“I want to go out,” said Melissa.
“So go.”
“No, I mean go out. Go someplace.”
“There’s no place to go.” A certain small animal has already made that discovery. Nevertheless, you’re welcome to explore.
Seven buildings along the highway, including the gas station. Seven buildings positioned here for no apparent reason except to take advantage of the demand for fuel. You can’t even call this place a village.
Melissa made a face: I’m running out of patience for your excuses.
“At least we could get a beer and a nice, greasy burger at that place up the road.”
Out on the roadway, a sign proclaimed in faded, hand-painted lettering that they sold the best burgers in town. Zane saw no reason to doubt this assertion. Neither had he any desire to investigate its veracity. His guts squirmed at the prospect.
“That sounds just lovely.”
“Party pooper.”
“That’s an apt turn of phrase, even if it is somewhat too explicit.”
“You’re disgusting.”
She turned away from the window and Zane shot a frame against the light as she walked across the worn and cigarette-cratered carpet. On the wall by the bathroom door was a mirror, and she paused at it and looked carefully at her face as if studying the portrait of a stranger. She gently prodded at the bruising around her eye, purple now giving way to blue, green and yellow. The swelling had subsided but the white of her eye remained a livid red. She pulled gently at her eyelid and winced.
“I look like shit.”
Zane shot two more pictures, framing her to make her a small feature of the squalid room.
“Shit, Zane, do you ever put that thing away?”
“How I see the world, kiddo.”
“Creep.”
She returned her attention to the mirror, turned her head one way and then the other, raised her chin and lowered it, raised her eyebrow and then relaxed it, judging the effect. She essayed three experimental smiles followed by a skeptical glance.
“Zane, d’you think I’m pretty?”
“You mean before or after you called me a creep?”
“Seriously.”
“Are you going to ask if those jeans make your ass look fat?”
She turned back to the mirror.
“The black eye doesn’t help,” he said.
Echoes of the afternoon creeping into the room. Now you hold the lid on and stay clear of all known minefields. Melissa had been emitting electrical waves since morning and Zane had no idea of the cause or the solution.
He checked the film counter and snapped the lens cap back on and slipped the camera into the pocket of his jacket, which he had earlier thrown over his bed. Putting the camera away seemed a prudent response to her crystalline mood.
“I want to go dancing,” she said.
The prospect of finding a place to go dancing in this node on the Trans-Canada seemed something less than dubious. And Zane was, at the best of times, hardly a dancing fool. A dishevelled man twice her age sporting a shock of unkempt hair and a haunted look seemed an unlikely dancing partner for a girl like Melissa, black eye or no. Zane hadn’t danced with a woman since 1991.
“Nobody ever took me dancing.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Lots of guys want to see me dance. Nobody ever wanted to take me dancing.”
Fair enough. Nobody goes dancing anymore, anyway.
“I doubt if there’s anyplace to go dancing around here.”
“Well, what the fuck.” She made the two steps to her bed and flopped onto it with a theatrical flourish.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s my birthday,” she said. “I’m twenty-two.”
“And all of a sudden you feel old age a-stalking you?”
She fixed him with a look that made it clear: you are an idiot.
“Birthdays get me down. My dad would buy me something nice but then he’d try to make it extra-special.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that all the time, Zane. It’s not you.”
Zane looked helplessly at the ceiling tiles, noting in the corner the telltale signs of a leak in the roof. Must be brutal up here in the winter. One good storm and you’re snowbound, trapped with the best burgers in town until the ploughs finally get through. A snow shovel would be no more effective than a teaspoon. You could dig clean through to spring and hardly make a dent in all that snow.
“Well, let’s go get that burger, at least.”
“I need to take a shower first.”
Melissa went into the bathroom, and Zane laid back and tried to make sense of his situation. The motives of your guardian angel remain out of reach, and in any case the angel has poor timing. Any misstep will earn you another punch in the nose. That’ll make three. The holy trinity. Give us a sign; the least any useful guardian angel can do is to drop the odd hint now and again. I’ve had about enough of this enigmatic silence.
Zane got up and retrieved a notebook from his camera bag and tore out a page and wrote, “Gone out dancing. Back soon.” To this he signed his name, realizing only after the fact that the gesture was unnecessary. Then he walked over to check out the best burgers in town.
Yellow incandescent bulbs cast a warm light over the roadhouse’s round wooden tables. A counter at the back of the room doubled as a bar, and through the order window Zane could see the kitchen behind it. The place was empty save for two men at one end of the counter, whose boots and hands marked them as loggers. A slightly overweight girl of about eighteen manned the other end of the counter, along with an older woman, similarly overweight but lacking pimples. Mother and daughter, in all probability. Mother stood between daughter and the loggers.
“I heard a rumour you have the best burgers in town,” said Zane.
“That’s the rumour,” said the older woman. “But you know rumours and little towns.”
Her name tag said that she was Darlene. Her daughter was Cathy. Two ordinary, small town names. The kind of names you can trust.
“Please tell me you also have a jukebox.”
“We can move the tables if you want to dance.” Darlene pointed to the corner. She clearly found Zane amusing.
“Maybe later.”
“You want dinner?”
“Maybe later on that, too. But let’s see what you got.”
He picked up the laminated card that displayed the limited menu. It looked like he was going to be having salad, although the ominous behaviour of the younger logger suggested that Zane might be staying in. The logger had close-cropped blond hair under a dirty ball cap, and he moved like a kid who had recently graduated from crushing bones on a high-school football field, and now felt an overwhelming nostalgia for crepitus. He stared at Zane over his coffee cup with all the sympathy of a bull for the matador’s cape.
Everyone on edge today. Must be something in the air, heat lightning. I have had my nose punched twice already in the past twenty-four hours. Thank you for your interest, but further tests of my blood clotting factors are unnecessary at this time.
“I’m here with my daughter. It’s her birthday, it’s not working out too good. All of a sudden she says she wants to go dancing. I’m trying to surprise her.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“Well, she’s been through a tough time. She needs some nice.”
“That’s the girl with the eye.”
Rumours and small towns. This accounts for the electrical charge.
“That’s her. Anyway, I want to do something kind of special.”
“You want a cake?” said Cathy.
Zane almost came unpinned.
“You’re a saint, Cathy.”
“Oh, please. It’s a freezer cake. But I’ll put some candles in it for you.”
“Just do one. First year of the rest of her life.”
“Good for her,” said Darlene.
“We’ll be about half an hour,” said
Zane, and checked his watch. He walked to the door on a wave of approval. For now, at least, you’re one of the good guys. That’ll change quick enough if the cake prompts Melissa to punch you in the nose again. That blond kid in the ball cap will go right ahead and land a few punches of his own. At least it’ll be quick. Be sure to bring a supply of tissues, for the blood and for the mourners. If any bother showing up.
The sun now filtered through the pine trees and the room had fallen into gloom. Zane turned on the light. The water had stopped splashing and Melissa had drawn the curtains, so he reasoned that she had already read his note although she was now cloistered again behind the bathroom door. He crumpled the note and threw it in the trash can and then sat down on the bed and waited.
She emerged from the bathroom in wet hair and a towel.
“Where’d you go?”
“I went to make dinner reservations.”
“Yeah, right.”
She fished a hairbrush out of her bag and began brushing her hair in short, quick strokes, with her head tilted to one side.
“For your birthday, I’m taking you out to dinner, and then I’m taking you dancing. But first, you have to do something for me.”
The hairbrush froze in mid-stroke, and Zane realized the misfortune of his words. For a long moment, Melissa said nothing.
“Sing for me,” he said.
“What?”
She held the hairbrush as if unsure of what it was for.
“I want you to sing for me. Anything you want. I never hear you sing anymore.”
She put the hairbrush down and tucked the towel between her legs and sat down on the bed.
“You really are crazy.”
“Shut up and sing,” he said, and she laughed, and looked at him until it was clear that he was serious. And then she sat on the bed and started to sing, and tried to sing through her laughter. And then she gave up and said fuck it, Zane, let’s go eat.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Melissa meanders through a fine drizzle, tracing a path along the water’s edge with complete disregard for the deteriorating state of her running shoes. The Pacific, a grey and featureless expanse broken only by the dark mass of Point Roberts, stretches to the horizon under a flat, overcast sky. There will be no sunset tonight.
In the end it all comes down to this, at the end of the long downhill along the Fraser Valley: sitting on the hood while your engine cools, metal pinging as it contracts, its fading warmth rising through the soggy seat of your jeans. Drizzle finding its way under your jacket collar. And there she is, down on the beach, at the end of a trail of sodden footprints, at the end of the road. Taking her time. Not that it matters. Might as well spin this thing out as long as we can.
Zane hunched into his jacket and pulled up the collar and waited. She was alone on the beach.
When they hit Vancouver, Zane turned south off the Trans-Canada and drove down on through Surrey to White Rock because he wanted to see the water, and this was the route he knew. We are all of us creatures of habit. At the end of the road he pulled up and parked by the beach and then shook her. She opened her eyes and sat up, and he pointed at the ocean.
“There it is,” he said, as if it was a rare and exotic animal instead of the boring, empty sweep of the open sea.
“The ocean.”
“The Pacific Ocean.”
“I love the ocean.”
It looked as bleak as the endless prairies, flat and empty. Nothing to see and nowhere to go. The great navigator spins the roulette wheel, the ball bouncing and skipping and rattling to land on north-west by west; he tacks down the chosen bearing and finds greater expanses of nothing. Eventually we all sail off the edge, discover a greater emptiness. Might as well load up the old canoe and paddle off into interstellar space.
Zane put his hands in his pockets to warm them and his right hand came up against the hard, cold mass of his Leica. He framed Melissa walking down the empty beach, found a way to make it work, and took the shot. You won’t get too many more pictures now.
At the point where her tracks turned back towards the car, Melissa paused and stooped to pick something out of the sand. For a moment, she stood and looked down at whatever it was, turning it over in her hand, and then she leaned over and flung it, sidearm, over the surface of the water, where it skipped once, and then twice, and then again, each time a shorter distance, until it dropped from sight and sank. A flat stone.
She stood at the water’s edge as the ripples made by the stone spread and flattened once more, and then she turned away from the ocean and walked back up the beach to the car. Her hair lay flat, tangled with the wet, and her face had a cold, pinched look.
“Have a seat.” He patted the hood. She tried to wipe the raindrops off the metal with her hand and sat.
“Now my ass is all wet.”
Stop being a baby. This moment won’t come again.
A row of cormorants flew low over the water, evenly spaced black silhouettes with long necks and rapid wing beats. Apart from the cormorants, the scene offered nothing to look at. Zane slipped the camera back into his pocket and hunched his shoulders. He shivered.
You got geese all over your grave again.
All of the pressure of forward movement had dissipated and now Zane wanted only to remain still in the emptiness of the present. He felt they had reached the cusp of things, and now hung suspended.
“So this is it,” said Melissa. “The end of the line.”
“The end of the line.”
The end of the line could not have been less impressive.
“Where do we go now?”
“You can keep going, but you’d run out of road pretty quick.”
“I guess I’ll have to put down roots.” Melissa hunched forward and hugged her arms against her chest. “I could put down roots in a place like this. I bet it’s nice when the sun shines.”
You won’t be putting down any roots among the million-dollar condos of White Rock.
“When does the sun ever shine in Vancouver?”
“I bet it does sometimes.”
Realization, which had been creeping up on Zane, now sprang upon him. He felt an odd sense of admiration. The cuckoo is a brood parasite that dupes other birds into raising its young at the cost of their own, but still you have to admire its ingenuity.
“What part of Vancouver are you actually from?”
Melissa pulled at the knee of her jeans with bitten fingernails. He saw the rough, uneven edges now, as he had never noticed before, and wondered how he had missed them and when she had discarded the artificial nails. That would have made a good photo, if he had seen it. But he had missed everything.
“I never been to Vancouver in my life,” she said.
Zane laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
He laughed again, and they looked at each other in strange wonderment. All of the facts had disappeared like landmarks under heavy fog. Zane was adrift.
“Where are you from, really?”
“North Bay.” She shifted her weight, straightened her back and looked up at the overcast. “But I always wanted to go to Vancouver.”
“Anyplace is better than North Bay.”
He had never been there. She seemed to find this quite funny. Probably the disorienting effect of finding yourself adrift in the fog. Might as well laugh; nothing makes sense anymore.
A gull wheels across the flat arc of the sky, a dark shape in silhouette, gliding in slow and aimless circles down to the beach, where it flares and touches down and then shrugs and settles into position on the sand. The gull stands motionless in the drizzle, as if fixed there.
Cold drizzle on your skin, the smell of the ocean, the smell of fish and of salt water and of kelp stranded on the beach, and in that moment you feel alive, alert in all your senses as if the feel of drizzle on your neck had woken you to the beauty of the seagull’s descending arc, backlit by the soft light of the overcast sky, aloft in that certain light.
You are onl
y alive in fits and starts.
“Yesterday, was it really your birthday?”
She looked at him and then laughed and shook her head and looked down at the sand.
“Shit, Zane, I never even seen the ocean before.”
Anyone driving past would have wondered what it was, down on the beach, that they had stopped to look at, and how it could possibly be that funny.
Zane took the camera out of his pocket and slowly turned it over in his hands, wondering how many photographs he had missed. Photographs never lie, but liars can take photographs. Lewis Hine said that. Lewis Hine had not addressed the problem of photographing liars. Zane’s story, which up to now had described a perfect arc, now lay in an uncertain and shapeless mass. Meanwhile, Jack lay coiled inside the telephone, waiting to strike. He would hate to say he told you so, but would nevertheless do so at some length. It was a trial Zane was uncertain he could endure.
“I guess I messed everything up,” she said.
Along the pier, the masts of moored boats stood motionless. Zane watched the blinking of the breakwater light. He was trying to calculate his expenses. The numbers had grown unpleasantly large.
“It doesn’t matter.”
This is what you get for building things up. Better to stick with the facts. The breakwater light, for example, keeps right on blinking regardless.
“Just tell me some of it was true.”
“Shit, Zane, I can’t even remember which parts are true anymore.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear. The edges of her black eye had faded to pale yellow, and he could now see that the cut would leave a scar despite his best efforts. The white of her eye showed a livid red.
“It was true about my dad.”
Only the painful things are ever true. The things you want to believe in are always the things you can trust the least. What you least want to believe, that’s probably the truth. The bruises on her face are true.
I don’t want to know anything more that’s true.
They sat and looked out over the ocean while the engine cooled and the drizzle dampened their clothes.
“I fucked up,” she said. “I fucked up bad.” She began picking again at the knee of her jeans.
Combat Camera Page 23
