Searching for Petronius Totem

by Peter Unwin

  Back they went into their vehicles. The doors slammed. A fox barked. The day stood still for a moment. Then another moment. Petro’s computer was in their grease-stained hands. But Petro was not. Petro had flown the coop. He was out there in some bit-torrent universe of absolute freedom where the buffalo roamed and the music was free and women grazed in the endless pasture of his mind. Petro was elsewhere: in the future or whatever it used to be called, where the grease doesn’t stick to you, and the chickens still have heads. The first man in. You go girl, I thought. Why not?

  The convoy screeched out the way it had come in, spitting grit from beneath tires. Sirens caterwauled. I held my breath until the tail lights of the last Ford Falcon disappeared into the black rock and beneath dark clouds. By that point the smoke was rising in furious grey spumes from under the tiles of the motel roof. Three soft explosions rattled the place, a flash of ash and orange flew from behind the windows, and the smoke leapt upward to the sky.

  Finally through the telephone I heard muffled steps, the approach of Elaine’s mighty feet, her hallowed shapely feet, womanly feet, distinct from Maddy’s tread, coming closer to the phone until they stepped two thousand kilometres into my heart.

  “Hello?” The pure mezzo-soprano of her voice burst through the receiver, but she did not sound pleased. She had me pegged as a telemarketer at best.

  I spoke fast. I did not have a lot of time, I knew that.

  “Elaine, darling, it’s Jack, and I love you more than anything in the world and I want to make everything up to you.” As I spoke the flames heaved upward from the roof, straining against the sky. “I want to come home, Elaine, believe me. Nothing’s the same. Everything’s been chickenized. Reality is not the same anymore, honey. They’re trying to turn your back into an emoticon. They want to pixelize you. Do you understand what I’m saying? Even the chicken has been chickenized. You can’t trust it. That free-range stuff? Forget about it. It’s not just Monsanto anymore, it’s all of them. They’re all in tight with Leggit Fibre Optics. It’s all Frankenfood, baby. The entire world has changed. Me too, Elaine. Even me. Honest, I’ve changed. For the better this time. And sweetheart, don’t eat the chicken, whatever you do — I love you so much!”

  There was a pause. An actual pause. “I’ll scratch your back,” I shouted. “I’ll scratch your back for as long as —”

  She hung up.

  The motel roof erupted into a fireball.

  Crickets stridulated.

  Herons cronked.

  Etc.

  I STOOD HOLDING the dead black thing in my hand. Elaine had hung up. Of course she had. But not with a slam, not with a deafening slam at least! No. She did not slam! Best of all she did not hang up right away; I got my words in, my Gettysburg address, my Pukaskwa River Moment. A moment of indecision had crept into that pause, at least half a moment. I’d heard it with my own ear.

  “Yippee,” I shouted, “Yippee.” I knew that moment from better times with her. The wormhole of Elaine’s forgiveness, I knew from long experience the crucial lapse of her reason, the lapse that leads to a moment when those years of having her back scratched envelop her and she tumbles into the hole of her forgiveness, perhaps not forgiveness, but the beginning of it, a small puncture in her fury toward me and my kind, the hole of her tenderness, the forgiveness-hole through which I have crawled many times before, drunk and sober, begging and pleading for entrance, with and without my keys. My life depended on such an opening.

  “Yes!” I shouted into a day that suddenly blared with birds of all kinds, every one of them going hysterical in the trees, the doves cooing, the herons cronking, the bobcats whistling, every sound from the woods reminding me that Elaine had paused. There was a meaning to that pause, there had to be.

  My heart thumped. I lurched out of the phone booth, hefting my numbed leg upright and laying it down in front of my other numbed leg. Bracing the car door handle against my thigh I made my way across the asphalt, across the parking lot, gaining ground and speed. One wobbly step at a time I started up the embankment, trampling blackberry bushes and raspberry canes, thistles, nettles and gorse and even perhaps brambles. What do I know from brambles? Or gorse? I stepped on lottery tickets and broken chunks of asphalt and the love-soaked condoms of the young.

  Finally I made the shoulder of the Trans-Canada Highway and stepped on that too, breathing hard, sucking at the air. Lake Superior heaved below: a great liquid city restless in the grey day. The dead floated down there within it, bumping into one another, doing their business. I began to move.

  “Elaine!” I cried.

  Her glorious name rebounded from the cliffs where the ospreys once nested. Maybe they still nested there, who knows? I cupped both hands to my mouth and shouted into the mountains. “Put the coffee on, Elaine, your man is coming home!”

  And with that I started to lurch down the highway.

  PETER UNWIN is the author of numerous books, including Life Without Death, shortlisted for the 2014 Trillium Book Award. He lives with his family in Toronto.

  ¶ Author photo by Paula John