“Where’s the camcorder?” Piotr asks.
“You’re not serious.”
“Why not?” he says and grins.
“It’s in the trunk,” Amy says, peeved, “where you put it this morning.”
“Hey!” he says, and pokes her in the ribs. “You never know, I might get something useful.” His eyes shine in expectancy of an adventure.
They travel for several minutes, gaining swiftly on the red truck and the bend in the highway. “Come on, slowpoke,” Piotr urges and although the curve in the highway is sharp, he decides to pass the truck. As they get closer to it, Amy sees that there are two people in the cab now. Amy recognizes the driver’s grey ponytail and, beside him, the red-plaid jacket, the black shoulder-length hair of the weird man she saw on the ferry, beside the road, in the giftshop. The hitchhiker. Piotr speeds up, is only metres away, when the taillights of the truck glow suddenly.
“Watch!”
He swears and swerves around the vehicle and Amy holds her breath. The highway opens up then as they complete the curve, and directly in front of them they see the OPP car angled across the road, light still flashing. Piotr brakes hard. Beyond the police car Amy sees a school bus turned onto its side. “Shit.” Little kids, she thinks. But she notices all at once a front-end loader parked on the shoulder, several derelict vehicles positioned up against rock and trees, making the highway impassable at either side of the overturned bus, and people milling about.
The red half-ton stops behind a group of cars parked on the opposite shoulder and the man with the ponytail and the hitchhiker get out.
“What’s going on?” Piotr rolls down the window as one of the police officers approaches.
“You’re going to have to pull over, folks,” he says. It’s a barricade, he explains cheerfully, as if it were a minor irritation which must be endured for a short time only. His partner has gone over to the barricade and stands beside the school bus, hands on hips, a patient smile as he chats with a native man. It’s one of several barricades that have gone up suddenly, a chain reaction of roadblocks in Ontario, and there are threats of similar action in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, they learn. This could last hours, a day, or longer. “These people don’t have anything better to do anyway,” the officer says.
“This doesn’t look good,” Piotr says, as he studies the map. The positioning of the barricade is not arbitrary, but cleverly strategic, given that at this point the highway hugs the shore of Nipigon Bay and there are no roads to the north. They would need to backtrack a hundred kilometres to Terrace, then head north, and travel miles on secondary gravel roads through wilderness before they could pick up the No. 11 and cut back south again. A good day’s drive. Amy feels mildly elated by the prospect. She sees that solid wall of rusted vehicles, the overturned bus, the silhouettes of two native people sitting on top of it. Below them, sitting in a row of lawn chairs, men, women, and children stare across the distance between them. Good for you, Amy wants to say.
“Let’s get the camcorder,” Piotr says, and pops the trunk.
So you think it would be worth to go and see the pictographs?
Yes, she said.
Time wasted, when instead they could have passed by the spot on the highway chosen for the barricade.
“Let’s get the camcorder,” Piotr says, and pops the trunk. They get out of the car. People stand around, clustered near the parked cars across the highway from the barricade.
A young man with the build of a weight lifter approaches their car. SNAKE BITE is printed across his tank top. A set of earphones encircle his muscular neck. “I’ve got to get to the Peg. They bloody got a lot of nerve,” he says, and appears surprised when Amy and Piotr don’t readily agree. Piotr bends and opens a carrying case and when the man sees the video camera he grins. “Great,” he says.
Amy sees two black and white Japanese girls standing beside the highway looking as though they’re waiting for a bus. Black oxford shoes, white socks, black shorts, white tops with black geometric designs, white faces, and black, blunt-cut hair. A father, wearing coveralls, walks past them pushing a baby in a stroller back and forth, back and forth.
Let’s get the camcorder, Piotr said, and popped the trunk.
Amy hands him a battery, a tape, and watches as he hefts the camera to his shoulder. They cross the highway to where people are standing, two deep across from the barricade.
Yes, he was cautioned, she told them at the police investigation. But he had to be the farthest out from the shore, or the highest, or on top of the largest rock. Of course he wanted to be in the front of the crowd.
As Piotr walks across the space that separates the spectators and the native people, Amy’s eyes caress the image of his squared shoulders beneath the tan shirt, his tan Bermuda shorts, his well-shaped legs. Piotr, walking out the farthest. Snake Bite moves up to Amy’s side. She can feel heat radiating from his body. “Good,” he says, hawks, and then spits. “Get those suckers on film.” The Sixties-looking man with the grey ponytail stands on the other side of her. He says something in a dry, sardonic voice, and Snake Bite guffaws loudly. From the corner of her eye, Amy sees the hitchhiker standing behind the grey-haired man, a tangle of black hair against a red-plaid jacket. Her attention is drawn then by a woman in an Adidas sweatsuit who appears suddenly, heavy breasts bouncing as she jogs past dragging a white toy poodle on a leash. The Japanese girls, who have crossed the highway to where the spectators stand, giggle and lift little disposable cameras to their eyes.
Piotr’s camcorder looks into the inquisitive round faces of the native children sitting on their mothers’ and grandmothers’ knees. Above them, the two men on top of the school bus rise to their feet, sticks dangling at their sides. Guns? Amy wonders. She hears the high-pitched sound of sirens overlapping, growing louder as police cars, one after another, round the curve in the highway. Their shrill alarm makes her shiver.
As Piotr begins to record the images, the enquiring faces of children, the calm, stoical demeanour of the men and women, the wrinkled, patient faces of the elders, a police officer moves towards him. Piotr records the man’s palm raised to cover the camera’s lens, his businesslike voice saying over the wail of sirens in the background, “Back off, fella.”
Yes, he was cautioned, she tells the members of the investigation.
The sirens of the approaching police cars wind down to a halt one by one, and Amy hears car doors slamming shut.
“Hey!” one of the men on the school bus calls down to Piotr, wanting to play to his camera. He raises his stick over his head in a boastful, rebellious gesture, the stick a baseball bat and not a gun, as Piotr’s videotape will prove. “Hey, you!” the man yells, his hand dropping to his crotch in an obscene gesture. “Fuck you all!” he screams at the crowd of spectators.
Amy, do you think it would be worth to go and see the pictographs?
Yes, she said.
Amy stands watching with the others as Piotr holds his ground, ignoring the police officer’s admonition to back off. She hears the words “fuck you” again, but this time they are uttered softly, from behind her. The hitchhiker, she realizes, as she sees the barrel of his Savage single shot .22 jut forward at her shoulder. His rifle cracks and she hears the whine of the bullet through the trees at the side of the road. Piotr wheels around at the sound, lowers the camera, a question in his face, hesitating. But as the police officer who had tried to warn him away turns now and strides across the space towards the spectators, his hand placed against his hip holster, Piotr raises the camera again.
The hitchhiker steps in front of Amy then, directly in line with Piotr, blocking him from her view. She sees his gun barrel dip and jerk as he reloads. He raises the rifle to his shoulder, pointing it at the barricade. “Fuck you!” he yells this time, and shoots. The bullet pings sharply against the highway. The Japanese girls shriek and their cameras drop to the pavement. “Whoa!” Snake Bite exclaims and backs away from Amy’s side.
Amy sees him and
sees him, how the hitchhiker swipes at the strands of dark hair which lie across his forehead obscuring his vision. His voice is a roar inside her head. Fuck you, fuck you. She hears him later in her nightmares, his voice raw but emotionless, its tone saying that it was not anger directed against any particular person. Fuck you.
And then it is over.
He screams his oath, reloads again, and runs towards the barricade. Piotr records the policeman’s back, when he drops to one knee, hand at his hip rising. Amy hears other voices barking strong, terse commands. Or I’ll shoot, her dreams say.
Then she heard another shot, she told them. Not the metallic crack of a .22 rifle, but the fuller sound of a higher-powered rifle. Two shots. They did not come from the policeman who was down on his knee. They came from behind. Another policeman. Another gun, she was certain.
The video camera tumbles through the air and bounces several times across the cement. Amy sees Piotr in slow motion, again and then again, his arms opening wide to clutch at the air. Falling, again and then again, face down. His head moves, once, twice. And then he is still.
“Fuck you! Fuck you!” she hears and then sees the hitchhiker stumble and roll sideways as she runs past him, runs across the open space towards Piotr. Lawn chairs tumble as people flee, crying and calling out to one another. Amy’s leg stings suddenly as she runs towards him. A bee sting. The sting of a bee. A bee sting, she thinks, as she kneels down beside Piotr.
Do you think it would be worth to go and see the pictographs?
Yes, she said.
One year later:
n the way over to meet you, I realized,” Daria had said to Amy earlier as they sat beside the river at The Forks on blocks hewn from tyndall stone, stone imprinted with the shapes of ancient sea animals for small fingers to discover, trace, exclaim over. “It’s June,” Daria had said. “You must be thinking about Piotr.”
A train enters the trestle bridge over the Assiniboine near its mouth, inching into the CN station. The rumble of it echoes in the steel girders, overpowering all other sounds as Amy and Daria walk along the river, now, towards it. Beyond the train trestle bridge, reflected in the water, are rows of the cement columns of three other bridges that span the shallow water; on them, traffic sweeps across the river, going both ways. Buses, cars, are blocks of colour passing above, soundless in the rumble of the arriving train.
The women Amy knows and whom she has in the past sat with at dinner-table discussions believe that what has happened to her is a tragedy. She knows her presence among them incites pity but, even so, she has said nothing to make them think otherwise. Doing nothing is making a choice, too, you know. She hears Rhoda’s voice.
She must speak loudly to be heard above the train. “Piotr was leaving me,” she tells Daria. “When Piotr was killed, he was running away from me. He was going to return to Poland. Alone.”
Daria stops walking and turns her soft face to Amy. “Oh!” she exclaims. “Oh, Amy, I’m so, so, sorry.” Tears brim in Daria’s heavily pencilled eyes. Don’t you cry, Amy thinks. Don’t you let any of that sadness get out here. You’ll make a wreck of your face. Daria wants to touch her, Amy can tell. Daria wants to be as soft as her face, to put her arms around Amy, for the both of them to weep over their collective, unspoken tragedies.
Separate houses and bank accounts, Amy writes in her notebook later that evening. She leans over her desk in her room; where she has sat for a year, thinking, remembering, writing. The women had agreed when they sat around the dinner table one night, over a year ago, about what might be the perfect relationship. It was freedom they wanted but intimacy too. A relationship similar to her and Piotr’s, where they’d have to be apart for work, sometimes a month, or four, and then would come together again to give and receive the best of one another: tender attention, long walks, gourmet meals, back rubs in the middle of the night, a mickey bottle turned hot-water bottle placed gently against the abdomen to ease menstrual cramps. “Being apart on occasion for long periods of time is the only reason why we have lasted this long,” she had told them, rather smugly she knew. She didn’t tell them how she felt when they were apart, that it was like being alone on a beach at night, listening to waves washing in and pulling back. The sound of their separation a melancholy sound. Or, that she had often thought that she would stop breathing if for some reason he didn’t return. That, to her, Piotr was Timothy, Richard, the sibling she never had, and the only person she had ever loved.
Amy goes to the closet and the trunk which holds her journals, the reels of eight-millimetre film. The film, brittle with age, proves difficult to thread into the projector she borrowed from the library. The subject of the first one she chooses to watch is “The Robin,” so says Timothy’s printing on its box. She turns off the desk lamp and sits in darkness watching scratch marks run across the wall and then, suddenly, tree branches sway, their colour washed out, almost yellow, and among the branches she catches a glimpse of what had motivated the filming, a crimson-breasted robin. A square of light leaps onto the wall as the film breaks and flaps noisily on the reel.
She chooses another film, one she has seen before, and watches herself playing at Grand Beach. She leans back, eyes half-closed, studying the little girl on the wall. A stranger, she thinks, as she notices the child’s puzzled expression, the smile often too wide, as though over-anxious to please, the flicker of worry darting into the eyes.
She watches film after film and sees the pattern, sees all of them, marching across the wall for Timothy, waving on command or cajoled into more outrageous acts for the camera. A document of their connection, Amy thinks. Together, but apart. Timothy. Only the eye behind the camera. She shuts off the projector and sits in the soft glow of the desk lamp, thinking. Piotr, like Jill, had left too soon. Like Rilke’s “godlike youth,” they had ceased to exist. Their absence makes “emptiness vibrate” in ways that do not comfort, Amy thinks. That do not help me now.
She picks up the last box of film, the one that is labelled in a child’s large-size writing. “In the Cemetery.” Her fingers shake as she feeds it into the machine. She flicks on the projector’s lamp and sits for several moments staring at the square of light on the wall, finger toying with the toggle switch which will set the film in motion. She wonders what will be revealed. Will she see a slash of lightning, or a sheet of light – or a ball of light becoming wings unfolding, carrying a human-like figure in their centre whose eyes are white, whose feet glow as it ascends up and out of sight? She gets up and goes over to the window to look down into the street. Dappled shadows move across the lawn as trees sway beneath the streetlight. Who do we turn to? Not angels.
Barefoot, and wearing her housecoat, she stands on the patio in the dead of night. Fire flares in the gas barbecue. She rips a page from a journal, holds it to the flame until it catches, and then drops it among the lava coals. Snivelling, whiny, she thinks; she would never want anyone to read it. She rips another page loose and then another, until the fire burns strong and bright. Then she makes a teepee over the fire out of all her other journals and watches as pages turn brown and curl in the heat. She reaches for the glass she’d set on the patio table, sips at the Scotch, thinking of Hank building a fire, someone calling the fire department, a truck screaming to a halt outside the house. I’m sorry ma’am, but you’re not allowed to light fires in the city.
She takes the reel from the pocket of her housecoat and unwinds a length of brittle film, still tempted, though she suspects that if she held it up to the light of the fire she would see only holes, holes the size of pinpricks, and the light of the fire passing through them. An undercurrent of cool wind rushes in, feeding the flame, and Amy watches how, for an instant, pages, words, glow white hot, fade, and then disappear. The Scotch tingles in her mouth.
The swollen thing moves behind her rib bone, a slight sliding sideways, a pressure. A reminder.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is a work of fiction and I have taken certain liberties with dates of poli
tical events and with the year of publication of Matt Cohen’s The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone, which in reality first appeared in 1979.
I would like to acknowledge the assistance of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council, and to thank the universities of Alberta and Prince Edward Island for their support during my stay as writer-in-residence.
With thanks to Patricia Sanders, Armin Wiebe, Lynn Schellenberg, and, especially, Ellen Seligman.
Sandra Birdsell was born in Manitoba and, until recently, has spent most of her life in Winnipeg. Her first novel, The Missing Child (1989), won the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, The Chrome Suite (1992), and her most recent collection of short fiction, The Two-Headed Calf (1997), were both shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Her two previous short story collections, Night Travellers and Ladies of the House, were reissued in 1987 as Agassiz Stories. Her most recent novel, The Russländer (2001), won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Book of the Year, and the Regina Book Award, and was a finalist for The Giller Prize.
Sandra Birdsell’s fiction has been anthologized and has appeared in literary journals and Saturday Night magazine.
She lives in Regina.
The Chrome Suite Page 38
