I shivered.
We broke through the forest and onto the camp’s compound. A few naked bulbs cast deep shadows on the dorm cabins. A gravel cul-de-sac looped around the buildings and back out through the dark spaces of trees to the highway a short distance away. A logging truck roared by, its headlights and yellow running lights flickering through the trees. For a moment, it drowned out the distant buzzing of the power line that ran to the camp from the lines along the road. It drowned out the quiet gurgling of water that passed through a corrugated aluminum culvert that redirected a stream under the highway.
We whispered good nights.
Leonard and I watched the girls go, their bodies side by side slipping from white to black through light and shadow. Their feet reported a muted crackle as they walked along the gravel lane. They rounded the girl’s dorm and were gone.
“Want to go for a walk?” Leonard asked in a hushed tone.
I nodded. I was glad he asked. I needed to be around someone. The place was too quiet and, that night, the universe was too big. I felt too small. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway.
We wandered up the short road that led to the highway. A single lamppost, crowned by a yellow spotlight, marked the turnoff to the camp.
Across the highway was the large black spot of a recent cutblock. The space left behind where trees once stood was large, flat and empty. It smelled of earth and was a feeling that settled into both of us. The spotlight did not stretch far from the tarmac where we stood. There was a slight creosote smell from the lamp pole. We stood in the safety circle of light, looking in opposite bearings along the highway. The unknown tarmac stretched out in either direction. For all we knew, in the dark beyond our vision, the road may have just looped above, rising overhead and leaving us looking at each other in opposite directions.
“You feel that?” Leonard asked.
“Yep, weird,” I replied.
“You got any smokes left?”
I had stolen a pack from Father on our way here. It had been in the glovebox and was easy enough to take when he stepped out at a gas station to go to the can.
“Yep.” I fumbled around with my pockets and pulled one out. “Do you have the matches?”
A sulphurous smell flamed bright. Leonard held a match out and I puffed, coughed and handed the cigarette to him.
We stood, power lines humming overhead. A garland of telephone line was pegged to the same poles. The creek trickled hollowly through the culvert. A cicada chirruped in the night air from the direction of the clearing.
We stood, quiet enough that I could imagine the power travelling through the lines to lights in far-off places, coming out over empty dinner tables, coming through companionless television sets flickering in some distant neighbourhood. In a quiet, lonely suburb, someone switched off a bedside lamp and pulled the covers up snug. Leonard and I stood, far away from all of that, in a spotlit hole in the forest, a point of light like a distant star.
I imagined I could hear late-night telephone conversations, thousands of them, sliding through the little phone lines, simple thin wires carrying voices.
One of those calls was to the camp counsellor’s office. A weary hello was exchanged between the counsellor and Mary Koshushner’s mother. Mary’s grandmother, Margaret Koshushner, had passed away that night.
Margaret had undergone the surgery for her pancreatic cancer five years ago and it had taken that long for the disease to catch up to her again. Margaret had thought of each year as a gift. She saw Mary grow up a little bit more. She had been able to visit with her friends for five more years. It was all she had hoped for.
In the end, she didn’t mind dying. She missed her husband since he died in the Pinto and she truly believed she would see him again. She had never referred to herself as a widow. She always said she was separated.
Tomorrow, Leonard would learn Mary had gone home in the early morning sunlight. Tomorrow, I would try to speak to Paige and she would avoid me. I already knew that would happen but I didn’t want to think about it. The horrible loneliness would return but, at that moment standing on the highway, the feeling was held at bay by Leonard, the spotlight above us and the cigarette we shared.
“Check it out. There’s an airplane,” I said. What I had thought was a star slid slowly in front of the others, smoothly as if the night sky were an ocean.
“Where?” Leonard exhaled smoke and passed the last centimetre of the cigarette back to me. “Oh, I see it. That’s way farther out than a plane. It’s a satellite, I bet.”
“Cool,” I said, not smoking, just letting the coal wink out against the filter. The first few drags had tasted horrible.
“How was your night?” Leonard asked after a pause.
I thought for a moment, my head swimming—from the cigarette or the events of the evening I couldn’t tell. “I’m not sure,” I answered.
Confusing, I wanted to say.
Sad, I thought.
Unreal and wonderful but so grounded it made me feel lonely, I wanted to say.
It didn’t really make sense.
“It was so real,” I said, “except it doesn’t feel like it really happened. You know?”
Leonard gave me a sidelong look before shifting his gaze back to the darkness up the road.
“I know,” he said. “You can talk to me if you want.”
“I know. I’m okay.”
“Okay.”
The creek in the culvert plopped as if a stone had been dropped into it. The sound echoed metallically.
“Look,” Leonard said. He pointed at a pinprick of light. A firefly.
Looking around, there were hundreds of them blinking across the clear cut.
There were signals everywhere. There were signs everywhere, all the time. Even at that late hour, in that dark spot in the middle of nowhere, flashing butts in the deep black, the chirp of the cicada, pheromones of a million ants disrupted by the logging, the burbling creek, signals from airplanes and satellites, power lines and static from distant stars. Thinking of it as silence was false. Stillness never happened. The night was full of radio waves, television broadcasts and phone conversations.
My feeling of isolation lessened.
Everywhere there were layers of activity and constant interaction. Even when things seemed so still and quiet, the world was full and moving and connected. The air was alive everywhere, at every moment, even those seemingly still and quiet ones. Something was always in the air. Things were progressing. Life was progressing.
The signals were everywhere.
The signs are everywhere.
CHAPTER 8
The Anatomy of a Model
Early summer, 1993, found me putt-putting my way south along the coast in Uncle Tony’s rusty Chrysler Magic Wagon. Of course, Uncle Tony had a new minivan by that time, a year ahead of the rest of us with his 1994 model. He kept the old Magic Wagon for sentimental value. It had been his first, new from the dealer, loaded to the brim, financed to the hilt, automobile purchase.
“The Magic Wagon was the first front-wheel-drive small van of its kind,” he told me proudly, admiring it in the garage with his hands on his hips. Birds chirped in the cool, early morning air.
When Uncle Tony had asked me to go pick up Leonard and bring him home from college for the summer, I jumped at the opportunity—freedom to get out of the city for a few days and road trip back with my buddy.
I clambered behind the wheel.
“The thing’s a piece of shit on the hills. Totally gutless,” Uncle Tony said, closing the driver’s door with a creak behind me. He handed me the keys through the open window. “But it won’t die and it’s magic on gas.”
Uncle Tony passed me one hundred dollars gas money and stepped out of the garage. I turned the ignition. The Magic Wagon failed twice but started on the third go, billowing out greasy blue smoke that filled the garage.
Despite its creaks and rattles, in my mind, the Magic Wagon was perfect. When I pushed the breaks, it slowed
down. When I pushed the gas, it sputtered faster. The tape deck worked. Most importantly, the Magic Wagon was the thing that would get me away from the city.
The sun rose as I waited at a set of lights where the ring road marked the city limits. The cool morning air poured into the cab, flushing out the exhaust smell. Music came out of three speakers and static hissed out of the fourth: Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow.” The light turned green. I smiled at the long stretch of road before me. I pushed the gas pedal and the engine stalled. The speakers went silent when I turned the ignition off. The car behind me gave a long, uninterrupted blast of its horn. I flipped the key forward. The engine lurched and the Magic Wagon stuttered through the intersection, threatening failure until the speedometer needle jerked past thirty.
I hadn’t told Father I was leaving. He hadn’t been very attentive since Mother left, so I didn’t think it would matter. The morning I went, he was sitting greasy-haired, and glaze-eyed in front of the television, watching X-Files reruns and smelling like he hadn’t bathed in days. The house had been pretty quiet for three months. Only the blathering television noise crept through, muffled to different degrees depending on which room I was in. The air was stale. Windows hadn’t been opened in months. Most of the curtains were drawn. Dishes were piled in the sink, on the counter and beside the couch.
The Magic Wagon, burning a steady cloud of blue up the coastal hills and easing up on the emissions on the less strenuous glide down the other side of the Continental Divide, couldn’t really—safely—handle the main highway speeds. So, I mostly stuck to the cracked asphalt and gravel-filled potholes of the secondary highways and side connectors. It would take twice as long but I didn’t mind.
I had woven my way through the mountains and along valley sideroads for three hours. Still, a few hours out from my destination, I pulled into a gas station in a small town sitting in a wide, sunny river valley to pee, check the oil and get some beef jerky before moving on. Everything was green and the air smelled alive. It felt good to stretch in the parking lot, chew some dried beef and breathe the mountain air before driving on.
Leonard had gone to college the previous fall, three hours down the coast if you took the freeway. He had written his last exam, completing his first year of journalism.
I hadn’t seen him in as long. I finished my final year of high school and envied his freedom. He had escaped the city, lived with a roommate in the campus residence. I couldn’t wait to catch up with him. So much had happened lately that I had holed up, stuffed deep down and needed to tell someone.
After a while of being lulled by the sun flashing through the trees and the buzzing engine, droning a higher pitch up the hills and relaxing to a lower hum coasting down the hills, I broke from the mountain forests and drove out onto the wide, bright coastal plain. The sun twinkled off the ocean and a dark square of a tanker ship sat between the shore and the horizon. It was big, seemingly unmoving, but when I looked away and then glanced back a minute later, I could tell it was heading south. The ship was so big and the ocean was so much bigger that it seemed inanimate.
Then I hit a skunk.
At first, it was a sharp bump and a heart-lurching moment of confusion. Then the smell hit me, that burnt plastic and frying garlic smell, and I knew what I had hit.
My heart beat faster even though it was sinking. I killed it. I could have avoided it had I been paying closer attention. Some distance passed, asphalt rolling under the tires. I gagged on the smell for a while and, as it lessened in the cab, it was replaced by a murderous hollow in my heart.
I had murdered an innocent being.
The tanker had moved an inch along the horizon.
Maybe it wasn’t dead, I thought.
I slowed, spun the Magic Wagon around 180 degrees in a jerking three-point turn on the deserted highway and then started back.
Maybe I could save it, send death back empty-handed.
The Magic Wagon shuddered as the speedometer needle bumped against eighty.
From behind the windshield, my hopes dwindled as I approached the long smear of organic matter, a juicy exclamation mark on the asphalt punctuated by the corpse. Checking the rear-view mirror and finding myself alone, I slowed to a stop near the largest chunk, slid the stick to park and stepped out.
The Magic Wagon coughed and stalled. The reclaimed silence was complete and profound.
The tanker had moved another inch to the south.
I looked up and down the length of carnage, determining there was no hope for resuscitation and realizing that even if the animal had remained in one piece, I wouldn’t have known what to do. I so badly wanted to do what was right. I wanted to fix what I had killed, but there was nothing to put back together, no going back in time to pay attention to the road enough to swerve out of the way. No way to put the animal back together and make all the bits work again. Some things, once done, cannot be undone.
So, I cried. I cried at how useless I was to fix the wrong I had committed.
I resolved to do the next best thing, to dignify and remember the dead. I would bury him.
I found a cardboard box in the back of the Magic Wagon and tore off a flap from the lid. I used it to scrape the smears off the highway the best I could. I put the pieces in the cardboard box, dragging it around behind me. I spent twenty minutes wandering the tarmac, scraping up small pieces of fur, flesh, bone and jelly. The whole while, I choked and cried, on both the smell and the sorrow.
Sweating in the heat, I dug a hole in the dirt just off the side of the highway and buried the remains.
One car, a Monte Carlo, drove by as I was saying a few words. A shadow swivelled behind the steering wheel as it drove by, watching me choke out a eulogy and wipe away globs of snot with my arm.
By the time I climbed back behind the wheel of the Magic Wagon, I had no more tears. I got the Magic Wagon started in a cloud of blue smoke. The tanker was nowhere to be seen. It had fallen off the horizon. The ocean was empty.
I drove north.
After a while, houses became more frequent, slipping past along the side of the highway. Traffic grew denser and eventually, I pulled up to the first red light I had seen in hours. I arrived, burning oil, exhausted and emotionally drained. Two hands clutched the top of the steering wheel and two arms hung from them. One block later, I pulled up in front of the dorm building. Leonard was there, sitting on a pile of boxes and chatting to a woman.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked as I get out of the minivan.
The woman grimaced at me and said goodbye to Leonard. He kissed her on the cheek before turning his attention back to me.
I was covered with dust. My shirt was splotchy with rusty blood patches and snot smears and I smelled like sweat and skunk anal scent glands. My eyes itched from crying and, when I told Leonard what had happened, tears welled up again. While I confessed to murder, Leonard pulled a shirt and a pair of jeans from a box. He nodded as I recounted the funeral. He handed me the clothes and I changed there on the sidewalk, stopping my story only for a moment when I pulled my shirt off and put the clean one on. I told Leonard how lonely the funeral was, how empty the highway, the forest and the ocean seemed. How a life had passed from the world, how I took it and how I only wanted to do right now that I had done something so permanent and unforgivable.
“You’re an idiot,” Leonard said, not condescendingly but more out of a loving kind of pity. He grasped my shoulder. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“No problem.” I blew my nose into my dirty shirt, looked at it, wadded it up and then threw it into a nearby bush.
“I’m all moved out.” Leonard gestured to the boxes. “They needed me out by two o’clock so here’s all my stuff. Let’s go home.”
We loaded the Magic Wagon and, on the way back out of town, Leonard suggested we stop at a pub to get supper and a beer. I reminded him that I was only seventeen but he brushed off my concern by saying, “I know this dumpy place just off the highway. All the students go there.
They never check ID.”
Leonard directed me past a scrapyard to a deserted service road. Twilight settled over the parking lot where the Magic Wagon putter-putter-stalled. A building clad in corrugated metal hunkered down in one corner of the lot, rusty tear-shaped stains dripping from where nails tacked the siding on. The only thing hinting at a place of business was a pink neon Open sign. An old biker wearing a leather jacket and bandana stood beside the door, sucking on a cigarette. The dull thudding of loud music played from within.
The old biker grunted and tipped his head at us when we entered. Inside, cigarette smoke hung like a film in the air, probably left over from the previous night. The bar, a large warehouse with wooden picnic tables, pool tables and a dance floor, spread out before us. Everything was lit by feeble bulbs strung from the rafters. There was a strong smell of stale beer and an organic waft from the straw fermenting on the floor. The place was empty save for one scantily clothed buxom beauty leaning against the bar talking to a beefy bartender who watched us suspiciously when we entered. We ordered the Road Kill Sampler Platter and a pitcher of beer.
People trailed in and the cloud of cigarette smoke grew thicker. Every time the door opened, I could see the old biker outside, smoking a cigarette and nodding at everybody who passed by. The music grew louder to the point where Leonard and I were leaning across the table, up on our elbows and shouting. We ordered more beer. Every table filled up and the buxom blond became a blur of waitress. The beefy bartender looked suspiciously at everyone who came through the door.
“I’m going to write obits,” Leonard yelled.
“A bit of what?” I sloshed my beer, tilted my ear so I could hear better. Our picnic table had filled up with round, sweaty, biker bodies.
“Obituaries,” Leonard yelled.
“Oh,” I called. “I thought you were taking journalism.”
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