Palmer shook his head at me as he passed on his way out to the kitchen. I noticed he left the door open. Eavesdropping. Typical cop.
Grace had waited, watching me rubbing my knuckles. Reform school tats, L-O-V-E on one hand and H-A-T-E on the other. I’d regretted those a week after I got them and I’d spent nearly a half century rubbing at them. I quit fidgeting when I saw her looking and laced my fingers together, chewing over what she meant by that “unless.”
I am getting too old for this, I thought, kicking myself. Christ, I’m almost sixty-five and still getting caught. Shoulda got better at it, not worse.
“As I was saying,” she continued, staring pointedly into my face, “unless you do as I ask I am prepared to press charges.”
“What do I gotta do, kill somebody?”
“Nothing that dramatic, believe me. I just need you to drive me somewhere … take me somewhere. Today. I’ll need you the whole day.”
“What? You want me to—”
“Oh, don’t look so worried! I’ll pay expenses. Even see you have enough for a bus back.”
“But wh—”
“I want you to drive me where I want to go. They won’t let me drive anymore,” she said, staring at me through her thick bifocals. Made her eyes all big and creepy looking. “Don’t think you have much choice. How many theft charges have there been now?”
“How d’you kn—”
“Oh, I know. You think I didn’t look into your background before I hired you?”
“Well, why didya hire me then, if you knew?”
She paused a moment, leaning back into the stiff, wooden chair she sat in, even though there was a plush looking chair facing the big screen TV. “Because I wanted you, Jimmy.”
“Me?”
“Yes. I have my reasons. Don’t you think I could hire a teenager cheaper than an old crook like you?” She leaned forward, peering at me. “Least they wouldn’t steal from me. Now, don’t worry about that old wreck of yours. We’ll be taking my car. I’ll pay for the gas.”
She sat back and waited. I didn’t know what to say.
“Well, what’s it to be?” she said, sipping her coffee and watching me over the rim of her cup.
I was thinking there was something a little weird about all this, but I didn’t want to go back in. God knows what they would throw at me if she pressed charges. Had so many arrests on my sheet, they’d probably lock me up for good.
“If you knew … then that’s entrapment,” I mumbled, all belligerent. I never have stood for people making a fool out of me.
“Oh, you do wriggle, don’t you? It’s a drive, you foolish man, and you don’t have to break your back hoeing my garden. An easy day and the charges disappear.”
“Well,” I said after a moment, “if that’s all I gotta do—drive you somewheres and drop you. Take the bus back, you say? And no charges?”
She smiled at that and said, “No, I won’t … be in a position to lay charges. Of course, you won’t be working for me anymore, but you’ll be a free man.”
She had me there.
“All right,” I said finally.
Palmer came to the door of the living room. There was a half puzzled, half angry expression on his face and half a ham sandwich with a bite out of it clutched in his meaty hand. Cops! All greedy sonsabitches. He was shaking his head at her. “No, Mrs. Clark, you oughta—”
Before he could go on, she dismissed him, saying, “I think we’re done here. Jimmy and I can handle things from now on. I will be all right.”
Palmer clearly wasn’t happy, but he left anyway. He was obedient, like her family. Might even have been a relative, for all I knew. They all did as they were told around her. People said it was because she had plenty of dough. Money talks.
We listened to the cruiser pull out. She sipped her coffee and passed it cold and half-full to me. “Put that in the sink, would you? There is a large manila envelope on the desk in the study. We’ll need that, if you could fetch it.”
She surprised me when I returned with the envelope. Opening her purse, she drew out a set of car keys, saying she didn’t want to take the little Corolla she used to drive into town before she lost her licence. “In the drive shed out there is a car under a tarp. These are the keys. You do know how to drive a standard, I hope? Key to the shed is on the ring.”
Remember how to drive a standard? Me? Course I knew how to drive a standard. Ain’t no halfwit!
When I first went out to work at Clark’s farm, I tried getting into the drive shed, but the lock kept me out. Besides that, the doorway faced the sun-room where she sat all afternoon, drinking herbal tea or whatever and staring out at the bird feeder by the window. I could never tell when she would be there and if she was sleeping or not behind those sunglasses she wore. So I’d tried creeping up to the shed from the rear and looked through the windows. My view of the inside was blocked by dust and some crap leaning on the glass, so I stole some stuff I thought she wouldn’t miss from the barn, thinking to find a way into the shed later.
Now, using the key she gave me, I unlocked the padlock and pulled wide the two weathered doors. There was an old cement floor, stained by years of grease and solvents. The light coming in through the grimy windows lit the floating motes of dust stirred up when I opened the doors. There was an old tarp, some kind of mottled and faded green and brown canvas thick with dust, covering the car. Looked to be a convertible underneath.
A workbench ran along the wall on the car’s passenger side. There was a cobwebbed collection of rusted tools, but also some things that were new, put there recently, with no dust on them. A new battery attached to a charger. Two large, red plastic gas containers. They were both full and smelled fresh. She had planned all of this. I glanced back at the sun-room and saw her watching me.
Pulling back the tarp, I exposed a chromed grill and red paint. Peeling it back further, careful not to drag the tarp and bugger up the finish, I found more chrome, more red paint, and red vinyl upholstered seats. As I uncovered more and more of the car, a vague feeling of familiarity crept over me. A red Mustang convertible, one of the early ones, sat gleaming under the floating sunlit dust motes. When I stood back to take it all in, I realized I was breathing heavily. I had no idea why.
With the new battery just sitting there, I figured she wanted me to install it, so I popped the hood and got to work on it, then after that I poured the gas into the tank from the plastic containers. When I was done I looked up to see she had left the sun-room and was standing on the porch with her purse, the manila envelope, and her kerchief, already tied.
* * *
As we coasted down the steep road, past the gravel pits and into Duntroon, I wondered what was in that manila envelope and whether she had more surprises in store for me. As we came to the main corner, I saw the lights had been taken out and replaced with a stop sign. Weird.
Then I glanced to my left and noticed that the school looked newer. No doubt they had finally spent some money to brighten it up over the summer and now, in the first week of September, the playground was full of kids chasing each other around and playing ball games.
We pulled through the intersection and set off down the road toward Stayner. There was hardly any traffic on the road. Summer’s over, I thought, the kids’re back in school and everybody’s back at work; cottages are closing down.
“We’ll need to fill up,” she said, glancing at the gauge on the dash. We’d used a lot of gas driving across Grey County. She opened her purse but then had second thoughts, and she closed it before I could see inside.
“There’s a place up ahead in Stayner,” I said.
“Mmmm,” was all she said, and turned to stare out at the farms basking in the late summer heat. There were red patches on her cheeks and I could see a gleam of moisture on her forehead. The kerchief she had tied under her chin to stop her hair from blowing around and to hold her sunglasses in place looked tight against the loose skin of her neck.
“Wish we had air,” I said, leaning fo
rward, shrugging my shoulders away from my sweaty t-shirt, “but it’s not too bad.”
“No, I don’t mind the heat at my age,” she said, “and I like this car with the top down. Takes me back.”
An old Pontiac with metal stripes running down the hood went by. “Nice old car,” I said. “Wouldn’t have minded having an old classic like that … or like this here.”
She smiled, turning to watch the Pontiac. “Well, maybe one day you will,” she said.
Not goddamned likely.
She smiled her far-off smile and stared into the distant fields.
Yes, I certainly would have liked a car like it, once upon a time. The truth was that I could barely afford to keep my old Sunfire on the road, living hand to mouth like I did in broken down old apartments like my place above the Golden Dragon Restaurant on Owen Sound’s main drag.
Early on, before things went bad for me, I wanted to have my own garage. I worked a time or two as an odd job man in gas stations. I’d thought that I could be a mechanic, maybe even own my own service station someday. As a kid I always loved the dinging sound made when a car rolled over the rubber hose. There was a little bell inside to tell whoever was working the pump that there was a customer waiting. They don’t have those now. Now everything is self-serve.
When we pulled into the gas station on the outskirts of Stayner, there was someone hammering at steel in the service bay. I was surprised to hear a bell ding as I drove up to the pumps. Getting out, I saw a rubber hose snaking across the garage yard. A young guy wearing grease-stained coveralls and a bandana was wiping his hands as he came towards the Mustang.
“Nice car, man,” he said.
“Yeah, belongs to the lady,” I replied. The teenager grabbed the nozzle, flicked down a metal switch, and moved to open the gas tank. The noise of a pump started up.
“What’ll it be?” the mechanic asked.
“Fill it up, please,” Mrs. Clark said before I could reply.
“Sure thing,” the mechanic said, flipping a little flange on the handle. Grabbing a squeegee, he lifted the wipers and started cleaning the windshield.
“I’ll just use your washroom, if I may?” the old woman asked, opening her door to get out.
“Sure,” the mechanic said. “Keys’re just inside the door there.”
I watched her head off to the ‘Ladies’. She had left her cane in the car.
“Nice now,” the teenager said, his mullet sticking out of the bandana, “but the heat’s building and they say it’ll storm later. Gonna have to put that top up or you’ll get wet.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, realizing I hadn’t thought of that when we set out. I wasn’t sure what kind of shape the top was in. I got back in while the kid topped up the tank.
The old woman started back to the car.
“That’ll be twenty-three,” the teenager said.
“Twenty-three!” I said, turning to look at the pump.
“I’m getting that,” she said, opening her purse and taking out an old-fashioned change purse. I watched her pay, handing over a twenty, an old one, and one of the old brown coloured twos. To my surprise, he accepted the money without question.
As we pulled away from the station, the Mustang rolled over the rubber hose and the bell dinged once more. “Twenty-three bucks?” I said. “That can’t be right.”
“No,” she replied, “that was about right.”
“Can’t have been, Mrs. Clark,” I said. “Must’ve been more than that.”
“Jimmy,” she said, “don’t worry about it, and for heaven’s sake, stop calling me Mrs. Clark. You can call me Grace.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Where are we going, Grace?”
“Just keep driving. I’ll tell you when to turn.”
* * *
She didn’t speak until she told me to turn off the main highway onto a road I didn’t recognize. She said it led up across the 400 to Horseshoe Valley. I hadn’t been that way for many years. Hadn’t ever truly had what you could call a vacation, so Wasaga Beach, north of where we turned off, was as far this way as I had been in the last thirty years. Of course, as a kid I’d lived for a time in North Bay and Sudbury at a bunch of forgettable foster homes. I don’t like to think about that time.
“We’re going all the way across here to Highway 11,” she said. She seemed calmer then, not as hard as she had been when we set out—like allowing me to call her Grace—at peace somehow as we followed the long, straight two-lane through Anton Mills and Craighurst.
All around us, acres of ripening corn and grain lay warm and glowing under the early fall sun. I held my hand out to feel the wind rushing through my fingers, like warm water flowing by. My mind went blank, lulled by the warm air and the slow rhythm of the Mustang eating up the miles. I drove automatically, guiding the convertible effortlessly up and down the rolling hills and around the lazy curves toward Highway 11.
“We’re going north,” she said at last, breaking the silence and reviving me from my stupor. “Head toward Bracebridge.”
A mile up Highway 11 a sign said, “Weber’s Charbroiled Hamburgers and Hotdogs”.
“I feel like having a hamburger and some fries, maybe a Coke, too,” she said. “It’s been years.”
When I glanced over at her she added, “Oh, don’t worry. My treat. I dragged you into this.”
I pulled into the gravel lot and shut down the Mustang. A dust cloud settled around us. Even though it was after Labour Day, there was a line up at the burger stand. “I’ll go freshen up. Wash some of this dust off me,” she said.
She handed me a well-used ten, adding, “I think I would like mine with ‘the works’. Everything, and ketchup on my fries, if you don’t mind.”
Yeah, sure, I thought, like ten bucks is gonna buy lunch for both of us. However, I was surprised to find it did. Crazy, but the busy season was over. I figured they’d dropped their prices to keep people coming.
We sat under a tree at a wooden picnic table that had seen a lot of burgers and fries. She took off her kerchief and stretched her arms up toward the sun. She looked younger. I hadn’t noticed before how her hair was like auburn streaked generously with grey. She looked like she felt younger, too, no longer the old woman of the morning. That scene, the farm and her confronting me, seemed ages in the past.
I watched the kid who had been inside flipping burgers come out and sit in an old Dodge hardtop. Soon the window was unrolled and rock songs came from inside it. His thin arm rested on the warm metal as he flicked ash from his cigarette out onto the gravel. The song was “Rag Doll” by the Four Seasons. Must be a classic rock station, I thought, staring past Grace at the rear of the Dodge. ‘Polara’ it said. My eyes dropped to the licence plate and I was surprised to see it said ‘1966’ on it.
Must be some kind of antique licence.
When he finished his cigarette, the kid got out of the old Dodge and locked it. Seeing the Mustang, he wandered nonchalantly over to it and walked around it. “This yours?” he asked, looking at me.
“Naw,” I replied. “Belongs to the lady.” I jerked my thumb towards Grace, who just kept on chewing her burger and feeding fries into her mouth with her fingers. “I’m just her driver.”
“Beautiful,” the kid said. “They’re gonna be classics one day. Wish I had one.” He lit another cigarette with a match from a matchbook that he had stuffed into his pack of Rothmans.
“Already are,” I said and balled up the paper my burger had been wrapped in, tossing it at the oil drum trash can sitting under the tree. Grace had stopped chewing and was watching me.
“Yeah? That’s pretty good for something out just a few years.” He reached out and touched the chrome around the grill. “Pretty. Where you folks off to?”
“North—”
“Pritchard’s Landing,” Grace said, interrupting him. “Know the place?”
“Yeah, sure,” the kid replied. “Lot of cottagers … from the city like, who have places on the islands. They leave their
cars there. There’s a store or something there, isn’t there?”
“Yes, there is,” Grace replied. She continued watching me.
I was beginning to feel strange, as if Pritchard’s Landing ought to mean something to me. I didn’t like the feeling. Creepy-like.
“Gonna storm pretty soon,” the kid said, looking up at the clouds. Off to the west, ominous grey banks of clouds with dark edges were moving towards us. Underneath, we could see trailing draperies of rain. “Better put your top up.”
“Yes, soon,” Grace said.
“Well, see ya,” the kid said. “Gotta get back in or the boss’ll be after me. Sure do like your car.”
“Yeah, thanks, see ya,” I replied as the boy walked off. “Think he’s right. We oughta put that top up,” I said to her.
“Not yet,” she said as she stood and threw her trash away, still holding onto her Coke, “I want to ride with it down for as long as I can. Plenty of time to put it up.”
We pulled back onto the highway and set off north toward Gravenhurst and Bracebridge. I could not shake the feeling of familiarity. There was something so déjà vu about all of this. As we headed north, I eyed that threatening line of clouds off to the west and thought back to another September years and years ago.
Half a century ago.
* * *
My mother gave me up once she realized her tenth grade boyfriend wasn’t going to have anything more to do with a pregnant girlfriend. Not a lot of babies were adopted in Sudbury in the fifties, so I ended up in a long succession of foster homes funded by Children’s Aid. Some were okay, but most weren’t. By the time I was fifteen, I’d already been caught shoplifting. The court decided I was better off placed with somebody who could ‘turn my life around’. According to them I needed a ‘strong guiding hand’. That ended up being Helmut Reiner, a prison guard and his piggy-eyed wife, Marthe. Helmut was away at Burwash Industrial Farm through the week, so he could only smack me around on the weekends. That job was left to Marthe on weekdays.
Stealing a candy bar brought about a call that Labour Day in 1965, which aroused the beast in both of them, and they set into smacking me around. I was almost sixteen, strong from haying for Helmut’s brother-in-law and innocent enough of the shoplifting charge—a friend had actually stolen the Oh Henry and shared it with me—that I resented it more than usual. So having had enough of it, I threatened some knocking around of my own with a broken hockey stick. Picked it up, at first just to defend myself, but when the pair of them started towards me, I swung it at them and managed to ding Marthe. They backed off, but I heard them calling the cops. I stole a duffel bag from a closet and managed to throw some underwear and a couple of t-shirts into it before jumping over the back fence and escaping down Highway 11, hitching a ride in a Coke truck heading south.
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 36
