The Hour of Bad Decisions (14 page)

The things you learn: screaming on planes, they don't like it. I was only asleep for a moment – I let my guard down.

In the dream I was cutting with a knife and smiling – I saw myself smiling. Red rooms and a deep thrum like a heart beating, but not my heart.

I phone home when I can, but I have to hold my teeth tight together to sound like myself. Sheer willpower, to make the words come out as close to normal as possible. To me, it sounds like someone else talking.

“Don't worry, everything's fine. One meeting in Seattle, and a couple of days on the coast.” Keep it light and simple – it would be easier if I had written down what I want to say, but it's hard to read my handwriting anyway – I've been keeping track of the
wake-ups I've taken, but some of my notes look like little vibrant coloured snakes. And sometimes the hairs on my legs all shiver at once, like a fairy wind, like a bug is crawling up towards my knee. I slap at my legs absentmindedly, before I realize what I'm doing.

“Will you be back for David's birthday?” Anne sounds like she's been crying: her voice is thin and dry, and it wavers from word to word.

A sharp pain, that. Birthdays – remembering David's face at seven, watching the wonder of him open presents at two. The image is as strong as if he were toddling along right there in front, a vivid colour slide show of a tiny perfect boy. As clear as if it were happening right then – I'm sure my eyes are open, and I'm sure I'm still staring at the back of the phone booth. He toddles towards me, clutching a stuffed Big Bird, his hair the bright platinum curls it was until he turned three. So clear that I could almost talk to him. But he's thirteen now, fourteen in three or four days.

“Of course I will.”

I think I left my luggage at the airport, either that or it was stolen from the trunk of the rental. I don't remember getting it back, but I'm not sure where they take it when you just leave the flight. I'm thrown off the plane in Calgary before they can even close the doors, and I can see from the anxious faces of other passengers that they're glad to see me go.

Getting another rental car is easy, because the computer's in the way and she can't really see my
face. My face like steel now, because I can't stop grinding my teeth, like rolling a fistful of marbles together in your pocket so that they grind with a vibration that is almost a noise. Almost a colour, really, a sheet of white with curved vertical black lines. I can find cards in my wallet, the plastic necessities. Driver's licence, visa card, “here are your keys,” and out to the lot for a mid-size, burgundy this time, and I try putting the seat all the way back – just in case – put it up again and all the way back, looking at the dome light and the fabric of the inside of the roof, and when I sit up again, the lot attendant is staring at me, and I wonder what he's heard. When he picks up the phone, I wonder who he's calling, so I turn the key, put the car into drive, and whip out of the lot so fast that I almost nudge a pile of luggage two cars down. The radio searches for its own stations, so I turn it up as loud as I can. Power windows. I open them all. The air rolls in my ears like shallow thunder.

Getting out of Calgary is hard, the houses all look like teeth in a big head, all cream-coloured and virtually identical. The problem with coffee is that you piss almost as much as you drink, and I'm pissing on tangles of wildflowers, small blue nodding ones on long blue-green stalks, on small daisies and yellow flowers – bright little suns – that I've never seen before. Down below me is a driving range, and I can't tell if the green is unusually speckled with odd round flowers, or whether the golfers have buckets of yellow golf balls. That's funny, too, and I piss for hours.

Then I lose a day – a whole day, only it's night again and I'm still driving. I should have warning lights on the car, like those “Wide Load” banners, front and back. “Danger – Sleepless Driver,” and somewhere I've crossed the border. It's funny: I can think of the border guard's hat, the pole-barricade, and that he asks a lot of questions – but I can't remember the questions, or what I say. There are other flashes – a firetruck screams past me, going the other way, and I see a firefighter in the jumpseat, facing backwards, driving towards danger, looking bored.

Sometimes it's the interstate, wide and straight and surrounded by heavy trucks, and sometimes smaller roads, trees right up to the shoulder and looming. Can't decide which I like better. On the big roads, the trucks passing make me twitch and lurch suddenly towards the shoulder. It's like finding someone right behind you, whispering in your ear, when you didn't know they were there. On the small roads – too close to the centre line, always, sometimes across it all at once because you can't help but feel you're being pulled into the ditch. Can't decide – drop the cups over the seat into the back, or pitch them out the window. Giggling uncontrollably at that. Bought a whole pie somewhere – half of it is on the passenger seat, no seatbelt. Not much of a conversationalist, though. It's depressed – it's blue. It's blueberry. Christ, that's funny. My fingers are stained blue – must not have bought a fork.

I'm doing well, though. Haven't slept yet. No dreams to speak of. Sometimes the shapes of stuff on
the side of the road turn out to be something else once I get closer, but that's only sort of like dreaming.

Wind up at a highway motel in Washington State. I rent a room and abandon the rental car out among a forest of semi-trucks, some of them with engines grumbling, lights still on. It's a motel built around a big gas station, bright and all lit up like a spaceship landed here on the highway, and it's sucking people in like some kind of big ant-trap, baited with huge clean bathrooms and fresh coffee. There are shower stalls and even bunks and there are truckers everywhere, wolfing down bacon and eggs at three o'clock in the morning, snoring, shaving in the sinks. It's like they live on a different clock, but so do I. I have my own clock; it's just hard to read the numbers.

I have a room near the reefer trucks, the noise of their refrigeration units a drone like big sleepy bees, a noise that swallows up other noises and leaves the night empty.

The mini-fridge has four kinds of beer – I make coffee.

I must have left the door unlocked, and there's someone using my bathroom. I thought it was locked, but I'm drifting in and out. The person comes out of my bathroom, and sits across from me in chair, just like that, as comfortably and easily as if she belongs there.

It's a woman – a small, thin woman, but pretty in a fragile kind of way, dark hair cut close to her face. Addict-pretty: high thin cheekbones cut her face the
way rocks sheer, abrupt and all along one clear fault line. She says her name is Lisa.

“They call us lot lizards,” Lisa says, and I don't know what that means. It must show in my face.

“I turn tricks with truckers. For money, for drugs. For a room for the night.”

And she sits down on the bed next to me. Her sequins shine red in the light that comes through the blinds – sequined tube-top over small, high breasts – and I think of hummingbirds, especially ruby throats. I tell her that I am dangerous, that I don't know what will happen.

And she laughs. Peals of laughter: laughing the way that gives you hiccups or makes you want to throw up.

“I know dangerous,” she says finally, “and you're just not it.”

We agree that she can sleep in the bathtub with all the spare pillows and the blanket from the closet. She's a tiny thing, shorter than the tub, and she says she's used to a lot worse that that.

“Just pull the shower curtain if you have to have a piss,” she says.

“Yeah, I wouldn't want to embarrass you…”

She laughs again. “It wouldn't be me that was embarrassed,” she says. “You haven't got anything I haven't seen.”

Disarming how someone so small can take such quick control. She has sharp white teeth and a pronounced underbite – pretty, but she also looks somehow feral.

I tell her about the dreams and her eyes are wide for a moment, and then she nods, like she's hearing about a particularly familiar disease.

“I dream about slitting throats,” she says. “About giving some trucker head and then cutting off his dick with a straight razor while he's still hard, saying to him, ‘How's that, then?

“But I haven't done it yet.” She smiles. Pretty girl.

“Dreamt about lots worse than that,” she says, shrugging. “But they go away. Just dreams.” Sometimes her face looks much older – as if she's focusing on something just ahead of her eyes that I can't see. I've run out of wakeups – threw the last empty box out when I rented the room. And suddenly it's like my head is full of molasses. There are still thoughts in there, but each part of them has to pull out of the soft ground in my head, making a sucking sound like boots in wet soil. My vision goes flat, into two dimensions, so that Lisa's face is like a panel in a comic strip. My eyes are crossing.

We're sitting on the bed then, and she pushes me backwards towards the pillow with both hands, so hard that I feel the imprint of her hands long after she's taken them away.

There's someone I should really call, I think, my head filling with black. Someone I should call, so they know I'm all right, so they know where I am.

“You'll sleep,” she says, her voice close to my ear and urgent, and my eyes close hopefully, almost a reflex, believing she's right. And I do slip away, faster after the pinprick inside my arm.

Just before drifting off, I try to tell her about Anne and the kids, about what I am trying to do, but my tongue feels so thick, pressed against my teeth and refusing to form any words at all. No one is really listening, because I'm not really talking, it's just that my brain is making shapes like words that don't go anywhere, they just run around the inside of my head, thudding into the surrounding skull and then sliding down into a pool somewhere near my neck. She's holding my left hand, sliding off my watch, my wedding ring. But my arms are like dead weights, and I can't imagine she can hold even one up for very long.

I wake up again later, and she is filling a syringe with liquid from a saucer on the table – “We'll share,” she says – and then I sleep again.

H
E LOST THE FIRST TWO FINGERS RIGHT AT
the knuckle – the index and middle fingers on his right hand – in the chattering chain drive that carried half-made, tapping hardwood chairs around the plant.

Another one, he lost later.

He was holding the chain, putting a chair on its hook after attaching the legs to the seat, when his fingers caught.

And he probably would have kept both fingers if he hadn't lost his balance at the same time in the loose shavings, slipping the clutch and popping the chain back into gear. Lying on his side on the floor as the bright blood sprayed over the loose curls of maple and birch, he half-saw the fingers as they juddered away, bunched together in the greased chain. He lost sight of them forever when the chain rolled over the
first spindle, although he saw that last chair travel all the way to the varnishing station.

A handful of brand-new chairs there, lined up as if ready for a children's game, but sticky with varnish so no one could sit on them.

The chair plant was almost a hundred years old, a long, leaning one-storey structure held up by rough-hewn timbers inside and covered with greyed shingles outside. It was bunkered between huge piles of sawdust and shavings that the company burned in the boiler in winter for heat, but the shavings piles always grew, supply outstripping demand, and occasionally the plant workers would be treated to hot, smoky fires in the yards that huffed like giant's breath and were started by spontaneous combustion deep within the heaps.

Then the loaders would turn the shavings and dust as if tending God's compost, and the company would pump hundreds of gallons of water up from the slowly-curling river to put the smouldering blazes out.

The same loaders brought the dry maple and birch logs to the front of the plant, where they were cut and planed and spun on lathes, getting ready for the chair assembly.

At the end of the chain line, near the loading dock, the company's name, Black Rock Furniture, was branded into the bottoms of the chairs, and the smoke rushed fast and dangerous from the hot iron and the charring wood. Fine sawdust covered all the equipment like flour, sifting down into the cracks on the floor and crusting up his nostrils, and the workers,
mindful of the risk of more dangerous, explosive fires, had to have their smoke breaks outside where the gravel road widened to let the 18-wheelers turn around and back into the loading dock.

They smoked looking across the Gaspereaux River, a low, flat, rocky river whose flow was determined by the distant hydro dam that provided power for the chair plant.

In summer, the air hung low and still, and the cows moved slowly up and down the sloping pasture on both sides of the river. Higher up the hills were the hardwood stands, silver-sided and grey maple and paper birch, and the stands ran back across North Mountain, past the single-wide house trailers at the ends of the woods roads, past forgotten, hard-scrabble orchards doomed to fail, past the grey-sided woods camps bleached by the sun.

Finally it was just solid hardwood and the curious white-tailed deer, easily-startled grouse and hares, and paths that led nowhere.

When David Hennessey came back to work, the two blind knuckles made him something of a celebrity, even though, when he was among people he didn't know – like when the labour inspectors came to ask him about the accident – he would hold his hand in a fist out of sight behind his leg or pushed deep in his trouser pocket.

And that celebrity was an unexpected surprise.

Small incidents from the past had always made Hennessey feel like an outsider, like the way that, on the loading dock, the two guys who worked without
shirts in the summer – Bill Roundtree and the always-spitting Lorne Boutellier – pushed by him roughly when he stood in the open doorway on his break looking at the water. Pushed by, and looked at him hard from the corners of their eyes, as if daring him to start something they would love to finish, just for the novelty. Boutellier had broken someone's nose for the first time when he was in grade nine: that was also the last year he had gone to school in nearby Gaspereaux.