Vandal Love (23 page)

By Toronto, François was low on money. He took a damp room in a boarding house and worked all winter
and through the next summer washing dishes and subsisting on leftovers and practising his English on the line cooks. He was miserable, lonely. He shovelled snow on the side, saving every penny. He tried not to think of Ernestine and kept his spirits up by dreaming.

After a year and a half, he had enough to buy an old green Ford. It came with a wooden camper, and just seeing it he thought of how the tortoise must feel with its home on its back. Spring had finally arrived, and he was off again, west, rains blowing up into the electrical system, making the truck sputter, though the heaving engine dried within its own heat. Crossing into Manitoba, he thought of his grandmother on foot. He imagined her ghost within the landscape, the strength of her wandering a slow motion against eternity.

Those next weeks he travelled with a sense of intention. Every day seemed a revelation. Slight bumps in the highway radiated through the seat in a gentle coasting motion. The western sky sopped and drained in an endless dye bath beyond the edge of the earth. The smell of fields and grass, the wind and rattle of the pickup had an old-fashioned feeling, like a hayride. Evenings, he parked on overgrown farm roads, mullein sprouting hugely from the dry husks of the previous year. The truck tires crushed wild chamomile, and he sat in the dark, breathing the perfumed air.

At times, as he meandered west, he stopped on the side of the highway and walked into the budding fields and stood, squinting in the flashing sunlight. He tried to sense that absence of consequence before his grandmother had
arrived with her primitive head. In nature, he’d thought he would always be back where he’d started, but money was running low and he was realizing that there was nothing to return to. It seemed obvious now, but the emotion of finding what he’d lost had been so strong for so long that he’d never considered what he would do here. How long could he wander the prairies? The world seemed to be asking what he was, the farmers with their lead gazes, the squinting cowhands. A few hippies were hitchhiking west, going to B.C. They talked of paradise, El Dorado. They grinned and asked where he was heading.

But three weeks later, though it felt sudden, he wandered too far and reached the mountains. He camped on the shores of lakes and rivers. Sitting alone, he felt erased, the truth of this measureless earth and stone pouring like light into his eyes until there was no room left in his head for himself. He searched for another truth, for one that might include him, but in the end, the only other that he found was money. His truck engine stopped with the thundering of hot steel. Smoke issued from every panel. He lingered awhile, then set off for help. Walking a mountain road, he looked up from the kicking, battered cuffs of his jeans. He saw the vantage of himself from the sky, a diminishing speck between rocks and cliffs and trees. He hardly had a penny to his name.

The next week he slept in a few odd places, tried to make deals with mechanics in towns occasioned by two roads slipping past each other. A man took pity and gave François a lift. But either one lonely valley lane was
identical to a thousand others or his truck had vanished. The scenery came in wave upon wave until the sound of shifting gears emanated from their bones. At last, François thanked the man. He opened the door and put his boots on the broken asphalt. He started walking in a direction that turned out to be west.

The first job he found was in a valley near Mission, an hour from Vancouver. An elderly Polish couple needed help bucking hay and clearing drainage ditches. They gave him twenty dollars for a day’s work and let him live in a damp cabin on the back of their farm. Summer had ripened the sun to golden, and it seemed he’d found paradise at last. But at night he came awake, heart thudding, sweat dampening his chest though he couldn’t recall any dream or sound.

He pulled on his jeans and walked from the cabin into the dew-soaked grass. He entered the woods overhanging the stream. Tree frogs croaked in the darkness. Something harmless rattled across last year’s leaves, a muskrat or groundhog, sounding enormous. The sky deepened and revolved as he stared upward and swayed and breathed the cold air that poured off the stream, hardly existing, trees cast up against stars. He felt numb, detached, alone, without purpose. He told himself that he should just let things be, that he should work and find peace in nature.

The next afternoon the old Polish man came over. We got troubles, he said.

What?

Troubles, the old man said. A sod company from out in the city is buying up the valley.

What’s dat? François asked.

Sod? It’s grass. Roll-up grass. Bright green. Sells for a bundle. It’s this alluvial soil they want. Moist. It’s good for sod. Perfect conditions. They want to strip this all down to nothing and put in sod just far as the eye can see. If I’d of known when I was younger, I’d of done it myself.

What’s de trouble den?

Oh, the old man said, mortgage and foreclosure and that company bought us up and wants us off the land. Like as you’d about expect.

But François couldn’t take seriously goons who wanted to make rolled-up grass. The old man told him some neighbours were being bullied into selling, that men were going around and to be careful. That night François saw what looked like a shed burning across the valley. The next he heard a few intermittent gunshots.

One afternoon, as he was walking to the gas station to renew his supply of oatmeal and withered apples, he saw a Buick coming down the road and he remembered that it was Wednesday though he couldn’t possibly think why that might be important. The Buick glided silently through the shadows of occasional trees, its grille flashing like teeth. It stopped across the ditch from where he stood. The window slid down, warping the reflection of mountains. The driver had a nose long ago broken into two distinct steps and thick, brooding lips.

François, he said as if they knew each other. I’m supposed to be telling you you got to vacate. It’s not owned by the old folks no more. Time to clear out.

I don boder no one, François said.

What’s that? the man asked.

Don bother no one.

He tapped the ash off his cigarette against the side-view mirror and paused as if considering his reflection. You fucking with me, François?

I don ’ave nowhere to go. What I suppose to do,
hein?

Look. I don’t know about all that. I’m just here to tell you to get lost. Otherwise I’m supposed to break your fucking legs. You got it?

He crushed his cigarette and rolled the filter against his thumb. He stared until François looked away, then he drove off.

Two days later, François woke in the cabin from an overlong afternoon nap. He hadn’t seen the Polish couple around and so had no work to keep him busy. The fading sun was in the window, and he was sure he’d heard something. He stood and listened. He had to pee and maybe it was just that. As he neared the doorway, he saw someone outside. He tiptoed. It was the man from the Buick, much bigger than he’d appeared sitting down. He wore a suit and was staring into a piece of mirror François had put above the washbasin. The man looked bored and tired and had clearly been waiting. He dipped his fingers in the water and touched his hair, then glanced up.

Jesus, he said, man, you almost gave me a heart attack.
He thumped his chest and took a breath and belched. Goddam, it’s like an instant case of heartburn.

He looked around as if someone might be watching. Then he drew himself up. Come on, he said in a different tone. We gotta talk.

Having witnessed the display of vanity, François wasn’t too worried. He followed down the grassy ruts towards the road.

Look, the man told him, you got to get off this land. Nothing more complicated. You’re a little guy, and I don’t want to hurt you. In fact, you got a likeable mug, but I have my reputation at stake. Can’t you appreciate that?

Oh, you know, François said, I t’ink I like to stay. It’s nice here.

The man stopped and inhaled and glanced off as if trying to get into character. He took a boxy pistol from inside his jacket. He poked François in the chest with it.

Turn around. They told me nobody gives a shit if I kill you.

As François was prodded through the shrubby pines, his legs began to jerk so that he pranced forward like a jester. I need,
eh tabernac
, I need, he repeated though he had no idea what. Every part of him shook until he felt his bladder let go. The barrel pushed into his back, and his leg worked as if at a sewing machine, slapping the wet denim of his pants. Then he gave into full spasm and leapt forward, fumbling and kicking and crying.

You got to leave, the man said. You get the point.

When François made it back to the cabin, he felt as if every inch of him was being chewed on by a different
insect. He plunged into the stream and wrung out his pants. He sat on the steps, short-circuiting all over. The kerosene lamp inside was off. The sun was setting and something with a hoarse voice called from below the mountain. He tried to imagine what his parents had felt when he was born, a tiny, happy boy probably. But maybe they’d felt nothing, too caught up in their own lives. He could almost understand that. He wished he had one certainty, that he’d been the son of a smarter, stronger man than himself. If he’d been shot that day, if he were to die now, what difference would it make? The world would go on. No one would miss him. He was nothing. He’d chosen nothing, not his language or scrawny body.

He watched the garden earth darken as if absorbing the blue air. The forest was hushed, the road, the entire valley. Not a single houselight dimmed the stars.

He was still there at dawn and again the next evening. His body cramped with fatigue, and hunger gave way to numbness. It spread through him. His head lolled. For periods it seemed he’d gone blind. Or was it night? He never lost consciousness, but there was no desire to stand, no impulse to care or preserve the self that he was seeing now for what it was, incidental, petty, unremarkable. The dull sun propped itself on his head, and he was no longer sure how many days he’d sat. Rain fell, and he couldn’t move from the doorway.

Imperceptibly, a sense of hatred filled him. A flame began to twist inside his silenced body. Mountains reeled up into night, trees and stones and the backward
reaching line of a lit stream. Moonlight rippled as if it were water and lifted him. Veins stretched like cables. He drew himself into that point of heat. There had been stories of strength and violence, but the only person to kill was himself.

Then he began to run. Stiff at first, he stumbled through underbrush. But the rage of each fall propelled him and he was soon racing against the gauntlet of branches, striking at trees, leaping stones. He came into clearings where animals stood in patches of moonlight as if on coins. Beavers, moose, bears. Watching, tense with fear. From a ridge he howled until his voice pressed back on him from the valley in wave upon wave of overlapped echo, a purity of sound, an animal fury. Houselights came on in a ragged string across the dark distance below.

Some time before dawn his hunger possessed him. It was more real than pain. He ran, leapt fences, kicked a farm dog until it yelped and fled. He raided fields of cow corn, blueberry farms, groped like a demon in silos. He knew the ravaging of hoed earth. He ate dog food from the can or bag. Night after night carport freezers went empty, gardens pawed of tubers, vines stripped. Each day, more and more men sat on stumps with rifles or studied tracks, bowels loose with terror of the Sasquatch. Fanatics drove out, measured prints plowed through speed, not the full-grown variety, they determined. Then it all stopped. The beast had moved on, its final crime unreported, men’s business suits taken from a widow’s closet, a bar of soap and some razors.

When the Buick pulled up, its window sliding down on the air-conditioned interior, the man was doing a routine check. His work here was almost finished, and he’d seen no one in weeks. He drove towards the cabin, shocks complaining on the rutted, grassy trail. He was lighting a cigarette, watching himself in the rearview mirror when the figure emerged from shabby pines. He groped on the seat for his pistol but he’d put it underneath. There was a moment of nauseating stillness as François loomed in the man’s terror-dilated pupils, his reflection that of a businessman bending at a bright surface to adjust his tie.

François had finished with nature. Let them paint the valley with fluorescent sod. The man in the Buick had complimented him on his suit and offered to drive him into the city, though he’d had one nearby foreclosure to rough up, to which François had lent a hand. On the highway, the man complained about wanting a job working for the real bad guys instead of being a ruffian for a sod company. Downtown, after saying goodbye, François went to a newsstand, and for the first time he bought a paper. He studied job listings,
trying to hear each title: manager, clerk, longshoreman. He took a room in a boarding house and washed dishes for fast cash. Alone he read aloud, attempting for the first time to improve his pronunciation. He paused often to do push-ups. In the end he had to give credence to what he’d been, an offer in Miscellaneous. A scientific firm was looking for a person who’d let his big toe be cut off and sewed back on with only local anaesthesia. Compensation: three thousand dollars. Not much but fast, easy in a sense, and enough for a little business capital. At the hospital there were forms and interviews, close inspection of his feet, a makeup artist and a pedicurist.

That’s the problem with finding someone, the head clinician told him. Not a lot of people are willing to do this. Mostly bums want the job, but they don’t have photogenic feet. We see everything from fungus to missing toes to whitlow and spoon nails and anonychia.

Ano-what? François asked.

The congenital absence of nails. But you, your feet are okay.

François was kept a few days under observation. There was hesitation on the part of a sponsor who thought a Québecer would be bad publicity, but that passed. François’s toes were X-rayed and washed. The operating room had the energy of a modelling session. Blond and Asian interns with stylish glasses lined the walls, cameras beneath lighting umbrellas. He was hooked up, strapped in and injected with a new anaesthesia. His heart blipped. After the cold steel of incision, a man approached with a miniature circular saw. François set his teeth. A fiery jet
pinged into a metal dish. The clinician nodded. He’s a tough little guy, someone whispered.