“No,” Gavin said, “there’s a parking lot for the ski trails, and then you go up that way.” He pointed to a road that wound up a hillside.
“We need to be on the other side of the highway,” Tara said. “I’m sure of it.”
Gavin, I had the sense, didn’t think she was right, but as he’d been trying unsuccessfully to kiss Tara for three or four years, he seemed to think it best to listen to her. We turned around and drove across the overpass, to the other side of the highway.
“Now go left, I think?” Tara said.
The sunlight was leaving, only long shadows remained, and the odd shard of cold, yellow light. There were a few farmhouses there, little cottages among the trees. The road grew smaller, and then it was a gravel road.
“Probably not the right way, I’m guessing,” said Donald.
“That’s what you think, is it, Donald?” said Gavin.
“Relax, Gavin,” said Tara.
Gavin took a right, another gravel road, shooting between walls of trees.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’ll take this until we hit the river, then follow it up,” he said. “Sound good to everybody?”
“Sure,” said Donald.
“Whatever,” said Tara.
“Good,” said Gavin, “because that’s what I’m doing.”
The sun had slipped completely below the hills by then. Everything was swimming in a suffocating blue dimness. The Volvo’s headlights didn’t seem to be doing any good. Behind us the hills were all in shadow, and the forests between fields had become black.
Gavin had slowed the car because the road was terribly rutted and the light was so bad. We dipped and rose, then veered around a steep bend, between two open fields. Gavin seemed bored, or aggravated, and when he cleared the bend he mashed the Volvo’s accelerator.
“Whoa,” said Donald. Tara grabbed the door handle next to her, braced her other hand on the seat. The Volvo fishtailed and shimmied across the loose gravel, jounced and shuddered. We hopped over a little bump and I hit my head on the passenger side window.
Tara said, “Ow! Gavin, slow it down!”
I looked over my shoulder at Donald and Tara when I felt a sudden hiccup, and then heard a terrific whistling noise. The tail of the car snaked its way along behind us, and the road began to feel spongy.
“Shit,” said Gavin quietly. The car slowed and he eased it to a stop on a muddy strip next to the road, right up against a split-rail fence. We all sat in silence for a moment, then two, then three. “We have a flat,” he said, his hands still clamped on the steering wheel. He was the oldest among us, but he looked young then. He wore a thrift store toggle coat that smelled like mothballs, black corduroy pants and, like all of us, all-black high-top Converse. But as he looked out over the steering wheel, at the road where it disappeared into the blue darkness, he looked like a kid. He undid his seatbelt, opened his door and stood in the road. He walked around the car and inspected the rear tire on the passenger side. We filed out of the car and stood near him, just looking at it.
“Anybody know how to change a tire?” Gavin said.
“Don’t you?” Donald said. “It’s your car.”
“I’ve never done it,” Gavin said.
“But you know how,” said Tara.
“Yeah. Well, like, you unscrew one and put on the other.”
“Unscrew?” I said.
Gavin twisted one hand over his other, which he held in a fist. “Unbolt.”
“Where’s the other?” said Donald.
“The trunk?” I said, having some vague notion that that was where one found the spare tire in a car.
“There’s no tire in the trunk,” Gavin said. “I’d have seen it.”
The wind was cold and the ground seemed hard. There were no houses on that stretch of road and the fields had fallen into darkness. We were alone out there, without knowing just where there was. Without saying why, Gavin climbed over the split-rail fence and began walking into the field. We just watched him for a long while.
Finally Tara said, “Where is he going?”
“Nowhere,” I said. I felt as though he was just moving, because moving was all he could do. It seemed likely to me that he was feeling as I did: that we’d had everything done for us, our whole lives. And now, out in the world, we’d been left to tally up a list of all those things of which we were incapable, one by one, as they came to us. Simple repairs. Filing taxes. The care and maintenance of automobiles. So we retreated. We’d reached the point where struggle and effort were necessary to propel ourselves forward into life, and as we knew very little about those things, or how to wield them to our advantage, we folded inward.
“Maybe he thinks tires grow out there,” Donald said.
“This is so messed up,” I said.
After a long time Gavin came walking back to us and stood on the other side of the fence, leaning his elbows on it. “I think we should walk that way,” he said, jerking his head over his shoulder, indicating back across the field.
“Why would we do that?” asked Tara.
“Because what else do we do?” asked Gavin. He knew it was a bad idea, and he knew we all knew. Action for action’s sake. But because he was the oldest and it was his car, we all listened. We began walking.
We had made two bad decisions—turning off the good roads and not stopping to ask directions—and then several smaller bad decisions followed until we found ourselves unable to get back to the junction of good sense and poor judgment. We were stranded out there, but nobody said it quite yet. We just walked across the muddy cool field and into a row of tall poplars, and then into another field. We walked and walked, and then Donald stopped and said, “We should stop. We should go back to the car and wait out the night.”
“No. We should sleep in the fields,” Gavin said.
“That’s a terrible idea,” said Tara, but he had turned and was marching quickly back toward the car. “Gavin,” she cried, “there must be a house around here somewhere,” echoing what I’m sure Donald and I were thinking. But Gavin kept on. He walked fast through the trees and across the first field, hopped the fence, then opened the Volvo’s trunk. He pulled out an old weathered grey blanket, then a blue nylon tarp.
“You can have softness, or you can have waterproof. Pick.”
“What is that?” asked Tara.
“Your bed,” Gavin said, throwing her the tarp.
“Oh, perfect. Come on, Lyle,” she said to me, climbing over the fence. “Let’s go to bed.”
Tara had chosen a spot among the poplars, overlooking the wet field. It was a little hump of dried grasses, shielded from the wind by a small berm. She arranged the tarp there, laying it flat, then sitting on it and pulling the lower half over herself.
“Why here?” I asked
“Because it’s far away from Gavin.” She patted the space next to her. I sat down, pulled my knees to my chest, and rocked a bit. She lay down.
“Relax,” she said, so I tentatively unfolded myself and spread out on my side with my back to Tara.
“I feel bad about leaving Donald back there with Gavin,” I said.
“You feel bad about everything, Lyle,” she said, and she was not wrong.
“Gavin might kill him,” I said.
“Donald’s a big boy. Not your problem.”
“What’s Gavin’s deal?” I asked, since Tara had known him longer than I had.
“Who knows. Absent father? Untapped aggression? Bad combination of meds? He was really into wrestling a few years ago. He’s got stuff bottled up.”
“I guess.” I could feel the cold that was coming, which would settle into our bones as the night wore on. The poplars brushed against one another and hissed over our heads. There were stars visible up there, and if I looked out over the field, the speckled wash of the Milky Way.
“If you come closer we might stay a bit warmer.”
“I just didn’t know,” I said, “like, if you wanted that.”
“I don’t want freeze to death,” she said. “And, you know, some closeness might be nice. It would be hard to feel worse right now.”
I slid myself back toward her, my knobby spine only just pressing into her side. “There,” she said. “Romantic.”
“Very,” I said, and forced a laugh. I lay there with my muscles tensed in a way that was very uncomfortable, but I did not know that I could stop it. I was not yet too cold. The tarp was keeping us dry and warm, and I could feel the heat coming off of Tara, but I was terrifically afraid of getting too close to her, or of making her aware of my body. I was attracted to Tara, but not all that specifically. She was pretty and funny, but more importantly for me at that point in my life, she listened to The Nation of Ulysses and Spiderbite and enjoyed going to shows. That alone made her desirable. And being attracted to her made all my own flaws that much more important to conceal. How thin my arms were, how sharp my elbows, how bony my shoulders. My bad skin and my gamy body. I wrapped my arms around my knees and tried to hide them all from her.
Then Tara turned on her side, facing my back, and moved into me. She slid her arm around my ribcage and squeezed. I tensed up even more.
“Just relax, Lyle,” she said, but I couldn’t, and I have spent the years since trying to shake that suspicion of happiness, that fear of letting go.
After a time I realized Tara’s breathing had levelled out and her grip on my body had slackened. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, too, but the wind and the small movements of things, rustling and bird sounds, and the absurdity of our predicament—made worse by just how avoidable it had been—kept me from it. So I turned my head and strained my eyes to look upward without disturbing her, and I looked at the stars.
Donald came crashing over. I could hear him moving across the field, stumbling and wheezing. He wasn’t panicked, but he was agitated.
“Donald?” I said, which startled Tara awake.
“Jesus,” she said.
“Fucking Gavin,” he whispered, as though Gavin were right behind him, but I looked and could see no one coming across that first field, and I couldn’t hear anything.
“What did he do?” I asked, looking Donald over for signs of molestation.
“He just won’t stop talking about weird shit,” Donald said, “like, famous murders and stuff.”
“Creep,” Tara said.
“Total creep,” Donald said. “I’m just trying to sleep. Or at least not hear about Ted Bundy and The Zodiac while I lie in a Volvo in the middle of nowhere. Do you guys have any room?” He was already moving onto my corner of the tarp.
“I don’t know,” I said, “Maybe?”
Once Donald had settled in next to me there seemed no sense in even thinking about sleep. The three of us sat upright with the tarp pulled up to our chins, and we talked. We tried to imagine the show we were missing. We talked about camping, which seemed related to our current experience. We talked about our parents and when we had last wanted to go camping with them.
Then we heard the Volvo’s door open on its creaky hinge, and shut with a clap.
“Oh great,” Tara said, “he’s coming to see us.” I tried to imagine just how far away the car was, and how long the walk would take. In the dark everything seemed farther off.
After a while Gavin was nearly upon us. He was whistling something as he moved across the field and into the tree break. Then he stood over us.
“What are you guys doing out here?” he asked.
“Just hanging out,” Donald said.
“Seems like a hell of a party,” Gavin said. “My invitation must have been lost in the mail.”
“Pull up some tarp,” Tara said unconvincingly, but Gavin was still standing and had moved in front of us, looking out at the darkened field.
“Do you guys hear that?” he asked.
“What?” Donald said, and he started to his feet.
“Sshh. That. Honking.”
“Geese?” I said.
“A ton of geese,” said Gavin.
We all stood then, folding back the tarp and brushing imaginary things from our clothing. We gazed over the starlit field and let the shapes take their form as we all realized that we were looking at a flooded field full of thousands of geese resting on the shallow water. They had been so quiet. I’d had no idea they were there in such numbers. We stood looking at them, careful not to move or disturb them. They were barely visible, but came into sharper view the longer you looked. They sat on the water, which looked like lighter patches of darkness, reflecting the sky back up, and some of them turned in slow circles, while others were completely motionless. There came a honk or two, lazy little noises you could not attribute to any one animal, out there in the flat, dark field.
“Look at the pretty geese,” Gavin finally said. “All those pretty, pretty geese.” His voice trailed off and he lingered on the final consonant in a way that sounded sinister. “Our dads would be shooting them. It would be like target practice.” He raised his right hand to his shoulder and held his left out in front of him, elbow crooked, as though holding a rifle. “Boom,” he whispered.
“Too bad we’ve got nothing to shoot them with,” said Donald.
“Oh, but we don’t shoot,” said Gavin, his voice loud. “Right? What are we, Americans? If we had a gun in the trunk, would you shoot all the birds?”
“No. What for?” said Donald.
“Just to kill them. Would you, Donald? Come on, would you?” Something was rising in Gavin. He had turned and was facing Donald, his back to the field of geese. “How about a fucking machine gun? Huh? Take them all out? Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!” He was shouting now, and the geese were stirring.
“No.”
“A knife, then,” he said. “A fucking knife! You could sneak up and cut their throats.” He drew a knife from his pocket that none of us knew he had. It was long and impressive when he unfolded it, with a blade that curved slightly, and a slender tip. It looked like a relic, something from the bottom of a trunk, or a museum display case.
“Oh my god,” said Donald, and even in the darkness I could see that his already pale face had gone the colour of paper.
Tara said, “What the hell, Gavin?”
Gavin said nothing. He held the knife straight up in the air in front of his face, between him and Donald, and he stared at the tip of it. We all stared at the knife.
“Sometimes you need a knife,” he said, “that’s the truth, even if you don’t like it.” He waved it around. “But sometimes you have to cut something!”
“Put it away, Gavin,” Tara said. “We get it, you’re scary. Now put it away.”
He held it at the very bottom of the grip, between his thumb and index finger. He let it waggle there, and then dropped it. It stuck in the ground at our feet, straight upright. “Fine. You won’t forget I have it, though.” He picked up the knife and wiped the blade on his pants.
He was right about that. I felt our vulnerability to blades, to the cold, to our own ignorance, standing out there in a dark field in west Quebec. Gavin had folded the knife and put it in his pocket, but we couldn’t put it away. As we accumulated knowledge of the world’s threats, we could not go back and pretend to be the children we’d recently been.
I’ve had my own children since then, and I have worried about them the way I know my parents helplessly worried about me. I looked at our newborn twin boys and I said to my wife, “They’re beautiful, aren’t they? Look at what we did. They’re beautiful.” And she looked at me and said, “Now what do we do?”
I had no answer then, but what I would say now is that if a person can look at his children when they are grown and say, “They’re a better version of me,” that would be okay. A person could be happy with that. If he can say, “I kept them safe.”
But we are out in the world, and we cannot be sure of the intentions of others. There are so many things for which we cannot account. It all requires such luck that I am amazed we make it through at all, any of us.
/> “Gavin,” Tara said, “I think we’d all feel better if you didn’t have that knife.”
“Worried I’ll go all Dahmer on you?”
“Kind of, yeah,” she said, and he laughed. Tara was the only one of us who could talk to him like that, and he knew we knew that.
“Do you want to keep it?” he asked.
“Yes, please,” Tara said. He took it from his pocket and handed it to her, and she held it behind her back. We stood facing the field of geese, me a step behind her, and I could see in the faint light the shape of the knife in her fist. As she held it, the knife seemed to lose its heat and menace, to become an ordinary thing, uncharged. A piece of metal with which you might cut meat, or slice a length of rope. A utilitarian object. It was, in fact, Gavin’s unpredictability which had made the moment so tense, and that was still present. He still held that.
We made our way back to the car, which Gavin ran for a while with the heat up all the way, and we wrapped up in the tarp and the blanket, not speaking. We dozed fitfully until the light came and the rising sun began setting the tops of the hills ablaze.
Gavin and I were standing behind the car in the dim early morning when a man in a pickup truck came by. He stopped and helped us find the spare under the floor of the trunk, and put it on. He shook his head and laughed at us, which was fair. We were silly young people, hungry and tired. Once the spare was on he wished us luck getting back to the city.
We drove in the new light, the sun just reaching over the hills as we retraced our steps and found the autoroute. The road seemed to roll out ahead of us and drop away. None of us spoke. Soon, all of the valley opened before us. There below the fresh and airy sky lay Ottawa, scene of our failures and conflicts, our home and the place where we hoped to identify success, if not to experience it. It appeared static and distant. It looked untouchable, even unfathomable in its complexity. Roads and buildings and the grinding of machinery.
We drove through Hull and then across the Alexandra Bridge, with Parliament Hill visible off to our right. Gavin took us east toward the Byward Market to drop Donald off first at his apartment in Vanier, then he’d take me downtown, and finally deliver Tara to her apartment in Lowertown. It was a route that made sense only when you considered Gavin’s feelings for her.
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