by Melanie Mah
“Getting salad.”
I wanted to ask what kind but didn’t want to sound dumb. Soon we came upon a bush. She was excited. She picked something from it, then put it directly into her mouth.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Berries.”
“How do you know they’re not poison?”
“I just do,” she said. Wanted me to eat some, too, but I wasn’t sure.
“I’ll have one,” I said. It was smaller than a pea and sweet. I was scared but I ate more. Later, she told me that blue berries are usually good, white berries are usually poison, and with red berries, you have a fifty-fifty chance. She had me hold the greens while she picked berries. I was uneasy, thought the greens could’ve been poison. What if they were poison ivy? “Are you sure this stuff is okay to eat?” I said.
“Chris, it’s sweet gale and wood sorrel. I’ve been taking Outdoor Ed for two years. I got a hundred per cent in foraging. Will you relax?”
We went back to the car with a hat full of berries and two handfuls of greens. No one would touch her salad, not even me, but she, my dad, and I ate the berries. I was proud of my sense of adventure. Stef said it felt great to eat something you foraged for yourself, and I could see she had a point. My dad, though, made a fuss about the lack of food. He thought it’d be easy to make a fire and cook the whole deer.
“If you want to stay up for another few hours, okay,” Stef said. “But we’d have to find enough wood, cut a leg off, make a spit, then start a fire. It’d probably take a couple hours to cook. I don’t think we should do all that, do you? This isn’t crown land. You can’t just start fires wherever you want.”
“Oh?” my dad said, surprised.
Stef didn’t say how she knew how long it’d take to cook the deer, but later she told me that she and Josh McMurtry had spit-roasted them quite a few times while camping. My dad found a jar of nuts in the trunk and calmed down, got tired, lost the gumption to walk alone on the highway at night. Still not a single car had passed.
Stef collected branches from a nearby thicket of trees and made a lean-to in the field. I helped, but went back to the car when we were done. “There’s room for two or three more,” she called out, but no one got out of the car to join her. I sat in the front between my parents, thinking of Reg and the deer on the road. I watched the spot in the field where Stef lay. She didn’t seem to be afraid of anything. Hard to believe that there are people like that. Quite a few of them. It’s kind of inspiring.
13
*
SUNDAY MORNING, MY dad wakes me up by turning on the light, finding my leg under the blankets, and yanking.
Bolt upright. “What do you want?!” I yell without thinking.
“Want to learn to drive?” he asks.
No, I don’t. Not at all. But he’s grinning.
“Fine. Yeah. Okay,” I say.
DRIVING IS A big deal in my family. We all learned how, even my mom, which is weird, since she’s so afraid of everything. You know I’ve never even seen her drive?
My dad made her learn five years ago, after he’d hit black ice and the guardrail on Taimi Road Turn. He was on his way home from delivering stuff to Mary-Beth Erickson, a customer who was too fat to walk, and was lucky no one else was in the car. My dad came home frazzled, rubbing his head and suggesting my mom learn to drive. “For future,” he said.
My mom said, “I don’t have to learn. You’re here. Why would I learn?”
That shut him up then, but he brought it up again every chance he got: during dinner, while she washed the dishes, while they watched tv, while reading a story in the newspaper with stats on women drivers, on weekend trips to Edmonton, during a tv show where a woman was driving, and sometimes in bed for no reason at all. Their voices in the dark, us laughing. Give it a rest, Ba.
It took three months but eventually she caved. She started going to classes at the high school every Wednesday afternoon and was the oldest person there by decades. My dad drove her there, paid for Stef to go, too, even though she’d already passed the test. Stef was there to help out — all those strangers — and also so my mom wouldn’t cut class or get lost. That’s how important it was for him that she learn to drive.
I wish I could have been there. Her first class in anything in close to thirty years, her writing faster and messier than I’ve ever seen it, her awkwardness with the high school kids that made up the rest of the class, her not knowing what to do when she didn’t understand the teacher — and Stef a skinny security blanket who looked like my mom, only forty years younger and ten times more social. I picture her easy grace in those classes, think of her slouching and not paying attention, making small talk with kids a year younger than her, kids she might not have even known. Having a bit of fun. She was one year away from the end of her life. Imagine being that close and not knowing.
Stef sometimes went when my mom practised driving, reminding her of things they’d learned in class like the hours of a playground zone and how you’re supposed to stop three seconds at a stop sign. But mostly my mom practised after dinner with my dad. I kept trying to come along, but I wasn’t allowed. My mom can be real proud of herself. She goes on about how quick her hands and eyes are, about the classics she read in high school, she gets excited talking about her school days, about all her classmates who became professors or lawyers. She wanted us to be doctors, wanted each of us to have the best marks in our year, as if all it took was will. But it’s easy to succeed at everything when you never try anything new, let alone something you might fail at. It would have been nice to see her be worse than one of us at something for a change.
MY DAD AND I meet outside five minutes later. Eight a.m. I’m still half-asleep. It’s windy and too warm for November. Low grey clouds you could reach up and touch. Across the alley, cinder block apartments painted white. Crabgrass, puke, wild roses.
I wake as soon as I get behind the wheel, the car enclosing us like the fist of a giant. I do what my dad says, back straight out, turn sharp, then go. Dread in every move — but also delight. There’s an arena parking lot four blocks from our house where all the kids in my family — and probably my mom — learned how to drive. It’s closed for construction, though, so we drive away, end up in a field near the bike path. I try a parallel park by the trees. He doesn’t ask me to, I just think it’d be fun to know how. I get it wrong twice, and when I get it right, he gets out. I open the window. “What are you doin’?” I say.
“Well, I go home.” The car’s still running.
“Home?” I say. “But you asked if I wanted to learn to drive.”
“Wah, I go home, watch de news, make breakfast. Yo mudder —”
“What, you’re just going to leave me here?”
“Sure! I come back long about elaven.” And with that he walks away. I watch him shrink with distance. Why learn to drive when you can walk everywhere you need to go?
I put the seat back and pop a tape in. The car is a mobile karaoke unit. New Order’s Substance came out when I was seven years old, but it still sounds fresh. “Blue Monday” comes on, a driving song if there ever was one. I bring the seat up, shift the car back into drive. An empty field — what could go wrong? I press the gas and lurch into trees, turn hard and the back end slides pinging into low-hanging twigs. I right the car somehow and cruise the edge of the field, bob my head to the music. The first two minutes of the song are artificial, synths and drum machines, sad and happy at the same time. I’m driving, like Trina is driving. I whip another shitty — it’s deliberate this time, something she does, too. Ice in the Yukon. While I’m singing, I whip another shitty, and something thunks against the car. Oh no. Shit. I shift to reverse, back up, and it thumps again. Ruts? I get out. Grey. The forecast calls for rain. On the ground is a twitching red thing. Behind me, a different red thing. Fur on both. I used to be fascinated by dead animals — roadkill, dead squirrels on the sidewalk — but it’s different when you killed it. I get back in the car and try to collect
my thoughts. I press the gas and poof, something else dies. Impossible but true.
Is there someone to call in the event of half-dead animals? I get out and start walking. Walking can’t kill anyone, can it? Fuck. Bugs. Stef would have known what to do. I walk fast. The path: asphalt paved, trees on both sides, winding. It’s busy. People keep saying hi to me. They don’t know I’m a danger. I turn at the junction, cross the highway to the north service road. Fuck. I watch my feet for bugs, look up, see the Petro-Can sign, walk towards it.
He told me to call him. Phone book. What was his last name? Marsch. Four rings, then a woman answers. “Hello?” she says. Her voice is groggy.
“I’m sorry to bother you so early in the morning, but is Conrad home?”
“Yeah. It’s fine. We should be getting up for church, anyway. I’ll go get him.”
A minute passes, then, “Hello?” His voice even sleepier than hers.
“Umm …” I say.
“Hi!” he says energetically, though his voice is still gravelly. We laugh. “Just had a dream about you, I think.”
I don’t want to see him. You need to talk to someone. “How soon can you leave the house?”
“Uhh … pretty soon?”
“Can you meet me at Petro-Can?”
“Yeah. My mom lives down the road. I can be there in, like, ten minutes?”
“See you. And fuck, I have a story to tell.”
I grab a corner table, order an orange pop, and look out the window as I drink. Grey. A few cars and trucks go up and down the highway. Little bells on the door. Every time they ring I turn to look.
Eventually he shows. His face lights up when he sees me, not in an obvious way, but you can tell by someone’s eyes if they like you. “Hi, Chrysler,” he says when he’s close enough, all gentle. He chucks me lightly on the arm, then sees my face. “What’s wrong?”
Sorrow makes a hollow in my chest. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
I get the bill and pay. We go outside, start walking. “What should we do?” he says.
“We just left the only good place that’s open. How much time you got?”
“A few hours.”
“What, you’re not going to church?” I’m teasing, my smile and tone of voice. I do everything but laugh in his face. Church.
“Look at me like that again,” he says.
It’s actually kind of cool, this science geek loyal to his churchgoing mom. I ask about his parents, and he tells me his dad cheated for more than two years, and that it really fucked up his mom. She tried to bring him in for couples counselling, but he wouldn’t go, kept cheating.
“Uhh, but you live with your dad. That’s … weird, isn’t it?”
He nods. “My dad’s rich. He got a good lawyer.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“Why are you sorry?”
“I guess it can’t be easy.” He shrugs.
We stop at the Red Mart for snacks — Josh McMurtry isn’t there — then we go through the industrial area, past the water tower, down the hill of Fifty-Third, through Old Town and the new subdivision. It doesn’t take long to see most of it. At some point, we wind back up on the highway.
Conrad points and says, “What’s that?”
It’s Joe Play’s, a half-finished amusement park built by the Meers. When Gary Brown sued them for food poisoning, they ran out of money, stopped construction in the middle, though I hear the rides work. An amusement park is a good idea in theory — people love the midway when it comes to town with the rodeo — but Spring Hills is cold nine months out of twelve and too close to the mountains for tourists to want to stay long.
Conrad and I walk in the gate, past a cracked red booth with yellow marquee bulbs and white plastic signs reading TICKETS in old-timey letters. Behind it are three and a half unloved and rusty monsters — a Ferris wheel, some bumper cars, a roller coaster, and an unfinished ride we called the Arms — about to be abused by more rain. They’re all pastel coloured and covered in pathetic graffiti: BLOOD KILLER, COP KILLER, CRIPS. Garbage cans on their sides, chip bags and beer bottles, abandoned clothes half-hidden in tall grass. Near the Ferris wheel we see Mo Meer and his daughter Aabidah, who I know from school. Mo hauls up a lumpy garbage bag and stuffs it into the trunk of his Chevette. Aabidah sweeps at the dirt and grass, picks up a crumpled pop can with two gloved fingertips and tosses it into a bag.
“It’s a mess down here, eh, Mr. Meer?” I say.
He looks up, says to Conrad, “Have you come to mess up my park?”
“No, Mr. Meer,” I say. “We’re just passing through.”
“Please leave,” he says, and Aabidah looks at me apologetically. Her dark eyes and thick lashes — she’s pretty, even though she looks like her dad.
“See ya,” I say to her.
At the edge of the park, Conrad vaults over the metal bar fence, a character in a video game, while I squat down and squeeze through. After ten feet, he crouches down, digs into the snow to uncover some plants, then lovingly cradles some in his hand and says, “This is edible.”
I look at him.
“Well, it won’t taste great now,” he says, “but when it’s alive? White sweet clover. Put some in a salad. You will fucking love it.”
I tell him about Stef, how they probably had some things in common, then quiz him on the names of all the plants that will grow here come spring. For all I know he could be making them up: shepherd’s purse, lamb’s quarters, woolly lousewort. Cows in a nearby field, trees further away. Wind messing up our hair. Cold, wet, red hands.
“So what do you think of Spring Hills?” I say.
“Eckville doesn’t have a half-finished amusement park.”
“What’s it like there?”
“I don’t know. Like any small town. Nothing to write home about.”
“Yeah, but every place has a story, don’t you think? Like, the place we went to last week, Marlene’s, has amazing soup, better than anything I’ve ever had in Edmonton.”
“Yeah. Nothing like that in Eckville.”
“But every town has a feeling. What’s Eckville feel like?”
“Boring, shitty, depressing. I’ve been in Eckville my whole life. It’s like, close your eyes.”
I do what he says.
“Okay, now describe your hands.”
“They’re small, a little bony. I like the lines on my palms, on the fronts and backs of my fingers. I like my nails. The one on my left ring finger curves weird. I’ve got scars, cooking accidents. I could go on.”
“But you like your hands, right?”
“Yeah.”
“See, I don’t like mine at all. You know them well enough, they become boring. I like seeing new things. All these towns are the same.”
“I wanna see new things, too, but this town is a part of me. If I woke up tomorrow in some other place and someone said I couldn’t come back here, it’d mess me up.”
“Couldn’t you leave, then come back, then leave again, then come back again?”
“If I live past the first time I leave.”
We walk towards the cows. I’m excited — never petted a cow before — till I see the electric fence, and we turn around.
When we pass Joe Play’s again, Aabidah’s there all alone. “Sorry about my dad,” she says, glancing at graffiti on the roller coaster. “I know you’re not a Crip.”
“Yeah. Blue’s not my colour,” I say. “Uhh, we should probably go.”
But she’s introducing herself to Conrad now, looking into his eyes as she shakes his hand. I bet they’re soft. Every time she comes back from the bathroom at school, she reapplies lotion. “My dad went to the dump,” she says. “I could let you guys ride if you want.”
“Really?” Conrad says.
“Well, the bumper cars are outta commission, but that still leaves the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster.”
I ask Conrad which one he wants to ride. He says Ferris wheel. I look at the sky. “Could be lightning soon,” I
say. He says the more excitement the better and gets in. I don’t.
“Don’t make me ride by myself, Chrysler.” He gives me this look, goofy and pleading. There’s something about it.
“Okay. Fine.” There’s no recourse. I check the hinges. They look strong, but what do I know? I get in the car with him. It’s cramped and cold.
“I’ll hold your hand if you’re scared,” he says.
“I can hold my own hand, thanks.”
Aabidah takes something from her pocket, a key, and starts the engine. The Ferris wheel rumbles and vibrates.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” I say.
“Yeah,” she says, casual.
We start moving, it keeps shaking. It gets windier as we go up. I look at the hinges again, the floor and sides of our car, check the safety bar. When I look out, I can see the whole town, the thick, dark stripe of highway and the roads coming off it like branches, the trashy businesses, all that white. “Cool, hey?”
“Yeah,” he says, shifting in his seat.
“What’s wrong?”
He’s looking at his hands. “Umm. Kind of afraid of heights.”
You’re the one who wanted this, I almost say. “Umm, well, it was probably a thing back in caveman days to be afraid of heights, right? Like, don’t go too high because you’ll probably die. It’s survival. We’ll be fine, I think — but if we die, it was nice knowing you.”
The wheel groans, slows as it reaches the top. I think of us in a movie, bits of colour in the sky, a grey backdrop. Far away, my dad’s car in the field by the bike path. He might be waiting, blowing a shit fit. Or he might not have come back yet. Quarter to eleven right now.
Conrad says, “What if we get stuck up here?”
“Then someone’ll have to throw sandwiches at us.”
The wheel keeps going and Conrad eases up. A crow flies by really close. When I reach out for it, it caws and poos. I watch the poo drop till it’s too far down to see.
“Why’d you pick the Ferris wheel if you’re so afraid of heights?”
“’Cause I knew it’d look different from up here,” he says, peering out. “It’s cool up here, it’s like we’re part of the sky. All those cars down there look like they’re going really slow, but they’re going at least fifty, more like eighty or a hundred over there. Like, I can barely look at them, but I can’t be afraid of heights forever. I gotta push myself, you know?”