by Lee Gowan
“Can I have one of those?” I ask.
He pauses and looks at his right hand rolling the cigarette as though he hadn’t realized until now that that’s what his right hand was doing, and then he offers it to me. I take it and punch the lighter.
“Do you regret it?” I ask.
He cocks an eye at me and curls his lip as if he were amused. “That depends what we’re talkin’ about.”
Am I provoking him? It’s really none of my business. I have enough of my own regrets without pestering him about his. I’ll look at his cliff and say thank you and get him to drive me back to town and leave him there. That sounds like a reasonable plan.
“Do you love her?”
The lighter pops, and he pulls it out and offers the glowing rings to me. I suck on the roll-your-own too hard and almost cough.
“Gwen? Of course I do. And I love Sam too.” He pats me on the leg. “I’ve only known you for an hour, and I think I’m already in love with you.”
I exhale, waiting for him to remove his hand from my leg, and finally he does.
“Really? You fall in love rather fast, don’t you?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Like a ton of shit fallin’ from a leanin’ tower.”
He shrugs and sighs and turns his full attention back to the road. After a while he pulls his fixings out of his breast pocket and starts rolling himself a cigarette. “To tell you the terrible embarrassing truth, I feel like a bit of a victim in all of this mess.” He twirls the paper between his fingers and then licks the stickum. “I feel like I was set up.”
“You were what?”
He punches the lighter. “Set up. I was set up. I mean, Gwen was lonely. What’d he expect? He works late every night. She never saw him. And he was constantly gone on his business trips. So, she’d invite me over for supper, just for company. Just to spend some time with somebody besides the kids. He knew I was spendin’ more time with her than he was.” He pulls out the lighter and holds it to his cigarette, taking a deep drag once he’s got it going, before replacing the lighter again. At last he turns very deliberately to me, the cigarette glowing there in the left side of his mouth, as he speaks out of the right side. “If you wanna know what I think, I think he wanted it to happen. Which is why he set me up.”
He squints at me before resuming his squint at the road.
“You’re saying he was just looking for a way out of his marriage?” I ask.
The cowboy shrugs. “Either that or he wanted to lord it over me. Be morally superior. He’s always liked doin’ that. Some people like to face their own problems by being morally superior. It makes them feel better about themselves.” He glances at me as though he’s accusing me of something. “I think maybe he oughta take responsibility for his own marriage,” he continues. “He wants out, but he doesn’t have the guts to get out himself, so he set me up to do it for him.”
“And what about you?” I ask him, chuckling to indicate that I make no judgments on anyone. “What are you going to take responsibility for?”
His eyes kill the road. “Myself.”
There is a ringing in my ears, and it takes me a second to identify where it’s coming from. My cellphone.
My father is dead.
It rings again.
“It’s not for me,” the cowboy says.
I open my briefcase and fumble open the phone. “Hello?”
“Ai. Lance Taves here.”
“Lance! I think I may have found that location. I’m just about to have a look at it.”
“Oh. Well. Don’t bother. I’ve got some bad news. They’ve called the whole thing off.”
“Pardon?”
“Yeah. At least for the moment. Herzog went completely bonzo and pulled the plug. In the middle of a meeting with the minister responsible, Jerry asked him why anybody’d be crazy enough to live in this godforsaken place, apparently because he didn’t approve of the dressing on his salad. He says he’s taking the production back stateside. He walked out in the middle of dinner. Aspen never even showed up. It’s all a smokescreen, if you ask me, to cover up the fact that Aspen doesn’t know if he’s Jesus or Dead Eye Dick. Creeping senility, I suspect. I have serious doubts this film’ll ever be made. Anyway. It looks like you’re unemployed. At least for the moment. We’ll cover your expenses until tomorrow, of course. I’ve already got you booked on a flight tomorrow morning.”
“Oh,” I say.
“We should meet, though. We may still work together in the future. You never know. I’ll buy you dinner. How long will it take you to get back to the hotel?”
“I’m … not sure,” I say.
“Well, where are you?”
“Somewhere near Broken Head.”
“What?! What the hell are you doing way down there?”
“That’s where the location is.”
“Jesus. You really get into your work, don’t you? Well, should we make it a late dinner then?”
“I think I’ll be too tired by the time I get there.”
“Yeah. I guess. Well, sorry about the bad news.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’ll have them give you a wake-up call for your flight.”
“That would be nice.”
“Talk to you soon.”
“Bye-bye.” I snap the phone shut and put it back in the briefcase.
“Everythin’ okay?” the cowboy wonders.
“I’m fired. They don’t want the cliff for the movie anymore.”
He searches my eyes to see if I’m kidding, and apparently sees that I don’t know how. “Good,” he says. “Then no worries about showin’ it to ya.”
I take a deep drag on my cigarette.
“Are ya sorry to lose the job?” he asks.
“No. I’m not sorry. To tell you the truth, I’m a little relieved. It could have been worse.”
“That’s good. Why would ya want a silly job like that one anyways? I see you got a movie camera back there. If you like makin’ movies so much, why not make your own?”
I shrug. “I had a boyfriend who used to ask me that.”
“And what did you answer?”
“That he made movies, and somebody had to have a real job to support him.”
“Are ya still supportin’ him?
“No.”
“Well, then? Do you still want to see the cliff?”
I crush out my cigarette. “Are we almost there?”
“Almost,” he says. “Are you Chinese, or Japanese, or Vietnamese or Korean?”
I don’t respond.
“I was just wonderin’.” He grins impishly. “You all look the same to me.”
“I’m from a place called the Leaside Towers. It’s a high-rise apartment wasteland. Right near Don Mills. Where your breakfast cereal comes from.”
He’s still smiling, the smoke curling lazily out of his mouth, and he points out the side window at the field in the background.
“That’s where breakfast cereal comes from.”
JANUARY 2nd, 1971: BROKEN HEAD
IRENE HURT. It was so bad she laid back down on the floor and closed her eye, hoping the pain might have nothing to cling to if she let her mind go completely free. Free as the wind. They said they were going to let her go free, but she refused to snap at their baiting. She wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of laughing in her face. She would lie here with her eye closed and escape from them that way. But on the back of her eyelids she could see the young cop’s ugly smile. To escape him she opened her eye and the gum was still there, stuck to the bottom of the desk.
She prayed. After another prayer or two or three, the door opened and two cops escorted someone into the room. She recognized the running shoes. Luke.
“Tell her we’re letting you go,” the oldest cop with the fancy uniform said.
“Irene. Are you okay? What did you do to her?”
“We didn’t do anything. She attacked one of my men. We’ll leave you here to talk to her. Tell her we’re letting you go.
”
The two cops walked out and closed the door.
Luke’s running shoes stepped closer, and she felt his hand on her cheek, smelled the scent of his cigarettes. “Irene! Are you okay? What did they do to you? Those bastards. Tell me what they did to you. I’ll kill those bastards.”
“No,” she answered him, raising herself with his help. “They’re listening, Luke. Just keep your mouth shut.”
“I don’t give a fuck if they are. We’ll get them for this, Irene. We’ll tell everything to this lawyer guy I know in Calgary, and we’ll get them. I told them even before I knew what they done to you.” He clasped her face in his hands, studying the eye she couldn’t open. “Oh, Irene, what did they do to you?”
“Did you take the old man’s wallet?”
His eyes shifted away and he shook his head slowly. “I took a few dollars for gas. For helping him. He hardly had any. What’s wrong with that?”
“And your cousin’s car is stolen.”
He talked to those black holes in the white tile. “Not that I know of. It doesn’t matter anyway. They’re letting us go. They’re scared. They know they went too far, doing this to you. They’re letting us go, Irene.”
“No, Luke. They won’t just let us go.”
“They will. They told me they’re letting us go.”
But she did not believe him, and so she began to pray again, and he held her, murmuring that they would let them go, while she called on Jesus to save them, which is how the officers found them when they returned a few minutes later.
“Let’s go,” the older man said.
“You’re letting us go?”
“We’re letting you go. Come on.”
Luke helped Irene to her feet.
Outside, it was now very dark and still very cold, though the wind was gone completely. The officers escorted them to a police car and told them to get in the back.
“I thought you were letting us go.” Luke said.
“We are.”
“Where’s our car? Aren’t you giving us our car?”
“It’s not here. We’ll have to take you to it.”
Apparently they’d left it at the hospital. Luke helped her into the back seat of the police car, and they drove off into the night, stopping at all the stoplights, back out under the underpass and north, into the darkness, on a highway they’d never been on before. They were not going to the hospital. She buried her face in Luke’s shoulder.
“Where are you taking us?” Luke asked.
“To your car.”
She kept her face in his shoulder until the police car began to slow down and Luke shook her and said, “Irene. There it is,” and when she opened her eye, sure enough, the car was sitting on an approach, pointing away from the road, off into the night.
“All right,” the old cop said. “There’s your car. Now you take off down that trail to make it look like you got away from us, and that’s how we’ll report it. You got away. We’re letting you go because you saved the old man. That was a good thing you did. So that’s what we’re doing for you.”
Luke nodded his head, staring off in the dark. “What if we get stuck?”
“Get stuck? Why would you get stuck?”
“In the snow.”
“You won’t get stuck. That trail’ll lead you right back to the TransCanada.”
The driver, the same driver who’d stopped them, got out of the car and opened Luke’s door.
“Did you find that boy?” Irene finally spoke.
The officer shook his head. “There’s no missing boy.”
“The old man said he was missing. Young Sam. He called him Young Sam. He could still be out there.”
“There’s no boy missing.”
“Come on, Irene,” Luke said, “forget about the boy.”
Irene let Luke help her out and walk her to the car. Every step she took was like a knife in her chest. The officer got back into his car, and the two officers sat there at the edge of the road, watching. Luke tried the ignition, and it started.
“Still warm,” Luke said, wondering at this, and he put the car in gear and started down the trail, which was two lines of white in the black. The trail was not too bad, though, so he went faster. As they picked up speed, he began to laugh. “They did let us go. I told you they’d let us go. We had them scared.”
She watched the two dark lines of the trail leading into darkness, wincing each time they hit a bump. Inside her head, she tried to think of a prayer. But her head was empty. There was nothing inside her but two black lines on white.
“What was that song from the radio this morning?” she said. “Luke. Do you remember how it went?”
“What song?”
“The song on the radio.”
The darkness rushed at them in ice crystals.
“The Beatles song?”
“No. The song about Irene.”
“Good night, Irene,” Luke began to sing, “Good night, Irene. I’ll see you in my dreeeeeeams.”
Two black lines leading to black.
“No. Not that song.”
“What song?”
“The other song about Irene.”
“The one the cowboy sang?”
“No. The one from the radio. The one they were playing on the radio. Don’t you remember that song? They were playing it on the radio, and you turned it off.”
“I don’t remember. I’m not sure. I don’t know which song you mean.”
And only black.
And Irene felt Jesus reach down through the windshield and grab her by the waist and take her, clasped to his icy body. He spread his wide wings and lifted her up into the bottomless sky, where she would dwell forever in the arms of her Lord.
JANUARY 2nd, 1971: NEAR BROKEN HEAD
A TICKLE in my throat’s telling me some bug has already invaded. With any luck it’ll kill me in the next ten minutes. Annoying as all get out. A smoke might help, but I don’t have any dry fixings on me. Maybe I’ll ask the boy to fetch them. The other boy. Vern. Her father’s name. It’s a definite risk. He might say no. He is not used to doing my fetching, no matter what the situation, and he’s not likely altogether sympathetic of my present position. He did help with my boots, but he’s left me in my stockinged feet. My feet are frozen, but I can feel the cold wool on my ankles. I bend and pull off my sopping wet socks without even asking him for help, and he sits there without offering any and watches me rubbing my poor old feet. Trying to get the blood moving, but why am I bothering? My fingers are already tingling, and I’m remembering exactly how bad it’ll hurt.
The boy’s looking for his brother’s blood dripping from my hands. His face has that kind of look. Not so much an accusation as a surrender from all possibility of connection. Like I’ve grown horns and am no longer of a familiar species. I’ll have to get used to that kind of look, I suppose. Or I’ll have to find other things to look at.
“Could you get me a dry pair of socks from my room?” I ask.
He nods and goes, happy to be away from me.
“And grab the bottle in my sock drawer when you’re there.”
That plaque on the wall wishes me to be held in the palm of God’s hand. That would be warm. Likely He’d just close his fist and grind my bones into a little stale flatbread. Man can not live by Sam alone. The calf bleats, calling for its mother, but she can’t answer, though she’s not that far off, standing on the front walk, staring at the boot scraper the boy fashioned out of a horseshoe. She’s waiting for her own boy to come back to her. The little thing’s hungry, it’s tongue hanging out the corner of its mouth. I hold out my hand to let it suck my fingers.
“It’s all right. She’s only a hop and a skip away. Just on the other side of that wooden thing over there with the knob.”
Vern comes with my socks and the bottle, handing them to me without offering to help me on with the socks. I can see he’d like to help with the bottle, though.
“Your mama’d probably walk right in here if Ver
n went and opened the door for her, but that might not be too good an idea. We don’t need any pie at the moment, do we Vern? Or are you hungry?”
He turns away. Not much of an audience for killers who tell jokes, it would seem. Maybe I should go out and tell it to the cow and see whether I can make her crack a smile. The calf’s still sucking at my cold fingers, and I don’t have the heart to take them away, so I vice the bottle between my knees and screw off the cap and take a mouthful and let it burn down into my centre.
Standing at the door, waiting. That’s a mother. She’ll wait right there until he comes back to her. No matter how cold and hungry she gets. Well, she might stray away for a few mouthfuls of straw. Won’t begrudge her that. She’s a good mother. What must she think? What must this place be, in her estimation? In the calf’s? A place this warm in the middle of a blizzard, the hot air coming out of the little grill there in the floor, coming up from some fire down near the centre of the earth, or somewhere between here and there. Of course, he’s got almost nothing at all to compare this particular experience to, except being born in a snowbank, and riding through thirty below on the back of a horse. Might very well think this is what every day will be like. Land in a snowbank, pulled out and plopped on the back of a monster, carried through whiteness, no idea where he’s heading, fall in ice-cold water, pulled back into a wind that’d freeze the sulphurous fires of hell, but all for the final gift of that blessed place where the heat comes out of the floor. Quite a day, all right, but with nothing to compare it to, how would he know that they’re not all exactly like this one? Doesn’t realize he’ll never see this side of the door again. And his mother will never see the other side, so all she’ll have to go on and pass on to the other mothers is his stories of that strange warm place where the ground was perfectly flat and the light was an all-too-pale shade of yellow and a man wiped her beautiful boy down with a rag that smelled like nothing he’d ever smell again. And the wailing. That might be the music of the place. He might go through the rest of his life wanting to hear more of that lovely music. A mother’s terrible keening. But then, what sound would a calf love more than that?