Wind Tails

by Anne Degrace

  “Of course,” she says, eyeing Jo over the rim of the cup, “you look too young to have any regrets.”

  Jo cracks a hard-boiled egg against the side of the bowl and begins peeling. The shell isn’t coming off easily; it sticks to the white, pulling off chunks. If she doesn’t respond, maybe Eunice will stop talking.

  Apparently, she’s not going to. “What’s your story?” Eunice asks, leaning forward, elbows on the counter.

  “Why would I tell you?”

  “Ha! That’s what I like, a girl with spunk. No reason you should. None at all. Careful, though: you’ll be old like me before you know it, one foot in the grave.”

  The shell is really fighting to stay on the egg; the end result looks like the cat got it; it’s a good thing these eggs will be egg salad.

  “You have that look about you, though, like there’s a story there. Used to be, I never noticed that sort of thing, but now—”

  Jo starts mashing the eggs with the back of a fork. Eunice picks up her pie fork and jabs it in Jo’s direction. “Right now, you just see a crazy old lady, right? Well, you’d be right, I guess,” Eunice cackles for a moment. “But I’m a crazy old lady on the road.”

  Jo starts on tuna salad, lines up celery, then cuts the stalks lengthwise into long strips, turns the cut stalks around and begins chopping, knife tip never leaving the cutting board. Four cans of tuna, mayonnaise. She glances through the window at Eunice, who’s watching her from her perch at the counter. She takes a whole pickle from a jar, begins chopping it to add to the tuna, Cass’s recipe.

  “You never stop learning, girl. I’m old, and I’m still learning. Even that boy I picked up, drove a few miles. That hitchhiker. He taught me something.”

  “What boy?”

  “With all the colours on his shirt.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t what he said. It was what he did.”

  “Ouch!” It doesn’t hurt, but it surprises her. Jo has chopped off the end of her thumbnail with the knife. She’s careful to pick the nail up so it doesn’t wind up in the celery. “What did he do?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  When Jo comes around the counter, Eunice’s eyes are actually twinkling. It irritates Jo, so she ignores her and starts rooting around beneath the counter. There’s a box of odds and ends, a likely place for a pair of nail clippers that will take the sharp corners off her chopped fingernail. She puts the box on the floor and, squatting, begins taking out the contents, setting them on the floor as she rifles through. She finds needle-nose pliers, a Polaroid cartridge, a large button from a winter coat, an aspirin bottle full of nails, an I.O.U. from someone named Dwayne, a deep-blue glass marble, and a Donovan single with “Atlantis” on the A-side and “To Susan on the Westcoast Waiting” on the B-side. She can sense Eunice peering over the counter. Jo’s hands close on the nail clippers, and as she pulls them out the blue marble begins to roll.

  “He kissed me, that boy. Here.” She points to her tissue-paper cheek.

  Jo stands up abruptly, banging her head on the counter. Did Pink really kiss this crazy old bat? The marble rolls past the cash register and, with the odd slope of the floor, turns and begins rolling out into the restaurant, past Eunice where she sits on her stool. She puts out a sneakered foot and stops it.

  “Pick that up, would you, dear? After all, I’m almost a hundred. My old bones don’t bend so easily.”

  Jo decides to ignore Eunice’s changing story. Eighty? A hundred? Does it matter? She comes around the side of the counter and picks up the marble, placing it in the wrinkled palm.

  “We had a pane of stained glass just this colour in the hall window of the house I grew up in,” Eunice is smiling, a million creases gathering at the corners of her mouth, and for a moment Jo can see her as a little girl looking through a window pane the colour of the night sky. Eunice holds it up and looks at Jo through the blue, and then tucks it in her pocket.

  “Funny, just now it feels like that was yesterday. Like all that time in between didn’t happen.”

  Eunice looks at Jo as if expecting something. Jo can’t imagine what that might be. “Pie and tea is a dollar thirty-five,” Jo tells her.

  “And good advice is priceless.”

  Jo waits. There’s no way she’s leaving without paying, not the second customer of the day. She’s sure a tip is way too much to hope for. Eunice rummages in her handbag and places two one-dollar bills on the table.

  “Keep the change, dear,” she says.

  Surprised, Jo smiles.

  “That’s better. You were starting to look like me there for a minute.”

  There’s a pause in which Eunice looks out the window. Jo follows her gaze, watching the trees sway.

  “Thing is, I could die tomorrow. I could. I don’t look like it, I know, but I could. Meanwhile, there’s someone I need to find.”

  As the Austin Morris peels out of the parking lot, Eunice puts her arm out the rolled-down window, reaching skyward. Jo can’t tell if she’s waving or just catching the wind in the palm of her hand.

  Jo

  My grandmother lived with us for a while before she got a place in an old folks’ home. She sat in her chair wearing the same brown cardigan every day. She read Winnie-the-Pooh, the same page, over and over. She liked to help, and so she would offer to wash the dishes, and later Mum would do them over again to get the stuck-on food off. When our dog, Charlie, wandered into the living room Gran would say “no flies on Charlie!” to no one in particular. To me at fourteen, she was a fixture, like the coffee table, or the standing lamp. Except when my friends came over; then, she was an embarrassment.

  There was a time when we would visit her when she still lived in her own apartment, the place all decked out with crocheted doilies, tiny photographs in gilt frames, a brass candy dish that always held Hermits. On the landing was a wavy glass window surrounded by squares of coloured glass—like Eunice’s window, I guess—and I would look through them at the garden, imagine a monochromatic world. How different everything looked bathed in green or yellow. Blue was my favourite, the same deep blue as the glass marble Eunice liked. It never once occurred to me to imagine my grandmother’s life: daughter, wife, mother, friend. As a child, did she love flowers or horses or the colour red? When she was a young woman, did she tell off-colour jokes with her girlfriends, feeling deliciously wicked as she did? When she kissed her husband, the grandfather I never met, did her heart leap, her breath quicken? When she tucked my mother in when my mother was a small child, did she look at her daughter’s sleeping face and feel so touched by its beauty she could weep?

  What did she regret?

  Of course, this train of thought means thinking about my own mother. And that’s where it stops, a black curtain, nothing. I am nineteen years old. I work at Cass’s Roadside Café. I am standing here, rag in hand, wiping the counter where an old lady just ate a piece of rhubarb pie as if it might be her last.

  Archie

  It doesn’t suit me to have anyone expecting me any particular time. I have enough schedules to pay attention to, thanks, without that. I suppose that’s why Myra and me more or less gave up any expectations early on, even if we stayed married. It’s not an arrangement most women would want, their man on the road all the time, showing up whenever. But for me, well, it just suits me, I guess, and Myra’s come to some sort of peace with that.

  And Cass? Cass is there when I turn up, on my own or, time to time, with someone like Jo, and she takes us all in like we’re lost cats or something, and it just damn well feels good. No harm in feeling good.

  In between, there’s the road.

  Don’t know where I’d be without the road. Betsy is my home on wheels: she’s a 1968 Kenworth, cherry red, sweet as all get out. My name on the door, Archelaus Smith, but Archie’s what I go by. Nice chrome, nice lines, but more than that she’s my girl: no backtalk, and I treat her nice. Check her brakes, her tires, her lights. Keep her greased up. You
gotta respect what you drive, ’cause you’re gonna be spending a lot of time together. Coming down a mountain pass some night in the snow, you’ll be glad you and your rig are on good terms.

  Got a nice little bed to sack out in, everything I need. After a while she’s more comfortable than either of my more regular rest stops. And she’s just mine, nobody else’s. There’s something to be said for having a place like that. For one thing, out the window, the view’s always new. Mountain, trees, the road ahead. Sometimes elk, bear, ’til I get to the city, then there’s all that city stuff, always changing, new buildings going up, old ones coming down, never the exact same thing every time. Used to haul the long routes, now I’m mostly Calgary Vancouver and points in between, sometimes Stateside, but even if I’ve driven it a hundred times, it’s always different. Out my front window in the side-by-side I share with Myra, the view’s always the same. Land is flat, for one thing, foothills in the distance on a clear day but otherwise the only thing flatter than Alberta is Saskatchewan. Houses lined up in straight little rows. Myra says she sees it different every time: if it’s sunny or cloudy, when the leaves change, the first snowfall. She says it’s all that travelling that’s spoiled me to see the little things that happen right under your nose.

  I got Myra, and I got Cass. In between, I got a lot of road. Cass knows I’m married, so no harm there. Myra’s no dummy, either, but she never asks, and I never tell. We all have our arrangements, I guess.

  Time was, Myra and I were going to be a team, trucking. She’d give me a little poke in the ribs—had ribs you could poke back then—and tell me she needed to keep an eye on me. And true enough there were some bumps on the road early on, a little cutlery flying, a broken dish or two. But she never did get her ticket and after a while got herself a job babysitting, which is better for those next-door kids than their own mother if you ask my opinion. She’s happiest around little kids, Myra is, and a natural with ’em. Saddest thing in the world since she couldn’t have none herself. At least, that’s what we figure; it’s a busy life on the road, hard to find the time for all those tests. I’d have liked a little nipper too, if things had been different, but they aren’t, and that’s just life.

  Here’s the thing, though. All sorts of people on the road these days, a lot of them somebody’s kids. I mean, I guess we all are, but it’s the young ones that get to me. You see stuff that would break your heart. And I see a kid like Jo, looking lost, and, though she maybe didn’t know it, looking for trouble, too, well I guess the part of me that would’ve liked a kid thinks about how I’d want someone looking out for mine. Just keeping them safe, you know? It’s not like I do it all the time, maybe a half-dozen kids the last few years. “Jesus, Archie, I’m not the S.P.C.A.,” Cass said to me once, but she doesn’t ever say no. Still thinks about that little girl of her sister’s. Talk about lost.

  Cass. Myra. If those two hens ever met like as not they’d take to each other like ducks to water, but they won’t ever meet, and that’s not a bad thing either. Don’t ever mention one to the other, and that’s my rule of the road. It’s easier to ignore something that’s not right in your face.

  You see all kinds of drivers on the road, too. There’s guys who stay professional about their driving, stick to the limits, sleep when they got to. There’s guys that do the exact opposite, and they’re the guys don’t last. Then there’s guys that kinda come down the middle, like me. You gotta pay attention to your hunches. Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve just had a feeling, better haul off on the gas, then what’s over the hump but a Smokey with a cherry on top, sitting there hoping the little bit of brush he’s parked behind will cover the evidence so he can reach his ticket quota. Sometimes that Smokey’s in a plain wrapper, but you get so’s you can see them.

  There’s good stuff happens on the road: once I passed a guy standing on the shoulder with a sign said: SPEED TRAP AHEAD. I gave him a little wave as I went by, remember thinking that was a strange way of being a Good Samaritan, just standing by the side of the road with a sign, but probably saved me a hundred bucks. Little while later I pass the Smokey, in a little dip off the side and behind a bunch of scrub. Kept my eyes on the road and my foot off the gas, shook my head, thanked my lucky stars ’cause before that I was pushing, no doubt about it. Then come over the rise and there, on the other side, there’s a sign propped up in the ditch says: TIPS, 300 YARDS. Time enough to stop at the pullout where this other guy sat with a bucket. ’Course I stopped, just like everybody else must’ve. Gotta tell you, that bucket was full of money. Got on the radio, found out those guys had been out there two hours at least. Laughed all the way to Merrit.

  There’s drivers know when to push on, drivers know when to stop, like I said. Most times I like to pull over away from the crowd, where I can get some sleep. I’ve been known to stop at the diner for a meal, shoot the shit with whoever’s around, then head on up the highway ten miles and find some lonely siding. Makes sense: refer trucks, to keep cold, they’ll run all night, but the motor cutting in and out’ll drive you crazy. In the winter, truck’s gonna run all night to keep the heat up. Cattle cars are the worst, smell like shit and make a racket. Get a nice quiet spot, park Betsy on a flat, have a drink, conk out. All you can hear are the crickets.

  There’s guys got their pitstops like me, and there’s guys who keep a photo of Shirley or Peggy or whoever on the visor at all times. And there’s guys see the road as a mobile cathouse. Me, I tell those lot lizards I don’t need their services thanksverymuch, and if they get belligerent I tell them to take a hike, more or less, and I’m not sorry for saying it either. You gotta be able to take no.

  One night I was pulled up at a truck stop, a big lot, seven or eight rigs pulled up. I’ve got a low-bed with a cat on the back, running a little ahead of schedule and feeling pretty good about it. Don’t recognize any of the rigs in the lot, but that’s okay. You don’t always feel like talking. Everyone’s in the diner or in their cabs, nobody in the parking lot. I decide to stay put: it’s quiet, and anyways there’s a mountain pass ahead I know from experience means I’d have to park either slanted up or slanted down, no good place to stop at the top. It’s gotta be level or I wake up my face crushed into the back of the seat cause I’ve rolled with the slope. So, yeah, I decide to have a bite, stay put for a few hours, get forty winks on the flat. The diner’s all lit up, one or two guys gulping coffee inside. Overhead there’s a million stars. I’m kinda sentimental about stars. I see the Big Dipper, Orion. Cassiopeia, which always makes me think of Cass.

  After I wolf a coupla burgers, fries, and a glass of milk (Myra’s always after me about the milk) I’m thinking about the Jack Daniels I got in the rig, thinking to listen to what’s going on out there on the CB for a while, then hit the sack. But first I have a smoke, look at the stars, and when I pull my head back down there’s this lady going truck to truck and of course I know what she’s doing. I watch her for a bit but there don’t seem to be any takers the first two, and I’m at the end of the row, pretty much. I’d rather she wasn’t climbing up onto my cab with me not inside, so I head back a bit ahead of her.

  When she gets to my rig I’m just butting out my cigarette, ready to call it a night. She’s about forty and looks like something the cat dragged in, dark red nails bitten down, mascara running into the bags under her eyes, little thumb-sized bruises all over her neck and right down into the crack between her boobs where they hang in a blue shirt that says shake ’em baby. No thanks, I tell her, but she keeps knocking down the price, first a hundred, then sixty, and before long it’s a blowjob for two bucks.

  When I told her to take a hike it was with no satisfaction. It felt ugly, you know, dirty and pathetic in more ways than I can tell watching this sorry whore stagger off to the diner, because there was no more prospects after I turned her down.

  I watched her through the lit-up window as she slid into a booth seat, only one in the place, tried to see the waitress’s face, couldn’t see if she felt sorry or
just disgusted as she poured the coffee, watched the small change counted out on the counter. She was pathetic, all right, but she coulda been anyone. You just never know what life’s gonna throw at you. You never know the story behind the lot lizard in the truck stop selling anything you want for a deuce.

  I was tired, I’ll tell you, ready for the sack like you wouldn’t believe, the JD starting to take effect, but I got out and went over to the truck behind me, a new Bulldog with chrome everywhere and a load of culverts that had to be overweight, probably planning to haul out in the middle of the night to beat the scales. I hammered on the door and there’s this big guy, a whole lot bigger than me, pushes the door open. Whadyawant, he asks, and I think maybe this is pretty stupid but I hook my thumb in the direction of truck stop window, light spilling out and the waitress pouring a second cup for the hooker sitting in the booth.

  “You even thought about it for ten seconds, you pay up.”

  “What?”

  “You even thought about it, even for one second, that’s ten bucks. Ten bucks a second. Takin’ up a collection,” I jerked my thumb again at the window behind me. “She needs a meal. Hell, needs a doctor. Needs a break, anyway.”

  He looks at me, looks at her, shakes his head. Hauls out the wallet from his back pocket. Digs in and pulls out a twenty, then digs some more and pulls out a ten. I’m waiting, looking at the bobbing head of the hula girl on the dash. I take the cash and nod, start to walk away. “Wait,” he says. “I’m comin’.”

  Two of us together, we made a good argument. By the time we got to the last rig in the lot, we had two hundred and thirteen dollars. My new buddy went back to his rig, grinning, and I slid into the booth opposite the woman, feeling pretty damn good about the whole affair. We were the only two in the diner, must’ve been just about closing time. Well, I looked at her, and thought: she may be a two-bit whore, nothing no mother would ever want her daughter to be, but you had to feel sorry for whatever put her there. She’s sitting there in that baby blue shirt that says shake ’em, baby. And she looks at the pile of bills for a full minute before saying anything, while I wait, looking at her.