Bow Grip

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I
would never have sold him the car in the first place if I’d known what he was going to do with it.

I’d seen him around town a couple of times, once or twice at the café, just drinking coffee, no cream, no sugar, never eating anything, and now and then at Ida’s little grocery store, buying crackers and tins of oysters and canned soup, you know, bachelor stuff. I should know.

Once or twice I’d seen him thumbing a ride on the highway, always when I was going the other way, not that I’d have picked him up necessarily, since I’ve usually got the big dog in the front seat with me, shedding and generally leaving no room for another passenger, something Allyson always used to complain about, before she left. I guess I pretty much inherited my dad’s disdain for hitchhikers, and on top of that, I had heard nothing but no good about the guy, if you can believe what you hear around town. My buddy Rick Davis nicknamed him the cowboy, kind of sarcastic-like on account of the straw hat he wears everywhere, combined with his apparent lack of a horse to go with it. Anyways, the cowboy isn’t much liked by the guys I play hockey or poker with, nobody trusts him. Rick says it’s because the guy doesn’t appear to have regular employment and he lives alone in a school bus. I always secretly thought he was unpopular because he’s quite good-looking, or so the ladies tell me, and a bunch of paunchy poker players with receding hairlines probably never take too well to an unattached man showing up in town. Nobody invited Nick the
new dentist over for dinner for years, until he imported that blonde nurse from Edmonton and properly married her and moved her piano in. Now he’s one of the guys, like he’s been here in Drumheller forever, just like the rest of us.

I realized when the cowboy came into the shop last month and inquired about the Volvo that I’d never heard him talk out loud at all before that. Not very friendly of me, when you think about it. He’s been living out at Archie’s farm for going on three years by now, easy, and I guess I’ve never even said a proper good day to the man.

“Name is Carson. James or Jim. People call me both. Saw the car for sale out front.”

His long-fingered paw appeared in the sideways rectangle of light between the concrete and the underbelly of Betty Makerewich’s Taurus wagon. I was on my back underneath it, on the dolly, since Franco was using the hoist. I rolled out to shake James or Jim Carson’s hand.

“Saw the car out front,” he repeated. I didn’t so much mind someone getting straight to the point like that. No small talk with this guy, that was plain to see. Some folks just don’t like messing around with the idle chatter. There’s been days I wished Franco was more like that. I got right to it. I wiped my greasy hand on the thigh of my coveralls and shook hands with him for the first time. His grip was firm, but not one of those look-how-tough-I-am handshakes, the ones that feel like foreplay to a fist fight. Just a decent hello.

“The Volvo,” I told him. “Came in on a trade for some work I did. Used to belong to Donny Nolan’s oldest daughter. He bought it brand new for her eleven years ago. Single owner, lady-driven. Couple hundred and twenty thousand clicks on it though, from when she was going to film school
in Winnipeg, but someone took care of it, for sure, it’s still in fine shape. Solid. I’m thinking I want thirty-eight hundred. I rebuilt the carburetor and replaced the head gasket. New battery. Good little car. Lots of rubber left on the tires, too.”

We walked out the open bay doors to the asphalt yard in front of the shop, towards the blue Volvo. He didn’t stop to kick the tires or open the hood; instead, he opened the driver’s side door and folded his long frame inside the leather interior. He ran his palms over the steering wheel, wiggled the gearshift. He had a good four or five inches on me, and he slid the seat back to make room for his legs, and surveyed either himself or the empty back seat in the rear-view, hard to tell from where I was standing.

“You want to take it for a spin?”

He appeared not to hear my question. “Thirty-eight hundred you want? Would you consider a trade?”

I shook my head. “Like I said, I already took it on a trade in the first place. Got to keep the cash flow going somehow.”

I had done a lot of work for trades over the years. In a town mostly populated by farmers, ranchers, and hunters, I was often offered things other than money in exchange for fixing up something or other for someone. Too bad I couldn’t buy new parts or pay the electric bill with frozen deer meat or cords of firewood. Franco only worked for cash, too.

“Don’t have the cash,” the cowboy said, his hands still on the steering wheel, ten o’clock and two o’clock, as my dad had once taught me, years and years ago.

“You could talk to the bank then, see about a small loan?” I raised the end of my sentence in a half-hearted question. I knew the guy didn’t have a real job. He had built
a more than decent deck and fence for Mrs Baker when she got her insurance money, and he helped out at Archie’s farm, where he kept his school bus parked, but I didn’t think the bank would like him much for a loan.

“Don’t have the time. I need the car right now. I need the car tomorrow.”

“Well, what do you have to trade for it?” I was hoping it was something I already had or didn’t need, so I could say no to him with no hard feelings. Business is business.

“A handmade cello.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“A cello. The instrument. You play it with a bow, like a violin, but it’s a lot bigger. It’s a beautiful piece of work, worth a helluva lot more than thirty-eight hundred dollars. More like five or six. Thousand.”

“I don’t play an instrument. Never had the knack. Tried playing trumpet in high school. Never took to it.”

“Strings are different than brass.” He pulled a half-flattened pack of Player’s from his jean jacket and pushed the Volvo’s cigarette lighter in with a wide thumb. “Much more emotive. You should think about it. A new hobby. Something to fill the time, since your wife left. This car needs a new cigarette lighter.”

I took one step back. I thought about being pissed off that this guy who I hardly knew was bringing my private life up into a conversation regarding a used car, but then I remembered what my mom had said to me not the very night before. I had come home from walking Buck Buck to find her sitting on my back porch, a Saran Wrap-covered meatloaf steaming up on the stairs beside her rump.

“There you are,” she had said, hauling herself to her feet. “Take this. Your sister and I have been talking about
you recently. We worry. We think you need a hobby. You need to move on. You need to clean up Ally’s office, and pack up the last of her stuff and send it on to Calgary. She’s not coming back, Joseph. Time you faced facts. Got on with things. Get yourself a diary, or build something in your shop, whatever. I’m off to bingo. You need a haircut.”

I decided on the spot to trade the guy for the cello. The car had had a For Sale sign in its windshield for six weeks now, with no one showing more than a passing interest in even test-driving it. I could buy myself a new hobby, I figured, and get my mom and Sarah off my case for a bit. All it would cost me was the work and parts I’d already put in to Nolan’s tractor, and the labour I had put into the Volvo. I still didn’t like the guy bringing my wife’s whereabouts up in casual conversation, but I didn’t have to like him to do business. The car could sit there for months; I was a mechanic, not a salesman. Instruments were expensive, I knew, because Rick Davis was always bitching about still making the payments on his oldest son’s baritone saxophone, and the kid graduated already last June. Five thousand bucks was a lot of cello.

I shook the cowboy’s hand for the second and last time. “Bring the thing around tomorrow, I’ve got the transfer papers for the car in my desk. I’ll be here anytime past seven-thirty. You want to take it for a spin then?”

He shook his head, and lit a squished smoke with a silver flip of his Zippo. “I’ll take your word that it runs just fine.”

Normally I would have mentioned there was no smoking in the vehicle, but I figured, what the fuck? The car was his now, after all, he could smoke in it all he wanted. I never smoke in my own truck, but only on account of the dog.

James or Jim Carson refused my offer of a cup of coffee, saying he had business to attend to and he’d be back in the morning, first thing. I dug out a set of transfer papers, unplugged the open sign, and locked up.

The sun was still working its way over the horizon as I walked the three blocks from my place to the shop the next morning. The lights were on in the office already, and the open sign had been plugged in. The Volvo was gone.

Franco was in his chair drinking coffee on the other side of my desk. The cello was in a black case in the corner, taking up too much room, polished and out of place next to the dusty coffee maker and the wall of calendars, ancient and new. The seller’s copies of the transfer papers were in a neat pile in the centre of my desk. Buck Buck circled the rest of the floor, uncertain where he was going to lie down now that the space beside the heater was occupied.

I picked up the cello and stashed it in the closet with the broom and the spare printer paper.

“The guy that lives in that old bus at Archie’s place was here half an hour ago,” Franco said, flipping the page of his newspaper. “I tried to call you but you must have been walking the beast.” He eyed me sideways from his duct-taped rolling chair. “Couldn’t see you needing a cello, no offense, but the guy was fairly adamant that you two had made a deal. Seemed too weird not to be true, if you know what I mean. He filled out the papers, and I forged your bit for you, so he could take the car. Said he was in a hurry.”

“Thanks, Franco.” I poured myself a cup of coffee and added one cube of sugar, stirred it with the pen from my shirt pocket.

“Since when do you need a cello more than you need a perfectly good car?”

I took a slow breath. Like I said, Franco talks too much sometimes.

“Thought I’d get myself a new hobby.”

“You don’t even whistle.”

“A guy can’t try something new every once in a while?”

“You listen to all-news radio. I never heard you play so much as the stereo. I never took you for the musical type, is all.”

“I don’t know if I am the musical type, but my mom is on my case to get a hobby, and the man needed a car, so I took the goddamned cello. Now everyone can be happy. Maybe I’ll be good. Maybe I’ll be Alberta’s next Ashley MacIssac.”

“He’s from the Maritimes. And he plays fiddle. Not to mention he’s a flamer.” Franco’s eyes dropped and I watched the red creep up into his stubbled face. “I’m sorry, Joey.”

“Don’t apologize to me, Franco.” I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking about Allyson, living with another woman in Calgary. He was thinking he had sideways insulted my wife, the lesbian, by calling Ashley MacIssac a flamer. I was getting sick of everybody bringing up my private life as though it were the hockey scores or current events. Even a guy with no phone living on a bus on a farm twenty minutes outside of town had heard all about where my wife had gone and with whom. That could be partly due to who she had left town with. Kathleen Sawyer. Mitch Sawyer owns the Esso on Fourth Avenue, and his wife had been a fairly quiet kindergarten teacher, not much to gossip about at all, until her and Allyson both broke the news to Mitch and me on the same night.

That was a little over a year ago now, and ever since then Mitch has spent at least three nights a week in the
lounge of the Capitol Hotel, telling anyone who will sit for a beer with him all about his wife and my wife and their one-bedroom artist’s loft in Calgary.

Mitch Sawyer seems to feel that the fact Kathleen left him for another woman is more binge- and sympathy-worthy than if she’d just run off with his brother or the post-man, but I guess I don’t really see it that way. My wife of five years has left me, and I pretty much don’t care who she went with, all I know is that she’s gone, and it’s been about twelve and a half months now of looking like she isn’t coming back. Drinking doesn’t seem to help much either, so mostly I try and just avoid running into Mitch Sawyer. I like the Mohawk gas better, anyways, higher octane, plus they got the video rental counter right there in the gas station. I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately.