by Lee Gowan
Every time she stopped, worried that they’d roll into the ditch, they’d be stuck again, but after three or four attempts they were finally through the snowbank and Luke took his place behind the wheel. He rolled down the window again, and they crawled the rest of the way out to the grid road. When they’d finally reached it, finally travelled that first hundred yards, he turned to her and said, “Which way is it to the highway?”
She had no idea. Try as she might to visualize the moment they’d turned at the driveway an hour or more ago, she could not do it. After asking her advice, Luke argued it was a right, but that only made Irene think she might remember it being a left. In the end they agreed it would be better to wait until the wind died down a bit before they continued. If they left the engine running they’d run out of gas or die of carbon monoxide poisoning, so they huddled together under the old green wool blanket and after a while dug out the can of Sterno from under Irene’s seat and lit it to warm their hands by. At first they talked about what they’d do when they got to Calgary, Luke’s short-term plans of the places he would show Irene and her long-term plans of the job she would find. After another hour the wind had not abated in the least, but their talk had dwindled to Luke’s periodic curses at the storm. Irene could no longer think of anything to say.
From time to time Luke would start the engine to keep it warm and warm up the car a little, and they would listen to the radio. There were weather warnings and other warnings to stay off the roads. Sometimes Luke would argue that maybe they should try going to the right and feel their way towards the highway, but Irene would shake her head. Luke cursed, but he would not attempt the escape without her blessing.
She was not sure how many hours had passed, but it was growing dark when she picked out a dark shape looming in the ditch and realized it was a boulder she’d noticed there when they first turned in the driveway. The wind, perhaps, was finally receding.
“It is to the right,” she said.
She had not said anything in a long, long time, so Luke looked at her as if she had risen from the dead.
“You see the rock …” but when she turned to point it out it was gone again. “I saw the rock there a second ago, and when I saw it I remembered us turning in the driveway, and you were right. We do have to go right.”
“What rock?” Luke said.
“There’s a rock at the end of the driveway. Remember? I saw it there a minute ago. The wind must have dropped off.”
“Where?” Luke said.
She turned to the window, and a grizzled old face with hoarfrost eyebrows was staring into her eyes.
“Jesus Christ!” Luke said.
Not only the eyebrows were hoarfrost: despite the cold, his head was uncovered and his hair was frosted too. He wore no coat. Only a cowboy shirt that had spots of frost for snaps. His skin was greyish blue, the lips a shade greyer and a shade bluer, and the whites of his eyes were yellow. He stared intently into her, not even seeming to see Luke beside her, and she did not immediately cry out when she saw him there six inches away. She hoped that he would pass on the way he had come. She thought that this unending stare was a look of hateful accusation; she wondered if he wasn’t the God the priest sometimes talked about in church—the God of the Old Testament—that other jealous God, who squashed the enemies of his people beneath His icy heels. Except that he was so small.
Of what might He accuse her?
And then he disappeared.
“Jesus!” Luke said again, and he started the engine. Irene had already opened the door, but Luke popped the Studebaker into gear and stomped on the gas pedal, slamming the door closed with their momentum as they started to roll forwards.
“What are you doing?” Irene shouted.
Luke swung the car right and onto the road, fishtailing so badly he almost lost control. She clutched the handle, waiting to feel them hit the man or slide into the ditch, but Luke slowed and rolled down his window and started crawling the car towards the highway.
“Stop right now!”
“Like hell.”
Irene grabbed his right forearm. “He’ll freeze.”
“He’s already frozen. Couldn’t you see the ice in his eyes?”
She had, but when she saw him turn away from her she knew he must be only a man, and if he was only a man they had to save him, didn’t they?
“Stop the car, or I’m getting out.” She pulled the door handle, and the full force of the blizzard leaked in like the breath of the dead.
Luke pressed the brakes, turning to her as the car stopped. “Whaddaya want me to do?”
“We’ll find him and get him into the car before he freezes.” She zipped up her parka all the way and pulled tight the drawstring on her hood.
Luke breathed deeply. “Shut the door, Irene.”
“I’ll shut it once I’m out.”
“We can’t get involved. It don’t pay to get involved in this kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“This kind of thing.”
“This happens to you all the time?”
“Don’t be dense. Two-Indians-and-a-dead-white-man kind of thing.”
“What? He’s not dead yet. We gotta help him.”
“They’ll blame us. Would you shut the stupid door?”
“For trying to save him?” She pushed the door open and started to step out into the blizzard.
“Irene. What about the car?”
That stopped her. She sat back and let the door close. “What about it?”
“What if they ask about the registration?”
“It’s in Calgary. You told my uncle it’s in Calgary.”
“They’re gonna ask a lot of questions.”
He was staring into the speedometer, trying to read how fast they weren’t moving.
“Is this car stolen?”
“I don’t think so. Ricky says not, but who knows with Ricky? Anyway, it’s not like it’s worth anything to anybody.” He stared into the yellowed numbers on his dashboard, refusing to meet her eyes.
“Who knows with Ricky? Who knows with Luke? So my uncle was right.”
“Your uncle’s not right about nothing.”
Irene turned away from him and sighed. “I’m going to find him. We’ll get him and take him to the hospital and go. They won’t be asking questions about the car. We don’t need to answer any questions anyway. We’ll just say we found him wandering around without a coat in a blizzard, so we brought him in so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Okay?”
She opened the door and put her feet on the ground, the wind and snow blasting in her face, biting her wrists between her mitts and her parka. Her boots were good. Her feet were warm even with the frozen road right beneath her. She hunched her shoulders against the storm and walked back towards the driveway. The car hadn’t gone far, and in a few seconds she saw the boulder. Then she saw the shape of the man standing at the side of the road, as though he were watching something in the ditch. She rushed up to him and grabbed him by the arm and he turned to her, and when she urged him back in the direction of the car his legs started moving and he followed. A moment later she saw Luke’s shape coming towards them out of the white, and he took the man’s other arm.
They managed to manoeuvre him into the back seat of the Studebaker, and Irene got in to spread the green blanket over him. Luke walked around and got in the driver’s seat. “You riding back there with him?”
“Go,” she said.
And they were off, going five miles per hour, back towards the highway, on to the nearest town, which they knew from the radio station was a place called Broken Head. She touched one of the old man’s ears and found it frozen like a piece of hard plastic. He blinked his eyelids and looked at her.
“Who are ya?” he slurred, with a thick tongue between blue lips. And his eyes suddenly locked on hers with the same look he’d had as he stared through the window.
“Irene,” she said.
JUNE 28th, 2000: SOMEWHERE OVER SASKATCHEWAN
TO TAKE MY MIND off the fact that the ground is forty-thousand feet below, I keep trying to imagine the moment I will meet the great James Aspen: “I love your films, Mr. Aspen. I’m so honoured to meet you. My name is Ai Lee. I’m your locations manager.”
He gives me a peculiar look and responds “I who?”
Even my fantasies are awkward disappointments.
When I’ve finished what I can of the newly hydrated freeze-dried chicken Kiev, I try reading the script for The Last Cowboy one more time, but it’s not engaging enough to keep my attention another time through. Why would James Aspen want to make this film? The money? Perhaps, but why would he need so much money at his age? He has a legacy to protect. His first western was acceptable, I suppose—he was part of the old Hollywood system, part of the studio’s machinery and had to make what they gave him. But he is an old man now and can do as he wants and should have matured beyond shallow romanticism. Why is he reverting? Has his genie escaped the bottle, as his last film suggested? That one, though, was all bluster and pretension: a Kafkaesque allegory of a psychiatrist going mad. Is The Last Cowboy simply an old man’s bid for lost innocence?
The in-flight movie, a romantic comedy, is ridiculous enough to have been written by the same writer. With nothing to distract me, I am pulled into an imaginary debate with my mother in which I cleverly use the metaphor of my father’s journey to justify my own travels. If I could, I would take my father to meet James Aspen. Goodness knows, Dad would love to accompany his daughter to meet the man who made That Golden Sky. That first western of Aspen’s is one of Dad’s favourite movies. But, of course, I can’t take him. I must go alone. Just as he, in the end, will have to finish his journey alone. Needless to say, I would like to accompany him as far as the security gate …
Oh my god. Death as an airport. What if it’s true? What if the hereafter is spent breathing filtered air in a pressurized cabin while bored and uniformed angels serve you processed food and offer a limited selection of glossy magazines to while away eternity? Perhaps there is something to be said for burning in hell.
The man next to me is reading an article in The Sporting News about the scientifically proven importance of cheerleaders.
Boy, could I use a cigarette.
It’s Wednesday. I should be visiting my father. Wednesday is our day. I do my best to make Wednesdays work because it gives us a routine, and it means I can avoid my siblings, who generally descend on the house with their depressingly busy families on the weekends. I think Dad finds my visits a quiet relief. Mom has moved his bed into the living room, where he can watch the television or the squirrels in the old elm in the front yard. I take my camera and document his progress. He has no objections, but Mom finds it morbid and insists on leaving the room. It is morbid, I know, but it gives my visits form and purpose. It is a way for us to feel comfortable together.
He expects me on Wednesdays. I would go more often, but we have nothing to say to one another. I go as often as I do because I have this idea—I’m not entirely sure from where it arises—that we should have something to say to one another; that something needs resolving; that one day he will take my hand and turn to face me, his eyes opening into mine so that I know he is seeing me for the first time in my life—so I know he has always seen me, always understood me, but he couldn’t show me because he had to be my father.
Then there are my even more embarrassing fantasies of what I will say to him. My list of apologies and complaints and condolences and recriminations and thank yous. I want to tell him I love him. I want to tell him I hate him more than he hates himself, which takes some doing on my part, for he has always wallowed in a fundamental self-loathing. Why else would he have decided to smoke himself to death? I want to forgive him for everything he hates himself for, with the exception of those things he hates himself for that he has no right to hate himself for, and for which I have ended up hating him. I want to blame him for all of my own mistakes, which I’d never have made if it weren’t for my own self-loathing, and where did I inherit that if not from him?
I want to beg his forgiveness for all of my vicious thoughts.
Sometimes, when Mom leaves the room to make the tea and his eyes turn from the television and trail over my camera lens, sometimes the first item on the list finds its way to my lips and I hold it there, ripe, bursting, but I can never speak the words. I know they would embarrass him, that he would only awkwardly look away and pretend not to have heard me.
He is my father. We do not say such things to one another.
Instead, when Mom’s in the kitchen and I’m snapping his profile and his eyes find me in that slow wanting way, what he asks for is usually much simpler. “Cigarette?”
At first I refused, until he was able to make me understand that he did not mean to smoke; now I always give him one and he presses it to his nose, sniffing the rich tobacco, and kisses the filter with his puckered lips. Small pleasures mean everything to him: the scent of a cigarette, the feel of my mother’s skin on his forehead. One day I was shocked to hear him say, “Your hand is so soft,” as she was stroking him. It wasn’t something he would ever have said before.
He says nothing about the cigarettes, but I’ve captured the pleasure in his eyes with my lens. They’re photos I’ll never be able to show to my mother.
The prairie really is a chessboard. With a few imperfections. The rivers and the draws that drain the squares lie like gashes in the game. The grassland is more like skin. I take a few photographs with my digital, but the perspective is too limited to get anything interesting.
Mom was furious when I told her I was going. Her entire life is looking after my father, and she couldn’t understand how I could give up my one day a week and take the chance that he might die without me there to watch him go. She called me selfish. For a moment I was a teenager again, shrinking from her accusations, until I braced myself and fought back.
“Mother. James Aspen is one of the greatest directors in history. His films have changed the way we see the world. I can’t very well turn this down. If something happens, I have my cell and you can call and let me know and I’ll be on the next flight. Nothing’s going to happen.”
Instead of responding she picked up her spoon and began stirring her tea. I couldn’t look at her.
All at once my father raised his head from the pillow, his eyes exuding that strange sheen that I imagine gives some slight hint of the veil of pain and the painkilling cocktail he sees the world through. Mom was on her feet, at his side, and so was I. He was about to impart a message from the other side.
“What is it, dear?”
“Of course she’ll go,” he said in his hoarse whisper. I couldn’t help looking at Mom, but she was staring into his eyes. Dad, smiling peacefully, rested his head on the pillow again.
“Perhaps she’ll meet a cowboy,” he said.
My father loves cowboys. Though I don’t believe he’s ever actually met a cowboy. He worked for an insurance company in an office in one of those towers downtown that have genuine flakes of gold in the glass so that when you look out you see the whole world filtered through gold. He’d get up at seven, appear from the bathroom in a cloud of steam and sit at the table reading the paper, a cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth and a cup of coffee making sporadic passages between the Arborite and his lips, while my siblings and I gulped down our cereal or, if we had been too long rolling out of bed, our Carnation Instant Breakfast, everybody arguing over whose turn it was for the shower, because we only had one bathroom and I had three older sisters and one younger brother and the only person who had a say over the bathroom was Dad. He wanted in, you got out.
He wore a blue suit. Never brown, never beige, never black. Always a blue suit.
So far as I know, my father has not once in his life ridden a horse, but he did ride the subway to work every day. I remember riding with him once, and I looked up and saw this woman glaring down at my Dad because he was sitting, and I suppose she tho
ught he should give up his seat to her. She wasn’t an old woman or anything. Just a young woman. Probably off to visit her grandmother in Mississauga. Slight moustache, perhaps evidence of too much testosterone. Enough makeup for two people, but not enough to cover up the moustache. Dad finally noticed her glaring, and he stood up and nodded at her with that silly subordinate smile I’d seen him use on everyone in his office when we visited him there, and he said, “Please, have a seat,” with his BBC British accent, clipping the vowels like dried twigs. You might have thought he was urging the Queen herself to take her rightful place upon the throne of England.
The woman sneered and sat down next to me and I heard her say, “Dumb Chink.”
I’ll never forget that moment. I’m sure the young woman had forgotten it an hour later, but when I’m an old woman with granddaughters who visit me sometimes—probably not often enough—that subway ride will still be repeating endlessly in some dark screening room at the centre of my brain. The train clattered on, shaking its familiar heartbeat rhythm, and squealing on the turns like fingernails down a blackboard. The lovely young Scarborough princess sat there glaring at my father’s belt buckle, and I watched an orange roll around under a seat across the car. That orange was alien and beautiful. I wanted to go over and pick it up from the floor and peel it and eat it section by elegant section. Instead, I breathed in the young woman’s sickly sweet perfume and felt that chemical smell entering my bloodstream.
There were never any cowboys on the subway.
I got my driver’s licence when I was eighteen and bought a Toyota Corolla when I was twenty-four, vowing that I would never again be a prisoner of the Toronto transit system.