The Path of Most Resistance

by Russell Wangersky

  The drive had started with a deep blue sky full of stars near Winnipeg. The road was straight in the way only open country will allow, and Matt had been at the wheel when the sun had suddenly appeared. He could picture the road back behind them for the whole drive, unspooling in his head like a dropped roll of ribbon. He occasionally nodded off in the passenger seat — Shelley driving, resolute, her jaw set on stern — and even then, with the steady whine of the tires on the pavement, most of his dreams had been about driving anyway.

  There was some part of coming into Saskatchewan that he still wasn’t sure about — like when the road had narrowed from four lanes to two and cracks had started to appear in the pavement, as if driving to a poor relation’s house — but thinking back, he wasn’t absolutely sure he hadn’t dreamt part of it, manufacturing the roadway in his head.

  “Chicken noodle,” the woman behind the counter said. She was dressed in a white smock, grey wiry hair fighting out from under her hairnet.

  “Excuse me?” Matt said.

  “Chicken noodle. It’s the soup of the day,” she said. For some reason, Matt suddenly felt that the other people in the room were sharing a regular joke. There was only one pot, a huge aluminum barrel, on the front burner of the gas stove, the blue triangle flames flickering out tentatively from underneath the metal.

  “Umm — the bathroom?” Matt asked, looking around.

  “Down back in the corner,” the woman said. “But you’ll have to wait.” She pointed back past the pool tables — in the gloom of the back corner of the room, there was a closed door, and next to it, an elderly man, standing, leaning against the wall with his palm flat on the wallpaper, as if depending on the straight line of the wall for his balance. The man didn’t move, and Matt couldn’t make out his eyes clearly enough in the darkness to see whether the man was looking at him or not.

  If Shelley hadn’t been sleeping when they pulled into the town, Matt would have made an attempt at a joke about its name — “Chaplin — must be a funny place” — but she hadn’t stirred, not even when he shut the car off. He’d had an almost irresistible urge to wake her, to show her the cookie-cutter sameness of the town as they drove through it, the way the houses were all virtually identical, the way the streets had been laid out perfectly straight, as if planned in advance on an architect’s drawing board somewhere a thousand miles away.

  It was a company town, with even the small patches of yard designed with careful deliberation and the measured step of rulers. Matt had glanced over at Shelley, sleeping — her mouth went strangely slack, her face changed to someone both solemn and almost empty, like she’d drained out through a hole in herself — and he felt an odd little tug and decided not to wake her.

  He wouldn’t have even stopped in the town, except that his bladder was bursting, and by now the prairie was so clear and empty that he felt as if he would have to walk a mile or so from the highway just to get far enough out of sight to piss on the hummocked grass.

  Chaplin had bumped up over the horizon all at once and just in time: one minute it had all been rolling prairie, brown and endless, and then Chaplin was simply there, a sleight-of-hand in the heat-shimmer, appearing at the seam between sky and road.

  It was an intersection and a gas station — but no one in sight at the twin pumps — and then the town out behind, a short rank of empty streets where the only cars in sight were parked in orderly lines, all on one side of the road. Matt imagined that, one morning, everyone would get a letter in their identical mailboxes, and the next morning, someone would carefully move all the cars to the other side of the street.

  It was almost cartoon-bright outside by then, the sky huge and upended with only a few clouds running along the edge of the horizon. When Matt got out of the car, his hand had come up to shade his squinting eyes and he wished he had the ball cap he’d tossed into the back seat.

  Standing and waiting for the bathroom, Matt imagined that the town was almost empty, kept up for appearances, and all of its residents were there in front of him.

  Then the bathroom door opened, revealing the small wood-panelled bathroom, a single bright bare light bulb hanging above the toilet. For a moment, the bulb threw a thick wedge of light across the floor, and then an older woman moved out into the light, throwing a shadow across one of the pool tables. She had a cane in one hand, and as she came through the door, the man who had been waiting beside the door slid his arm easily through hers at the elbow, and they moved slowly back to an empty table.

  The woman looked at him for a moment, pursing her lips slightly as if trying to remember how she knew him.

  He let the two of them pass before he walked to the bathroom.

  Matt was already out of the bathroom and up at the counter when Shelley came in. She saw him, waved sleepily, and swung her hip out to hit his with a solid little thunk as she walked by him to the bathroom, shutting the door hard behind her. He couldn’t remember exactly when that particular intimacy had started — the couples’ reach, the way one person always knows where the small of the other’s back will be.

  On the other side of the counter there was a long flat black griddle with a rectangular exhaust hood hunched over it. In the big two-handled aluminum pot, which was closer now, he could see big pieces of chicken cycling up through the soup’s thermals, cresting at the yellow surface before sinking back down again.

  There was an old automatic coffee maker: glass coffee pots with Bakelite handles and metal bottoms. Just looking at it, Matt knew it made hard black acidic coffee that he would feel in his gut for the next fifty miles. He bought a cup anyway.

  “Sugar’s over there,” the woman at the counter said after he counted out enough change. Shelley was still in the washroom, so he put the plastic top on the cup and looked up, letting his eyes play slowly around the room.

  The domino game had started again, the dominoes clicking like a dog’s claws on linoleum. The players were two bushy-eyebrowed men, both leaning in over the table so that the crowns of their heads almost touched — the black dominoes sharply defined against the red and white checked plastic tablecloth. On the other side of the counter, behind Matt’s back, he heard the tinny clatter of pot lids and silverware clashing.

  Matt took a sip of the hot coffee and walked toward the back of the room, stopping to look at the faded cardboard signs by the rack of pool cues, two signs, each pinned in place with four thumbtacks, each with a small ribbon of rust running down the cardboard beneath them. “Official Rules for Pool,” read one sign. “Care and Cleaning,” said the other. Both signs had been made by the makers of the pool tables, and Matt could imagine the pool tables arriving at the train station decades before, flat and strangely heavy in their wooden crates, the big brittle sheets of slate packed carefully. He could imagine someone hanging the two pieces of card on the wall and then never having them move again, collecting dust.

  There were chalkboards for each table, both with a shadow of some recent game ghosting up, carelessly erased handwriting that was still almost legible.

  When Matt turned back, the coffee bitter on the back of his tongue, the woman who had left the bathroom earlier was looking straight at him, holding his eyes with her own. Her hands were flat on the surface of the table — faces can go two ways with age, Matt thought. They either fill out, rounding and losing their features in the depths of spare flesh, or else they dry to spare lines where every scrap of laughter ends up caught in the corners of the eyes, every angry moment caught in the thin space between the eyebrows. The woman looking at him was the second kind: her face was spare and lined, and Matt swore it was a road map of every right and wrong turn she’d ever taken. Brown eyes, now almost black, the whites around her pupils yellowed and strung with small blood vessels. She stared.

  But with a little huff, like cool wind on his neck, he suddenly saw her as a much younger woman — hair black, those same eyes younger and flashing — the room changing, the pool tables pushed back closer to the wall.

  Now
surrounded by players, the occasional sharp click of the balls loud enough to break through the nimbus of cigarette smoke and music. He could see her with scarlet lipstick, a summer-weight dress falling just below her knees, broad mouth smiling. Outside in the prairie night, there would have been summer insects rising on the briny air from the alkali pond, the bugs battering futilely against the handful of street lights and the big dome lights at the gas station, the rising moon fat and yelling mutely at the edge of the horizon.

  The picture changed; two people up against the back of the building, the man rushing, his hands low and eager, the woman with her back against the building and her dress pulled up. Two cigarette butts twisting red on the ground, turning like compass points with the wind, small threads of grass touching the butts, flaring bright into red filaments before winking out into grey ash. Then, their bodies lit bright for a few instants by the big light on the front of a train engine rumbling fast into town, shadows thrown against the back of the building and sliding down sidewise as the train passed. Her hands caught tight in the hair on the back of his head, everything fixed and sharp and frozen.

  Then the train passed and the night was filling in again, simplifying the universe into touch and taste and stars and the slip of falling moon.

  It ended, all at once, and Matt was sure he could still hear ragged breathing, and it might have been his own.

  The woman at the table was still watching him intently when the bathroom door opened and Shelley came out.

  “All set?” Shelley asked. It wasn’t really a question — the length of her stride said simply, “Places to go,” and he found himself immediately falling into step behind her, heading for the car, his path taking him right by the tables.

  “Did you see it?” the old woman said, grabbing hold of the sleeve of his shirt as he passed close by her. “Did you see?” The man at the table was already reaching for his partner’s hand, bending back each finger of her surprisingly strong grip one digit at a time.

  “Let him go, Marie. Let him go,” the man said, his voice calm and resigned, like this was an everyday occurrence.

  Matt thought it might be her husband — the man looked toward Matt, his face serious but absolutely unreadable. “Go on,” he said formally. “Don’t mind her. Marie just gets all worked up when she sees someone new. Upsets her when things are out of the ordinary.” Then he turned back toward the woman, the hair on the back of his head silver smoothed tight to his head, like wet fur on a mink or otter. An older version of the man he’d just seen.

  She was smiling now, but with tears bright on her face, following the lines down. “I know,” she said. “You see.”

  Matt moved away sharply and spilled some of the coffee on the back of his hand, a small and startling burn that grabbed his attention like a hand turning his chin. Shelley was already out the door, the screen banging back hard. Matt was hurrying then, his hand already flicking the key to the car’s ignition like a small silver weapon.

  One of the domino players snapped down a tile with a sharp click, and Matt thought the sound could not have been more final if it had been choreographed as part of a disturbing and painfully short stage play.

  Then the door slammed shut behind him as well, and the bright sunshine hit his eyes like a wall, and the inside of the pool hall simply disappeared as if it never had been.

  “Was there even one of them under seventy?” Shelley asked as they slowed at the stop sign to turn back onto the highway. The turn signal ticked its ordered heartbeat, one-two, one-two.

  “I thought we were going to be trapped there. You know, ‘You have to stay here now. You are the future of our community. You have to stay and breed.’” She quavered the last two sentences in a high, thin, old voice, waving her hands up in front of her face, fingers shaking and pointing. She let her voice drop back into its normal range: “What the hell else would keep you in a place like that?”

  Matt swung the car to the right.

  “We should’ve taken pictures,” Shelley said. “No one’s going to believe it.”

  “You’re right,” he said, “no one would,” and he was speeding the car up on the empty road, hearing the whirr of the tires and the thump of the wheels every time they drove over a crack in the grey pavement.

  They were already driving past the very edge of town, the alkali salts high and white and piled in slope-sided cones. A yellow CAT loader was worrying the edge of one of the piles, its bucket drooling salt as it backed away, arms held high. It was the only thing moving at the salt plant, a rectangular building with high corrugated steel siding, the loader scrabbling like an insect building a small and traditional nest.

  A train, three big Canadian Pacific diesel locomotives belching black smoke and pulling a long line of identical grain cars, was playing tag with them — catching them easily when the train tracks were in a straight line next to the road, losing ground again when the tracks veered away as the result of some small shift in the terrain.

  The windows in the car were all the way down by then, and they passed a big flat-fronted tractor-trailer truck. It was big and too square and impassive, its windows mirrors, and Matt was reckless and swinging out too fast over the double line. As they pulled by, the trucker blew his horn at them. Matt flinched, but he didn’t look back at the big semi in the rear-view.

  Then Shelley was letting her long hair blow out the window, and she was laughing, really laughing as the yellow prairie whipped by. Matt had a last sip of coffee, grimaced, and poured it out the window, the slipstream catching it and flinging it against the side of the car in a long and trailing ribbon that would later catch a pattern of dust shaped like fossilized flame.

  A hawk hung in the distance ahead of them, motionless — then Shelley was pointing at it, her entire upper body hanging outside the car now, the wind rippling her shirt tight against her breasts so that he could see the outline of them so clearly that it was as if he was holding them in his hands. The day so bright and full that it was like he couldn’t stand it.

  She was gripping onto the doorframe with just one hand now, her back bent by the wind as the car sped forward, pointing.

  Then all at once the hawk plunged toward the ground, angling down toward its prey, its wings swept back sharply as it dove. As it disappeared, Matt imagined some small life ending as quickly as someone flicking a light switch — a rabbit, maybe, or something smaller, a meadow vole or a mouse — a life ending with little more ceremony than an aerial shadow flicking down and a brief useless instant of alarm. An instant faster even than being caught in the cold, disinterested stare of a train’s headlight.

  “Did you see it?” Shelley called, the words coming in the window at him on a snatch of wind. “Did you see?”

  And Matt felt a click in his chest, a small and solid heartsick definite thud, a feeling as if this moment would pass too quickly, and never, ever come again.

  “I saw.”

  He heard the tires against the slightly roughened pavement as the car moved forward, the sound filling his ears, a noise so steady and even that it was as if it was never meant to stop. Matt forced himself to think about the future, about Shelley and Calgary and a job he’d taken because it was offered and because it was new.

  He looked through the windshield and pretended there would never be a need, a time, to look in the mirror again.

  Snow

  Art Ford heard the snow blower in the distance as if the sound was coming through layers and layers of soft cloth. It didn’t disturb him at first; he was warm under the weight of the covers, only just catching the sound of the engine rising as the wind blew it toward the house. It wasn’t even annoying, but the more it cut into the edges of his sleep, the more a thought tugged at him that there was something he was supposed to be doing.

  Then, all at once, he was awake, feet on the floor, all seventy-two years of waking and always being ready at a moment’s notice, struggling to get to his feet without losing his balance, the window in front of him with only the cu
rtains in the way. Before he even pulled the curtain aside, he knew what he was going to see. He knew it from the forecast, because they seldom got the really big storms wrong.

  Fran was supposed to have woken him up — she was the one who was always up early, the light sleeper, the early riser. But it must have thrown her off, too, the sudden snowy quiet of it, the way the falling flakes seemed to eat the noise, swallowing it, erasing it.

  They had watched the weather report before they had gone to bed, and Art had pointed at the approaching low pressure system on the weather map with one finger.

  “Don’t let me sleep in tomorrow,” he’d told Fran. “Get me up as soon as you get up.” Forty years they’d been married now, and she could always be depended on.

  Now, he almost wanted to wake her and have words with her, but there wasn’t time. Besides, looking across, seeing her sleeping, he didn’t have the heart. She had never been a really sound sleeper, and he wouldn’t think of waking her. He’d heard once that there is a point in life where you stop looking like a child when you’re asleep, and start looking like you’ve died instead. Fran, he thought, had passed that point long before, lying there on her back with her mouth slightly open, her cheeks hanging loose. He couldn’t even remember what she’d looked like before. Art would never have said a thing about it to her, though. He wondered for a moment what he must look like when he was sleeping, too, thinking that he was nothing to write home about either.

  No time for all this, he thought, getting his pants and shirt from where he’d left them on the chair, bunching them all up and taking them to the bathroom so he could turn on the light and get dressed. He had no time to waste, not with the tax man already up and working.

  It had to be the tax man, he thought. There were no other snow blowers on the street, and too much snow coming down for the sound to have been carrying from anywhere else.

  The tax man — Art supposed he could tolerate the man, most of the time. They were both retired and shared many of the same slow, regular schedules. Except that the tax man was always trying to pull off some kind of one-upmanship. At least once a week he was talking about how lucky he was to be on his “partially indexed defined benefit pension” — or else he was doing something equally annoying like bringing Art a large double-double, without even asking, like Art and Fran were in such dire straits that they couldn’t afford to buy a cup of coffee or something.