The very idea, now that she’d found him, of releasing Réjean back into the ether was unfathomable. But the sensation of waking up every day and wanting him, like a pheasant under glass, so close but impossible to touch, was a thousand times worse than lying amid his shirts, wondering what had become of him. Being the object of his discomfort hurt infinitely more than imagining him stroking another woman’s hair and laughing about how Agathe would never find him. She had seen and felt enough of his trepidation to know that it defined him now, just as his love for her once had. Just as the empty expectation of his return had defined her.
Trooper told her to see how it felt to raise a little hell of her own.
She grabbed the gearshift, stomped down on the accelerator, and launched out onto the white. She shifted up and cut a track straight across the ice. Just as she was about to hit the shore, she seized the emergency brake and sent the Silverado spinning out in loops.
As she tore across her own wheel skids, grinding the half shafts, and as her thoughts spun in her mind, stuck to the sides, another process was taking place in the core of the eddy. It was hallucinogenic at first, uncontrollable, like malaria or anesthetic, then slowly crystallized, becoming tangible. Literal. She was losing mass and tension. Her top half was decompressing, her spine straightening, her eyes retracting into their sockets.
She hooted, her breath barking out hard as the truck slid sideways and she reached hand-over-hand to bring it under control. She threw back her head and shrieked, put it into gear and burned toward the opposite shore. Again, she grabbed the brake and spun out, then back into gear, driving one big circle all the way around the shore, howling out the window.
She finally came to rest in the middle of the river, the once-pristine snow ravaged by her tire tracks, and she panted, admiring her work, illuminated by the headlights.
With a final salute to the trees, she brought the Silverado back up onto land and through the wooded path to the road. As she waited with the turn signal blinking, a transport truck passed her by, and she pictured herself at the wheel with the radio blasting, soaring past the other cars. She made a note of the number on the door. 1-800-WED-RIVE.
The sky ahead sparkled with the glow of late-night commerce. This world still amazed her. People who didn’t watch TV or play cards at the kitchen table, who went out after dinner—who ate dinner outside their own homes. It was all so new, filled with the promise that things could be different. Here, you could sing to yourself.
The noise pulsing from the Whisky Mak pulled her like a magnet past the sedans and hatchbacks and trucks to the big red doors, where she inhaled deeply before throwing them open.
She ordered an Alpine and glanced at the two solitary women in their same spots across the bar. When her beer arrived, she lifted it judiciously in their direction. They lifted their drinks in return.
Scanning the ocean of heads, she found him almost instantly, perhaps because of his attire, because he was the only person seated at a table alone, or because to Agathe he shone like the high beams.
Bruce started singing a song about madmen and bummers and drummers and a hundred other things.
The mass of noise and bodies blurred into uniform darkness around the army man’s glow. Agathe picked up her beer and pushed off the bar rail with her toe, headed for the light.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Tor Brodkorb, Kevin Cogliano, Anne Drew, Maria Eleftheriou, Sarah Heinonen, Scott Hildebrandt, Laura Martin, Marko Sijan, and Jacques Viau for your sharp eyes and helpful comments, to Leigh Nash for believing in this book and helping me chisel it down to a fighting machine, to Stuart Ross for things too numerous to count, but namely for teaching me to write and for championing this book like a champion, and to my only, only Lori Delorme, for bottomless support, tireless readings, and for being my best friend.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michelle Winters is a writer, painter, and translator from Saint John, NB. She was nominated for the 2011 Journey Prize and her work has been published in THIS Magazine, Dragnet, Matrix Magazine, and Taddle Creek. She is the co-translator of My Planet of Kites, by Marie-Ève Comtois, with Stuart Ross. She lives in Toronto.
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I Am a Truck Page 13