This story is one of them, I guess.
"Get in," the trucker said, so in I got.
I had been standing here on the side of the road just short of the east most end of the city limits of Toronto, my thumb hooked hopefully into the contrary-minded west wind, just wishing for a ride when that big old semi rig pulled up.
When it hissed to a halt I was halfway lost in a day dream, wander-bound and telling myself a slow quiet sort of nothing-thoughted story, staring off down the highway and thinking on how absolutely miraculous it was that this single patch of road could tie one end of our country to the other and by nature must touch nearly every other road in North America. It is like my dad always said - bloodstreams and building blocks – a body sometimes wonders just how much of the world is made out of nothing more than itself made big.
I clambered into the truck before the driver could think to change his mind.
"Strap yourself on in," the trucker told me.
The trucker was built big, even sitting down. All shoulders and arms looking like he had strength enough to tear that steering wheel off the dashboard and tie it into a forget-me-knot about my gawking neck. He looked like he had been poured out of concrete into the seat of that semi-truck and let harden for a while. He reached over and shook my hand clear down to my toe bones. I counted my fingers when he let me have them back again.
They seemed mostly intact.
"Been out there long?" he asked.
"Long enough," I said.
Don't get me wrong. I wasn't nearly as terrified of him as I was scared of what might be waiting for me back home in Deeper Harbour. Going back home will do that to a fellow if he has any sense of history or style. Memories will scare you if you think on them hard enough.
"So where are you headed?" the trucker asked me while I was busy strapping myself into the shotgun seat.
"Nova Scotia," I answered, keeping it simple. Deeper Harbour would have been far more information than he needed to hear. When you are hitching a ride it is best to keep your answers comfortably vague. Facts will only get in your way. The road isn't a place for conviction or scrupulous detail.
"I'm going that way too," he allowed. "Halifax."
"Good," I said. "That suits me fine."
I figured I could easily hitch the rest of the way up the Cabot Trail to Deeper Harbour, once I got myself handy to Halifax.
"You got a name?" he asked.
Call me Ishmael was what I thought to myself but "My name's Tommy," was what I told him out loud. I had learned a long time ago to keep my literary allusions to myself. What can I tell you? Three years wasted in wading through the study of North American literature, Northrop Frye, and a hefty dose of post-modern deconstructionalistic theory can surely crucify a conversation long before it ever gets started.
"My name's Hank," the trucker said. He gave me a big piano key grin. I decided I was going to like riding with Hank. He seemed like an okay fellow. Straight-talking, without an ounce of illusion to him.
"The women call me Hunk," he added and I abruptly reversed my previous verdict and prepared to give ear as Hank started to talk.
There is a rule for hitching rides on whatever highway you choose to stand next to. Sooner or later, in one way or another, you've got to pay for the gas or listen to it. If the driver wants a story, you've got to be ready to give him one and if he wants to tell one than by God you had better be ready to listen.
Hank told me he had women stretched from one end of the country to the other, just lying splay-legged along the side of the Trans-Canada highway, panting and dreaming and waiting for Hank and his eighteen wheels of pure pulsating passion to come rolling on in. He told me that he was a sexual Tarzan, a bull moose monsoon of testosterone and transport, an internally-combustioned Casanova of diesel-driven delight.
Of course, I am paraphrasing with a little more than a fair degree of poetic license and embellished color. As the great bard will tell you - a story is just not a story without a little blatant hoop-doodlery.
"I've got ladies who wait for me night and day," Hank said. "They are tracking the rumours of my whereabouts, marking the days out like the promise of Christmas on their calendars and inking out my progress with banana-black Sharpee's and penis-shaped map pins pricked across a communal diagram of the Trans Canada Highway. They call me up on the CB radio to talk dirty to me and they scribble their telephone number in the back of my semi bunk and they leave me love-dewed panty mementos to remember them by."
Now I knew for a fact that most truckers were too damn busy trying to make up the time on the road and trying to keep the costs down and keep the log book lying just pretty enough to fool anybody who wanted to believe that a man could actually drive from Point A to Point B and make quota time and still remember to catch the legally proscribed proper hours of sleep to bother chasing females.
The truth of the matter as I saw it was Hank was lonely, maybe one of the loneliest men I'd ever met and he needed to tell these stories in order to breathe.
So I let him tell.
I listened just hard enough to follow his drift but I was more interested in a wallet-sized photograph that dangled from the hinge of his sun visor. It was a photograph of a little girl standing in front of a backyard swing. Her hair was the color of prairie wheat and her eyes would have put cornflowers to shame and she wore a sort of a half-hook of a smile that looked to be one part sorrow and one part joy.
"Is that your little girl?" I asked.
We drove a kilometre or two before he answered.
"That's her," he said. "Joanie Margaret, she stole my heart and I aided and abetted her in the process."
Another kilometre clicked on by.
"Divorce?" I asked.
I pronounced the word with a careful politic precision as if I were attempting to slow chew a pre-digested mine field.
"Her mother got tired of my stories," Hank said. "Especially when she found out that some of them were true. She packed her bags and drove away while I was halfway to Winnipeg. I was driving this semi and she was driving her Volkswagen beetle and there's probably some kind of irony there that escapes me the same way as she did. She was up and gone and I didn't find out until I reached Toronto, on my way back home."
The road continued to roll, not saying a word. Highways have ears and mouths and can tell you things, believe you me.
"You see her often?" I asked.
"Not at all," he said. "I keep a road map marked with the places that she ain't been. I show her picture at every truck stop I roll into and so far nobody can tell me where she has got herself to."
Now we were getting to the truth of things.
I should have felt proud of myself for uncloseting this particular skeleton; however I felt too damn sorry for Hank to crow over my discovery, even internally. We sat there and listened to nothing but the sound of the tires wishing over the road tar, the miles slipping away like water beneath a fast-paddled canoe.
"Reach on back," he said, so I did. "There's a sweater hiding back there."
The sweater was folded neatly beside the shelf of his long haul bunk. It was a child's pale blue cardigan and I imagined I could see his fingerprints tangled through the wool and I was certain that the color had been faded with tears and the intensity of his lonely dome-lit gaze.
"It was supposed to be hers," he said. "I bought it for her in Winnipeg. She's probably six years too big to wear it by now but I'm keeping it all the same. I count the stitch knots at night time and it pretty nearly counts me down to sleep."
Something caught my eye.
A movement in the truck mirror.
I took a quick a glance.
Just for a moment I thought I could see her, standing back there on the roadside with her thumb hooked into the wind, the shadow of a lonely wolf pine leaning down over her, a tire swing spinning wistfully round and around and around.
And then she was gone.
One more damn old ghost story fading away.
A fe
w more kilometres passed by. The road signs told me we were aimed for the Quebec/New Brunswick border.
I wondered what that meant.
If it was some sort of omen.
It ought to have been.
Borders are funny places that way. Most of them were just a line on the map that nobody really saw but you always seemed to know just when you've passed through one. Hank and I had come to some form of a border, as well. We had passed a kind of a road sign in Hank's personal brand of story country and he was not about to let me proceed any further down that particular road.
He launched into one more reminiscence of a truck stop tart. It didn't take much of an imagination to overlay a soundtrack of cheaply-synthesised porno background music.
Bow-chicka-wow-wow.
Nothing more than poorly laid camouflage.
I listened coldly. I recognized a force-field when I saw it. A do-not-disturb sign tacked squarely across a road block telling me to go no further. The air iced over into a slow brittle silence. It took at least three more wishful Penthouse Forum pastiches and another hundred kilometres or so before Hank found the courage to risk breaking his tale with some sort of a truth.
"I miss her, you know."
I didn't know if he meant his wife or his daughter or both so I just nodded.
"You're not gay, are you?" he asked, nervously.
I assured him that I wasn't, hoping that he wasn't about to make some sort of sexual proposition.
"That's good," he said. "I don't mind gay, you understand, but I didn't want to offend you by talking about women, if you know what I mean?"
I told him that his conversation was just fine with me.
"Talking about women to gay men," Hank went on. "Well that's just a little like talking a ham sandwich to a Jew."
"I like women just fine," I reassured him. "I always have."
"You're not a Jew are you?" he asked.
I nearly laughed at that. I had been sitting here trying to figure out just what made this truck driver tick and all the while Hank was trying his best to decide just who I really was. I wondered if that was how the world went round – nothing more than eight billion strangers sitting together and telling each other stories and lies while trying to figure out just who the hell each other really was.
For a moment I thought of my mother, and my dad, and the woman on the beach.
"I mean I've got nothing against Jews," Hank assured me.
I laughed to myself, wishing Hank the best of luck in his search for my identity. I had been trying to figure the same thing out for the last three years and as far as I could tell I was still no further ahead in my search.
I welcomed further inquiry.
"I'm sorry," Hank said. "I talk too much."
I told him he didn't need to apologize.
"Sure I do," Hank said. "I've bent your ear near double."
I told him that my ear had been bent and rebent by far greater gas bags than him, but he didn't believe a word of what I was telling him.
"Most of those women stories weren't true," he confessed. "Just a lot of worn out hogwash, is all. The truth is I haven't been with a woman since my wife up and left me."
I didn't have an answer to that.
I didn't know if there was one.
"I've had offers, mind you, or maybe I've just imagined them, but the truth of it under all the lies is I just don't have the heart for it anymore."
I still hadn't found a proper reply.
"You were just telling stories," I said. "I've heard a few of them."
Hank ruefully chuckled.
"Sometimes I think that's all I really am," Hank said. "Just a gust of windy old stories rolling down a long old highway."
He shook his head slowly.
I smiled at his words.
It was a pretty good metaphor.
"You ought to meet my dad," I said.
And that's right about where this story ought to begin.
I left Deeper Harbour when I turned eighteen with a high mark in English, high hopes and a brutal gunfighter's notch carved deep into my heart by my first girlfriend - Sheila Hunter. She'd up and left me to go attend some university in British Columbia. She told me she wanted to be a marine biologist.
My dad didn't think much of that whole plan.
"Living all of her life beside one end of the ocean," Dad said. "What's she figure she's going to accomplish travelling halfway across the country to take a look at the other end of the water?"
"British Columbia isn't halfway," I said.
"It is if you have to come back home," Dad said. "And sooner or later everybody has to come back home."
I wasn't sure who he was talking to right then, so I tried my best to change the subject.
"The Pacific's a lot different than the Atlantic," I pointed out.
"Not if you look at it from a map," Dad said. "The way I figure it all of the oceans are touching. There are no borders that a drop of water can't slip through. Calling them by different names was some fellow's idea of a joke I guess."
Geography 101, as taught by my dad. Rand McNally were likely rolling over in their collective graves.
"Besides, she left you didn't she?" he said. "How smart was that?"
Dumped, some folks would call it. I preferred to think of it as nothing more than a temporary shift of relationship.
Euphemisms are so damned optimistic, aren't they?
"I'll follow you," I told her. "I can get myself to British Columbia."
"Don't follow me," she told me right back. "I'm trying to dust my history off and start something anew. I want to discover my destiny and I'm pretty damn sure it doesn't lie anywhere here in Deeper Harbour."
Now I had heard all of the love stories and I knew that the very best thing a star-crossed lover such as myself could do was to up and chase her. And that's how I saw myself right then and there was a star-crossed lover, fallen pointy-side up.
Star-crossed lover. Too bad I'd forgotten to pluralise that particular phrase. Sheila was already living in a whole other time zone uncrossing her legs beneath far different constellations than I could ever hope to imagine. She had seen the future and had gone after it while I was too busy trying to resurrect the past.
"I have to follow you, Sheila," I said. "I'm in love."
"They don't call that love if you follow a woman who tells you to not come ahead," Sheila said. "They call that stalking."
Now that was pretty well about the point where that whole line of communication broke down between me and Sheila Hunter, but I didn't recognize that right off the bat. That useful bit of knowledge belonged to the realm of afterthought and hindsight.
"There are a lot more fish in the sea," my dad said.
At the time I had felt embarrassed by my dad's choice of aphorism. He was usually far more creative than that.
"I don't want a fish," I told him. "I want Sheila."
I guess I wasn't doing any better than Dad in the originality department.
"Want in one hand, dream in another," Dad said. "And see which hand fills up first."
I guess love, especially the broken kind, is best spoken of in cliché. Sooner or later we all get to tell the same damn story.
"Did I ever tell you about the henpecked husband?" Dad asked me, right about that time. "That there fellow he had so many beak marks in his hide you could have planted a whole corn field in between his wrinkles and his freckles. Well sir, he was sitting on his death bed and that old wife of his she leaned over and told him that he was going to a better place and she'd be following close at his heels and he looked up at her and said – for God's sake woman, take your time."
I guess that was supposed to make me feel better about losing Sheila but it didn't seem to help much at the time. I told myself that it was Sheila's loss, not mine. That thought cheered me slightly.
I told myself that I knew just what my heart was telling me and that Sheila was way too busy listening to whatever her head and her all-too-adventuresome
loins had to say in the matter. I figured I'd follow her just the same and sooner or later she'd be bound to see the error of her ways and the music would rise up in her heart just like it does in all the movies and she'd throw herself into my arms and beg my forgiveness and I would smile and kiss her like I thought I wanted to.
I was awfully young and I had a lot to learn. I was a straight A student scoring low double zeroes in the fine art of human relationship. School learning doesn't tell you a thing about how to break your heart.
You have to figure that one out all by yourself.
A conflict in my careful plans arose when I received a scholarship offer from York University in Toronto. I believe my mother filled out the application for the scholarship because I cannot remember asking for such a benefit. My mother was responsible for most of the paperwork and doings in my life.
Nevertheless, a subsidised shot at a higher education was nothing I could afford to turn down. My family's fortunes lay on the lean side of skinny, dieting down at an absolutely anorexic rate of deflation.
I told myself that Sheila would wait for me in British Columbia and I took off down the road for Toronto with a pair of battered old suitcases that had belonged to my great-uncle Wilfred and had never quite learned how to match, and a plan to dust off my own personal history and rediscover the road map of my destiny which I didn't even know I had lost.
I felt a little like old Ulysses, marching out of Ithaca with a heap of arrow-pierced suitors humped up in the dust behind me; carrying an oar held high above my head like a freshly painted protest sign.
That's just how old Ulysses did it, you see. Following that brouhaha in Ithaca over a bevy of Penelope's old boyfriends, Ulysses left town carrying that oar, swearing to himself that he would wander on out carrying that oar over his head until he met someone who would ask him just what the hell that oar over his head was supposed to be, and then he'd settle down right then and there, figuring he was far enough away from the wandering god-cursed sea to let he and his family breathe easy and live simple and pure for the rest of their days.
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