Cape Breton Road (35 page)

“You going down north by any chance?” she said. He was going west toward the Canso Causeway. But the Captain’s garage doors were still closed and his Cadillac behind them so far as anybody would know, and here was a girl he didn’t want to say no to.

“How far North?” Innis said.

“Ingonish, or thereabouts?” What would Ingonish cost him, an hour? It wasn’t as if there was a radio alert out for him.

“I can take you a ways.”

“Great. You could turn around and take the ferry, it’s shorter.”

“No, I’ll go around the bay. Sometimes the ferry’s a wait.”

She brought into the humid interior of the car a refreshing current, like a cool spray of water, her cheekbones red, she’d been in the sun. A long madras skirt and a short buckskin jacket stained with rain. She set her pack on her lap.

“You soaked?” Innis said, waiting for a car to pass before he took off. “I’ll turn on the heat.”

“No, no. I just got dropped off a little way back.”

The turn toward St. Anne’s came up quickly, then they were off the TransCanada, passing a lobster restaurant.

“You hungry?” he said.

“Not for that place. I’ve got fruit. You want an apple?”

“Maybe later. I’m more thirsty than anything.” He had no time to pull in there anyway, stare over coffee at the water of South Gut, a shivering smoothness after the squall, and just chat with her, talk of no consequence. She poked around in her pack and brought out a pop bottle, held it out to him uncapped.

“Water,” she said. “Here.”

His face went hot, he didn’t look at her. “I’m okay,” he said. She was talking to him but he only heard her voice. His breath was coming fast. They passed the Gaelic College, the road wound along the bay, down and up. The spring, their spring, his.

“Some bus you have here.” She ran her fingers along the dash.

“It’s not my car.”

She laughed. “What’s a cah? Are you Boston? Maine?”

“Boston. Visiting.”

“You don’t look like a tourist. Nova Scotia plates.”

“You’re not with the Mounties, are you?”

“Am I bugging you? Sorry.”

“It’s … my Uncle Angus’s. He can barely drive anymore, his eyes are bad.”

“Angus who? Where from?”

“Oh Jesus, no family trees, okay? Please? A MacNab, that’s all.”

“Sure, fine.” She muttered at her window, “Never heard of any Angus MacNab around here. Look at that pony in the rain! Poor little devil.” On a hillside field a small shaggy Shetland, head bowed, its rump to the wind. An herbal smell seemed to rise from her clothing, and of damp leather. Was Starr up?
Hungover, he’d be thirsty too, gulping water at the sink. Jesus. But it wouldn’t have arrived yet, couldn’t, not down that long hill.

“Going to see someone?” she said.

“Just driving.”

“My mother, she’s home with my aunt, and no men anymore, either of them. It’s nice when you haven’t been home for a while. It’s all easy for a day or two, smiles and love and treats of meals I like. But then she takes a long look at me, with her eye cocked just so, stitching a tear in my skirt, say, a skirt she doesn’t like on me anyway. She can’t help it. She has it in her mind I’m a hippie and won’t let go. I love it there, above the sea. I just can’t stay home anymore, not for long.”

“I want to get away too.” Acts of moral turpitude, the immigration judge had said, a hardnosed Irishman, as an alien you get only one, Mr. Corbett, two at most, and then we send you home.

“From Boston? Live up here you mean?”

“Somewhere west, a long way from here. A real city.”

“Boston not city enough? I loved it for a while, around Cambridge there, around the university. Down there most of a summer. Great music. Awful hot some days.”

He braked for a sharp turn where the road went round a cove, his mind was drifting. He wanted to put mile after mile behind him as if nothing had happened, away so far he would never hear what turned out, not even in a newspaper. But his tongue lay bitter in his mouth. A car resembling a Mountie’s flashed past in the other direction, he hadn’t noticed it coming. He picked it up in the mirror and watched it disappear in the blowing rain.

“There was a bar there we liked,” he said suddenly, “my
buddy and me, it had a submarine torpedo game, you aimed torpedos at passing ships, slow ones to fast ones. All hand/eye coordination, and we racked up scores, Ned and me, we were damn good at it. But a college kid came in one day and showed us how to beat the machine. He just held the trigger down and swung the sight from one side to the other real fast, he didn’t even aim it. Free game after free game, he ruined it. It’s easy, he said, don’t let them rip you off. But he didn’t get it. We played for the skill.” He was just yammering, filling the air that sometimes felt too thin to breathe.

“College guys,” she said. “There’s plenty they don’t know, but they don’t know that either.”

When they came out of a long valley and reached the east coast highway, Innis hesitated at the intersection. The Atlantic lay behind trees across the road. He wanted to inhale that rainy ocean light.

“When you’re past Wreck Cove,” she said, “there’s a little cemetery. Could we stop? I wouldn’t be long.”

“That’s a good bit north.”

“Not as far as Ingonish.”

“I’m in kind of a hurry. What’s your name?”

“Jessie.” She studied his face. “You’re awful pale. You okay?”

Feeling a car behind him, he turned north with a squeal of rubber. “Me, I can do without cemeteries. What’s there, relatives?”

“My dad’s there but they had to wedge him in. Sure, it’s relatives. Yourself must have a few around here, under stone.”

The old spring was ringed with stones, he’d knelt against them. “Jessie, I have to be somewhere else, I don’t have time for this place.”

“Cape Breton you mean?”

“I mean here, now.”

“What about your uncle?”

“What?”

“Angus, his car.”

“What’s the time, Jessie? How far do you live?”

“Not far.”

A white church, he couldn’t catch the name, see what saint was on the sign against the white shingles, sometimes it wasn’t a saint but he preferred them, St. Margaret’s, St. Joachim’s, St. David’s. The sea was distant through trees, then moved near the highway, a sudden broad grey, bringing gulls, throwing itself white over the rocks, reaching, falling back. It wasn’t as if Starr was lying on the kitchen floor with a knife in his heart. One glass of water wouldn’t harm him, he’d have to drink more than one. Wouldn’t he? Gallons and gallons of water in that long waterline to the house, a dollop of hemlock couldn’t be lethal, not diluted like that. Could it? And the toilet flush, and wash water, all that would go down the drain, he might never put it to his lips.

“Piece of orange?” Jessie held a section out to him on the point of a jackknife. She had quartered the orange in her lap, flicking seeds into the ashtray.

He took it in his mouth, the tart sweetness, his mouth was dry. He thought for a moment he would weep, that it might well out of him and be over, but that passed, he wasn’t even stoned. When they finished the orange, Jessie shared an apple with him, slicing it carefully and placing each piece in his mouth as he drove. He let her find music on the radio, she liked CBC classical in the morning, but today it was organ
music so doleful even she agreed it was a downer, like a rainy day in church. They passed an enormous concrete structure set into a steep hillside, gated and fenced, and beside it a road ran up into the high trees. “Wreck Cove Hydro Project, that’s the power plant there,” she said. “Looks like science fiction, doesn’t it?” “Yeah, sort of.” She mentioned a general store, they could get a bite there, a drink, but when he saw it was right on the highway, he told her he’d wait. He listened to her talk about Boston, about swimming in Waiden Pond Reservation with a boyfriend, and Innis remembered swimming there too, he and Ned Mohney, but there’d been too many people that day, even in the woods. Jessie said she liked The Garage on Boylston Street, the shops with folk art, far-out clothes, but when she came home she didn’t wear outrageous things. Innis asked her did she know the New England Aquarium, he and Mohney would get stoned and watch scuba divers feeding ocean fish in a huge tank, a real trip, more than weird to see them swim behind that glass. Jessie was quiet for a stretch and he could feel her brown eyes on him. No need for panic. Still lots of water between Starr Corbett and the spring. Small amounts moving down that line. One glass here, one glass there. A kettle. A basin. What if he took a bath?

“Jessie, could I make a call from your house? Your phone’s in the kitchen, isn’t it. Never mind. Everybody listens in.”

“Not everybody. Innis, you’re sweating.”

The little cemetery was just above the sea, on a strip bare of trees, but the narrow dirt road to it sloped downward and, parked, the car was mostly out of sight. Innis showed her the roach he’d been saving for later, and she said sure, and after they exchanged a couple hits, she took his hand and led him
down to the older stones, some with Gaelic inscriptions, the dead had been born on the Isle of Harris, of Lewis, early 1800S. Her father had a new headstone of white granite, he was the last one, the place was full, some of the original stones no more than grassy hillocks.

“In the early days,” she said, “they’d just pick a stone from the beach, one they liked, and put it over the grave.”

“I bet the sea could climb right up here sometimes.”

“High tide and wind and you’d get waves up here sure, a lot of the bank washed away over the years.”

“But nobody here is feeling the water, they don’t care,” Innis said.

“We don’t entirely know, do we, Innis.”

He pulled the telescope from his back pocket and offered it to her. She laughed.

“I’ll look for a white whale, will I?” She found a freighter, hull down in metallic glare.

“That’s where I’d like to be,” he said. “Out there, farther than any spyglass could find me.”

Huddling in the misty rain, they put an arm around each other and watched the ocean breaking loud and white beneath them. In a sandy stretch a plover on its clockwork legs buzzed back and forth, always at the heels of the shore wash. Innis turned them back toward the Caddy where he warmed her hands in his.

“Jessie, I have to split now, head back south.”

“You want to come meet my mother first? It’s only her and my auntie. They cook one hell of a meal.”

“Jesus, I would, you know. I just can’t. Can’t. Not this time.”

“What makes you think there’ll be another time?”

Innis rested his forehead on the steering wheel. “Nothing. Nothing makes me think that.”

She squeezed his hand. “Come anyway, when you’re ready. See you when I see you, then. Okay? Safe home.”

He thought of getting directions to her house, but there was no point. She assured him she’d get a ride easily, she wasn’t that far from home, but when he left her at the roadside and waved to her out the window as he turned south, he felt desolate and alone. He would have loved to go with her, he could imagine the warm kitchen, the strong tea with milk and sugar, there’d be bannock, maybe with raisins, his favorite, butter and jam, he’d just be a guest, laid back, he wouldn’t have to come up with a lot of lies, a few harmless ones would do, Jessie wouldn’t care, she wasn’t suspicious, her mother and her aunt might even like him. He overtook two cars before he calmed down, cursing softly, tears in his eyes, come on, this is stupid. So here he was driving fast for St. Aubin back toward the spring. The sun hurt, flaring off wet pavement, he’d had sunglasses somewhere. Then two things caught his eye almost simultaneously: a Mountie car with its dome light flashing, pulled onto the shoulder up ahead, and, coming up fast on his right, the looming structure of the Hydro Plant. Innis braked just enough to swerve onto the road running into the highlands, it seemed perfectly logical that he avoid that police car no matter what.

As he climbed the steep road he was aware that it followed a deep brook hidden in big maples and birches, the asphalt looked fresh, and it was easy to believe he was being hotly pursued or soon would be, that he was climbing into the Everlasting Barrens with a Mountie on his tail and he’d have
to put the Caddy to the test, do some real driving, there were other roads in and out of the Barrens, he could slip that patrol car and find his way back, but that urgency faded the higher he went: he could see wind in the foliage but an odd stillness descended over everything and he slowed down. The area felt recently abandoned, like a military site. Unearthed rock still lay about, huge pieces blown out of the landscape, but the road crossed over dams built of neatly piled rocks, in places bare earth looked newly healed. There was no person anywhere, but a little building off behind a cyclone fence, and further along on the other side of a small lake, a solitary trailer, accessible only by a causeway with a locked cyclone gate. A day’s workclothes beat like drab flags on a line strung from the trailer to a pole. Shirt, trousers, socks. Something forlorn in all that, fluttering out flat in a cold wind, the guy shut away inside the trailer by himself, his lonely stuff hanging outside, his underwear.

Innis drove on, more slowly, the asphalt gave over to graded dirt. Had Claire taken a plane off the Island, or was she driving too, on a road somewhere west? He would never find her now. He shut off the radio, no more than a murmuring hiss. Rocks had been no obstacle here, or woods. Dynamite, dust, an immense plowing. But all that was over. A strange calm, still settling. Like after a one-sided battle, everything had been buried, piled up, reconstructed. The engineers call it a flowage, Dan Rory had told him, from the old waters that were up here they had to, they said, correct the mistakes of nature. Imagine that. The way they looked at it, the engineers, there was all this water up there going to waste, running down little rivers and streams into the sea, such a waste of water, eh?
So they made these new lakes and poured concrete canals and made spillways and sluices, stepped the water down faster and harder, into Wreck Cove Tunnel, into the great turbines there. And so the power went out over the land. Not to us. Over us. That’s where it always goes. Amen.