Cape Breton Road

by D. R. MacDonald

  Driving back, only three cars passed him from the other direction, he drove at a sensible speed, if the car was seen they’d say, Well now, I didn’t know the Captain was down, but there he was on the road last night, couldn’t wait to get into that nice Cadillac, no. Innis’s plan was to pull down behind the toolshed long enough to fetch his suitcase and get away, hit the mainland before sunrise, but shit, the Lada was parked at an odd angle in the lower driveway. Damn you, Starr. He idled on the shoulder, his eyes at the rear-view mirror, where in hell could he hide this now? He buzzed the window down. Car coming around the curve behind him, he could hear it, and as he started off again he remembered the old logging road on the MacLeod property, long unused, could a Caddy get up there? He was afraid he couldn’t spot it fast enough in the dark but he saw a culvert and he turned and crossed it, headlights meeting the thick weeds, he gunned the engine, the car fish-tailing, skidding in and out of the old ruts, the lights of another car zipped past in the door mirror, Innis hoped the guy hadn’t seen him. He worked the Cadillac just beyond a turn, alders and young spruce and willow bushes raking the undercarriage, he couldn’t take it further than this, he’d get hung up. Lights off, engine. He leaned his head on the seat back. What time was it? The dashboard clock was screwy, must be getting on for midnight. Crickets, no longer shrill, resumed their muted, fading notes. The nights were colder. Later, he could back down without the engine, ease her onto the road when it was clear.

  INNIS WALKED AS casually as he could down the long driveway. Seaward in the east, clouds were rising rapidly into a starless sky. There was one lighted window upstairs but the rest were dark, the fields as black as the woods. Starr was silhouetted in the door of the toolshed, a bottle of rum sitting on the bench under the dirty lightbulb. Innis turned past him toward the house.

  “Where the hell you been on foot?” his uncle said.

  “I don’t drive. Remember? And I don’t have to answer any questions.”

  “A man has to answer somebody’s, sooner or later.” Starr flicked his cigarette into the darkness. “I thought you were in your room. You left the light on.”

  “It isn’t my room.”

  “Funny, I could’ve sworn I saw you there, oh, the last few months or so. Well, fàgaidh sìoda is sròl is sgàrlaid gun teine an fhàrdach.”

  “Save it, Starr, whatever it means.”

  “Silk and satin and scarlet, b’y, they leave a fireless, cheerless hearth. Claire called.”

  “She did?” Innis came nearer his uncle.

  “She didn’t.” Starr showed his teeth in a slow smile. “I just wanted to see the look on your face, Innis. Move into the light a little better, yes, you look like a puppy. Hoping for a pet, a little bone.”

  Innis’s fist flew out before he even thought and sent his uncle sprawling into the toolshed, clawing the air. Innis took a fighting stance, breathing hard, fists cocked, he didn’t care, but Starr sat on the floor looking out at him. He touched his chin, pushed it side to side, then laughed quietly, shaking his head. “Go on,” he said. “Get away out of here.”

  His uncle did not come in from the toolshed and Innis paced in his room praying the man would crash. His hands were shaking as he spread them out before him. Funny what hands could do, what they could take hold of, let loose. Claire. Here. Once. He flopped back on the bed, but soon sat up. No, no sleeping here anymore. He raised the hall window a few inches, he could hear Starr growling to himself but couldn’t see him, he’d finish that damn bottle before he quit. Innis would never get past him to the Caddy now, not with a suitcase. He pulled out dresser drawers in case he’d missed anything that belonged to him. There was the jar in the toolshed loft but that would have to wait. He poured water from the pitcher into the bowl and soaked his hand. His knuckles hurt, but it was hurt he could live with. Puppy? Jesus. I’ll give him a bone. He dozed in the chair. Claire was in his mind when he woke, he thought he was in Claire’s bedroom, where was she? Not here. Sick or well. The phone rang out, repeated, he lost the count. They were after someone else, too late to call this house anyway. He took his telescope from the dresser top and aimed it out the hall window: toolshed light still burning. Had Starr passed out? Trees were hissing with wind. Mountain was indiscernible from sky until slowly tumbling clouds turned livid with lightning. Thunder rumbled in the soles of his feet. He directed his telescope at the strait: above the thrashing treetops dim whitecaps raced by in darkness. Soft explosions of light. Christ, a nightmare, out there in a boat. The storm broke over the house as he was thinking could he slip past his uncle, past everything, but water was pelting the windows like gravel, and then in his head the tension of lightning, a sizzling blue beyond the barn, this was how he would remember it, a brightness bearable only for the second it took to strike, any longer and it was the light of madness. The lapse between flash and thunder grew shorter until they ripped the sky almost at once. Suddenly a pitchfork flash caught Starr, like a photo negative, leaping a puddle, making for the back door. The lights went out quietly, a pylon had been hit somewhere. Innis drew back from the window, slammed it shut and stood behind the closed door of his room. Soon his uncle came clumsily up the stairs, stumbling, pausing, his footsteps lost in a long erratic break of thunder. “She’d be here!” he shouted outside Innis’s door, “if it wasn’t for you!” then slammed it with his fist. Innis’s heart surged, what bullshit, what lies, he tried to shout back but only a croak came from his throat, he wanted to yank the door open but they would only tear into each other, things that had to be said could never be said. Lightning snapped close by, throwing the deer skull into absurd shadow. Trembling, he raised his walking stick like a club, he felt he could kill or be killed now, at this moment, this very spot.

  Innis didn’t move. He heard nothing further from his uncle, only rain shifting across the roof as the storm spilled away into eruptions of distant thunder and fading light. He opened the door slowly, but Starr was not there, nor in the hallway. Still grasping the stick, he found him flung across his unmade bed, a snore mashed beneath his face.

  The house was still dark when Innis stopped in the toolshed long enough for a good toke, and then climbed the wooden ladder to the loft, descending with the small jar in his fist. In some mean city he might need it.

  He took up his suitcase and started up the driveway in the rain, disguised under the hood of his jumper. Streetlamp out, nobody driving, but they’d have to wonder about him this late at night, hunkered in their headlights, hauling an old gladstone bag. He wheeled around and walked backward for a few steps to take in the darkened house, the barn. Where was the excitement of leaving, the rush? Too much excitement, the wrong kind. Maybe on the highway, an accelerator under his foot, it would hit him.

  When he reached the Cadillac the rain had quit, there were rifts in the clouds, whitened by a moon somewhere. He dropped his suitcase in the trunk, struck by how odd it looked under the lid light. With the trunk closed, there was just the darkness again and himself. He was thirsty. How far to the spring from here? Couldn’t be a long hike. He found a dim flashlight under the seat and pushed off up the hill, slipping in rut mud, he was tired, there were deadfalls to climb over, the rough hair of lichen in his hands, dead bark, he’d never been this route and the line break was further off than he’d thought. He rested, saving the flashlight, but the dark seemed to fall in on him so quickly, dizzying him, he forced himself ahead into an alder thicket, a smothering maze of thin branches. Crashing through on the edge of panic, he was breathing too hard, but he was in the open, in the break. The power line rose up overhead. Between this pylon and the next, just above the break, was the spring. Somewhere along here in the wet grassy sod he had found purple-fringed orchids and picked them for Claire, he could smell their faint scent now if he tried, she’d put them in a slim vase of clear glass.

  That grey little hut, not easy to pick out with weak batteries, he missed a landmark and backtracked. But there it was, the wooden peg in its doorlatch. He knelt to the door,
the peg was jammed tight and he had to work at it, his fingers cold, clumsy. Flashlight flared off the water when he opened the door, spiders trembled in their webs, sorry, fellas, tearing up your hard work, I know how you feel. He angled the beam into the still water, down to the quiet silt of the bottom. Then he put his mouth to the cold surface and drank, it hurt his teeth and he quit, his lips numb. With his head hunched just inside the shelter, out of the dripping trees, he put a match to the roach, toked deeply and nipped it out. He pulled back into the darkness. Maybe another squall moving in, above him long sighs of wind showered moisture from needles and leaves. I don’t know the Gaelic for car thief, Starr said many months ago, don’t make me learn it. The Cadillac, so long hidden, a treasure in a box. Maybe they could have left together, he and Claire. Maybe she would still be here, if. If something. Innis rocked gently on his haunches. A lynx swims like a dog, he had read, and if a foe awaits him at the shore, a lynx will not turn away, but land and fight to the death. Rivers are women, oceans are men. Somewhere he’d heard that and wanted to believe it, it sounded wise and balanced and true, but he still didn’t know what it meant. Claire liked blouses in plain but striking colors, with dramatic collars. How clear that was to him now. She would never come back, not here. Suddenly, his heart beating wildly, he tilted the jar over the water, held it at the verge of spilling, heard the liquid hit with scarcely a sound. He snatched up the flashlight and clicked it again and again, he wanted to see the water but it wouldn’t light and he smashed it on a stone. He threw the jar into the trees, then pegged the door fiercely tight, pressing his forehead hard against the wood.

  His legs were shaking as he started down the hill. Jesus, only a little, in all that water, what could it do? Maybe trembling was how poison kicked in, then what? A hot shaking flash, your whole body coming undone, muscles, bones, vessels, cells, every thin little thread you breathed and moved with, all shorting out, every bit of wire burning, a smell on your tongue, black bile searing your voice so you couldn’t cry for help, and who would come anyway, who would hear you melting away while this stuff coursed in your blood like fire, killing every microscopic thing it met there, putting out every light? Would your mind go first, or last? Details rose at him vividly, indulgently, moaning, gagging, convulsions, a chalk-white face, a hideous swollen tongue, guts churning. But these visions had their own life, they were not attached to anyone, not yet, not even his uncle, and the rain began again, washing them from his mind, it was not easy going, he stumbled hard into a water-filled rut, soaked to his knees. In the back seat he struggled out of his wet boots and socks and jeans. If he left now, by daylight he could be well off the Island, by noon maybe out of the Maritimes altogether. Just a few minutes rest on this soft leather. He hadn’t been this whacked since that first week in Dan Rory’s woods, yet what had he done but hike to the spring and back. Claire’s skin, how unbelievably smooth it was, how soothing to think of it.

  When he woke, uncomprehending, his head thrown back on the seat, his mouth gaping and dry, everything around him was so strange that for a few seconds he only moved his eyes. Too much grey light in the steamy windows. The first sound was not rain but the claws of a crow on the roof, and as Innis sat up, it flapped away, cawing to its raucous mates in the trees. Jesus, daylight! The wet glare of woods, the sun was already burning behind that lowering sky. He could see up ahead his ragged path of last night, the stomped weeds disappearing now in white mist. He hopped in his bare feet to the trunk and dug out dry jeans and socks, his feet were freezing. Damn it, he’d lost the night, let it get away. Shivering in his undershorts he pissed into the cold grass. The Caddy looked abandoned, they did that to old cars here, drove them up in the woods and walked away, but the Caddy was new, out of place. A chainsaw was snarling up above somewhere, much too near.

  He dressed quickly, letting the engine warm up as he backed slowly down, playing the brakes, gritting his teeth at the sounds underneath the floorboards as the car combed back over crushed saplings and brush, skidding, scraping, but gravity got him to the shoulder where he stopped, and after a quick look each way, he backed out onto the Ferry Road and turned, for what he was sure would be the last time, toward the main highway.

  The Seville took the road smoothly and he let out his breath, he had to settle down. Raining again, that was in his favor, in rain a car passes and people, huddled inward, might glance up, someone might even say, Wasn’t that Captain MacQueen’s car? But they wouldn’t be sure, the pavement slicked with light, the hiss of tire mist swirling off a black car already gone by, well Jesus, John, was it his, you think? No, no, it couldn’t be, not Moneybags’s, the man’s in Florida still. Let them talk, let them get on the phone and speculate, that could take up a good part of the day, there were other Cadillacs on the TransCanada, he’d be off Cape Breton Island in a couple hours, and by the time they determined the Captain had not arrived, Innis could be in New Brunswick, the car on a side street in St. John or someplace, another few days before anyone would know it was ditched. At the TransCanada intersection, he waited for three cars and a truck to pass, revving the engine, checking the rear-view mirror. They were barrelling all right, the traffic was sparse. He turned west, descending the long curve toward the strait, he was in the flow, ahead of him the elegant arches of the bridge. He didn’t need the radio yet, only motion, flight. The rain had let up but still flew from the metal of the car, like the stormy light off the strait as he levelled out onto the bridge, smoothly, rocked suddenly by wind, girders slashing past the window and through them the waters of the strait turning west like a wide river, the surface all silky metal, disappearing beyond the point that hid Starr’s cove, and lined by the wooded hills of St. Aubin on the side he was leaving behind, and by the high woods of the mountain ahead, and east out the passenger window the weather was rolling off the sea, dark, fast-moving clouds, the sun roiled in them like light in a school of fish. The causeway dipped into a level stretch of highway, past a trailer camp at the base, the bare brown cliff rising behind it where they’d blasted all the stone and fill for the bridge. He sized up two hitchikers as soon as he saw them though he didn’t slacken speed, two young guys hunched and miserable under backpacks. Sorry, fellas, my nerves are tight. Not cool to give you a lift in the Captain’s Cadillac, I’ll lose my momentum, I want to wind up that mountain highway fast. And then he was pushing it upward, keeping speed, the tires screeching slightly as he cut into the first banked switchback where semis sometimes lost it downhill and careened off into roadside trees, he slipped into the outer lane and passed three cars up that long grade, he could feel the strait behind him, there was a motorhome parked in the lookoff, its passengers staring east toward the Atlantic, a wide dramatic view he couldn’t glimpse from his direction, a postcard, he’d seen it in a drugstore. Another squall burst upon the road and he eased back, the curves were nicely banked but too easy to speed on. He tinkered with the electric seat, backing it a little, tilting it, until it held him just right, he was airborne, cresting the mountain, heading down, the silvered light of St. Ann’s Bay north of him, tapping the brakes now and then, letting a car pass him, easy does it. Through the wiperwash he saw the Englishtown turnoff coming up, the ferry route across the mouth of St. Anne’s Bay, but he wouldn’t take that, not this day, he wasn’t going north. If he did, he’d stand out on that small ferry, handing a quarter out the window to a crewman who’d have a great chance to remember him, just the sort of witness a Mountie would pump for information. Could you give me a few details of description, Mr. MacTavish? Oh, a ponytail of red hair he had, not real red, brownish, a sort of hawk nose in high bones, his face, the glass was a bit steamy.… Ahead on the roadside a girl, young woman, long skirt, a shoulder pack, and she turned her head calmly as he went by, smiled, not thumbing, as if walking in rain were just fine with her. Innis didn’t hit the brakes hard, all taillights and skidding, but came to a controlled stop, gliding onto the shoulder until she was a blur in the rear window. In a Caddy, you just sat waitin
g, engine ticking over, you didn’t back up. He was watching a car approaching in the side mirror, feeling suddenly conspicuous, when he heard a fingernail tapping glass. He buzzed down the passenger window and the opening framed her face, long light hair corkscrewed by rain, freckles across her nose, a pleasant face, tilting her head, smiling.

  “You going down north by any chance?” she said. He was going west toward the Canso Causeway. But the Captain’s garage doors were still closed and his Cadillac behind them so far as anybody would know, and here was a girl he didn’t want to say no to.

  “How far North?” Innis said.

  “Ingonish, or thereabouts?” What would Ingonish cost him, an hour? It wasn’t as if there was a radio alert out for him.

  “I can take you a ways.”

  “Great. You could turn around and take the ferry, it’s shorter.”

  “No, I’ll go around the bay. Sometimes the ferry’s a wait.”

  She brought into the humid interior of the car a refreshing current, like a cool spray of water, her cheekbones red, she’d been in the sun. A long madras skirt and a short buckskin jacket stained with rain. She set her pack on her lap.

  “You soaked?” Innis said, waiting for a car to pass before he took off. “I’ll turn on the heat.”