The Path of Most Resistance

by Russell Wangersky

  Angie looked at the man: he stared back.

  “Would you like some cereal?” the man said. He was holding a bowl: he tilted it toward her so Angie could see the last few cereal “Os” riding like life rings in a milky sea.

  He closed the door after Angie came in, and the curtains rose briefly as if in surprise and then settled back into place.

  Mike was going in the front door of Cabin Six when Bev burst out.

  “Angie’s gone,” Bev managed to say. They looked around, eyes sweeping the space between the cabins, saw the sweater crumpled on the pool deck, and started to run.

  At the edge of the pool, the crows had arced in over the fence and settled near Angie’s sweater, preparing for the pleasure of dining on the wing-pinioned, slowly drying princesses.

  When the panic started, they took to the air again and watched from on high as the old man’s car drove away

  Baggage

  The store on the lower level of the mall had the cheapest suitcases out front — Alice knew that from experience.

  Hard-shell luggage that looked like a cross between something a professional would carry and what a suitcase would look like if it was modelled on a wheeled turtle. Hard plastic, always at a good price — always the loss leaders, $100 or less. Alice had lifted up the ones that were on special, the ones that nudged out of the store and into the mall’s open space with their signs shouting discounts. She’d checked their weight, felt their edges and seams, wondered whether the zippers would fail or if the stitching would unravel. She knew the more expensive ones were inside, the ones with the familiar brand names, with the Swiss Army cross on the front, or the American Touristers with their familiar promise of secure and old-style travel. Leopard prints and pink ones and suitcases with bold stripes: as if you were supposed to show off some kind of surface personality to all those people who hadn’t met you and never would. In other parts of the store, there were the purses and knapsacks and the computer bags that so many people seemed eager to shoulder.

  Alice knew the way the aisles seemed to get narrower as you walked to the back of the store. It was as if there was a manual that dictated that the further the customer got into the store, the more and more crowded the place was supposed to be. The protruding cases and narrow lanes acted like sharp-toothed shoals, snagging you and keeping you from moving quickly when the sales staff angled toward you, alert, bright-eyed, and eager to make a sale.

  “What are you looking for? Where are you going?” they’d say, pinning her deep in the store against the walls of cases without any obvious lane for escape.

  Alice had no clear answers for them. She was without a decided destination, adrift. The sales staff were at a loss, too, unable to find a suitcase to fit anything as nebulous as Alice’s absence of a clear plan. They would thrash around for a while before breaking it off with the usual, “Well, if you see anything you like …” It was, she thought, more an invitation to leave the store than it was to continue shopping.

  Sometimes she would leave when that happened, just head right out of the mall and home to the Internet, opening airline sites, and booking flights that she cancelled just as soon as the screen demanding her credit card number came up.

  Which of the eight flight options would be the best way to get to Vancouver? To Ottawa? To Brisbane, Australia? When she wasn’t checking travel sites, Alice browsed through Las Vegas hotel offers, looked at B&Bs in small-town Newfoundland, and at a dude ranch operation in the foothills of Alberta. She tried to imagine having enough money in the bank or room on their credit card to pick a five-day or ten-day package, with only a one-way ticket. She wondered about news stories where women had disappeared but had turned up years later in South Florida, or Nevada, or the Northwest Territories.

  But always, she came back to the luggage. It was a cheaper option, she thought: an easier dream.

  What would be better? The big rectangular soft-sided ones or the small ones with the telescopic handles and the wheels that let them scoot along beside you almost like a pet? What would suit her clothing best? How much clothing should she take? How much could she take?

  Her husband’s name was Paul, and he spent the evenings sunk into his chair like a grounded ship. Alice tried to imagine what it would be like, telling him she was leaving. There would be two or maybe three new suitcases in a tightly regimented line next to her by the front door. She tried to picture the small living room filling up with the size of his angry voice. But would he even be angry, or just resigned, she wondered. She wasn’t even sure of that. Would he start a fight or just shrug, his eyes barely flickering away from the television? When she imagined starting to explain that there just wasn’t enough — enough contact, enough caring, enough anything — would he know what she was talking about, or would it simply flow over him like water?

  Then she wondered how she’d feel after leaving — if she’d find herself missing the constant plodding regularity of their lives, something she was certain she’d grown to hate. She couldn’t imagine that she would miss any of it. Not even Paul.

  They’d met when they’d been teenagers in the Annapolis Valley, had married quickly in the midst of a pregnancy scare that later turned out to be a false alarm. Paul wanted to “do the right thing” and, at the same time, seemed almost proud of impending fatherhood. He didn’t seem afraid — she was. He seemed, well, bigger.

  They hadn’t been going out together for long, but everyone said they looked good together. Alice remembered her friends saying they looked “made for each other.” Somehow that was critically important to her at the time. More important than what they were going to do or whether their futures would come close to meshing.

  When it turned out she wasn’t pregnant after all, he’d announced that it didn’t matter, because he’d wanted to get married anyway. They had already been to Canning to see the Justice of the Peace, a small intense man in a dirty office who had made Paul give him the $50 before the thirty-second instant marriage that left them with a certificate and, for Alice at least, a profound feeling that everything in the world had changed.

  Alice was just beginning to look around the Justice of the Peace’s small office with her newly married eyes when he shooed them out and into the small parking lot at the edge of the highway. She had hoped Paul would have joked around, picked her up and lifted her over the threshold of the car door and into the front seat of the Toyota, or swept her into his arms so they could hold each other in the warm spring air. Instead, he said, “Well, that’s that, then” and walked around the front of the car, his car keys already out and jingling in his hand. But he did reach across right away and unlock her car door once he was in behind the wheel.

  Alice wasn’t sure she believed Paul would have married her without the pregnancy scare, and as hard as she tried not to let it bother her, the suspicion wormed at her. Alice knew him well enough by then to know that there was a way he held his mouth, a strange straightness at the corners of his lips that gave him away when he wasn’t telling the truth. She hadn’t told him about that look. She had always felt there were good reasons to hold onto an advantage, and it still worked.

  At first, she’d thought that he was going to run his own business, because he was always so confident that his way was the right way. It would only be a few days into each new job before he’d come home from work and spell out the shortcomings and mistakes of his latest bosses.

  This one wasted time and that one had favourites and no one ever stopped to tell you when you were doing a good job, only when you fucked up.

  “They don’t understand good management,” he’d say. “They don’t even know what it means” — and somehow she believed, at first, that he did.

  That’s not how it worked out: the bad managers just meant that Paul kept moving, job to job, always identifying the same flaws before moving on, never admitting that maybe he might be part of the problem. With each new job, she watched him shave away the sharp edges of his expectations — and hers — the only dif
ference being that she felt like she was the only one who actually mourned the loss. And that wasn’t the only loss. They had tried again for children and that hadn’t worked out either. Alice, now forty, thought it was some kind of sign that they’d failed at the very thing that had brought them together in the first place.

  It was surprising how many luggage stores there were in the bigger malls, she thought — surprising, too, that there were so few malls that didn’t have at least one store dedicated just to suitcases. Didn’t people ever have enough of the stuff? How often would you need new ones, anyway? It’s not like it wears out, she thought. Not with only a trip or two a year, before being stuck back under the stairs in the basement until the next time you need it.

  That was what Alice was thinking when a young man appeared next to her, “Robert” on a name tag pinned to his dark blue sweater.

  He started with, “What are you looking for?”

  She couldn’t really blame him — it was, after all, a sensible question about a sensible kind of purchase — but it still made her sigh inwardly, as if she had hoped for more. But then Robert, a thin and awkward-looking younger man with a quick smile, surprised her.

  “I get off at five. Want to go for a drink?”

  She did want a drink and she didn’t buy a suitcase. Not that day.

  Afterwards, walking back to her car after she’d met Robert, the thing Alice was most aware of was the wetness high on the inside of her thighs and the recurring thought that any single thing could have changed it all.

  When they had gotten to the hotel room, one of the magnetic room keys didn’t work. The other one did.

  She knew with complete certainty that if both keys had failed, she would have left, walking out of the hotel without another thought.

  There were a number of things just like that. The way one of his eye teeth sat slightly out of line from the rest of his teeth, giving him an almost hungry look. The way the front of his shirt — along the strip with the buttonholes — was frayed, slightly dark with wear. The back seat of his car, with a blanket thrown crookedly across the seat. Any one of them, or each one of them, charged with the power to change everything.

  There were other things she’d noticed like small snapshots: the underside of the counter in the bathroom, the stain around the drain, the water glasses in their crinkled paper sleeves. The way the sheets felt against the skin of her back, against the backs of her moving legs. The curious way she felt about the whole thing, with him up above her, sweating and eager and separate. The dark room, with the silhouette of his hair ragged against the shadowed white of the ceiling.

  Alice remembered feeling amazed that she was there — and feeling perfectly fine with being there — as he finished and crumpled down against her. She felt distant, not really in her body, and looked at everything as if it were new to her and strangely marvellous exactly because of that.

  She liked all of that better than when he rolled on his side, turned on the light, and started asking questions. “I see you in the store a lot — are you planning a trip?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Do you live around here?” She felt awful for doing it, but she reached out a finger and put it against his lips.

  “Shh,” she said, feeling bad for a moment — but only a moment — as he toppled back onto his own side of the bed. She felt like a teacher in a classroom, deliberately and calculatingly shrugging off a too-precocious student and regaining some crucial distance. They lay there side by side in the silence.

  Alice could hear his breathing, still slightly ragged, and she thought about the way the sharp ridges of his shoulder blades had felt under her hands. She wondered what was going through his head, but she didn’t want to ask. He hadn’t asked if she was married — she was still wearing her ring and hadn’t thought for a moment about taking it off.

  “I’ll pay for the room,” he said after another awkward minute of silence. She could hear something like gallantry poking through, his voice all high and thin and reedy.

  “All right,” she said, although she had never thought that it would be any different. It was easy and strangely familiar, giving up ground she had already surrendered. She could feel his sweat — their sweat — wicking off her body and into the air, leaving the skin of her stomach and breasts feeling sharply cooler. But she didn’t reach for the sheet and pull it over herself. For a moment, she found herself thinking about spring sunshine and the way it feels the first time in the year when you realize it’s actually come around again to warming your skin. She could also feel sleep approaching, stepping closer, but she got out of bed and got dressed before it arrived.

  Robert lay on the bed without speaking, and he didn’t say anything else to her before she closed the door.

  Alice had groceries with her in the front seat of the car when she pulled into the driveway. The nice thick pork chops that Paul liked, green beans, a bag of new potatoes — his truck was in the driveway at the side of the house, and she knew he’d be watching television.

  He was working different shifts now, taking plenty of hours at the call centre. A week earlier, he’d said that he liked it, that they left him pretty much alone. The only thing that really bothered him was reading the script where it said “This call may be monitored for quality assurance” and wondering every time if this was the call when there’d be a soft, hardly audible “click” and a manager would wordlessly join the call.

  “We say that to the customers, but it’s really supposed to be a message to us. ‘Stay on the ball, we can pull your strings any time we like.’ Like, ‘We’re always watching.’ They don’t know the first thing about motivating employees,” he said.

  That had been four days before, and it was, she thought, the longest conversation they’d had in a month, even though she’d said next to nothing.

  She came through the door into the kitchen, put the groceries on the counter, looked across through into the living room where she could only see the edge of the couch and his protruding knees. There was a beer can upside-down in the sink, so at least he’d rinsed it.

  “Hi, honey,” she said.

  She heard him murmur in response, heard him shift his weight. She looked into the living room — the knees were gone, but the coloured light from the television was still flickering across the wall.

  “Good day?”

  “Good enough,” he said. “Shopping again?”

  “Didn’t find what I was looking for.”

  “Hmm.”

  She was certain Paul was already staring at the television again, that she could have said almost anything about her day and gotten the same response.

  There was shouting from the living room, from the television. Now it was almost always reality shows, she thought. All of them about finding gold or catching crab or shooting alligators, or buying storage lockers and haunting auctions. Watching other people’s exciting lives to make up for the one he wasn’t living.

  Alice took the frying pan out of the cupboard where it always was, took the pot for the beans from the drain rack, put the potatoes into the sink to wash.

  As the water ran over her hands, she thought about driving to the really big mall that used to have the fountain in it, before they took the fountain out because teenagers kept pouring detergent into it. But when they filled in the fountain, they’d crammed in even more kiosks, so maybe, she thought, it wasn’t anything to do with the detergent after all. She decided that was where she’d go next, even though it was an hour or so away, that or to the outlet stores that were all clustered at the highway exit coming into town. She was pretty sure there was a luggage place on the second level of the big mall.

  When she closed her eyes, it was like she could almost feel a new suitcase handle in her hand.

  Official Rules for Pool

  Two of the men were playing dominoes when he came through the door. As his eyes adjusted to the light, Matt Mahon realized that the sharp downward click of a domino put in its place had been the last sound he heard as the
room fell still.

  It was a canteen and pool hall in an old Quonset hut, the building like a great fat galvanized culvert split in two, laid on its side and set down awkwardly. Not only the building but the entire town looking as if it had been arbitrarily tossed out like a mat onto the great flat prairie.

  Matt had never seen anyone playing dominoes before. Not formally, not seriously — not like the outcome of the game actually mattered — but for the two old men just inside the door, it obviously did. They studied the tiles, their eyes the only ones that hadn’t turned toward Matt and the sharp rap of the door closing behind him.

  It was a strange patch of prairie, Matt thought. Probably the only prairie town for miles, maybe the only prairie town anywhere that was surrounded by water, even if that water was just an alkali lake, shallow and strange-coloured and dotted with travelling flat-billed pairs of snout-shovelling ducks.

  Shelley was still out in the car, a rented silver Grand Am with cruise control and the faint smell of spruce car deodorizer, and Matt was glad she had stayed in the car.

  There were six of them in all: the men playing dominoes; a table with three women, each with a bowl of soup and a cane, and in behind, the two silent pool tables sleeping under their bed-sheet shrouds; a woman standing behind a hip-high Formica countertop with a threaded pattern in dark greens, and chips busted out all along the front edge.

  Matt just wanted to use the bathroom, and maybe get a cup of coffee.

  He and Shelley had been driving since four in the morning. They had a schedule to keep. Matt was on his way to a job in Calgary that couldn’t wait an extra day. Shelley was along for the ride, like a girlfriend, he thought, who won’t let go of your hand, no matter how awkward it felt.

  They’d spent the morning filling up on beef jerky, and chips, and other junk food, occasionally fiddling with the radio and stopping only for gas and to swap drivers.