My October

by Claire Holden Rothman

  Most people turned away. They were afraid too, he realized. What a strange thought.

  As the light changed, a man made a gesture with his hand. It wasn’t a wave, exactly. Smaller than that. A flick of the index finger. Hugo ran toward him. The car was an Echo, bright metallic blue. Ontario plates.

  “Buckle up,” the man said in English after Hugo climbed in. He turned the car onto the ramp and for the next few seconds concentrated on merging and then positioning himself strategically in the middle lane of the northbound expressway. When this was accomplished, he turned to Hugo and stuck out his hand. “Frank,” he said simply.

  “Joe,” replied Hugo, looking away.

  “Hey,” said the man, “you’re English.”

  His handshake wasn’t firm, although it could have been the angle. Frank’s hair was brown, starting to grey at the sides. He wasn’t fat, exactly, just sort of soft, like his grip. And even though it was mid-autumn, he was wearing short sleeves. His arms were pale and covered with dark hairs. He began talking about himself almost immediately. He had spent the week in Montreal at a convention, he said, not bothering to say what kind. For five whole days, he had spoken nothing but French. Well, that wasn’t entirely true, he admitted. His French wasn’t that good, but he’d been surrounded by French people trying to speak English to him. He couldn’t understand half of what any of them said. Joe, he announced, was the first honest-to-god English person he’d spoken to since leaving Ontario.

  He gave Hugo a sidelong glance. “You from out of town too?”

  Hugo shook his head. He was from Montreal, he said, but his family was mixed. He regretted it as soon as he’d said it. He had to watch how much he gave away.

  “Ah,” said the man. “You’re a mélange, are you, a half-breed? I suppose there’s quite a few like that now. The real English left years ago, the purebreds. I ought to know. They’re all in Toronto with me.”

  They were approaching the Trans-Canada Highway, about to merge. Hugo and the man fell silent so that he could concentrate again on the road. Hugo turned his whole body to look out the window, thinking about the man’s words. Half-breed. Was that what he was? It seemed demeaning, somehow, that a life could be boiled down to this one defining aspect. On either side of the elevated ramp, the roofs of factories and the tops of stunted trees rushed by. Hugo stole a look at Frank, who was hunched over the wheel, following the other cars into the merge.

  Once they were on the Trans-Canada, Frank unbuttoned the top of his pants, laughing when he caught Hugo glancing at him. “I ate way too much this week. Steamies. You know what steamies are, Joe?”

  He meant steamés, those hot dogs they sold on the Main, but Hugo didn’t correct him. Frank was chuckling to himself, but not in a warm way, not including Hugo in the joke. Hugo wasn’t sure how to react.

  “How old are you, Joe?” he asked suddenly.

  “Sixteen,” said Hugo. He’d been anticipating this moment.

  There was a pause as Frank digested this. Hugo couldn’t tell if he believed it. He was wearing Ray-Bans. He asked if Hugo had a girlfriend.

  Hugo’s heart missed a beat. He tried not to glance at Frank’s open zipper. Was he angling? He didn’t know what to say. There was a girl in his class. Angélique. Her face rose like a moon in his mind, white and ethereal, the way she sometimes came to him in dreams. He shook his head. He’d never said a word to her.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” said Frank, his face lighting up with amused surprise. “A good-looking guy like you? All grown up?” He paused and smiled as though Hugo were the most interesting person he’d met in a long time. “Sixteen years old,” he said, grinning broadly.

  Hugo shrugged.

  “Haven’t met the right gal yet, is that it?” He had put it as a question, but he didn’t wait for a reply. “There’s no rush, Joe, believe me. You got plenty of time for all of that.”

  Hugo was warm now. Too warm. Frank’s probing was making him uncomfortable. He took off his hoodie and, on Frank’s insistence, tossed it in the back seat. He sort of regretted it. He felt exposed in his T-shirt, but Frank had the heater up so high he was starting to sweat. They covered the next few kilometres in silence. Hugo’s head began to droop.

  “You want to sleep?” Frank said, his voice kind. “Be my guest. It’s a long, boring drive.”

  Hugo pushed his seat back as far as it would go and closed his eyes. He was grateful for the lift. He had spent the whole night on his feet, trying to keep warm. From the reading, he’d walked back to Saint-Henri, taking his bearings from the cross on the summit of Mount Royal. Instead of going home, though, his feet had surprised him by keeping on walking. He’d ended up at the canal, wandering by the water, looking for shelter. Itinerants camped out there. Kids like himself and older homeless men. Someone had lit a fire, and Hugo had stopped to thaw out. But then a fight broke out and he’d left. His breath grew heavy. He felt himself sinking. And then something startled him. Frank’s hand was on his inner thigh.

  Hugo jerked his head back and slammed his knees together.

  Frank pulled his hand away. “Sorry, pal. You were interfering with my gear shift.”

  Hugo stayed wide awake after that. Frank was a pédé. That was the word they used at school, the casual mocking insult the boys threw at each other—but until this moment, Hugo had never knowingly been in the presence of one. He angled his legs toward the passenger door, making sure no part of him came anywhere near Frank’s gear shift.

  When a sign for a highway rest stop appeared, Hugo told Frank he had to take a leak. Conversation had stopped some time before, and now the radio was blaring. They had been listening to a rock station, an hour of golden oldies from the seventies and eighties, but it was the top of the hour. The news had just come on.

  “Looks like we’re going to war,” Frank observed after the anchor delivered a report about al Qaeda. He turned on his flashers, and for the first time in thirty kilometres, Hugo felt like he could breathe again.

  “Heads are going to roll in Afghanistan,” Frank went on, “and they won’t be American. You watch. They got drones.” He removed his Ray-Bans for a second and looked over at Hugo. “You ever heard of drones? You don’t need a pilot to steer them. It’s all done by remote control, like a video game. I saw a program about it on the military channel.”

  He kept talking even once the car was stopped, but Hugo had had enough. He grabbed his hoodie from the back and opened the door. Frank pretended not to notice his haste. He told Hugo he would wait and leaned in the sunshine on the car’s hood, trying to look nonchalant.

  After ten minutes, when Hugo failed to reappear, he drove away.

  Hugo watched with relief from the window of the food court. He marked the event by buying a Tim Hortons coffee and a chocolate cruller. Then he went back outside. It had warmed up since dawn, but not enough to tempt people to eat out here. The picnic tables looked abandoned and sad. He sat down at one of them and licked flakes of frosting off his cruller. He was famished. The dark-chocolate dough was so soft and fresh, he barely had to chew. The coffee warmed him. He’d never had a full cup before, and it wasn’t too nasty when you loaded it with cream and sugar. Not far away, there was a parking area with three eighteen-wheelers lined up in a row. Mastodons, his mother used to call them. He’d loved them as a little boy.

  A man was standing near the front of the farthest one, checking his tire pressure. He was wearing an undershirt even though a stiff wind was blowing. His arms were thicker than Hugo’s legs. Hugo finished his snack and walked over.

  The man didn’t look up. He was shorter than Hugo had supposed, and his legs were slightly bowed. On his right arm, just beneath the shoulder joint, was a tattoo of a man either falling or leaping through the air, his limbs outstretched and flailing. Above the tattoo was a banner with a single word.

  “T’es français,” said Hugo, walking up to him.

  The man looked up, startled.

  Hugo pointed at the banner. Icare. Fro
m the Greek myth.

  “Québécois,” the man said in French, wiping his hand on his jeans and offering it to Hugo. “Jean-Louis Joncas.”

  There was a pause. “Hugo Lévesque,” said Hugo.

  Jean-Louis worked out of Saint-Jérôme, forty minutes north of Montreal. He was a long-haul driver. His pickup this time had been in New Brunswick, and he was on his way to Toronto. After that, he was going to New York and Pennsylvania. Only then would he head home again. A short trip, he said, starting with the 401, which he disliked. It was a dead strip, he told Hugo. Good for nothing but paying the bills.

  Hugo screwed up all his courage. “You take passengers?”

  The man looked sharply at him. “You are alone?” Unlike Frank, Jean-Louis Joncas waited for an answer, appraising Hugo’s face in the bright noonday sun. When Hugo nodded, he asked his age.

  Hugo told him the truth.

  “I could get in trouble,” Jean-Louis said, looking at him with chocolate-coloured eyes. “Big trouble. How do I know you’re not a runaway?” He paused for half a second. “Not that that would stop me.” He did a quick check to see if anyone was watching, then pulled open the passenger door of the truck’s cabin.

  Once they were safely on the highway, Hugo discovered that Jean-Louis was a talker. Driving a truck might seem romantic, but the reality was boredom and long hours of solitude. Jean-Louis was like a bottle uncorked. He had been driving trucks for two decades, he said, even though he was only thirty-three. Hugo laughed. Jean-Louis must think he was a complete imbecile. He knew, after all, how to subtract. But Jean-Louis swore it was the truth. “My stepfather did overnight runs on weekends, delivering bread up north to supply the lumber camps. When I was thirteen, he asked me if I wanted to come along. It became a thing we did. Something to share. One Saturday, we were speeding up the highway, and he asked if I would take the wheel. He was sleepy, he said. It would be safer. He could nap. It was supposed to be a short nap, twenty minutes, tops, just to give him energy. But in the end, I drove the whole night through. I had never even driven a car, but there I was at thirteen, driving a fifty-three-foot tractor-trailer.”

  “No one stopped you?”

  Jean-Louis shook his head. “When I pulled in at the end of the run, I told them my stepfather was worn out from the drive and that I would unload the shipment. Truth was, he’d been in the tavern all afternoon with his buddies. So I unloaded the bread, turned the truck around, and drove all the way back to Saint-Jérôme with him snoring beside me in the passenger seat. Just before we reached this coffee shop outside town, I poked him in the shoulder. The sun was almost up. The sky was starting to brighten. When he saw that, he started cursing me. What did I think I was doing? I was heading in the wrong direction. He would catch it big time because of my incompetence. We pulled in at the coffee shop, and he gave me a dressing down right there in the parking lot. I tried to explain, but he wouldn’t let me speak. Then this waitress came outside, a friend of his, and she started yelling. At him. I’d made the trip, she said. She had seen the truck leave at dinnertime the day before. That wasn’t a sunset out there. It was a brand new day.”

  Jean-Louis threw back his head and laughed. “When my stepfather opened the empty trailer, his jaw dropped, I can tell you.” He winked. From that day onward, the route was his. He drove while the old man snored. By the time he was fifteen, he was a seasoned trucker. The following year, when he got his licence, he quit school and started working under his own name.

  He turned to Hugo. “You still in school?”

  Hugo looked down at his jeans, which were frayed above each knee, the white threads showing through. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about Saint-Jean-Baptiste.

  Jean-Louis shrugged. “Not that I’m in a position to lecture you.” He squinted into the sunshine, eyes on the road. “I wish I were, though. I wish I had stuck with it.”

  Jean-Louis offered him some coffee from his Thermos, sweet and creamy, just the way Hugo liked it, and they drove in silence for a while. Hugo’s hands were trembling, probably because of all the caffeine he’d had. And his thoughts were jumping around like sandflies. He kept picturing his mother’s face. She would like Jean-Louis, and she’d absolutely love his truck. She’d been almost as enamoured of the mastodons in his childhood as he had, making a beeline to any truck they spotted parked on the street. The little boy in the stroller had been her excuse. She would push him closer and closer to the gleaming wheels until he could reach out and touch them. One time, a driver had let Hugo climb into his cab and honk the horn.

  “I got a boy your age,” Jean-Louis said suddenly. The trucker was facing forward, looking intently through the windshield at the highway, even though the road was as straight and easy as a ruled line.

  “Not so old, actually. He’s a year younger than you,” Jean-Louis continued, still staring at the road. “He’ll be fourteen next year.”

  “Does he drive with you?” asked Hugo, envious.

  For several seconds, the only noise was the groan of the motor and the sigh of the eighteen tires. Jean-Louis shook his head. He hadn’t seen his son in years. In fact, he admitted, he’d only met him once, right after his birth.

  The mother had been a waitress at a truck stop in Sudbury. Jean-Louis had been passing through when a snowstorm hit. She’d offered him a bed for the night and he ended up staying the whole week. After that, he drove up to Sudbury a couple of times and she came down once to Saint-Jérôme. She would have married him, he said. But what did he know about that? He was twenty at the time. “And believe it or not,” he said, “that’s young.”

  By the time Jean-Louis learned she was pregnant, it was too late to do anything about it. Their child was born on October 3. His name was Dylan, like the folksinger.

  “He’s English?”

  Jean-Louis shrugged. “I hope he knows a little French. His mother’s family speaks it, but it’s dying in Northern Ontario. Just like it did in Louisiana.” He glanced at Hugo. “You ever been to New Orleans?” he asked. “The Mardi Gras?” He hardened his r’s to sound like an American. “No French there anymore. No siree.” Jean-Louis turned to him again. “You ever been outside the province?”

  Hugo went quiet. He had travelled to Toronto several times. He had vivid memories of his grandfather’s house, big as a castle. They’d let him climb a crabapple tree in the huge backyard. His grandmother had been afraid, but his grandfather had cheered him on, confident he wouldn’t fall. Hugo gazed out the truck window at the naked trees by the side of the highway.

  Jean-Louis kept asking questions. He wanted to know where Hugo had grown up, what school he went to, what had brought him out on the road today. Hugo couldn’t answer. He liked Jean-Louis and wanted to be friendly, but he couldn’t tell the truth. Not now. Not with so much at stake. He had to reach his grandfather’s place. He couldn’t risk messing that up.

  Eventually, Jean-Louis got the message and began talking instead of all the places he’d travelled to. He was a born storyteller. Once more, Sudbury slipped into the conversation. He had tried his best to forget about Dylan, he said. The boy’s mother wanted nothing to do with him now. She didn’t even want child support. She had hooked up with someone else and made a new life for herself. Jean-Louis was firmly behind her.

  “I dream about him sometimes,” Jean-Louis confessed. “And when I do, it’s the strangest thing. He’s still a baby.” He turned in his seat. “What would you do, Hugo? I mean, if you were me? I’ve only been up there twice in all these years. He has a new life. A stepdad. Maybe some half-brothers and -sisters. Either he’s forgotten all about me,” he said, pausing to take a breath, “or else he’s mad as hell.”

  Hugo didn’t even stop to think. It was a no-brainer. “I’d go,” he said. Dylan was waiting. It was obvious. A picture of him began to form in Hugo’s mind, a miniature Jean-Louis, built sturdy, with the same bright spark in his eyes.

  “Just like that?” asked Jean-Louis. “No warning or anything? You’d pack up and
hit the road?”

  Hugo nodded. Jean-Louis had an impressive set of wheels. And he obviously still cared about his son.

  Jean-Louis kept glancing at Hugo as if he held all the answers. “What if he refuses to see me?” he said, his voice small and anxious. Then he raised his right hand and smacked it down hard on the steering wheel. “He probably hates me, walking out on him like that.”

  “He might be angry,” Hugo said, surprising himself with his certainty, “but if he is, it’s not because he hates you.” A wave of sadness rose up from his stomach.

  WHEN THEY REACHED the outskirts of Toronto, they discussed where to let Hugo off. By that time, Hugo had told him he was visiting his grandfather and that the house was in North Toronto. He trusted Jean-Louis and didn’t want him to worry that he had no place to sleep. Jean-Louis couldn’t take the truck into the city proper. He would lose too much road time. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said. “I would have loved to drive you to the door.”

  They pulled off the highway in York Mills, where there was a subway station close to the 401. “It’s been a pleasure,” Jean-Louis said, coming to a stop near the red-and-gold subway sign and climbing out of the rig to offer his hand. The stubble on his chin, Hugo noticed, was silver in spots. A sort of growl came out of him as he took Hugo in his arms, scooping him up and crushing him hard, chest to chest, the way Hugo’s father used to do in happier times.

  Then Jean-Louis climbed back into the cab, and the gleaming mastodon rumbled away, leaving Hugo by himself in the Toronto sunshine.

  21

  York Mills, the stop where Hugo got out of the truck, was near the eastern tip of the U that was Toronto’s principal subway line. His grandparents lived one stop to the south. Hugo paid the full adult fare so as not to have to show his Montreal student ID to the ticket-taker. Then he darted through the turnstile and into a purring red-seated train that arrived at the platform at the same moment he did, as if ordered personally for him. The subway trains in Toronto were quieter than Montreal’s, and grander. They also came out of the ground sometimes and into the open air. Hugo liked these differences. And all around him, people were speaking English. Another change. The passengers looked more or less the same as in Montreal, the same mix of skin colours and styles, but they sure sounded different.