The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “A native person probably,” Piotr says.

  “Why native?” Amy asks, and thinks how not too long ago they both would have said Indian and not native.

  “They have the right, don’t they, to hunt and fish wherever they want?” he says.

  She leans over him as he looks at the map and he feels her heat and the hope she so stubbornly clings to. They had bathed together that morning, she straddling him and rising to her knees to sponge her neck, raising one arm then the other, the sponge following the hollow of her armpit, the contour of a full breast, giving him an image to keep and perhaps use later in a scene, he realized, as he lay back in the sudsy water and studied her.

  She twisted the sponge and soap trickled down her belly and into her thick mound of pubic hair. “I’m leaving you,” Piotr had said. She closed her eyes and saw them old. Older, perhaps already grey. They carried ice-cream pails and walked among the scrub of the inter-lake in search of blueberries. On the way home they would discuss at length whether the berries would be best put into a pie or eaten with cream and sugar. She hummed and sponged her body for him and saw them old. “My flight’s on Friday. Friday morning,” Piotr said. “Yes, I know,” she answered, still watching her hands pluck blueberries.

  He slips the binoculars from his neck and hands them to her. The highway leaps towards her, its surface shimmering with heat waves. She scans the forest on either side of it but there’s nothing, no one. The rifle cracks once again, to the north, farther away this time. As she loops the binoculars back around his neck she drinks in the sight of him, his youthful unlined face, small hands spreading the map flat against the car. She believes that he has told her everything there is about himself, while she has told him virtually nothing. He doesn’t know, for instance, that she has a son, Richard, who is twenty years old now and lives in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, with his father in a house trailer outside of town. That Hank drives a school bus and is the icemaker at the skating and curling rink. He’d wanted flexible hours so that he could care for Richard. He explained this to Margaret when he and Richard used to make infrequent trips back to Manitoba to see her. They did not come to see Amy. Too painful for the boy, Hank told Margaret. Painful for which boy? Amy asked her mother. Not remarried yet, Margaret reported from time to time, and just as good-looking as ever. But many years have passed since their last visit. Margaret has written several times and was rewarded recently with a photograph of a cocky-looking Richard, hair too long and kneecaps shining through threadbare jeans, a bottle of beer raised towards the camera.

  When Amy and Piotr return to Winnipeg, she’ll go up to the closet that holds the trunk. She will say, See? This is me at age three and four. She will read to him from her journals. But she will not show him the baby pictures she has of Richard. She knows that he would never understand. He would never understand how she could have left him.

  “So what do you think?” Piotr asks, the sun glinting off his glasses as he looks up from the map. “Do you think it would be worth to go and see the pictographs?”

  The pictographs didn’t really interest her. This was the reason why they hadn’t gone to see them before. But she said yes because she wanted to be with him for a longer time and it’s possible she will forever in her mind see the question in his eyes, his uncertainty, his hesitance, his desire to please her, and not knowing which would please, to go or not to go. Do you think it would be worth to go? It would have been better if she’d said no, she didn’t particularly want to go. But she didn’t. She said yes.

  “Indians have been in the Lake Superior region since around 9000 B.C.,” the guide tells Piotr, who wants to chance the gusty wind and venture out onto the narrow ledge worn into the side of a thirty-metre-high rock cliff to take a closer look at the paintings: a caribou, lynx, and fish, totems of the Ojibway Nations. “Ochre,” the guide says in answer to his question. “Careful,” she tells Amy, offering her hand, “it’s slippery.” The guide is a small woman, deeply tanned and muscular, and although Amy resents the outstretched hand she takes it anyway and steps out onto the ledge. The turquoise lake flashes light, and waves slap against the base of the cliff. Far below, slabs of submerged rock appear to circle the cliff, resembling giant fish or whales.

  “Windy up here today,” the guide says. The drawings, she explains to them, commemorate the canoe-crossing of Lake Superior by chief Myeengun and many others from the Carp River to Agawa Rock. “They believed that the great lynx, Misshepezhieu, helped them to survive the trip.” She traces the shape of the lynx with her finger. Piotr appears to be captivated by the story and wants to learn more. They’ve been the only visitors all day, the guide tells them; she’s eager to answer Piotr’s questions at length. Amy stands behind them, one hand flat on the rock face to steady herself against a sudden gust, which could sweep her off the ledge and down onto the encircling rocks below.

  After several moments of not being able to hear what the guide is saying, she leaves them with their heads together, and she climbs down from the ledge and begins to wander along the road. A narrow path winds through the dense growth of trees along the lake’s edge and she decides to walk it and search for early raspberries. She finds instead a mushroom and stoops to pick it, twirling the stem. She tears it open and smells its ruffled gills. It’s the mingling smell of both of them earlier that morning. She continues to walk for several minutes, and then the path becomes narrower still, the shadows deep. The moist forest floor crawls with moss and fungus. Her breath quickens and she begins to feel that she’s being watched. The feeling grows stronger the further she goes. Intruder, trespasser, she thinks, and turns back. No raspberries, she’ll tell Piotr, but the forest is littered with mushrooms. I heard a large animal; porcupine, I think. She can barely keep from running back down the path to the road.

  When she emerges, the guide has returned to a trailer set off to one side of the rock and sits on a lawn chair in the shade of an awning, reading a newspaper. Piotr has gone down to the shoreline at the base of the cliff, climbed among the tumble of sandstone boulders until he reached the rock farthest out in the water. He sits there cradled in a wedge-shaped groove, legs extended straight out in front of him, hands jammed down between his knees like a small child. His tanned face glows in the sun. He sees her and beckons.

  It takes her several minutes to reach him as she climbs up and over sharp stones, skirting around the largest boulders, looking for an easier, safer way. Piotr watches her progress towards him. He has noticed the change from when he first met her. No more of the careless leaping before she proceeds, no more night-long tirades over suggestions of the slightest change to a scene. No more using her advantage of the language. She’s quieter now, easily won over. She has given him many, many things. He has grown heavier and sluggish in the face of her largesse. Too many things, he thinks.

  She asks for his hand and he pulls her up and makes space for her beside him. She leans into the rock, eyes closed against the sun. “Have you ever wondered why you do this?” she asks. “It never fails.”

  “What?” he asks. “Do what?”

  “This rock,” she says. “It’s the farthest out into the water. Or else the highest. Or the biggest.”

  He laughs and shrugs. He knows it’s true but it hasn’t occurred to him to question why he’s compelled to do it.

  “How will you manage without French in Belgium?” Amy says, eyes still closed to shut out the bright sun on water. The waves lap and gurgle among the rocks.

  “Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, I see.” She both wants and doesn’t want him to say more. Her heart lies tightly bound in her chest.

  “She speaks many languages.”

  “You know it’s not really necessary for you to move your things before you go,” she says. “You could always –”

  He reaches for her hand, squeezes it, strokes the backs of her fingers, lifts her hand to his mouth and kisses it. “You know that I care about you very much.”

  She pulls her hand aw
ay. “That means nothing to me.”

  “Amy,” he pleads.

  I will not say what he wants to hear, Amy thinks. I will not write the script for this scene. A dragonfly hovers and lights on the tip of Piotr’s running shoe, and then flits away. Love, Amy thinks, diaphanous, elusive. A crock of shit.

  “How is it possible?” She speaks quietly, lulled by the heat of the sun and the swish and slap of water rising and falling among the pile of rocks. “Tell me. How is it possible to love me one day and not the next?”

  “It’s too difficult to explain.” He turns his face away from her and speaks out over the lake. “I’m not sure that even I can understand it.” That is what he’d said in the hotel room in Toronto. “Maybe I’ve changed, but it isn’t the same any more.”

  “Well, it seems impractical to try and do everything all at once,” Amy says. “You can leave your things and then when you come back –”

  “No, Amy. A clean break is better.”

  Better for who? she thinks. She takes a deep breath. “I want to ask you a question. You won’t like it, but I want to know. This Elizabeth person. Does she mean something to you?”

  His blurted words surprise her but it’s his expression that hurts, the twist of anguish and longing there. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But, frankly, Amy, I hope so.”

  Amy closes her eyes and hears the lap, lap of water, a constant, insidious erosion of the rock. It is her will alone keeping them forever together, whole.

  “You hope so.”

  She feels the warmth of his hand on hers as he takes it again, sets it against his thigh, and covers it with his own.

  “In my city there’s a cathedral,” he says, after a time, “where a bugler plays from a tower. Every day, on the hour, he plays, in all four directions. It is even broadcast live to other cities in my country. Except for short times during the war, a bugler has played for six hundred years. Almost every day. Six hundred years!” He squeezes her hand and becomes caught up in his own story. “Tartars were about to invade the city and a guard sounded an alarm to warn the people. Only he didn’t get to finish playing because he was killed. Zzt!“ he says, and then makes a clicking sound with his tongue. “A Tartar arrow in the throat.”

  “And so?” Amy asks, impatient because he’s circling her question with another of his in-my-country legends, an unauthenticated story.

  “It became a tradition. The music is played, then stops suddenly, as though the bugler has been shot.”

  “A real person?” Amy says. “A real person goes up into a church tower each day, on the hour, and plays – and then pretends to be shot?”

  He appears not to have heard as he looks out over the water at the green clumps of islands dotting the horizon. “I got used to hearing the music. I would walk through the square and not even look up.”

  Amy senses him listening now, the sound a spirit guide, the great lynx, drawing him far across the water. She feels desolate. He’s shut her out because he knows that where he’s going she has no place.

  “Well, I think it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make sense,” she says, feeling inadequate, like a child wanting to kick over someone’s sand-castle because it’s bigger and better constructed than her own. “Why don’t they just use a bloody tape recording!”

  As the car glided swiftly along the Trans-Canada Highway across the undulating escarpment, the face of the lake flashed through the dark trees, giving them fleeting glimpses of light on water. As they drove he began to speak, haltingly at first, not wanting to say more than was necessary, not wanting to hurt her. Canada, he said, had not been kind to him. She seemed calm, almost soft, with what he took to be acceptance at last, resignation, and so he told her that he would not be returning. That from Belgium he would go back to his home country. She listened as he attempted to explain how it was, that in his family he was expected to make a mark, to leave behind something lasting, a legacy. It was not possible to achieve this here. He would return to Poland with the hope that some day he would have children, children who would make a difference in the new period of his country’s history.

  After that they drove in silence for almost five hours, passing through Wawa and White River, stopping once for food, to spell one another off driving, for gasoline. No wildlife stepped out to greet them as they passed by. No special children, she and Piotr. Just an ordinary man and woman. Piotr, about to be swept aside by the whim of fate, a white arm unfolding in a graceful gesture, space opening up between them.

  It is steady, monotonous driving, the highway climbing suddenly, trees pulling back to reveal the face of the sky and thin streamers of clouds scudding across it and then dropping back down again to become a buff corridor cutting through a jagged skyline. The traffic is light, sporadic. Several motorized campers driven by early vacationers, cars towing boats or sporting wind-surf boards, semi-truck trailers hauling from the eastern cities to the prairies and on to the west coast, and a red, older-model half-ton with a homemade wooden sleeper on back, which they had been behind earlier, passed, then met again after stopping for gas and pass now for a second time. The truck is a Chevrolet C10, about 1968 or ‘69, Amy notes, and the driver has a full grey beard and a ponytail, a throwback to the Sixties.

  When she and Piotr stop to eat they speak only to complain about the menu and the usual fare of deep-fried foods, greasy hamburgers. Amy watches as Piotr eats with zest, his appetite an affront, one foot already in Belgium, she knows. She hates the fact that he can eat, the politeness he’s assumed, his sudden deference as he opened doors, pulled out her chair in the restaurant. It’s as though she had suddenly aged, or become his mother.

  When they get back to the car they drive in silence again, half-listening to the woman who broadcasts the news, her voice clear, emotionless. When later that evening she announces their own names it will be in the same way. The newscaster tells them that fires north of Thunder Bay pose no threat to travellers, while in northern Manitoba half of the forest is burning out of control. There has been a death in a boating accident on Lake Ontario involving two crafts. Amy hears the deceased man’s name, and then the survivor’s, a model named Elsa Miller.

  Amy turns the volume up and listens, shocked, as she gradually takes in the information. A woman named Elsa Miller, sailing, out on the lake alone but for her companion, a dog. A collision with a large power boat, its occupant, a man, who was killed instantly on impact. Elsa Miller was thrown into the water and kept afloat by the hero of the story, her pet dog, Jock, a springer spaniel.

  A picture instantly flashes into her mind. She, Mel, Elsa, appear now as they are in one of the few remaining photographs taken at Jill’s funeral. Amy and Mel stand beside the open grave where the white casket rests, suspended on straps, a mound of dark ferns spread across its lid. Margaret had insisted on a white casket because Jill had died a virgin. The little bride of Christ. A polished gem. Mel wears his first suit and has affected a casual pose, hands in his pockets, turning sideways to the coffin and looking off into the distance as though distracted by something more important. Amy’s shoulders slope beneath the navy-blue cape she’s wearing. Elsa stands behind her, bending forward at the waist as if she has a stomach-ache. Both hands are pressed against her eyes. It’s clear that she’s crying hard.

  “I know that woman,” Amy says to Piotr. “She used to live in Carona.” She wonders what she should be feeling.

  “Is it a common name?”

  “It’s her, I know it.” Elsa had become a model and Amy had seen her from time to time on billboards, always wearing white, gazing out from a tropical island: the heaven you gained if you invested in a certain insurance package. Amy had seen Elsa at forty looking like thirty, had seen her on television, her long blonde hair streaming in the wind as she walked among the twitching flanks of stallions, turning her sun-drenched face to the camera, or selling automobiles with her nondescript foreign accent and her enigmatic smile.

  Amy studies Piotr’s profile, how he chews at dry ski
n on his bottom lip, eyes fixed on the road beyond, mind focused on another country. I was struck by lightning, she wants to say. I used to believe that I had enough power in me to light up a city as large as New York. That I could affect the outcome of other people’s lives by just thinking.

  She turns off the radio. “I was struck by lightning once,” she says. “When I was a kid.”

  “Amy, you’d probably be dead if that was the case,” he says curtly. She feels at this point he is beyond being interested in what to him may be one of her inventions.

  “I was.” When they reach home, and after they store the canisters that contain their latest film in the cool room in the basement, she will take him by the hand and lead him upstairs to the closet and the trunk where her journals and her childhood films lie. “I think I was about nine or ten years old when it happened. A clear day. Not a cloud in the sky.” She will at last view what she filmed that day in the cemetery. Trees appear to fly past the window, white lines flash by. She hears a siren. Its sound rises quickly, and she turns and sees a flashing red light. “Slow down, Piotr.”

  “I’m not speeding,” he says, and she lurches forward as he brakes. Seconds later, the police car is upon them. “Should I pull over?” he asks. But the car swoops around them, engine roaring and siren screaming, then swerves into the lane in front of them, swinging out once again and passing the red half-ton with the wooden sleeper. The police car races around a curve in the road and out of sight, the sound of its siren only a faint echo now bouncing off the rock of the escarpment.

  “Whew, scary.” She doesn’t want to see carnage. There was a time when her stomach was stronger. Now she must close her eyes, even to violence acted out on a screen.