Down the Road to Eternity

by M. A. C. Farrant

  The same old house. Grey stucco walls, wet concrete steps, the wooden front door. The soggy poverty of the place. And the garden, too, drowned: a ragged chrysanthemum, a small drooping bush. Jimmy Silvey imagines the lonely woman inside, her life sodden with boredom, imagines his mere ruined presence bringing joy, like an unexpected gift.

  This time she’s at the kitchen counter buttering toast. Jimmy Silvey comes up behind her, quiet as a cat, and calls her name so softly she thinks it is her own sad desire speaking to her. But there he surely is, her own poor Jimmy, never having had any luck in this world. He’s thinner than she remembers, his clothes dirty, the smell of him strong like gasoline, sour like sweat, and thinning on the top she notices and sagging beneath the eyes as if his whole face was hollowing in. Home at last and doesn’t he look as if he needs someone to love him?

  Then the dog. Jimmy Silvey helps her out of the truck. His mother, wrapped now in a cardigan against the forlorn morning, is with him too, offering the dog pieces of buttered toast. “Who’s a good dog now?” she’s saying, stroking the bony back, kissing the dog on the head. “Who’s a good old thing?”

  We’re all she has, Jimmy thinks, and feels the weight of that responsibility descend upon him like an angry black cloud, feels the storm it causes in his heart whenever he cannot give what is needed.

  He stays the winter. To rest a while. With his dog and his mother, the only beings in Jimmy Silvey’s world who love him without question, without reason.

  And then it’s spring. Jimmy Silvey spends the last two weeks of April working on the truck’s transmission out in his mother’s driveway. The world suddenly a brighter place, everything alive around him: flowers, birds, dogs, kids on bikes, pensioners pulling at weeds in their derelict gardens, all of them shaking off the soggy winter, putting hopeful faces towards the sun and taking deep breaths of the sudden sweet air and smiling.

  And Jimmy Silvey’s heart fills with the same impulse of hope and his thoughts turn towards Alberta and Carol-Ann and the baby. He plays the truck radio as he works and his soul, it seems to swell as he listens to the music, some rock and roll tune about love and good times. And he gets an idea. A golden idea that’s pulling him away from the dreary time with his mother, now that he’s rested. Some bright dream scene about things being all right with Carol-Ann. He can almost see himself happy, riding into that northern Alberta town to see her, arriving like a surprise out of nowhere and the brightness he might possibly bring. Having dreamed up the next place to go.

  And so on the first Monday in May he loads into the truck his wheezing dog who did not die and kisses his sad mother good-bye and heads out towards the ferry, impatient to be on his way and thinking of Carol-Ann and the child, she must be two by now, and wondering if they are still in the same motel or if they have moved or if he can find them.

  Time passes. Jimmy Silvey wanders the range, a drifter along Route 401. His truck, broken down, is left for dead by the side of the road, his dog buried in a ditch along the way. Carol-Ann is from another time.

  A man of few words, he hitches rides, does odd jobs, sleeping roadside when it’s warm, on floors during winter. Surprising no one. Jimmy’s eyes are rigid pools finding a point and moving towards it. His heart is an empty husk blown on its stubborn way.

  Alone in the mountains for two weeks, Jimmy Silvey hears a train whistle. The loneliest sound you’ll ever hear, he thinks. It sounds like a thin, distant cry. He walks towards it furtively, fists clenched at his side. Deliberately through rough salal, slippery ravines, over rotting logs. It’s a bright sunlit morning yet he seems to move under the cover of night, in fear, watching the vacant forest for signs of his personal doom: murderers with guns, knives, ravaging animals, the sudden upheaval of old timber.

  He wears his hair slicked back beneath a baseball cap, a cheap brown suit, tied at the waist with a rope. Carries a slender pack over his shoulders, covers his eyes with cheap wraparound sunglasses, disguising himself against the treachery without, the emptiness within. Jimmy Silvey is hurrying through every obstacle towards that crying sound, a man, for the moment, with somewhere to go.

  ALL THE GOOD AND BEAUTIFUL FORCES

  Hey, let me tell you, the trips have been heavy. But like I say to the young ones, the ones with spikes for hair and pins through their noses, enlightenment is a calling, not for everyone. And if they can settle down long enough to hear the truth I tell them this: some people got to be plumbers or brain surgeons and some people got to sell insurance or be gynecologists even, peering up women’s snatches all day. But if your own true calling, like mine, is the road to Nirvana, is that drive for Oneness, then you’ve got to hang in there through the good and the bad. You’ve got to push through every level of understanding you can and pocket for yourself every bit of universal wisdom like I done. Then you’ll be able to dance.

  It’s probably one of the hardest roads to travel, I tell them, and the way ain’t easy, but if you work at it, you can probably get there.

  Like for me, the first time nearly blew me away. Seems like a million years ago now. There I was eighteen and still with fuzz on my face and well on my way to oblivion when these two guys from SFU turned me onto some Colombian Gold. Under a bridge on the Fraser River. I was so dumb I thought they were taking me on a canoe trip. Shit, my mother even packed me a lunch. We’d stopped to rest and get out of the rain and just as I was opening up the wax paper around my sandwich, this guy Jim pulls out the Zig-Zags and a bag of grass. I hardly knew what the stuff was. Heroin, I thought, alarm bells going. Even expected the cops to swoop down, you know, the usual paranoid stuff. But that wasn’t what did me in. It was later on, after I’d gotten used to inhaling and holding my breath, when the three of us were standing on the muddy bank grooving on the drizzle and the way the water flowed in time to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on Jim’s transistor radio and this other guy, Brian, I think his name was, said, “Life is terminal, man.”

  I mean those words hit me like a rocket. I nearly passed out from the truth. I said it out loud, “You live, you die. That’s it. There ain’t nothing else.” I mean I couldn’t get over it. My mouth must have hung down to my knees. Brian just nodded his head like he’d let me in on the big joke and I was his latest fool. I guess his trip was ripping the cobwebs from the eyes of snot-nosed innocents like me, but it had an effect, I felt it right down to my core, and all the while I’m trying to get a handle on this heavy revelation my mind’s so stretched I was seeing stars throbbing on the leaves of trees, souls fluttering in the breasts of sea gulls.

  I was so twisted I tried to put my lunch bag over my head, blot it all out, wipe away the awful truth: “You live, you die.” I spent weeks after that, going from class to class at the university almost scared to think, but this one idea wouldn’t go away and I knew it never would. Life was just one big cartoon with Woody Woodpecker at the end of it shrieking like a maniac, “Bid-di-dit, bid-di-dit, bid-di-dit. That’s all folks.”

  For years that woodpecker kept howling at me and that red head kept turning up, man did it ever! I’d never know what form it would take and then, later on, it settled on my old lady Red but by then it was screaming a different tune: “Do this Wilson. Do that Wilson,” she’d order all the time like some kind of torment.

  But, hey, like I said, the path to enlightenment takes work. You don’t give up because of irritating shit like woodpeckers or being afraid about living and dying. You got to be on top of all that. Grease the old sy-nap-sees. Get in the groove. That’s what I did.

  Sure there were bad trips. Ever read Camus on acid?

  It was Osley’s Blue at somebody’s beachhouse. The world went all melted plastic but this chick I was with had Camus in her pack, The Myth of Sisyphus. “Here,” she said, “feed on this.” After a while I managed to understand what I was reading but that eating idea took hold and pretty soon words started crawling off the page and coming up my arms like worms, like broken spider’s legs. And then this one word, “meaninglessness,”
poked itself right into my eyeballs and into my ears and up my nose so that before long it had gotten into my head, like rot, and taken over. And then everything meant nothing, a big fat zero. So I figured, well if that’s the case, there’s no way I’m going to push a rock up a hill for the rest of my life, not like my old man, the bathtub salesman. Hell.

  So you see, plenty of good things can come out of a bad trip. It was about that time I dropped out of second year. Hey, if everything was meaningless, I might as well get a lid of dope, ride the Cosmic Elevator, right? Cast my thoughts into the vast useless ether, enjoy the ride. It was the best thing I ever did. I moved in with a bunch of freaks, made candles, sold dope, got by that way.

  Yeah, I sure took to dope, must have had the right disposition for it. I mean it was my number one teacher. I learned stuff on dope it would take a dude maybe a thousand years to figure out straight.

  Love is part of it too so I’ve always been into that. Back then, I tell you, it was the Golden Age. Peace. Love. Dove. Every chick would put out right away, no questions asked, just because you were beautiful. I was calm all the time.

  Now and then my old man used to track me down, rattle his tonsils about my hair, about my dropping out of school. My Jesus robe really bugged his ass. I used to say, “Hey man, if you really love me it doesn’t matter what I look like.” “Bullshit,” he’d say, “what’s love got to do with it? You weren’t born to turn into a godammed vegetable. What are you going to do with the rest of your life?” “Hey, what’s the sweat?” I’d say. “When you’re dead who gives a fuck?” “Think of your mother,” he’d say, by now sounding like a woodpecker, “you’re breaking her heart.” I’d try to explain. “Hey man, we’re just travelling different roads, that’s all. You got a bathtub on your back. Me, I’m carrying the wisdom of the universe and anyway what have hearts got to do with it? Trouble with you,” I’d tell him, “you don’t know what living is. All you care about is selling bathtubs and cutting the lawn and drinking martinis.” “That’s not true,” he’d say, “you just wait until you have children of your own. You just wait till they break your heart.” “Shit, man,” I’d answer, “nobody owns their kids. What do you think I am, a godammed goldfish?”

  One time he actually smoked some dope with us. In this dump we had on Fourth Avenue. Him in his tie and shirt, his fat belly hanging over his pants, that bathtub on his back, sitting crosslegged around the sand candles with us in the dark. Said he wanted to find out what all this “marijuana business” was about. “Far out!” I said. But stoned, he looked hassled. I could see right into his soul like it was a plate glass window at a department store. Just bathtubs and toaster ovens in there; he was a real disappointment.

  And then it turned heavy. It must have been the paregoric we soaked the joints in. Before long everything in the room was on a tilt, like I was standing at the bottom of a mountain and my old man and everybody else was on top. I felt like I was being crushed, right in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe. And then the mountain turned into a giant bathtub, the whole room was a white enamel bathtub and it started to fill up with water and my father was grinning, he had teeth like chrome bathroom fixtures and I kept yelling, “Pull the plug, we’re gonna drown.” But everyone else seemed to be swimming just fine, all of them like monster goldfish, even my fat old man, he could swim the best. But me, I was drowning. I was gonna die in my father’s bathtub and the only thing that could save me was to get out of there and never go near a bathtub or my old man again. And that’s what I did.

  Anytime I’d happen to see my old man after that I’d get that drowning feeling all over again and have to split, and have to swim for my life.

  Fuck, shit, piss, eh? Some trip. Hey, but in living your life there are some things you’ve got to avoid if you want to stay calm. For a while bathtubs were easy to miss but I had a harder time with woodpeckers. Like for years I was falling in love about once a week. It was all right for the longest time but then one night this big, blonde chick from California, Loralee, showed up with her dog and a load of mescaline and it was from Loralee that my path led directly to Red.

  Loralee was a turn-on, too bad she didn’t stick around. She wore a poncho and cowboy boots and when we got it on her dog would howl like a wolf, the whole world knew what was happening. And Loralee was a real noisy chick, too. Screamed and shouted making love and then wanted more. Nearly did me in. But I could have stayed with her forever. She’d kind of look after me, cook me food, brush my hair. So I followed her to Hornby Island and met some guys she knew there who were into agriculture. There’s where I stayed and learned to grow dope.

  The country’s the place to be, birds and all that natural shit. Stoned, Loralee read my Tarot cards, said I always drew the Death card and that meant I was one heavy dude. Hey, that’s me, Wilson, the heavy dude! But I didn’t like the idea of carrying Death around on my back. I should have known that the woodpecker was coming close. Just as soon as life and death come into the picture, shaking things up and demanding meaning. I should have known that before long I’d run into Red. It was my Karma.

  It happened this one time when I’d been living for ages with the freaks on Hornby Island, minding my own business, growing dope, staying calm. There was this weird guy lived down the road a ways called Ken-Zen and he was into heavy machinery, power wagons, tractors, industrial chain saws. I don’t know how it happened but Ken-Zen and I ended up having this contest to see who could chop the most firewood, him with his chain saw or me with an axe. So everybody came. It was a real event, all the freaks and their ladies in long flowered skirts and shawls. This Ken-Zen had said that going back to the land was a pile of shit and he was going to prove that machines were stronger than men. Can’t think now why I was picked to take him on but I did and it was a real bummer. He was light years ahead of me with the wood and I nearly broke my goddamned arms trying to keep up with him. After he’d won he strutted off to his cabin laughing like an idiot and I was left in the pile of half-split wood feeling like a useless bastard if ever there was one.

  But then there was this chick, someone’s friend from the Mainland. I’d never seen her before. Her name, she said, was Red on account of her red hair and the red aura she always had around her. I should have flashed on the woodpecker but I was too freaked out over losing the contest to notice and then Red was being so nice to me. She was real calm, like a soft swollen lake, and she didn’t say much that day as we roamed through the woods, except, “I love you, Wilson.” She said it a couple of times. “I love you, Wilson.” We made love in a clearing covered with moss and wildflowers, shooting stars and some tiny blue flowers were all about, and maybe it was the dope, but that day I guess I loved her too.

  Before long she made herself my lady. She always wore this grey blanket made into a long skirt and a black and green lumber jacket. She drank Calona Red for breakfast. Next thing I knew, I’d knocked her up.

  Red knew of this place called Sombrio Beach, just up the coast from Sooke, where there were some empty shacks on the beach. It was getting to be spring so we went there. We found a cabin that was pretty rotten in this cove but figured we could fix it up with driftwood and some plastic. Everyone else was doing that down there. We were getting welfare so the money was no sweat. It was a gas to hitch a ride into Sooke for supplies and get pots and pans from the Sally Ann and sacks of brown rice and pinto beans from the health food store and bring the stuff back to our shack on the beach. It was neat in there, like a fort I’d had as a kid. We made a bed out of cedar boughs and an old sleeping bag and I fixed up some shelves using flat pieces of driftwood I found on the beach.

  It was incredible, too, having all that welfare bread. The dope you could buy! And we lived pretty good, got rock cod off the beach and mussels and clams off the rocks. Now and then straight campers would hike down the cliff to the beach for the day and then find they couldn’t carry all their stuff back with them. It was like Christmas then, we’d be given hot dogs and buns, jugs of wine, Oreo cookie
s, bags of potato chips. One time we were left three sirloin steaks. Shit, did we have a feast that night! During the time on the beach we did a fair bit of acid and when it came summer and got hot we went naked all day. Boy, did that blow the campers’ minds! Yeah, we were a real community of freaks down there, living calm and easy. But then it got heavy.

  Winter came and the rain. That place was like living inside a plastic bag. Everything was wet all the time and then Red started bitching like a regular fishwife. I’d seen it coming all summer; she’d get her bird claws into me over every little thing. Like where was I going whenever I’d wander down the beach with Anabel, two shacks down, or why didn’t I come straight home after a trip to Sooke, how come I had to stay away for a week? She started acting like she owned me. You’d think I wore a three-piece suit all day or something and then that shitless winter she started screaming, “Why don’t you get a job, Wilson? Why don’t we get a proper house, Wilson?” I sure found out what that red aura of hers meant. Trouble, man.

  Here she was turning into that woodpecker, that “you live, you die” woodpecker and making all the stuff in between a colossal bad trip. And there I was in her cage somehow, in the goddamned bird cage with her, and I couldn’t get out because I was tied. She had that kid in her stomach and it was mine. I was tied because I thought then I wanted that kid.

  I did acid the night Red finally had it. I felt like I was on the moon. Just whirling around in space. There was this storm crashing branches outside the cabin and I thought it was meteor and stars we were banging into. It was so cold in there, too. The beach wood was so wet it only fizzled when I lit it.

  The guy from the next cabin came in and did some chants with an eagle feather over Red. He was a skinny guy with red acne crud all over his face but he sure had soul, the way he said those chants, all about spirits and stars and the universe. It was heavy duty, made me think of God. And just one candle burning, too, made me think of nativity scenes on Christmas cards. It was about that time of the year, and for a moment I felt swollen up with warmth like I was Joseph and Red was Mary and maybe this kid inside her was another Jesus about to be born, my Jesus, my boy. I rode on that thought for most of the night until Red, with her usual woodpecker screech started complaining about her pains and shrieking so much I had to go outside and sit under a tree. That frosted me off. In all that rain. And then that drowning business started all over again. I was sitting in a bathtub and all the rain was going to fill it up and I was going to drown. The guy with the eagle feather came outside just as I was yelling, “Get out, get out, the ship’s sinking,” and he grabbed me and pulled me from the water. “It’s a girl,” he said. “Vishnu Meadowlark.”