Echolocation

by Karen Hofmann

  As if he’s on the same wavelength, Roy asks, then, Lori still working? Still nursing?

  She is. (This morning, him feigning sleep, even through the rocking motion that was her sitting on the end of the bed putting on her pantyhose, till she was gone, and then another fifteen minutes or so, waiting for the house to heat to something closer to the bird’s-nest temperature under the duvet. You need to get the boys up, she had said, clipped, before going out the door. As if he didn’t, every morning.)

  Roy nods and nods. Bryan has already told him, on his last visit, six months ago, about being laid off, and he doesn’t ask if Bryan is back at work.

  Economy’s still slow, Roy says, though, and Bryan thinks it’s a nod at his unemployed status.

  Yes, sir, he says.

  He works – or worked – for a company that sells heavy-duty equipment for mining.

  Roy neither commiserates nor makes suggestions about how to get back on his feet, as his in-laws put it. Bryan feels a curious vertigo, as if he has braced for an impact that has not arrived.

  How about some lunch? Roy says, finally.

  It’s only eleven, but Bryan jumps up as if reprieved.

  There are sandwich fixings in the refrigerator, meats and cheese wrapped in butcher paper, and fresh, unsliced bakery bread, and soup that Bryan heats up in a saucepan. They sit at the table, Roy lowering himself into his chair with a kind of dignified heaviness. He slices the bread, makes Bryan’s sandwich, asking him what he wants: Butter? Mayonnaise? Salt and pepper? The soup tastes homemade. Beef, barley, vegetables.

  Bryan finishes too quickly. You went to town on that, Roy comments.

  Roy is eating his own sandwich slowly, sipping his soup slowly, still with that dignity. He always had that, Bryan thinks. That slowness, that deliberateness. As if he were a rock. That’s how he’d seen Roy, when he was a kid. Solid, fixed. Jenny, erratic as water.

  He had come to like being in Roy’s house, living with Roy. He had held Roy’s hand whenever there had been the opportunity, though Roy hadn’t encouraged this, only tolerated it, surely. He’d referred to Roy as his dad at school, as often as he could. For that part-year.

  He looks around the kitchen: an old-fashioned one, with a formica table. White-painted cabinets. They’d been varnished wood, before. Jenny had painted on them: a flock of birds, yellow and green, winging across the maple, their bills open, their eyes bright. At the lower edge, she’d put in the mountains, with their rich dark spruce. Roy, he remembers, had said: You’ve got the scale wrong. Those birds would be two hundred feet across.

  The birds are bigger because they’re more important, Jenny had said.

  The ghost of the painting must be still there, on the wood. He brushes a fingertip along the white paint, but there is no sign, no disruption in the flat white surface. Sanded down, first, likely. But under the white enamel, would the colours still exist, staining the wood?

  HE REMEMBERS AGAIN, with that dull knock of repetition, his losses: the electric car set, the fancy racing sled. Like a needle stuck in a groove, he wants to ask Roy again if he can look in the basement, but they’ve already established, years ago, that none of Bryan’s things have remained in Roy’s house.

  That year, that almost-year. Of course he remembers everything about his Christmas gifts. That had been his only family Christmas, his only real Christmas, maybe, until he and Lori had got married and made Christmas themselves, or more usually, gone to her family’s. Of course he remembers everything about his gifts.

  He and Jenny had left, had pulled out, before the next winter. The racing set had been left behind; he’d not had time to pack it. And the sled – that had been in the shed, and left behind too. Jenny had brought the tape deck Roy had given her, but her next boyfriend had stolen it, sold it to buy dope, likely.

  He has never been able to call up the details of their exodus. Had it been day or night? Had they hitchhiked, that time, or caught the Greyhound? Had there been a sudden fight, had Roy kicked Jenny out? Or had they built a slow resentment, Jenny fuming silently, then making tracks while Roy was down at the station?

  There’s a leap to be made over something deep and cold and dangerous, and he can’t trust that he won’t fall in.

  When they’re finished eating, Bryan washes up the plates and bowls and cutlery, the saucepan, and stacks them in the drain rack, then joins Roy, who has headed back to his chair. Roy has not picked up the newspaper. He looks sleepy, now. Is he older than Bryan thinks?

  SIT, ROY SAYS, but he can’t sit. He never can sit still.

  Roy never asks about Jenny. Bryan never mentions her, the way she lives, the stress of the continual crises.

  The trip into Clearwater the first time, more than thirty years ago. Jenny driving that Celica, which was a kind of bronze-brown, a late model, and probably, Bryan thinks now, not actually Jenny’s own car. He can’t remember it much later than the trip, so possibly it was reclaimed by its real owner, who would have been Cliff, or perhaps Doug, who hadn’t been Jenny’s boyfriend, really, but a teenaged boy who she’d met at the midway, and brought home to the house she and Cliff had shared, which had resulted in her and Bryan leaving in some hurry.

  The interior of the Celica had been cream. Leather seats. Himself curled up on the seat, next to Jenny. Trying not to drip ketchup or ice cream on the seat, not because Jenny was worried about it, but because he had naturally liked things to be neat and clean. He remembers the sky cut into blocks: cloud, blue, cloud. He had reclined the front passenger seat right back, and looked up through the sunroof, and Jenny was singing along to “The Gambler,” making her voice deep like Kenny Rogers’, and the sun blading through the blocks of cloud so that he was suffused with light, shadow, light.

  He had seen, through the sunroof, a hawk, and had sat up quickly, scrabbling in his bag for his bird book and binoculars, which hadn’t of course been there.

  You should have remembered them, Jenny had said. But she’d pulled him out of his bed, into the car, when they had left Cliff’s, so quickly that most of his stuff had been left behind.

  Maybe Cliff will send my stuff, he’d said. But Jenny had made a face. I don’t think so.

  His lost sled, his car set. They have almost lost their shine, now; he’s brought them up too often, used them to shame his sons, when they’ve left one of their perpetual messes of toys or games uncared for, unvalued. The impatience in Jared’s voice, just this last week. We’ve heard the story a million times, Dad. Your deprived childhood.

  YESTERDAY: HE HADN’T MEANT. Only Jared, so mouthy. So full of himself. Didn’t mean to do that. But the kid pouring half a six-dollar box of cereal in the bowl, the bowl nearly overflowing, the kid slack-jawed, blank-eyed. The number of half-eaten bowls of cereal he’s carried upstairs from the playroom. Oblivious.

  Hey! Dad! That’s my cereal!

  Look. Just. Look how much.

  I’m gonna eat it!

  He hadn’t meant to get into it, the tussle. The kid’s fault, grabbing the box back. Insolent. He’d fought off every instinct to shake Jared’s silly stubborn head off his shoulders.

  Dad! Let go! I’m trying to get some breakfast! Do you want me to go to school or not?

  The room suddenly crowding him into a small, powerless place.

  Have it then!

  His own face nose-to-nose with his son’s. The momentary rush and release of letting go, letting his vocal cords expand fully, his clenched hands move, tipping the bowl of ash-brown flakes, of blue milk, over his son’s head.

  Lori: You have no idea how to be a father.

  WHEN JARED WAS BORN, Lori’s mom had come to look after Lori and the baby for the first week or so, and the three of them, Lori and her mom and the baby, had made this tight group, in which there really wasn’t room for Bryan. Bryan had not thought: I have a son, but, I wonder if Roy is still up there in Clearwater? And he was. He’d gone straight to the library – no computer at home, then, not like now – and found the Clearwater directory
and Roy still in it.

  Bryan had driven up, by himself the first time, a few weeks after Jared was born. He hadn’t been back, at that point, for sixteen years, but he’d found it easily enough, the cluster of diner and garage, tattoo shop at the turnoff, the bed-and-breakfasts with their signs in German, the small houses, many of them mobile homes with layers of porches and carports added on, as if trying to assume permanence, legitimacy.

  He had found the street he had walked along, to and from school, that year, scuffing his winter boots through the snow, cracking the thin ice of the puddles underfoot in early spring. The mailboxes, still in the same place. It had all seemed smaller and shabbier than he remembered, of course. But he’d been pleased at that, too.

  He’d thought that Roy was happy to see him. He was never sure. Roy remembered him, but he didn’t seem like he needed company all that much. Roy had another family: He’d had a marriage and kids before Bryan and Jenny came along. And he must have had women friends, even ones with kids, after Bryan and Jenny, though Bryan does not like to think of that. But he did not tell Bryan not to come.

  A boy needs a dad, Jenny had said, because she had fallen in love with Roy’s voice on the radio announcing “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Roy ran a little independent radio station, in those days. He was a draft dodger, an American, and there still hadn’t been amnesty, but Roy had been on that radio every day, talking to the people around Clearwater in his deep, slow voice intoning the names of songs, or maybe important information, like I highly recommend the blueberry pie being served down at Charlene’s today, or Would the owners of the chartreuse Pinto please move it as Chuck can’t get his Jimmy out of his driveway. Roy, dispensing moods as he saw fit, the slow songs like “Tequila Sunrise” and “Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life”; the quicker ones like “Cinnamon Girl” and “Could Have Been a Lady” and “Your Backyard.” Roy winding the day up and slowing it down. Here’s one for all of you folks out on the east cut.

  To hear Roy’s steady baritone on the radio and think: That’s my dad. He had worked at that; he had polished up that thought.

  ROY LOOKS OUT OF THE picture window now, and Bryan, following his gaze, sees that it has started to snow, suddenly, very heavily, flakes of snow coming down big and flat as torn paper, wastebaskets of the stuff, lacing through the bare weak yellow branches of the willow. Big, wet flakes, gluing themselves to the ground, obliterating the lawn with a startling quickness. It snows so much more up here, up against the Rockies, than where he lives, and the snow is so much wetter, heavier.

  It had been his first real snow, that winter he had lived in Clearwater – it hadn’t snowed much in Vancouver. He and Jenny had played in it like kids, snowball fights, snow angels, snow men. Roy coming in, from shovelling the driveway, snow in his beard, watching them, smiling in his dignified way. Solid, apart.

  What had it meant for Roy, having him and Jenny there? That’s what he’s always wanted to know. What had it meant?

  He and Jenny had driven from the coast, where it was lush and rainy, through the very dry land, cowboy country, and then stopped at Clearwater, where it was rainy again and the forest dense with hemlock and cedar, thick green vines and bushes that he hadn’t been there long enough to learn the names of. They had been on their way to Jasper, and had stopped on a whim, and then the next summer, before school was out, they’d left. They hadn’t gone to Jasper, though – only back to Vancouver, to a lot of change, a lot of different addresses. He hadn’t lived in one place for more than a few months until Jenny had got together with Don. Then a couple of years in one spot, in a decent house. But Bryan hadn’t got along with Don, and had moved out pretty soon after that.

  Roy says, You’ll want to be hitting the road soon; it’s really coming down.

  Yes, and he hasn’t put the snow tires on the pickup yet. He ought to be going. He’ll go, in a minute.

  But he sits down, finally takes his seat on the slip-covered sofa. You want any wood cut? he asks Roy. Groceries? He can stay and shovel the driveway, maybe, so Roy’s caretaker can make her way in.

  The snow is coming down as if it can’t stop itself. He hasn’t seen it snow anywhere else like it snows here, in these huge, heavy flakes, like the snow is being poured over the edge of something.

  HE TURNS TO ROY, to say, Remember that Christmas, remember carrying me back from the toboggan hill, but Roy has fallen asleep, his eyes closed, his head held upright against the back of his chair, his big body perfectly immobile, as if he’d been rooted in one place for years and years.

  THAT FIRST TRIP UP HERE, over thirty years ago now. Jenny driving the stolen Celica, the landscape becoming green as they neared the mountains, as they came close to Clearwater. Bryan had found a new station on the radio, and a man’s deep voice was announcing a song, a country song, and Jenny had said, My God, I’m in love with that man! I’m going to stop here and find him!

  And Bryan said No, no don’t, Mom, but Jenny laughed. Why not? You could use a dad.

  And he remembers that they drove right up to Roy’s door, and Jenny hopped out of the car, swinging her bag over her shoulder, and knocked on the door, and Roy came out onto the porch, looking surprised (you could see more of his mouth then; his beard wasn’t so bushy) and Jenny said, hi, we’ve come to live with you. And Bryan had carried in his own bag, with his spare underwear and jeans and the jackknife that Cliff, Jenny’s last boyfriend, had given him, the one thing he’d managed to keep, and walked into a room with a bed and dresser and a little table by the bed with a lamp on it, and put his underwear and jeans and T-shirts into the drawers.

  Of course it couldn’t have been like that. There must have been a space of time; there must have been a place they stayed while Jenny made inquiries and met Roy in a bar or something and fixed it up so he’d let them move in. He knows that. He remembers the campground; maybe they stayed there for a few days, or maybe there was a motel, or a room in someone else’s house. Jenny was good at getting people to take them in, take care of them. They must have been in Clearwater some time before Jenny found Roy.

  But Bryan can’t remember that. He’d swear that they’d driven right up to Roy’s house. He’d swear that Roy had opened that door, and said, well, hey, Bryan. There’s lots of room for a boy, here. You just come right on in.

  The snow falling steadily, the big wet flakes piling up. Roy asleep in his chair.

  JENNY MUST HAVE BEEN WHAT, twenty-three, when they came to live with Roy. And Roy? He can’t tell, doesn’t know Roy’s age now, even. Maybe he’d been in his forties then. To children, all adults look about the same age until they’re old. He had thought Roy was old, though: much older than Jenny.

  Bryan had been born when Jenny was fifteen. They’d been only fifteen years apart, he and Jenny. He thinks, now: She was the same age his son Jared is now when he was born. A child. Fifteen.

  Jenny had never had other children, though she’d tried, he thinks: when he was in his teens, when she’d married Don, when she’d been sober for a while. Lori said once that likely his birth was really hard on Jenny’s body; she hadn’t been mature enough, and had been damaged somehow. Lori knew that kind of thing; she was a nurse. Though it pissed him off, when she said things about Jenny. Jenny was a mess, sure. It was bad. But Lori didn’t know everything. She didn’t know.

  It had been just the two of them. Like two kids together.

  At first the snow seems to have let up a little, but then the highway is nearly whited out, and Bryan slows to fifty, wipers going full blast, fog lamps on for extra light. Even dimmed, the headlights seem to bounce right back from the snow in bright needles. He turns the radio on for the distraction; then decides, after a short corner skid, that he needs to concentrate more, and turns it off. Good thing he knows the road as well as he does.

  The snow is slowing, and Bryan can see more clearly, only now there are shapes up ahead and he brakes, slides, grips just in time to fetch up safely behind the last in a line of semis. He’s on the incl
ine above the bridge; the line snakes forward ahead of and a little below him, so he can see the white-caked oblongs of vehicles, their tail lights spaced between them. He can’t see the head of the line in the falling snow, but he gets out of the pickup, after a minute or two, and walks up to the truck ahead of him, raps on the door.

  Semi jackknifed across the bridge, the driver says. Really wedged in there. Better turn around if you can – my rig’s too long.

  So there it is. Might as well go back to Roy’s. Bryan thinks about calling Lori, even gets out his cell, but then remembers she’d still be at work, not even close to leaving. Not that she’s likely to come right home after work, anyway.

  He makes a U-turn and heads back north. He almost feels that he should try to get home, but he can’t think of an alternate route. Anyway, Roy’ll likely be glad to see him, have him spend the night, even. For all he doesn’t show it, Roy must be lonely sometimes.

  AND NOW ANOTHER MEMORY: It must have been just before they left. A group of hippies camping down by the river, so it was summer. Early summer. Only they weren’t really hippies – it was too late in the decade for that. Already 1978, not the Summer of Love anymore, which is when Bryan had been born. Jenny had been hanging around their camp; a couple of times Bryan had come home from school to find her gone from the house, only a note left for him to come there. He hadn’t liked it much; the hippies had not been friendly to him, and their children had been mean, too – the older ones bossy, trying to take his stuff off him, the younger ones naked and crusty-nosed. But Jenny had glittered, there, talking, talking, to the men in their long hair and beards. She’d laughed a lot; she’d invited them to come up to the house, to use the shower, to wash diapers. As if it had been her house, Bryan thought: and then, of course it’s her house. Hers and Roy’s. We all live there now.

  Then he’d woken in the night to music, and looked out the window into the backyard, the yard where he played and Jenny said Roy would build him a tree house, the yard that seemed to go back miles, through the meadow and trees, through the whole town, to the river, and there was a bonfire. A bonfire, a big one, half of the winter woodpile they were building, Roy was chainsawing out of trees washed up in the spring flood, piled on it. And people – at first he thought they were strangers, but then he recognized the hippies from the campsite – were dancing around the fire, and they were naked.