Zack

by William Bell

  A nauseating stench of puke, sweat and old shoes filled my nostrils. I breathed through my mouth, fighting down the heaves. A ball of fiery pain burned between my shoulders and I strove to hold off claustrophobic panic as I lay face down, wrists manacled behind me.

  The cop was talking into the radio mike. Computer keys clicked. A few moments later he got out, opened the back door and helped me out of the car.

  “Didn’t you see the sign?” he asked, the tough edge gone from his voice. “It’s illegal to camp here.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t mean to sleep so long.”

  I was tempted to point out that the truck down the parking lot had been there longer than I had, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Nothing in his truck, Duane,” the second cop said. He was a clone of the first cop, except his jacket was zipped up and he had a pencil moustache.

  “Listen, fella,” Duane said. “Aside from the bylaw, it’s not a good idea to camp out in a place like this. There’s a lotta mean types riding the Interstate. You wanna catch some sleep, go to a campground.”

  “We gonna write him up?” Moustache said, turning off his flashlight.

  “Where you headed?” Duane asked me.

  “Mississippi. I’m going to visit my grandfather.”

  “Turn around.”

  With a jingle the cuffs fell away.

  “We’re gonna let you go with a warning. But watch yourself. Don’t do anything foolish like this again.”

  “Yessir,” I said.

  The two cops walked slowly to the cruiser and got in. Duane spoke into his mike as Moustache drove away.

  I got into the Toyota and pushed the key into the ignition. The contents of the glove compartment were strewn across the seat and littered the floor. I felt liquid trickle down one side of my nose and into my mouth. I tasted blood. When I reached to the floor for the box of tissues I noticed the scrapes on my wrists where the manacles had dug in.

  I started the truck and steered onto the Interstate, a pain stabbing my shoulders each time I changed gears. As I drove, I dabbed the cut on my aching head with the bloody tissue.

  By dawn, Columbus was behind me and I was headed towards Cincinnati on I-71. My hands still shook if I took them off the wheel.

  Chapter 4

  A little while after I crossed the Kentucky border I saw a familiar name: General Butler State Park. He couldn’t have been the Butler from Pawpine’s days in the Revolutionary War, but I took the off ramp anyway and followed the two-lane blacktop through the hills. I figured I’d find a campsite, put the truck back in order—the cop who searched it had low respect for other people’s property—and take it easy for the rest of the day. Getting handcuffed and thrown around and generally treated like a crook had tired me out.

  The sun was high in the sky when I located the campsite assigned to me by the ranger. It was in a row of sites along a creek that, according to my map, trickled through the hardwoods into the Kentucky River. The campground wasn’t full—the sites on both sides of me were unoccupied—but it wasn’t like being out in the wilderness either. Dogs barked, kids flashed past on mountain bikes, car engines growled to life, savoury blue smoke from barbecues drifted on the hot air.

  I sat on the picnic table munching a three-decker sandwich and sipping tonic water from the can, watching a pair of ducks tip their tail feathers towards the clear blue sky as they fed and chuckled in the shallows. A light breeze murmured in the evergreens that flanked my campsite. But I couldn’t relax.

  I didn’t really feel like reliving the experience at the welcome station but I knew I had to. Mom had always told me never to hold down feelings or pretend they weren’t there. “If you do,” she’d say, “those emotions will stew and bubble like a volcano and sooner or later they’ll erupt, usually when you don’t expect it. Yeah,” she added, mixing her metaphor, “like thugs crashing a party.”

  Well, a thug was what I felt like. What had that whole SWAT team episode been all about, anyway? A kid trapped in the back of a pickup truck wasn’t exactly a terrorist threat. The cop who had cuffed me and thrown me into the cruiser had either taken too many steroids or watched too much TV. And his partner. Thrashing around in my truck, pulling my belongings apart, poring over everything I owned, leaving a chaotic mess behind him.

  I fingered the wound on my forehead; it was still sticky and it stung when I touched it. I drank down the last of my tonic water and flung the can at the garbage drum chained to a hardwood tree, then pounded the top of the picnic table, seething in frustration. Manacled and disoriented, I had felt completely helpless against the authority and menace of the two cops. It was hard to explain: they had treated me like scum, and for that reason I felt worthless, a nothing, and when the cop had hauled me out of the cruiser and unlocked the cuffs I had felt grateful. Now I was disgusted with myself for letting them get to me that way.

  I hopped off the table, picked up the pop tin and dropped it into the drum. I climbed into the truck and changed into my running gear. After I locked up, I loped off down the gravel road and jogged around the park to warm up before I came to the hill by the main gate. Leaning into the ascent, I sprinted to the crest, turned and jogged back down, dashed to the top again, repeated the cycle endlessly, grinding up the steep grade again and again until sweat streamed from every pore, my chest rose and collapsed like a bellows, my pulse hammered in my ears, my thigh muscles burned and quivered. I pounded up that hill until I crumpled exhausted to the grass by the side of the road.

  The hangover from my running fell on me like a bag of sand, sending me into a dreamless sleep. I woke slapping mosquitoes and perspiring: the inside of the truck was like a stove. I crawled out into the morning swelter, grabbed my gear and headed along the road to the showers. I might as well have saved my energy. By the time I got back to the campsite every inch of my frame was bathed in sweat.

  After a gourmet breakfast of peanut butter and crackers washed down with warm apple juice, I decamped. Above me a grey slab of sky threatened rain. I hit Louisville just in time to get snarled in rush-hour traffic on the bypass that looped around the city to connect with I-65. Blasted by humid air rushing in the windows, I drove south, set my watch back an hour at Upton. The highway seemed to sway between the hills like a pendulum. Kentucky blended into Tennessee, and not long after, I made Nashville. No fan of country music and its variations, I kept the radio silent, and as if in revenge the tangle of intersecting highways and bypasses around the city led me the wrong way. Instead of slipping past the music capital I found myself in it, and then the rain began.

  Exasperated and short-tempered, I pulled into a mini-mall, bought a vacuum flask and got it filled with coffee at a take-out chicken joint. In an accent as thick as molasses the waiter gave me directions, drawing a crude map on a napkin while he drawled away, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Talking to him, I knew I was finally in the South, and my trip to see my grandfather, for so long an abstract plan, began to feel real.

  Fifteen minutes later I was speeding south on Highway 100, looking for a place called Pasquo. By the time I found the little town the rain was heavy and thick and I almost missed the sign indicating the northern terminus of the Natchez Trace Parkway. I parked in the lot, went inside the welcome centre and left a few moments later with a collection of booklets and a map, which I looked over in the truck, sipping hot strong coffee.

  “You’re goin’ to Natchez, you oughta take the Trace,” the waiter had suggested, completely confusing me until he explained that the Trace was a five-hundred-mile-long two-lane road. Looking at the map, I could see his advice was good. I was sick to death of the homogenized boredom of the interstates. The Parkway began just outside Nashville and twisted and bent its way south through Tennessee, taking a twenty-five-mile bite out of Alabama before crossing into Mississippi.

  Reading the pamphlets while the rain drummed on the roof and coursed down the fogged windshield, I felt like a time-traveller. For centuries before Columbus landed in the so-called
New World (to the millions of people already living here it was the same old place), the Trace had been a major trail used by Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians. Later, Hernando de Soto—whoever he was, I thought, imagining a frown of displeasure on The Book’s chubby face—had followed it. So had the explorer Meriwether Lewis and the Indian-killer and someday president Andrew Jackson. The Trace became a post road after 1800. Most of the travellers, settlers and merchants who floated their wares on timber barges down the Mississippi River to Natchez, sold the boats because they couldn’t be poled back upriver against the current. Then they hiked back north on the Trace.

  In a strange sort of way I thought the ancient trail was part of my history, too. “None of you came from nowhere,” The Book had told us in our first class the previous February, smiling at our confusion. “That’s a correct use of a double negative. All of you came from somewhere. You have a history. This subject isn’t an abstract list of dates and wars and constitutions. It’s real. As real as you are.”

  I read that the Trace would take me past farms and fields where slaves had bent sweating over rows of vegetables and cotton with crude hoes in their callused hands. Yeah, I thought, men and women like Pawpine whose parents and grandparents had been torn from their lives and homes in Africa, shipped across the sea, given strange names and put to work building a country they weren’t allowed to share in.

  I turned the window defroster on high, spread the map open beside me on the seat and started the truck. When the windshield cleared I turned south again.

  I didn’t get far. The road, a well-maintained two-lane with wide grassy shoulders, wove its way through gently rolling woods that opened up occasionally into farm land. The rain beat down with a vengeance and thunder growled in the distance. I passed Garrison Creek, pushed on until I got to a picnic area with a sign that said Old Trace and finally gave in, pulling off the road. The windshield wipers flapped in vain against the sheets of water pouring down. At the far edge of the little parking lot a bush road led to a hiking trail. Remembering the cops in Ohio, I steered the truck into the bush until it was out of sight.

  The few steps from the cab to the back door were enough for the roaring rain to drench me to the skin. Inside, I pulled off my wet clothes and tossed them into a corner. I clicked on my flashlight and lay down on the sleeping bag, head propped up on my clothes pack, and read a mystery novel, slapping mosquitoes that hummed in the humid air before taking turns at the feast.

  Some time during the night I woke to the roar of wind, the drumming of rain and the hollow slamming of branches striking the top and sides of the truck. With the violence of a ship striking a reef, a thunderclap burst overhead. I sat up quickly, banging my head on the rear wall of the cab as I scrambled to my knees. I peered out the back window just as a flash of lightning crackled for at least two seconds, illuminating the parking lot and the meadow with a ghostly blue light. A deafening crack of thunder followed immediately. The storm was right above me, flinging sheets of rain against the truck. The wind came in furious waves. Another blinding bolt of lightning leapt from the dark sea of sky, driving me from the window just as thunder slammed the air and the floor shuddered under me. A second later, something exploded behind me and crashed down, rocking the truck on its springs like a toy boat.

  I dove under my sleeping bag and rolled into a ball, wishing the storm would go away. Two more flashes lit up the sky, so bright the light pierced my bedding; two more eruptions of sound pounded above me before I realized the tumult was receding. As slow as a tide, the wind lessened in power and the deluge became rain again.

  I’d like to say that I jumped out of the truck eager to do battle with the forces of nature and anxious to survey the damage, but I stayed inside, shaking and wide-eyed until dawn. I dressed in shorts and a T-shirt and climbed out of the truck onto the spongy leaf-covered track. Grey light and birdsong filled the bush around me and gold sunlight tinged the treetops along the edge of the meadow. It was already hot, the air sodden with moisture.

  Pushing fallen branches aside, I made my way to the front of the truck. A monstrous dead oak had crashed down in the storm, crushing dozens of smaller trees as it fell, and its topmost branches had grazed the Toyota’s hood and fender. The hood was creased across the middle, the fender was crumpled and one headlight smashed.

  “Man-oh-man,” I muttered. The massive trunk of the oak, half a metre in diameter, had broken off about two metres above the ground. Had I parked a few metres farther into the bush the tree would have struck the truck’s cap, crushing both it and me into the muddy ground.

  “Welcome to Mississippi, Zack,” I said out loud.

  Chapter 5

  I wished I could have lit a bonfire to cheer myself up, but even an experienced woodsman would have been challenged to coax a flame from the drenched wood scattered around me. I sat down on the rear bumper of the truck. There had been times in my life—like the time I had given in to the nagging of a girl I had been going out with in grade nine and tried marijuana—when I had shaken my head in disgust and asked myself, Zack, what the hell are you doing? This was one of those times.

  I had lied to my parents and grandparents, taken the family wheels without permission, almost gotten myself arrested and my head broken, smashed up the truck—and for what? To find a grandfather my mother wouldn’t talk to for reasons I didn’t know. It began to look like living in Fergus had ruined my brain after all.

  I sipped some lukewarm coffee left over from the day before and dabbed the cut in my forehead—it had begun to bleed again when I cracked it against the truck wall during the storm—while I thought about my options. It didn’t take long. I had only two choices. I could continue my goofy quest or I could point the truck north and go home. Maybe, I thought, I could get back in time to get the truck repaired before my parents returned and pretend nothing had happened. That idea died with the first mosquito of the morning as it tried to bore a hole in my forearm. I hadn’t really thought about the net result of leaving home, but I had known I’d really be in for it, regardless of the condition of the truck. They would find out. That was clear.

  And besides, if I slunk back to Fergus I would have nothing to justify my lies and mistakes. My only hope was the remote possibility that no matter what punishment was eventually laid on me I could tell myself it was worth it because I had met my grandfather and seen where I had come from. To go home now would mean wasting Pawpine’s gold.

  I headed south. Confident? Happy? Not on your life. As I shifted up through the gears I recalled a phrase from a novel, “It’s gone south.” The expression meant it’s screwed up.

  Under different conditions I would have enjoyed the drive down the Trace. It was a sunny day, the air was fresh after the storm, the scenery was pretty and there were so few cars and campers on the road I could pretend it was mine.

  But the closer I got to Natchez, the more real it all became and the deeper my nervousness grew. The Trace ended east of town at Highway 61, the same highway Mom had sung about in her most famous tune, and when I turned onto that road I did something I’ve done all my life, something I had practised to perfection—I procrastinated.

  On the edge of town was a strip of discount motels and fast-food restaurants. It was eight o’clock and I had driven all day. It wouldn’t look good, I rationalized, to arrive late in the evening at my grandfather’s house, dirty and underfed.

  So I hit one of the greasy spoons on the strip and took away two jumbo hamburgers, a large order of fries, a fruit pie and a “maxi-jug” of ginger ale, then drove into a run-down motel called the Plantation Inn and parked under the sign that said Office/Vacancy in pink neon. The screen door creaked as I entered.

  A moment later a middle-aged woman wearing a wrinkled apron pushed through a bead curtain and stood at the counter. Behind her a TV flickered—some game show or other—and I heard the muted cheers of the audience.

  The woman crossed her pale arms on the counter-top. “Help you?” she said, deadpan. A drop of s
weat trickled across her temple.

  “I’d like a room for the night, please. Nonsmoking.”

  She eyed me up and down with the enthusiasm of a rattlesnake, looked past me to the dented truck idling outside the door.

  “We’re full up tonight.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But the sign says you have a vacancy.”

  “All the rooms is reserved.”

  “You have nothing left?”

  “I don’t think y’all’d be happy here,” she said with finality. “Y’all might could try The Oaks just down the road.”

  She turned and slipped through the curtain, the beads rattling as they came back together.

  What the hell’s with her? I wondered as I got into the truck. I turned around in the empty lot. Although I counted at least twenty doors in the motel, only three had cars parked in front.

  At The Oaks I was told by the manager, “Got lotsa room, son. Pretty slow around here this week.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “The Plantation Inn was full.”

  “All booked up, you mean?” he said, smiling and running a broad hand over his bare scalp. The stubble on his face was white against his coal-black skin. “You ain’t from around here, are you?”

  I registered and paid him in cash.

  Once inside the small room, which was panelled with imitation wood and smelled damp and musty, I activated the air-conditioner, flicked on the TV, collapsed in the one armchair and watched a ball game as I wolfed down my supper. With the food sitting in my stomach like a stone, I stripped down and took a long cool shower. Then I dressed in fresh clothes. I sat on the bed and picked up the phone.

  First, I called Montreal. I tried to sound breezy and noncommittal as I answered the standard list of parent questions—the How-are-you and Did-you-remember variety. The blues festival was great, Dad told me. Mom was knocking them dead, getting standing ovations, making lots of contacts. He was practising his French, visiting art galleries and museums. Had my marks from school come in the mail yet? Mom wanted to know. Was I eating enough?