The Journey Prize Stories 23

by Alexander Macleod; Alison Pick; Sarah Selecky

  I hadn’t seen the man on the subway for a couple of weeks and had started to feel that I was in the clear.

  Then this happened:

  I was on my way to work, as usual, when I saw him. He was a few yards away, near the end of the car. He wasn’t sitting, even though there were seats available. He was standing next to the pole, but he wasn’t holding on to it. He looked bad. I had to really squint to make sure it was him, but his rug was unmistakable. Just as I was looking, not sure what to do, the front of his toupée stood up from his head, just lifted right up. He didn’t seem to notice. The rug stayed that way, looking at me for a second. Then it addressed me.

  “He’s sick,” it said.

  It didn’t have eyes or fangs or anything; it was just standing up, talking. It had a soft, deep voice.

  “If you let this happen,” it told me, “it will kill him.” I was frozen on the spot, staring back at the rug, which, even though it didn’t have eyes, was giving me a very serious look. We stood like this for the rest of the ride. When the doors opened at my stop, I nodded slightly and then the rug nodded back, flopping up once and coming down to rest on the man’s head.

  I would get rid of the bomb. I would throw it in the river.

  I walked as fast as I could to work and was almost running when I rounded the comer and the smell stopped me like a wall. It very nearly knocked me down. It was how you might imagine the smell of an open mass grave. Next to a latrine. I doubled over and gagged a few times with my hands on my knees. Then I looked down the street at the restaurant and saw Glenn on the steps.

  He was sitting there with his head in his hands. He wasn’t screaming or scampering around like a gerbil; he was just sitting, looking at the ground.

  With my nose buried in my arm, I made my way over. He looked up when he saw my feet in front of him, and I saw it in his eyes: the pain of a full grown child still getting his lunch money stolen every single day in the schoolyard. Glenn lied to himself a lot, but as much as he wanted to believe that as a successful restaurateur and former radio celebrity he was loved and respected by his clientele and staff, he knew that people simply didn’t like him. He knew that people made fun of him. He had heard them in the kitchen.

  “What is it, Janine?” he asked. He really wanted to know. “Is it – is it disdain? Is it …” He shook his head and trailed off as his voice filled with tears.

  I sat down on the steps beside him and hesitated a second before putting my arm around his frail little shoulders. This made him start crying harder. I felt something let go inside of me, put my other arm around him, and pulled him close. I actually squeezed him. This made him start sobbing so hard he felt like he was breaking apart, so I squeezed him tighter, hoping my arms might hold the pieces of him together.

  D.W. WILSON

  THE DEAD ROADS

  One time we roadtripped across the country with Animal Brooks, and he almost got run over by a pickup truck partway through Alberta. It was me and my twenty-year-old girlfriend Vic and him, him in his cadpat jumpsuit, Vic in her flannel logger coat and her neon hair that glowed like a bush lamp. We’d known Animal since grade school: the north-born shit kicker, like Mick Dundee. A lone ranger, or something. Then in 2002 the three of us crammed into his ’67 Camaro to tear-ass down the Trans-Canada at eighty miles an hour. Vic and me had a couple hundred bucks and time to kill before she went back to university. That’d make it August, or just so. Animal had a way of not caring too much and a way of hitting on Vic. He was twenty-six and hunted-looking, with engine-grease stubble and red eyes sunk past his cheek bones. In his commie hat and Converses he had that hurting lurch, like a scrapper’s swag, dragging foot after foot with his knees loose and his shoulders slumped. He’d drink a garden hose under the table if it looked at him wrong. He once boned a girl in some poison ivy bushes, but was a gentleman about it. An ugly dent caved his forehead, and rumours around Invermere said he’d been booted by a cow and then survived.

  Vic stole shotgun right from the get-go and Animal preferred a girl beside him, anyway, so I squished in the back among our gear. We had a ton of liquor but only a two-man tent because Animal didn’t care one way or the other. He’d packed nothing but his wallet and a bottle-rimmed copy of The Once and Future King, and he threatened to beat me to death with the Camaro’s dipstick if he caught me touching his book. His brother used to read it to him before bed, and that made it an item of certain value, a real point of civic pride.

  The Camaro’s vinyl seats smelled like citrus cleaner. First time I ever got a girl pregnant was in Animal’s backseat, but I didn’t want to mention it since Vic would’ve ditched out then and there. Vic’ll crack you with a highball glass if you say the wrong thing, she can do that. We weren’t really dating, either. She just came home in the summers to visit her old man and score a few bucks slopping mortar, and we’d hook up. I don’t know anyone prettier than Vic. She’s got a heart-shaped face and sun freckles on her chin and a lazy eye when she drinks and these wineglass-sized breasts I get to look at sometimes. On the West Coast she bops around with a university kid who wears a sweater and carries a man purse. Her dad showed me a picture of the guy, all milk jug ears and a pinched nose that’d bust easy in a fight. Upper-middle-class, horizon-in-his-irons, that type. Not that I can really complain, I guess. Vic never mentioned him and I never mentioned him and we went about our business like we used to, like when we were sixteen and bent together in the old fur trading fort up the beach on Kopokol Road.

  Vic planned our journey with a 1980s road atlas she snagged from her dad’s material shed. Animal kept his hand on the stick shift so he could zag around lorries hauling B.C. timber to the tar sands. Whenever he geared to fifth his palm plopped onto Vic’s thigh. Each time, she’d swat him and give him the eyebrow, and he’d wink at me in the rear-view. —Dun worry Duncan, I wouldn’t do that tuh ya, he’d say, but I know Animal.

  For the first day we plowed east through the national park. Cops don’t patrol there so Animal went batshit. His Camaro handled like a motor bike and it packed enough horse to climb a hill in fifth, and I don’t know if he let off the gun the whole way. He held a Kokanee between his legs and gulped it whenever the road straightened. Animal was a top-notch driver. As a job, he manned a cargo truck for this organic potato delivery service. One time he spun an e-brake slide at forty miles per hour, so me and him could chase down these highschoolers who’d hucked a butternut squash through his windshield.

  To kill time, Animal bought a Playboy and handed it to Vic. He suggested she do a dramatic read if possible. At first she gave him the eye, but he threatened to have me do it if not her. He also handed her all the receipts for gas and food and booze to keep track of, on account of her higher education, but I’m not even sure Vic did much math. At university she studied biology and swamplands, and I like to think I got her into it, since there’s a great wide marsh behind this place we used to get shitfaced at. It’s a panelboard bungalow on the outskirts of town, built, Vic figures, on floodland from the Columbia River. Vic and me used to stash our weed in the water, pinned under the vegetable band. One time we stole election signs and ditched them in the marsh, and the Valley Echo printed a headline that said the cops didn’t know to call it vandal ism or a political statement. Neither did I really, since Vic planned the whole thing. Then last summer I asked her to muck around the marsh with me but she said we really shouldn’t, because it’s drying up. She had a bunch of science to prove it. —Something has to change, Dunc, she said, pawing at me. —Or there’ll be nothing left.

  Eventually Animal bored of the Trans-Canada, so he veered onto some single lane switchback that traced the Rocky Mountains north. I thought Vic’d be distressed but turned out she expected it. She shoved the road atlas under the seat and dug a baggie of weed from her pack. Later, we played punch buggy, but I couldn’t see much from the back, and Vic walloped me on the charley horse so goddamn hard I got goose skins straight down to my toes.

  The sign said, Tent Campin
g – $15, and Animal said, —Fuck that shit, and then he booted the sign pole for good measure. He plunked himself on the Camaro’s cobalt hood and rubbed his eyes. We’d been on the road for a while, and I don’t remember if he ever slept much. The air smelled like forest fire and it also reeked of cow shit, but Alberta usually reeks like cow shit. Vic leaned into the doorframe, hip cocked to one side like a teenager. Her flannel sleeves hung too low and she bunched the extra fabric in each fist. She chewed a piece of her hair. When we used to date I would tug those strands out of her mouth and she’d ruck her eyebrows to a scowl and I’d scramble away before she belted me one. In the low Albertan dusk her bright hair was the colour of whiskey. She caught me staring, winked.

  Vic slid her hands in her jean pockets. —I got fifteen bucks.

  —Yah I bet yuh do, Animal said.

  —What the hell does that mean?

  —Et’s Duncan’s cash ennet?

  —Just some, Vic said.

  —I got more money en Duncan, yuh know.

  —Shut your mouth Animal, I told him.

  —Jus sayen, he said, and ducked into driver’s.

  We reached some place called Shellyoak and Animal called all eyes on the lookout for a campsite. He drove through the town’s main haul, where the Camaro’s wide nose spanned the lane past centre. A ways out, the Rockies marked the border home. This far north their surfaces were dotted with pine husks – grey, chewed-out shells left over from the pine beetle plague. Not a living tree in sight. Shellyoak’s buildings were slate brick with round chimneys and tiny windows high as a man’s chin. A group of kids smoked dope on a street bench and Vic hollered for directions and one waved up the lane with an arm so skinny it flailed like an elastic. —Near the amusement park, he called.

  Big rocks broke the landscape on Shellyoak’s outskirts, and Vic figured it used to be under a glacier. Animal was dead silent the whole way. I guess the bony trees irked him, that carcass forest. The stink of wood smoke blasted from the radiator and it reminded me of the chimneys that burned when I used to scrape frost off Vic’s windshield, all those mornings after I stayed the night at her place. Her dad would be in the kitchen as I tried to sneak out, and he’d hand me a coffee and the ice shears and tell me to keep in his good books. One time he said Vic and me made a good pair, us two, but if I got her pregnant he’d probably beat me to death with an extension cord. He grinned like a boy, I remember. Then he said, —Seriously though, ya make a good pair. A few minutes later, Vic tiptoed downstairs and her old man clapped me on the shoulder like a son, and Vic smiled as if she could be happier than ever.

  Animal yawed us around a bend and all at once the horizon lit up with a neon clown head big as an RV. From our angle, it looked as if the clown also had rabbit ears, flopped down like two bendy fluorescent scoops. The highway’d gone gravel and the Camaro’s tires pinged pebbles on the undercarriage. In the distance I saw a ferris wheel rocking like a treetop, but not much else in the park to speak of. Animal geared down and this time when he laid his palm on Vic’s knee he didn’t take it off, and she didn’t smack him. He still winked at me in the rear-view, though.

  —Christ, it’s a gas station too, Vic said, pointing at the pumps hidden in the clown’s shadow. Animal steered toward them, tapped the fuel gauge with its needle at quarter-tank.

  —You got enough, I said, but he didn’t so much as grunt.

  He parked at the first pump and unfolded from the vehicle. Vic popped her seat forward so I could climb out. Figures milled inside the gas station and their outlines peered through the glass. A painted sign that said Tickets 5 bucks hung above the door. On it, somebody’d drawn a moose.

  Animal started pumping gas. He tweaked his eyebrows at me. —Well?

  —The hell do you want now, I said.

  —Go enside and ask where we cen camp, he said. He winked over my shoulder, at Vic. —Giddyup now.

  —They’ll tell us to go to the pay grounds.

  —Kid said we cen camp near the amusement park.

  —That kid was on dope, I said.

  —Yer on dope, he shot, and thrumped his fingers on the Camaro’s hood. He flashed his gums. —Go on, skinny.

  —What the fuck, Animal.

  —Yer in muh way, skinny, he said, and cocked his head to indicate Vic. —I seen better windows en you.

  Then the station’s storm door clattered and Vic yelped and I turned and saw the biggest goddamn Native man ever. He wore Carhartts and steel-toes and no shirt beneath the straps. The buckles dimpled his collar. His hair gummied to his cheeks and his head tilted at an angle. This gruesome, spider-like scar spanned his chest and the whole left nipple was sliced off, snubbed like a button nose. He leaned an arm-length calliper on his neck. Then his face jerked into a smile, but not a friendly kind. —I never seen a Camaro can run on diesel, he said, stressing his e’s.

  For a second he stood there in the doorway as if he might say gotcha! Vic bunched excess sleeve in her fists and I sniffed the air to see if the place reeked like diesel engines, the smell of carbide and tar and dirty steel. Animal stared straight at the Native guy, as if in a game of chicken instead of wrecking his engine with the wrong fuel, as if he just needed to overcome something besides the way things actually were, as if he could just be stubborn enough. Then he killed the pump and yanked the nozzle from his tank. —Where the fuck’s et say?

  The guy did a shrug-a-lug. —It’s a trucker stop.

  —Yah well I’m not uh trucker.

  —Me neither, the guy said, and moved between Vic and me, toward the car, and the air that wafted after him stunk of B.O. His neck muscles strained to hold his head straight, like he was used to keeping it down. A scrapper’s stance, almost. I caught Vic’s attention and her forehead scrunched up and the skin at her eyes tightened like old leather. I’d never known her to be the worrying type.

  —Nice car though, the guy said. He dragged a wide hand over the Camaro’s cobalt finish.

  —Yah et is.

  —I’m Walla, he said, and swung his head to Vic. —This your girl friend?

  Animal banged his commie hat against his knuckles. —Ya got uh pump er sompthen?

  —Nup, Walla said, and stressed the p.

  —Or sompthen else?

  —Buddy has a siphon.

  —Can we get et?

  —Nup. Tomorrow, I bet.

  Animal’s mouth jawed in circles and I could all but hear his brain trying to find a way to make it all go right.

  —There a campsite nearby? I said, to buy time.

  Walla twitched his head behind him. —The summit. Not like she’s a real mountain, though. You owe me $12.37 for the diesel.

  —The hells I do, Animal said, and crossed his arms.

  Walla set the callipers on the Camaro’s hood and their measurement end tinked. He swung his gaze from me to Animal to Vic, then to Animal, and then at the shop. He stood nearest Vic of all, a full two-and-a-half heads taller than her, and I swear to God he had hands big as mudflaps. —No, he said, very slowly, —you do.

  Vic dug cash from her wallet, fifteen bucks. She handed it over and Walla tugged the bills one at a time. —I’ll get your change, he said, and stepped toward the station. Then, over his shoulder: —You can’t leave your car there. He grinned at Vic and his teeth were white as gold. —Well, maybe you cen. Push her outta the way of the pump.

  I got behind the Camaro. Animal hung at the gas tank like one of those old guys who hope somebody’ll come talk to them. —Put her in neutral, idiot, I snapped, and dug my toes into the ground and heaved and the Camaro rocked. Vic pressed her back to the bumper. —What’s happening, she whispered to me, but I grunted and got the car rolling.

  We pushed the Camaro outside the clown face’s shadow and I put myself between Vic and the station. Walla reappeared, horselike in his gait. He dumped the coins in my palm and ran his tongue over his teeth. He touched a notch under his jaw. —The summit’d be a helluva climb, he said. —Especially if you’re taking your booze
. I got a pickup.

  —We can hike it, I said.

  —Trade you a lift.

  —Fer what, Animal barked.

  —What ya got? Walla said, and rubbed his triceps. The scar-tissue on his chest looked sun-dried, pinker than it ought to, and in the sticky neon light it shone raw and oily like a beating. —Aw hell, he said, —I’ll help you out. Get yer stuff.

  We grabbed our beer cooler and Vic took the sleeping bag and Animal pocketed The Once and Future King. Walla disappeared around the gas station and a few minutes later he came chewing up gravel in a green three-seater Dodge. He was sardined in driver’s with his shoulders hunched and his knees against his armpits. The truck had a bust-out rear window and poly duct-taped in the gap. Horse quilts blanketed the box, warm with the smell of dog.

  —One of you needs to sit in the bed, Walla said, then dangled his keys, —and one of you needs to drive, cause I’m shittered, and the fucking pigs have it out for me.

  Animal lunged for the keys and me and him shared this moment between us, his mouth twisted like a grin, and I wanted to hit him so bad. But if I wailed on him I’d look bad to Vic, so I climbed into the mess of bedding while Animal drove the switchback. The truck whipped around bends and I imagined Walla’s skunky B.O. sneaking through the patched-up window, how bad it must’ve been in the cab with him. Animal was goddamn lucky he’d pocketed his book. The whole way, Vic shifted uncomfortably, and I could hear her thighs brushing Walla on one side and Animal on the other.

  Atop the summit, Walla showed us a fire pit ringed by skeleton trees where he’d piled some chopped wood. Animal collapsed near the pit to work a blaze. He waved Vic off when she offered to help, so she dug a mickey of Canadian Club from the cooler. Fifty feet off, a cliff-side dropped to the highway below, where the ferris wheel keeled and the goddamn clown face smirked.