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Authors: Peter Behrens

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BOOK: Travelling Light
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“Let me speak to her,” Mr. Heaney said.

Alix handed him the receiver and went back to the stove and tried to adjust the flame beneath the coffee pot. The pilot had gone out. As she struck a match and held it to the pilot she noticed her hands were trembling.

Mr. Heaney covered the receiver and said, “Give Mike a shout, would you? He must be out of the shower by now.”

Alix walked slowly to the front of the house. She glanced into the living room, which had been redecorated over the winter. She had studied hundreds of fabric swatches and paint chips, determined to get the room exactly as she had always wanted it. Walls and carpets were pale grey and the furniture was upholstered in heavy Irish linen. She could hardly remember what it had looked like before the renovation. On the ninth anniversary of Bobby's death her husband had suffered his heart attack lying on the old sofa. She'd knelt beside him, loosened his collar, and kissed his hands. Her gesture had frightened him and he'd pulled his hands away.

Michael heard the phone ringing as he stepped from the shower. Towelling his hair, he went to his bedroom and started getting dressed. From the window he could see his car out in the driveway. He studied it for a moment, pleased with the way the paint gleamed, then he sat down on the corner of his bed. In the shower it had occurred to him that maybe he was being born now, this morning, this actual hour. He let the feeling soak in further as he sat on the bed. How great
—
if he could only believe in it. If only he could trust that it was, in some sense, true.

His mother knocked on the door. “California on the phone!”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll take it in your room.”

As he passed his mother he deftly kissed her cheek. In his parents' bedroom he picked up the bedside phone. He intended to tell his sister about his plan to visit the glaciers but before he could mention it their father was back on the line. He began asking Clare about her pregnancy. Mike said goodbye and went back to his own room.

It had once been Bobby's room and, in some indefinable way, still was. Anyway, it had never felt to him like
his
room.

Sometimes he wondered if his brother would have been as large a presence in their lives if he were still alive. Bobby had become something more than a person, but no one could give a name to what he actually was.

Gathering up a few last things, he stuffed them into a small backpack. He had already decided to skip the goodbyes if he could get away without them. He would spare his parents all the emotion and just slide away. That would be easiest on everyone, especially his mother.

He silently went down the hallway carrying his shoes, then down a set of back stairs they called the servants' way, though they'd never had servants, except burly old Mme Poliquin, who came once a week to clean the house. His sisters used to sneak up the servants' way coming home late from a date. Maybe Bobby had too
—
Mike couldn't remember. The stairs led down to the basement and a door that opened to the driveway. As he was going down the stairs he could hear his father on the kitchen phone still talking to California.

It was early enough so that the driveway was still shaded and the air almost blue. He'd polished and waxed his car and in the morning light it shone the same blood red as the tulips in the flowerbeds.

He unlocked the driver's door, eased it open. Tossing in his shoes and backpack, he slid behind the wheel. Then he released the parking brake and pushed out the clutch and the car started rolling silently towards the street. A neighbour getting into his own car across the street waved and Mike waved back. The neighbour looked surprised.

Michael turned the key and the engine fired. He suddenly felt an urge to roll down the window and yell to his parents, or to the house
—
yell something spirited, and reassuring, but he couldn't think what. He could smell fresh exhaust jetting from his tailpipes, moist and sweet and promising, and he let in the clutch and drove away.

That night Mike slept on the ground beside a lake in northern Ontario. He'd meant to phone home from a gas station but forgot about it while paying for the gas and only remembered as he was unrolling his sleeping bag and swatting mosquitoes. And by then the last payphone was probably twenty miles back.

Alix finally went to bed at midnight and dreamed the house was destroyed and nothing was left but a pile of empty glass bottles.

And Mr. Heaney sat in the kitchen with a shining glass of whisky, neat, wondering if his dead father and himself and his dead son were in some ways the same person. The dead were joined to the living. They would always be powerfully connected. Or was that just hocus-pocus?

His throat narrowed and for a few seconds he felt very close to tears. But instead of giving in, which would have been weak and pointless, he sat up straight, poured another finger of golden whisky, then raised his glass and took a sip.

AWAY

INTERSTATE
HEAVEN

“I hate this stuff,” said Olsen, the younger of the brothers, maybe nineteen.

I was in a coffee shop at Elko, Nevada, with two brothers who had picked me up out in the desert. On the table between us was a bowl with little plastic tubs of coffee creamer, and Olsen was reading the label on one of the tubs.

“‘Non-dairy product,' that's what it says. Cancer for sure.”

“Quit your complaining,” said Timothy. He was maybe twenty-one.

“Would you drink this stuff, professor?” Olsen said.

“I have in the past,” I told him. “But no, I don't think so.”

Olsen was looking around for the waitress. “Where's the bitch?”

“Leave her be,” said Timothy. He stirred his coffee and began scribbling lines on a napkin. He had told me he was a poet. While he jotted what could have been verses, his pencil point kept making gashes in the soft, fibrous paper. He tore the lid off a creamer and a jet of the milky white gunk hit his brother on the chin.

“Bastard!” Olsen jerked a napkin from the steel container and wiped himself furiously. He needed a shave, and the paper made a rasping sound.

“Sorry,” said Timothy, laughing. “But hey, it was an accident.”

The manager, behind the cash, squinted at us. The waitress with green eyes came over to stand by our table, her hip cocked, balancing a tray and a plastic coffee pot.

“Refill?”

“Yes,” I said. “Please.”

“Fuck you, toots,” Olsen said, crumpling the napkin and throwing it at her feet.

“Shut your mouth,” said Timothy.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“Don't tell me to shut up, big brother,” said Olsen, clutching his mug. I noticed the star-shaped earring in his left ear.

“I'd be happy to shut it for you,” said Timothy.

They had been working in the oilfields of Wyoming and were headed home to California, they said. I could imagine the brawls Timothy had fought and won in the oilfields over the writing of poetry. His writing, he said, was all about young women. He wrote at night and made Olsen sleep in a tent outside their trailer.

Timothy suddenly broke the pencil in half and dropped both halves into his brother's coffee mug. Olsen shoved the mug across the table and it slid off the edge and broke on the floor. I could see the manager coming around from behind the cash. Timothy reached over and wrapped his hands around his brother's throat. The manager pushed the green-eyed waitress out of the way and pointed a pistol at my heart.

“Get out of my place,” he said. “Get out right now.”

“Let's get out of here,” I told the brothers. “I'll pay for the coffee.”

I laid money on the table and followed them towards the door. The manager trailed me, occasionally poking my shoulder with the pistol. Looking back, I saw the waitress starting to clear off the table. I was about to wave to her but knew the gesture might be misread, so I just followed the brothers out into the colourless daylight. As soon as we were outside Olsen kicked over the
USA
Today
vending machine. The manager rapped on the plate-glass window with his pistol. Olsen whirled around and ripped open his shirt. The buttons went skittering. “Do it to me then, big man!” he screamed, thrusting out his bare white chest.

From the other side of the glass the manager just stared.

Olsen cackled. “What a chickenshit, what a big fat slice of bird pie!”

A lot of the desert was military test range. As we walked towards the brothers' white Falcon, a flock of fighters came in quickly, dropping from the sky like stones. “F-16s!” Timothy shouted. The brothers began shouting and waving as the jets swept overhead. Timothy aimed both index fingers and made machine-gunning noises and Olsen whooped like an epileptic Comanche, pulling pins from imaginary hand grenades and lobbing them skywards. The jets swiftly disappeared, leaving contrails like white claw marks on the sky. The noise faded until it was lost in the pell of traffic from the interstate.

Timothy held open the driver's-side door and I scrambled into the back seat. Timothy got behind the wheel. Olsen stood on the passenger side, drumming his fingers on the roof.

“You want to walk to California?” Timothy said.

Olsen leaned down to address his brother through the open window. “Your wife's a whore. The only home you'll ever have is a trailer at Rock Springs.”

Timothy hardened as if a piece of wire had been inserted into his body. His neck became stiff and his head cocked aggressively, like a large fist.

“Your mind's a slave,” Olsen said.

Timothy jumped out, walked around quickly, and threw open the trunk. He lifted something out and slammed the lid. I saw him holding a canvas seabag. Olsen stopped his drumming on the roof. Timothy whirled the bag around his head a few times, then flung it as far as he could. It landed on the asphalt twenty yards away. Jingling keys, Timothy got behind the wheel, slammed his door, and fired up the engine. Olsen reached in through the window and pulled an automatic pistol from under the passenger seat. I saw his earring sparkle. Timothy reached over, rolled up the passenger window, and locked the door. Olsen started banging on the window with the pistol butt. He began moving around the car, striking the fenders with the pistol.

“Let's get out of here,” I said.

“Hold your horses, professor.” Timothy shifted into reverse and the Falcon rocked backwards, grazing Olsen, who barely had time to skip out of the way. We began chasing him across the parking lot. He dodged and twisted like a matador. He managed to get behind the car and break the taillights. Timothy went into reverse again and backed up over the seabag. Olsen leapt onto the hood and started banging on the windshield with his pistol. Timothy jerked and swerved, trying to shake him off the car, but he held on by clutching the stem of a windshield wiper. Timothy slammed on the brakes and he tumbled off, landing on hands and knees on the asphalt.

We started driving away. I looked back and saw Olsen scrambling to his feet. He crouched and took aim, gripping the pistol with both hands just like a policeman in a movie. I saw the pistol buck and flame but didn't hear the shots. Timothy hit the gas and we went screeching out of the parking lot, bouncing over the curb and thrusting into the hectic traffic on the boulevard.

I could see the big green sign for the I-80 but at the last moment Timothy changed his mind, and instead of joining the entrance lane we stayed on the overpass. On the other side of the interstate the boulevard was immediately narrower and dustier, lined with furniture stores, auto-supply stores, churches, gun shops. At the first big intersection Timothy made a U-turn, and I knew we were heading back to the parking lot and Olsen. Timothy said now I would have something to write about. I imagined him in the library of a great university, poring over all the wrong books, noting their wrongheaded anti-wisdom in a ledger he'd keep tucked inside his shirt.

We passed over the interstate once again. Up ahead I saw Olsen hiking alongside the road, seabag on his shoulder, pausing only to stick out his thumb. We passed him and made a U-turn, then passed him again, then pulled over. As Olsen approached the car Timothy reached over and unlocked the passenger door.

Olsen got in.

“Don't ever put a fucking piece in my car without telling me,” said Timothy.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said his brother, twisting around to drop his seabag on the back seat beside me. “Let's get out of here.”

“I mean it.”

“I heard you the first time,” said Olsen.

Between Winnemucca and Reno the Falcon blew a front tire. Timothy wrestled the car to the shoulder and we all got out. Timothy opened the trunk and dragged out the jack and the spare. They both took off their shirts. The same eagle tattoo was scribed on both their backs. They knew how to use tools and worked fast, wrenching off the shredded tire. While they were fitting on the spare I saw my backpack nestled in the trunk. I decided I would grab it, dash across the interstate, and try hitching another ride. It didn't matter if I was going in the wrong direction: I needed to get away from these two. Olsen was torquing lug nuts. Timothy was cranking down the jack.

As I reached for my pack I heard a rustling. Looking up, I saw a pair of needle-shaped fighters. As I watched they launched missiles from their wings, and I watched the missiles trace incisions on the sky.

LYLE

Jerry watched his father dashing his horse around in the corral muck, cutting out the animals he wanted, running them through the gate Jerry held open.

At noon Jerry's mother called them in for dinner. He ate lentil soup while his parents listened to the livestock report on
CKRD
Red Deer. His parents loved listening to the radio. His mother had it on in the house all day and his father kept a Japanese transistor radio in the barn. They loved rock and roll. They had met at a high school dance in Caroline and married a week after graduation. Late at night they sometimes danced with each other in the kitchen. They liked to jitterbug. His father whirled his mother around until she gave a little scream. Then he would release her and let her spin away, catching her hand at the last second. He'd pull her towards him and lift her off the floor while Jerry watched, feeling curious, and embarrassed.

The soup had a burnt flavour, a bit like the smell at branding but not nearly so strong. “Hell smells like branding,” Lyle had once said.

Jerry picked up his bowl and was about to drink the rest of his soup when his mother noticed. “Jaroslaw! I don't make soup so you can drink it like Coca-Cola!”

Jerry picked up his spoon and at the same instant heard the sound of a car turning into the yard. “Cunninghams are here,” he announced.

His father, a compact, wiry man with dirty blond hair and sideburns — his nickname in high school had been Jimmy
,
short for Jimmy Dean
—
went to peer out the window.

Jack Cunningham was an old rodeo cowboy who came in spring to help with branding and stayed on for the summer work. He had a wife and four kids. They stayed from May through October in a cabin on the riverbank quarter. Lyle, Jack's son, claimed that they wintered in the Rockies, camping with Indians on the Kootenay Plains. He said that Indians had taught him to change himself into an animal and that once he'd been a timber wolf, dragging kids and hunters back to his cave.

Jerry's father took his hat and stiff new jacket from the peg and reached outside for his boots.

“She'll want to come in and use the flush toilet,” said his mother, wiping her hands on her apron. “Tell her she can use the privy behind the barn.”

“Coming, Jerry?” said his father.

Jerry leapt up from the table and grabbed his jacket.

“I don't want him making friends with that Lyle again,” his mother said. “And wait! Hold your horses, mister. Finish your soup.”

The car was stopped in front of the corrals. It seemed to be riding low on its springs. Jack Cunningham leaned against one fender. The car was streaked with mud and the windows were rolled up tight. Mrs. Cunningham sat in the front seat, wearing a kerchief over her hair and a red nylon windbreaker. She rapped on the windshield and Jerry's father tipped his hat.

While the men lit cigarettes Jerry peered into the back seat. The twins, Sheryl and Sharlene, were sitting next to the windows, big, waxy-looking blonde girls wearing eyeshadow. One of them made a face at him. Lyle and Wayne were squeezed between their sisters, sitting very still. Both boys were small for their ages, and small-boned. Lyle held a yellow mongrel pup on his knee and pretended not to notice Jerry. Both boys' heads had been shaved.

The year before, Lyle had tried walking a perfectly straight line across the ranch: across the pastures, over the fences, through the plowed fields. He made Jerry follow him and wouldn't allow them any detours. If a tree stood in their path they'd have to climb up and over it rather than step aside a few inches. He'd insisted they climb straight over the barbed-wire fences instead of looking for a good spot to crawl under. Jerry had torn his jeans and cut his hands painfully trying to get over a stretch of tight, taut wire.

Wayne's eyes followed Jerry but Lyle was still pretending not to see him. Their fathers' voices droned on. The dog nosed up to lick Lyle's chin and Lyle began scratching its ears. One of the girls grabbed his wrist and tried to press it back on the seat. They struggled for a moment, then Lyle punched her thigh. The dog started yapping and Mrs. Cunningham twisted around in the front seat and slapped the girl, catching her on the side of the head.

“When my mother was a girl in Pincher,” Lyle had said, “at the beer parlour, she just about killed a soldier. Nearly broke his head with a beer bottle.”

Lyle sat back in the seat, hugging the dog and grinning.

Jerry stepped away and went to stand behind his father, who had one foot on the bumper. He and Jack were looking out across the corrals to the cattle grazing in the home quarter.

“Find any work over the winter?” his father was saying.

“Packers in Calgary. Then we went to her brother's at Pincher.”

“How is Mrs. Cunningham feeling these days?”

Jack licked his lips and tossed the butt of his cigarette into the mud.

“She's fine. Everything's all right with her.”

“I'll come down later and bring you some things.”

“We'll need a cash advance.”

“That's all right,” said Jerry's father. “What were you doing down at Pincher?”

“Breaking horses. Almost broke me.”

His father laughed. “You're an old cowboy — you've just about broke it all anyway. Go down to the cabin, clean it up, get settled. I'd like to start branding tomorrow.”

Jerry and his father watched the car slowly turn around, then drive cautiously out of the yard, riding low on its flattened springs. His father always said Jack was no good at operating machinery — the swather, a grain truck, even his own old beater car. Jack Cunningham was a horseman pure and simple, Jerry's father said, an old Alberta cowboy, last of the breed.

For supper that night Jerry's mother served them tongue, mashed potatoes, and beets, and rhubarb pie for dessert. There was nothing on the radio but classical music. Jerry's father, drumming his fingers on the table, said, “I might take a little run to the cabin and see if they're settling in. Want to come along?”

“No, thank you very much,” his mother replied. “It always depresses me.”

“Jack's not so bad,” said his father, “but she gets worse every year. I don't know how they'd keep going if they didn't come here.”

After a moment his mother said, “You'll bring them some food and blankets. Jaroslaw should go along with you and help.”

The idea of going to the Cunninghams' in the dark made Jerry nervous but if he said he wanted to stay at home his mother might think he was feeling sick and make him take a dose of medicine.

When the dishes were cleared, she began packing boxes with canned food and frozen bread. “One week's wages advance, but not more,” she told his father. “They'll only spend it at the beer parlour in Caroline.”

Jerry's father loved to drive his new red pickup with his left wrist hung over the wheel and his right arm across the seat back. The truck still had the sweet smell of new but it rattled on the washboard road. There was a full moon in the sky. Jerry's father suddenly reached down and switched off the headlights. They both laughed and Jerry watched the truck's moonshadow skipping along the roadside.

The old log cabin was surrounded by big spruce trees and defunct machinery — a buck rake, a Cockshutt thresher, a flywheel John Deere tractor — all of it junk. The summer before, Lyle had told Jerry he'd seen the devil sitting like an old farmer on top of the Cockshutt. The belts had been whirring, the knives clattering, the pickup teeth going round and round.

Jerry's father honked and in a moment Lyle stepped out onto the sagging porch.

“We've brought some supplies,” Jerry's father called. “Come down and give us a hand.”

Lyle helped them lift the cardboard boxes out of the truck.

“Where's your dad?” Jerry's father said.

“Went into town.”

They carried the boxes inside. Mrs. Cunningham was sitting at the table in the kitchen. She was younger and smaller than Jerry's mother, with green eyes set wide apart. Her hair was messy.

“Well, aren't we glad to see you!” she said.

“Where's Jack?” said his father. “Where are the girls?”

“Gone to town. We nearly didn't make it this year. That car was making such a noise we didn't think it'd do the trip.”

Jerry disliked the sweet, dirty air inside the cabin. There was no electricity. His father's skin looked mustard yellow in the light of the kerosene lamps.

“Where's your other boy?”

“Wayne's sick. We put him to bed early. He's asleep. He's my baby,” said Mrs. Cunningham.

She stood up and fetched two Cokes from the icebox. Jerry's mother did not allow Cokes. “You take these and go play somewhere,” Mrs. Cunningham told Lyle. “Go play in the barn. Be nice to your guest.” She reached to tousle Jerry's hair, then turned to his father. “You sit right down here for a visit. Give me a cigarette.”

“You can sit in the truck and play the radio,” his father told Jerry, “while I visit with Mrs. Cunningham.”

“I want to go home,” he whined, putting down his Coke. The dirty light threw their shadows on the wall, which made the room seem even more crowded.

“You go outside like I said.”

Mrs. Cunningham took a cigarette from his father's pack. “You're not afraid of the dark, are you?”

His father struck a match for her. Lyle held the screen door open. Jerry picked up his Coke and walked out and Lyle followed him and let the door flap shut with a bang.

“Lyle, be nice,” Mrs. Cunningham called.

The spruce trees were whispering in the breeze. Even the white moon looked hot. The old machines in the yard, with their rotted rubber belts and smell of rust, looked like ghosts of themselves, or huge insects.

“Why don't we sit in my dad's truck?” Jerry said as Lyle walked towards the barn. “Keys are inside. We can listen to the radio.”

Lyle ignored him. Finishing his Coke, he flipped the bottle into tall grass that hid rusty coils of barbed wire and some old tires. Pulling a flashlight from his pocket, Lyle tugged the barn door open and shone the beam inside and upwards. A criss-cross of rafters and cables threw shadows on the roof, which was stuttered with holes large and small. Inside the barn smelled of old straw. Tools that hadn't been used for years — baling hooks, scythes, branding irons — hung on one wall.

Lyle pulled the barn door closed behind them. Playing the beam against a wall, he closed his fingers slowly over it so that it looked like a black giant's hand reaching down to get them. It was something Jerry had done with his own flashlight, plenty of times. Lyle put the light in his mouth and his cheeks glowed red. Then he took it out. “I got this flashlight off a kid at Pincher.”

“Probably robbed it,” Jerry said.

Lyle played the beam around the barn. “Want to go fishing tomorrow? I can get us a million worms.”

“Tomorrow's Sunday. We go to church.”

Lyle switched off the flashlight.

“Put it on,” said Jerry.

“Come fishing.”

“Nope,” said Jerry. “Turn on the light.”

Instead he could see Lyle stick the flashlight into his pocket. Clapping his hands, he took a step closer to Jerry. “You're a little puss, aren't you. What happens if I pull your tail?”

“You're crazy,” Jerry said.

Lyle froze, then cocked his head as if he'd heard something. “Shh. Listen.”

“What?”

Lyle raised both arms and started walking like a robot, holding his arms out stiffly, making a whirring noise. He stopped when his knuckles bumped into the wall. His fingernails scratched at the wood. He took hold of the shaft of a branding iron and lifted it from the wall. Turning around, he started staggering towards Jerry, like a sleepwalker, like a robot, like a vampire. He was holding the branding iron like a war club. Jerry took one step backwards, then another. Lyle kept tottering towards him. Jerry hurriedly slid the door open and went outside. Guided by the moon and the yellow light from the cabin windows, he headed for his father's truck. He was nearly there when the cabin door opened, throwing a splash of yellow light across the yard, and his father stepped out.

“What's the matter, seen a ghost?” His father looked at Jerry, then held open his arms, and Jerry ran to him and let his father pick him up.

Mrs. Cunningham's voice called from inside, “Don't you think I'm any good?”

His father told Jerry, “I shouldn't have brought you here.” His father set him down, then held his hand as they walked towards the truck.

“Don't you think I'm worth it?” the woman yelled.

“Don't pay no attention, Jer.”

His father had him climb in first, then he got in and shut the door. She was still yelling as they backed out to the road.

“Don't say nothing to your ma, chief,” Jerry's father said. “No need to get her upset.”

His mother was afraid of germs the Cunninghams brought from Pincher and the stockyards. She phoned the school to make sure Lyle and his sisters would be scrubbed, deloused, and vaccinated by the school nurse, but none of them turned up at school. On Saturday Jerry's father drove to town and came back with a rifle, a single-shot .22, which he presented to Jerry along with a box of ammunition. The little bullets were cold and greasy, the size of gumdrops, and when Jerry shook them, he heard grains of powder rattling inside the brass cartridges.

After lunch Jerry took his rifle and went off hunting gophers in the meadow. An hour later Lyle appeared. He said the Alberta Stockmen's Association paid a nickel apiece for gopher tails and offered to help collect the bounty by clipping off the tails.

“I don't need help,” said Jerry. He held the rifle casually over his shoulder, the way he'd seen his father and other ranchers hold their rifles. He and Lyle were standing in the meadow. Wind was blowing waves through the high grass.

BOOK: Travelling Light
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