The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

“I guess we are lucky,” Amy says as they get into the car, but she doesn’t feel lucky. She thinks of the extra days they might have had together if they had encountered the barricade and not been able to board the ferry. They would have had to backtrack, take a land route up around Georgian Bay. For the past two summers there have been similar occurrences of short-term blockades by native people in all three of the Prairie provinces. The incidents that have sparked them are sometimes sketchy and forgotten almost as quickly as the barricades come down. Piotr turns on the radio, still concerned about the possibility of heavy smoke from forest fires reducing visibility and causing the highway to be closed. The news report says the fires burning north of Thunder Bay are still under control. They learn, too, of other blockades by the Ojibway Indians at the Saugeen and Cape Croker reserves.

  The sun has begun to drop low on the horizon as they drive through Espanola. YOU ARE ENTERING INDIAN COUNTRY, a yellow spray-painted message on a train trestle bridge announces. “Where isn’t it Indian country?” Piotr comments, and, as if to confirm the message, two dark-skinned children appear beside the highway, carrying fishing rods. There are probably six more where those two came from, Amy thinks, and sure enough three more dark-haired children rise up from reeds beside the road. “Watch.” But Piotr has already touched the brakes. Beyond the children a woman stands in front of a sagging, unpainted house, an axe in hand. The children turn and look at her; she has obviously shouted a warning. Then she returns to her task of chopping kindling. Amy imagines a warm setting, fried potatoes browning in a pan on the stove inside the house, fingers dunking pickerel fillets into a bowl of flour.

  While Piotr is forever raising the binoculars in search of distant shores, Amy sees bits and pieces of the whole. It doesn’t occur to her, for instance, that there is dioxin in the fish the children aspire to catch. As the car passes by the house she turns and notices the satellite dish set up on a rock behind it. “You okay?” she asks Piotr. She noticed that his skin has become slick with perspiration as his body works to slough off the poison of the Scotch he drank last night.

  “Amy, I am okay.” He’s peeved because it’s the second time she’s asked him this in the last half hour. She supposes that he objects to her asking because it draws attention to the fact that even though she had drunk more Scotch than he had, been awake the entire night while he had slept soundly, she has driven the larger portion of the distance so far. That even though she is nine years older, she seems to have much more stamina. But she discovers her error as he begins to tell her he’s worrying about how to adapt the stage play The Emigrant for film. He has already discussed the problems at length with the woman he will meet in Belgium; how he will take the two men in the play out of the basement room where the entire action is supposed to occur without sacrificing the tone of the play or the sense of the immigrants’ isolation in a foreign society. If he takes them from their basement room and puts them out on the street, he will lose, he worries, the important factor of their self-imposed imprisonment in a new country, how they choose to cling in desperation to old ideas, ideals, philosophical stances. As Amy listens to his monologue, she hears this Elizabeth person speaking through him and bitterness rises in her throat. She, Amy, is his translator. It’s up to her to pick apart the tricky analogies he draws in awkward and convoluted sentences. Only she can paraphrase them and repeat them back to him or write them down. The reward, his relief and astonishment that she appears to have read his mind, belongs to her alone.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asks as he finishes describing how he will go about dramatizing what is already dramatic.

  Corny, melodramatic, hyperbole, Amy thinks. If she said this his face would darken and twist with anguish and he would lash out at her, say that she doesn’t understand the nature of real drama. Later, after he had looked up her words in a dictionary, he would circle her with cautious, tentative questions. An endless screen of dark trees flies past the window, a seemingly impenetrable wall. But suddenly there’s an opening, a logging path cutting through that wall. “Stop the car,” Amy says.

  The car idles beside the highway. A man’s voice on the radio predicts rainfall during the night. “I see that you are angry,” Piotr says.

  Amy picks up the binoculars from the dash and raises them. A speck on the highway leaps forward, a truck, slightly distorted by the lenses. “I’m not angry.”

  “Tell me what you’re thinking, then.”

  My chest will explode, Amy thinks. She has come to imagine that in breathing one another’s breath across the pillow cells have fused and they have given birth to a third entity, which is both of them, yet exists apart from them, and whose singular and omnipresent shadow somehow confirms their own existence. She knows that if he leaves, this third person will be murdered. She shoves the binoculars back onto the dash with more force than is necessary. He calls after her as she leaps from the car and jogs down the gravel shoulder. She cuts down through a spongy ditch and up the other side of it and enters the logging path. Hard, mean, confining, she thinks, and musty, like the inside of her head right now. Mean country. A relentless gloominess. She squints up at the corridor of sky at the top of the path and watches as a hawk wheels, riding the air’s currents, its keen eye noting minute movement, discerning what is prey, what is not. There’s a sudden scrambling sound in the underbrush off to one side and she stops dead, the hair on the back of her neck prickling. A bear. She fears the lumbering but swift and deadly violence of a bear, but then she sees the sweep of antlers as a deer rises up among the trees.

  Piotr steps up close behind her, watching as the deer ambles off into the dense forest. “Oh, nice.” She feels the push of his words against her cheek. His arms circle her waist.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  She leans against him for a moment. “What I am thinking.”

  “Yes.”

  Amy turns into him and they stand face to face, noses touching. “What I am thinking,” she says, “is that I’d better take off about ten pounds if I’m going to find another lover.”

  She’s gratified by the mixture of fear and grief in his eyes. “Oh, I see.” He releases her. “You are being perverse.” As he turns away she sees that pebbly pink mole sticking up through the bristles of his fresh haircut. You have a thick neck, she thinks. Believe it or not, your head is perfectly square. I don’t know how your mother ever managed to give birth to you. You are ridiculously pigeon-toed. You have the legs of a woman. The reason I love your penis is because it looks so funny when it’s stiff, the way it sways and dips, the flagpole of your body so large yet friendly-looking and eager to the point of being almost obsequious and not at all as menacing as you may hope. Shut up, shut up, she tells herself. I love you. She steps forward and holds him and presses her face into the back of his head. “Everyone always leaves me.” She tastes the saltiness of his perspiration. This isn’t entirely true, she knows it. She was the one who left Hank and their child, Richard.

  “You knew it would come to this. I never said anything different. This has always been the understanding.”

  Because you have your goal, Amy thinks, which probably includes a younger woman with wide enough hips to allow for the passage of another square-headed person just like you.

  “Amy, please, don’t cry, you’ll just make it more difficult.” But it’s he who is crying. She feels it in the trembling of his stomach muscles and in his words.

  “I can’t help it.”

  He turns to face her again and they stand joined from knee to face, crying. Amy is feeling rather than actually thinking about Timothy becoming withdrawn after Jill died, turning into a collector and hoarder of the past. How the family, after the initial surge of sympathy it received over Jill’s death, became the source of ridicule and gossip as a result of the junk Timothy began carting home in the trunk of his car. They were small things at first, licence plates, bits of pottery, and then almost anything he could fit into the trunk – hub caps, wagon wheels, wash
stands, scrap metal. And then he began to tow home whole vehicles. In the same way Margaret’s new ecstasy spilled into the town of Carona – as she seized every opportunity to proselytize in the street or in the hardware store, telling people the good news, that Jill’s death had been for Margaret’s salvation, and theirs too, if only they had hearts willing to listen – Timothy’s junk filled the basement, the garage, and spilled out into the yard.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Piotr says as they walk hand in hand back towards the car.

  While last night in the hotel room in Toronto he was quietly determined and concise, speaking as though he had memorized what he wanted to say, his steely but quiet resolution to leave her is now giving way to sadness – doubt? She squeezes his hand and he returns the squeeze and she feels hope rising.

  They wheel in off the highway outside of Thessalon and pull up at the office of the Maranatha Motel and to the sight of adolescent children, exuberant and daring as they skateboard up and down a set of shallow steps in front of the service building. Parents push toddlers on swings in the playground while a black Lab dodges in and out among their legs and then lopes off to fetch a stick someone has thrown into the lake.

  Mr. Kruik, the efficient, brisk-mannered motel owner, is behind the counter in the office and hands them the key to the room Amy always requests, the one at the very end of the units, facing the water and a large outcrop of rock. He tells them that the kitchen is still open if they hurry and so they go straight to the dining room without bothering to park and unpack.

  They’re the only people sitting in the cool, dimly lit interior. Feeling sticky and weary, they’re content to lean back into their chairs and passively watch the panorama of the end-of-the-day activities through the wall of tinted windows. Several bare-backed children skip stones, and the black Lab prances and dives where the stones dimple the water’s surface. Clouds begin to change from pink to deep oranges and reds, their bottoms heavy and ballooning down to meet the horizon of the North Channel. Amy and Piotr watch as the waitress fills their wine glasses. They lift them in a toast to the end of the day.

  Later, their stomachs full, and slightly light-headed from the wine, they decide to walk and regain their equilibrium, hoping to banish the humming sound of tires and the drone of the engine from their ears. They follow a path they know well. It cuts through bush at the side of their motel unit down to the water’s edge. They skirt the shoreline, climbing up and over granite slabs jutting out into the water. They emerge at the highway, cross it, and head down towards a modern two-storey building. CRAFTS OF THE NATIONS, its sign proclaims. Passengers begin to stream from a Greyhound charter tour bus in the parking lot. As they enter the store, Piotr goes off to look at the tooled leather belts but stops instead to try on an expensive anorak, which he won’t buy, Amy knows, though he insists, nonetheless, that she watch as he tugs it down around his hips and turns slowly in the full-length mirror. The bus passengers begin to enter the store and mill around. Amy overhears the driver talking with one of the store clerks about the barricade at Tobermory, how it has thrown a monkey wrench into the tour. He hasn’t told the passengers yet. As people crowd about Amy she hears foreign languages, smells garlic and, fish. Hands reach for and examine billfolds covered in various tartans. Sun-catchers – bevelled-glass trinkets in geometric shapes – clank together as people turn them and exclaim over the wildflowers pressed inside.

  The tourists haven’t yet discovered the second floor where there are more crafts and a gallery of lithographs, and so Amy escapes up there and wanders about the almost empty loft among shelves filled with raw lye soap, beeswax candles, dried weed arrangements. She picks up a round ivory-coloured box from a shelf and admires the look of the quills decorating it in a precise arrangement, a star inside a circle. Interwoven among the quills are strands of sweetgrass. She opens the box and inhales. The whispering sound of denim thighs moving startles her as she realizes that she’s not alone. Her eyes meet the eyes of a person standing on the other side of the shelf. She sees long, black, slightly matted hair and recognizes the red plaid jacket of the hitchhiker, the man they had seen on the ferry. He smiles but not at her. It appears to be his natural expression. Bad teeth, she notes, as he laughs aloud and jiggles something in his hand. Then his head dips forward as he tosses whatever it is he has in his hand into his mouth.

  “I see you managed to get a ride,” Amy says.

  He blinked at her. She had startled him. Daydreaming, she supposed, of sitting at the window at the Husky station just outside of Ignace, looking out over the iron-coloured hills and yellow tamarack; such a stark contrast to what he’d seen from the ferry that day, the band of clear water and sky. He blinked and saw her in front of him, realized that she had spoken to him.

  “What?” he asked, pulling a wad of cotton from his ear.

  “I saw you earlier today. Beside the highway. Been on the road for long?” She speaks to him through a display of English bone-china ballroom dancers.

  “A day and a half. Outa Owen Sound. Took a whole day and a half to get this far.”

  “You from Owen Sound?” More Prairie or Maritime than central Canada, she thinks. He has the look.

  He shook his head at her indicating no, and poked the cotton wad back inside his ear. Perhaps, when he was in the iron-coloured hills in Ignace, he craved the sight of water and how the sun changed the light against its surface, breaking it into particles as bright as fire, white fire that he could barely look into, and, perhaps, once he’d seen it, he craved equally to be in Ignace and feel the trees and hills surround him.

  Amy waits for him to say more and is disappointed when he doesn’t. She wants a clue to this person so that she can begin to rearrange and shape him, mimic his manner of speech – a story for Piotr later on, one of the stories that he loves for her to tell and listens to carefully, laughing at the right places.

  “I guess it’s not as easy to get rides as it used to be in the Sixties.” She realizes with chagrin that he probably wasn’t around during that decade.

  “What?” Once again he blinks as though startled. She notices how his jaw moves sideways as he chews, rather, than up and down.

  “People aren’t as willing to pick up hitchhikers now.”

  “I have to get to Ignace by tomorrow.” He speaks louder than necessary. His eyes shift suddenly and fix steadily on her face.

  “You live there?”

  There’s movement behind his face, it’s as though he’s having an argument with himself over what to say next. “Yes,” he says finally and then runs his fingers through his matted hair, shaking it into place. His face becomes still and unreadable.

  Strange person, Amy thinks, as she backs away from the shelf of figurines. “Well,” she says brightly as she turns to leave. “I guess we’re lucky we got this far, eh? Seems we got the last ferry going for a while.”

  “Don’t leave your headlights on,” he calls down to her as she descends the stairs.

  Weird person up there, Amy will tell Piotr.

  She imagines him, the hitchhiker: sitting in the Husky restaurant outside of Ignace in his booth across from the cash-register counter, close to the doorway. Perhaps every single day he recognizes someone, but they rarely recognize him. When he hitched up and down the strip of highway that was his, moving once every month between Ignace and Owen Sound, he recognized the licence-plate numbers of the four-by-fours, the pick-ups, the swaying rust buckets of the locals, but mostly the compact Japanese imports like the one she drives, a silver Nissan SX.

  It is likely that he had seen her before that day on the road with Piotr. He could have seen her at the Husky station where she and Piotr may have stopped for gas on one of their several trips between Winnipeg and Toronto. Where the hitchhiker waited for his shift to begin and drank coffee and watched travellers pull in off the highway and cross the apron of cement surrounding the restaurant. “Don’t forget to turn off your headlights,” he’d said as she went down the stairs in the giftshop. And i
t could have happened. She could have forgotten to turn off the headlights of the silver Nissan and he’d noticed. “You’ve gone and left your headlights on,” he’d said and watched her eyes widen with gratitude.

  Amy looks for Piotr and then hears his voice rising above the murmur of many voices. He speaks rapidly, unusually loud and animated, in Polish. She’s irritated by this. She hears the same animation, vitality, when he speaks long distance to the woman in Brussels. The story of the weird man upstairs disappears from her mind as she wanders among the giftware, listening for familiar-sounding Polish words that will give her a clue to what they’re talking about with so much energy. Walesa, she hears the name. Tak, tak, tak, she thinks. Damn. When this happens there is nothing she can do but wait.

  Still damp from the shower, Amy wraps a towel around herself and joins Piotr on the couch. He flicks through the television channels in search of news. The faces of native people appear behind a tangle of barbed wire at a barricade, then the knowing smile of Sam the bartender on “Cheers,” three seconds of an old movie. He flicks through channels until he finds news of Poland. Then he hunkers down, legs crossed, hand cupping his mouth and chin. Like the day she first met him six years ago at an orientation meeting. They had both been selected for training at the film institute. He was sitting like that, his posture saying he was being defensive. Amy was late, there was only one empty chair, the one beside him, and when she sat down she smelled his strong odour. His eyes were almond-shaped, tiny and dark. Seed-shaped, she thought, Mongolian-looking. When she stood to shake hands, his palm was too moist, his smile enigmatic, and she noticed that they were almost the same height. “I don’t want to work with this person,” she later told the powers that be. “He can barely speak English, for God’s sake. We’re supposed to be able to communicate.” But she could understand everything he said perfectly. She couldn’t explain that his odour and intensity frightened her. The first thing Piotr said to Amy was, “I am very sorry but I don’t like your script.” And she replied, “Well, I’m very sorry too, but I can’t take very seriously the opinion of someone who can’t read the language.” Six months later, they were living together.