he went out into the darkness and the sound of crickets. She waited until they were out of earshot of the office before she spoke.
“Aren’t you getting into character.”
“I was starting to feel left out, the way you were carrying on with Henny Penny.”
“Don’t be mean.”
“Since when are we going to Calgary?”
She waved a hand in the air: cease this nitpicking.
“We’re going through Calgary. Good enough.”
Room Fourteen was the kind of spare and functional space that defines a trans-Canada road trip: panelling walls and a threadbare green carpet at least fifteen years old. The room smelled of dry pine and mothballs. Melissa closed the curtains and staked her claim by throwing her bag on the bed farthest from the door, then turned on the television and started flipping through the channels. Zane took a photo of her, and she stuck her tongue out at him. That’s what you get for rooming with me, he said.
Shower first, then food. In the bathroom he locked the door and started the hot water. A weak sprinkle issued from the shower head, but it was hot. His bones ached from the car. The heat of the water gave him a chill and he stepped under it to drive the cold from his body. The tub enamel felt rough and worn under his feet and some of the tiles were cracked. All the discomforts of home. He put his head under the flow and let the water sheet down over his face, opening his mouth to breathe and spitting out the water that flowed in as he inhaled.
It’s too long to sit in the car. You’re too old for this. It’s impossible to get a good diet on the road, and it’s a long way to Vancouver. To Zane, the whole enterprise now seemed too much effort for too little gain. And he needed to find a liquor store.
Zane towelled off quickly, left his hair in a shambles and pulled on his jeans. He returned from the bathroom and threw his dirty shirt and socks onto his bed and started digging in his bag for clean clothes.
“Holy shit, Zane.”
He turned to her in puzzlement, holding a clean T-shirt.
“Nice scars.”
He looked down at the puckered scar of the entrance wound, and the neat surgical scars that accompanied it. And of course, she had already seen the big one, the exit wound.
“How’d you get a scar like that?”
“I got shot.”
Zane dug in the bag for a pair of fresh socks and then tried to brush his hair into some semblance of order with his fingers before putting his shoes on.
“No shit? You got shot?”
He nodded.
“How can you be so matter of fact?”
“It’s a matter of fact.”
In matter of fact, he had been unable to talk about it for months without displaying a nervous tic he had developed, a fluttering in his left eyelid. He now rubbed at his eye, in case.
“Is that why you quit?”
“No.”
There is no why-you-quit. Reasons for quitting are a complex structure, too complex to investigate. Best now stick to the facts; the facts don’t move around. Any answer you come up with is probably bullshit, anyway. You can never trust yourself to tell the truth about this matter, or indeed about any other. You want to get from one day to the next, you make a deal with yourself: you agree not to dig to the bottom of certain boxes. And you try to forget that the stories you tell yourself are probably full of lies.
His Leica lay on the night table. He picked it up and checked the frame counter, and then decided to change out the roll. He could feel her eyes on him, unnaturally close, as he slipped the fresh roll into the camera and replaced the base plate. The feeling of being watched disturbed him. He shot a quick and pointless frame of her sitting on the bed.
“Jesus.” She reached up and touched the entry wound on his belly.
Her touch unravelled him. He pulled on the T-shirt and tugged it down to cover the damage and then sat down on his bed and closed his eyes and covered his face with his hand.
If it’s not the rage or the flashbacks it’s the tears. We’re done blubbering over long-distance commercials now, tearing up over televised kittens playing with toilet paper. Get a grip on yourself.
Melissa reached out and put her hand on his shoulder, which only made it worse. He shook his head and waved her off, fought himself until control returned.
“This other guy got hit in the head, got killed. I knew I was going to die. I kept talking to this guy to keep him awake, because I thought it was my job to take care of him. I didn’t know he was already dead.”
The eyelid had started to flutter. He blinked hard but it wouldn’t stop.
“You don’t have to talk about it.”
“You just kind of took me by surprise.”
No one had ever touched the scar. He had forgotten what it felt like.
“When the bullet goes through it makes a big mess. I lost a good chunk of my intestines. I can’t eat anything greasy, pizza, fries, nachos, hamburgers, bacon and eggs. It gives me lethal attacks of the runs.”
“I made you bacon and eggs that time, and you ate it.”
“I had to.”
“No, you fuckin’ didn’t.”
“It was like breakfast on father’s day. You eat it.”
“Bullshit.”
“And I paid for it, too. I spent the rest of the day in the can, feeling like death.”
She swung and hit him in the shoulder, hard.
“It was a great breakfast.”
“You’re a fuckin’ idiot.”
“It was worth it.” He picked up his keys. “Let’s go get something to eat.”
She said I want a pizza, double cheese, pepperoni, bacon and mushrooms. And I’m gonna eat it right in front of you. Serves you right.
“If you ask anyone, like our dear sweet Marilou, they’ll tell you that they don’t mind doing it and it’s good money.” Dinner in a family restaurant in Dryden, well after the suppertime rush. Three quarters of the tables empty. Their own table felt faintly sticky. “And it’s all complete bullshit.”
“That’s what you told me.”
“What?”
“Good money, etcetera.”
“We
ll, that was all bullshit.”
She waved her past statements away and took off the top of her burger. Its contents, a mess of grease and cheese and fried mushrooms topped with bacon, received a close inspection. Fries on the side. She planned to enjoy this, she’d said, just for him.
“Who’s gonna say, it’s fuckin’ horrible, I can’t stand it, it pays good but I still feel like a whore? You already know everybody’s lookin’ at you like you fell out of the bottom of the world and you’re trapped in the shitpit. And you want everyone to think that you’re really just a normal girl with this offbeat job. So you say, maybe it’s just that everyone else is so uptight.”
Melissa, having finished showing off her hamburger, reassembled it and took a bite.
“They tell you you’re gonna make a thousand bucks a night, so you think, wow. You aren’t going to get that ringing up groceries. But then they start pulling all this shit on you.”
“Such as?”
She waved her hand in the air as she chewed and swallowed.
“This is good.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Boy, if I couldn’t eat like this, I’d just about die.”
“You may die as it is.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Think of your cholesterol.”
She took another bite and made appreciative noises.
“I’m not old enough for that.”
“So they pull all this shit on you,” he said.
She wiped her fingers on her napkin and took a drink.
“You’re a contractor, so you pay for stage time. Then they overbook the stage. You might not even get on. You got to pay a cut of your tips to the bouncers and the DJ. At the end of the day you got half what you thought you were gonna make.”
She started picking at her fries. Zane waited. It had always been his experience that most people distrusted silence and would rush to fill it.
“But the money’s still good, I guess. It’s the work that sucks.”
Zane had ordered a turkey sandwich, no mayo, and a garden salad with dressing on the side. The dressing was off limits.
“You dance for all these creeps, fuckin’ misfits who can’t talk to women. Sometimes you get these creeps waiting for you outside, following you home. Guys expect you to suck them off for twenty bucks. And girls do it, too. They just charge a little more.”
A woman passing their table glared at Melissa but she had returned to her burger. Zane smiled up at her: these kids today, what can you do? No manners and no respect. I can’t take her anywhere, you know. He felt an urge to ask her what she thought of the weather, this being the universal safe topic, but the look in her eyes suggested ice storms descending from the howling northlands. He waited, instead, for silence to overcome Melissa once more.
“You can call it what you want, man, but you’re really just a fuckin’ hooker. You know how that feels?”
Not exactly. What I want to know is when you say that all the girls are hooking, do you include yourself. But there’s no diplomatic approach to this question. Best to file that one away forever under things you really don’t want to know. And in future, you might want to fill in these silences yourself.
“So you get baked before you go on. It makes it easier. There goes half your pay. Half the girls are on fuckin’ crack. But you know the worst thing? You wanna know the worst thing?”
Silence stretches out across the empty restaurant.
“What’s the worst thing?”
“The worst thing is the money. Because you want that money. You want it bad enough to keep on doing that stuff just so you can get scorched again and make it go away. And it’s like that joke, you look in the mirror, you know what you are. You’re only haggling about the price. So yeah, you tell people that it’s not so bad and you make good money. What the fuck, I’m just an ordinary girl, right?”
“You seem pretty ordinary to me.”
“Don’t pull that bullshit on me.”
Zane picked at his salad.
“Shit, Zane, you just want to be normal. But I look in the mirror, I know what I am.”
Melissa stopped and looked around the diner, and Zane belatedly became aware that the buzz of conversation was lacking.
“Shit,” said Melissa. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Zane signalled the waitress and wolfed his sandwich. Melissa ate a few more fries but left half the burger to congeal on her plate. Outside, a cloud of moths battered themselves senseless against the light.
Zane threw his bag in the car and closed the trunk lid with a satisfying thump that echoed through the morning quiet. Pale grey light and the air filled with birdsong. He took the Leica from his jacket pocket and shot a couple of frames of the motel parking lot, a desolate open space with a neon sign flashing “Vacancy.” He couldn’t identify any subject, any reason to take the picture. It just seemed like taking a picture was the thing to do. When you get the right light you can make a picture of anything.
He liked the sign, so he walked out to the road and shot the same picture another way, with the sign in the foreground so that the dead neon tube that spelled “No” was visible. The frame contained simple facts: a motel, a parking lot, mostly empty, and the sign declaring a vacancy. He liked the picture, liked the idea of it, although he didn’t know what, if anything, he meant by it. There was a strong possibility that it was simply nonsense. Possibly, this was the very reason he liked it. He dismissed these speculations; you overthink these things, next thing you know, you’re writing artist statements, talking about what your pictures interrogate. Why do you like chocolate? Is chocolate a metaphor for a certain aesthetic? Consider rum, on the other hand: not a metaphor, but a certain anaesthetic. Aren’t we witty this morning.
The morning chill worked its way under his jacket. Zane had always liked dawn, the feeling of being alive, all senses alert. In the early morning light, everything seems simple, slender, reduced. Everything seems true. By noon, you’ve built a day on top of it, a day like any other.
A large mayfly rested on the window screen of Room Fourteen. He wanted a picture of it but the Leica was the wrong tool for that job. He left the camera alone and leaned in for a closer look. The mayfly, sluggish in the chill of morning, did not move.
Summer camp: big mayflies rise in clouds off the lake at night and in the morning you find them on window screens and canoe paddles and life jackets, drowned in a puddle of water in the bottom of a canoe that someone had forgotten to invert, drowned on the flat mist-smeared surface of the lake in the morning quiet. Someone said that they only lived for a day. It seemed like a rip-off, to be a mayfly. Zane suggested to a girl called Karen, if a mayfly only lives a day, it can’t exactly afford to guard its virginity; I’m just saying. Karen, to his surprise, agreed. A disappointing fumble in the bushes ensued, Karen stopping short of his highest hopes, and thankfully no contact with poison ivy.
Here on the screen is northern Ontario distilled: the smell of dry pine wood, sunscreen, and bug juice, the rough feel of a weathered canoe paddle, the thrill of a girl’s smile in the light of a campfire. He straightened and turned back to the parking lot. Some things, like the feeling you get from a song, you never can bring back.
Rumble and cough in still air, the bubbling sound of a big diesel exhaust: a tractor-trailer shakes off the night and pulls out onto the road, its cab rocking with the torque of the gear changes, groaning and wheezing air from its brake lines like an old man getting up from an easy chair. He wanted to freeze it, wanted to take a picture that no camera could take: not only the sound of the truck but the rocking motion of the cab, the brisk feel of the morning air on his skin, the stillness of the dawn and the sounds of the birds. He wanted to get that light.
The door to Room Fourteen was cheap and thin, no more secure than a curtain. He went in to check on Melissa. She was out of the shower, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, with her hair still wet. Zane went to the window and rolled back the curtains to let the morning l
ight flow into the room and then shot Melissa pulling the bandages from the cut and inspecting her face in the mirror. The swelling had subsided a little and the white of her eye now showed, red with blood.
He continued photographing her as she finished packing, and then put the camera back in his pocket. He loaded her bag in his trunk and then on impulse rummaged in his own bag and found his book, a heavy hardcover, and handed it to her before starting the engine.
“That’s the whole story,” he said. “And be careful with it. That thing’s out of print.”
His engine sounded unhealthy. The valve clatter was beginning to worry him. Nobody wants to find himself in the middle of nowhere with a dud engine.
“Thank you.”
“Just don’t spill your coffee on it.”
“I think I’m having bacon and eggs for breakfast,” she said. “With extra grease.”
The light was getting harder now, as the sun came up over the trees.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Scrawny pines and white paper birches and road cuts strewn with chunks of blasted granite stream past the windows, blue lake water flashing Morse code through the trees. Wind buffets Zane’s left ear, blasts his hair, blows his left sleeve up his armpit. This is the only way to keep cool. The air conditioning is banjaxed; it is essential, therefore, to keep moving, to maintain the slipstream. Hanging one arm out the open window carries a risk of sunburn; it’s a trade-off.
From the waist down, Zane was a grease spot. He had considered driving with his fly open, to open all remaining vents to the cooling rush of air, but this might have communicated to Melissa certain notions that were ultimately incorrect. He chose to sweat and to suffer instead.
On the left, trees drop away to reveal the blue sheet of a lake, cold water. Ghosts of summers past, diving off the dock, body knifing into water, clean and cold, a girl in a bikini watching: you make certain not to lose your shorts. Humid summer nights, clouds of blackflies around your head, deer flies, mosquito bites swelling hot, red and uncontrollably itchy. All of which, surprisingly, filled Zane with a restless, non-specific nostalgia.
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