We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night

by Joel Thomas Hynes

  Is he still driving trucks? Is he still with that same woman?

  Johnny with his yes and no answers until the old fella driving finally gave a good look in the rear-view. An awkward moment or two, then mostly a quiet ride. The old girl never knew the difference first nor last.

  That’s near on two hours ago now, and here’s Johnny stuck out like a sore thumb on the side of the highway in jeezly old Gander, and wanting to be moving on. Too many eyes. Too many fucken baby-boomer gawkers. Next thing the pigs are gonna be swingin by lookin for some ID. RCMP too, out this way. Whole different kinda bastard. Not that Johnny’s got nothing to worry about. There’s the record, yes, but nothing outstanding, no conditions no more. Nothing no one can say. Travelling. Here’s my dead girlfriend’s ashes, right here. Yes sir officer, gonna scatter em into that other ocean, on the other side. Minding me own business, grieving along. Cant get far enough gone. Now, if you’ll excuse me, officer.

  Johnny watches the steady onslaught of Sunday afternoon coffee junkies gushing in and out of Tim Hortons. The drive-in cars lined up all the way into the hotel parking lot across the way like some nullified serpent. Two girls tucked in under the one umbrella, wolfing back a smoke. A man with a small boy on his shoulders and the boy cracks his head off the doorframe on the way inside. Johnny watches through the front windows at the boy screeching and the gangly man, the boy’s father or uncle or something, tryna quiet him down with a five-dollar bill.

  Some dolled-up skirt jumps out of a brand-new Toyota Tacoma, a black one with chrome bumpers, tinted windows. She clicks inside and leaves the motor running. Make short work of that truck, Johnny would. Enough gas money to get him across the rest of the way. Speed limit. Dump her outside Port aux Basques, maybe set a fucken match to her. Dont tell Johnny about burning cars, dont bother.

  Fifteen years old. Pius and his wife, or Johnny’s mother and father back then, gone out to some banquet, down to the Legion for a dance and a drunk. Pius with a brand-new Cavalier in the driveway. First ever new car he owned. Only ever used her for going into town. Takes the truck when he’s having a drink. Sister Tanya off whoring somewhere. Johnny sitting there, sitting there, watchin NYPD Blue and wishing someone’d crack Jimmy Smits’s face open with a maul. Spare keys to the Cavalier in the big glass bowl on the table, buried under light bills and last year’s birthday cards, hair elastics, nail clippers. Johnny on the phone then, with that saucy little Rhonda from Fermeuse.

  Did you really kill all those hens Johnny?

  Is it true you found Mikey?

  Johnny tellin her no to the hens question, ignoring the other. Tells her what short work he’d make of her if she came down the Shore. Rhonda giggling, sayin she’s never seen one before. Johnny says come on down the Shore girl, come on down if you wants to see it. No. No. She’s not allowed out of the harbour on a Sunday night. If Johnny wants to see her he’s got to come up her way. But her folks are gonna be home in an hour. The big glass bowl on the table. Johnny’s cock out, throbbing pain in his balls, tryna get her to talk dirty when she dont know how.

  Come on up Johnny Keough. Are you scared Johnny? I think youre scared.

  The fuck I am.

  And then Johnny’s behind the wheel of Pius’s car racing like a fiend towards Fermeuse with his lad still out. Two feet for the pedals—one for the gas and one for the brake, his knees like rubber. He pulls onto the side of the road in Ferryland to haul on his seatbelt cause he does not wanna die before he’s got Rhonda’s nipples in his mouth, and when he pulls out again he knows nothing about rear-view mirrors or what’s coming behind, his mind clouded and fevered with the possibility of that hot wet slit between Rhonda’s legs, and there’s the screech of tires and headlights blasting across the dash and Johnny’s burning up the road again with some fuckhead tryna rape him in the bumper and flashing his headlights and blowing his thin girly horn. But Johnny drives on and on, putting more and more distance between himself and Fuckhead and no thoughts of moose along the black roadside. Skid Row’s Slave to the Grind jammed into the Cavalier’s top-notch tape deck, the sparks flying from his cigarette. Johnny catching on, somewhere outside Aquaforte, that he only needs to use one foot now, one foot. And poor sweet Rhonda when he gets there. And the less time he’s got before her folks are due home then the better and the worse she’s gonna get it. If that’s what’s on the table? Please Christ she wants what Johnny hopes she wants, what she’s more or less came right out and said she wants. I mean, if a fella says he’s got his cock in his hand and she says well come on up the Shore and show it to me, that kinda sets the bar right there, dont it? A fella can reasonably expect some sort of action, no?

  Outside Fermeuse and just when Johnny spies the lights of the snack bar next to where Rhonda said her house is, he swerves too late to avoid a toppled road sign and there comes a booming, clunking, murderous crunch under the car, and one of Johnny’s headlights is gone and there’s the sudden fragrance of gas from the back seat and Johnny’s nerves are just about shattered in bits but he’s afraid to slow down because Fuckhead seems to be picking up speed again. Johnny burns past Reddy’s Pub doing about ninety and then hauls off by the old bridge and tucks himself in behind the big rock where Mikey had himself a bit of a meltdown during a school dance the year before. Out in the parking lot punching himself in the head, swinging at everybody, screaming vile shit at this quiet girl from Town, someone’s cousin, who’d been dancing with him all night. Snapped, Mikey did. Right outta nowhere. Johnny had to give him a few taps that night, to set him straight. Dragged him off before the cops showed up. Mikey muttering nonsense the whole way down the Shore.

  Johnny, with the Cavalier tucked in behind the rock now, sits and watches Fuckhead blow past the bridge and latch on to the taillights of another rig that’s pulled out of the gas station. Johnny sits and waits, waits, tang of gas stronger now, beautiful fumes swooning in his head, that folding echo growling in his brain. He rests his shrunken head on the steering wheel. And then Johnny’s at Rhonda’s door, pounding on the screen like a lunatic and the fresh air almost making him heave and she’s sayin he cant come in, he cant come in, that her folks are coming any second and Johnny starts to undo his belt and she squeals and slams the storm door and Johnny hears giggles and laughter from her girlfriends inside and when he turns around Pius’s Cavalier is parked askew, still running, in Rhonda’s driveway and the cab is full of thick grey-white smoke that’s leaking and curling, wisping in cartoon spectacle up through the edges of the doors. And then a green flame licking up the back seats and Johnny staring, staring, waiting for the boom, his hand around his cock and the raw, sickly gas-huffer’s loose-tooth muscle cramps, the burning whore-sludge in his sinuses, and he’s lurching across the shiny black asphalt of Rhonda’s driveway with the girls howling in the background. Scrambling through some icy river of slime up to his knees, up to his waist, and clawing his way up a bank of alders behind the church with the desolate screech of a fire engine moaning down from the heavens.

  No clue how it burned. No explanation to this day. Maybe a stray spark from a cigarette wound up on the floor in the back when Johnny thought he was tossing it out the window. Maybe wiring got ripped loose when he hit that road sign. Maybe Johnny stood in Rhonda’s driveway and tossed a lit match onto the back seat. Just for shits and giggles.

  No explanation.

  In any event, Pius’s precious Cavalier, his baby, up in fucken flames.

  Johnny made it back down the Shore somehow that night, smoking hash in the back seat of a Camaro with some lads from Witless Bay. Holed up by hisself in Big Tony’s drafty old hunting cabin for three nights, listening to Sex with Sue on a windup radio and sleeping with a hatchet in the bunk, the funnels on the stove too fucked up for a good fire. Shivering and shaking in the bunk and eating Cup-a-Soup straight from the package. Talkin out loud to Mikey. Going to the door and shouting his name into the night woods. Mikey dead and buried not six weeks even. Johnny sobbing himself to sleep. Where are you man
? Where did you go? Where the fuck are you? And then waking up around midnight on the third night to Big Tony, with a full-faced helmet on, tellin young Johnny to get the fuck up and come on, that the cops were after sending him in. And Johnny so fed up with the hunger and the cold and the freaked-out noises in the woods, and wanting to be back in the land of cigarettes so bad that he just got on the back of Big Tony’s trike and went on out to face up. Fuck. The racket waiting at the house. Pius, God love the wily old fuck, way too sly to lay a hand on Johnny this time.

  There, anyhow, dont tell Johnny about burning cars, no by Christ.

  Johnny’s kicked back in the passenger seat of a cushy eighteen-wheeler, a dusty black Kenworth. Somewhere past Grand Falls and the hopped-up hippie named Saul in the driver’s seat with his greyed-out mutton chops is droning on about some puckbunny called Sass that he knows who works a Comfort Inn near the US border and who better be waiting for him come Tuesday night. Old Saul hammers his fist into his thigh every time he says the name Sass and the heat is blasting so vicious Johnny’s nose is feeling like it might bleed. But his suit is good and dry now and it’s coming on seven o’clock. Saul thinks they’ll make the one o’clock ferry in Port aux Basques, and when he says this he upshifts and gives a roaring shot of gas and Johnny entertains no misgivings about making the one o’clock ferry.

  The heat in his face, his hand wrapped tight around the wad of bills in his pants pocket. Madonna’s ashes tucked up against his balls. She’d be mortified. Saul flips on the radio for the evening news. Johnny’s chin is just about rested on his chest, puddle of drool collecting behind his bottom teeth, when he hears the broadcaster spew something about the police lookin for a John Joseph Keough, only the bastard pronounces it Keough, instead of the right way. They say Mr Keough is wanted in connection with an armed robbery on Queen’s Road. No mention of the other thing, how he pulled that old couple outta that flaming inferno. That’s old fucken news, hey Johnny. Still and all, they give a pretty goddamn accurate description, of the suit Johnny’s wearing, his height and his looks, the teardrop tattoos. It’s believed Mr Keough is in the St John’s area. This is the only part that brings a smile to Johnny’s face; old Shiner ripping up every flophouse in town tryna get to Johnny before the cops do. Saul glances across the cab at Johnny smiling like that, and gives him the once-over. Too much of a fucken coincidence, fella in a beige suit, Johnny’s height, with the teardrops tattooed on his face, out on the highway like a stray cat. Johnny knows Saul knows.

  Shit man, says Saul, they nailed you didnt they?

  Johnny, in his state, thinks first to feign ignorance, but what with the heater blastin in his face and the burning blistered feet on fire, and that pork chop dinner burbling nasty in his guts, he just dont have the energy to lie to old Saul. Johnny eyes the rusty, oversized tire iron on the hump between the two seats and thinks, hey, if it comes down to it . . . if it comes down to it. And he pictures himself in Saul’s seat, the captain’s chair, plowing through the sidewall of the Kingston Pen in a flurry of barbed wire and bullets and blowing the horn for Stevie, his old man, Stevie the Scar. Cause you cant just let an innocent man r-r-rot away like that?

  Johnny eyes Saul coldly until Saul tosses his head back, for a laugh, and dips into a little pouch attached to the front of his seat. Johnny eyes the tire iron. No way to use it without putting the big-rig into the ditch, at this speed. Johnny watches Saul’s hand grip and pull and slide a twenty-six-ounce bottle of Beefeater into his lap. Saul takes a big slug and then passes the bottle to Johnny. And sometimes, hey Johnny, sometimes you just gotta take a risk on some folks. Sometimes the good guys are in disguise and you cant very well go about with no faith in no one, none of the time. Johnny drains about four ounces of gin.

  I guess they did, Johnny says, I guess they fucken did.

  Well, you can always change your outfit somewhere along the way, but I dont know what youre gonna do about them teardrops . . .

  Not much I can do. Burn em off. Not like I flaunts em.

  Yeah, still though, it aint in your favour . . .

  The bottle slips back and forth from Johnny to Saul, thirsty slugs. Silence, the wide road unfurling in the dark.

  Well, I pulled my fair share of smash-and-grabs when I was a pup, ’fore I got myself into the long-haulin. So long’s you never hurt nobody.

  I never hurt nobody, says Johnny, and he has a tight flash of the cop with a towel held to the head of that big blonde from the shop on Queen’s Road.

  Not no one who never asked for it anyhow.

  Well, says Saul, it can get pretty messy out here on the road sometimes too. I aint none to judge. So you relax young feller, you relax . . .

  Johnny feels the gin do that nauseous churning devil’s dance as it passes his stomach and scurries on into his parched veins, down to his smouldering shins and feet, waits for it to hit his battered brain, only to realize it likely hit there before he even had the bottle to his lips.

  Saul starts in again with some story of an old-time trucker that helped him across a weigh-in scales outside Saskatoon years back. Saul says how he was nearly three thousand pounds overloaded, and the old-timer told Saul to follow up behind, and when the old-timer pulled onto the scales he hits his kill switch and makes the truck stall out. Made like he couldnt get his rig started for love nor money, until the guy at the desk came out, all pissed off, and waved everybody else around. Saul says this was back when you could take another trucker on his word alone, but how it’s dirtier out there these days, lots dirtier. Johnny nods and listens in the dark of the cab, the mute squelch of Saul’s two-way and the first of the night’s predicted flurries clinging like ash to the corners of the windshield. He strokes the urn between his legs. Madonna in there, in a ceramic bottle between my legs, incinerated.

  A gas station. The parking lot thick with a fluffy layer of snow. Johnny’s neck is stabbing stiff from having it slumped against the window. A notice taped to the pumps about how gasoline theft affects us all. Fuck off. A sign at the edge of the parking lot pointing towards Stephenville. Johnny thinks, from any maps he’s seen, that Port aux Basques cant be too far down the road. Saul on a pay phone near the doors to the station. Johnny thinks he might have to bolt, his hand on the handle, then he sees Saul throw his head back and laugh, so he knows it’s not the fuzz he’s on to.

  Some crazed young bayman in a bright orange floater suit bounces up out of the ditch on a red quad and burns across the road into the parking lot, nearly slamming head first into a passing pickup. The pickup driver toots his horn nice and friendly like and the young feller on the quad winks back at the pickup driver and simultaneously does that reverse grinning chin-wag thing like youd see the old men outside the fish plant do when you were a young scrap. The feller on the quad tilts the handle bars and his body to the left and hits the gas until the bike is spinning like a top up on one wheel in a fuming powdered flurry of snow and gravel. The pickup starts blowing its horn and someone somewhere starts whooping encouragement as the quad spins faster and faster until it and the driver are just a red-and-orange blurry little tornado that lifts off the parking lot and floats on out over the black treeline, vanishing into the storm. Something, that. Christ. What you wont lay eyes on.

  Johnny hears himself mumble something when Saul climbs aboard. The sound of Saul laughing, like that giant, that wrestler in that movie where they were lookin for somebody with six fingers. No my son there’s no tornadoes around these parts. The big door clicking shut, the sound vague and outlying like the snap of branches in the woods at night, far off, ricocheting over the tops of the trees, away out there in the darkness.

  Johnny raises his head for a moment, then nods off again. Rumble of the rig vibrating up through his toasty toes. The faint growl of some waiting hungry creature. A brittle laugh on the wind and the grinning face of Johnny’s old friend Mikey, Cousin Mikey, flickers and dances briefly across his mind.

  Dime-sized black hole in Mikey’s throat.

  Fi
sh flies.

  The gravel black with blood.

  Look I’m fucken sorry, man. How could . . . ?

  Johnny tries to push it away, reaches out for the image of this nurse in a smutty book that got passed around down at HMP. The nurse is leant at her desk lookin over a clipboard, bursting out of her tight white skirt. The edge of her nipples heaving out of her low-cut blouse. Heels and white fishnet stockings. There’s a knock on the door. She looks up and sees Cousin Mikey floating towards her holding a chunk of his own skull in his hands. FUCK! No, no, no. Come on Johnny. Let it lie. Leave it alone. The snapping echo of a thirty-ought-six rolling down across Gorman’s Hill. Pius sayin how someone musta got their moose. Fuck off Johnny, shut up now. No one wants the juice Johnny. No one wants the real meat. Keep it nice and light and easy with your bleeding-heart shit about gettin pussy-whipped and thinkin it was fucken love. Where’s that nurse gone? Where did she go? Who wants to think about brains and blood and bits of skull and hair splattered halfways across that gravel pit? The nurse Johnny, the nurse, I believe she was reading over your chart . . .

  Johnny climbs down out of the bunk behind the seats in Saul’s rig. Saul’s not in the driver’s seat, and the only view is what looks to be the back end of another trailer. It’s cold, Johnny’s breath little explosive wheezes of blue-grey. The thunder and grumble of a far superior engine pulsing through the rig’s cabin, rattling the little beaded dream catcher dangling from Saul’s rear-view. A net to catch your dreams in. Johnny cant help but wonder how long it’s been since he was on a swing set, at a playground, doing that. Did them days ever actually take place? Fuck it all. The truck dips in a drawn-out list to the left and Johnny staggers gently towards the driver’s side. This must be the ferry.