Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  When he’d first driven into The Mines with Starr to give him a hand at the TV repair shop and seen it in all its dreary clutter, he’d nearly left that very day. But he had nothing to take him anywhere, no money, no friends or destinations, he was starting from scratch in a new country, it didn’t matter that he had been born here, and The Mines itself, with its rundown storefronts and air of commercial despair, offered nothing. Starr was bound that Innis should learn to repair televisions, be his cheap apprentice for awhile. It was a skill you could stay afloat with, Starr said, get you on your own no matter where because every goddamn person everywhere has a TV. Go to the backwardest spot on earth and they’ll have a TV before a toilet, even in Outer Mongolia or someplace, and sooner or later their favorite yak program will suddenly turn to snow and there’ll be no man between them and heaven they would rather see standing at the door of their hut than you with your tools because no kind of prayer can bring a TV picture back, nobody’s god deals with that. But Starr’s shop, with its blank dusty screens stunned every which way, its spill of haphazard parts and testing devices and wire, reminded Innis of a correctional school, and Starr its dead-end instructor hunched under a lamp, a man, it seemed to Innis, who’d settled for the least ambition he could get away with. A few episodes of sparks and smoke and cursing and Innis got what he preferred—staying back in North St. Aubin, picking up odd jobs with people Starr knew, cleaning yards, painting, cutting wood, doing handyman carpentry from junior high woodshop. Sometimes he was less than handy, a jackknife carpenter for sure, but he learned fast from his mistakes and faster yet how to cover them up. I don’t care, Starr had said, if that’s what you want to do, you don’t have the knack for circuits, you handle a TV like a trash barrel. Bring in something toward your board, that’s all I ask for now, and there’s no temptations out there in North St. Aubin, at least I’m not finding many. You can settle down and keep straight. Don’t give your mother any more grief. Jesus Christ, Starr, who’s got the grief? If she’d made me a citizen, I wouldn’t be here. Starr said no, you got the sleigh before the horse, was it her that stole the cars?

  He was kneeling beside the tub testing the water for a bath when he heard the Lada skid down the driveway to a halt. His uncle’s laughter, a door slamming, then Starr pounding up the stairs. What the hell was he doing home so soon? Innis turned the taps on full for the noise, sweeping his hand through the water now nicely hot. Little chance that his uncle would blunder into the attic, but Innis stumbled into his jeans and by the time he had buttoned his shirt Starr was rapping on the bathroom door.

  “Hey, save me some hot water! I might need it later.”

  When his pulse had calmed, Innis stood at the door to Starr’s bedroom. His legs felt too light under him as he looked in at his uncle groping into a lower drawer of the dresser, yanking out shirts.

  “Back early,” Innis said.

  “I’m not back, I’m just refueling. What you up to?”

  “Come on, Starr, what could I be up to? A hot bath. Wild, huh?”

  “Your age, I had a bath on Saturday night in a tin tub in the middle of the kitchen.”

  “Okay, I’m really grateful for the hot running water.”

  “If you had to heat it on a coal stove, you’d damn well be grateful.”

  Starr pushed some bills into his wallet and kicked the drawer shut, stooping toward the dresser mirror. He patted his face with both hands, a tough face, darker than Innis’s, its angles squared and solid, like the men in the old photographs downstairs. A deep cleft in his chin—like a stroke Innis might make with a soft pencil—gave to his face the possibility of humor even when he set his jaw. And that’s what had saved them when they got in each other’s face, when the strain of Innis’s living there was too much for either of them, the release of a few laughs. Starr stroked a brush carefully through the tight waves of his steel-grey hair, pursed his lips at himself. “I have to piss and get out of here. There’s a woman waiting, she’s not the sort to wait for long.”

  From the hall window Innis looked down at the Lada sputtering and trembling in the dark. In its headlights snow danced like moths. Kitchen light faintly reached the open car door, the leg of a woman in jeans, her black fur-trimmed boot resting on the running board. Radio music was going and her foot tapped to it. A hand appeared gracefully, palm up, received a few flakes of snow, and then withdrew. Innis could make out the edge of a wide-brimmed hat but not the face beneath it. Jesus, his uncle never brought a woman into the house, not since Innis had been here. You won’t be driving, he’d told Innis the first day, I don’t have to tell you you won’t get near the wheel of a car while you’re in this house. I’m not turning my life around to make room for you, but we’ll be okay for the time it takes you to get straightened away.

  Starr came out of the bathroom zipping up. “Now you know where my money is,” he said. On his uncle, alcohol always seemed like cologne, definite but not dangerous. He gazed into Innis’s face with mock gravity but he meant it. “And I know it will always be there. Eh?”

  “You mean I can’t skim any?”

  “I’ll skim it off your hide.”

  “Another Friday and I’m trapped here, Starr. No wheels, nowhere to get to, nothing.”

  “Look, you had wheels back in Boston, but they didn’t belong to you, did they? They shipped you back here and you’re not exactly our idea of an AI immigrant. Felony deportees don’t deserve much, not for awhile, now do they? It’s a probation, like.”

  “In your eyes maybe. I left all that at the border, I paid my dues in the States. It’s a clean slate here.”

  “And clean we’ll keep it.”

  “I been here seven months clean as a whistle. I bet I’ve walked more woods than you have in a lifetime.”

  “You’d like to think so. Just because you don’t see me doesn’t mean I’m never up there.”

  A polite toot came from the driveway.

  “She’s antsy, I’m off. Don’t use so much damn water. Oil isn’t cheap, you know.”

  “Why didn’t you ask her to come in?”

  Starr cocked his head, looked him up and down slowly. “With a dangerous man like you in here?”

  He laughed and started down the stairs singing without words, then stopped and looked back at Innis. “Let’s keep it simple. That’s best for me and you too. Right?”

  “Whatever you say, Uncle Starr.”

  “And don’t call me Uncle. It makes me sound like a geezer.”

  When he was gone, Innis looked again into the attic dark. Satisfied, he closed the door and locked it. Where did Starr get his ideas of what was best? What was Innis, a freak?

  So, no women, a cold Friday night, but at least the house was his. Drafty as a barn anyway. To hell with the bath. Leave it for Starr, he could cool his nuts in it when he got home. Innis jacked up the basement oil furnace and pokered the coal in the big iron stove his uncle used for heat in the kitchen and sometimes for cooking when he felt nostalgic, shifting pots about on its flat surface as he recounted how skilled Granny had been, boiling water here, and simmering fish over there, baking the best bannock in the oven at the same time. The sink tap pattered on the black skillet and its crescent of chilled grease. After warming his hands over the stove, he fished out upstairs a small wooden stash box, hidden in a boot in his bedroom closet. He unwrapped with great care a ball of tinfoil: his beautiful seeds, the ones he hadn’t used. In his palm he worked them around with his finger like diamonds. The party at Mohney’s brother’s apartment back in Boston where the hippie guy pressed the seeds into his hand like they were magic: Put them in the earth, man, they’ll bring you joy. Right on. Promising plumpness and color, so said the book Innis kept under his mattress. Miraculous things, seeds. He squeezed them in his fist. Summer. Heat. Green leaves spreading like hands, flower tops dense as bullrushes. But God, when would this winter let go?

  He rolled a thin joint, then held his baggie of pot up to the light: had to go easy on this. Some floating aro
und in town probably, in The Mines, in Sydney for sure, but he couldn’t afford to get busted, he had to pick his risks carefully. Ned Mohney, the crazy bastard, had brazenly mailed this weed to him from Boston, two cleaned and tightly-compressed ounces from the last kilo they had scored to deal over in Cambridge, and it got here through customs, despite the wrong box number packed in a big bag of M&Ms, a note inside: Something for the munchies, pal. Keep your energy up. Keeping anything else up? Sure, Ned, I’ve never seen so many women. He hadn’t heard from Ned since. Why would he? Innis was banished, gone from the conversation of the few friends they’d had back there in Watertown. He’d been a topic for a while, did you hear what they’re doing to Innis, they’re deporting the guy to Canada, can you believe that? For what, dope? No, that Porsche he stole. His mother had called at Christmas, just small talk, she seemed nervous and the line was bad. How could you have a private conversation anyway on that old wooden crank phone on the kitchen wall with another dozen people up and down the road bending their ears to it? Alexander Graham Bell lived a few miles from here, Starr said, up at Red Head, and we’re still using the phone he invented, we’re getting dial next year, but that’s no excuse for not calling your mother. We’ve said all we have to say, Innis told him.

  Starr might come home tonight, and he might not. Unsure still if his uncle knew the smell of grass, he lit up and stepped outside the back door, huddling against the jamb. He drew deeply, held it until his eyes welled and the smoke blended with his breath. Even so, Starr didn’t miss much, and he kept a lot of things to himself. On the radio one night they heard about a pot bust on the mainland, and Starr said, Marijuana, hell, they used to grow it for rope, and now they hang you with it. Folk doctors concocted it for nerve medicine and perking up appetites, not just for food but sex, eh? If you think country people didn’t know much, there you are. Your Granny, she knew the wild plants and herbs, she was a healer, a midwife, many a night she was called out in terrible weather.

  The telephone rang and Innis counted reflexively, three longs, three shorts, not ours, a shaky hand at the crank, it sounded like. People had styles of cranking out rings—some bold, urgent, loud, others hesitant, tripping along. Innis was getting so he hardly listened at all, the phone simply trilled out a few times and went silent. No one was phoning for him anyway, he’d fielded enough calls for Starr, from women even, one in particular who seemed put out that he was never available lately, though when he had been he’d sweettalked her in low tones, as charming as he could be in code, on a party line. But this new woman with the hat and snow on her hand, she had Starr jumping, avoiding the shop some days, often gone in the evenings. Innis himself felt older now, beyond teenage girls, what he saw of them on his few visits to The Mines seemed just that to him, girls who would not understand what had happened to him or why. Why should they. And what could he offer the older ones, floating in space the way he was? Starr had told him, Look, you don’t have a license anymore and I’m damn sure not going to take you somewhere looking for a date, better you stay out here for a while, you’ve had enough problems out on the town, you don’t need women, have a drink instead. He’d pushed the rum bottle across the table, Dìreach boinneag, but Innis said no, that stuff’s poison to me, I don’t touch it anymore.

  In Watertown he and Ned had loved beer, not just in bars but at home because pot made them thirsty and they could glide nicely on a sixpack or two. But later on when Innis was facing his final INS hearing, they thought hard liquor was maybe the way to go, more miles per gallon, Ned said, and in a loud bar they went for bourbon, flat-out, and Innis reached a point where it slid down like pop. He began to flip unshelled peanuts at people passing their table, laughing at first, but then grimly flinging them, taunting anyone his bleary gaze could fix on. To save him from a sure beating, Ned coaxed him into the street and drove him home, Sleep it off, man, go to bed. But when Innis, stumbling and cursing, saw his mother glowering at the top of the stairs, something flipped, he was on the verge of striking her before he pulled back, somehow it was her fault that his simple life had turned hopelessly complicated. After throwing up in the bathroom, he smashed the mirror, the toilet. It was the toilet that freaked her out, seeing him lift the lid off the back and break up the tank, yelling and slipping, collapsing finally on the wet tiles, water gushing everywhere, so mad drunk no one would come near him, and if he hadn’t been in deep trouble already, she would have had the cops in, such was her disgust. No alcohol since, not even a beer. He did not miss it: it lit flames in his nerves, made his mind thick and stupid. But grass was clear, thoughtful, mellow, most of the time. Every so often, though not enough to put him off, bitterness rose up in him when he smoked, his grievances vivid, he tasted them, felt their sting. But he kept them in his head, talked them out with himself, found the words that would have worked if he’d had the wits when he’d needed them. Sometimes, stoned and alone, he would realize that he was talking out loud, fists clenched, pumping his anger as if the person were right there in the room with him. But he calmed down when he came down. Maybe it was good after all, that he could work it out this way alone. And if grass stoked his fantasies, better that than nothing. By fall, he would have plenty weed, not just for himself, but for the right people with money to spare.

  His only call had been from his mother a few weeks ago, and though there were times back home when she’d been tough with him, formidable, and he’d feared her temper, he was struck by how distant she sounded, her voice thin, almost pleading. When he’d lived with her, she knew a good bit about his life, if not as much as she wanted to know, but now she had no real idea what he was up to and that seemed to shake her up. Don’t worry, Ma, Innis told her before he hung up, conscious of the bad line and the eavesdroppers, I hitched my wagon to a Starr. She didn’t laugh.

  He squinted at the dark shape of the barn set back in the old pasture. Hard to imagine there’d ever been life in it, horses and cows coming and going, rumbling in their own hot stink, but warm nevertheless even on a night like this. Starr had hated farming, he let the place go after Grandpa died, the equipment wasn’t touched again, even the old pick-up behind the toolshed was sunk to its hubs, the tires rotting, a load of snow in the truckbed. I shovelled so much shit I ran off to the navy, he said, and I wouldn’t grow anything here now that God didn’t give me for nothing, not even a blade of grass. Okay, Starr, I’ll put in a crop for you. Grass it is.

  The trucker who’d picked Innis up that day last fall outside New Glasgow said, Listen, stuff this good you could move easy, no problem at all around here, and don’t give me another hit or I’ll have us in the ditch. Jesus, it’s a damn shame we don’t grow it here, look at all this land, gesturing at the hills they were passing, black with spruce, and the old neglected fields. But you can, you know, Innis told him, explaining that he’d read how you could develop a strain for your own climate, they grew it all over the States, down South it was replacing moonshine, was what he’d heard. Well I never heard tell of that in Cape Breton, the trucker said, but if a man could and he did, he’d make a real go of it, good weed like you got in your hand there. Real money in that. What would we call it, eh? Cape Breton Gold? Canso Red? He laughed. He was a heavy guy with a blond neatly groomed beard and a darker ponytail, hauling drums of herbicide to some Swedish pulp company over in Port Hawkesbury, and Innis envied him, on the move, heading out every day. If guys like him wanted weed, Innis could, maybe by September, with some luck and good weather, provide it. And no middleman.

  But without money, without a car, you were helpless, no more than a kid anyway. When the INS officer told him, Son, you are barred for life and that means what it says, it knocked him back, he felt like a bum. He couldn’t live in the country he’d grown up in, couldn’t even do time there anymore, they did not want him in the United States, period. He had told his mother, for Christ’s sake, hard criminals don’t even get thrown out of here, Ma, people a hundred times worse than me walk the streets free every day, killers, rapists, the wors
t kind of scum. They do time, they get to go back home when it’s over. But his mother said, You are a criminal, Innis, that’s what they call you when you keep stealing automobiles, and they are sending you home, that’s where you were born, down east. You can live with Uncle Starr until you get on your feet. His feet? What about the rest of him?

  He had thought, Cape Breton, it’s just a name I’m going to, he heard it in his first memories, fluttering through his mother and dad’s conversation, always with a peculiar and specific warmth whether their tone was anger or nostalgia, he’d heard it on the telephone as they talked with friends, it was a place where the people in his parents’ kitchen came from because they had so many stories about it, Cape Bretoners they laughed over or admired or recalled with affection, the room full of cigarette smoke, bottles of beer or rum or Canadian whisky on the table, names tossed back and forth, you remember Johnny MacPhail, Johnny Nookie we called him? Lord, yes, he put out the bushline on the ice until he was too old to stand. And old Archie Bain, he told my dad, Listen, if you want to farm good you got to get the sheepses. But the names just drifted past, Innis never dreamed he’d be going there, “down home” belonged to his parents, to their time and their past, not to his, and Starr was just another name he had heard. A road to Cape Breton, that’s how he’d thought of it as a kid, there was a road that went there and back to Boston, and all these people who gathered in the kitchen and called on the phone had travelled it one time or another, some just yesterday, last night, fresh with news and stories, and others a long time ago, but they had stories too and memories and people they loved to talk about, and they all seemed to want to go back over that road, sometime, even the ones who never would. Innis had thought it an awful long road to where they all had come from and where they all were going, and even the ones who said they were glad they’d left sounded like they couldn’t forget this road either, and if Innis could get on it, if somebody would put him in a car and take him there, he would understand what they were all talking about and he wouldn’t be outside their passions and joys. But as he got older, it was not a road Innis wanted to take, he wasn’t listening in the kitchen anymore, it wasn’t his road, it was theirs.