Caught (18 page)

The train station was a fifteen-minute walk from the room Slaney had rented.

The man at the ticket booth asked for his identification. Slaney slid his passport under the glass and the man frowned at the picture and raised his droopy eyelids to look at Slaney and slid the passport back to him. Then he wrote out a ticket to Vancouver and slid that through too.

Slaney tried to call Hearn and the phone rang and rang. Hearn had probably gone to his classes. Slaney sat down to wait and got up at once and wandered out on the platform and paced a bit and sat down on a bench with the suitcase between his knees. The heat of the day was already building and some broken beer bottles between the rails glittered and shone.

He could not think of Jennifer. Her hands tightening her ponytail, the washer surging and rattling under them. She had held on tight to him, her legs crossed behind his back. They had hardly even undressed. His jeans around his knees, the change from his pocket spinning and bouncing on the floor. His mother’s engagement ring had fallen out with the change. When Jennifer turned to open the door he lifted the lid of the washer a little and dropped the ring into the churning water. He wanted her to have it. He wanted her to remember him.

He thought about what he had done to her. He’d left her, is what happened. How do I put this, David. That’s what she’d said. But she meant he had made the choice, and he hadn’t chosen her. He hadn’t taken her up on the offer. She meant: And now it really is over, there is no going back.

The trip was starting; it was really starting now. He was shocked by the desire he felt to meet up with Hearn, give him a couple of fake punches to the belly,
pow-pow
. Get stoned with him. Just be with him, carousing. Slaney wanted to carouse. He wanted to tell Hearn about his heart. His heart was hurting in his chest as if he’d run a great distance. They say a broken heart, but it felt more like a tear or puncture. It hurt when he breathed, or even when he was thinking about something else. The pain could well up out of nowhere and surprise him.

There was a couple making out farther down the platform. The girl had on a long crushed-velvet coat with fake fur trim and a red tube top and denim miniskirt. The coat was slipping off her shoulders and she was wearing white go-go boots and her leg was hooked over the guy’s hip and his hand was disappearing under the hem of her little skirt.

An elderly black man with a briefcase sat down beside Slaney. He was reading a library book and the plastic cover made a crinkling noise every time he turned the page.

Slaney took the passport out and flicked through it again.

Good book? Slaney asked. The man grunted in the affirmative without looking up.

Slaney beat out a tune on the edge of the suitcase. The black man with the book licked the side of his thumb and turned the page and then he looked into Slaney’s eyes and then very purposefully at Slaney’s drumming hands and Slaney stopped drumming. The man returned to his book.

There was a security guard who appeared to be snoozing on a chair in the meagre shade of a potted tree.

Then the train horn, a shrill hoot in the distance, and a deep, earthy rumbling. The amber lights in the station flashed on and off and the long, silver-sided blaze of train poured like a viscous liquid into the platform, the deafening squeal of brakes and engine hiss-huff, a steady clang of oiled metal and grind and the hoo-hooing.

Slaney tried to pretend he was not the name he had taken on but he had committed an act of black magic in that graveyard. He thought of the guy covered in flour, looking like he’d walked through his own private snowstorm, a narrow slice of winter gale in all the still morning heat. The name haunted Slaney. He was being possessed by it, overtaken.

He boarded the train and found his seat and they were maybe an hour out of the station when a man passed down the aisle to the bathrooms, moving with the sway and rattle, and Slaney thought familiar. But he could not place him. The guy went back and forth three times, and he took each opportunity to look Slaney up and down, lingering on the last trip.

Slaney turned his face into the crack of the armrest pretending to be asleep and at the next stop he grabbed his suitcase and jumped off the train.

He saw the guy in the window searching for him, his forehead a flat white spot where he rested it on the glass and the reflection of the rusted-out freight trains on the tracks opposite sliding all over him.

The guy saw him and waved frantically, gave him a thumbs-up.

Joe Murphy. He went to Gonzaga, a year behind Slaney. Geraldine Murphy’s brother. Geraldine Murphy played tennis. Slaney had kissed her a few times when he was thirteen, a game of spin-the-bottle, then he blew all his paper route money on her, a little red transistor radio. She never spoke to him again. Murphys from the South Side.

Joe Murphy was a math whiz everybody said was destined for the priesthood. A little touch of home. It pierced him through and through. Slaney’s stomach turned to water. He couldn’t go back to the train station a second time — somebody would notice. He picked up the suitcase and started walking for the highway.

Alberta

There was the
endless drive through Ontario, all glittering lakes and foliage and bland sunshine, and the sudden baked flatness of the prairies.

The truck that picked him up outside Winnipeg was carrying a thousand chickens. The driver had pulled over and when Slaney got in, the man was holding a pair of glasses out at arm’s length, frowning at the lenses. Then he handed them to Slaney.

Slaney breathed on the lenses and rubbed them in his shirttail. They were bifocals. He could feel the ridge of thickened glass with his thumb. He held them up and saw the rows of harshly yellow canola on the opposite side of the road, crisp and straight in the top half of the lenses, and below the ridge, the same flowers were magnified so they became a wind-ruffled blur of colour. He passed the glasses back to the truck driver.

The driver put them on and his mouth was solemn and judging. He pressed the bridge of the glasses up his nose, and then he lifted his chin to glance out through the bottom half. He turned to examine Slaney.

The ridge of the bifocals fell exactly halfway across the man’s eyes, magnifying the bottom half; the brown irises were vulnerable and watery. There was a bright crimson dot in the left iris, just below the pupil. The pouches beneath the man’s eyes were veined with violet lines and pressed upon by the black frames; in the top hemisphere, above the ridge of thickened glass, the irises were sharp and calculating.

The two men looked at each other and then they became aware of looking at each other and both turned back to face the road, embarrassed.

The trucker stared forward then, as if memorizing what was out there, and he took off the glasses and put them back in the case and tossed the case out the open window.

Jesus things, the man said. They belonged to my mother.

There was a spill of 8-tracks at Slaney’s feet and the man waved at them.

Slaney picked up one and it turned out to be Johnny Cash. The machine pulled the tape slowly inside itself and the metal flap flopped down and it pushed the tape halfway out and then drew it back in. There was a dragging whir and hiss and then Johnny Cash sang about a burning ring of fire.

For a time the trucker sang along with the tape. He sang about flames as though he had come through them and he had an authority when it came to the subject.

You got some set of pipes, Slaney said.

You like that? the man asked, grinding down the gears.

They drove for an hour and all at once the sky got dark and the trucker cleared his throat. He said: I believe we’re in for some weather.

The darkness seemed to charge across the prairie toward them, deepening as it came.

The yellow of the canola drained away. The bottoms of clouds were charcoal and smoke gold and the rain lashed the grass.

Slaney was hungry and it was close in the cab with the pine-tree air freshener and this driver had on a cologne and Slaney wanted to crack the window.

There were, at first, only two splats, the size of quarters, on the giant windshield and they trembled like things with a consciousness, things trying to hold together against a terrible force of entropy, and then they ran sideways and a drumming began on the roof and the world.

The trucker said there was a bunk if Slaney wanted to sleep.

Why don’t you crawl in back there, the trucker said. Get yourself some shut-eye.

You don’t need the company? Slaney asked. To keep you awake?

I’m good until breakfast, the man said.

Slaney woke when the truck pulled into the parking lot of a diner.

The driver told him they were in Alberta. The sun was a red ball hovering over the lettering on the window that said
BLACKFOOT CAFÉ
.

They walked across the steaming lot and as they got closer Slaney could see the white blouse of the waitress passing through the reflection of the sun and the place was packed and noisy and warm when they got inside, smelling of bacon and burnt coffee.

The trucker found them a table and the waitress came over and asked what they wanted.

Bacon and eggs, the trucker said.

Will you have toast? she asked.

I want a stack yay-high, he said.

Coffee?

That coffee fresh? the trucker asked.

Fresh since yesterday, she said.

I’ll have some of that, he said. The waitress turned over the driver’s cup and it chinked against the saucer and she poured. She wore sneakers with white tennis socks, a cotton bobble on each heel, and her hair was grey and mashed down in a fine net.

The driver rubbed his hands together, picked up his butter knife, and for a brief second drew his top lip back from his gums, checking his teeth in the reflection of the blade.

The teeth dropped, all of a piece, and slid wetly away from his lips, hanging, detached and gleaming, out of his mouth. The driver, absent and alert, watched the collapse of his face in the knife blade, and there was a hiss of saliva and the bridge popped back as if nothing had happened. The waitress, digging her pad out of her apron pocket, had missed the trucker’s false teeth.

She turned over Slaney’s cup and asked him what he wanted to eat.

I’m not hungry, thank you, ma’am, Slaney said.

A growing boy, she said.

Just the coffee, thank you, Slaney said.

Call me Lorraine, the waitress said.

Bring him same as me, Lorraine, the trucker said.

Just coffee, Slaney said.

Same as me, Lorraine, the trucker said.

Over easy?

I sure hope something is easy around here, the trucker said. He was seized with a quaking spasm. One of his fists raised and jiggling near his chest, the other hand slapping the table three times.

Aren’t you the saucy one, she said.

Don’t be shy with the bacon, Lorraine.

A police car pulled up into the parking lot and the cop just sat inside it. Slaney looked for the back exits. There was a hallway with a sign over it that said
NO ADMITTANCE
. He wondered if there’d be a window or door back there.

After about five minutes another cop car pulled up alongside the first. Slaney watched as the cops got out of their cars, one of them leaning on his door. They both looked at the window of the diner and they spoke to each other at length.

When the cops came into the café the bell tinkled and the screen door hitched against the frame and jostled and then it clapped shut. They looked around the diner and then sat at the counter on the swivel stools and the waitress poured them each a coffee.

It’s getting hot out there already, the cop said.

We’re having a stretch of it, Lorraine said. She brought Slaney and the trucker fried eggs and bacon on thick white plates. Slaney cut the egg in half and folded it over and jabbed the fork into it. Then he took a triangle of toast and wiped it over the spilled yolk and folded that and ate it too.

The waitress came back with more coffee and the trucker told her about a hydraulic lift he had installed in front of his house going up the five steps to the porch.

Slaney kept his eye on the cops. He watched them and strained to hear what they were saying. They had walkie-talkies on their belts that hissed white noise. But they hardly spoke to each other. They were intent on the meals they’d ordered. Slaney could understand the first cop, but why had the second one shown up?

He looked out the window. There was a thin bank of trees, mostly skinny birch, the white trunks like bones, and the leaves so green they seemed lit up and the branches were trembling hard with the breeze. Beyond, fields in every direction. He realized he had slept most of the drive and had no idea where he was, except that he was somewhere in Alberta, which seemed as vast and flat as the rest of the prairie, without so much as a shadow to hide under.

This was for Mother’s wheelchair, installed to the tune of several hundred dollars, the trucker was saying. It was installed only a couple of weeks and she had to be moved to an old age home. I couldn’t take care of her no more.

I’ve heard of them lifts, the waitress said.

Both the cops had swivelled around and they were surveying the dining room and they swivelled back and continued with their food.

We never used it no more than a few occasions.

I’d say she enjoyed the ride, Lorraine answered.

Happy as a clam, he said.

You can tell what a man is made of by the way he treats his mother.

She’s no more than a feather now, he said. Wheelchair and all. I could lift her up with one hand if she required it.

Gone away to nothing, Lorraine asked.

She’s not all there, either, the trucker said.

I’ve got one like that at the house, the waitress said.

When Slaney was done he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and scrunched it in his fist and dropped it onto the table and balanced on the two back legs of his chair, his hands linked behind his head. He nearly tipped over so he dropped back down.

Thank you, sir, he said.