Cape Breton Road (18 page)

Still, he’d never seen himself as a criminal. He didn’t think it sexy or macho to be hustled into a police cruiser in cuffs while neighbors looked on like he’d just knifed his mother, to be preached at by a juvenile court judge, to spend time in a detention center with toughs and fuckups. He’d just wanted the cars, couldn’t stop himself from taking them, each one grooved him into a mood he needed. And the court convictions, they seemed to accumulate in a dream, and finally they’d crashed through the ceiling. As a kid, when his mother yelled him out of her hair or argued with his dad about money or about things to do with Cape Breton—they never seemed to agree on how to think about “down home,” they loved it to tears one day and the next recalled ways it had held them back—on those days Innis would wander up the street trying car doors, looking for one shiny and big and unlocked, and he would sit inside, the windows rolled up, in the deep plush comfort of its seats, eager for whatever flight. He would play the wheel that could turn him in any direction he wished, his voice for a motor. The silent hand of the dashboard clock
advanced, just an instrument among others, measuring he didn’t know what. And always that smell of new, all new. More than once he was found asleep in the back seat, but no one accused him of felonies, a boy sleeping in a car not his own was not illegal, not yet, and his mother was crying when they brought him home, but she slapped him too, angry because she was scared, undone. He would undo her many times more, fraying her, later, especially when a new man came home with her, he gave her a hard time. But he had never heeded what his mother told him until it was too late, the one thing he truly needed to remember: You are not a citizen, they could send you straight back to Canada some day. And after the final hammer came down on his head, he asked her why in hell she hadn’t made him a U.S. citizen, for Christ’s sake. Listen, Innis, she said, it wasn’t my lookout, it was your dad’s, he tended to things like that, not me, and he always thought we might go back home, I never thought about it later, not a citizen myself yet, I didn’t think it would ever come to this, how could I?

He savored his supper that night, two salt codfish cakes fried crusty in butter, washed down with ice water. The sun was sliding into dove grey cloud above the mountain, burning like steel on the sheened surface of the strait, glimmers of sequined light, thrilling, then gone. A calm excitement in every simple action, the last bite of food, drinking cold water from a glass. He had an itch to sketch. A cat, its still-mysterious face, burning too, tufted ears alert. Paws big, the size he’d seen in snow. Dan Rory told him there’d been a mountain lion on the island once, he’d seen him, quite a beast it was, he said, but it was shot in a trap eventually. Eventually. Innis flipped a page and did a quick take of Claire, leaning into her spade, smiling,
a bit tousled by her labor, her blouse undone deeper than it had been, a sexy hitch to her hip, a pose she might have assumed for a joke, if he’d asked her. He liked shaping her with his pen, now she knew he could draw her well. Okay, the impulse had been juvenile, but the nude sketches were good. This ballpoint pen in his hand could turn out a vision of her, and yet she was up there someplace in the green hinterlands of Cape Breton, doing something not like this on the paper at all, her expressions would be totally different from what he had drawn, her hair would be tousled in a different way, her leg, arm, hip angled some other way from how he had her in these lines and hatchings. She and Starr now, maybe, heading for a motel on the Cabot Trail. Getting away, that’s what lovers did—they excluded you. No surprise in that. Well, he’d sown his crop. Leaving wasn’t just another vague, murky intention. A red spill of cloudy light, the mountain a long silhouette beneath it: it had once looked only like a wall to him, and Starr had said, if you want to go west, you got to go over that mountain, and I don’t mean just by car. Through the screen door the wind turned suddenly, carrying with it distance, momentum, places it had passed through, the fragrance of trees, the sea. At night now Innis opened his window high to feel it sweep over his body.

His plants, in that cool clay, deep in a woods their genes had not prepared them for. Was there a Gaelic word for pot?

He tidied up the attic, around the loom, swept up traces of soil. Pushing a trunk aside, he found a long-dead mouse behind it: a grey puff, dessicate as bird down, its tailbone tiny beads. Not really a mouse at all but a misty grey aura that dispersed like dandelion seed when he blew on it. He was
tempted to look into the trunk, but no, this was not the time to pore over the old things of this house, he was moving forward. He unfastened the lights from the loom, carried them and the warming tray out to the toolshed and stashed them in the loft, maybe Starr could use that kind of heat and light someday. One big risk, the attic risk, was over. He was sorry, in a way, it had charged the air at times. Like the evening the lights went out when they were all in the parlor. Good Christ, Starr said, why are we cooking so many fuses? I’ve screwed in a goddamn boxful. He dragged impatiently on his cigarette, it glowed bright, and Innis had listened to Claire’s breathing, it was easy to hear it in the dark, until she said, I guess it’s my turn, and went off to find a flashlight. It’s the old wiring, Innis said. Something new in the old wiring, Starr said. But he never sought it out.

Just about dark, Innis hitched a ride on a propane truck that dropped him off at Dan Rory and Finlay’s. He walked up the hill across the brook, through the path he’d cut, and found Finlay bent into the weeding of their potato patch below the house, Dan Rory at the end of the row talking away but not about weeds or potatoes.

“You referring to the power in those damn lines up the hill there?” Dan Rory said, waving his cane toward the upper woods. “It shoots over our heads to the mainland. What good was the Wreck Cove Project to us?”

Finlay flung aside a fistful of weeds, smacked a mosquito. “That was a feat of engineering, Daddy. That’s the modern world.”

“Come out of those potatoes, it’s after getting dark. Listen, they blasted rock and dug out the earth and cut down
thousands of trees, yiss. They messed up the old lakes there in The Barrens, linked them with concrete. What are you trying to tell me?”

“We got lakes to burn, Daddy. Important places have dams and things, for Jesus sake. The fish are fading, the mines shutting down. But the Wreck Cove Hydroelectric Project, now that’s a different pig altogether.” Finlay stood up, rubbing his spine. “Look, there’s Innis himself. How’re you now?”

“I’m good, Finlay. On my way home from Father Lesperance’s, just wanted to say hello.”

“We were on about the Everlasting Barrens, way up in the Highlands,” Dan Rory said. “A maze of little roads there now, after the Project, I’d get lost myself.”

“I shot a moose up there years ago,” Finlay said. “Felt bad about it. They invite their own killing. Deer will gambol away but a moose, he’ll just keep eating, he’s that kind of animal.”

“Or charge right at you. Have you eaten moose, Innis?”

“Never had the pleasure.”

“Och, they’re a big beast. Come inside for a cold drink.”

Innis said no, he really couldn’t, Starr would pick him up on the road any minute. He idled long enough to discuss the bats flowing out the west gable of the house, dozens of them, “We don’t care, Finlay said, “they can have the attic, eat mosquitoes by the carload, you know.”

A thin moon had crept above the southern hill, up toward the power line. Innis would have preferred a darker night.

“Have you seen that sight before, Innis?” Dan Rory said, pointing his cane over Innis’s head. The sky above the mountain ridge pulsed with flickering, shadowy lights of unimaginable size, their source hidden by the mountain, their rays
wavering in the dark blue sky. A chill rushed up his back.

“No,” he said.

“Northern lights,” Finlay said. “Something to do with the polar ice, I think. I’ve seen them brighter.”

“We thought they were the breath of dead warriors,” Dan Rory said. “A long time ago.”

Innis glanced back at the tall upstairs windows already lit and that brought him down. They went to bed early, these old men. He bid them good night, leaving with an alibi, should he need one.

He jumped the ditch into the trees whenever he heard a car. He didn’t want anyone to see him walking toward the Wharf Road, not tonight. And there was a chance that the priest might be at his cottage now that the weather was turning. But no, it was dark. Captain MacQueen’s silver poplar loomed in full leaf, shadowing the little house. He was nervous, he hadn’t expected that, and so he continued on past the Captain’s garage, stopping for a dutiful look in the priest’s window. He tried the door to see if it was busted. Nope. If he got caught in the Captain’s, they wouldn’t send him away, they would put him away. But at the moment he was comfortable in his innocence, he basked in it, he was almost sorry to cash it in. I’m a good boy, Father, not a Catholic but I’m okay for the moment. Have I done anything lately bad enough for confession? I wish.

He stood on the wharf, the water beneath him slapping through the blackened timbers, their bolts and pins exposed and harsh, they’d rip a hull quick. A lively place once, a ferry back and forth, cars, people, the priest’s cottage was a thriving store. A rough stretch of water sometimes, squally seas when
the wind tore over a strong tide. He wished he had a boat and the knowhow, he’d sail her right down that strait, under the bridge and into the ocean. Ports were great places to start over, their wharfs clustered with boats. The distances here, a glance could take in miles of mountain, long sweeping looks you wouldn’t get in a city.

Telling himself it was precaution, making sure he was alone here, he plodded along the beach. A car had spun deep ruts, somebody parking for a hot session, beer bottles flung into the sand, before or after. He had not often seen cars here in the day, not in winter, except for the odd one come down for a gaze at the strait. He arced a bottle end over end into the water, a white splash in the small, steady waves. Starr could fix TVs and stereos, but there he was in a grubby old shop, a throwback, totting up bills on an adding machine you cranked, paper tape unspooling over the floor. But Starr didn’t care, it didn’t matter if people came to him only by word of mouth, that there was nothing in the window but the twisted, dusty blades of a dead aspidistra. And Starr didn’t care, no matter what he might say in his cups, to go any further than the boundaries of Cape Breton Island, and most of the time St. Aubin Island itself, tucked safely inside it, would do him. But Claire? How long would she hang around? If she was still here in the fall, the fall …

Innis cut in behind the old garage and stood listening, his back pressed against the weathered shingles. Why couldn’t a guy they called Moneybags build himself a good garage, protect that sweet machine inside? All oiled motion, that Caddy, a car that swam. Innis was shivering as he came up through the hatch and set out searching the house, moving
through it confidently now, switching the flashlight off when he passed a window. What if the man didn’t keep any keys here? Maybe someone else looked after them. But the old Captain, God bless him, had to be nothing if not neat, adept at hiding things from sight. Innis spent a little time in the obvious places, whipping drawers open and shut, rooting under linen. The flashlight flared in the glass doors of a tall cabinet. There, inside the third from the left of a nice row of brass-hook-hung mugs with different sailing ships on each, sat a nest of keys, among them two with a Cadillac logo. Yes.

Cracks and seams of moonlight scored the earthy darkness of the garage, caressing the car’s black finish. Damn, he liked that short rear deck, the classic lines. Seville. Best looker Cadillac ever made, as far he was concerned. The key slid into the lock smoothly and he laughed as he inhaled the leathery smell and eased himself behind the wheel. But the ignition switch lit nothing on the dash. Battery. Stowed. He found it on a small wall bench plugged into a trickle charger, a half-inch box wrench lying beside it for the cable nuts. Captain MacQueen, always at the ready, gear within reach. Innis dropped the battery into the engine compartment, connected the cables. Even the engine was clean. When he turned it over, the squawk of the starter seemed disturbingly loud and he sat for a while before he tried again, his heart going hard. But who would hear it? Only this house and the priest’s on the Wharf Road. The third go the engine caught, ran rough for a little and then idled quietly. He revved it but not high. Couldn’t run it for long, even in a garage peppered with holes, but he knew how smoothly it would respond on the road, how it would carry him. Tank was almost on full. Before anybody discovered
the empty garage, he could be miles away west, a few days’ driving if he slipped out of here late at night, an hour and a half and he’d be off the island, across the Strait of Canso, go all night with the radio and just enough weed to make the road interesting, stop for doughnuts and coke when the munchies hit. He’d head out across those long, half-deserted Canadian highways where you could pull over and piss in the trees and nobody’s headlights would pick you out, there would be only the silence of the endless woods and your own trickle and steam, the car idling on the shoulder, waiting to carry you as far as you wanted to go, and as you pulled away, the lights might sweep across a pulpwood road cut into the trees and it would chill you, imagining the dark woods and monotonous labor and being trapped in that kind of life. And no borders to cross but provincial ones, no cold customs officials looking him over grimly like he was a serial killer with a razor hidden in his shoe. He could ditch it maybe near Toronto, push it in a river somewhere, sell it even, cheap and quick, and start living again, city living. But he could not push his imagination into the blurry regions of this vision, he pulled back from its necessary details into the simple certainty of his plan: the plants were in the ground, growing this very minute. When the earth warmed up, they’d flourish there in the woods, flower, bring him profit. Then he could leave the way he wanted.