Two-Man Tent

by Robert Chafe

  Thanks in advance for coming to collect the wide-eyed country boy as he arrives to the big city.

  I will let you go now. I keep bothering you because I am so happy to be meeting you.

  Me too Panda. And so far strangely not nervous. Though I’m sure that will change.

  Have fun wandering DC tonight without me. As of tomorrow it is all about entertaining the Canadian. :)

  February 27, 2013

  Flight AC304 TO to DC right? Hope you have a safe flight.

  AC7354. Just landed in TO. Scheduled to arrive in DC at 12:10.

  Got it. Thanks!

  See you soon!

  Make sure you sit on the left side of the plane. The flight in will give you spectacular views of the National Mall.

  Left side of plane. Will do my best.

  February 27, 2013

  Just landed.

  I saw your plane! I’m at terminal A baggage claim. Wearing bright blue chinos.

  Hot. :)

  I’ll be out soon.

  Gulp.

  TOTALLED

  I get out of the sliding side door of the van and do a quick check to see if I’m bleeding. Take my hair down from the dirty elastic, still damp, and work my fingers through. Scott sits behind the wheel, struggling with his shaking cellphone, his face caught in its grey light. Emily is next to him and Geoff behind, silent and still boozy, their heads hung, eyes averted from the sight of it on the road in front of us.

  “Theresa? Theresa, it’s…” Scott’s voice is unreliable with shock. He’s been jolted out of the last strain of his buzz like me. He’s managed to find service on his cell, here in the middle of nowhere. “No, we’re ok, we…Theresa? Theresa?” He loses reception again, and sits a second in frustration before he thinks to ask: “Everyone ok?” Our silence somehow confirms, and he cracks his door and joins me on the outside.

  The clouds had made for a stunning sunset over the water, but now they cover the moon and whatever stars there are. My head hurts from hitting the window, and I can’t stop the low body tremble. I finish combing my hairline with my fingers, no blood, and put my hair back up. I manage to light a cigarette. Its cherry dances against the black trees. I write my name in the murk, my name and Geoff’s. The orange trail lingers a while in the eye before turning purple. Scott scoots around the front of the van and stands at the edge of the light, sweeps his cell in arcs over his head looking for service again, trying his best to be calm. The one remaining headlight casts a bright tunnel down the road we should still be driving. Going and gone, the only light reflected back blue in its wide lifeless eyes.

  “I didn’t see a fucking thing,” Scott whispers. An apology. I can’t tell if it’s for us or the moose.

  It was the last thing my mother had said to me: watch out for the moose. The warning so synonymous with driving across the island it might as well be on the license plate. In her living room back in May, I’d been fighting with a sleeping bag and the clock, Geoff about to pick me up. Three months on the west coast of the island, a working graduate term at the marine research station. It had been highly competitive, applicants from across the country, don’t get your hopes up people said, and I hadn’t. That was my excuse—surprise and shock at getting accepted—for having left everything until the last minute so that there I was with five minutes to get it together and my life spread like broken pottery.

  They’re smart, my mother said, the moose. Smart enough to rally within the boundaries of the park.

  “What, do they have maps? GPS? Really, Mom.”

  “There’s something crazy like a hundred of them per square mile in that park, dear, don’t you tell me they don’t know.”

  “A hundred per square mile? Sure. Manhattan for moose.”

  Her fear was only slightly abated by the fact that it was Geoff who was driving me out. She liked Geoff. Said he had nice hands, whatever that had to do with anything. She watched him load the car with me, said his name lots, ended every sentence with it. She sized him up, in that non-sexual way mothers do, taking the mark of the man, blurring his features with mine.

  We’d been together a little over a year, me and Geoff. One winter’s night of brutal weather and we’d been out and we were drinking and I slipped off my boot under the bar table and slid the arch of my foot over his nuts. He pretended it wasn’t happening. For a good hour that went on. He finally got up to head out, and forced me to flat out ask if I could come home with him. Some would call it bravery, but it was really just impatience. That first sex was awful: brief and embarrassing. But somewhere in it lay potential.

  The next morning we lay on his bed on our backs, staring at the ceiling. He asked me if I always knew we’d get together, that we would be this happy. The question stunned me. So premature, one day in and the joy in it. My happiness was something we hadn’t yet discussed: what I needed, what I want. Geoff warm, and I felt so fucking light, and wanted to be heavy. The day was brightening, the remnants of the previous night’s sleet storm clicking off the roof. He got up, looked out the window.

  The treeless sky cut his silhouette, so that he wasn’t a person anymore really, just an idea: man.

  Father, maybe.

  Scott bums a smoke. I snap my zippo to give him a light, and as he bends into it I see for the first time the full effects of the last ten minutes. The cigarette dances spastic between his lips, his forehead beaded wet. He raises his hand to cup ignition, and absently sends his pinkie into the flame, curses and shakes it loose. He backs off, a puff of smoke like a parting magician, kicks the gravel, screams some curse at the sky.

  I had been half asleep when the young cow bounded into our way. Scott cursed then too. He swerved the van, stuck his hand out and over Emily’s chest, a parent-like reflex in lieu of a seatbelt. The top half of Geoff thrown towards me, and me sent headfirst into the side window. The long lonely note of the four-tire skid, then the van shaking with impact, jolted to the right and sputtering to a halt on the shoulder. The heap of the animal in front of us, silent and still, its shape molded into the front engine panel, a splat of blood across the bonnet and windshield. The doors cracked then, so the moose and its wildness came through instantly in the smell of dirt and woods and blood.

  “Is everyone ok?” Scott asks again. Unconvinced, or forgetting he’d asked the first time. He is hyper now, adrenaline rushing to his heart and legs. He bounces, shakes his hand and burnt finger. I feel bad for him. Maybe he will blame himself. Moose dead, him driving. But it’s not his fault. He’s a good guy, Scott.

  My first week out here, I wanted to go home right away. I was older than the others: they were kids fresh out of undergrad. Most were from out of province. Theresa from Manitoba. Emily from New Brunswick, her first time on the island. Her and Scott had hit it off that first weekend, were bold enough to hold hands by week two. Romance seems so easy for some. Scott was from Springdale and was in one of my classes last year in town so he knew me and was nice to me. But the others, they seemed to make some liberal estimates about my age and conservative estimates about my sense of humour, which had me spending most of my time alone. The summer stretched long ahead of me like a bad Friday night in.

  Mom called that first week, asked how I was, and in a rare display I spilled my guts. She tried to be supportive, but her wisdom was thin, and I could hear the dismissal right there in her voice. I huffed and puffed and hung up on her and called Geoff. I called to broach the topic of him coming back to the park two weeks after he’d left, to pick up his scared shitless girlfriend. When he answered I was diverted. Without the visual stimuli of the dirty track pants and three-day beard, his voice painted him a different person. His voice, and how he was using it, it hit something and I found myself having the strangest fear of disappointing him. I didn’t tell him about the bad two weeks. I told him instead about the park’s borders and a little cove beyond them and the beach there, and how I wanted him to fuck me on it the next time he came to visit. He set the date in stone, and I marked it on the back of t
he kitchen phone book.

  Geoff finally opens the van door and stretches out into the night. Emily doesn’t want to be alone, so she gets out too, follows Scott as he walks slowly towards the dead moose. Their shoes kick and roll the gravel that had been sent from the shoulder onto the road with the skid. Emily’s hands flail half-heartedly at mosquitoes. Scott slows and stops some distance from the carnage, spreads his legs like he’s about to be searched, twists his weight over on his ankles. Emily stands next to him and in front of the van so she’s cut the light on everything but her ass. Scott pushes her away so he can see what’s been done. Emily backs up, leans on the healthy side of the bonnet, watches Scott watching.

  I want to be home again. St. John’s is a million miles away. I want to tell my mom she’s right in fearing sometimes, that I’m learning to do it more myself. We could have been killed out here. We are miles from town, the dark hollow of the night and there is no one around and we can’t get cell reception and even if we did who would we call, not the cops, not with the smell off of us and Scott unable to light a cigarette let alone walk a straight line. We are standing by the side of the road in the dark, and the van battery is failing, and there is blood running into the ditch, and my hands won’t stop shaking.

  There is a weird noise and Scott is tumbling backwards. He loses his footing and falls against the beaten bumper. Emily is on him in seconds, then retreating.

  “Fuck! Fuck!” Scott is scrambling, crossing in front of the headlights and his face is streaked with blood. Emily’s hands are on his head and neck, checking for damage.

  “It’s fucking alive, man. It’s still alive.”

  The moose makes a louder bellow and blasts another spray of blood at Emily’s feet.

  Geoff had set his date to visit. I’d written it on the back of the telephone book, scrawled with such longing, but fading then, in the days and weeks that followed, relaxing into something I hardly thought about. And then three weeks before schedule he drove into the marine centre’s parking lot. My flush of panic, watching him through the lab window, yawning and stretching against his car, not knowing I could see him, his smug grin. So pleased with himself and the surprise he was pulling up with.

  I didn’t miss him. I’d come to realize that, and it frightened me a little.

  I rallied Scott and Emily, and we four took over the coveted sole booth at the pub. Geoff bought the first round, and the third, told good stories. He had his hands on me, wasn’t shy about what we were in front of these strangers. It was going for midnight and the karaoke was kicking in and kicking us out and the night still seemed young. We declared we were warm and we all wanted to go for a swim. The highway stretches long up this peninsula, the back roads lawless. Four hundred kilometers and only a couple of RCMP cruisers to govern it. If you should find yourself after dark with a car gassed and an itch to go to the beach, conversation need never turn to blood alcohol or designated driver. Scott still had the keys to the centre’s panel van, so Emily snatched them. I started a fight with the driver’s seat retract, while Scott and Geoff stood giggling their protest. Emily slurred a curse on their cowardice, called Scott a faggot. It worked and they piled in and we peeled out of the parking lot and up the coast towards the day-use campgrounds.

  Scott’s window was down, his hand surfing the night air. Geoff was all smiles but fingers like forks on his lap, complaining about the speed. I’m a good fucking driver. I told him this twice. I was saying everything twice. I’d had enough to make me talkative but I was staying on the road. I’m a good driver. I said it again.

  It was a long drive and then a short walk from the parking lot over daily mowed campgrounds, past the public cookhouse. The beginning of dew on the grass, the promise of sand between the toes. I was taking off my clothes as I walked and Geoff followed suit. Scott waited for cover from the last street light, his shyness the first hint of a returning sobriety. Emily had her arms crossed, a signpost of her intent to stay dry, her mood going south.

  Geoff ran past me and dove headfirst into the shallows. Complete darkness now, his splash cutting through it, then laughter and nothing but stars above. I waded in, found Geoff lying on his back, tiny waves breaking over him, his chest barely wet. Scott roared past us, his skin so pale you could see his white arse jiggling by starlight, eventually slowed by deeper water into a sucking lunge.

  I sat with Geoff, the rise and fall of the water lifting and dropping me, his hands on me in the dark. I could smell the salt water in his hair. “Don’t go too far, Scotty.” Emily’s voice came from high up the beach. She wouldn’t even sit next to the water let alone get in it. Her words travelled over us and onwards to Scott splashing further out.

  “Seriously, I mean it.”

  “I’m not even over my head out here, it’s shallow.”

  “I don’t care. I can’t see you.”

  The wind retreated a little, and as the shallows calmed, Geoff saw something moving around us. The water suddenly filled with thousands of phosphorescents. All around us, light and beauty. He kissed me and I thought: I’m spinning. The stars above and below, the booze.

  In the lone fading headlight, Emily now does her best to clean the blood off Scott’s face. Her jean jacket buttoned tight against her bare skin, her cotton T-shirt off and in her hands, dabbing at his cheeks. Scott is eye-locked with the dying moose, transfixed, totally fucked up. His proximity has stirred the animal out of whatever pain-induced stupor had descended, and now it jerks in pain, moans and spits. The sounds are horrible. The wetness of it, a flutter of fluid in every passage.

  Scott pushes Emily off him, fights with his phone again, but continues to lose reception. A moment of frustration and he whizzes it at a tree trunk, misses and loses it somewhere beyond the farthest edges of the light. The park is two hours wide. He had gotten through to Theresa back at the centre, but didn’t have enough time to tell her where we were or what had happened. It is going for three in the morning. And she is moving now, the moose. She is struggling for the assumed safety of woods. Kicking her legs, scraping and dragging her face along the pavement. Her movement into the light brings a full view of what the van has done. Her back left leg is barely attached. This is where most of the blood flows. The leg is bluntly severed but there is enough nerve and muscle that the losing leg joins the other three in the escape. The leg kicks wildly and unnaturally out and up, only to end back where it began with a loud slap in the quickly pooling blood. She’s in real distress. The adrenaline lets her turn a corner into true panic, eyes wildly scanning us as shadows against the light. The four of us hang back, and eventually recede to hide behind the van.

  “I can’t take this.” Scott is turning the corner himself, starting to take on responsibility. You can see in his shoulders that he means business. “I cannot take this.”

  “Someone is going to come,” Emily says.

  “Come where?” Geoff is raising his voice to top out the sound of the moose. “Even Theresa doesn’t know where we are.”

  “She knows we’re in trouble,” Emily counters. “She’s called the RCMP, they’ll be out looking.”

  “Well that’s fucking great, the cops.”

  “A park ranger then, someone, she would have called someone. Someone will come.”

  The moose protests the time frame. A mournful howl. Not soon enough, she says. Geoff hacks a cough, and without a word sets off, starts walking away from the lights and into the darkness up the road from where we’ve come. He finally shouts over his shoulder, as an afterthought: he’s going back to the day-use campground to look for a phone or someone who can help.

  “It’s thirteen kilometers!” He chooses to ignore me. “Geoff!”

  And he’s gone.

  The moose groans: I’m dying over here. Guts and gore feeding the dirt in the ditch. Come on, help a girl out. She kicks again, and something rips inside her. You can hear it, and you can hear it in her voice, higher, more urgent.

  “This is fucking cruel, man.”

 
; The moose doesn’t want to be saved. She’s not confused. The darkness of the trees is seductive, but she’s no fool. She’s not making it off this pavement. And like she accepted that she stops moving and goes quiet. She wants out.

  Geoff is gone out of the limits of the light, and somewhere in the murk of the forest Scott’s cell begins to ring. Like an alarm, I think, and I look at him and Emily. Something has to be done.

  Lying in the grass of the day-use park, I rolled over, rested my chin on the ground. With my full weight on my stomach like that, I could feel my ribs reaching down into the earth below, breath enough to lift and drop me. Sometimes I feel so light it’s like I’m made of dust. Makes me consider my body and what it’s been made to do. Precious time ticking.

  “You alright?”

  Geoff beside me propped up on one elbow. It was going for two in the morning and the swimming hadn’t been as fun as it should have been. The flare of the street lamps at the edge of the park gave us a view of each other and the children’s swing set, its lower limbs threaded in grass.

  I was thinking: I like this man. I don’t love him, but I like him, and that can be enough. I don’t need love. Not love like his. There is only one thing I need. The wind picked up and set the swings in motion, the squeak and adjust of the rusty mechanics.

  Emily and Scott had a fight when he had gotten out of the water, his not heeding her by going into the deep alone, her worry. They were walking wet circles in the far-off orange light of the campground parking lot. It was just me and Geoff alone in the grass. Privacy. And drunkenness, and the need to speak that comes with it. And so I opened my mouth and I started talking. I told him. Not how I felt, but what I needed. Needed from him.