by Nadia Bozak
And he was an evil bird, what with his shiny black hair and his quick paddle. Thought too how maybe I could pass for a kind of a bird, the two of us, migrating south out of season, against the way that nature liked it. For this was now the spring, after all, and the winter birds should be coming home to the North.
Pulled over along a dark stretch of shoreline. We squatted on cold rock eating the last of the bread and peanut butter. Drank water and smoked cigarettes. Then passing the whisky bottle back and forth and taking deep drags on the cigarettes Dave had rolled, we rocked on our heels, just looking out at the water.
The sky had begun to leak with light. Stood up from where I’d been crouched on my haunches and rose to meet the rising sun. It was a blazing orange, and behind it the sky had gone purple, except for the places where it was gold. A breeze came in off the water, and it blew back our hair as we stood looking out at the sun and the sky. Side by side and together, we stared down the sunset rising up from across the water in the east. This was how it was for us, the worst kind of pals.
* * *
Through the cotton sighs of that new land, we navigated our way deeper into the south in search of the Hudson. Had gone only another few kilometres, passing a town cropped up between the mountains like mushrooms from some wound, and then Dave called back that we’d sprung a leak up there in the bow and would have to pull over. Paddled on, skirting the bank. We came to a stretch of thick bush, and when we looked around and listened hard, all there was in the whole world was the water of the canal, and when we looked around, we saw only hickory and beech, and also there was the sky, a dense blue, and in it a gold spot that was the sun. That was all just then, except there was a breeze that rustled through the bush so it sounded like the coming of rain.
Dave stepped up onto the bank and then held the boat by the centre thwart while I climbed up beside him. Saw when Dave stood up that the knees of his army pants were dark with wet. Together we emptied the canoe and lifted it to shore. The inside was all garbage, matches and dead leaves, empty whisky bottles and rolling papers, sticks and lots of dirt, and also there was the black-char leftovers from some of the stuff Dave had burnt along the way and it all spilled out when Dave and me rolled the canoe over onto its front, careful of the boots on the bow deck. Silver stitches that patched the scabby belly of 37 gleamed in that bright afternoon sun.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucker,” said Dave. “Should have left this cocksucker in the garbage. Just got on a bus like other fucking runaways.”
Crouched down, he ran his hand along length of that poor old boat. Me, I just stood behind and watched. On the starboard bow a patch had come sprung up, and it grinned at Dave and me with its horrible staple-teeth.
“Christ,” Dave said. “This one I’ve patched countless goddamn times.”
The burst patch was a square of aluminum about three inches by three. Beneath it was a gash that went right through the body, though when he’d started out, Dave said, looking up at me and peeling back the bandage, it was little more than a crack.
Looked down at Dave, at his own pink gash, the hole between chin and lips, and I was going to say something about it, about the boat and him and him and the boat, but I knew better, so I kept quiet.
“We’ve beaten the shit out of this boat.”
“It’ll hold up the rest of the way, though. We don’t have far to go now,” I said.
Dave shrugged. Standing up, he found his tobacco and papers in the inside pocket of his jacket that was tossed across the heap of duffel. He rolled a smoke and lit it, and then stood back to look at the boat. Picking tobacco from his tongue, he rubbed his thumb along the outer edges of his parted lips. Me, I rolled a smoke too, then lit it and stood beside Dave, and with Dave I looked at the sorry state of that garbage-picked canoe.
“Can’t believe we’ve come this far in that fucked-up thing. Looking at that belly makes it seem a whole lot worse, don’t it, kid?”
“How’s that?”
“Everything. Every fucking thing we come from and came through. How fucked we had to be to end up riding that goddamn thing, especially when we can hear the highway go past it’s so close. Humiliating sometimes is what it is.” Dave took a final deep drag, then flicked his cigarette at the canoe. Flicked it hard and mean and mad, and it pinged off the bow and fell to the earth where Dave trod it out with his boot.
Dave went on. “What a piece of shit we’ve been riding.” He was shaking his head and choking on something that I thought for a minute might be tears, so I just turned away from him because I didn’t like people crying, especially not someone like Dave Bashed-up-Boat. Started rummaging through the duffel, looking for his staple gun. When I found it stuffed into a side pocket of Dave’s army pack, I took it out and with it I brushed past Dave and knelt over the bow. With the point of Pickles’s hunting knife I tore the staples from the bunged patch, and then I flattened the aluminum with my fucked-up fingers and aimed the gun to start stapling it back down again. Dave stood and watched me and then he must have snapped because before I could fire off the staple, Dave was on me in this whiplash of anger and was trying to tear that staple gun from my hand. Me, I was going, like, what the fuck, Dave, you asshole, and all the while we were struggling there on the ground by the boat. And I saw his hand palmed there along the bow, but just for a second, and I don’t know, the gun went off, a couple of times, and the staples got Dave’s right hand, biting into the web of flesh stretched between thumb and forefinger. That gun, it clicked and it clacked, and then I fell back on my heels and I saw Dave’s hand really was stapled to the boat. Dave didn’t howl or do anything a normal person would have. He just stared, his eyes all hard and flat, and me, I had that staple gun still poised in my fist. Then Dave ripped his hand from the boat, tearing apart that fleshy web, and he leaped up and over and took me out and got me so his knees were pinning me down at the elbows, and then he got his own elbow high, lifted it up to the sky and I saw it looming there and I saw it in slow motion when he brought it down on my chest. Turned my face away. A hollow thud came when my chest bone got crushed, and the sound screamed through the air, popping the surrounding peace like a vessel of blood, a bloated eye, and then, after a second, the world hushed up and fell still.
Dave left me there to flounder, and he got up and his hurt hand went to his mouth and with his teeth he pulled out the staples.
“Bitch,” he said. He spat the bloody bits of metal at me.
All I did was lie there, gasping and wishing that the pain would stop and wishing I could remember what painlessness felt like, but just couldn’t. Dave stepped around by the boat, just over from where I was lying, and I heard him pick up the gun and then he started stapling the boat like I’d been doing. One minute I was just Bozak and he was just Dave, and the next minute I was Bashed-up-Bozak, about to die of breathlessness, and Dave was some kind of an asshole and a stranger.
Blood dripping down his wrist, Dave fired off a round of staples, patching up the bow like I’d been doing. Then he got to his feet, tossed away the gun, strode down to the river, and put his hand in the cool water. His back was to me. Was crouched on his haunches with his knees pulled tightly into his chest. The sun in his hair was deep, dark rust. For minutes he stayed there as still and as calm and as hard as the land all around him.
Slowly, I got myself up onto my heels and doubled up, and I stayed by the scabby old boat, rocking back and forth to cool the pain pounding in my chest. After a while, Dave climbed up the bank and with a roll of duct tape, he wound a bandage around his hand between forefinger and thumb, pulling it as tight as he could. Then Dave came and stood over me. His hands were jammed in the pockets of his army pants, and his eyes were down. After a minute he put out his hand, the one that was not wounded, and with his fingertips he touched the top of my dirty old messed-up head. Then he turned away.
For a long time we were just there and we said nothing. Then when my breath was
back a bit, enough I could talk, I looked over at Dave and I called him an asshole. Said how I hated him. Coughed deep. Spat in his direction. Looked at the spit and said to him how there was blood in there, mixed in with the usual tar-black and bile-yellow.
Dave just said, “Let’s go.”
“It’s patched?” I asked him, wheezing.
“For now,” Dave said back.
Helped him carry the canoe to the water and loaded in the duffel. Was going slow on account of how my chest hurt so bad, was all doubled over and still wheezing, so Dave helped me into the canoe.
“Get down, lie down. Rest.”
Folded up my legs so that I was curled up in the basin of the bow. Dave left me there, and he climbed into the stern and pushed off from the bank. Curled up on my side, and I watched the sky unfolding as Dave paddled us beneath the sun. That water calmed me and so did the sound of Dave’s paddle, and after a kilometre I felt my breath coming back for real. As the afternoon unwound and the water narrowed down the canal, Dave paddled on, and me, I guess I just fell asleep.
* * *
Woke up wondering what had happened that I could be up in the bow without a paddle. Sat up. Saw Pickles’s boots leading us on through the water in the direction of the south. The pain in my chest, right square in the centre, reminded me all about what had gone on back there between me and Dave. Looked back at Dave. His eyes were blank, sort of sightless. We were coming around a bend, and I saw how behind him the sun was going down.
Soon enough we pulled over along the west bank of the canal. Hopped out of the canoe and held it tight by the bow deck while Dave scrambled on land. Pulled the boat up after us, and then we threw ourselves down onto the grassy bank. Dave and me closed our eyes against the low-slung sun glowing in the west like kind of an orange gunshot.
After a long while of silence, Dave called me kid and he asked me if I was doing all right.
Shrugged. “Yeah, just sore in the lungs from where you elbowed me like that.”
Asked him how his hand was. Said it would be all right. Said it was just torn up, was nothing he couldn’t handle.
The sun set behind us and the canal gushed past. Rolled cigarettes and wished the water there was safe to drink, for both our throats were used up and dried. Gathered up some wood and got the fire and a kettle going while Dave looked at the aeronautical chart, trying to figure just where it was we had landed. Boiled the water for a long while so Dave would drink it. He told me up there with no farms and few towns, it wouldn’t be as bad as lower down on the Hudson, though he supposed there were mines around dumping all kinds of other shit into the water. Sipped at cups of coffee and smoked cigarettes and watched the darkness falling on the mountains across the canal in the east, and we felt the bad luck of the day receding away behind us in the west. Saw the red of blood and also some pink splashed across the water, but found we could not watch the sun going away again because we just didn’t want to be out there alone with all that night again. No food left, we had coffee and sugar and another smoke, and Dave still had some hash he’d gotten back at the bush bash and he crumbled that up and mixed it in.
Dave said to me when I asked where we were, he said we were off the aeronautical chart I had brought along. It just ended like that.
“This here map is finished. We’ve paddled clean over the edge of it, kid.”
“Now we’re on our own?”
“Sure. Just go by our guts. Eyeball it.”
“Straight south now.”
“Go with the water and we’ll get to New York.”
Then Dave balled it up and tossed it into the fire.
We both watched the map burn and turn to char, writhing and wrinkling, and we said nothing to each other about what it meant to see that and how it showed for real how far we’d come.
“Was Bellyache’s, you know. Just grabbed it before I took off. Lucky it was pinned up there in the kitchen, otherwise I’d have been fucked up and lost.”
“Thought you still kind of were.”
“Sure,” I said. “And for a north star to follow, the smell of revenge.”
Dave shook his head. “Got to let that boyfriend of yours go.”
“Not my boyfriend, Dave. Christ, how many times do I need to say it?”
“As many times as you bring that shit up. All that regret you have, it’s enough to make you sick. And me too.”
“That the deal, Dave? I got to forget him to be here? With you?”
“Doesn’t have to do with me, but with those.” His wounded hand gestured at the mascots stapled to the bow of his boat.
“Easy for you to say. You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “The wrong Slava did to me, not just Pickles.”
“Maybe so, but I still say you got to deal first with the wrong you did Pickles. That’s something you can control, your own regret. It’s real hard to make someone else feel bad and sorry, especially when you feel that way too.”
“You’re pretty goddamn wise all of a sudden.”
Dave shrugged. He was fingering the scab under his lips, it now formed over the hole where his teeth had gone through. A patch of black worn like a beatnik beard, it aged him, gave him this maturity with the advice he was doling out. “Stop torturing yourself first. Then you can concentrate on torturing O’Right.”
Looked at Dave as hard as I could. Wanted to find some bit of fault in what he had said, though there was none. But the secret I would not and could not tell him. Maybe if he knew, he would have turned the boat around and gone back up there with me, just to make sure Slava did get tortured, like he said. That or he’d shudder, jump in the water to wash me away like a disease. And he’d leave me there, to be alone in the dirt and filth of Black Dew Seat history.
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. Again, but quiet this time. “But I’ll do like you’re saying anyway.”
Decided to sleep a bit, so together we carried the gear and then the canoe back into the bush behind us, Dave checking the patch that had sprung and seeing it was holding tight. Put out the fire on the bank, and then in the deep, dark bushes, we stretched out side by side in our sleeping bags. Up there, above us, in that same old sky, moon and stars were just beginning to glimmer.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Summer heat turns grasslands to fire.
Elk City, Oklahoma.
BURNING MEMORIES FOR FUEL. HAVE ENOUGH TO GET ALL THE WAY THERE, BUT NOT TO GO BACK, NOT EVER. AND WE’LL BE THERE IN A FEW DAYS, SO FAR SOUTH AND ONLY ONE TIME HAVE WE FOUND OURSELVES LOST on the back roads of west Oklahoma. Shooting for Elk City, but the stranger’s fatigue is too much, so they turn off in search of a motel. There was a sign back there, the promise of a town, but the town was a gone one, a ghost one, and that’s just how the stranger feels.
Getting hotter the further they go west. And this heat is something that’s new to both of them, coming from the north as they do. And the sprawl of flat land and dry land, the cities that spring up from state to state, every few hundred kilometres or so, that’s new too. The stranger’s in shirt sleeves now, and the kid’s still in the outfit Heather gave it, a T-shirt and a little pair of jeans. Also these tiny running shoes. The stranger’s got the kid propped up on a pair of Memphis area phonebooks, and it’s quiet as it watches the world go past out there beyond the truck. The kid, bottle or soother or thumb jammed in its mouth, sits there and listens to the music when it’s on the stereo or to the talking when it’s not.
The truck pulls over onto the soft shoulder of the empty road. Engine and lights are killed. Sky above is hung with cloud now, the air is thick with coming rain. But the heat is still such that the windows are left open, even though they’ll be sleeping, and vulnerable therefore. Outside it smells of burning. At a gas station it was heard said that some grasslands had exploded somewhere north. The wind is carrying in the scent. The stranger leans back, smokes, has a think, then fa
lls asleep.
And the rain comes. After days of drought and air so dry it catches fire, the sky opens up and frees Oklahoma from its hell of rotting hot. Raindrops through the window prickle bare arms, each one nudging the stranger to wake. In the passenger seat the kid starts squirming, its face and head, the soft, dark hair are broken out in droplets of wet. The baby’s window is rolled up, but the stranger’s is not. After some minutes the weight of the rain swells, it pounds the roof of the truck, punishes the asphalt highway, the earth, the night. But in the truck they are safe. The kid sits with open eyes, thumb in mouth, just listening.
“I’ll be right back,” the stranger whispers. “Don’t fret now.”
Shirt comes off, boots too, the stranger steps out into the rain. Windows up, doors locked, keys in the fist.
Rain burns the skin with the shock of cool. Standing there in the dark, on the rough of gravel, eyes pinched shut, it takes only a minute before the stranger is as good as drowned. Bare feet step onto the blacktop, face lifted, open mouth drinking in the ocean that is the sky. And the stranger breaks out into a run, going west, screaming above the sound of the falling water. Goes on like that a half kilometre, maybe more, stopping only when headlights appear in the distance. They stay where they are, immobile, the rain has forced a vehicle to stop.
The stranger turns around, runs and then walks back to the truck. Beaten by rain, bruised and pained, feet roughed up, the feeling is of being alive again.
The kid is sleeping. Shivering, the stranger wraps up in the warmth of a sweaty T-shirt and leather jacket, clean and cool now, bathed by the earth. Melted and then reformed, fresh and new. It is the way of the road. When the rain comes lighter, the stranger finds sleep.