She laughed despite herself, and her palms started to sweat. The drums announced something momentous, and the man held up a fist and sang for her to dream on until her dreams came true. Agathe laughed helplessly. She glanced at the driver-side mirror and saw Réjean at the counter of the Lobster Shack up the hill.
The man sang still higher, and as he did, he spread his fingers and let the song flood through, as though he had been holding it in his clenched fist, his voice disintegrating into an animal shriek—aAaAaAaAaAaAaAaA!
It was then she saw the dust kicking up behind Réjean in the rear-view mirror.
“Aie, va-t-en!” she hissed, waving the man away with both hands.
The man spread his palms in the same theatrical way he had with the pointing and made a mock hurt face.
“Allez-y,” she rasped more loudly. “Il va te tuer.”
The man reacted to the change on her face and turned to see what caused it.
“Go!” she shouted.
At the sight of Réjean’s thunderous approach, the man threw the truck into gear, playfully shaking a scolding finger at Agathe. He peeled out of the lot, pointed meaningfully back at her, and raised his fist in the air.
Réjean slapped both hands against the door frame. “Agathe! Qu’est-ce qu’il t’a dit?”
“O, Réjean,” she said, “c’était un psycho. J’étais tellement scared, mais y est parti, y est parti.”
Réjean reached through the window and gathered her up in his arms, and Agathe tried not to smile as she watched the man disappear down the road.
NOW
Réjean was filed as a Voluntary Missing Adult, and the police again promised to let Agathe know the moment they heard anything. Considering his size, there was an assumption he’d left of his own free will. It didn’t look as though he’d been kidnapped or harmed. The police seemed convinced he’d come back if he wanted to.
Agathe awoke the day of their anniversary to the sound of gravel crunching out front and ran to the window to see a tow truck dragging the Silverado. Her confused heart started to pound. She looked hard, searching for him in the hitched-up truck, and held her breath as she opened the door to a guy in green coveralls who gave her a sheepish look as he held up the keys and asked if she wanted him to drive it into the garage for her.
She stood in the garage and smoked, looking at the truck.
The Silverado was a living metaphor for Réjean, a physical manifestation of the man who wasn’t coming home. Why wasn’t he coming home?
She pitched her cigarette and fell toward the truck, throwing her arms around the driver side.
“Où es-tu, Réjean?” she keened, her face smudging the liquid black finish. “Où es-tu?”
She slid her hands down and kissed the window. She brought her forehead to rest on the frame, squeezed her eyes shut tight, and lifted the door handle.
The smell of his aftershave hit her in an agonizing wave, and she threw herself face first on the seat, grasping at the upholstery, the wheel, the head rest…All these things had held Réjean.
Réjean.
Another wave hit her and she abandoned all restraint and released the first long, loud sob with her face in the flocked velour. What was he doing? What was he doing out there? She coughed out three uncontrollable, athletic sobs. The tears kept coming, soaking the seat covers. She bellowed mightily, forcing the sadness out, and was starting to feel crazed from the enterprise. Her muscles and lungs spasmed from fatigue, and she heaved a last sob, panting, unfulfilled, and let her head drop so that her eyes came square with a brown paper bag under the passenger seat.
Son lunch.
She dove for the bag, scraping her arm against the seat recline track, choking back another torrent of tears when her hand grazed the downy carpet of the pants protector—Réjean kept them so clean. She righted herself and clutched the bag to her chest, reliving the feeling of anticipation as she had prepared his sandwiches that morning, the giddy excitement of a surprise. The feeling of knowing he would come home.
She gently uncrumpled the bag and peeked in at the cloud of torn waxed paper that she had smoothed, folded, and tucked seven days ago. This was the closest she’d been to Réjean in a week, and she steadied herself as she prepared to touch perhaps the last thing he had touched. She reached in a trembling hand, pulled out a fluff of paper, and peeled back a corner to reveal the stiffened edge of a sandwich au bologne and the two beneath it. She had packed four. Agathe blacked out all her thoughts but the missing sandwich, and it materialized in her mind, with her inside of it, between two slices of baloney. She imagined herself covered in butter and mustard, being chewed up by Réjean’s powerful molars.
Setting the waxed-paper package down beside her, she thrust her hand back in the bag. The date squares. Agathe’s date squares were so popular with Réjean’s co-workers that she had made sure to send him off fishing with a solid dozen. There were nine petrified ones left, lying in disarray in a tuft of mangled paper.
Agathe called the police and asked that they come to the house right away. When they arrived, she dropped the lunch bag on the kitchen table and folded her arms.
“Et?” she said.
The officers said nothing.
“C’est ben son lunch. Y’avait laissé dans le truck.”
“Right,” said the older officer.
“Ben, ça veut dire quoi, ça? N’est-ce pas de l’évidence? To find him?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. It doesn’t really tell us anything.”
She grabbed the bag and pulled it open. “Garde! Yate some!”
“All right,” said the officer again.
Agathe laid her palms flat on the table and leaned across it. “What. Does. It. Meen?
“I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s not much we can do with it.”
“Alors, je le garde?”
“I suppose so, ma’am.”
“Je garde son lunch.”
“It’s not being held in evidence, ma’am.”
She lit a cigarette and looked at them, exhaling slowly. “Vous savez toujours rien.”
“We…just haven’t received any information.”
“Voyons, yé big comme crisse. How you can lose him?”
“Honestly, ma’am, we’re doing everything we can. He seems to have just vanished. Are you sure he wasn’t in any trouble? Didn’t have any enemies?”
“Ben là, y didn’t même have any friends. Ce n’était que moi.”
After the officers left, Agathe climbed into bed without undressing, pulled her knees up, and crouched under the bedclothes. She felt as though her flesh had been replaced with that of another animal. A fat, solid animal with a rigid hide. A boar, or a rhino. She gazed into the darkness and asked, “Est-ce ma faute?”
She was starting to feel more and more that she knew the answer. Every time an image of the Lobster Shack parking lot, or the face of the army man, or the sound of rock and roll, slipped into her mind, she would chase it away. And every time an image of Réjean’s face drifted into her thoughts, she would force her eyes open, though they would seize and sting with tears, and she would resist, making a pinched mask of her features. This would begin to sculpt the topography of her face, defining and eroding her daily, digging a deep crevasse between her brows and gradually pushing her eyes ever so slightly from their sockets.
The days without Réjean were endless. At first, Agathe would wake up in the morning, call the police station (“Toujours rien?”), then ride the bus for the day, putting up posters with his picture and their phone number, asking strangers if they had seen him, searching for any sign. He was somewhere; the physical entity of him was just, for now, not here.
Réjean was still alive. The police had said there was no sign of a struggle, no body recovered—all of which she held to be excellent signs of his possible return. But what she had to invariably consider, too, was that the policemen might be right—that wherever he was, he was there willingly. It was physically impossible to make Réjean do something
against his will. He was alive and he had opened his lunch and hadn’t bothered to rewrap it for later, because he knew he wouldn’t need it. Then he had tossed the bag carelessly on the floor and left it. She could picture it now. It didn’t make sense before, the ease of his disappearance. But now, when she thought of his recent strange behaviour, it made more sense. She could imagine him walking away now, leaving the Silverado as easily as he’d left behind his lunch, cutting all ties from his life with her. A sting like poison squiggled through her veins, more powerful than any dark feeling she had allowed herself since the Silverado was discovered. Under the covers, she squeezed her arms around her bent knees. She thought of Réjean’s abandoned sandwiches, once soft and edible, now fossilized, and understood she would have to start looking for a job.
THEN
Réjean Lapointe sat in the scratchy grey swivel chair, his chair, across the desk from Martin Bureau. He absently swirled his glass of rum, looking admiringly out the window of the portable trailer at the brand-new Silverado, which was about to become the eighth truck he would buy from Martin at the Chevy dealership.
Martin was filling out the paperwork in his swirly handwriting, occasionally stealing quick glances at Réjean, looking for signs of boredom or impatience. He marvelled at the big man’s stillness, at his comfort sitting in a room with another man in silence. Martin recoiled from silence almost as much as he did from conversation. While he recognized the need for verbal communication in his job, and despite the fact that sales talk hinged mainly around a handful of regurgitated jokes, such intercourse terrified him.
More frightening than sales talk for Martin Bureau was small talk. He knew that it was polite to make it, that every sale required some, and that it was essential to humans’ ability to coexist, but Martin always feared he might just run out of things to say midway. He never knew how long he would be able to keep going before he shut down, and sometimes felt so bored by what he was saying to another person that he wondered whether he should shut his mouth and let them both off the hook. But that would leave them in laborious silence and he didn’t know which was worse.
Early on he had developed a sensitivity to signs of an interlocutor’s desire to bring the conversation to an end and he spent much of his time trying to determine whether or not this was happening. His neurosis made car sales a poor career choice, but he had stumbled into it because he hadn’t gone to university, possessed few skills, and had no experience doing anything else.
He was also physiologically predisposed against a life in sales. Martin was what the doctor referred to as a “sweater.” He sweated unconcealably and uncontrollably. He sweated sitting perfectly still at his desk and could soak an entire jacket over the course of a sale. It was a cold, nervous sweat, a clamminess felt by every client whose hand he clasped. He was not suited for a career of hand-shaking. He would search the other person’s face for signs of disgust and was always impressed by their ability to conceal it, though he would sometimes catch them wiping a palm down their pant leg afterwards.
Martin was not overweight, or not very overweight, and so could not attribute his dampness to excess pounds or poor health. Martin was soft, he was flaccid, but not fat. Not officially. His body was simply composed of a little bit of muscle blanketed in a generous covering of doughy white flesh. He daydreamed about how much easier life would be had he grown into a good-looking, muscular, dry-palmed man. But he would never be muscular, no matter how hard he might try, because he didn’t like physical activity. It made him sweat.
In spite of his ineptitude with the public, Martin had the highest sales numbers at the dealership. No one who spent even a few moments with Martin Bureau would ever say he was capable of deceiving them. He told the truth no matter how uncomfortable a situation it created. In his stalwart commitment to soldier through a verbal exchange to its conclusion, he would say just about anything. As a result, he revealed intimate details about his own loneliness and personal habits. He instilled in the clientele a sense of control, which gave them confidence, but also the feeling they were helping out a guy who could really use the sale. People bought a lot of cars from Martin Bureau.
As he looked up again from the paperwork at Réjean, Martin got the feeling that he was not so much staring out the window at his truck now as simply staring. Réjean still swirled his glass of rum, not noticing the sloshes that escaped over the rim. Martin had never seen him so distracted.
The day, years ago, that Réjean Lapointe strode across the lot, filling his nostrils with the licorice scent of the new models, the camaraderie between Réjean and Martin was established immediately. Réjean loved Chevy trucks and Martin happened to sell them.
Réjean had approached Martin, wearing beneath his formidable moustache the smile of a child at the gates of an amusement park. When he noticed Martin’s name tag, Réjean gave his head a shake and held aloft a great paw.
“Aie, un francophone! C’va bien aller. Y sont beau les new Chevy, hein?” he enthused, pumping Martin’s small hand inside his own.
Despite having a French first and last name, Martin spoke no French and usually joked about the fact as an opener in his self-deprecating sales routine. He would say, “Me j’excuse, nein sprechen sie deutsch.” It made him cringe to say, but it had the dual effect of reassuring the customer that not only was he not French, but also that he found the French ridiculous. The customer would laugh in agreement that other languages were indeed funny, and so it was established that they were on the same team.
He looked up into Réjean’s handsome face for a moment, filled with regret at knowing not a single word of the language that his name misled others to believe he spoke. He winced only a little, as if expecting a blow.
“Oh God, I feel really awkward,” he said.
Needing to redeem himself, and not yet ready to give up on a potential sale, Martin asked, his hand still ensconced, if Réjean would like to hear a joke. He’d thought this one up the other night, and hadn’t yet tried it out on the other sales guys, whose ongoing pastime it was to mock rival automakers using the letters making up their names.
Réjean cocked his head.
“What does FORD stand for?”
Réjean shrugged.
“Fast. Only. Running. Downhill,” said Martin, pausing after each word.
Réjean stared at him for a moment as he processed the information, then resumed shaking Martin’s hand with even greater vigour, seemingly indifferent to its dampness, chuckling silently as his dark eyes crinkled. Martin had made a joke about a Ford.
The value of humour among men was just one of the lessons Martin had learned from his father, Jack Bureau—humour, and Lamb’s Navy Rum.
Trying to make enough paper noise, Martin pushed the ownership documentation toward Réjean, whose attention could not be drawn away from the lot outside. He held the pen in midair for a few silent moments, then lifted it into Réjean’s field of vision.
“Réjean,” Martin tried to whisper, so as not to disturb him, while disturbing him.
“Ah, oui,” Réjean said, his mind returning. “Oui.”
“Is there something you’d like to talk about?” asked Martin, hopefully.
Réjean looked into his rum, then up at Martin. “Non,” he said. “C’est un beau truck.”
Martin decided to start learning French the day he met Réjean. He sent away for instructional books and cassettes to listen to as he slept, repeated phrases after the mechanical recorded voice on the tape, conjugated verbs in his head and sought out any bilingual signage that could be found on the lot at work.
Les objets dans le miroir sont plus près qu’ils ne paraissent.
His family’s French ancestry had been a source of difficulty for Martin growing up, and he solidly resisted learning the language. French was mandatory on the curriculum at school and widely hated by the students, who refused to retain a single lesson. Their irritation at having to study it was transferred to Martin. French was stupid, Martin was French, and his last
name in French meant desk, which was a stupid name. But when Réjean Lapointe opened his mouth that day in the Chevy lot, Martin had never heard anything more red-blooded. He hadn’t known that the language could sound so authoritative. So masculine. In his head, he played out the scene of their first meeting at the dealership—only in his dream version, he was fluently bilingual. He envisioned the jovial exchange they would have, to the exclusion of everyone around them.
He was cautious not to let on to the other guys at the dealership that he was learning French, which made it extra-strange when they saw him talking to himself on the lot. Martin found that the more emphasis you lent the statement, the easier it was to say. He didn’t realize how clearly he was shaping words with his lips, especially when he was trying to mentally assume an expression particular to Réjean, a long, low sound, a beunh, accompanied most times by an actual shrug, or a tone that implied a shrug. The shrug and noise together communicated that the idea being conveyed was abundantly obvious, but was also like saying “well,” or “come on.” It was wonderfully French. Beunh.
Martin carried on simple exchanges in his head, mutely emoting as he asked himself what he felt like for dinner while maintaining an internal monologue on his activities in the kitchen as he prepared it. Je prépare du spaghetti. He would list everything he drove past on his way to work: une maison, des arbres, de la neige, de la neige, de la neige, encore des arbres…Voici un client, he mused when the door of the dealership swung open at the hand of a customer.
The idea of getting caught talking to himself was not nearly so concerning as getting caught talking to himself in French, not only because of his feared perception of the language, but also because it reeked of a childish attempt to impress Réjean Lapointe. The sales guys all knew Réjean. He was impossible to ignore. They had all watched that first day as he walked across the lot, when by some miracle Martin Bureau had made him laugh. After that, the guys knew Réjean belonged to Martin.
I Am a Truck Page 2
